Who's Fixing Who

Over on The Spectator this week, former Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts lists twenty ways to fix Doctor Who. I hated or disliked every episode of Doctor Who he wrote ("The Shakespeare Code", "The Unicorn and the Wasp", "The Lodger", "Closing Time", and half of "The Caretaker") and I consider his views on gender and transgenderism to be paranoid and abhorrent. But I mostly agree with his list.

At number 12 he has "Stories about Dr Who himself, the Tardis and the Time Lords, the series mythos etc, and overarching narratives in general, are boring and a turn-off." This is generally true of the entire run. I always want to skip The Deadly Assassin when I watch through the Tom Baker era. Though I find Omega kind of interesting.

At 15, Roberts says the Doctor "is beyond sex, money, religion, politics and most other things that children are not interested in. He never ever peacocks or grandstands and is never pious or self-pitying." Yes, absolutely, this needs to be tattooed on the backs of every Doctor Who writer's hands.

I don't wholly agree with number 16, "There should be one (female) assistant only", though I do like Roberts' preference for the term "assistant" over "companion". Generally speaking, it's better when the Doctor has just one female assistant but one of the best assistants was Jamie and his rapport with Zoe and Victoria was great. I also obviously don't agree that the assistant should be "someone from planet Earth" given Romana is one of my favourite assistants. But the general point that the assistant should be someone the viewer identifies with seems sensible to me.

"19. Attempts at profundity and social commentary should be resisted as strongly as attempts at sentimentality." I think we're all sick of social commentary and sentimentality but profundity is too general a term to prohibit. When you're talking about life and death situations one is almost certain to be profound now and then and I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of.

Many of Roberts' points are to do with the idea that the show should not be Doctor-centric, that the stories ought to be self-contained situations in which the Doctor is an outsider who gets involved. I would agree the show is better that way and there are only so many ways you can tell the story of the lonely mad genius in a box but I don't know that audience interest is currently there for a story that isn't fixated on a psychological progression (or regression) of the main character. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the evolution of superhero stories has been to slowly move away from being "A terrible situation in which a powerful being miraculously gets involved" to being "A powerful being finds itself in a situation that provokes self-contemplation and emotional growth". It's a side effect of people growing less interested in having a saviour and growing more interested in being a god.