10 Doctor Who Controversies Fans Can't Agree On
3. Does The Show Lose Its Charm With A Good Budget?
Doctor Who has always had ambitions slightly beyond its own reach. While the show was fairly contemporary when it first aired, the effects began to fall behind the scope of the scripts.
This became an even bigger problem when the BBC cut off the show’s air supply and pushed it out the airlock on a shoestring budget to die. Around the time that Star Wars was reinventing sci-fi, Doctor Who was so dated that the hokey effects became a part of its identity.
There was obviously a huge leap in production quality when Series 1 launched in 2005, but that silly charm remained intact, with creatures like the Slitheen and the Abzorbaloff putting aside any doubt that the show had outgrown its roots. It wasn’t until the Moffat era that the effects seemed to, for the most part, catch up to the current standard, with the Chibnall era sometimes going too far in the other direction with an overreliance on CGI, despite marked improvements overall. It was during this era that the show lost some of its visual identity.
This is a question that’s come back into circulation recently, with Disney bankrolling the show into what we can only assume is, by far, its highest budget ever. And so far, it's hard to argue with the results – everything looks high-quality, but there's a camp charm to the space babies and murderous music and evil ambulances that still feels like Doctor Who.
OUR VERDICT: We may be attached to the wobbly walls and Welsh quarries, but Doctor Who needs to compete with a lot more shows in the nerd space nowadays, and the increased effects budget is a necessary step to stay relevant.