Warning: This article contains full spoilers for Doctor Who Season 14.
The first season of showrunner Russell T. Davies’ second tenure on Doctor Who is now wrapped up. After a season finale with plenty of sci-fi wackiness and emotional payoffs for the 15th Doctor and his companion Ruby Sunday, we can finally look back at how the overall season compares to its predecessors. Doctor Who, of course, has been a British cultural staple since 1963, but gained more of a worldwide audience with the 2005 relaunch, also spearheaded by Davies. After so many ups and downs over the past 20 years, how is the show faring in its latest iteration?
Quite well, all things considered. After the frankly dreadful era overseen by producer Chris Chibnall, which preceded Davies’ return, and the haphazardly assembled final season under Steven Moffat before that, Season 14 has been a massive step up in quality. It’s not perfect, and we’ll examine where it could improve a little later, but Ncuti Gatwa’s first season as the Doctor is the first time in years that Doctor Who has felt like it has a purposeful direction.
Unlucky Number 13
It’s not much of a hot take to say that before RTD returned for this second time as showrunner, Doctor Who was stuck in something of a rough spot. Moffat’s tenure as showrunner is divisive among fans, but the fan-favorite installment “Heaven Sent,” which was part of the wrap-up of the 12th Doctor (Peter Capaldi) and Clara Oswald’s (Jenna Coleman) relationship in Season 9, was the last time the show delivered a truly excellent episode. Moffat originally believed the 2015 Christmas special “The Husbands of River Song” would be his farewell to the show, and that special still feels like the most appropriate series finale Doctor Who will likely ever have, tying off every loose end and giving the Doctor and his wife River (Alex Kingston) a happy ending. But Moffat stayed for one more season, and everything went downhill from there.
Not that Season 10 didn’t have its charms, like Pearl Mackie’s performance as Bill or the first time multiple versions of the Master shared the screen, but Moffat had clearly exhausted all of his big ideas in earlier seasons. Chibnall taking over only made everything worse, with three seasons almost completely bereft of the quality we’d seen in earlier eras. Pretty much the only good thing in this run was Jodie Whittaker’s performance as the Doctor, with the Broadchurch alum doing everything in her power to wrestle something workable out of the dire scripts she was given. Many fans were happy to see a woman finally take on the iconic role after so many years, but sadly, the 13th Doctor’s era is one of the weakest in the show’s history.
From an array of flat and uninteresting companions, incomprehensible plotting, dialogue driven far more by exposition than character, the Doctor becoming a conservative-minded individual who defends the status quo, and massive, unneeded retcons to the series mythology, the Chibnall era would likely have killed any other show. But Doctor Who is too big to ever meaningfully go away, and with Disney+ swooping in to take over international distribution, a revamp of the series was all but assured. Thankfully, Doctor Who is already showing significant signs of improvement, and it all starts with giving the new era a solid foundation.
Ready, Set, Relaunch
As with all the best eras of modern Doctor Who, Season 14 hones in on mostly episodic plots centered around the Doctor and a single companion. This style of storytelling has always been the show’s strong suit, with the dynamics between the 9th Doctor and Rose, the 10th Doctor and Donna, and the 12th Doctor and Clara standing out as the best examples. It’s too early to tell yet if the 15th Doctor and Ruby will enter that esteemed group, since there’s a lower episode count these days and Millie Gibson still has at least another season of playing the character. But for now, the “back to basics” approach seems to be working. Out of the season’s eight episodes, the only two that stand out as not quite making the grade are “Space Babies” for being too juvenile to get invested in, and “Dot and Bubble” for struggling with jarring tonal shifts.
By contrast, the season contains some exemplary episodes the likes of which haven’t been seen from the show in years. “Boom” is another great example of the high concept self-contained episode writing Moffat is best at (he came back to script that segment); “73 Yards” gives Ruby a full Doctor-lite horror story that goes in unexpected directions, and the two-part finale with “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” and “Empire of Death” brings the throughline established in the 14th Doctor Specials about the Pantheon of Discord, a collection of evil gods, to an explosive conclusion with the final confrontation with Sutekh. The teases related to this subplot are better handled than previous attempts in the show’s history at story arcs, especially because members of the Pantheon were actually used as villains of specific episodes with the Toymaker in “The Giggle” and Maestro in “The Devil’s Chord.” And although the topic is contentious, I felt that the reveal of Ruby’s mother as a normal human instead of a cosmic being or long lost figure from Who lore to be a poignant choice, and Ruby reuniting with her mother to be one of the season’s most emotional scenes.
Long-form stories have never been Doctor Who’s strength under any showrunner, with the show’s biggest stumbles occurring when they tried to force one. An egregious example would be Season 13, which became an overly convoluted mess of characters and factions that rarely left the audience with a fixed point of reference. Here, each episode gets to stand on its own terms, and both the plotting and stakes are easy to understand. It’s a welcome reprieve after the extremely messy storytelling of the past season, and an acknowledgement that Doctor Who’s 60 years of history can sometimes be daunting to wrap your brain around. Luckily, we have a great new take on the Doctor to guide us all through it.
Doctor Whomst?!
The most consistently strong aspect of Doctor Who is that every incarnation of the Doctor has had a gifted performer take up the role. Favorites may vary (Matt Smith heads unite), but even when the writing wasn’t the best, fans always had a solid lead actor to latch on to. That trend continues with Ncuti Gatwa as the 15th Doctor, who brings tremendous energy and an easygoing swagger to the part that was apparent even from only being in the last 10 minutes or so of his debut outing, “The Giggle.” Yet perhaps the most interesting aspect of his take on the Doctor that has revealed itself over the course of the season is how much of that performance is, well, a performance on the Doctor’s part, because deep down, 15 is a hot mess.
While he originally believed that letting the 14th Doctor have a happy ending with his best friend Donna would let him be calm and collected in the next phase of his life, 15 has not healed at all. His over-the-top mannerisms and friendly demeanor try to present otherwise, but his psyche is held together by duct tape and prayers, his emotions bubbling over at the slightest conflict. The subliminal self-loathing he struggles with and blaming himself for everything bad that’s ever happened in the universe comes to a head in “Empire of Death,” when he screams into the void upon seeing a lifeless universe. Accepting that the world doesn’t revolve around him and that evil beings making evil choices is not his fault just because he’s tangentially connected to them (as with Sutekh clinging to the TARDIS to enact his master plan) is what makes his rebuke of Sutekh and declaring himself the one who brings life to the universe a powerful moment.
Every main Doctor in the modern era has a critical flaw that gives them dimension. The 9th has his crassness, the 10th his rage, the 11th his arrogance, the 12th his self-doubt, and the 13th her authoritarianism. The 14th Doctor wasn’t around long enough to establish what makes him so different from the others, since he only had three specials instead of a full season. 15 has his emotional fragility, and seeing the Doctor who was supposed to be the most suave and composed actually be one of the most vulnerable under the surface leaves many possibilities for character-driven stories in future seasons. Sure, some of Davies’ weaker tendencies have still appeared in this new season, such as wonky world-building or rushed resolutions, and hopefully those are finally addressed next time around. But after how much of a slog the last few seasons could be, jumping back into Doctor Who that feels fresh, focused, and most of all fun again has been long overdue.
Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.
