Now that the dust has started to settle (Empire of Death gag right there) on the most recent eight-episode season of Doctor Who, it’s time to step back and take a look not only at the season itself – its highs and lows – but also at where we are with the series now in this brave new Disney-powered world. How has the return of the saviour Russell T Davies repositioned the show creatively? What has the involvement of Disney – as the show’s new international distributor (and co-funder) done for its global reputation and audience? How does the show now sit in a landscape littered with noisy, big-budget, high-concept genre shows? Will Ncuti Gatwa ever stop crying?  Let’s have a chat…

Shortly after the announcement of his surprise return to Doctor Who a few years back, Russell T mentioned somewhere or other that he was back because (amongst other more prosaic reasons) he’d found “a new way of telling Doctor Who stories.” This intrigued me. What could he possibly mean? Scripts written backwards? Scripts written in Latin? In iambic pentameter? The truth, as it turned out, was a little more mundane; he’d just decided to throw off Doctor Who’s often ill-fitting ‘sci-fi’ cloak and tell stories with more of a ‘supernatural’ theme. In last year’s sixtieth anniversary specials, we saw the first fruits of this ‘new direction’ in Wild Blue Yonder and, more particularly, The Giggle. Last year’s Christmas special, The Church on Ruby Road, went a step further as, in a story that could only really be generously described as ‘wafer-thin’, the newly-regenerated Doctor found himself fighting unexplained baby-eating extra-dimensional goblins aboard their flying ship and inadvertently becoming embroiled in the mystery of the birth mother of foundling Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson). Long-time fans – myself included – felt a bit disquieted by the fact that Doctor Who seemed about to untether itself from its tenuous grip on ‘reality’ and embrace a new style of storytelling that effectively meant that anything is possible and nothing needs to be explained because it’s… well, weird and supernatural, and stuff. Doctor Who is, in fact, no stranger to stories with a supernatural slant; probably the most famous example is 1971’s Jon Pertwee five-parter The Daemons, with its occult themes of witchcraft, dark magic ceremonies, and manifestations of a distinctly demonic giant horned beast called Azal. Typically, the situation turns out to be another alien incursion, and magic is debunked – “everything that happens in life must have a scientific explanation… if you know where to look for it, that is”, he tells his wide-eyed assistant Jo Grant – and Doctor Who continues on its merry way as a family adventure show and firmly closes the door on the prospect of entertaining ‘magic’ as any part of the programme’s storytelling bedrock. Davies has now kicked that door down, though, and in doing so has opened the floodgates for the show to embrace proper fantasy stories with all the narrative freedom it entails. This has led to several stories in the new season displaying gaping plot holes or unexplained conclusions that Davies has waved away as “supernatural and inexplicable.” Or worse still, he claims to know exactly how certain story elements make sense and weave together but chooses not to reveal them. In another recent interview, he addressed the somewhat opaque conclusion of the otherwise superlative 73 Yards – probably the best episode of the season – and declared that he knew exactly what the ending meant but chose not to make it clear in the episode itself. Supernatural stuff. That’s all well and good and fine and dandy but it does to tend to give writers – Davies, in particular – carte blanche to write any extreme fantastical situation and then write a way out of it that leaves the audience scratching their heads because they can’t make proper sense of it all. The writer (Davies) may feel smug and superior for a while but even Doctor Who – especially really good Doctor Who – needs to make some sort of sense if it’s not to leave the audience wondering why they have invested so much time following a story if the writer can’t be bothered to tie it up all in a nice neat bow before the end credits roll. Ambiguity is one thing; completely abandoning the basic rules of narrative is quite another, no matter how clever and meta it might appear.

