Chris Chibnall, the former showrunner of Doctor Who, has reflected on decisions made in the finale featuring Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor and Yasmin Khan (Mandip Gill). After it was revealed in the 2022 New Year Special that Yaz had feelings for the first female Time Lord, audiences were anticipating a kiss between the two characters.
Sadly, despite evidence that the two shared a romantic interest in each other, highlighted during the Easter Special a few months later, nothing substantial came of the storyline. Discussing the storyline with WHO Corner to Corner podcast (H/T The Radio Times), the former showrunner, who also penned several episodes of Torchwood, described ‘Thasmin’ as an “unrequited love story.”
“We discussed it. I think it’s an unrequited love story. I don’t know whether that’s the right decision, but it is an unrequited love story,” Chibnall explained on the podcast. “I felt it was more heartbreaking.”
“It wasn’t like there wasn’t any sense of ‘they’re not allowed to kiss’ or ‘they’re not going to kiss’. Dramatically [and] emotionally, it felt slightly more wrenching if they didn’t.”
“And also, I think if they kiss, you don’t get the final scene on top of the TARDIS, because that scene was always sort of the kiss really,” the former Broadchurch creator added. “It’s a really delicate kind of pressure because it could have happened. And who said didn’t happen?”
“But it wasn’t any sort of conscious decision to not to have it for anything other than ‘is it going to break your heart if they never quite get there?’” he continued.
Chibnall added that, retrospectively, if he’d been faced with the decision concerning ‘Thasmin’ today, he’d have chosen to take the story in a different direction.
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