Why Doctor Who Could Be Good
I am a grown man, who has ten years experience writing and developing stories and scripts, who studied scriptwriting for three years at university, who pays close attention to the gods of storytelling, the theories that preside over it, and the convoluted systems that you can access to make a story blossom into something beautiful, obscenely new, and adaptable, and yet, somehow, I fucking love Doctor Who.
From Tom Baker contemplating the morality of genocide, to Sylvester McCoy fighting Cheetah People that ride horses (WHY DO CHEETAHS NEED HORSES), from Peter Kay being a blob to the complete avoidance of why a time-travelling god will not kill Hitler, from The Movie to The Audio Books to long conversations with nerds about Lupine Wavelength Haemovariforms (I know that from memory bitches), I love Doctor Who. And I have no idea why.
As much as certain seasons, or episodes, or moments, have been beautiful to watch, the overall nature of what Doctor Who is should make me turn in my grave before I’m even dead. Everything I know about story-telling — everything I learnt about the nature of story-craft — is utterly ignored in this show; for some reason, I am utterly indebted to discovering it, its moral compass, its bizarre tales of adventure, its boyish charm, and yet I know, deep down, it’s terrible. I’ve been binge-watching Community as of late, and their parody Inspector Spacetime isn’t even a parody at all; it’s as good, it’s just the same show. Why then, do I still have a desperate need to watch every episode? Why then must I rail and whine at the ‘bad writing’? If the show is inherently terrible, why do I care so much about it being good? Can it even be good? What the fuck is Doctor Who?
I remember having this truly amazing feeling when I saw Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor. He was in feeling my first Doctor — an idea in whovian circles, this moment of realisation that this time traveller is specifically yours, your first experience of this gentle traveller fixing the universe — and although technically Tom or Colin Baker were my first, this was the one that made me click with the show, that did something to my brain chemistry like heroine must to addicts. I remember seeing this man, PTSD-riddled from war, lonely, isolated, and with a desperate need to love and care and fix others. I hadn’t seen anything like it in my young life, and, I’ll be pathetically blunt, I connected with such an idea. I was alone in school, and here was this man who was undeniably other, undeniably isolated, just wanting to spread love. I think this is the reason why I love Doctor Who, this need to reclaim that feeling, but in academic senses — in the sense that I am a writer who knows the craft who hates bad writing in the industry — I have no idea why I still watch it.
But if it is indeed that one feeling that keeps me going, I feel I have a duty, as some random twat on the internet, to give you an answer to if Doctor Who is good. Or rather, I’m going to ask a simple question: how can Doctor Who be good?
The following is a break down of five key elements that I think, with some serious redevelopment, could transform Doctor Who from a bizarre British romp through god-knows-what, into something truly special. Doctor Who should not just be loved as a kitschy nonsense machine of free-radical tea and adventure novel charm. Doctor Who should be good.
Circle Jerking & Story Circle (Jerking)
I have no idea how the BBC handle their writers, but I can only assume they herd them like cats, if all of the herders had a crippling phobia of cats. In all other instances of hearing about a show — if you are the kind of person who researches such stuff — you hear of the structure the writers exist within. But in Doctor Who — especially the era of Moffat — it seems that anything from invisible deadlines, unedited scripts, over-edited scripts, round-tables, or isolated writers who never even meet, all exist simultaneously. There is no responsible source for how the show is even written, which, before I even get into the content of the show, is the most important aspect.
This leads me to Dan Harmon, and Supernatural. American Television utilises the roundtable of writers in a beautiful way, and although we can argue whether writers are treated with respect over there, let’s assume we live in a fair world for just a second to look at this structure of writing. All the writers are in communication, in contact with their show-runner, who guides the scripts and the story with their overarching vision. Scripts share editors. Writers share information. No writer is an island, and the head-writer is not god; rather the lead writer becomes the guiding light through the potential nonsense of the decisions the show could take, and the writers are a crew, working together to construct an overarching story, in a cohesive world.
