10 Reasons RTD's Doctor Who Return Failed
5. Unexplained Moments And Sloppy Writing
It’s usual for some stuff in Doctor Who to remain unexplained, but RTD2 really took the biscuit.
In RTD2, characters broke the fourth wall. Constantly. For no discernible reason. Maybe if this was an established regular part of Doctor Who and maybe if an in-universe reason was provided, it would've been a fun addition. But as it stands it was just weird, and distracting, and made the show a pantomime.
Long-term fans kept waiting for the penny to drop. Newcomers were confused. And all the while, RTD withheld the explanation because he thought it was beneath him to give us mere mortals a peek behind the curtain. He said:
"That hasn’t been explained, and it might never be, frankly. Within the Doctor Who offices, we know exactly why that happens and yet I’m showing no sign of putting that on screen. I see no need to explain it whatsoever."
Once again, it just comes off as arrogant. To fundamentally adjust how Doctor Who works and then decide not to share the explanation for seemingly no other reason than 'vibes' is a ridiculous holier-than-thou attitude. Why would you want to confuse and irritate your audience in this way?
And there's more. According to Russell that apparent six-month timeskip in The Devil's Chord actually wasn't a timeskip at all, and Doctor Who fans are fools for thinking it was. He told SFX Magazine:
"No, that's meant to be... that's complicated. I can see that no-one in the audience would ever get this! I'm trying to explain how Sarah Jane is clearly from the 1970s and yet in 'Pyramids Of Mars' she says she's from the 1980s. So I'm trying to establish some sort of temporal drift as you go into the TARDIS. There's not a six-month gap there. No-one else but a Doctor Who discourse would ever think six months had passed."
If you can "see that no-one in the audience would ever get this", why are you deliberately making things so confusing and weird? Why would "no-one else but a Doctor Who discourse ever think six months had passed", when that's literally just the information the episode presents to us?
If the audience is repeatedly struggling to comprehend the staggering genius of your writing, then maybe, just maybe... the audience isn't the problem?