Will nothing ever really be the same again after Timeless Child retconned the history of the Doctor, regeneration and Time Lord culture in its entirity, it really only compounds the fundamental issues with the Jodie Whittaker era of the series under showrunner Chris Chibnall.
Chibnall's appointment as Doctor Who showrunner was one met with immense optimism. Coming off a stellar run on Broadchurch that displayed immense emotional maturity, a strong understanding of modern British culture, and the ability to balance tense overarching plots with character-driven episodic storytelling, he appeared to be the perfect antidote the tired later years of Steven Moffat's tenure. To boot, he'd be taking over with the show's first female lead, a much-welcomed change to the status quo. That Chibnall's own episodes were uniformly on the blander side of Doctor Who (devil-sunned "42", Silurian return "The Hungry Earth" & "Cold Blood", and season 7 double-tap yawn "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" & "The Power of Three") be damned, things were looking up.
Unfortunately, two seasons and over three years since Jodie Whittaker's announcement, Doctor Who doesn't feel invigorated as much as hampered. It's never been more ambitious on paper, yet routinely feels restricted by a disinterest in much of what it raises. This isn't about ratings, the show's perceived focus with messaging or even the ostentatious continuity rewrite of the Timeless Child itself. The storytelling issues with Whittaker's Doctor Who go much deeper, and are best seen in contrast to what made the new series so great.
How To Tell A Doctor Who Story Properly (According To Russel T. Davies & Stephen Moffat)
Since it was revived in 2005, Doctor Who has defined itself on season-long arcs that unfold in the background to the individual episodes, in stark contrast to the four, six, eight or ten-episode serials of the classic series. Instead of seeing a single story over a lengthy run, adventures were wrapped up in 45 minutes (90 if it was a two-parter, usually reserved for more experienced writers or the showrunner).
The season arc was a straight-up twist in Christopher Eccleston's era, with the phrase Bad Wolf following the Doctor and Rose Tyler unspoken during season 1, and made the way for more inventive setups of Torchwood in season 2 (seeing its origins in a Queen Victoria historical adventure before winks and nods later on) and The Master's return in season 3 ("You are not alone", Mr. Saxon and the Chameleon Arch). When Moffat took over in 2010, he built on Davies' style, subverting and adjusting it to tell bigger and more impressive stories: the Doctor became aware of the crack in time midway through season 5, with its mystery overt leading up to the Pandorica reveal, while season 6's River Song mystery took the show full-on serial, before Matt Smith's final specials tied up grand questions regarding the Time War and regeneration limits.
The success Davies and Moffat did lie in very distinct approaches. For the former, it was the ability to bring a human core to the drama, seeing Doctor Who flirt with soap-like emotion against the threats of Daleks, Cybermen et al. His first episode centered not on the Doctor, but Rose, and every companion, even the weaker set, had immense growth that paid off brilliantly in finales. Indeed, the final twist of David Tennant's run was that the "he will knock four times" prophecy referred not to The Master, but kindly old Wilf, who'd been slowly rising in prominence over the past couple of years. Moffat certainly enjoyed character work too, but his stories were more eyed on the Doctor, questioning the impact he has on companions, villains and the universe. While Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi's era were marred by criticisms of obsessing with canon minutiae, in truth Moffat was most often playing in his own sandbox, using and twisting pre-existing notions but only ever to power the story at hand.
But while these big picture ideas suck up a lot of air, it wasn't just the ingenuity of the arcs themselves that made Doctor Who work so well in the respective showrunners' early years. Even though most seasons were built around the payoff finales, it worked because the setup was fun in its own right. The Doctor becoming human via the Chameleon Arch and fob watch in "Human Nature" & "The Family of Blood" was an engaging standalone, with connection to the wider story only coming after it had been seamlessly established in the canon. Meanwhile, episodes unrelated to the bigger picture - think "The Doctor Dances", "Blink", "Vincent and the Doctor" - succeeded on their own merits. It didn't matter if an hour was tied to the bigger plot, just that the adventure at hand was a strong story in its own right.
In both eras, the writer ended up running out of steam and coming up against problems. By season 4, Davies had played most of his cards and was stuck repeating baiting teases of Rose and bees. And Moffat came undone when he introduced Clara, another mystery woman for the Doctor to obsess over (the fourth, counting "The Girl in the Fireplace", Amy and River Song) without full development, while Peter Capaldi's era was spotted with convoluted tales of the afterlife, Missy and Hybrids that never felt as logical or impactful as what came before (along with a multi-season grapple of what the new Doctor's personality should be).
Yet even when it did go bad, Doctor Who's episodic structure meant there could be great episodes at any point that didn't feel reliant on a convoluted bigger picture. "Heaven Sent" is Capaldi's best episode by a Gallifreyan mile, perhaps the strongest of the whole series, and it achieves that in spite of being in the middle of a strange raven-confession-dial-hybrid three-parter.
There is so much variability in this theory, but across two showrunners, four Doctors and ten seasons, it's clear that it was a guiding force. And the Chibnall era has roundly broken the underpinning rules.
What Chris Chibnall's Doctor Who Has Got Wrong
Rosa Parks and the Partition of India were refreshingly challenging, the series struggled to create something strong and cohesive.
