Doctor Who and the Nostalgia Trap, Part 2: It's the Writing, Stupid

What's gone wrong with Doctor Who? Looking at the seeds sown in the Chibnall era and the heated question of whether the show is 'too woke'

The Time Vortex from the Doctor Who title sequence, 1970s style

Doctor Who is in a weird limbo just at the moment, without any further series officially confirmed, and fans waiting nervously for news from Disney+ and the BBC.

I remember the air of optimism at the 60th anniversary, with Ncuti Gatwa as the new Doctor, the air of confidence around the Whoniverse and upcoming spin-offs — but now, only 18 months or so on, the only buzz around the show is speculation that it might be cancelled or a new showrunner brought in, with J Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, angling for the job. What a change in a short space of time.

A big part of that is the general contraction of the TV industry and bursting of the streaming bubble. But I believe the quality of the show matters just as much: it’s struggling not just because of the wider media landscape shifting, but because issues with the writing have prevented it from succeeding and resonating with audiences.

What’s gone wrong? We’ll need to go back further than Russell T Davies’ return, to the problems sown during the Chibnall era.

Previously on Bigger on the Inside….

In part one, I traced my delight in and eventually waning enthusiasm for the Doctor’s adventures in time and space across the Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat eras, through to the departure of Peter Capaldi’s Doctor. If you haven’t read it yet, check it out below!

This article has grown in the writing, so this is going to be part two in a series of (at least!) three posts.

On being a critical fan

I’ve found this a tricky article to write. One reason is because I don’t want to be ‘cancelled’ for talking about Doctor Who’s progressivism/“wokeness”. I may well get attacked from both sides in trying to take what I hope is a nuanced and thoughtful position on that question. But engaging with it is pretty inescapable in talking about the show’s recent reception, so I’ll start discussing that later, with more to come in part three — get your tar and feathers ready!

The other is because I’d much rather be enthusing over what I love about Doctor Who than critiquing what I dislike. I’m painfully aware that making television is difficult and complicated, and even when the final result is lacking, it’s the product of blood, sweat, tears and passion by many people. So I’ve generally followed a policy of “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it” in terms of reaction to Doctor Who — one of the reasons I’ve been more muted on the subject than you might expect if you know my love of the show!

Fandom can easily turn toxic in having impossible expectations of a beloved franchise, with middle-aged fans grumbling that its latest output can’t make them feel the same magic as when they first encountered it as a child (see also Star Wars and many others). This problem is heightened when you have had exceptional talent working on it, as I think was the case with RTD1 and Steven Moffat’s runs on the show, quibbles and critiques notwithstanding.

That said, I think there are genuine problems with the last few years of Doctor Who. My critique is not out of hatred for the show or contempt for the writers, but passionate out of genuine affection and interest in the show being as good as it can be. At its best, Doctor Who is drama, fun and moral inspiration, even modern myth-making, all for a family audience, and that’s brilliant.

With all that in mind, let’s set the TARDIS for 2018…

Jodie Whittaker as the first female incarnation of the Doctor

Jodi Whittaker and the Chibnall era

I have to admit, I was concerned when Chris Chibnall was announced as the new showrunner. His track record on Torchwood and Doctor Who didn’t fill me with confidence, with episodes ranging from mid at best to mind-boggling ill-conceived at worst (Cyberwoman and that one with the sex gas monster for Torchwood being particular lows).

While Chibnall’s show Broadchurch had been critically acclaimed (I have to admit I never watched it – crime drama isn’t typically my bag), it wasn’t obvious to me how that would translate to success as lead writer on Doctor Who. I don’t want to be unkind or overly critical, because Chibnall had some good instincts, ideas and moments, such as avoiding returning monsters and villains in his first season, and the show is a very complex one to write and produce. It’s also worth noting Jodie Whittaker was wonderfully enthusiastic as the first female incarnation of the Doctor, and I’m fine in principle with a female Doctor.

Chris Chibnall wrote Cyberwoman and was showrunner of Torchwood on its first two seasons. Yikes.

But one of the challenges for a show like Doctor Who is to keep having stepping-on points for a new wave of fans – of childr

en – while then growing up with them over the next few years, and hopefully keeping them to stick around through it’s next reinvention. It seems that a lot of people turned up to see Jodie Whittaker’s debut, but over her run, lots of them fell away. The wider shift to streaming is part of the picture, but I think there show had its own weaknesses.