That’s not to say that the supernatural elements of the show have been all bad news this season or even that they’ve dominated the series. It’s been a fairly even split between weird stuff and more traditional sci-fi. But there’s a sense that Davies has turned to this ‘new’ type of story without really thinking it all through. There’s vague talk of Pantheons of Gods, dark forces lurking in the background somewhere, harbingers that portend doom and destruction (and we’re done with that particular story element) but that’s exactly what it seems – vague, ill-defined, entirely random. It allows Davies to create some manipulative super-being from this ‘magical reality beyond science’ and get them to do pretty much anything. The best example of this in the season was The Devil’s Chord, which saw the Doctor and Ruby travel back to 1962 to watch The Beatles record their first album with George Martin at Abbey Road Studios in London. But the flamboyant, distinctly camp Maestro (Jinkx Monsoon), the offspring of the Toymaker, has become manifest and has stolen music and turned it into a weapon. This was an episode I wasn’t exactly looking forward to; rumours of a ‘musical number’ sent shivers up and down my fanboy spine, and as someone who finds the whole concept of drag utterly tiresome and uninteresting, the casting of Monsoon didn’t exactly fill me with joy and delight. But The Devil’s Chord turned out to be superb. Monsoon’s performance was utterly malevolent and, at times, genuinely chilling – using musical notes as weapons towards the end of the episode was an inspired visual – and the Always a Twist at the End musical number was another joyous Murray Gold earworm. This wasn’t just an expression of a world rediscovering music and embracing it after decades in the darkness but also, it seemed, a little poke in the eye to those often dead-eyed Who fans who feared the show would become unduly ‘Disneyfied’… what better way to wind them up than to give them a song-and-dance number in the second episode?

The supernatural reared its spooky head again in the aforementioned 73 Yards, an episode that allowed Millie Gibson to deliver a tour de force performance as Ruby Sunday, living her life without the Doctor but always haunted by a mysterious gesturing old woman who remains 73 yards away from her, and who poisons everyone against her when she speaks to them. Gibson is extraordinary here, especially considering the fact that this episode was her very first; she establishes and inhabits Ruby like an actor who has been playing the role for years. Sold initially as a ‘Welsh folk horror story’, 73 Yards quickly veers off into even darker territory as Ruby is manoeuvred into a position whereby she can confront and confound the sinister, abusive politician-cum-Prime Minister Roger ap Gwilliam (Aneurin Barnard). But not only does the episode fail to provide a properly coherent conclusion, it also refuses to explain what exactly the old woman says to people like Ruby’s foster mum Carla (Michelle Greenidge) and even the redoubtable Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) to make them turn against Ruby so completely and with such apparent revulsion. Davies asks us to make our own minds up and imagine the worst possible case scenario… that’s all well and good, but it can’t help but feel like a cop-out and ever so slightly lazy, undermining an otherwise well-crafted, atmospheric and compelling story. More supernatural shenanigans in the season finale of The Legend of Ruby Sunday/Empire of Death, with returning baddy Sutekh (resurrected from his last appearance in the 1975 Tom Baker classic Pyramids of Mars) now repositioned as a big magical dog-donkey thing that has been – gulp – hanging onto the TARDIS since he and the Doctor last clashed (not sure quite how this chimes with Ncuti’s Doctor creating two TARDISes with a big sledgehammer at the end of The Giggle… did Sutekh cling on to one and hope for the best?) and using his harbingers to turn the population of the Universe into dust, Thanos style.

But it’s not all been magical beings from other dimensions, ominous, powerful gods and maniacal creatures of chaos. The show has kept to the sci-fi rails on a few occasions but with mixed results. Season opener Space Babies reminded us, bluntly, that this is the same writer who gifted us the ‘farting’ Slitheen and a burping wheely bin in his first season way back in 2005. Daft, wacky, and utterly disposable – if not a little embarrassing to the “Doctor Who should be proper hard sci-fi” crowd (I own up to having been a member now and again until I learned to lighten up) – it’s clear that the episode, with its formidable Bogeyman monster made of (the clue’s in the name) baby bogies and a spaceship powered by methane in baby’s nappies, was aimed at the very young audience the show seems keen to embrace again. As a season opener, though, it seemed deeply ill-advised, and even its introductory scenes, where Ruby steps aboard the TARDIS and the Doctor briefly explains a bit about who he is and where he comes from, seemed garbed and hurried, an inevitability in a series with only an eight-episode sandbox to play in. More of which later…

