Doctor Who 60th Anniversary: BBC releases cryptic teaser

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A cryptic video teaser for the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary dropped on BBC One at 6:58pm on Saturday 29 April.

I can’t take credit for the information contained here as it has already been discovered by several Doctor Who fans. What follows is what they found. @NotAgnor on Twitter managed a thorough breakdown of the images and information.

First the new images — they are likely from the first of three Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials, apparently titled The Star Beast. More on the discovery of the title later in this article.

The most intriguing of the new images is one of a UNIT soldier with glowing eyes. The glowing eyes are a callback an effect caused by neutron radiation in the 1980 comic featuring Beep the Meep titled Doctor Who and the Star Beast publish in Doctor Who Magazine.

Another new image is from the action sequence with UNIT soldiers, the Meep, Wrarth Warriors, the Noble Family and the Doctor filmed at Axminster Road in Cardiff over several nights in early June.

The teaser also contained a new image of what looks like the Time Vortex, the medium through which the Doctor’s TARDIS travels.

The other images have been seen before. One was a version of this image from the 60th Anniversary trailer showing the Doctor’s companion Donna Noble speaking to her mother Sylvia.

The other images are from previous Doctor Who episodes, one of the TARDIS windows and the other of the preserved severed hand of the Tenth Doctor which sparked the DoctorDonna meta-crisis.

When the teaser is played in reverse, some dialogue emerges — Fourteenth Doctor: “Cryptic, I hate that”; Donna: “Why did this face have to come back?”

There was some binary code interspersed with the images which was decoded as “THE STAR BEAST”. The official Doctor Who Twitter account tweeted, then deleted, the same code.

There is also a reference to Eurovision, which airs on 13 May.

There could be some new Doctor Who content, including a new trailer, in tandem with two events expected to garner a large television audience — the coronation of King Charles III and Eurovision.

Doctor Who will return in November 2023 with three 60th anniversary specials starring David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor and Catherine Tate as companion Donna Noble. In the following festive period, Ncuti Gatwa will star in his first full Doctor Who episode as the Fifteenth Doctor. Doctor Who Series 14 starring Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson will debut in 2024.