Doctor Who: 10 Writers We Want To See Return

While I praised the imagination of Neil Cross’s first episode, Neil Gaiman shoves him out of the airlock on that front. But that’s to be expected since he’s a primarily a fantasy author whose stories are aimed at children. Spectacular nonsense is right in his wheelhouse.

The best thing about Gaiman’s Doctor Who is that it throws the manual into a supernova and deliberately does things differently. Which is how we ended up the Tardis in a human body, and the Doctor’s split personality stand-off against the Cyber-Controller. It’s barmy but it works. And now that New Who is in its twelfth year, that sheer imagination and disregard for convention is a huge plus.

But despite this, you can tell that his fandom runs deep, bringing back the Gallifreyan Hypercube as an important plot device after a single appearance more than forty years earlier, and originally wanting to use an original Tardis console room for the climax of The Doctor’s Wife. That kind of genuine love of Doctor Who can often yield great results in the right hands. And if not, pointless fan-service can still be pretty good.

Gaiman already has two episodes under his belt so let’s give him a hat trick. And a slightly bigger budget so he can finally get an original monster instead of raiding the costume cupboard.