10 Biggest Mistakes Of The Doctor Who Disney Era

One of the big questions of the Disney era was how it would adapt for the modern media landscape, and that’s sadly where we fell apart a little.

In the modern era of streaming, with a plethora of shows available to most households, what really cuts through the noise is prestige quality and a unique premise. With an improved budget, Doctor Who could manage the former no problem, and it already had the latter on lock.

Unfortunately, the entire era was designed around outdated notions of ‘going viral’. We’re all familiar with how much Russell loves the word ‘content’ by now, but that seems to be the foundation on which his second era was built. You might have got away with hollow mystery boxes in 2005, but 20 years later, they are exhausting, and audiences expect more.

Ultimately the huge mysteries of RTD2 that we were all meant to be super excited about were old lady cameos that went nowhere. And to be fair, we did all have fun speculating in the build-up. But none of the payoffs lived up to the hype.

There clearly wasn’t a plan for Mrs Flood, as evidenced by some of her bizarre dialogue in Season 1 about “storming down the gates of gold”, and apparently the Rani somehow knows about Sutekh too, for some reason. And the identity of Ruby’s mother, while a sweet and emotional resolution, was pure clickbait. The mystery of Ruby was clearly and blatantly teased with supernatural clues like falling snow and a mysterious hooded figure acting mysteriously, so for the solution to be an ordinary single mother leaving her baby outside a church just made no sense.

In the end, in spite of all the ‘shocking’ twists of the Disney era, what moment was it that actually went a little bit ‘viral’? It was Mr Ring-A-Ding. As it turns out, the era’s boldest departure from its own formula and its most unique and original creation in years was in fact the moment that captured the audience’s imagination. Fancy that.