9 Worst Times TV Shows Went Meta
8. The Doctor Breaks The Fourth Wall
One of the tricky things Doctor Who has to accomplish each week is making its high-concept plots comprehensible to a family audience. This means simplifying a fifty-five-year-old canon, with hundreds of characters, intricate timelines and time-travel paradoxes, for the Saturday night viewing public.
Rarely has this been done as inelegantly as in the cold open of “Before the Flood”, during which the Twelfth Doctor inexplicably breaks the fourth wall and explains the episode’s wibbly-wobbly premise to the audience, with guitar playing to boot (pun intended).
Peter Capaldi has a fine stab at it, but the problem is just how unprecedented it is; okay, the William Hartnell's Doctor did break the fourth wall in the first ever Christmas episode (“The Feast of Steven”), but it’s not been a part of Doctor Who’s toolbox since. The result feels like a cheap attempt to hurry the necessary exposition out of the way.