I posted this in another thread but I think it's a point worth making in a new topic:

I'm sick of these complaints that the show is no longer about the Doctor and that it is dominated by the companions.

In fact, in the last couple of years there's been more focus on the Doctor and his life than there's probably ever been before.

This season we actually saw him as a boy on Gallifrey! We've never had anything more than hints about his life on Gallifrey before this, and certainly not his childhood. We saw the moment he stole the TARDIS and left Gallifrey in Name of the Doctor! In a storyline that was about the Doctor's name! And his grave. And indeed, a big central storyline has been the return of Gallifrey. Hardly companion-centric. In Day of the Doctor we saw the Time War! You can't get a more Doctor-centric story than that. We saw John Hurt play a secret incarnation of the Doctor! Never has anything as big as that been done with the character before. In the last couple of years we've found out more about his backstory and the motivation that drives him than we probably did in the entire classic series, where the nearest they ever got was a vague speculation that he stole a TARDIS, possibly because he was bored.

Hell, Moffat even gave the Doctor a romance for the first time ever onscreen, and even had him marry. Could you have even conceived anything like that happening in the RTD era, let alone the classic series? The Doctor had a love affair and got married (kind of)! This is all in the last few years.

We've had so much about the Doctor and his life and history that some people, me included, even worry that they're showing too much and ruining the mystery.

Heres something else to consider: every time we see the Doctor argue with Clara or Danny Pink, we aren't just learning about them. We're learning about him. Every episode is about the Doctor.

The people who are making this complaint are straight up wrong. The show has never been more about the Doctor than the last few years.

I agreed with you on the other thread and I agree with you here. Just because the companion and the Doctor have an equal amount of screen time doesn't mean the show is no longer central to the Doctor. As you say, the stories are about him. Just because we are seeing Clara's relationship develop doesn't mean it's all about her. It's just about her a little bit. The alternative is having a cardboard cutout companion like she was in the beginning.

Said it before, and no doubt will say it again.

If it is the case that the compainions are more front and centre than The Doctor this isn't new. This is the original premise.

I agree - the show has in general, explored the Doctor more in the past few years than it even did in the classic era. Explored what it means to be that traveller, the effect he has on people, the responsibilities that he bears. That doesn't always mean that the camera has to be focussed on him to do that.

In fact, for the show to work at all we have to have a little distance from the Doctor - if we were mostly following him around and finding out everything he was thinking and doing, it would be like the magician explaining the trick before the big reveal. The Doctor must have his moment of triumph.

Classic era episodes, in the main, were heavily focussed on the adventure that the Doctor got himself into, rather than on the Doctor himself. Our heroes generally got pushed from one place to another by plot demands, rather than because of the character's personality.

There was a podcast a few weeks back where Toby Hardoke interviewed RTD, and RTD said that the key difference he saw between the old show and the show as he relaunched it was that the old show was about the people that the Doctor visited, whereas the new show was about the Doctor.

I agree with a number of your views but not this. Of course I can conceive of a romance for the Doctor in the RTD era, because it happened. Rose and the Doctor was the big love affair, slowly built over two seasons and continuing to resonate for another two after that.

I don't think the relationship between Matt's Doctor and River Song can be described as 'romance'. Yes, they got married, but that was really more of a plot expediency than because they were so desperately in love.

Even if we haven't seen it The Doctor must have had a romance in the past as Susan was his Granddaughter so of course he had kids of his own.

Even in the classic series I think he made the odd reference to he had kids and a family once.

He's referred to his family a few times in the new series, like he had a brother once, he's been a father and mentioned Susan.

Funny enough I read recently that in the Five Doctors they originally cut any mention from Susan of the word Grandfather as the modern audience wouldn't like the idea of the Doctor ever having had a romantic relationship.
Apparently Carole told them not to be so stupid and she wouldn't do it if they insisted on that.

I think we were supposed to think the brother was The Master but he later confirmed it wasn't however they were friends if not best friends at one point in their lives.

I'd never thought of this, but it is very true. The old show showed us (amongst others) the internal conflicts of the Kaled people, the development of the medieval society of Peladon, and inevitably the Time Lords of Gallifrey. Exposure to other cultures in the new series has been somewhat limited (at the moment only Planet of the Ood and Rings of Akhaten spring to mind) and only superficially explored - most of the alien worlds we've seen have been occupied by human settlers.

Even with human settlers in the old series. Think of, say, "Vengeance On Varos". Etta and Arak don't even speak to any characters other than each other, let alone actively participate in the story. They're there as a Greek chorus and in order to flesh the society out further. Even in Earth-bound Pertwee stories it wasn't unusual to spend a fair bit of time with people who weren't any of the regular cast.

Partly this is down to running time - when you've got 4 episodes or more you can spend more time world-building and with characters who aren't key players in the plot. But I also think that it's an artefact of who the series is written by. Right the way through the original run the writers and producers were primarily writers and producers. Some didn't even want to do the programme at all. Many saw it as a step on the road to bigger and better things.