I know the era has its defenders, but to me the drop in screenwriting craft, ability to create compelling characters and dramatic arcs, was very noticeable. Chibnall’s first season admirably eschewed returning monsters and villains, but felt rather empty. If he has anything interesting to say through the show, it passed me by. His writing often feels to me like Doctor Who as written by AI — able to ape the surface imagery of the show, but lacking insight or human viewpoint to make a strong emotional connection.

A missing ingredient?

Just to give an example of what I find missing in Chibnall’s writing, and one of the reasons I was concerned when he was announced as the new showrunner: in his Matt Smith-era two-parter The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood, the human race comes into conflict with the Silurians, lizard-people from the time of the dinosaurs who want to reclaim earth as their own. The Doctor tries to broker a peace, with negotiations shown in montage, snippets of superficial discussions skimmed over quickly. However, it comes out that one of the human characters kills a Silurian, out of fear and hostility, and negotiations break down.

There could be an interesting conflict here: both sides have a legitimate claim on the planet. But there is little interest in digging into the specifics of character or motivation to uncover any real conflict, just a superficial contrast between fear and selfishness on the one hand, and apple-pie and good vibes affirmation of teamwork and “being the best humanity has to offer” on the other. The negotiations are even summarised by voice-over rather than dramatised directly.

It’s incurious and inert, unable to inject any nuance or complexity into the situation, or root conflict in characters’ needs and desires in an emotionally compelling way. It goes through the motions, but lacks emotion.

And this isn’t a one-off: I almost always find Chibnall’s writing on Doctor Who to be shallow. At its best it is entertainingly shallow, but it lacks the emotional intelligence or thematic depth of Moffat or Davies’ scripts.

Chibnall as showrunner

Ever optimistic, I hoped that Chibnall would prove a better showrunner than individual contributor. After all, if you can pick the right talent, you can balance out your own shortcomings.

There was a lot to like about the Thirteenth Doctor’s era in theory. Jodie Whittaker’s debut episode, The Woman Who Fell to Earth, set in present-day Sheffield, set a promising, grounded tone evocative of how RTD rooted his era in the everyday life of Rose and her family, with an intriguing ensemble cast in Ryan, Yaz and Graham. Whittaker’s wide-eyed enthusiasm and optimism were a welcome contrast to Peter Capaldi’s moodier, edgier Doctor (as amazing as Capaldi was in the role as an actor).

But I think most fans would admit that satisfying character development wasn’t Chibnall’s forte. Unlike the likes of Rose Tyler, Martha, Donna, Amy and Rory, Clara (eventually, once the show settled down on a single ‘variant’ of her), Bill and so on, I never felt I really got to know Thirteen’s ‘fam’ or root for them in a meaningful way.

The TARDIS “fam”, Yaz, Graham, the Doctor and Ryan

To be fair, that may well be in part autobiographical: watching Doctor Who casually in my thirties as my personal and professional life got busier and more complicated was never going to have the same emotional impact as watching as a highly-engaged teen and twentysomething. I also don’t have the appetite to revisit the era to unpick in detail the writing choices that didn’t work for me.

But by the time we reached the end of Whittaker and Chibnall’s first series, with The Battle of Rav… something something. Sorry, I had to google it, it’s The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos. And doesn’t that story title scream ‘sci-fi gubbins’ of the sort that Doctor Who always sought to transcend in order to make the show accessible to a broad Saturday teatime audience?

The show moved out of that traditional slot to Sunday evenings, incidentally, which I think was a mistake. There were a whole bunch of other production-related missteps, like a bizarre series teaser at the end of the first episode merely showing the names and faces of guest stars, as if the presence of Mark Addy, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Shane Zaza and the like would have kids rushing to tune in. No offence to those actors, but it was a bad case of “TV industry brain” where I think the production team massively overestimated the draw of ordinary working actors to the target audience, and underestimated the importance of actually teasing monsters, alien worlds, past eras and actual stories.

Anyway, I’ve digressed from my digression! Back to The Battle of Ransack Of Chibnall’s Fanfic… Chibnall admitted in Doctor Who Magazine that they filmed a first draft due to running out of time for rewrites. That shows painfully, with what could be a powerful set-up in having the return of the villain who killed Graham’s wife Grace in the opening episode unfortunately squandered (to the extent that I’d forgotten completely that was a thing until I read the Wikipedia synopsis to jog my memory).

