Ten Reasons I Hate the New Doctor Who

10. Why So Serious
    I loved the original series because it very rarely took itself seriously. It had a terrible budget, hilarious special effects, frequently laughable monsters, and the cast and crew knew it. The actors/writers would even insert lines to make fun of this (ex. Tom Baker asking another actor if he's sure he's pressing the right buttons as the actor carelessly rubs his fingers unconvincingly over cheap plastic squares in 'Nightmare of Eden'). However, the majority of the writers did take their job to tell imaginative, engaging stories very seriously. This combination of 50% quality story telling and 50% B-movie charm in a relaxed environment ensured that the experience would be entertaining and hilarious regardless of the individual story's quality.

Hindle is a god amongst men.

     The new series consistently manages to take itself way too seriously, despite all the sitcom one liners, the plethora of catchphrase based humor, and other painfully smug, 'wacky', self-aware moments. The Doctor can and will go up to hordes of heavily-armed aliens and begin shouting about how huge his dick is and they will legitimately shrink back in fear, often just flat out surrendering as a result. He even seems to derive actual pleasure from knowing that people are afraid of him, and that's terrible on several levels.
    In addition, the program has become a soap opera. Ironically, the Oncoming Storm bursts into tears on a hair trigger in displays of emotion that often resemble deranged temper-tantrums rather than any kind of legitimate sorrow.

SURVIVING FATAL INJURIES IS SO UNFAIR, I HATE EVERYTHING

9. The Doctor Doesn't Give a Shit About Science, and is Always Right
    In the original series, the Doctor was primarily motivated by curiosity. After all, his title was supposed to signify him being a doctor of science, not medicine, and certainly not this cringe inducing "the man who makes people better" bullshit of recent years.
  The Doctor would wander into a situation, be completely confused, and begin applying the scientific method in order to figure out what was happening. If he was ever arrogant enough to flat out assume he was right without testing his hypothesis, he'd be proven completely wrong (as with the haunted house in 'The Chase').

What was that about "a dimension consisting of the dark recesses of the human mind"?

    The new Doctor rarely looks for new information, favoring instead to make absurd assumptions which somehow are almost always correct.
The Doctor: "Oh look, a unique strain of homo reptilia I've never seen before!"
Rory: "How long do their poison sacs take to recharge?"
The Doctor: "Twenty four hours."
    Confronted with zombies infected with every known disease? Just mix together every known medicine and spray them with it! BECAUSE SCIENCE IS FOR FUCKING PUSSIES, REAL MEN USE MAGIC.

Bitch, please. I'm trying to cure a disease the real way.

    When confronted with a significant hole in his knowledge ('The Satan Pit'), the Doctor chooses to never investigate it. He calls it impossible, shrugs it off, and never questions it again. He even goes so far as to chalk his scientific knowledge up to being "just another belief," equating it to religion. Science is the attempt to prove yourself wrong in order to gain new information (which he weirdly enough confirms during this scene). On the other hand, religion is the attempt to prove yourself right in order to repel new information. What the fuck is going on here? It's the most useless philosophy ever- 'I'll explore in order to disprove my assumptions about the universe, but not do additional research to form new hypotheses.' Especially when this big gap in his knowledge foretells the death of his current love interest, and later it is revealed that he likely would have drowned himself due to merely being separated from her. He should be scrambling like mad for information on this thing to investigate the validity of its claims. But no, he just lets it pass him by and in series 4 he just goes with the assumption that 'he's fought Satan. For real.' I guess if they teach kids to think for themselves and to analyze information, then they'll start to realize what a pile of shit this show is.

 Just... why.

  It's even worse when you combine it with his new and bizarre habit of judging people for being less advanced than him. He goes to museums to dance around in a smug fervor while either shouting "Wrong!" at the exhibits or claiming them as "one of mine". He loves slave-owning humans for exploring the unknown (and prioritizes saving them over their slaves), but then looks down at legitimate scientists (archeologists) with contempt because he's a time traveler and therefore better than them because he's more privileged than they are.

    This re-imagining of the Doctor must have just outgrown science. Despite the fact that the (scientifically curious as ever) seventh Doctor was 953, and the eleventh is inexplicably 909.

