Doctor Who announces guest cast for upcoming New Year’s special

Doctor Who announces three new guest stars for its upcoming New Year’s special.

Though we’re still waiting to find out what, exactly, Thirteen and her friends will face in the Doctor Who season 11 finale, it’s time to start speculating about what we might see in Jodie Whittaker’s first holiday episode.

Unlike seasons past, this year Doctor Who will present a New Year’s special, rather than a Christmas installment. This is a bit weird, since the show has offered up a festive special of some stripe each season since the series returned in 2005. Now, to be fair, they weren’t always holiday-specific fare, but they did air on Christmas Day, regardless. That won’t be the case this year.

We don’t know much about what to expect from the New Year’s Day special, though the BBC has released the vaguest of vague synopsis for it via their press site.

"As the New Year begins, a terrifying evil is stirring from across the centuries of Earth’s history.As the Doctor, Ryan, Graham and Yaz return home, will they be able to overcome the threat to planet Earth?"

So, even though season 11 hasn’t quite finished its run yet, we already know that the Doctor’s three newest friends are all going to make it safely through “The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos”.  But they’ll definitely be meeting some new faces afterward.

The BBC officially announced the guest cast for the upcoming New Year’s installment, a trio of actors who will probably be familiar to most who spend any significant time watching British TV.

Charlotte Ritchie will play a character called Lin, while Nikesh Patel will play Mitch, and Daniel Adegboyega will play Aaron. As has generally become tradition this season, we know literally nothing about these new characters beyond their names. But we do know a bit about the folks who will play them.

Ritchie is best known for her role on the very popular period drama Call the Midwife. For three seasons, she played the sadly doomed Nurse Barbara, who was kind, warm-hearted and beloved by virtually everyone onscreen and off. Will Ritchie play a similar character on Doctor Who or might the actress want to stretch her wings and play a darker kind of role?

Patel, familiar to U.S. fans from his role on as Aafrin on period drama Indian Summers, has also appeared in recent films London Has Fallen and Halal Daddy. He also has a role in the upcoming big screen adaptation of Artemis Fowl. Adegboyega, for his part, is slightly less well known, but has appeared in Sky TV drama Save Me as well as the James Bond film Skyfall.

It’s hard to know precisely what to expect from these new casting additions, given that of the three, only Ritchie is the one who probably comes guaranteed with a role of significant size. (She’s the best known, for starters.) It’s not like “The Witchfinders”, where it was pretty easy to guess that both Alan Cumming and Siobhan Finnerhan would likely have large parts in the story.

Plus, these may not be the only new faces we see to close out Jodie Whittaker’s first run as the Doctor. British tabloid The Mirror is reporting that Thirteen will finally meet the Daleks come New Year’s Day, though the classic monsters have apparently undergone some sort of makeover since the last time we saw them in “The Witch’s Familiar”.

Is that true? We don’t know yet. But it certainly seems as though it could be possible. Whether it’s a good idea or not, especially this early in Thirteen’s time in the TARDIS is anyone’s guess.

Doctor Who season 11 concludes Sunday, Dec. 9 at 8 p.m. EST on BBC America.