The core rule of world-building is internal consistency; if you establish a rule, never break it. If you must break the rule, establish new limitations still with narrative sense. This cohesion of new ideas is what creates the suspension of disbelief your audience requires to enjoy the show. And in the case of Doctor Who — which can do anything it damn well pleases — this is the most important aspect of the story, of the world, of what the writers have to fight like a mad bear every day in that writers’ room. If you can do anything, your need for rules is exceptionally important to maintain clarity.
Doctor Who, from what I can gather, has no such room. It has no such conversation; not even a Skype Call. They don’t even exist in the same timezone. We can shift from The Fisher King to The Girl Who Died without a single heartbeat of consideration. The themes and the styles of these two episodes are in such opposition I could write a whole essay alone just on that. But I raise these episodes to indicate the most important part of story-telling: internal consistency. You need your writers to share the same space, not just geographically, but mentally. And in a show like Doctor Who — where anything is possible — you need someone to say what can’t be done, what breaks theme, what throws you out into the void away from the original purpose of why you are writing. You need to keep your writers tethered.
I started this section with Story Circles. This updated system Dan Harmon created is the perfect example of how you need to construct a show like Doctor Who, which is unbelievably formulaic for something so bizarre. A combination of knowing how your story flows and having your writers sharing the same headspace creates a cohesive narrative where you don’t need Capaldi on a tank playing an electric fucking guitar. You need circles both within the narrative, and without it in the writers’ room, to make the show function collectively. If you have one writer using one formula, and another writer using another, you can only have a show that makes no sense.
The Wilderness
This leads me neatly into The Wilderness. That internal consistency is what makes a show make sense, it’s what allows the audience to bathe themselves in the bizarro adventures of a time-travelling god in a police box. But we hit a huge snag. In a show that is inherently about someone who can go anywhere to do anything — which is unlike any other show — how do you create internal consistency?
This article was inspired by this great piece by Adam Garcia on what he terms The Wilderness. To summarise:
Nearly every major franchise in science fiction has experienced some kind of wilderness period: a time when the main source of the franchise, whether it be a film or television series or even books, no longer produced content, allowing licensed media to continue narratives left unfinished or explore the edges of a complicated fictional world — Adam Garcia
The Wilderness is the outer rim of the expanded fiction of a universe, a sandbox to explore what the story can be to help the world flourish and grow. Having a place where writers can explore the nature of a story, or a world, and push it to its absolute extremes — to a point where the story has ceased to be recognisably the original tale that was told — is important in discovering where a story should go next canonically. Where I feel Doctor Who will struggle is that the whole fucking show is The Wilderness.
Doctor Who is a genre-bending incestuous weird-as-hell playbox ruled by insane gods taking mescaline on a regular basis. Doctor Who — TV show to Audio to Books to everything else — can have talking penguins, examinations of fascism, weird westerns, Agatha Christie homages, Lovecraft Mythos, high concept time-travel theories, evil dustbins, the fucking Absorbaloff, giant wasps, piranha shadows, and romcoms side by side. It’s a nightmare dream-fuelled LSD trip filtered through absolutely nothing at all! Whereas Star Wars can have an internally consistent world and a Wilderness, Doctor Who can only exist in this batshit maelstrom of everything it creates.
This is where we return to the story-circles. This is where we return to the idea of paring back, finding the core truth, and rebuilding. Doctor Who can’t get rid of its weirdness, or it’d cease to be Doctor Who, but it has to be sincerely and astutely aware of how maddening the show can get if left unchecked. If everything is acceptable, then nothing is. There is no world if everything is possible.
This is the clincher; is Doctor Who just going to be bad and awful forever, because it has no one pulling on the handbrake? Or can this be utilised to tell a broader story? That the universe is a vague and disturbing place, a chaotic nonsense that our Doctor navigates for our benefit. Doctor Who teaches morals, teaches lessons, and maybe the first lesson should be: life is fucking weird.
