So where has it gone wrong?

The Doctor should have a robotic cat.

Okay, you've got a valid point there. It wasn't like the episodes were all 100% awesome then suddenly it sucked once "Bill" arrived.

I've said for a while that Peter Calpaldi will unfortunately go down in history as the "Timothy Dalton" of the Doctor Who franchise.  Dalton was a terrific choice for Bond and could have been one of the best Bonds ever, but had the misfortune to inherit the role right when the franchise was out of gas and took a nosedive right when he took over the role (due to circumstances that had nothing to do with his acting).  Same thing happened with Calpaldi. The quality of Doctor Who really plummeted in "Series 8" and its just been downhill from there.  Calpaldi's first year had its moments but was nowhere near as good as Matt Smith's heyday (ironic, since I considered Smith to be a younger David Tennant clone when he inherited the role and thought they could have done better and gotten more creative).  Then they tried to make Calpaldi's Doctor "hip and cool" in the 9th season and the quality got even worse.  By the time they announced "Bill", it was pretty much official that Doctor Who would now be unwatchable tripe.

So, you are basically correct, "Bill" was the culmination of the franchise turning to pot. (or in this case, turning to Pott  )  The only good news is they've reached rock bottom now that that Steven Moffat is leaving, so I can't imagine it can get any worse. They can only go up from here.

<abbr>You make some excellent points about the major flaws with nuWho.

One area I'd disagree is with story arcs. The funny thing is I tend to HATE the "modern television" trend of having ENDLESS story arcs from episode to episode, where nothing gets resolved over the entire season, NO episode is self-contained, and you have to watch every episode in order for three seasons in a row just to understand what the heck is going on.

However, Doctor Who doesn't follow that pattern. They tend to have an overarching "theme" for the entire season ("Who is "Bad Wolf"?  "What does the crack in the wall mean?" etc.) but this is played out over smaller, self-contained episodes (no more than 3 in a row, and most of them are just 1 single stand alone episode) that have their OWN unique storylines that get resolved by the end of the episode. That format works fine with me... if I miss an episode, I might miss a piece of the puzzle overall, but the next episode doesn't DEPEND on me having watched the previous one first, and the vast majority of the time, the next episode has an entirely different setting/characters and does NOT tie into the previous episode aside from one or two lines referencing it.

Quite frankly, I wish more television shows would follow Doctor Who's pattern, it would make it a lot easier on the viewer to watch as much or little as they please, when and where they want.  But you have a bunch of snobby people who claim its necessary to have 4,546 episodes in a row where nothing gets resolved and that's necessary for "modern" television and makes it more "complex" and "layed".

In any case, classic Who also followed nuWho's format several times: the "Key to Time" season, the "Trial of a Time Lord" season, season 8 being all about The Master's grand plan, and so on. I agree classic Who didn't do it AS MUCH, so I'd be fine with a season or two that doesn't have one great overlaying "mystery" event.


On the rest of your points, I agree entirely. I am sick of all the companions being people from modern 21st century U.K., all the overdone melodrama in writing their characters off the show with some "tragedy", the constant forced attempts to be "trendy" and "revelvant" to whatever is in the news at the moment (its caused nuWho is already become terribly dated, as I went back and watched a Eccleston era episode all about reality television and showcasing Big Brother and The Weakest Link). I also sick of the Doctor being "zany". Not every Doctor should behave like Tom Baker, and thankfully Eccleston was the only in the nuWho era that didn't.


I hope Chibnall could give us a decent male character who ISN'T the jealous boyfriend of the female companion, a female companion that ISN'T from 2018 London (or anywhere near there), and DOESN'T beat the audience over the head with political pandering about whatever is "trendy" with the mainstream media at the moment (yay! It's 2009 so we have OBAMA! on Doctor Who) Now that would truly be REFRESHING.



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