In Doctor Who season 14, Jemma Redgrave will make a formal comeback as Kate Stewart, the head of UNIT. There is growing anticipation for Doctor Who seasons 14, including Millie Gibson as the mysterious new companion Ruby Sunday and Ncuti Gatwa as the Fifteenth Doctor. The series, scheduled to premiere in 2024, has just started filming, and returning showrunner Russell T Davies is candid about the upcoming episodes. Season 14 features a lot of on-location work, meaning that setting images to be post online and maintaining concealment would be counterproductive.
Recent set photographs (via @set do) revealed Redgrave would be resuming the well-known role of Kate Stewart, head of UNIT, the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, a team tasked with defending the planet from threats from extraterrestrial life. The BBC has formally announced Redgrave’s comeback in a brief news release. The statement is vague, giving only the information that may infer from the product images. Still, it confirms that Aneurin Barnard (Dunkirk, The Goldfinch, 1899) has joined the cast as “the mysterious Roger ap Gwilliam.”
Doctor Who’s Most Important Recurring Character Is Now Kate Stewart
Since 2005, Redgrave’s Kate Stewart has become the most significant recurring figure in Doctor Who. The so-called “Wilderness Years” of Doctor Who, or the time between the show’s cancellation in 1989 and its restoration in 2005, are when Kate truly formed. She is the daughter of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, the Doctor’s longest-human friend from the classic series. The character first appeared in the 1995 direct-to-video production Downtime, which granted permission to utilize many Doctor Who characters but not the Doctor. She is portray by Beverley Cressman and has appeare in subsequent stories.
In the 2012 novella “The Power of Three,” Kate Stewart had a makeover and assumed leadership of UNIT, the company her father had created. Numerous authors have found the character appealing because of her vast past, and she has been feature in every prominent revival of Doctor save Christopher Eccleston. UNIT will probably make a second appearance in the upcoming Doctor Who 60th-anniversary specials, which will air before season 14.
Redgrave is taking on the role as the replacement for the late Nicholas Courtney, who portrayed the first Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. In the 1968 story “The Web of Fear,” Courtney made his Doctor Who debut as a military colonel who assisted the Doctor in fending off a Yeti invasion of the London Underground. To defend the world from similar threats, Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart petitioned the UN to establish UNIT. He repeatedly played the part throughout the years, including his final main-series appearance in the 1989 episode “Battlefield.” Brigadier Lethbridge-absence Stewart’s from the 2005 relaunched series has always seemed like a tragedy. Still, at least Redgrave’s Kate Stewart, a wonderful addition to Doctor Who, pays tribute to both characters and the actor.