Grab yourself some HOLY today and use my code HARBO5 for £5 off your first order, or HARBO for 10% off!
https://uk.weareholy.com/harbowholmes

If you were The Doctor would Faolancortez be your companion?

Russel didn't want to write Doctor Who upon his second stint. He wanted to do whatever he wanted and he did.

The fact this character with 60 years of history is now known as “that guy David Tennant played” is a generational cultural fumble

Personally, I think the 13th and 15th Doctor era were simply less interested in exploring the Doctor as a character. 9-12 all made a conscious point to occasionally slow down and ruminate on The Doctor as a person. How had millennia of life and countless adventures shaped them into who they were. The loss, horror, and trauma caught up with them and it gave a texture to the adventures. We knew the losses stung and we knew that The Doctor was not effortlessly good. This was deemphasized as the show went on and it feels like the Doctor has been watered down, when really we just don't spend as much time peering into them as we used to. I think Jodie and Ncuti could have delivered amazing scenes had the stories focused in a bit more on how they dealt with the world and people differently than previous Doctors and allowed them to really get into what kept their Doctors going.

17:05 Did you know that the 5th Doctor is Tennant's father-in-law?

I think the writers started playing way too much towards the social sensibilities of the online, Tumblr/twitter fanbase, with the emphasis on mental health, “the fam” and etc, till you get to 15, who feels like a 2015 Tumblr caricature of the Doctor’s quirkiness and messaging

The Twelfth Doctor is an interesting case where he's my favourite Doctor but he has plenty of episodes that I think aren't that good. But that just shows how good Peter Capaldi was and how great some parts of his era were.

I would say the Doctor and the Doctor Who mythos have been ''overcomplicated'' rather than ''ruined'' necessarily. I'm not personally in favor of a full series reboot, but sometimes softly rebooting, retconning, or even just benignly ignoring certain parts of a long-running series can help streamline it for the better. And going forward, I do think a streamlined, more relaxed, ''back to basics'' approach that focuses more on fun, new episodic adventures with new characters would serve the show well. Bringing back old friends, enemies, and lore every once in a while is fine, but when it feels like every new season of your show is just mining its long history for more and more nostalgia porn to less and less natural or inspired effect, you have a problem.

Rise and fall of UNIT next? There's a lot to say about how the organisation was presented to us throughout the years

25:02 - 14 not getting a proper regeneration was particulary very dissapointing, because this was the face that originally didn't want to go. What better arc to get than having him, upon his second attempt, accept death and go in peace. It would've been perfect. But alas.

Your video essays are so good. I really enjoy them. Great analysis.

I think that the difference between the old series and the new era is that, in large part, the Doctor wasn't being played by someone who was coming in with preconceptions - each actor that took over the role came into it with little or no knowledge of what the character had been before them and therefore brought a different approach. Since the 2005 reboot, though, we've had too many actors who have some preconceived bias - they might not all have been super-fans like Capaldi or Tennant, but by the time we came to the modern era Doctor Who was so much a part of the public consciousness that you'd have to have been living under a rock to not have some experience of the show... even if it was just hearing kids doing Dalek impressions in the playground when they were growing up.

Christopher Eccleston famously knew almost nothing about Doctor Who though, since he admitted in interviews that he was never into sci-fi stuff like that - and as a result, he didn't really have a classic Doctor portrayal in mind when he approached the character... and because of that, he created a whole new take on the material where someone else who had grown up watching the show would have tried (intentionally or subconsciously) to live up to and work previous actors' portrayals into his mannerisms.

(This isn't to discount the writers' input here, of course - but you can throw a brick and find someone who could write for Doctor Who, which means there's plenty of people to choose from to find really good writers... but it takes a special kind of actor to do a good job of playing the Doctor.)

I think what's needed is for someone to write a character who you could build a sci-fi show around without writing them as the Doctor... no, wait, hear me out! The Doctor has a few core personality traits that are always present and that we all recognise, but those can be overlaid onto any portrayal. The PTSD from the Time War, the general wanderlust and need to get involved in whatever strangeness they stumble into - you could take any character and add those traits and you'd have a simple outline of the Doctor... the problem with some of the later portrayals has been that the writers did exactly that, and thought that was enough (hence the infinite regressions and the diminishing returns, as each new Doctor ends up being a knock-off of an older incarnation).

What I think is needed is to give the hubbub some time to die down so that people aren't asking who the next Doctor will be and speculating about their characterisation. Then, hand the basic bare-bones outline of a character with those generalised bullet points - PTSD (either on the surface or hidden deep), a compulsion to keep moving, and a habit of sticking their nose into situations - and give it to a writer who doesn't know they're developing the character of the Doctor. Let them come up with their own twist on it by taking out as much character baggage as possible while keeping the core personality traits. Maybe they'll come up with a more Han Solo type character - a swashbuckling rogue - or maybe they'll come up with a dark and brooding haunted figure... or maybe they'll come up with something completely new and out of left-field. How do we know? We've got umpteen Doctors across various media subconsciously influencing our ideas even if we're deliberately trying not to think of Doctor archetypes!

Then, do the same for a companion character - someone they share their adventures with. Maybe it's a lover, maybe it's a partner in crime, maybe it's someone with their own agenda, but just someone who has a compelling reason to be hanging out with our nameless protagonist. Again, not written exactly as a Doctor Who companion, but as someone who - for narrative reasons - is there to bounce ideas off, have fun banter with and generally make the screen time more interesting than just the main character bopping around on their own. After all, they'll need someone to vocalise plot points to diagetically so that the audience doesn't just watch them silently thinking or monologuing to themselves like a crazy person.

