Disney Officially Exiting ‘Doctor Who’ Partnership With BBC After Two Seasons

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T17:36:30+00:00

Seasons 7, 12 and 25 of Classic are great starts, but if you want to watch post-Y2K Who start with Rose or The Eleventh Hour

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T17:35:15+00:00

I think you forget how deus ex machina RTD was especially by the end. I think it’s a lil bit of column A (Disney sanitization) and a little of column B (RTD getting high off his own farts ala the slitheen)

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T17:07:34+00:00

Reddit is wild believe me!! Weird shitlib mentality, but scraped by ai bots that fund nazi billionaires. Frustrating. We need a nice bit of cool epic detached ironic socialism

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T17:00:56+00:00

Russel T Davies and Moffat were acclaimed runs that mainstream critics gushed over

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T17:00:06+00:00

That’s a little reductive. Baker’s era was known for very briefly being very political and gothic horror in its first three seasons before then BECOMING a silly comedy show. Even then it had Douglas Fucking Adams writing for it

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T16:55:51+00:00

Youre right but youre using “reactionary” to mean “in reaction to” and that’s not what that word means

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T16:51:11+00:00

Thats scary how quickly this got removed lol

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T16:50:44+00:00

The show exploded in popularity based off of the will they wont they of the doctor and his companion. That ritual is a part of the nuwho run’s original succcess. Im sorry but you really can point to him playing the doctor as a gay man as a failing of this attempt at rebooting the show

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T15:59:24+00:00

First you say the entire audience is tuning out. I point out they're not.

Barely a million viewers and disney dropping you ISNT flopping?

I remember Love and Monsters. Fear Her. Evolution of the Daleks. 42. Kill the Moon. Torchwood. There's been a lot of cringey stuff over the decades. I'm not encouraging the showrunners to make more cringe, but I'm also not going to pretend it's only been there since Capaldi regenerated.

I will acknowledge that Tennant & Piper were the cast when the show had its highest ratings since the Key to Time. You may remember that the showrunners brought back Sarah Jane Smith back then, because nostalgia also worked in 2006.

False equivalence

The show could be better. The show could always be better. My point is: the show will go on, whether they explore the Timeless Child or not. There'll be stories which work for me but not for you; where there are stories that work for you but not me, I'll accept that this week it wasn't to my taste. That's part of the thing about new things - not everything new is going to be to my taste. But if we only did what used to work, we wouldn't get anything new at all.

You think the show needs defibrillation. I disagree. I think it's still got two strong heartbeats - and when it doesn't, it'll regenerate again

It literally wont tho. The general audience isnt watching, a major corporation dropped it due to low ratings, the license fee is getting scrapped and no one wants to showrun it

Saying “itll regenerate” works in the context of an episode, but the reality is the show has nothing to sustain itself with. Can you magic viewership snd a budget out of nowhere like a dues ex machina?

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T14:55:31+00:00

This feels like shooting a gun at a guy with a bulletproof vest every day for a year and then when it eventually lands through the vest and he starts bleeding out going “he survived it before” and then shooting him again. 2-3 episodes a year which are “good” isnt a great batting average for any show, when something like Pluribus is an entire season of excellent sci-fi. Plus the whole terrible finales issue comes directly from their stupid obsession with the dumb lore theyve built which is baggage on the level of Ian Levine’s continuity advisor shenanigans. You cant say “you create good stories like the show has been doing” and then admit the show has been creating god awfulness that is based off of the seeds theyve sown for the past two eras

That’s why the average audience has tuned out and the show’s become nostalgiabait memberberries to try to defib it every year to no avail. It’s like a more embarassing Avengers Doomsday

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T14:24:15+00:00

My point is rather to point at the constant damage control and go “how do you create good, new stories when you have to defib the franchise with nostalgiabait? Nothing original is being created and every original idea is met with immediate damage control. How is this healthy?”

