Saving Doctor Who: Pace and Structure

Doctor Who was better in the 20th Century.

To see why, let's look at Rogue, one of the weaker episodes Ncuti Gatwa's first season. There were two strands to the plot - in one, the Chuldur, a family of shape-shifting alien Bridgerton fans come to Regency England and infiltrate a society ball, intending to Cosplay the planet to death for no particular reason. In the other, the Doctor has a brief, doomed romance with Rogue, a Captain Jack style bounty hunter who is trying to catch them.

Unfortunately, neither of these strands had enough development. The Chuldur and their plot were slight and insubstantial. We never got to know any of their victims, so none of them seemed to matter, except for the bait-and-switch with Ruby (who was obviously going to survive the episode). Meanwhile, Rogue didn't get enough character development to explain why the Doctor would fall for him so suddenly, or why we should care about him - especially as he obviously wasn't going to survive the episode. There simply wasn't enough time to make any of the story's elements work.

The problem lies with the first and biggest mistake that RTD made when he revived the series - one he made before writing a single line. This is the single episode format that has dominated Doctor Who since 2005. Many episodes seem rushed. Either the plot and characters are underdeveloped, or the pace is breathless, or the writer tries to cram so much stuff into 45 minutes that it becomes hard to follow, or there isn't time to set up a satisfactory conclusion, so we end up with deus ex machina. It seems that Russel T Davis was subconsciously aware of these structural problems as early as The Parting of the Ways, in which Doctor doesn't have time to finish his anti-Dalek weapon, and only the literal deus ex machina of Rose looking into the heart of the Tardis and making a wish saves the day.

So why did RTD chose this format? A clue can be found in the following line from Rose.

I got the Bronze.

Russel followed the format of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which had been popular in the years preceding the revival. A season would consist mainly of self-contained episodes, but build towards a final confrontation with a boss villain at the end of the season. This is the format that Doctor Who has followed (with a few variations) since.

As well as rushed storytelling, another consequence of this is that the leads have to be on screen almost all the time. This gives them a gruelling shooting schedule, and, to provide them with breaks, it's necessary to have a "Doctor-Lite" episodes - not so much Doctor Who as Doctor? Where?

Over the course of 21st Century Doctor Who's run, seasons have become shorter and shorter, from 13 episodes in 2005 to a mere 8 in 2024. This leaves fans feeling short-changed, especially when both 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble were Doctor-Lite episodes. Furthermore, because of the need for the season finale to be an event, each season finale has tried to outdo the last, leading to stories where spectacle overwhelms logic.

How did 20th Century Doctor Who do things better? Back then, stories were typically four episodes long, sometimes 6. This allowed them time to breathe. Settings could be explored, characters developed, villains given motivations, ideas fleshed out. At its best, this led to classics like Genesis of the Daleks, which had a depth of storytelling that no 21st Century story has ever approached.

When Doctor Who returns, the new production team should revive the original format. The BBC and its partners should commit to making 4 four-part stories per year. The greater depth and scope of these stories would allow us to feel that we were exploring the Universe with the Doctor, and remove the need for any one story to serve as a season finale. The pace of the action could vary from episode to episode within a story, and from scene to scene within an episode. As more time could be spent developing secondary characters, the scenes focussing on them could be sheduled together, so as to give the leads regular breaks from filming without having to take them out of a whole episode.

Doctor Who is the show that can go anywhere and do anything, but to truly reach its creative potential, it needs more than 8 single-episode stories a year. And for those of us who watched Doctor Who as children in the 20th Century, what was it we talked about in the school playground on Monday morning? The cliffhangers...