Doctor Who: What vs. Why

Where did the show go wrong?

Another era of Doctor Who has reached its conclusion. Unfortunately, the past few seasons rarely got better than just okay.

Doctor Who has had three showrunners since its 2006 revival: Russell T. Davies (series 1-4), Steven Moffat (series 5-10), and Chris Chibnall (series 11-13). Beyond the core premise of traveling through all of space and time, helping people in need, and saving the world and universe, each showrunner brought a distinct approach to the franchise, which I’d summarize as follows:

The Davies years—The Doctor helps his human companions fulfill their untapped potential, and the companions anchor the Doctor in humanity, helping him be a better man.

The Moffat years—Pretty much everyone and everything is a puzzle, and occasionally it’s dressed up as a fairy tale.

The Chibnall years—The show teaches the audience to do better, and then the Doctor learns information about herself.

Chibnall dialed down the preachiness in his later episodes, so he deserves some credit for improving on that front. But then he steered himself into another error that stemmed from the same fundamental issue: a focus on the what instead of the why.

SPOILERS follow!

1.) Doctor, Don’t Preach

As I’ve previously written, writers who want to convey a message through their stories should explore the issue, not preach about it. When we explore an issue, we examine why it’s wrong and how otherwise decent people might err. A preachy story merely points out that something is wrong. Even if we agree with the overall message, it often feels flat.

The Doctor Who episode “Rosa” takes us back in time to meet civil rights icon Rosa Parks, and it teaches us that racism is bad and we still have room to do better.

Yes, agreed. But I don’t want Doctor Who to preach about racism. I’d rather the show explore the origins and effects of racism from multiple angles, ideally through metaphor, giving us compelling television in the process.

All the characters in “Rosa” fall into two categories: bad people who are racist, and good people who are not racist. That’s not interesting. Sure, Rosa Parks can be a purely good character who represents the best of us, like Superman or Atticus Finch, but for everyone else, where’s the murky middle? Where are the seemingly decent characters we start to like until they suddenly demonstrate alarming attitudes? Where’s the victim of racism who becomes consumed with hatred and thoughts of vengeance? A more thoughtful look at the period, or perhaps deeper insight into Parks herself (like the show did with Vincent van Gogh in “Vincent and the Doctor”), could have given her act of defiance the full impact it deserves.

As far as the scene works, it’s because of the real-world history we already know, not anything this episode does. But after the historical reenactment, we get an elementary school lesson.

The series 4 episode, “Planet of the Ood,” tackles the theme of racism in a much more effective way for a sci-fi television series. The Doctor and Rose had encountered the alien Ood back in series 2. They were told the Ood willingly served humanity, and they never got around to challenging that claim. But in series 4, the Doctor and Donna learn that humanity has enslaved the Ood race. We see how people attempt to justify and rationalize this, causing history to repeat itself in a horrible way in the distant future. Humanity had overcome racial divisions, but those ugly impulses found a new target to lock onto. And the Ood become far more dangerous than they ever would have been otherwise.

Not even the Doctor had realized what was going on when he first encountered the Ood, and that intensifies his guilt and his desire to free these aliens in the later episode.

Donna: Being with you, I can’t tell what’s right and what’s wrong anymore.

Doctor: It’s better that way. People who know for certain tend to be like Mr. Halpen.

But the Thirteenth Doctor, at the end of “Orphan 55,” feels comfortable wagging her finger at us. Nothing’s weighing on her conscience as she stands apart from the central issue. She’s innocent while we need to do better.

2.) Talkin’ ’Bout Regeneration

Chibnall advised Jodie Whittaker not to watch previous seasons of Doctor Who as she prepared to play the Thirteenth Doctor. While a fresh perspective is indeed valuable, it can and should be applied to a thorough understanding of what’s been done previously. Bring in new ideas, yes, but do your homework too. By studying the performances of her predecessors, Whittaker could have worked out the connections needed to give her Doctor the proper depth and layers while still offering a fresh take.