Then, do a casting call for an unnamed sci-fi project - several actors for the protagonist, several for the sidekick - and give them a rough outline of the character and a generic sci-fi scenario, some sort of problem-solving situation (rather than running from a monster) and have the actors improvise how they feel their characters would react.

The two factors that seemed to influence each varied portrayal of the Doctor in the classic series were the actor's interpretation of the character, and the writers' vision. Each new incarnation presented a new actor with no real preconceptions to bias them in how the character was expected to behave, which is why their portrayals were all so unique... and the writers worked to create a consistent personality through the various storylines based in part on how the actor's portrayal came across in their first appearance.

So what needs to be done to reinvigorate that originality in the Doctor's portrayal is to try to boil out as much bias as possible - writers who are writing a character first, actors who are approaching that character with the eyes of someone seeing a new franchise rather than one with so much baggage in tow.

So the casting call will hopefully result in a few interesting interpretations of the Doctor that aren't being influenced by previous portrayals - and a couple of companion actors with a take that hopefully we haven't seen before either. If you told them they were going to be auditioning for Doctor Who they'd have expectations they felt they had to live up to - but now, hopefully they're focusing more on creating a new character rather than trying to bring some Pertwee or Hartnell or Baker to the role (or Sarah Jane or Rose or Clara).

When you have it down to a short-list, pair them off in different duos until you've got the best companion and the best Doctor of the bunch. Then send the video of their final improv workshop with the characters back to the writers' room, and say, "That's our new Doctor Who, and that's the new companion - congratulations, you guys are working on the new revival of the show!" and drop the series bible on the table with all the plot threads and background and established canon to come up with some story outlines...

NOW you start to take the character of the Doctor and overlay the trauma, the wanderlust and the busybody tendencies onto an already well-rounded and unique character, with the mannerisms and personality that the actor brought to the improv auditions to work from. You don't need to shoehorn references and fezes and bowties and scarves in as substitutes for actual personality traits anymore, because you should now have something new and fresh to work with. There's no need to avoid easter eggs completely of course, but they're no longer defining elements of the character's personality which only serve to remind the viewer of previous incarnations.

I think that would go a long way towards rejuvenating the character of Doctor Who - breaking the cycle of referencing the past until it all becomes a recursive loop of endless copies of copies, by removing the subconscious impulse to recycle what works and thinking outside the blue box.

I would like a Doctor with a Carl Sagan view of the universe and a MacGyver-level of creativity. Something that I enjoyed with the 3rd Doctor is how much he knew how to work with technology, from chemestry experiments, flying a 20th century ship to space and even attempt to "hack" and remove the block the Time Lords imposed in his TARDIS (while today the Sonic Screwdriver feels like a magical wand).

It does irk me somewhat when people try to trivialise and simplify the Third Doctor as the “action hero” or the “James Bond” archetype. Whilst he definitely has those facets to his character, he is much more than that.

Jon Pertwee’s incarnation, through the performance and writing, is the first one to actually feel like a hero with a moral code. Whilst Hartnell and Troughton had morals, it’s not until you get to the Pertwee years where you truly start to understand the Doctor’s beliefs and ethics. Stories like ‘Doctor Who and the Silurians’ and ‘Colony in Space’ really get under the Doctor’s skin about what he thinks is right, which, when combined with Pertwee’s serious and absolutely dedicated performance, makes his character so much more interesting.

Also, the Third Doctor isn’t really a spy, he’s a passionate scientist. He has the arrogance and grumpiness of his predecessors and successors, but he really was the incarnation to bring the character down to Earth (pun intended).

"The Timeless Children" answered the question 'Doctor Who?' and it answered it with two tired cliches (Moses in the bulrushes, and the disaffected cop who hands in their badge). I haven't watched since.

As usual, this is a solid analysis. What's missing though, is the context. Tom Baker's stories got great ratings, yes...but sometimes that's due to a distinct lack of competition for the Saturday tea time slot. Similarly, the 5th Doctor's stories ran 2 episodes per week in the early evening, while the 7th Doctor ran against Coronation Street. There's lots more but I feel like this is a bigger conversation that I'd like to have with you, rather than an essay I feel like typing on my phone, lol.

British culture's too fractured for the Doctor to be as iconic now as he was in past decades. The general public stopped paying attention to Doctor Who after Capaldi, and interest was dropping off even while he was still in the role.

Doctor Who still had passionate cast and crew when it was cancelled in 1989, it was more mishandling above production that brought it down, such as when the serial and drama departments got merged and later split again, Doctor Who somehow moving from the former to the latter, where it struggled with a more limited budget and deliberately bad scheduling, basically the BBC itself trying to end it; the cancellation itself was only meant to be a temporary rest period that just got longer and longer.  This is why it ended on a high, and with enough going for it that the Wilderness Years were still full of new and relatively popular media.
This last one though feels like the complete opposite; like the cast and crew were the ones who didn't want to be there, while the BBC would happily give it that prime Saturday slot regardless of quality.  The potential Wasteland Years do not feel promosing.

If I were to fix the Doctor from that awful cliff-hanger, I would say the regeneration into Billie Piper was the Doctor subconsciously searching for Tennant's version to put themselves back together by using Rose's face. Using a special or two to acknowledge how empty the Doctor has been the past 2 seasons and say bi-generation is not viable, find Tennent put them back together and regenerate into the next doctor. Maybe add some amnesia due to the process or start the next era like Eccleston and only allude to this happening at first as a mystery