As much as a writers circle must be able to say “no, we shouldn’t use space bees” — because fuck me, no one needs space bees — it has to retain the core logic that the Whoniverse is insane, and our companions, our lens, has to address this, handle it. Like a Lovecraft detective staring into the void, our writers must do the same, so that our audience can follow-suit through the eyes of the companions. If the very act of writing Doctor Who is to walk into The Wilderness, then we must be selective with what flora and fauna we bring back with us. We must pack our bags, and settle into the weird frontier, and not lose our minds on the ayahuasca of Whovian writing.
Every writer for Doctor Who has what I term a “bees moment”, when the Wilderness consumes them, when they realise anything is possible and the writer loses their mind writing whatever they damn well please. The writers have to remain grounded, so that the weird can flourish.
The Deus Ex Machina Problem
Our guide in this nonsense though is The Doctor, perhaps the biggest problem of all.
I remember at University really not appreciating at all the narcissistic omphaloskeptics of Youtube, but out of that crass lump of goo we call The Youtube Community, came a small review of Doctor Who that has stuck with me for all these years. I can’t find the exact video, but Christopher Bingham expressed to me perhaps the biggest issue that Doctor Who has. Bigger than unruly writers lost in the egotism of their infinite Wilderness, bigger than being able to write TALKING FUCKING PENGUINS (I’ll never let this go) alongside fascist peddle bins. The problem, as Bing put it, was along these lines:
Doctor Who is about a deus ex machina, travelling around in a deus ex machina, with a deus ex machina in their pocket.
Yes. I hate to agree with you (because you’re a youtuber, and because I love Doctor Who), but this is it. This is the key to the lock to the question “is Doctor Who bad”?
The God-Man character — the omnipotent semi-human handling the new knowledge of a meaningless void they can do whatever they want within — has always been a problematic one. A character becomes relatable — or at least, interesting — because they have a challenge they must overcome. If your character can just dismantle a tank with their hand (Dr. Manhattan) or fly whilst shooting lasers from their eyes (Superman) or can travel anywhere, anywhen, with a device that unlocks everything (The Doctor), you remove a huge part of what makes characters function; stakes. What stories usually do to combat this, is use these characters as a lens into the nature of power, or worship, or meaninglessness, or nihilism, or — etc. Dr. Manhattan works because they have arguments on Mars about the pettiness of humanity. Superman works because [coughs, splutters, mumbles a reason]. The Doctor works because [coughs, splutters, mumbles a reason a little less] they have companions that are the human doorway into a Timelords deistic existence. In the audio book Scherzo, Paul McGann’s Doctor says the following:
Reminders of death. … No matter how powerful you were, death was inevitable. You still had to remember your mortality. And Time Lords need to remember all the more. I denied that that was the reason, of course. As you said, friendship, companionship. But over the years, over my many life times, as my friends all left me one by one, I began to wonder whether they really might have had a point after all. Especially when I found you, Charley. A companion who was already dead.
For context, The Doctor is expressing that he struggles with the idea of his companions; he has them because they are his memento mori. He can’t die, his companions can. He literally only has humans and the like around as disposable hunks of flesh, to remind him there are stakes. But then he falls in love, or makes friends, and makes companions of these other travellers, and this breaks down the paradigm he has created so he can, what, enjoy putting people in horrible situations?
But when we look at the rest of the canon, this idea is barely noted. David Tennant explored it a bit (Waters of Mars), Sylvester McCoy explored it a bit (Curse of Fenric), Colin Baker explored it a bit (Twin Dilemma, the good bits, not the bits with the worm) but, especially in these later series (New Who), all of the moral conundrum of being a time-travelling god is pushed to one side. Doctor Who is repeatedly regarded as a family show (an issue I explore next), and with that comes a very black and white moral structure. And in such a morality, you can’t explore The Doctor as you would Dr. Manhattan. You can only explore them as gallivanting British stereotype saving people and handing out friendly aphorisms like jelly babies.