When the Doctor regenerates, he or she remains fundamentally the same person, but in a new stage of life. It works as a metaphor for how we change over the course of our lives. We develop new interests along the way. We pick up some new quirks while shedding others. We might mellow out in later years or perhaps become more irritable. We even adjust our fashion sense. We age, we learn, we grow. But at our core, we’re still us—building on what came before.

Whittaker’s Doctor is older than Peter Capaldi’s, even though Capaldi is much older than Whittaker is. David Tenant and Matt Smith (the former a longtime Doctor Who fan at the time of casting, the latter not) were both under 40 during their time as the Doctor, and yet both could exude age when they needed to. Both could play the fool to disarm their opponents, then switch gears and show us the ancient alien who’s seen it all—the ancient alien you don’t want to mess with.

Examine this performance:

Then this:

And then keep in mind that this is the same character later in life:

In trying too hard to give us a new spin on the Doctor, Chibnall and Whittaker wound up disregarding too much of the Doctor’s life and history, leaving little more than a surface-level understanding of the character in evidence. Whittaker picked up on the Doctor’s quirkiness, self-righteousness, and desire to help others, but missed so much more. For example, the Doctor’s self-righteousness is supposed to be a character flaw; he needs his companions to provide a sense of perspective and keep him moored.

I don’t think Whittaker is a bad actor; I’m inclined to blame the direction and writing. She might have excelled had she received better guidance. As is, the Thirteenth Doctor, the oldest of them all, seems far too young and inexperienced, and it’s all too easy to forget that she’s been at this for a couple thousand years at this point. Or perhaps even longer than that.

3.) If I Could Turn Back Timeless

At the end of series 12, the Doctor learns that she’s not actually a Time Lord. Rather, she’s the “Timeless Child” from whom the Time Lords stole the ability to regenerate. She’s had numerous regenerations even before the original William Hartnell incarnation (which seems disrespectful to the man who originated such an enduring role).

So, the Doctor learns she had previous lives and isn’t even the species she had always thought. How does this affect her? How does withholding further information affect her? What does it reveal about the essence of who the Doctor is?

I don’t know. I don’t recall that being addressed. Again, we get the what but not the why.

The “Timeless Child” revelation bloats the mythology without adding substance. It’s like when Superman stories delve into various aspects of Krypton—whatever happened on Krypton has nothing to do with who Superman is on Earth; it’s simply where he came from. Let the audience imagine what Krypton was like. And let the audience imagine the Doctor’s youth on Gallifrey.

Compare this to the revelation at the end of “The End of the World,” the second episode of modern Doctor Who. The Doctor tells Rose that he’s not just a Time Lord—he’s the last of the Time Lords, the sole survivor of his species.

This isn’t merely information. It’s a revelation with weight. This scars him. It explains a lot about who he is now.

Later, we learn that the Doctor himself was the one who destroyed his own people and all the Daleks to prevent their war from destroying the entire universe. He had to make an impossible decision that violated everything he stood for, and it would be a long time before he’d be able to set things right.

4.) Let’s Do the Time Loop Again

Even Moffat’s puzzle episodes, which could get frustrating at times, worked wonderfully when there was a why behind the whole exercise. Look at his best puzzle episode, and arguably the best time-loop episode in television history, “Heaven Sent.”

This episode is Doctor Who as a one-man show (almost), and it’s phenomenal. Immediately after the death of his closest friend, the Doctor is transported into a strange castle that’s really one massive torture/confession chamber with seemingly no way out. Gradually, he puts the pieces together and, to his horror, figures out the one way he can escape without revealing a secret he’s unwilling to tell. And the exit is pure hell.

He must punch his way through an incredibly dense, thick wall, and after every few punches, he gets killed and has to start the whole thing over, without any memory of his previous attempts, his grief once again fresh, just so he can achieve a tiny bit more progress chipping away at that mighty wall. But he perseveres nevertheless, despite the ordeal he must keep putting himself through.

