This excessiveness has been to the show’s detriment. It was evident last season in the complicated, twist-heavy plots of “Boom,” “Dot And Bubble,” and the Christmas special “Joy To The World,” which at times felt like four different episodes squished together. A prime example from this season is “Lux,” which featured a thrillingly novel animated antagonist and turned the Doctor into a cartoon (a first for the main series). You’d think that’s enough storytelling material to work with, but the momentum of the 1950s-set adventure is disrupted when the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) climbs through the TV of some modern-day Doctor Who fans. The meta scene at turns skewers Whovians and appreciates them, and then it asks the audience to care that these characters will soon cease to exist. (This kind of unearned emotional beat is littered throughout the Disney+ era: the heroic self-sacrifice of a character we’ve just met and have no connection to, but for whom the Doctor will inevitably shed a single tear.) Not satisfied with one strong central conceit, showrunner Russell T. Davies couldn’t resist breaking the fourth wall and including a knowing wink to the audience, deflating the tension of the adventure completely.
In “Lux,” the Doctor playfully chides his fans for preferring the iconic 2007 episode “Blink” to any of his latest adventures. Ironically, the very next episode is a direct sequel to the 2008 episode “Midnight,” which doesn’t say much for Davies’ confidence in this new era. “The Well” is one of the few episodes this season that stays focused on one idea, but bringing back an old monster and applying new rules is just another way of layering too many concepts on top of one good one. (Why couldn’t this have been an original standalone rather than a sequel?) “Midnight” is one of Doctor Who‘s scariest, most memorable episodes, but it works because the story was contained, both literally and figuratively. Bringing the creature back for this outing undermines what worked so well in the previous standalone story, not unlike the diminishing returns of the Weeping Angels in their appearances after “Blink.”
An ongoing concern about the Disney+ era is that it’s made the show “too woke.” But the issue isn’t the diversity of the cast nor even the social and political commentary in the writing, something which has always been part of Doctor Who (and science fiction in general). It’s the sheer amount of messaging crammed into each short season, with many episodes attempting more than one allegory, that’s so exhausting. Take this season’s premiere, “The Robot Revolution,” an episode that seems to be about our relationship to technology and the dominance of AI but shifts abruptly to be about misogyny and incel culture. (The twist that “The Great AI Generator” is actually “The Great AL Generator,” referencing a once-human man, is less clever than it is groan-worthy.) And then there’s “Lucky Day,” where a storyline about a companion’s TARDIS PTSD also tackles the manosphere and disinformation in the social-media age. Any one of those ideas would have been a fine subject for a Doctor Who story, but the episodes sag under the weight when all the ideas are stacked atop one another. And “the real villain was society all along” gimmick gets old when it’s employed in every other installment.
Rumors abound that Disney+ won’t renew Who, and Davies has hinted that if the show goes on hiatus it might not come back for a long time. Perhaps he was writing with the show’s precarious future in mind: The episodes are overstuffed in a way that suggests wanting to try every single trick before the Disney check bounces. Unfortunately, that impulse has overcomplicated the entire endeavor. Doctor Who has always been grand and clever, sometimes reaching too high and stumbling on the finish, but the best episodes (yes, like “Blink”) took interesting ideas and delivered them with straightforward clarity. That used to be clever enough.