8. The Writing

    Every season of the new series can be summed up with this formula: The Doctor hears a mysterious buzzword or prophecy while fighting some (usually misunderstood) aliens. He either murders them or takes pity on them and then murders them anyway. Repeat for about eleven episodes. Finally, the buzzword is revealed to have something to do with the destruction of Earth and/or the universe. The Doctor and/or a companion hits a reset button and everything is fine again until next season when the exact same events happen all over again.

If only Rose had been a fourteen year old boy. Then instead of "Bad Wolf",
terrible drawings of dicks would suddenly show up everywhere,
accompanied by loud dramatic music.

    Doctor Who used to be about story telling. The budget sucked, the special effects were laughable, and so they had to rely on quality scripts to carry the show. These scripts, save for the occasional clunker, are surprisingly tight. There are some continuity inconsistencies between stories, but nothing that makes a storyline impossible based on its own internal logic.

Aw yeah.

    This too is thrown out by the new series. Plot-breaking, indecipherable bullshit destroys most of the major plot lines. For example, the fifth season has people getting erased from time, causing them to have never existed. However, this only causes a few people to forget about them. History is not changed to reflect the absence of their influences, in any real way. This culminates with an Auton facsimile being made of a person who has never existed, based on (what should be non-existent) memories taken from dreams. This impossible Auton is animated by the Nestene Consciousness, which ceases to exist halfway through the story along with the rest of the universe. The non-existent robot made from non-existent memories continues to exist (and function!) despite its creators having never existed to build it in the first place (and not presently existing in order to continuously animate it). This quadruply non-existent robot is then erased from existence again by the universe resetting, and the original person upon whom this was all based somehow remembers the quintuply non-existent memories from his Auton counterpart. COME ON DOWN TO THE LAZY WRITING WAREHOUSE. WE GOT SCRIPTS SO LAZY, YOU'LL FUCKING CRY.

Careful there Mickey 2.0, don't think too hard. You might die, again.

7. The Catchphrases
    I could go into detail about how the new series constantly tells you to be impressed by how clever it is and how maddeningly smug this attitude is, but nothing sums it up quite like the catchphrases.

OH MY GOODNESS, I DON'T THINK I CAN
CONTAIN THE WACKINESS

    Fantastic, allons-y, I'm so sorry, spoilers, Geronimo, hello sweetie, the Doctor lies, wibbly wobbly timey wimey, spacey wacey, I wear [UNCONVENTIONAL CLOTHING ACCESSORY],  [UNCONVENTIONAL CLOTHING ACCESSORIES] are cool, etc. I am reminded of 'Teletubbies', which makes their audience squeal with idiot joy by reciting the same five phrases over and over again.


6. The Time War
    Nothing says contrived, unoriginal sci-fi/fantasy like making your main character the last of their kind. The decision to have the Doctor genocide his own race is a flimsy plot device to inject a lot of terribly unsubtle drama and angst into a character that doesn't need it. We've already done 'the lonely Doctor' thing before. Go watch the first Doctor era, in which the issue is handled with tact. The return of 'Doctor Who' should have been a celebration, not a funeral.
    What really bugs me about it though, is both the fans and writers alike using the time war as a fix-all explanation to waive away every inconsistency. Surely most new series fans reading this will use it to explain at least one thing I bitch about. Oh the Doctor is massively out of character? The time war. The continuity sucks and time mechanics aren't consistent? The time war. The sonic screwdriver can now solidify liquified human remains in order to create some kind of tortured, blowjob dispensing paving stone creature with a human face? Err… uh… the time war?

WHAT HAS MAGIC DONE

5. Plagiarism
    A large chunk of the new series concepts are stolen nearly word for word from the works of other authors, including the 'Doctor Who - Virgin New Adventures' line of books. I personally think the VNAs are terrible, taking themselves far too seriously and being very transparently written by incredibly angsty fans that think 'Doctor Who' would be legitimately improved by viscera, torture, and rape. Despite my dislike for the novels, plagiarism is still plagiarism.

YOU ARE MAKING EVERYONE VERY UNCOMFORTABLE,
PLEASE STOP... WHATEVER IT IS THAT YOU'RE DOING.

