Thoughts on Series 11: What Needs Improvement

After calling last week’s thoughts “positives,” I didn’t really want to call this week’s “negatives,” nor did I want to use “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” as I have in the past.  Because I wouldn’t go so far as to call series 11’s issues negatives or outright bad, and I don’t think I’d classify anything from this season as ugly.  More than anything, I just saw evidence of where it feels like the new team needs to tighten things up.

Soft Endings

This season features a lot of interesting ideas with some great new-to-Who locales and engaging one-shot characters.  However, it doesn’t feel like many season 11 episodes solidly stick the landing.  Instead of building to a dramatic finish and/or going out with a bang, many of them end with an “all right.”  This is greatly preferred to some of the more aggravating episodes from showrunners past at their more dubious moments (you can’t say that “The End of Time” and “The Time of the Doctor” aren’t dramatic, but goodness gracious is the former overwrought and does the latter feel like half a dozen stories dropped into a blender,) but it creates an overall effect of the season feeling a little on the ho-hum side.

Difficulty Juggling Three Companions

Now, I like Graham, Ryan, and Yaz, and I wouldn’t want to cut out any of them to make more room.  Classic Who handled crowded TARDISes just fine, but while I want to believe new Who can as well, it hasn’t quite followed through on that yet.  Although I see the potential in all three companions, they still feel drawn pretty lightly (a bit like the series 7 version of Clara, who was nice but felt a bit bland,) and there isn’t a huge amount of differentiation in their individual relationships with the Doctor.  Plus, it usually feels like at least one takes a back seat each week in terms of contributing to the adventure.  The show needs to work harder on making sure there’s always enough to go around.

Aliens Who Pack Less of a Punch

I get Chibnall’s desire to go in a new direction with the show and come up with new alien baddies for the crew to take on, and I appreciate that.  But while this season delivers on “new” (and, as I said last week, villains with specific motivations,) it doesn’t always deliver on “memorable.”  I come back to the idea of ho-hum and bland.  I wouldn’t characterize the season as a whole that way, but there are multiple elements that don’t quite feel enough of themselves to be Who at its best, and this is another one of them.  Although I want the show to keep coming up with new aliens, I want them to feel fuller and better defined than many of them were this season.

Not Enough Connection to the Past

This is maybe less of a knock on series 11 specifically and more just a wish for series 12.  I understand the instinct to hold off on, say, Kate Stewart/Osgood or the Paternoster gang meeting Thirteen – it’s been helpful for this regeneration to take a little time to establish herself – and everyone needs a break from Daleks and Cybermen now and again.  But I do think we need to bring these elements back in eventually, both the classic monsters and at least one episode featuring a character or two from past seasons.  As I’ve said before, I want Jodie Whittaker and Thirteen to have the full Doctor experience, and overplayed or not, that means Daleks at some point.  It’ll be unfair if she never gets to do Daleks.  And as for past characters, I feel like it ignores a good potential story for the Doctor to regenerate into a woman and then never encounter a single person who knew any of her previous male selves (I suppose you could have a new character introduced as a previously-unseen “old friend,” but it would work better with someone we know.)  Series 12, please?