Although the exact date hasn’t yet been confirmed (to the best of my knowledge), we know that Jodie Whittaker’s final episode as the Doctor, one billed as a “centenary special” as part of the celebrations to honor a hundred years of the BBC, will air some time in October. Presumably she will regenerate at the end, or at least begin the process (maybe we’ll get that long-since-filmed sequence next year instead, at the official beginning of Ncuti Gatwa’s tenure), but we don’t even know that for sure.

What we do know is that in a matter of weeks, Whittaker will be gone, and fandom will be awaiting the reign of a new Doctor. (Although it’s probably both a bit on-the-nose and Too Soon™, saying “The Queen is dead; long live the King” here does seem to fit…) And I already miss her.

It’s strange the way human brains work. We have this amazing capacity to anticipate the future, which can be a fantastic advantage. But it can be problematic, too, because sometimes we spend far too much time either looking forward to or dreading things to come. And that’s exactly where I’m at in my current Doctor Who mindset.

As with most Doctors, particularly the modern ones, I’ve really enjoyed Jodie’s performances, but haven’t been overly thrilled with the scripts she’s been given to work with. And since the trend over the last several series is to give us ever fewer episodes—we haven’t had a full thirteen-episode series since Series 7, which was over nine(!) years ago—we’ve gotten an even smaller number of opportunities for her to find a particularly awesome, unforgettable moment.

Yet I truly love the Thirteenth Doctor. She is wonderfully unique, just as all the other regenerations are. She has her own way of owning the space, of expressing the joy and pain of her millennia of life experience. Once she had become established and got past those initial constraints placed on her because of being the first “woman Doctor”—when the writers (or should I just say Chibnall?) gave her the freedom to be a full person who was allowed her anger (for example)—she really started to shine. And so as I think ahead to her departure, I am sad, and disappointed that we didn’t get more.

We’ve had far too long to think about it, too. Production has been painfully slow these last few years, with only a single Christmas special to break up the 15 months between Capaldi’s last regular episode of Series 10 (way back in July 2017) and Whittaker’s first in Series 11, a full year’s gap between Series 11 and 12, and only one New Year’s special in the 20 months between Series 12 and 13. Granted, COVID was much to blame for that last delay, but the overall trend was already well established, and hasn’t done fandom any favors.

Frankly, when one looks at those huge gaps, it’s unsurprising that my own enthusiasm for the franchise has waned a bit. Combine my brain’s desperate need for novelty with the lack of new content, and even my favorite fandom is going to suffer a crisis of interest. I guess all I can do is be grateful for what we did get to see of Jodie, look forward to her last hurrah, and celebrate her Doctor for what she brought to the screen. After all, she is the Doctor.