    The Doctor being some guilt-ridden and feared destroyer of worlds, to the point where people refer to him as "the Oncoming Storm"? The New Adventures invented it. The Time War? It's one of the many concepts lifted from 'Alien Bodies'. A diary-keeping, too-clever space traveling archeologist who has undefined, future romantic relations with the Doctor? No, not River Song, that's Bernice Summerfield from the New Adventures. If you don't want to come up with original ideas, why not just go the 'Human Nature' route by hiring the author to adapt their own work for television?
    However, none of these suspicious similarities compare to the blatant plagiarism committed by Steven regarding 2003's "The Time Traveler's Wife." The title should already sound familiar. The novel is about a man who frequently finds himself involuntarily transported through time. In his series of time jumps, he meets his wife at various points throughout time, and all in a non-linear order. These encounters lead him to meeting her as a young girl which causes her to see him as an imaginary friend throughout her childhood. When he first meets her in linear time (and therefore does not know her, but she knows him already) she is awed by how young he is, and gives him a diary cataloging their encounters, identically mirroring the events of "Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead". Madame de Pompadour's character, River's story arc, and Amy's story arc are all ripped off, nearly word for word, from this novel. Even the Weeping Angel's feeding ability is extremely reminiscent of this concept.

(I later found out that the author of "The Time Traveler's Wife" has accepted Steven's use of her novel as inspiration for "The Girl in the Fireplace," however I haven't been able to find any comment concerning his blatant intellectual theft post-2006. Even if she was okay with the plagiarism which spawned Amy and River, that still doesn't make it right to go around stealing ideas that aren't yours and recycle them to this extent.)

You're a bad person if you plagiarize something once, but to do it over and over again in this fashion is abysmal behavior for such a well-regarded writer.

    But the recycling and theft is hardly limited to literature. The new series goes so far as to reuse iconic scenes from the classic series as well, while managing to completely miss the point. For instance, the Doctor's "betrayal" of Amy's trust in 'The God Complex' is just a watered down version of the climax to 'The Curse of Fenric'.

You're a one dimensional projection of Steven Moffat's transparent issues
with women, you openly flirt with me during your wedding reception in front
of your husband who just waited around for two thousand years in order to protect you,
and your only purpose in this show is to be pregnant and do offensive
stereotypical 'girl' things. An emotional cripple.

    This still isn't enough, and so they go so far as to plagiarize other new series stories. Read this summary: "The Doctor and a new companion help alien police capture a shape shifting alien criminal as to prevent the aforementioned alien police from murdering innocent humans. The Doctor breaks his sonic screwdriver in the process, and finally faces off with the shape shifting criminal in a hospital. Having saved the day, the Doctor goes off on his own, obtains a new sonic screwdriver, and returns to pick up his new companion." Now, am I describing 'Smith and Jones' or 'the Eleventh Hour?'
    I don't know either.


4. The Doctor's Love Life
    The Doctor has likely had 'relations' in the past (hence him having a granddaughter). This is presumably with members of his own species, and I have no problem with this. However, I am not okay with the Doctor's new status as a zoophile.
    'Journey's End' makes it clear that the Doctor is disgusted to be inside a human body. It's the kind of reaction I could see someone having if they suddenly became a dog: "Eww fuck, I have to lick my own butt now." Understandable, that is until you realize that this new Doctor is frequently and voluntarily inside human bodies (and not in a sci-fi transmogrification kind of way).

   Let's move on to the real issue at hand. First, the Doctor falls into a codependent relationship with a very unremarkable Mary Sue. Then, in 'Turn Left,' it's shown that he's so depressed by being separated from her that he would have drowned himself if no one had intervened. Despite this unfathomable codependence, during their supposed 'relationship' he fucks a 18th century courtesan behind her back.

Misplaced my girlfriend in a parallel dimension, sulked a bit, then took out my frustration
by drowning hundreds of babies. Well, looks like the only
thing left to do is to kill myself.

   A few seasons later it's revealed that he thinks the TARDIS is sexy in a very literal way, and then marries the daughter of his current companions. Calling this a soap opera is far too kind.


