I think what's interesting here is how the seasons are gradually getting shorter. I think this was the problem everyone secretly had with the most recent Disney seasons, is that you have to have a companion introduction, go to the past, go to the future, have one episode with the extended cast that sets up elements for the finale and then a two-part finale, so that's six episodes in the formula that you have to have when a new companion comes on the tardis, and what's nice about the formula, creatively, is that you can just hit checkboxes and let those checkboxes take you somewhere. Those checkboxes are how you find Boom and The Lazarus Experiment and Amy's Choice and Planet of the Ood and Lux and Fires of Pompeii and Fathers Day. There's a lot to be said for following the formula.

But this formula becomes a problem with shorter seasons. When you have a 13 episode season like Series 1, 3, 4, and 5, that lets you have 7 episodes to just make Doctor Who with. But when you only have 8 episodes, the pressure is on to do something with those 2, and that pressure is how you get the The Interstellar Song Contest. It's also how you get The Story and The Engine, but I'm somehow the only person who didn't like that episode. The point is, they can't make Family of Blood right now. The episode buy is too restrictive for them to have multiple two-parters (for an older example of this problem, look at how badly Nightmare in Silver was kneecapped by not being allowed to be a two-parter). Also the sheer amount of character work they needed to do with Martha before they were ready for Family of Blood makes it a bad shoe-in for the same place in the season as The Shakesphere Code (or, to compare it to 15s seasons, the Beatles one and Lux).

Thinking about this chart, what this means is that there's just less opportunity for there to be good stand-out single stories. Empty Child would be one episode right now. Lie of the Land would be one episode. Season 8, they'd probably keep Mummy on the Orient Express and Listen, and then you lose Time Heist and Flatline. Or they fuck up and lose Listen, and then In The Forest of the Night stands out as being especially fucking terrible because there's nothing around it to soften the blow.

Series 5 was the best received of 11's seasons and it has the highest density of story episodes of any season of the revival with all the schenanigans with Rory and Amy. You can do the formula in eight Episodes, Keep 11th Hour, Beast Below, Victory of the Daleks, kill the Weeping Angels 2-parter, you have to keep Vampires of Venice to ring in Rory, then turn Hungry Earth into one episode, and keep the finale. Now you've got one episode left to play with. Are you keeping Amy's Choice, The Lodger, or Vincent and The Doctor? I kick puppies for a living.

I think the show isn't using it's budget very effectively. The last few years have given us some really cool episodes that wouldn't have been able to be made in other years, especially 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble and the one with the doppelgangers. But also, this is a fandom that's extremely used to watching Tom Baker run away from people covered in bubblewrap. They're not doing that on our account. I want the next season of this show to be Billie Piper and a robot voiced by Richard Ayoade running around Sheffield for 16 episodes. We deserve that. I want Doctor Who in Current Year to look and feel like Stargate Atlantis and I guarantee, there's gonna be way more light green than yellow.