June 3 2025 - 10:00am
The first episode of Doctor Who I can ever remember watching involved Third Doctor Jon Pertwee rushing around a quarry in Wales, trying to see off an infestation of giant man-killing maggots that had been accidentally created by an evil AI. It was part of The Green Death, a well-regarded serial from 1973. By the time I watched it in the early Nineties, it was already 20 years old and the special effects had not aged especially well. But it was unsettling, odd and compelling, and its emotional impact was heightened rather than lessened by the restraint of the storytelling.
Not long ago, I tried to watch some of the most recent series, featuring Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor. I’m not averse to New Who: I watched pretty regularly in the early days of the 2005 revival, when Messrs Eccleston, Tennant and Smith were doing their thing. But Doctor Who is barely watchable now. Amid the justified complaints about the strident, self-righteous, and relentless progressive messaging — Gatwa told those who disagreed with him politically not to watch the program, an instruction which several million people have apparently followed — it’s easy to overlook the fact that over the last decade or so, the quality has collapsed.
Gatwa left the show after last weekend’s finale, but it’s worth remembering how his Doctor had none of the gravitas or other-worldly mystery projected by many previous incumbents. Indeed, he barely seems like an adult at all, with his total lack of emotional restraint and hyperactive mannerisms. The plots lacked any sense of suspense or tension. What drama there was felt overwrought and trite.
This was not the case in those first few series of the new era. Several of the best episodes from the 2000s — Blink, most obviously, with the genuinely frightening Weeping Angels, but also The Empty Child, Dalek and Midnight — would work well as one-off ghost stories or tales of the macabre in their own right. Even the more conventional episodes had a sense of pace and verve that has been missing from Doctor Who for a very long time.
An honest accounting of the current state of the show has to reckon with this reality. It’s very easy for defenders of the current iteration — a dwindling band outside the professional boosters in the media and allies of the current creative team — to complain about “review bombing” by Right-wing mischief-makers. But the truth is that, as those defenders themselves often assert, there has always been a liberal bent to the post-2005 version of the show, and this was tolerated by the fanbase.
Think of the sexually ambiguous Captain Jack, or the unsubtle political allegory behind an episode like 2008’s Turn Left, which showed a British nationalist government interning non-citizens. The difference back then was that the stories were told with a good deal more wit and invention, with better actors and better writing. People are willing to overlook some political messaging, as long as it is subordinated to plot and character.
Unfortunately, since at least Jodie Whittaker’s time in the TARDIS, the preaching has frequently overwhelmed the story — consider 2018’s Rosa, a leaden parable about racism, or more recently the tiresome lectures about gender in 2023’s The Star Beast. Doctor Who is now a fundamentally moralistic and didactic show, and that is a great shame.