This kind of writing diminishes the story, because if you don’t address the utter terrifying truth that The Doctor is a god, that can do anything, that probably shouldn’t, but also can’t really care because the universe is but an ant under their magnifier, you end up with just a deus ex machina with a bag of magic tricks. If Doctor Who wants to be good, without changing what is inherently Doctor Who, it needs to grow up, and challenge the expectations, themes, and issues that arise from having a character that could cause a mass genocide to save the universe but chooses not to, just so its more fun, and more family-friendly.
Family vs Condescension
I believed it was Tolkien who had stated that he never talked down to children because they needed to learn lessons from those fairy-tales, but I couldn’t find that quote, so this one by C S Lewis will do (what do you want from me, accurate journalism?)
If we take Doctor Who not be a science fiction show, but a show of fairy tales — heroes journey, villain representative of a basic evil ideal, defeat, Aesop Fable — then we have to address the fact that fairy tales used to be diabolical, scary, and cutthroat. Children, yes, will be watching the show, but there are ways of telling moral tales, with all their grey areas, in a fashion that isn’t traumatic but also isn’t patronising.
As the series of Doctor Who have progressed, the terrible truths have been usurped with the fabulistic quality, to give a very dry understanding of good vs evil. You, child, can be good. To be good is to care, to never be violent, and to listen to others. And this is true, but when you are presented with space Nazis, or genocidal sociopathic Time Lords, or ecological conundrums whether you should blow up the moon, you can’t just revert to the one idea that good wins, that good is being nice, and that this always works in every situation. When you have a character who is a god — which never addresses their godliness — dealing with situations far vaster than the small set of characters the BBC can budget for, you can’t patronise your audience with simple placations to niceness.
As C S Lewis said, those blamed for reading kids books (Doctor Who) as adults, are the same children blamed for reading adult books (Doctor Who). In both instances, the older and younger book should be the same show, with adults enjoying a kids show, and the kids enjoying a grown-up story. It means sharing horrible truths. It means killing companions. It means raising stakes. It means explaining that not always the best course of action wins. Some episodes have addressed this (Vincent Van Gogh springs to mind immediately, and especially Waters of Mars), but in Kill The Moon, Capaldi creates a scenario that seems to be about this intense moral conundrum, but it concludes with “I knew all along the egg will just reappear with basic CGI”. It’s lazy.
What bothers me the most about this issue with Doctor Who, is that if we are going to express The Doctor as a saviour of children, and an educator of the moral compass, we are essentially teaching our children that nothing bad will happen, and that if they just say nice things, nice things will happen. When the real world smacks them in the mouth with the horrible truth that things like 8Chan, neofascists, proroguing, shitty people in the pub, toxic friendships, and abuse exist, and all the grey horrible areas that they possess, Doctor Who will not stand up as a show that taught the world how to be good people, but only taught them that a white knight saviour in a blue box will always come down and make things better; and out of that grows apathy.
Doctor Who doesn’t need to stop being a family show, but a family is more than it’s children that need swaddling in cotton wool against the evils of the world. If Doctor Who is to be good, it needs to be a family show that is capable of showing the plethora of goods, evils, and ambiguities that make human life what it is. We can’t just avoid the hard questions. Children are too important to be condescended to.
The Question of The Woman (where things get messy)
Before I start, I want to say that if you see this and went “yeah! The Doctor can’t be a woman, The Doctor is a man, I have a big penis, look at my big penis, I drive a Ferrari” then just go jump off a cliff. This is not a section on arguing that The Doctor always has to be a man, with all the transphobic, patriarchal bullshit that comes with it. This is an article about storytelling, and if your main character can set themselves on fire to avoid death, then they sure as hell can be a fucking woman.
The issue that I find here is a complex one, and one that if written just an inch to the left or right of the point makes itself moot; it is also exceptionally difficult to prove, as its entirely based on a hypothetical that I feel floats around the outer rim of the writerliness of the show.
