4. Travel with Purpose
Admittedly, I cannot take credit for thinking up this characteristic. It came out of a spirited conversation about Peter Capaldi with my friend Hana L. Brightside, but I agree that the Twelfth Doctor should have some sort of motive or mission guiding his travel. This idea comes out of a desire to play to Steven Moffat's prior choices as showrunner, we know he likes to experiment with longer plotlines, complicated narratives, story elements fitting together as pieces of a puzzle. So far, his attempts to do this are not entirely successful by anyone's standards, but if the focus of this larger narrative is not companion-centred, as with Clara and River, but Doctor-centred, it might work out cleaner. Doctor Who should not shy away from the messy or the complicated, time travel is bound to make for some confusion now and then, but that complexity should rest within the Doctor. It has been nearly thirty years (in our time not theirs) since Peri Brown admonished the Doctor for his "aimless wanderings" and little has changed. The Doctor is still drifting, seeing the sights "before they fade away" as the Eleventh Doctor put it. The most important drawback to going down this wormhole is, if taken too far, it would undermine the established character of the Doctor. He does, after all, appreciate travel for its own sake. I am not and would not suggest that he should suddenly turn into the Tesselector (nor despite the visual cue the Enterprise) with lists, and timetables, and the like. Just that a slightly more goal-oriented Doctor could be interesting.