Although oft-cited, the issue wasn't the lack of overarching plot. Indeed, there was one. Ignoring the Timeless Child mystery set up in "The Ghost Monument" (which formed the backbone to season 12), the story was that of the TARDIS family each facing the problems and losses in their own lives. Standalone episodes reflected personal events so that, when premiere villain Tim Shaw returned in the finale, it was an opportunity for all the characters - but especially Graham, who lost wife Grace to the Stenza - to face down a physical embodiment of that. The series arc was character-driven, not story.
The problem with that was a disconnect between the character development and the narrative, and more granularly an imperceptibility of who the characters were and a mediocrity to much of the standalone adventures. While grand concepts reaching deep into obscure Doctor Who lore such as Gods in alternate dimensions and demons overseeing lone deaths were introduced, they were never used to tell complete adventures, always stopping short to hammer home why this was important to the modern world and in the process undermining the message.
Doctor Who season 12 looked to be correcting that. The premiere, "Spyfall: Part One" introduced a new Master and things only expanded from there: the Timeless Child mystery returned, Galifrey was destroyed (again), Captain Jack Harkness popped back in, mysterious Doctor Ruth was introduced, more Time Lords were thrown in the mix, the Lone Cyberman was teased as a grand threat and a mystery surrounding an Irish policeman named Brandon dominated the penultimate episode. That's enough material for an entire showrunner's tenure packed into 10 episodes. And season 12 finale "The Timeless Children" couldn't deliver. Half the threads were ignored or their significance dismissed (the Lone Cyberman was killed with a bad pun, Ruth remains a plot gap), while the others compounded in a hitherto unprecedented rewriting of Doctor Who canon itself.
Many have objected to the Doctor being the progenitor of the Time Lords, for having at least 15 regenerations prior to William Hartnell and how this leaves Time Lords exterminated again, but there's nothing intrinsically bad with any of the ideas Chibnall has been playing with. Where he's gone wrong is that he's failed to make any of them exciting in their own right. The Timeless Child mystery around which all this orbits was a basic tease, with no clues or nuance to build hype; it was intriguing only due to its own self-pushed importance. Viewers were told to care about everything in season 12's finale because it was obliquely mentioned as important in a throwaway comment a few episodes previously, then when it arrived the reveal is done over multiple signposted exposition dumps with the Doctor sat on the sidelines.
What Chibnall has done is attempt both the Davies and Moffat model of modern Doctor Who in tandem, but fumbled both sides. The human drama with the companions has been between lackluster and non-existent - it's telling the season 12 analysis doesn't mention Ryan, Yaz or Graham - leaving minimal connection to the point Graham and Yaz's heart-to-heart feels wildly out of character. But the handling of the bigger picture canon mucking feels so desiring to be a big twist it doesn't get time to be developed or explained, being a continuity change for continuity's sake, not the story. Specifically, it's very hard to shake the sense that everything done with the Timeless Child wasn't entirely in service of explaining the "Brain of Morbius'" eight previous Doctors plot hole (an episode that aired when Doctor Who mega-fan Chibnall was eight).
The First Question For Any Showrunner: Doctor Who?
It's the first question, hidden in plain sight, and it's something any showrunner on Doctor Who must grapple with. Who is the Doctor? And it's much trickier than it seems. There are many things taken as hard-fast rules that aren't immutable in the original series (inconsistencies abound, to which Moffat spent a lot of time tweaking). It's generally accepted he's a renegade Time Lord who took the TARDIS - forever stuck as a 1960s police box due to a broken chameleon circuit - who has an overbearing care for the human race, but who each iteration of the Doctor is varies from regeneration to regeneration.
Each face brings with it a new personality, often the inverse of what came before. In the revival era especially, there's been a greater purpose or idea being explored. Christopher Eccleston was a tortured war veteran, still reeling from the Time War and perceived crimes of the War Doctor. Tennant shouldered some of that burden also, but Davies built upon less anger and more sadness, a sorrowful-and-jovial mix: that era's Doctor was a hero with his own demons, who fought to save everybody but when pushed had destroyed everything. When Moffat took over, he shifted gears to explore the Doctor as a living myth, willing the show into something of a fairytale with its youthful-looking, mentality-old Matt Smith. A stumble came with Capaldi, whose debut season was built around defining the character but couldn't quite make it stick (not helped by him having to play off the intentionally abstract Clara), but the idea seemed to be an extension of everything before: is the Doctor a good man?
Who is Jodie Whittaker's Doctor? Her personality and relationships are variable, with a scattered temperament that's unclear if it's a key trait or weak writing. And what Chibnall is attempting to explore is just as abstract. The Timeless Child reveal makes her Adam and Moses and Jesus, all wrapped into one, but that's a snaking backstory without any greater meaning applied to the present. Yes, there's time for that to happen, but two seasons in and there's a lack of purpose to the current Doctor Who run. It began with a daring gender-swap of the character, but that - and a mostly incidental location shift from London to Sheffield - seems to be the limit of exploration; there's been neither a full look at the ramifications of the switch, nor enough to get past it.
There's an argument that what Chibnall has done is revert the show's title back to a true question. "Doctor Who?" is fresh again because there is now a genuine mystery about just who the eponymous traveler is - compared to the elaborative Moffat era when the question was posed as a plot device, with the answer less important than what the audience already knew. But that's a superficial reading of what the show and character are, and certainly doesn't line up with anything else from Jodie Whittaker's performance.
Ultimately, things are left lacking definition. Chibnall has not just backtracked Doctor Who convention, managing to prioritize canon over story more severe than his predecessors, he's also failed to understand the very facets of the character. He was able to explain a 43-year-old plot hole that the fandom had widely dismissed, but was it worth it?