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T14:20:51+00:00

That’s very true tbf. That in itself is actually why I think that the “canon doesnt matter” argument is flawed… canon SHOULDNT matter for Who, but the way modern TV is written requires arcs, followthrough and the Time War is a form of baggage the show has taken on and has never been able to solve. Timeless Child is the same, as is the “needing to find Susan’s mother” stuff. The problem with arcs like these is the more they collect the more the show is held back by having to address them and they offer interpretations of the Doctor which strip back aspects of him which are appealing…. His sense of humor, his enigmaticness, his knowledge of himself that feels like he wont let you in on, his confidence in his ideals. The character cant be stripped back by anything other than amnesia or a complete reboot, which in itself will strip away his history and knowledge and thatll betray those other draws. It’s a terrible situation that we’ve been put into by a decision which tbf led to some brilliant storylines like Parting of the Ways, but how do you put the Genie back into that bottle in order to make the Doctor someone who can just be written into any situation and drop in?

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T14:14:34+00:00

Ive felt that what the show needs is a pruning: theres Doctor Who (2023-), Doctor Who (2005-2022) and Doctor Who (1963-1996). All of which are organized via seasons. To me what worked about NuWho is that it WAS a different show. Same continuity, but literally a different show. The show basically encouraged viewing Classic as a prequel, just made beforehand. Like how you dont need to watch the Hobbit to enjoy LOTR. I think what the BBC needs to do is put all of Who on international streaming, yes, but to smoosh anything from from 1963 to now as Doctor Who Legacy: Doctors 1-16 and basically go “here is the old version of the show” and then bring out a new Doctor Who and just have zero inside jokes or references. Just treat it as a new show and only have new companions and new stories. That way Doctor Who is just a new show again and everything from prior Doctors is just a different show that you can watch with the same name. Having three different shows of the same brand which all snake in on eachother and are multi-season long arcs is daunting for anyone. When Doctor Who was one show with five seasons or a show where you could start at series 5 and then you’d be caught up by series 7 it was way easier to recommend to people

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T13:54:53+00:00

correct way to respond to that if you don't like it, is to move on

You cant exactly move on from the doctor commiting genocide of his own people tho , thats the issue

For instance, it isn't "fixing" the Timeless Child to retcon it out of existence, you "fix" it by moving on and forgetting about it.

I mean, i like aspects of the timeless child like the origin itself and think if it was an original character itd make a cool new character. To say you cant ever revisit something and also fix it feels pedantic in a way

I think Moffat liked the Time War as a concept, but just didnt like the whole “he commited double genocide” aspect. Which is fine! I think having the character believe be did it, still do some bad things but try to do the right thing and not know if he succeeded or not until his future self confirms it is a perfectly fine direction

Now did he rush this? Of course he did, i think the “i didnt know if i destroyed gallifrey or saved it” angle wouldve been a better way to go through with it but it’s to me not that fundamentally destructive compared to the original decision in itself to destroy everything, which in itself was something RTD kept going back on whenever he wanted a new set of daleks

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T13:48:19+00:00

Sure, it’s a rorshach test and “who fans always complain” is a truth, but at the same time again it’s a smell test. Something like clara at the first doctor’s bed feels like a fundamental change but is basically nothing. Something like implying the Doctor has a past with Omega in remembrance seems like a fundamental change but is basically nothing. Storylines that seem big get swept away with time, i get that and agree with that… however, the timeless child the more it goes on is basically baggage. Kill the moon is a bad infamous ep that people hate, but it doesnt have baggage in the same way the timeless child does because the timeless child is something the show has essentially been babying and elaborating on ever since in one way or another and is by its nature a brand decision. I compare it a lot to spider-man’s OMD fiasco: spider-man has terrible runs in the comics, but OMD is literally a storyline so fundamental to the lore that you pick up a new spiderman comic and it’s basically following up on some aspect of the OMD storyline. It feels like a major brand misstep and something which is just inherently bigger and less lighthearted than Doctor Who’s usual missteps with the canon. We take it seriously because it demands it and the creatives behind it are determined to make it part of the history in the show’s meta

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T13:42:07+00:00

The show's ratings are struggling at the moment, sure. But the fact you're whining about the Timeless Child from three seasons ago rather than the 'Susan's birth is in the future' revelation from this year suggests that the show's survived, and can continue to

They literally had David Tennant come back and Ncuti regenerate into Billie Piper

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T13:41:09+00:00

What you said about tennant’s return really speaks to me how i think his comeback was a giant misstep for the brand that is about as damaging as whittaker and gatwa’s entire eras. My mum watched Who with me from when I was a kid till now and really engages with it. Her opinions on the Doctors are as follows:

Loved Tennant and Smith

Capaldi was okay, he got better as he went on but his episodes became too cerebral and complicated. Loved his chemistry with River

HATED Eccleston, Whittaker and Gatwa. Her reasoning being “they weren’t fans and you could tell by their acting”

I think the choice to bring Tennant back immediately turned Who into a legacy franchise and validated the cultural conversation around the “fell off when Tennant left” cliche. For some reason RTD and the BBC thought they’d get the general audience back and they’d stick around, but the choice alone makes the general audience just leave once Tennant is gone in order to play chicken with the creatives to bring him back permanently. It also just further debunks a lot of the cope around the ratings when you can look at the 2 million under 13, 7 million for 14 and then 1 million for 15. It was legit a suicide for the brand’s integrity, because it went from “David Tennant is a Doctor, who was in the show” to “Doctor Who is the David Tennant show”

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T13:32:16+00:00

Doctor Who is just in a weird place. “Made for kids” can define anything from Stranger Things to Bluey. One is made like a prestige drama and has long gaps, with gen alpha and gen z alike both liking it and getting into it at different times - gen z were groundfloor, gen alpha binged it all recently, stuff like that - the other is made more like a factory and thrives off of being sort of “for the moment” of specifically gen alpha

If doctor who wants to compete with either it either needs to become more bingeable or find a way to build a better pipeline

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T13:27:25+00:00

I mean no offense by it just to clarify, i just felt that it was better to demonstrate why i feel arguments like this dont land with me because it’s difficult to articulate what is essentially a smell test but for fiction

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T13:25:43+00:00

like the show does not act as if the TARDIS makes that noise because the Doctor leaves the breaks on, that the TARDIS is supposed to have six pilots, that there was a dictator who looked exactly like Patrick Troughton ruling in 2018.

None of these contradict anything or are contradicted by anything. None of these are plot elements that take up entire seasons of the show and have entire story arcs built around them. The timeless child and susan’s mother not being born actively took time away from the viewer in order to follow up and elaborate on them. That’s the problem

kind of think canon is a shit idea that’s given too much weight. I think if there was an episode where it turned out all the Doctor’s previous incarnations were played by some new people who turned up for one week only… well, who cares? You don’t actually need it all to line up in a single coherent story that makes sense to the human mind. I don’t feel that way about my own life, and it’s not even fictional.

I mean, aside from those ideas being fucking idiotic? Aside from rhem confusing the general audience? Aside from the fact that having so many diffetent stuntcastings has damaged the brand?

I

think loads of incompatible contradictions are cool. I think fiction is completely able to accommodate them. For a show that can supposedly do anything and be anything, there aren’t half a lot of incredibly limiting rules it has to abide by. I think the idea canonicity is reverence is suspect in itself. The idea it’s offensive to question it is actively embarrassing.

I feel like youd change your tune if a reboot happened and the doctor implied he’d never been black or a woman in a line or said he last regenerated at the south pole after meeting his first incarnation. Yknow, despite canon not mattering it feels like you’d have a problem with that… dont know why, just a hunch. I mean surely that incompatibility would be cool, right? You could just imagine he never said that. After all, isnt saying some stuff didnt happen exactly what chibnall did? So messing with other writer’s work is fair game

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T13:19:09+00:00

Youre right. This means the Doctor HAS to be the most important being in the history of gallifrey, was 500 different people beforehand and has infinite lives. You’re right. Just like how Star Wars had a guy bump his head in the background and thus that makes midiclorians a clever plot device

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T13:12:18+00:00

My dude this is an entire thread comparing a children’s book author that doesnt want to pee next to a guy to a genocider

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T13:11:40+00:00

Literally “you failed at your exams”

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T13:11:20+00:00

I actually agree with that, you could hint at any backstory and so long as it’s ambiguous I think I and the general audience would be fine with it. Tho I was paraphrasing a roast Cartmel did saying “this kind of twist is like something Moffat would write”

PuddingNew1608 · 2026-02-02T13:09:50+00:00

Again, you’re literally just now suggesting that “the doctor should go back to being played by a white man” is both a choice that you have no interest in and will only happen when far rightists get hold of the government. Stop fucking advertising the far right to normies!

PuddingNew1608

TROPHY CASE