Thoughts on Doctor Who

In the past year or so, I’ve gotten into “First Time Watching” videos on YouTube.  Basically, some 20-something will film themselves watching The Terminator, or Iron Man, or whatever and post a half-hour long video of their biggest gasps or reactions.  What I find appealing about these, is they will be watching a favorite movie of mine, but one I haven’t seen for a decade, and it’s like I’m watching it again with … not a friend, but a person I vaguely know who has no idea I even exist.  Also, I forget how many people I’ve seen shocked at the “chest burster” scene.  That’s fun. 

There are twenty or so of these reactors I follow on YouTube.  And recently, four of them have either started watching Doctor Who or I just found them.  So I’ve been seeing the highlights of these … not old-old Doctor Who episodes, and since season … whatever just ended, I figured now was as good a time as any to write up some of my thoughts on the show.

First off, back during the time of the Tenth Doctor, if you had asked for my Top 10 TV shows, Doctor Who would have made the cut.  Now, I almost need to be reminded it exists.  For me, I’d say the Tenth Doctor was peak, and it’s been going down – sometimes faster, sometimes slower – since then.  If you asked why I thought that, I’d say I think the writing isn’t as good.  But if you then asked for concrete examples, I could only shrug.  Because it’s all subjective.  For example, there is an episode that started strong, I thought had an interesting premise and I was eager for the mystery to be solved.  And then the episode kind of petered out and ended.  So it’s an episode that I do not care for.  But, the one First Time Watcher who is far enough ahead to have seen it, loved it.  And I think when it first came out the “consensus” was that half the people loved it while half hated it.  And I was just in the hated half.  And that just seems to be where I always end up.

I understand that no book, song, TV show whatever will be loved by everyone.  That’s … life.  But the more I thought about it, I think what happened with Doctor Who is it’s not just they have more episodes I dislike than like, but they keep going back to the episodes I dislike.  There will be an episode I don’t care for, but instead of letting me move on and forget all about it, four episodes later, that villain comes back and is just as lame and uninteresting.  Or next season there’s a sequel episode, or two seasons later this character I’ve completely forgotten about comes back to play a super important role and I’m just confused trying to remember who they are.  And while there are some characters I’d like to see return, I would rather have more new stuff with less callbacks. 

If, somehow, the people at Doctor Who see this, all I ask is they do more new stuff.  New, good stuff.  Stories where the villain isn’t one dimensional, or the mystery is “solved” in a satisfactory way instead of just petering out in some artsy-fartsy way.  And if you do bring things back, maybe do them in a way where we don’t need to have watched fourteen episodes over the last fifty years to know what’s going on.  You have all of time and space to work with.  Do something new, that’s also good.