3. Broken Time Travel Mechanics
    'Doctor Who' writers have never completely agreed on how time travel and changing history should work. However, much of the original series functions on the basis that history is unchangeable. This is very important for two reasons- first because it allows the Doctor to interfere in events he knows nothing about without having to worry about corrupting the timeline, and second because rewriting the past is a lazy solution for lazy writers. However, about half a dozen stories including 'The Time Meddler' and 'Genesis of the Daleks' ignore this rule in order to tell interesting stories about the ethics of interfering with history. Even then, it is always someone other than the Doctor who is trying to alter the course of history. There are a grand total of two times ('Day' and 'Genesis of the Daleks') where the Doctor is placed in a situation to alter history, and actually might have done so. It's always extremely vague on whether or not he has actually changed anything.

Oooooh shit muthafucka yo best get yo sick ass raybands on
cause its tha muthafuckin monk all up in this here abbey.

     So, despite already having admittedly low standards for time travel theory consistency, the new series still drives me nuts. First, you can hugely change history ('The Unquiet Dead'), but then you can't at all, no matter how small the change ('Father's Day'), but then you can change certain special points because time is divided into 'fixed' and 'non-fixed' events. Which is absurd. Silurians could take over the Earth? Oh it's a non-fixed event. Regardless if they take over or not, that couldn't possibly change future fixed points in any way, right? It's a very stupid and limited take on cause and effect. Especially because fixed points get changed all the time in recent season finales, but it's okay as long as you reset the universe or do something equally convoluted after you're done fucking around with them, apparently.
    But the real issue is that the new Doctors use time travel as a tool to solve problems, rather than a means of opening up new and exciting worlds to explore. In 'A Christmas Carol', the Doctor abuses time travel to rewrite a man's personal history right in front of his eyes in order to manipulate him into getting his way (while gloating about it to his face no less). Ignoring all of the abominable moral problems with this, he arrives back where he started to find that the isomorphic computer he was trying to manipulate the man into operating is still there, and that he's changed the man to a point where the computer doesn't even recognize him anymore. The writers clearly chose the easiest path in writing this story. They didn't even bother to think about the complex changes this would cause to the timeline. Instead, only the man's personality is changed and the situation remains exactly the same. Lazy, convenient, and utterly unimaginative.

Do you know, the Time Lords once told me not to use my powers to
completely and utterly break people? You know what I said to them? Nothing.
Dead people can't hear.

  In short, the new series Doctor relies on time travel as a crutch to directly solve his problems in nonsensical ways, the rules about changing history are incredibly sloppy and self-contradictory for no reason, and the TARDIS now contains magic fairy dust just in case the Doctor wasn't overpowered enough already. It can bring companions back to life, revert hostile aliens back into eggs, and if you give up a regeneration it will grant you unlimited wishes for a few minutes. Which I suppose is time enough to wish for more lives, so it's basically free.


2. The Villains
    A series can have bad protagonists and still be carried by threatening antagonists, easily. However, a (massively contrived) alliance between most of the new Doctor Who villains could only manage to lock the Doctor in a box… a box opened in about five minutes by the Doctor's trademark magic wand that they should all know about by now (despite it clearly being stated that it was deadlocked and therefore immune to the Sonic Screwdriver in the previous episode).

Who honestly thought this was a good idea.

    Yes, the Daleks are now candy-coated rainbow monstrosities who make bombs that can be diffused by love; the Cybermen will explode if exposed to crying babies/'the power of love' and the Master is a singing, dancing, anime inspired laser shooting skeleton whose only character motivation is simply that he's just crazy.

You know that scene in 'the Parting of the Ways' with the phalanxes of Daleks
pouring out of their saucers? I want to see that scene with these terrible redesigns.
Suddenly the Dalek ships will start vomiting rainbows.

      Couple this with the Doctor surviving getting shot to death and subsequently being ERASED FROM EXISTENCE and you have a load of inexplicably incompetent villains trying to fight an immortal god. Superman has more chance of being killed by an ordinary baby than the Doctor has of being permanently damaged fighting an entire universe of hostile aliens.
    Well what about the Weeping Angels? Yeah, they'd probably be pretty scary if their primary attack wasn't to safely transport people back in time to happily live out the rest of their lives in peace. Sure they start snapping necks later on, but they're immediately ruined by the demonstration that they'll automatically lock up if they think someone might be looking at them, combined with the fact that they are really bad judges of this, and that their extremely convenient paranoia seems to be completely involuntary. They're like some kind of joke species straight out of 'Hitchhiker's Guide' now, except they're expected to be taken 100% seriously. These unfortunate, laughable characteristics  coupled with a bunch of stupidly overpowered new abilities (that they should have abused liberally in 'Blink') dulls the concept considerably.


