Doctor Who: A Manifesto

My son loves Doctor Who. Perhaps not quite as much as he loves Ben 10, but enough that he identified the Doctor's space suit in tonight's the Waters of Mars as being the one he wore in the Satan Pit.

I am pleased to say that, in keeping with the great traditions of Doctor Who watching, he has spontaneously gravitated to watching the scary bits from behind the sofa. (I'm less pleased to say that, being the child he is, his approaches to getting behind said sofa are often more appropriate to stuntmen or a kind of clumsy Cirque du Soleil than a 4 year old, but he won't be told.)

Anyway, that's beside today's point. This is kind of off-topic, but with the impending regime change (new Doctor, new showrunner, new Tardis, new companion), I thought it was the right sort of time to put down a few thoughts on how Doctor Who could be improved.

Is that heresy? Russell T. Davies has done a fantastic job of resurrecting a show that died through becoming an irrelevant parody of itself. He's made Doctor Who matter again, turned it into a mini-TV empire with its spin-offs, secured its future and established the principle of credible production values. He has even, and I speak as a child of the Tom Baker years, given us the best Doctor so far.

And yet... I am sure I am not the only person who watches the programme with a mixture of admiration and frustration. There is so much that is right about the current incarnation, but it has some persistent flaws that hold it back from true greatness. It's like putting the wrong tyres on an Aston Martin: a subtle mistake, but all the more frustrating for the fact that it could so easily be fixed.

Ironically, these are thrown into sharper relief because of another sci-fi reboot and close contemporary. Battlestar Galactica started with less promising source material and achieved more. Not only was it compelling entertainment, it is arguably one of the best television shows ever made and asked some very serious questions about what happens to a society engaged in a conflict with an enemy that has a very different ideology. Of course, Battlestar did not set out to be family entertainment, which removes some constraints, but it tackled its brief with a rigorous intellectual and emotional honesty. The situations and resolutions had an internal consistency; the characters behaved in ways that made sense both in the broader context of the series and the immediate demands of the episode. All of which meant that we were more prepared to swallow the big things we had to swallow (Baltar's visions of Six; Six's visions of Baltar; how on earth the Cylon Earth fitted into the continuity - still wondering about that one).

To pull that off, you have to be tough on your scripts and on your characters. There have to be hard choices for both the characters and the script writers. Quite often, the character's flaws have to come to the fore, quite often - regardless of how much you love them - they have to suffer. You can't easily cheat a big character moment. It has to be earned.

Of course, the Doctor is different. He's not human, and as the last timelord he's got different hangups and a lot of power. Who's to say that he wouldn't behave the way he behaves? Still, my feeling is that a few too many shortcuts are taken.

So, here are my suggestions as to how to improve Doctor Who. I make them in the full knowledge that Stephen Moffat has already made his choices, established his milieu and put his own stamp on Doctor Who. We just haven't seen them yet. So maybe it's more of a wishlist. Or a kind of Gallifreyan bingo card: if you like my points, watch the new series with the list to hand, and if you collect the set you are fully entitled to jump up and down like you've won the jackpot, because you will be watching a very special piece of television.

1) If you're going to throw a big emotional punch, don't pull it. Shoving Rose into a different dimension, making Donna forget everything. These are cop outs for us and the Doctor. And it's more of a cop out if you bring them back. It even undermines future episodes because you know that the production team don't necessarily mean it.

And yet the same team are capable of getting it spectacularly right when they work it through properly: look at the emotional debris from John Smith's decision to open the watch in the Family of Blood.

2) Intellectual Honesty: no easy get outs. The Doctor is a timelord. He has knowledge we can't dream of and a ship that does stuff so far beyond our comprehension that it's not even remotely possible according to our physics. He can also make mobile phones work anywhere in space (and, remarkably, know when to place a call. Anyone else wonder how Rose's phone knows how to call the 20th Century from The End of the World?). He has a sonic screwdriver that can do all sorts of wonderful things.

We understand, accept and embrace this stuff when it's there so that the plot doesn't have to get hung up on basic technical problems. We delight in when it's done properly, with wit and common sense (for instance, when the psychic paper doesn't work or, better, works as an Oyster card).

But if you're going to make the technology a big part of the plot, you should invest the effort to ensure it makes sense. One of the worst examples is the end of the first series. Rose absorbs the power of the Tardis (eh?). With which she writes the words Bad Wolf all over the place (eh? why? why not something useful?), blows up a load of Daleks (fair enough), and makes Captain Jack immortal (eh?). But the power of the Tardis is too much for a human to carry, so the Doctor snogs her to get it back (eh? So there's no radiation damage from carrying it around for half an episode? So all this energy can just be packaged up and passed between people in a kiss? And once the Doctor's regenerated, where did all that energy go?). Looks to me like they got so caught up in the big idea of Rose saving the Doctor that they forgot to make it make any sense.