My blood ran cold – it nearly froze, in fact – when I discovered that previous showrunner Steven Moffat was back to pen Boom, the third episode of the season. Long-time readers will recall that I’m not fan of Moffat’s time on Doctor Who, a six-season eternity of poor stories, nonsensical arcs, pathetic monsters, and endless scenes of people in rooms talking back and forth at one another in a series of increasingly weak quips. I will forever maintain that he crippled Doctor Who so badly that it’s still not been able to recover from the damage he caused to its domestic popularity. But never mind, six years on from leaving the show, he’s bound to have come up with a new idea, a new type of story to tell, a fresh way of approaching the Doctor Who Universe. Within a few minutes of Boom, I was to be disabused of this hope; this was the same old, same old stuff. The whole concept of the story – the Doctor standing on a landmine that will explode if he moves a muscle – is nicked from… sorry, inspired by… one brief scene in episode one of Genesis of the Daleks in 1975. This allows Moffat to write yet another talky chamber piece in which a handful of characters are trapped in one location – this time a huge crater on an alien planet – and just trade reams of dialogue interspersed with the odd weak joke. Even the ‘threat’ just turned out to be yet more malfunctioning well-meaning tech. Seriously, again? Despite the alien landscape being realised by a version of the ‘Volume’ effects technique whereby backgrounds and skyscapes are projected and displayed on huge backdrops, Boom looked like a cheap, money-saving bottle episode and it did almost nothing for me. I won’t go as far as to suggest that my Christmas is ruined as Moffat has written this year’s festive fable Joy to the World, but I’m expecting another helping of turkey that I could really do without.

Rogue, the only other non-Davies episode of the season, was in many ways a very typical modern Who story, a period piece set in the early 19th century where a bunch of ruthless cosplay-obsessed bird aliens called the Chuldur take over the bodies of attendees at a lavish ball held by Lady Pemberton (Indira Varma having great fun). Rogue was the very definition of a romp; the aliens were very silly (a throwback to some of the make-up efforts of mid-‘80s stories), and the episode raised many eyebrows in its depiction of the Doctor’s ‘romance’ with the titular space mercenary played, rather insipidly, by Jonathan Groff. This was a rather unconvincing nod to the show’s more open approach to both diversity and sexuality. The Doctor can fall in love with whoever he likes (although I remain somewhat tied to the ‘classic series’ depiction of the Doctor as largely sexless and disinterested in matters of the heart and groin), but it really has to be earned. It took him two seasons to realise how much Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) meant to him, and Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor eventually recognised that her companion Yaz (Mandip Gill) had feelings for her that she might well have reciprocated but deftly sidestepped, presumably because she remembered that previous romantic entanglements hadn’t gone all that well. Even though Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor is clearly more in tune with his emotions than his predecessors (so much crying!), I couldn’t buy into him falling for Rogue and being willing to give up everything and run off into space and time with him after having spent about ten minutes in his company.

Dot and Bubble was another highlight of the series, a proper well-considered sci-fi story quite rightly compared to the best of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. In the far future, in a community known as ‘Finetime’, young white people live their lives controlled by the ‘dot’ and living and working in the ‘bubble’, an AI ‘umbrella’ that blots out the outside world and keeps them connected to one another via a dizzying wall of video screens depicting constantly-changing hyperactive faces and images. When the ‘dot’ turns against them (for unspecified reasons, but I daresay it had become sick to the back teeth of their inane mindless chatter) and creates monstrous people-devouring slug creatures (a classic Doctor Who monster design at last!) The Doctor and Ruby appear on the screens of one Lindy Pepper-Bean (Callie Cooke), imploring her to disconnect herself from the dot and bubble and make her way to safety. A powerful, quirky episode with a lot to say about our over-reliance on social media and where it could lead with a very nasty sting in the tale when Lindy and her fellow survivors refuse any further help from the Doctor because of the colour of his skin. Ncuti Gatwa’s reaction is electrifying, full of frustration and disbelief, even as he’s still willing to help the people who have spurned him because of the way he looks. It’s one of the highlights of the season.

