If you know, you get the reference.

So the rumor mill is active again. According to The Sun, Ncuti Gatwa is ready to leave the show and the BBC is ready to cancel Doctor Who because Disney isn’t going to help bankroll it after the recent ratings disasters. Well, we’re talking about a tabloid with questionable accuracy on these rumors and the BBC has at least said that despite being seriously delayed, the future of the third “Neo Who” season with Disney will be decided by season two. As for Gatwa, nothing’s been officially mentioned yet…but I need an article, so let’s have some fun. Don’t worry, I’m not going to attack Gatwa. I haven’t seen much of his Doctor…though the standout moments discussed and clipped online aren’t exactly winning me over…so I can’t fully judge his take.

Instead I want to try to figure out what I’d like to see in Doctor Who. Realistically, of course. I liked the half-hour serials better but fat chance of that happening and I’m not a slave to that idea. Also, Doctor Who is a British institution and I am an American. So judge that how you will. I would want the show to remain British, including the showrunner. Even the TV movie understood its roots. For me, the original show was something a friend told me about on PBS (for you British chaps and chapettes, imagine the BBC didn’t force you to pay them but it did come out your regular taxes, corporate sponsorships instead of adverts, and begging for what we now call crowdfunding twice a year), but until it was rescheduled away from family suppertime I couldn’t watch it. When that changed I very much enjoyed the show. I even made my own 8th Doctor in a comic my friend and I made long before Fox screwed up the TV movie because Fox and science fiction is almost always a bad combination. My friend came up with the Companion, I came up with the teen Doctor’s outfit…an outdoors vest, t-shirt, baseball cap, slacks, and sneakers. Yes, it’s boring. I was 17! At least I had a set outfit for my Doctor. Did Gatwa have a regular outfit? Every image my non-Disney+ owning eyes saw has him in a different outfit each episode.

So this is less about what I’d do with the Doctor than what I wouldn’t mind seeing come out of the show if a regime change would happen. And yes, it would require a regime change. Fans who were excited for Russell T. Davies returning found that he wasn’t the same guy that originally brought the show back. (I did warn you, and I didn’t even care for his first run as much as other fans.) Yesterday’s Davies was immature, couldn’t let an interracial romance go without hurting or killing the black one, which is a fault shared by Moffat and Chibnall I admit, and gave us the second ugliest TARDIS in the franchise’s history, beaten only by Chibnall’s death trap. In fact, that’s the first thing I’d change.

A BETTER CONSOLE ROOM!

Call me an old fuddy duddy, but I don’t think I’ve liked a new console room set since the original series. Bigger budget means you can do more with it, and I don’t have a problem with being a big larger…but since the TV movie it’s been TOO large. Look at the latest one. It’s the first time we had a brightly lit TARDIS in the restored series, and that’s great. It’s also just a series of walkways, Ncuti’s Doctor adding a jukebox. It’s too large, too boring, and too empty. After the initial running around it’s actually kind of boring.

Now put that lighting in the second Moffat’s TARDIS and I would have liked it more. It was kind of sterile until they added the bookshelves and other items in the Capaldi period. Steven’s first TARDIS was kind of warped but at least it represented the Doctor’s mind at the time as he was having yet another troubled regeneration. Davies’ first TARDIS is the worst. All that brass and coral, the console itself looking like a collection of junk, and the lighting that made the place dreary. The Doctor has to live in this thing and I don’t know why it took so long to get something brighter for him. Now get me something sizewise that’s between the Classic and Current TARDIS designs. Also, bring back the big doors and wall monitor. I miss those.

An updated version of this TARDIS design would work for me just fine; a nice mix of displays, buttons, switches, and a simple upy downy column in the center.

