10 Biggest Mistakes Of The Doctor Who Disney Era

Doctor Who has never looked slicker, that I will not debate. The problem is that, in all that style, we’ve lost more than a little substance.

The emotional foundation, as well as the Doctor-companion dynamic (i.e. the core of the show), has often felt as thin as toilet paper. Ruby was charismatic but hollow, as if waiting for character development that never quite materialised – interestingly, she actually seems far more like an interesting human being in her solo outing, Lucky Day.

The Doctor himself had moments of brilliance here and there, but sadly ended up feeling slightly more flat than previous incarnations due to a lack of moral complexity. That’s without even touching on the criminal character assassination of poor Belinda after an extremely promising first outing. The unfortunate truth is that all three of these characters ended up feeling like rough outlines drawn from an amalgamation of past characters.

But by far the biggest crime in terms of narrative was the fact that these characters did not enhance each other in any way. We seemed to skip over the companions settling into TARDIS life, instead just jumping to them being besties with the Doctor. There was no intrigue, no challenging of the Doctor, and Fifteen himself was lacking in any sort of arc.

At first, he was clearly being set up to be the ‘self-love’ incarnation, going on a journey of emotional healing. This didn’t happen. Instead we just watched him being sad a lot.

What’s frustrating is that RTD1 excelled in this area. The deeper nature of the core characters really resonated with 2005 audiences and made the revival what it is, so it’s baffling to me that this time around, this was skipped over.

Sure, the reduced episode count was always going to impact on this a little, but the fact that audiences are expected to fill the gaps in character development is sub-par writing for a prime-time drama. I guess this is what happens when your lead actor isn’t around a lot during your first season!