After just a handful of episodes, Davies delivered yet another of his insanely huge and bombastic finale two-parters. The stakes are high; there are umpteen unanswered questions – and more on those later – and Davies steals blatantly from the MCU (specifically Avengers: Infinity War) when Sutekh turns almost all life in the Universe to dust just because he can. History repeats itself as, during his first roll around the block as showrunner, Davies would set up his two-parters with a massively intriguing and pacey first episode that couldn’t quite deliver in the second half. For any and all the faults of Empire of Death, the episode was full of spectacle and drama, and it was quite amusing to see Davies jump through hoops and strain at the seams to make the story work, which it sort of did if you don’t ask certain questions and especially if you don’t expect coherent answers. After all the big, blousy bombast and the bizarre sight of Sutekh being dragged through the Time Vortex on a lead like a recalcitrant dog, Davies managed to close the episode off with what he does best – moments of human drama and emotion, beautifully realised and grounding a series that had often tended to hurtle off in the most wilfully bizarre directions.

What, then, did I think of this Season One/Fifteen/umpty-thrumpty of Doctor Who? By and large, I enjoyed it, although I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a series that was trying to shake me off, a fresh and achingly modern take on Doctor Who that isn’t really meant for (cough)-something white blokes with greying hair and too many Eaglemoss action figures (I have nine Mechonoid figures for no reason that I can adequately offer). It was inconsistent, of course – that’s one of the show’s greatest hallmarks – and even though I thought Space Babies was an ill-advised season opener, it wasn’t necessarily a bad episode. It also wasn’t remotely suggestive of what was to come, and despite Davies and the BBC insisting that the show, whilst not rating well, has performed more than satisfactorily in the ‘key demographic’ of the hard-to-reach ‘young’ audience (those pesky 16-34-year-olds), some of the episodes were surprisingly dark and challenging for a show aiming itself at a younger crowd. Where Davies previously took his lead from then-popular shows like Buffy and Smallville to recreate the series for 2005, it’s harder to pinpoint what’s inspired him this time or even where Doctor Who now sits in a TV world swollen by literally dozens of fantasy shows aimed at every demographic under the sun. As a result, the show feels a bit schizophrenic, not entirely sure where to go or what to do and with only an ill-defined ‘theme’ powering some of its stories and motivating some shaky running theme that seems to have no definable endpoint or purpose beyond just being a bit different. But I became increasingly conscious that the ‘standalone’ 45-minute episode format now seems rather old-fashioned and perfunctory, offering little time for proper incidental character development and allowing little more than hurried resolutions to interesting ideas not really fully explored.  For all its faults, Season 13’s Flux six-part narrative offered more ideas, more imagination, and more spectacle (despite the bloated Disney budget this year, the episodes really didn’t look as wide and cinematic as during showrunner Chris Chibnall’s much-maligned era) and just more time to breathe.

Other problems plaguing the series tend to relate to the brevity of its run. Eight episodes is a tight squeeze, particularly for a series that this year has asked so many questions. In his earlier runs, Davies would seed an idea – Bad Wolf, Torchwood, Mr Saxon – that would resolve in or around the finale. Here, he’s seeded a handful of mysteries: who is Ruby’s mother? Who is this woman (played by former Brookside actress Susan Twist) who keeps popping up in every episode? Who or what is Mrs Flood (played by EastEnders veteran Anita Dobson), and why does she keep breaking the fourth wall? What’s wrong with the TARDIS? Eight episodes doesn’t give these mysteries time to settle, much less grow and get resolved. I admired the audacity of the revelation of the identity of Ruby’s mother (ordinary people matter!), but other associated bits and pieces are still hanging in the air; why did Ruby appear to be able to manifest snow everywhere, and what was the ongoing significance of The Carol of the Bells that seemed to play at odd times when Ruby’s origin is mentioned or referenced? This is all too much weight for an eight-episode run to bear – especially taking into account that there’s also a new Doctor to establish and his relationship with Ruby to develop (itself scuppered by the fact that two episodes of the eight featured the Doctor in a reduced capacity due to Gatwa’s extended commitments to Netflix’s Sex Education series). Inevitably, it all felt rushed, hurried, unfinished – too much going on but not enough elbow room for any of it to breathe or flourish or even matter. The Doctor/Ruby dynamic, in particular, never quite gelled despite the palpable chemistry between Gatwa and Gibson – we just didn’t see them on screen together enough, we didn’t see them experience enough or suffer enough to really feel the strength of the bond the scripts wanted us to believe in.