In all narratives, what makes them engaging is to be aware of where the story is headed. To avoid canon, or rules established, simply to tell an easier more accessible story is to render the story immobile. As I’ve just said, we know Time Lords can regenerate, and they have partial control over what they become; it becomes a natural decision to then establish that The Doctor needn’t be man, woman, non-binary or otherwise, because this human form we are experiencing is merely a playful extension of this gods identity. To argue The Doctor can’t be a woman is to avoid the glaring truth of establishing regeneration as a concept; it is as bad as avoiding the fact time travel can solve most issues, or that the sonic screwdriver is overpowered. These elements must be addressed in narrative form, and new rules, and new stories established, to make them interesting again.
However, much as the show becomes patronising to families and children by avoiding big truths to tell a thinly veiled Aesop, so is casting simply to appease. We have, currently, an incredible actress. Jodi Whittaker has all the essentials to be an exceptional Doctor (see It Takes You Away and the scene with the ‘map’ on the wall, which I can’t find a video of). And yet her stories feel lacklustre, and fall into the age-old trap of a silly idiot with a permanently north-pointing moral compass.
I feel as if the BBC has panicked. Fans announced, quite rightly, that it was time to change up the casting for The Doctor. But rather than open casting, and finding that new face — that may have well been Jodi Whittaker — to represent this strange traveller, they picked seemingly the nearest woman and shoved her in very safe narratives to not rock the boat anymore. Rather than continue to tell the story, but with the added gorgeousness of inclusivity, the stories ignored everything Tennant, Smith and, to a degree, Capaldi had established, to just tell nice little tales where everything is always right at the end. I repeat, this is not qualm against the actress herself — for she has proved herself considerably in the role — but the writing falls into all the traps listed above, and she appeared just as it became impossible for the BBC to avoid the issue.
We patronise our children, and now we patronise our actresses and our inclusivity with thinly veiled attempts at appearing progressive. If Jodi Whittaker had appeared after Matt Smith, when the fear of the fans was not as prevalent, it would have been a sincere decision to explore the show narratively. Instead, we get a writer storming out in a huff, and half of Broadchurch grasped and shoved into the roles, to play out a laboured narrative of moral good, and naïve idealism.
I cannot make it clear enough that a show like Doctor Who, with its infinite Wildnerness, godly characters, and genre-bending potential, should not have women playing the semi-eponymous role; however it seems they have merely made the decisions they have as a laboured point on inclusivity, rather than because it is the nature of the story. The story is about a traveller bringing people together, fighting fascism, representing a British Ideology as we once knew it before we went into the pit of Brexit. It should have naturally conceived the idea of a woman as The Doctor, or a person of colour, or neuroatypical or — etc. Instead, it fell into it out of the BBC needing people to pay their license fee, and what better way to get those weird lefty kids to pay for it than by placating their desire for a girl. And this Doctor is certainly a girl, not a woman, not even a time travelling god, and it pains me to watch an incredible talent trying to find a way of delivering her girlish charm in a way that is engaging. Somehow, she achieved this, but I still feel the scripts have patronised the entire purpose of moving forward to a place it should have reached a few series ago.
Of course, much of this is conjecture, and I sure many can counterargue how this Doctor does not represent what I’ve said above (see Rosa). And perhaps I am just wrong. But if you are going to write a show such as Doctor Who, then you have to follow where the story is naturally taking you. Companions should be able to die. Moral ambiguity should be explored. And gender, colour, race, culture, and identity should be as flexible and explorative as any other aspect of this bizarro universe of rat people and Weeping Angels. I fear, in what I’ve seen so far, that this is not the case. This is the inclusivity of a broadcasting network that still can’t give The Green Party as much air time as the Tories; I would be shocked if the BBC honestly made the decision to cast Whittaker from a place of care.