Again, making TV is tough, and I salute anyone who can make a show as complex as Doctor Who. But I think it goes to show the skill issue compared to the relatively high bar set by previous showrunners. Some of Moffat and RTD’s scripts struggled because of constraints, but never flopped as hard as this.

It’s the Writing, Stupid

Here’s my core thesis:

Doctor Who works best when it combines science fiction flights of fantasy with grounded human emotion and drama. Russell T Davies did this brilliantly when he brought back the show in 2005, and the show can do it again, if the writers are deliberate and skilful in their writing.

I want to venture into muddy waters and discuss the alternative theory in some quarters of “go woke, go broke” – that Doctor Who has lost its way because of progressivism. I think there’s a half-truth here, often wrapped up in a lot of sound and fury and culture war nonsense.

It’s easy for critics on the right to put the blame on “wokeness” but I think the real problem of the Chibnall era was the shallow writing. This made the show’s gestures in the direction of diversity, environmental issues and so on feel preachier and less organic than the green politics of 70s Doctor Who or gay representation of RTD’s original era, particularly with Captain Jack Harkness (which hasn’t aged well with John Barrowman’s track record, but that’s another story). If you tell interesting and compelling human stories, they will resonate across political and cultural divides, as I argued in my article right- and left-wing reactions to Apple TV’s sci-fi thriller Severance.

As I’ll come to in more detail in discussing the RTD2 era, I do think the perception in these polarised times that Doctor Who is “too woke” (obviously an ideologically loaded term!) has damaged the show, and that the perception is an accurate if simplified critical view of the show’s progressive politics.

But I think what provokes that reaction is a perception of preachiness, which comes from simplistic, one-dimensional writing. Being both progressive and well-written, which would imply a greater degree of subtlety and nuance, would have shielded the show from much (though not all) of the criticism directed at it.

Like Bill Clinton’s slogan “It’s the economy, stupid”, I think that most viewers of Doctor Who just want good storytelling, rather than something that is obviously playing to either left or right wing in obvious ways. It’s important that stories can be “bigger on the inside” and have social and political commentaries as part of their themes. But that works best when it is integrated organically into the story, where characters and adventure come first, rather than it appearing to be tied to a single ideological viewpoint.

The Nostalgia Trap tightens

Chibnall’s second season turned to mucking around with Doctor Who lore to generate discussion among fans, to diminishing returns (“The Master is back — and has destroyed Gallifrey, again!”). Here we begin to see the nostalgia trap tightening. In the Moffat era, there had been problems with over-reliance on past continuity (assuming the viewers knew that “Davros” is the name of the creator of the Daleks in the very first scene of the season opener The Magician’s Apprentice, as I mentioned in part one, for example). But Moffat at least had a propulsive wit and energy, as well as that all-important emotional literacy, to be able to carry you along even if you didn’t get all the details.

By this time, nostalgia and continuity-remixing is having to do the heavy lifting instead of good storytelling. That’s a feature that hasn’t gone away, as we’ve seen in RTD’s recent season with the return of Susan, the Rani and Sutekh, all handled without due care to make them matter to audiences not inherently invested in the past as fans.

The Master combines Cybermen and Time Lords into ‘Cyber masters’. Please stop.

There’s not necessarily a problem with Doctor Who drawing on its past, if elements are introduced in ways that are interesting and dramatic to those who don’t watch the show. But you’ve got to take real care not to make continuity feel like homework and for it to be inclusive of new viewers, rather than offputting.

If continuity had been deployed with some more dramatic flair, I wouldn’t have had an issue necessarily, but to me it felt leaden: continuity-bombs as a substitute for actual drama. Before we got to the controversial The Timeless Children story that rewrote the Doctor’s origins, I was already out.

I’m sure Chris Chibnall’s a passionate fan, lovely man and has talent when he plays to his strengths, so I’m sorry to be so negative about his time on the show. But his era of Doctor Who pushed me away from watching it, largely for sheer frustration with the clunkiness of the writing.

I dipped back in for the start of Flux to see if it had improved, but it hadn’t really: it had a ‘kitchen sink’ approach that was superficially more exciting but I still found it emotionally and thematically hollow.

By that point, you might even have caught me muttering “Come back, Russell T Davies, all is forgiven”.

And then, in a shocking twist, he did.

To be continued…