It’s not just a puzzle or an exercise in cleverness. It’s a puzzle built around character. It’s a puzzle that delivers a gut punch. It’s a puzzle that has a reason for existing.

The Thirteenth Doctor had her own time-loop episode earlier this year, in “Eve of the Daleks.” It’s entertaining at times, but it feels like an early draft of what could have been a much better episode.

The time loop gets shorter with each iteration, and that’s a good way to add tension. But each time the characters die, it seems painless. They get zapped and then are suddenly fine again, without much opportunity to process the fact that they literally just died. The Doctor gives an inspirational speech about trying and failing and improving, and Whittaker’s at her best, hinting at how much better her Doctor might have been in different circumstances. But it’s an on-the-nose speech about an idea that should have been baked into the script throughout.

This could have worked as a story about coming to terms with failure—if the Doctor had failed in some painful way in the previous episode and those events continued to haunt her at the start of this episode. And each time she dies, the full weight of that failure hits her again … and again and again. The time loop is a metaphor for dwelling on failure and how we can let it hold us back. But as the Doctor figures out the time loop, she figures out how to move forward despite her failure and despite knowing that she’ll almost certainly fail again someday.

“Heaven Sent” demonstrated superb forethought and attention to detail. “Eve of the Daleks” feels like it’s figuring everything out on the fly, much like the characters in the episode, leaving it with all the depth of Doctor Who: The Video Game. It’s just, hey, look, another time-loop episode.

5.) Doctor, My Eyes Have Seen the Years

The recent finale, “The Power of the Doctor,” was surprisingly fun, mostly because of how it played on nostalgia for previous eras, including the original series. It’s not enough to redeem the past few seasons, unfortunately.

One thing bugged me at the end, in an otherwise nice scene in which a bunch of former companions connect with each other. Among them was Ian Chesterton, one of the original companions, played by the original actor, William Russell—a member of the original cast of any Doctor Who ever. And he just has a couple of quick lines of no real substance.

This struck me as such a missed opportunity, one that the 50th anniversary special also missed nearly a decade ago. We could have had just one nice scene of the Doctor crossing paths with an original companion.

It could have been a simple moment. The Doctor is rushing down a street, then stops as he or she notices a familiar old man resting on a bench. (I’ll stick with the Doctor being a “she” here for the sake of clarity, but take your pick as to which Doctor would have played this best.)

In this hypothetical scenario, the Doctor recognizes the old man as Ian and takes a minute to say hello. But she doesn’t say she’s the Doctor—she doesn’t want to bother getting into all of that, as Ian never learned about regeneration. She just introduces herself as a former student of his, and she thanks Ian for all that he and Barbara taught her. The Doctor says she wouldn’t be the person she is today without the two of them. She was so young and arrogant back then—she thought she knew everything—but Ian and Barbara sorted her out and taught her what it means to be human.

Ian is touched by the remembrance and asks for a name. “Doctor Foreman,” she says with a sly smile. The name strikes Ian as familiar, but he has trouble connecting it to a face. Mirroring their initial encounter so many years ago, he asks, “Doctor … who?” Then the memories start flowing, and he chuckles fondly. “A private joke,” he explains. Because surely this younger person can’t possibly be that strange older man Ian once mistakenly addressed as “Doctor Foreman.”

And the Doctor both is and is not that man, as the Doctor has grown up quite a bit since meeting Ian and Barbara—in part because of them.

What we got instead was just a shared cameo that failed to acknowledge why Ian’s presence was so meaningful.

The finale did give ample screentime to two former companions, Tegan and Ace, and they had brief reunions with their respective Doctors (Fifth and Seventh). These were among the best scenes of the episode, and perhaps of the entire Chibnall era, because we knew why these interactions mattered. The history gave the scenes depth, whereas so much of the past few years was little more than surface-level what.

The Doctor deserved better.