Ncuti Gatwa's second year as The Doctor improves on the first. This is typical for the show, but in this case, I feel that it wasn't just a matter of the actor settling into the role or the creative team figuring out how to best write for a new cast. It also felt like it took a full season for Russell T. Davies and company to stop remaking and referencing their greatest hits from the 2005-2010 seasons, and embrace moving "Doctor Who" forward. We still get plenty of old characters coming back, and even a few direct sequels to some classic episodes, but this season felt ready to be different. Well, to try to be different.
There's a new companion, a dedicated nurse named Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) who isn't interested in being a companion. She's very much a classic sidekick character, and I appreciate that there's not as much narrative focus on her as there was with some of the prior companions. Belinda is never backgrounded or spoken down to, but sometimes the show needs her to be a damsel in distress or someone for the Doctor to explain things to, and she's really good at being those things and still a competent professional woman without feeling inconsistent. I hope Sethu gets to flesh out Belinda more in future seasons, because the messy finale leaves her in a rough spot. More on that later.
Where the last season was very concerned with more spectacle and providing an easy entry point for new viewers, this year gets into some older lore and fanservice. However, it also tries some new ideas like a literal cartoon villain in "Lux," a story centering on a Lagos barbershop in "The Story & The Engine," and the self-explanatory "The Interstellar Song Contest" with a cameo from Graham Norton. It's less successful at paying off the ongoing storylines and mysteries that have been brewing since last year - namely the pantheon of evil gods, Mrs. Flood (Anita Dobson) and her secrets, and all the teases about a former companion, Susan (Carole Ann Ford). "Doctor Who" has always had a terrible habit of building up to big anti-climaxes, and this season is particularly rife with them.
I don't think it's spoiling too much to reveal that Ruby Sunday returns for a few episodes in a supporting role, along with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and some other established friends. Jonah Hauer-King, Alan Cumming, and Archie Panjabi guest star as various villains and allies. The main event, however, remains Ncuti Gatwa as The Doctor, who is so clearly the best possible actor for the job that I really can't imagine these last two seasons working with anybody else in the role. He is absolutely the only reason why some of these episodes work at all, with their rushed exposition and making-it-up-as-we-go-along story logic. I enjoyed most of the individual episodes this year, and a few like "Lux" and "Lucky Day" may even be all timers, but the season-long narratives are badly put together, and some of the creative choices are downright disappointing.
I've gotten used to the flimsiness of most modern "Doctor Who" stories over the years, accepting the repetitiveness and arbitrariness of the storytelling as part of being a show aimed at children and families. However, after twenty years of modern "Who," it's become apparent how far behind other fantasy and science-fiction television the show has fallen in the streaming age, and it's not just a matter of the production values. The show can go bigger, but its format, formulas, and status as a legacy IP means that it rarely goes deeper. Thus, it is rarely as compelling as I feel it could be, and ends up wasting an awful lot of promising material and audience goodwill.
Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor is trying very hard to be something new, and I love him for it, but he is never going to live up to his full potential with the show around him the way that it is, juggling all these competing interests, with everyone always feeling like they're one foot out the door, and the other foot somewhere in the past. Wherever "Doctor Who" goes from here, it's best if it gets a real creative overhaul to help it break out of its latest creative funk. Because though I'm willing to keep watching, the amount of times it's hit the reset button in recent years, only to fall back on bad habits, has gotten awfully concerning.
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