11 Things Doctor Who Is Getting Wrong With The 11th Doctor (And How To Fix Them)

4. The Whoverse Is A Small World After All

The canon of the 50 year run of Doctor Who is one of the most diverse, complicated, and conflicting collection story arcs, plot lines, and character journeys that you will ever watch. It is messy and muddled and magnificent all at the same time. One of the great strengths of the reboot, and in fact, one of the reasons that it performed as well as it did, was that it carefully pulled key story elements out of the jumbled mess of Whovianism and arranged them in a sleek modern vehicle, with sharp writing and respectable special effects budgets. This meant that as each new story element came up, it felt somehow official, as if these new iterations were the definitive iterations. But then a strange thing began happening, round about Season 4. Stories started ending. Not story arcs. Stories themselves. Like stars winking out across the skies of the Whoverse, villain and companion alike were consistently eaten by the conclusion monster. Why is this a problem? As we've said earlier, fresh and new are what keep the Doctor going. For every failed alien like the Jidoon, there are wild successes that become canon staples like the Weeping Angels. Innovation and creativity are the lifeblood of the expanding Whoverse. But it isn't really an expanding universe if each new development takes the place of an old one. Amy is amazing, but couldn't she have benefited from some time with Martha, who overcame her obsession with the Doctor? The Salurians are really cool, but what about sending them into a prehistoric war with the Daleks? Wouldn't it be mind numbingly awesome to find out the Silence was under the Master's control, and to orchestrate a showdown between The Master and his once-upon-a-time puppet River Song? These sorts of stories are not easily possible if each week we watch the universe's rules become more restrictive. Want to see Rose? Well, dimensions can't be crossed ever! Except like...every time we need them to be...but...not ever again we swear! Amy is stuck in the past forever, and the Doctor can never reach her again, because the Tardis is just "locked out". The Weeping Angels are totally wiped out, except that one we need to send Amy back, but then they are over, really really over! Etc. Etc. When you add new things but take old things away, it doesn't give a sense of expansiveness, if creates a sense of linear travel down a fixed narrative pathway. And we all know how the Doctor feels about things that happen all in the right order. So how do we fix this? It starts by just acknowledging that we fans know that you don't mean it. Yea, Rose is gone forever, trapped in a parallel universe. But you know what? We were excited to see her come back in Season 4's opener. Maybe surprised at the timing. But we never believed you when you said she was gone forever. We don't believe it now. Because the whole underlying premise of the Doctor Who series is that impossible things become possible. So stop spending so much time trying to convince us that you really, really mean it this time, and Amy is trapped forever in New York, or River Song can never get out of The Library computer, when we know you really don't mean it. None of us believes the Master is gone forever. Or the Time Lords. As a matter of fact, lots of us expect them to be a major part of the 50th anniversary special. And it's ok! Just stop inventing unnecessary and immutable inconsistencies in your plots just to justify why the universe has to be the one that prevents things from ever happening again. Maybe it isn't feasible, maybe it isn't probable, but let the Whoverse be big and complicated. It's best that way.