Doctor Who 50th Anniversary: 7 Things That NEED To Happen

5. Ultimately Use What Had Come Before To Move Forward

I mentioned The Three Doctors a moment ago, and now I'm going to compare it to the Five Doctors.

You know what the difference between the two really is? Ten Years. OK, yes, that too. But what I'm getting at is that while both celebrated the past, and both actively used the theme of looking back to the past as part of their story, where The Three Doctors succeeded and The Five Doctors failed is ultimately a question of hindsight. The Three Doctors moved forward. To whit, it changed the state of the show from one about the Doctor being stuck on Earth helping UNIT to one about the Doctor restored to traveling through space and time. Which is a huge change in the landscape of the show. The main change between before The Five Doctors and after The Five Doctors? Tegan's haircut. It's not enough to simply celebrate where we've come from in the last 50 years. It needs on a fundamental level to change the game somehow. To make the last 50 years important we need to somehow draw a line underneath them separating what came before and what came after.