10 Things The Doctor Who Reboot MUST Do
6. Treat The Doctor Like A New Character
One of the problems with Doctor Who in recent years is that its lead character has had so much baggage.
The Doctor isn’t just the Doctor. They’re also the Timeless Child. And the last of the Time Lords (again). Oh, and they keep meeting their past incarnations every five minutes!
It just makes the character impenetrable to new viewers. At the end of the day, the Doctor is a time traveller who ran away from their own planet to see the universe. That’s really all you need!
If the Doctor is to have a backstory then it has to be all new, and not rewriting anything that came before – something that new viewers can understand without feeling like they’ve missed anything, or need to do their homework.
The 2005 revival did this perfectly with the Time War, which was as much of a mystery to old viewers as it was to new ones, because it took place offscreen (and after the classic era, rather than during it). One popular fan suggestion is to have the Doctor suffering from amnesia, and slowly discovering themselves again over the course of the season.
Whatever the case, the key is to ensure that the character is at a baseline that both rookies and diehard Whovians can get onboard with.