Doctor Who: 10 Essential Changes To Make With Peter Capaldi's Doctor

2. Divisions

There's been a perceptibly Doctor-centric repetition of characters, villains and places throughout new Who. It also highlights a clear divide between the Eccleston/Tennant era and the Smith era. I don't like it.

This era-defined division seems to apply to virtually all characters who appeared during that era, most obviously to companions, and seems to prevent them from appearing with any other Doctor. But for a very few exceptions, it's as if never the twain shall meet. But why? The companions of any previous Doctor were still the current Doctor's companions, regardless of how many times he might've regenerated since. He infrequently recalls some of them by name, so why shouldn't he want to see them, need to find them, or even just randomly bump into them? A convenient plot device is all it takes. Doctor 10 proved beyond doubt that it was entirely possible, but then it all just kinda stopped. At least ten companions have witnessed the regenerative process or its immediate after-effects first hand, so they'd be more than capable of accepting a Doctor with a different face. Even if they never saw him regenerate, plenty of them ended up meeting a different incarnation of the Doctor at some point too, so it's not as if there's no precedent. And even though there've been loads of companions who neither witnessed a regeneration nor met another version of the Doctor, their minds must have been immeasurably broadened simply from having travelled with him, so it couldn't be that great a leap of faith for them to accept that a man with entirely different physical attributes could be the same person as their Doctor. I'm all for former companions coming back. But if it's going to happen, broaden the scope and reduce the repetition. Viewers and fans create associations around eras and, specifically, between Doctors and companions, largely because that's how they're packaged for us. But it's not reasonable to assume that the Doctor wouldn't retain any emotional connection with companions he travelled with in previous incarnations. It's even less reasonable to suggest he'd only ever want to revisit the companions he'd travelled with in his current incarnation. Capaldi's Doctor, step back in time - no, really! Stop in on one of your really old companions once in a while. It'll be good for both of you.