To be blunt, Doctor Who is a series of rivers leading to strange new lands and worlds. If you don’t let the story naturally reach these conclusions, and keep fighting against these currents to tell simple stories you can sell to anyone, then your show will just burn out under the weight of its own hypocrisy, and ignorance (mixed metaphors for the win). There are only so many times I can see her deliver a half-baked Matt Smith styled monologue whilst fumbling for her sonic before I realise they’re building dams in the river of all the progress they could have made.
So, is it just bad?
All of the above though doesn’t deny the fact that Doctor Who, inherently, has too many elements that might just make it, well… awful.
The main character can solve any situation without any stakes. The world has no set rules so any planet can be like anything and do anything it wants. There is no internal world, just The Wilderness, everlasting, filled with robot cowboys and DNA stealing bats. The show relies on its kitschiness, built upon the nostalgic joy of 60s Sci-fi, and relies on a near sitcom-like format of everything will be alright in the end. The main character can’t even die, because they are the show, and when they do die, you just set them on fire and start again. The canon is so vast it is riddled with errors, all solved by saying the phrase “timey-wimey”. And even when you do start doing stuff more interesting, or inclusive, it feels laboured and insincere. Can Doctor Who ever be good?
There is an idea, to get mildly political, called Capitalist Accelerationism. The idea is that capitalism is so god awful, that the only way to defeat it, is not to fight it, but to speed it up. If we overfeed capitalism, it will reach its natural destructive conclusion faster, and if we can get it to eat itself alive fast enough, we may have enough time to build the new thing from its wreckage. I feel, in a sense, Doctor Who is the same.
Star Wars wiped the slate clean with their EU, their Wilderness, so they could make the new films, The Mandalorian, and this new cohesive universe for us to inhabit, that still lets us enjoy the world of before. It both is and isn’t Star Wars as we remember. In Doctor Who, Matt Smith caused a second big bang to reset the universe, but it didn’t have the same effect. Because Doctor Who is The Wilderness, and The Wilderness is hardy as fuck.
If we accelerate Doctor Who, in its current form, to its last state, it’ll be a wishy-washy moral enterprise, with lazy stories, and nostalgia leaking from our noses. If we want a chance to explore a Doctor Who where, let’s say, The Doctor can not be present for six episodes, or companions die, or regenerations are more inclusive and happen simultaneously, or planets can die due to the error of a mad time-travelling lonely god — if we want those things, we need to let the current format explode in a puff of chaotic writers rooms and half-baked marketing strategies.
I would not like this to be the answer. I don’t even, really, believe it is the answer. But if Doctor Who is a wild, unruly Wilderness that no writer can tame — without fear of going mad, and writing their space bees without consequence — then we need to find a way of pruning it back to what it is really about.
It’s about going forward in its beliefs, without telling people they are mistaken in their own. It’s about enjoying the weird. It’s about accepting that loneliness is not the answer to being dangerously powerful. It’s about having friends going on an adventure, and learning no matter how awful things get on the way, you’ll always have those companions. We can’t tell that story without being inclusive, without addressing evil as something that sometimes cannot be stopped, and without coming up against the utter strangeness of a meaningless universe, and seeing the beauty in it.
We need to let the story play out without fighting it, but also without letting it get infected by too much of the everything it can be. We need to let it breathe. And let it be honest.
If I have to leave with anything, Doctor Who can only be good if it is sincere. And if that means wiping the Wilderness clean to grow a new garden, then so be it. If we want our Doctor to become all the different amazing people they are going to be, we have to do that sincerely; they have to be flawed, but not silly. They have to be lonely, but not alone. Doctor Who can only become good if it is sincere.
But for now, I just hope Jodi Whittaker gets the stories she deserves, when she comes back, yes, she will come back.
P.s. if anyone wants to hear any of my Doctor Who episodes that I want to make, then can you please be Nicholas Briggs or Chris Chibnall and give me a job. I’d fucking nail it.
