10 Doctor Who Mistakes Confirmed By The Creators
If it wasn’t for THAT scene, Series 5 would be perfect – even Steven Moffat agrees.
Doctor Who’s creatives work tirelessly to make the show a success. But with the best will in the world, things don’t always come out as well as intended.
Indeed, many cast and crew members have been quite vocal about what they would've done differently if they had their own TARDIS.
Sometimes a showrunner will think they’re making the right call, then, with the benefit of hindsight, will have second thoughts. Other times, actors will look back and cringe, lamenting the way their characters were written (or performed!). And sometimes, scenes just age really badly.
None of the following moments are worthy of life imprisonment in Stormcage, but it’s always fascinating to see the cast and crew acknowledge their mistakes and examine why they happened. In some cases, the show was able to learn from them and get things right the next time round.
To paraphrase the Twelfth Doctor, Doctor Who has made many mistakes – and these are some of the ones the creators decided to speak out on.
10. Clara Being Too Passive
Companions are meant to evolve during their time in the TARDIS. As the Thirteenth Doctor tells her fam in Arachnids in the UK, “You're not gonna come back as the same people that left here.”
Rarely has this been quite as true as it was for Clara.
The Clara of Series 7 is almost a completely different character to the Clara of Series 8 and 9. This radical reinvention was largely down to the Impossible Girl arc, which dominated her first run of adventures.
Making the companion the series arc was an interesting idea on paper, but in practice it created problems, as Steven Moffat has admitted:
“One of the difficulties with her ‘impossible girl’ story was that she wasn’t actually a participant in it, because she didn’t actually know about the mystery. It was always the Doctor fussing about it. She was completely oblivious until the very end, so it doesn’t change her hugely.”
Moffat adjusted in Series 8 and made Clara a much more active character going forward – though some would argue that he over-corrected!