Doctor Who is the longest running science fiction series of all time. Some people qualify that by adding “television” to that statement but it doesn’t need to be there. No other science fiction has been active longer than Doctor Who (active throughout its entire existence). Star Trek is 3 years younger. Twilight Zone had a huge inactivity gap. Doctor Who stands at the top of that mountain.
The Doctor Who of 1963 is not the Doctor Who of today. One of the reasons that Doctor Who has stayed relevant so long is that the property has adapted to survive. Replacing the lead actor, changing the way stories are told, telling different kinds of stories, and most of it done with a ridiculously small budget. Before the 1995 TV movie, fans only had a couple of decades worth of material to debate over and some of those fans became obsessed with trying to explain certain things that really didn’t need an explanation.
A prime example of such a thing is in the 4th Doctor story The Brain of Morbius, where the Doctor and another Time Lord named Morbius battle each other mentally using a contraption between them. Appearing in this contraption are several faces, which fans have long pointed to as former faces of Morbius and surmised that others must be pre-William Hartnell Doctors.
The fan that seemed to have latched onto this the hardest was Chris Chibnall, a man who would eventually become showrunner for his favorite sci fi show Doctor Who. What better way to tie up his pet peeve than to write a reason this episode had unrecognizable faces?
Chibnall wrote up the Timeless Child, which most fans hate outright. I actually like the concept and enjoy the fact that the Doctor is far more special than just a Time Lord. However, this is a fan of the show getting too deeply involved in fixing something that did not need to be fixed. Chibnall literally wrote fan fiction that is now Doctor Who canon and as a fan that makes me a little upset. I don’t want to see fan fiction made canon, I don’t want to see fan fiction period. This isn’t how a professionally made show should work.
Another example of such a thing is the 5th Doctor story Arc of Infinity, where the Doctor ends up on Gallifrey and has a back and forth with a Commander Maxil. This interaction isn’t really the important part but Maxil was played by Colin Baker, who would go on to be cast as the 6th Doctor (Peter Davison’s replacement) and debut in his first story Twin Dilemma.
Fans at the time may have noticed that an actor from the show had been cast as the Doctor but no one really made a big deal out of it. One person did apparently think this was a big deal and NEEDED it to be a huge deal: Stephen Moffat.
Moffat was a fan who latched onto this hiccup and decided his obsession needed to be everyone’s obsession.
Moffat wrote up the story The Fires of Pompeii, which featured Peter Capaldi as a Roman citizen in the city of Pompeii who would narrowly avoid being consumed by the lava with his family. When Moffat became the showrunner of Doctor Who, he cast Peter Capaldi as the 12th Doctor and made everyone wonder (due to a lot of dialogue about it) why the Doctor looked like some random dude from Pompeii.
Why is this an issue? This has happened before and no one cared. I still don’t care about this happening. Colin Baker was on the show and then later was cast as the Doctor. Same thing with Peter Capaldi. Move along, nothing to see here. But, again, we have someone who wrote some fan fiction that got made into canon and just like I mentioned with Chibnall above, that upsets me.
Moffat has committed a worse crime than Chibnall, though. He’s written A LOT of episodes that literally end with a hand wave resolution. Doctor Who isn’t supposed to do hand waves, yet a good chunk of Moffat’s era is “meh, it’s just fixed now because we say so.” I do not care for Matt Smith as the Doctor and I write these words realizing for the first time that it isn’t Smith’s fault… it’s Moffat’s. Smith’s era feels less like Doctor Who and more like an exercise video that has some elements of Doctor Who in it.
There’s one more to go over.
Russell T Davies became the showrunner of Doctor Who from 2005 to 2010 and selected two different individuals as the Doctor in that time. He was a fan of the show growing up and turned the show more towards character drama, over the top resolutions that didn’t make a ton of sense, overly explained dialogue, and lack of a long term structure.
Rather than spending most of the time he had on the show creating a new age, with new villains to rival the old, serialized storytelling (with less episodes per serial), and really bring the show from the classic era into a new one. (Side note: by serialized, I mean 2 episode arcs, an homage to the classic series, then slowly phased out.) Instead, we got a spotlight on reintroduced classic villains, melodrama to the limit, a frequent deus ex machina resolution, and allusions to the greatest story ever doomed to happen offscreen.
In Davies most recent run, he’s been a whole different mess than above. The 15th Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa (an actor I very dearly love, and I even enjoyed his Doctor), is largely seen as being wildly out of character from previous portrayals (too emotional). Other problems with the new era are a high level of what ignorant people call wokeness (here and there isn’t bad, but it was shoved in our faces from episode 1 until episode 16 is too much), diversity for diversity’s sake (I’m not opposed to including everyone but when everyone is special, we’ve lost the plot), and too much focus on the personal lives of the characters and not enough plot driven narrative that should be what stories are about.
And his worst crime only came to the forefront when I watched The War Between The Land And The Sea. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil it for those who can’t watch it yet, but I will say that it contains Davies’ worst crime: everything “interesting” happens off screen. As writers (I am one), we are told to “show, don’t tell.” This is a cardinal sin of writing.
While I did like some of Gatwa’s stories, others just read as a “Davies writing his opinion column in the form of a Doctor Who episode” story. These are Davies version of the fan fiction above. Moffat and Chibnall made their fan fiction into canon Doctor Who. Davies takes Doctor Who and makes it into his personal sounding board for whatever social issue he’s interested in at the time of writing.
These are not the people who should be writing for or running Doctor Who.
Doctor Who used to be about telling great science fiction stories, historical pieces with the Doctor involved, and episodes that were filled with story first and character building on the side. I sincerely hope that whoever takes over the reigns rights the ship, at least backing way back from where we left off. And can we please not do Billie Piper as 16? Please?
If you have anything to comment on, you can email me at emeraldspecter – at – gmail – dot – com.
Thanks for reading.