Finally… well, near enough, you’ll be glad to read… our new Doctor. Ncuti Gatwa is a gift, an actor with a superb, impressive, and seemingly effortless range. He’s possessed of unbelievable energy and enthusiasm, and he exudes that ‘something’ defines the Doctor despite being very different from all his predecessors in every way. I accept that he’s a more emotionally open Doctor than we’ve ever seen before, but I worry that his credentials as a ‘hero’, as the Last of the Time Lords, are being undersold slightly by the fact that he spends a lot of time with tears rolling down his cheeks. The whole point of this incarnation, post-David Tennant’s brief Fourteenth Doctor run, was to unencumber the Doctor of all the baggage he’s carried for regenerations so he can set off as a new man (literally) in touch with his emotional core but not driven or defined by it. But this year, he’s been in tears over something in almost every episode, and it’s getting to be a bit of a bore. Basically, man up, Doctor, and stop snuffling. And I’m sorry, no matter how cool it is, I can never hope to get used to hearing the Doctor calling someone ‘honey’ or ‘babes’, but that is very much a cross I have to bear, and I bear it in good humour. As a final observation about the new Doctor himself, I can’t help feeling that his lack of a signature look has robbed him of a little of his defining identity. I understand the desire to avoid a rigid ‘costume’ look so that he just wears clothes like everyone else, and I’m not suggesting a return to the long scarves, cricket gear, or question-mark pullovers of previous incarnations. But seeing the Doctor wander out of the TARDIS in a kilt, jeans, T-shirt, leather jacket or even, in one episode, an anorak and a bobble hat doesn’t help to set him apart. And the Doctor really does need to be set apart because he is apart; he’s not one of us, he’s not human, he’s a man of the universe, a man out of space and time. I’d dare to suggest that the long fawn leather coat he’s sported in a couple of episodes might be a good starting point for an ‘image’ for the Doctor with any variation of tops and trousers as Ncuti and the costume designers see fit. If nothing else, merchandisers would surely be pleased to have something to latch onto as a visual identifier for this latest incarnation. Either that or perhaps he could jettison the TARDIS wardrobe..?

So there we have it. A new Doctor, a new era. It’s been a bold, chaotic, occasionally frustrating run of breathless episodes that, although apparently aimed at a ‘younger’ crowd, hasn’t made the mistake of dumbing down or talking down to its target audience. Much as I admire Russell T Davies and his writing, though, I think a little bit of humility might come in handy, maybe the odd admission that not everything he’s done has smelt of roses and that one or two-course corrections might be necessary – although with Season Two pretty much done and dusted before Season One even started airing we can probably expect more of the same next year (albeit with Millie Gibson on reduced duties, unfortunately). What’s inarguable is that the show hasn’t caught fire the way Davies and his Bad Wolf team must have anticipated and hoped – but then neither has it ’flopped’ as many angry, clickbait-hungry YouTube pond life commentators have noisily suggested. In the UK, despite a tumble in viewing figures now broadly in line with the decline of the rest of terrestrial television, it’s still been holding its own as a regular fixture in the Top 20 weekly ratings and its catch-up figures (an increasingly important part of the metric) remain healthy. With the show streaming on Disney + worldwide, we’re pretty much in the dark regarding its performance but with Disney’s investment (Doctor Who is now funded by BBC Studios, Bad Wolf, and Disney) being significantly lower than the gazillions they’ve been spending on often poorly-received Marvel and Star Wars shows, we can only hope that its performance has been successful enough to ensure their investment in episodes beyond Season Two. And if it hasn’t been and Disney steps aside after Season Two (or Three, which is widely rumoured to be pretty much a done deal) then Doctor Who can return home to the BBC and Bad Wolf, who will almost certainly have contingency plans in place to keep the show rolling as, despite its place in a massively competitive 21st-century television landscape, it remains one of the jewels in the BBC’s crown and as long as it continues to get the odd buff of polish now and again, I see no reason why it shouldn’t stay that way for years and regenerations to come.