Now for the Doctor himself, and I do mean HIMself, I’m done with the flamboyant for a while. “Flamboyant” isn’t necessarily “gay” by the way, though that also seems off unless you can blame his estrogen versus testosterone levels when he did get a female regeneration. That big flair just isn’t necessary for every Doctor. I think one of the reasons Matt Smith is my favorite New Who Doctor is the same reason Peter Davidson is my favorite Old Who Doctor. They don’t stand out in a crowd. In fact, in the old show the two Bakers were the only ones who really stood out, and in Colin’s case that was just his coat. The Doctor may be the savior of the universe but this started as wanting to see the universe. Those tend to be the boring adventures so they’re rarely mentioned in passing. I’d like to see a low-key Doctor who takes charge when he needs to because he is the Doctor. Someone unassuming until it’s time for him to show off how brilliant he is. He can still be good natured, fun loving, and down to business when called upon, but the larger than life attitude is getting old.

The larger than life adventures aren’t necessary, either. I mean, I would love to see them go back to a multi-episode set of short serials but I know they won’t, and New/Neo Who fans wouldn’t take to it because it’s not the Doctor Who they know unless they went back to watch the old shows. I can live with that. Trying to outdo each season with higher and higher stakes, on the other hand, I can do without. Just make a satisfying season of adventures with the subplot mystery that leads and connects to the finale. It doesn’t have to be all about saving the universe or the multiverse or all of time and space forever and ever. Save one planet (probably Earth), one race (probably humans), or just some guy named Jim. Maybe someone holds a grudge against the Doctor’s old friend H.G. Wells and is trying to alter history so he never existed. So the arc involves finding a way around the “fixed point” problem without wiping out all of existence. That shouldn’t be so hard if you do it right. Or going back to Jim, he joins the crew only to find out he’s secretly a space prince and the season has been about protecting him from time traveling aliens looking to use him as a figurehead for their kingdom or squash a rebellion or something.

Speaking of Wells, and he actually has met the Doctor before, get your history right. Yes, you are messing with the personal history of Wells and other real life historical figures both in events the audience sees or hears and stories the Doctor tells people he had. The original goal of the show was teaching kids about science and history, so when you make THE Sir Isaac Newton into a race swap in a move that has less backing it than “Cleopatra’s was actually back because grandma said so” or “let’s make the short-term retainer into a samurai badass for social points” you have really failed. This is a good chance to set the Doctor and company into little known events that didn’t involve peach-skinned people. Even Chibnall found a way to do that with Yaz’s ancestry in one episode I’ve heard about. I wish I could trust them not to take a side and force their views on it, but at least stop appropriating other people’s histories and get your facts right.

We all know who the REAL First Doctor is.

Finally, it’s time the Doctor stopped being the Timeless Child…or any other “really special all along” nonsense. I don’t mind the “Fugitive Doctor” really being the Timeless Child and the source of regeneration (people really love Jo Martin’s performance enough that Big Finish started doing stories around her “Doctor”), but she should have heard of the Doctor’s exploits and opted to live up to them, like Jackson Lake. The Doctor does not need to be responsible for regeneration, or time travel, or “not just another Time Lord”, or “the question that should never be answered” to be interesting. (That might even fix the now broke Doctor numbering system…or part of it.) There is so much we still don’t know about the Doctor’s history, but this stuff just screws up and tosses out the stuff we DO know. Just let him be a traveler in time and space, seeing the universe, meeting interesting people, and saving everybody from some space menace or their own rank stupidity. That’s interesting enough. He doesn’t have to be the most important person in the universe. No more God Doctor, please!

Also consider bringing back the Time Lords for good this time. There’s still so much that can be done with them as allies and antagonists. I’d also like to see regeneration go back to not destroying everything around him. I accepted the burst when he absorbed the time vortex energies out of Rose, but that was a special circumstance. Even the new shows have had regenerations of the Doctor and others that didn’t end with an explosion redecorating the room in mass destruction.

That’s all I want, a good Doctor Who story. It doesn’t have to be for all the marbles, it can highlight forgotten but interesting history or give us strange and imaginative alien worlds, it can speak to the human condition, or a shared morality, or just be fun without any intentional message and just let us see good people doing good things. Give us more about what’s in the TARDIS. We haven’t had a good TARDIS bottle show in years exploring just how many rooms and oddities there are in that little box. I don’t need the everything and everything else. I just need to be entertained and have fun. Is that really so hard?