The changing face of Doctor Who

[mtbc]

I rather liked much of earlier Doctor Who. A few episodes, perhaps several, would cover each story, in which the world we found themselves in and the people in it would be the main part of the story, the recurring characters influencing it but often not dominant. At its best each story might explore a different idea and its impact on people, just as Black Mirror does from episode to episode. I am not so keen on recent Doctor Who which doesn't have time to much develop any particular situation and often puts the recurring characters more front-and-center as being very special in one regard or another. Now I reflect on this further, I realize that earlier Doctor Who could be somewhat like a kind of science fiction anthology series: the different stories and their diverse underlying premises were linked with strong threads but not overwhelmed by them.

The more recent Doctor Who that I have liked has tended to delve more into the situation and let it drive the characters more: for instance, the two-episode stories starting with The Empty Child (2006) and The Rebel Flesh (2011). While I have enjoyed some single episode stories like A Christmas Carol (2010) and Time Heist (2014) which did manage to provide thought-provoking entertainment without relying on narratively worthless daftness and peril, I do prefer when the recurring parts of the show can give way to an interesting story that is specific to the current episodes.

Comments

[mindstalk]

"Blink" and "Girl in the Fireplace" would be good one-episodes, from the "Moffat under Davies" set.

Yeah, Old Who spent more time on stories, though the episodes were half-length, so 4 episodes then was like a two-parter now. But almost everything was at least 4 episodes. OTOH, they often didn't have enough story to actually fill the time well. How many times can the Doctor get kidnapped in one episode? Tradeoff between "more side characters, but stretched" and "frenetically packed".

[mtbc]

True, I was puzzling over those episodes. Blink I like partly for Time Heist reasons of actually using time travel reasonably. Girl in the Fireplace is indeed surprisingly good given the deeply silly premise: perhaps it works more in terms of interpersonal drama than as science fiction.

Indeed, sometimes Old Who did construct interesting societies and what-if premises, and at other times the underlying idea was a bit weak (especially, when Earth-bound, yet another alien invasion with human collaborators). I wonder how well the kidnappings correspond with failure of underlying idea versus just being lazy drama serving narrative needs: for instance, to get a character somewhere else so that they can either get another party's perspective or escape once there to learn or do things in that location, or even just to generate another cliffhanger.