10 Simple Fixes For Doctor Who's Future

When the Whoniverse was first announced, our fan brains were fizzing with all the incredible possibilities for potential spinoff shows. A Paul McGann miniseries! An older Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor on Trenzalore! The Time War! The Nyssa Adventures!

So it was pretty disappointing to hear that the first new Whoniverse show will be The War Between the Land and the Sea. With an entire universe of possibilities, the fact that Russell T Davies settled on doing a Children of Earth-style drama miniseries about humanity's conflict with the Sea Devils is sorely lacking in imagination.

We've seen that story play out so many times already, from 1970's The Silurians, to 2022's Legend of the Sea Devils. Is this new spinoff going to finally have humanity agree to co-exist with our aquatic Earth-fellows and their land-based cousins? It seems unlikely.

Now to be fair, we don't know much about The War Between the Land and the Sea at this stage. Maybe there's a lot more to it than meets the eye – there could be a Doctor or two in there, or some other exciting twist that will elevate it to true event status. And regardless, the show itself is likely to be pretty good – the cast is stacked with talent, and it's being written by two veteran Doctor Who writers in Russell T Davies and Pete McTighe.

But if they want the Whoniverse to become a huge global franchise, then the ideas need to be much bigger and better than this. Not just ideas that will excite hardcore fans – ideas that will get everybody talking.

David Tennant returning as the Fourteenth Doctor was a bold swing that broke the internet for a solid year and resulted in monumental excitement around the 60th anniversary. That's the kind of big-scale thinking we hoped to see when that snazzy Whoniverse logo was first unveiled in 2023.