1. The Doctor is a Hypocritical, Genocidal Psychopath
  The Doctor has always avoided violence, but understood that it was sometimes an unfortunate necessity. When the peaceful alternatives ran out and negotiations failed, the Doctor would stand up and directly fight back, often all by himself.

 What was that about 'a man who never would'?

    The new Doctors, on the other hand, are permanently glued to a high horse upon which they chastise scared, relatively defenseless people for using weapons to protect themselves against clearly hostile life forms. This would be almost tolerable, except for the fact that the Doctor is now a bloodthirsty, genocidal maniac.
    For instance, the Doctor runs into some Scaroth rip-offs who are advancing human technology through subliminal suggestion. Unlike Scaroth, they aren't interested in obtaining the power of time travel and wiping out an entire planet's worth of species. No. They just want space suits. Because "they look cool." What monsters.

Hey Doctor, way to look compassionate and not at all like a
crazed killer eagerly anticipating the impending bloodshed.

     Of course, the Doctor isn't having any of this. In between flirting with his new girlfriend and bragging about how many of them she can kill, he tells them to get the fuck off the planet or else. However, realizing how merciful he's being, he immediately retracts the offer, saying "Okay you got me. I'm lying. I'm not really going to let you go that easily, it's not Christmas." Wait, what the fuck?
     He then informs them that he's already subliminally reprogrammed practically every human to murder their race on sight, for 'a thousand generations'. That's right, not content with a millennium of unwavering genocide, he also forces billions upon billions of people to become unreasoning murderers. I am hard pressed to think of anything any of the villains have done in this entire franchise that even comes close to how vile and horrible this is.

This is definitely the face I'd be making if I had just condemned two entire races to a future of
senseless unyeilding bloodshed, got bored with how long it was taking them to start dying,
and decided to just start murdering them with a screwdriver for shits and giggles.

      To be fair, they electrocuted some random woman in a bathroom and are planning to kill the Doctor. But he doesn't know about either of these things at this point. And honestly, who can blame them for wanting him dead?
(Edit from the future: Sure enough, the aliens that pissed the Doctor off turned out to just be a tiny sect of a religion that exists within their species. The rest of them are actually pretty decent people. Good fucking job, you goddamn monster.)

     Whoever this guy is, he clearly murdered the Doctor, stole his TARDIS, and is masquerading around as him in order to score with Earth women.

   

In Closing
    Since 2005, what we've been watching isn't 'Doctor Who'. It's a self-aggrandizing, fan-produced soap opera inspired by Doctor Who. The continuity is a disaster, returning characters are twisted parodies of their former selves, and the Twilight-inspired romance mechanics are sickening (codependent, ancient non-human falls in love with unremarkable Mary Sues). Yet the drama takes itself super seriously, which completely ruins any "so bad it's good" entertainment value it might have had.

'Doctor Who' ended in 1989, and with good reason. Everything since has been done purely for money or to fulfill basement-dwelling fanboys' wet dreams, and should be disregarded accordingly.

    A little personal background/disclaimer to dissuade inevitable strawmen arguments that I've heard several times: I started watching 'Doctor Who' only a year before the new series was announced. I was ecstatic about having brand new, high budget 'Doctor Who' on television, and so I willfully blinded myself and set about enjoying the first three seasons without question. I tried to like it very, very hard and nearly succeeded, if only it hadn't been for the ever-declining quality of the program.
This blog isn't the product of some old, miserable wreck of a fan viewing the show through rose-tinted glasses (despite sounding like one). And before you call me a hipster, you're the ones defending a show featuring a swooshy-haired, smug asshole dressed in tight-fitting thrift store clothing who drives a time machine fitted with a typewriter, phonograph, and thrusting anal beads in the central column.