For that matter, why does the Face of Boe just tell the Doctor "You are not alone" when (assuming he is the eventual end state of Captain Jack) he could have told him something useful and saved them all a lot of pain? And why does the Master's chameleon arch helpfully choose a name that hints to the Doctor (and only the Doctor) who he really is (albeit in a pretty daft way)?

The good news is that one of the episodes that really nailed the logic of what it was doing (and didn't cheat or take an easy way out) was Blink. Writer? Stephen Moffat.

3) Know when to stop. Making the Doctor old with a laser screwdriver? Neat. Like it. Plenty of pathos there. Turning him into Dobby? Stop it. It's getting silly. Where's Graham Chapman when you need him?

4) Don't over-explain. One of the reasons Blink worked was that it didn't try to explain too much. The idea of quantum locking was a neat plot device, but doesn't really stand up to much scrutiny and I'm pretty sure is out of whack with current interpretations of quantum theory. But it didn't matter, because it wasn't laboured in the dialogue.

5) Use the Tardis intelligently. Maybe it's just me, but I find it very silly that the wooden box bit of the Tardis physically travels through the time vortex (with or without Captain Jack holding onto the outside). I always thought the outside was just a convenient way of accessing the Tardis from wherever you chose to park it. So the Tardis dragging spaceships behind it (as in the Satan Pit) just looks wrong.

Worse, to do so misses out on some great dramatic possibilities. Imagine it: Rose has finally understood that the spacecraft has lost its battle with gravity and will fall into the black hole. Then everything goes black and very quiet. Gradually the crew realise that they aren't being ripped apart by tidal forces, and that there seems to be air outside. Nervously, they crack the airlock and step out to find that they are in a huge room. Which is, of course, inside the Tardis. The Doctor has materialised on top of them. Much better than "we invented gravity" (and it's a measure of how good David Tennant is that he just about gets away with that line).

And again, Blink used the Tardis intelligently to resolve the plot.

You can't make the Tardis a plot device every week, because we'd end up with a desperate effort to think of new ways to use it (think Asimov and the laws of robotics). Fortunately, you don't have to. But when it is a plot device, you have to use it logically and creatively.

6) Do the math on Daleks. More accurately: the stats. It's important to understand the correlation between the number of Daleks in an episode and the quality of that episode. Hint: the slope is negative.

The same general rule applies to a number of other features of Doctor Who, to wit:
a) the number of villainous races in the season finale
b) the preposterousness of the final plot
c) the amount of backstory attributed to the principal villain
d) the number of heavy handed hints dropped about what's going to happen.

This in film-making is called the "Van Helsing Effect". You know what I mean.

7) Be careful not to burn through good villains. School Reunion was one of my favourite episodes. The plot pretty much held water and it asked some big questions of all of the characters, especially the Doctor (What responsibilities do you take on in having a companion? Do I choose being alone among humanity or a peer among godlike beings?), to which the cast rose splendidly, especially David Tennant. The potentially whimsical return of K-9 was handled with wit and empathy, and earned its payoff.

One niggle I had was that it introduced a memorable villain in Anthony Head's chief krillitane, and then (seemingly) bumped him off. There aren't many actors with the range and lightness of touch to make a really good Doctor Who villain - someone who can hold the screen when pitted against the Doctor (and here's hoping that Matt Smith can reach the bar that David Tennant has set). Don't kill them off lightly.

8) Hire a science consultant. I don't mean someone to make it all scientifically plausible, but someone who is a) scientifically literate, b) science-fictionally literate, c) able to test the logic of what you're doing and d) cares about getting it right but e) has a sense of humour. David Langford would fit the bill very nicely.

9) Remix the theme tune. For me, the orchestral arrangement just doesn't cut it. It's too, well, normal. This is Doctor Who! We need theme music that sounds unearthly. Since the Radiophonic Workshop is no more, you need to find someone who knows how to make those kind of noises without it sounding gimmicky, arch or overblown. My shortlist is, well, short: Radiohead. My wife doesn't think they'd do it, but I think she's softened her stance after half of them recorded a song for Harry Potter.

And there we have it. Actually quite a short list, and not that hard to do. As the examples I've picked show, for every story that's jarred there's almost always another one that has nailed it.

Of course, this is just an overgrown fanboy's wishlist, and I know that not everyone will agree with me (not even my son. He loves the end of Series 3, Dobby and all). But I like to believe that a Doctor Who that adopted these small tweaks would be all the better for it, and I hope one day to find out whether I'm right or not.