Doctor Who: Season Pregame

We are once again a week away from the start of a new season of DOCTOR WHO, and so tradition demands that I put down a few of my thoughts about the state-of-play and my expectations for the show going into this new set of episodes. There’s been a lot of chatter across the last couple of weeks, seemingly pushed forward by a bunch of chuckleheads fighting culture wars concerning the possibility that the series will be cancelled by Disney+ and that star Ncuti Gatwa fill be sacked (or, alternately, depart) as will showrunner Russell T. Davies. I tend to think that most of this chatter is worthless, the usual ignorant cries of “woke” that have become an everyday part of the fog of communication. I don’t have a whole lot of time or patience for those who are rooting against a thing as a general rule.

All of which said, the previous season can in no way be considered the show’s finest hour. It was ragged, a bit unfocused, a bit tonally silly, and lacking in the truly great moments that used to be DOCTOR WHO’s calling card. So I’m hoping that this season we’ll see a bit more of a return to form. I don’t have any problem with the new things the show is trying–you need to continually experiment with a premise as old as this one. But I’d like for the writing to be a bit tighter and the characters to be a bit more focused. Last season, Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday turned out to be a Clara Oswald 2.0, a “mystery girl” whose attributes never quite jelled into a character. And while Millie was good, she doesn’t have Jenna Coleman’s inherent watchability that helped to paper over the fact that Clara was a conceptual mess. Ruby almost always felt like a plot device, and at most the quick sketch of a character rather than a living, breathing human being, and the eventual revelations about the truth concerning her parentage and upbringing were very unsatisfying–making the whole season’s journey to that point feel like wasted time.

So my hope is that newcomer Belinda Chandra has been crafted with a bit more care. Just from the trailer footage that’s been released so far, I already like her and her dynamic with Ncuti Gatwa. And I like the fact that the arc of this season seems built around the Doctor’s efforts to return Belinda to her proper place and time. It’s been an eternity since we last saw a companion who didn’t want to be there, who had a life that they desperately wanted to get back to and who consequently had some friction with the Doctor, so this seems like a vein of story material ripe for plumbing. It immediately gives matters a different feel.

Gatwa’s performance as the Doctor finally came together for me in the Christmas episode Joy To The World, where he was running solo. It probably didn’t hurt that the episode was written by Steven Moffat, whose handle on the Time Lord has always been strong. Across the prior season, I often had the same sorts of qualms about Ncuti’s Doctor that I had with Jodie’s prior: he never seemed on top of things, he always appeared to be flailing wildly and winning out through sheer luck or fiat. He was fun and funny, but seldom capable and terrifying. I feel like you need all of these qualities to make the Doctor work. Now that he’s got a full season under his belt, my hope is that, in the manner of Peter Capaldi before him, not only will the actor have a better grasp on their take on the character, but those writing for the show will be able to steer more into what he’s best at and avoid those things that don’t entirely resonate with this Doctor.

And that I think may have been my biggest complain with the prior season: the writing. Russell has said in the past, quite rightly, that the audience will go along with you through the most egregious lapses of story logic and common sense if they are emotionally invested in the characters and their journey. Last season, though, it felt like the formula was off, that the show was working so hard to both justify its larger budget and to pull its intensity back to a Disney+-appropriate level that it often forgot to service the characters as characters. So I wasn’t as invested in the assorted journeys and consequently, I became more and more aware of the lapses in plot as they happened. The word is verisimilitude, a need to take whatever is going on seriously. The thing that separates contemporary DOCTOR WHO from the classic show is its emotional moments. Those, more than the plots or the monsters or the alien vistas, are what have kept fans coming back again and again–no other show conveyed quite the same depth of emotionality. So I’m hoping to see a bit more of that again this time.

What else? Smaller matters: I really wish that they would make that TARDIS set feel a bit more lived in. I understand the intention was to give it more of an epic, open flavor, to stress the “bigger-on-the-inside” approach. But it’s just sterile. The addition of the Doctor’s jukebox was a good first step, now I’d like to see that carried forward a bit more with some additional tchotchkes. Even the Doctor admitted at Christmastime that he doesn’t even have a chair in there. While the earlier sets have all had their strengths and weaknesses, they all felt like a place where people lived. The current set is entirely too beautiful and pristine. It’s like the living room furniture that my grandmother used to keep in its plastic covering for fear of it getting dirtied up. The TARDIS needs to feel like a living place, not a set. (This is why, for all that it’s a bit of a daft concept, the control room of the “Remembered TARDIS” worked better. It felt like a place where a lot of memories were made.)