But since it's come back the showrunners have been huge fans, and many of the writers have, too. Not just huge fans, but a few have been authors of the books published in the fallow period. And the books over time tended to mythologise the Doctor more. My point of comparison is always thing - in "The Ark In Space" there's a sequence where the Doctor tests the gravity. He does so by pulling out a yo-yo and playing with it. In one of the 8th Doctor books (I forget which), there's also a sequence where the Doctor tests the gravity. He does so by grabbing some balls off a street juggler and juggling them in a way that's not only more amazing than the way the juggler was doing them in it's own right, but which made the balls and his hands appear to go through each other as if slipping in and out of alternate dimensions.

It's like the authors were such big fans that they couldn't resist making him the biggest and the bestest Doctor ever, despite the fact that part of the character's appeal was always that he was actually quite crap for a Time Lord. In fact, I once got into an internet argument with one of the authors of the books because I said that as there was evidence that Rassilon created the process of regeneration and that not all Gallifreyans were Time Lords meant that he was, in some ways, essentially an ordinary but clever bloke with access to superior technology, thanks to being an aristocrat. He did not like that and went off on some moaning tirade about how he hates the way that fans always try to drag the Doctor down and don't realise how special and amazing he is and how much intrinsically better than human beings he is.

Point being that during the years when the programme was off the air, the people who were writing the Doctor changed from being people who saw it as a part-time gig like any other part-time gig into being people who saw it as the endgame in and of itself and who worshipped the Doctor in a way that the previous people in charge hadn't. And it's from that particular subset of fandom that the last two showrunners and some of the writers have come. And many of the more recent writers are now writing the show as the show is written because that's how you write the show. In other words, they're fans of the current incarnation (many of the writers - even the famous ones - actively try to get a job on the show these days) and are writing to the template which has existed for the last 9 years.

None of which is necessarily the wrong way to go about it, but it is a noticeably different approach.

Try this out as an exercise - count how many story or episode titles in the old series referred to the Doctor in some way, and count how many story or episode titles in the new series refer to the Doctor in some way. I'd say that the title "The Doctor Dances" would have been unthinkable in the old show, and not just because of what "dances" is a euphemism for.

trollface,

Yes I agree with your points; my rather cryptic remark about the new series featuring off-world humans relates to your point about the running time; if you have short episodes then its much easier to portray that society because the audience can assume a basic human morality to the protagonists. When writing about Peladon (for example) more time was needed to establish the basis of that society. In a way, I think that was one of the flaws of Rings of Akhaten.

It's also true that the old series "fleshed out" the other protagonists more even when they were human. Personally I think this was done (and well) recently with "The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People", but was generally badly received (here certainly) for its slow pace.

The people making this statement include Moffat:



Doctor Who’ writer Moffat: ‘Clara is the main character in Series 8

But as trollface points out above( actually RTD points it out, trollface just quotes him), Tom Tit, for all his well argued OP, has presented us with a false dichotomy; it is perfectly possible to have the show more Doctor focussed and more companion focussed - thats because there is more to the show than just the Doctor and his companion; there are also (at least) the villains and their victims.

Think back to "Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways" - how much do we know about the human victims ? The story entirely encompasses the Doctor being trapped by his own morality, the saving of the situation by Rose, Mickey and Jackie, and Jack Harkness's immortality. The brief glimpse we get of the human victims is limited to Lynda-with-a-y and a single scene where the Daleks gun down the inhabitants of the Game station.

In addition, there is a poster here (or a group of them) who often states a preference for a return to simpler stories, where the Doctor+Companion fly in to a conflict, sort it out, and fly out again. It seems to me that this would return the focus of the onto the victims, rather than the Doctor + companion. I'm not personally convinced about this as a strategy for the current show. I think the show is stronger for the occassional bit of soul-searching by the Doctor. If he is "a good man" he can only be so by doing good things, and sometimes knowing what is "good" is not easy. But the new show has certainly lost an aspect that the old show had: stories which involved a "traitor in our midst" who was only revealed towards the end were a staple of "classic" Who. They perhaps suited the 4/6 short episode structure the show had then, but it would be nice to have one occasionally.
Last edited by prof_travers : 01-11-2014 at 15:36

That may well be true, and may well have been RTDs focus - but his song has ended now.

Whilst it's fine to argue that the show is more about the Doctor in the sense he gets the biggest supporting role Moffat has made it quite clear who the main character should be

Hmm, that maybe what Moffat says. However my impression (and one of the reasons I've preferred the show under Moffat's tenure) is that he has placed the Doctor more centre stage than RTD did. Neither Clara, Amy or Rory were "the most important person in the Universe" that Donna was. The finales to series 1,3 and 4 all placed the Doctor, impotent, in a cage (either physical (3), invisible(4) or moral (1)) whereas the finales to series 5 and 6 had the Doctor play a decisive role in their resolution.

He had a sort of romance in the TVM- and of course there was Rose. And David Tennant's Doctor was kind of flirty so the idea of him having a love life was not inconceivable.

I think the comments are mainly about this series, as the 50th anniversary was obviously Doctor-centric.