Since Doctor Who’s return in 2005 with Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor, the series finale has been a major part of the show. With trying to fit into the 2005 landscape of television it made a lot of sense to take inspiration from other TV of the time and mould the show based on it. However, with almost 20 years since the show's revival, I think the approach to finales and story arcs has become outdated and exhausted, evidenced by the vast number of lacklustre and disappointing finales in recent years and the show is in need of a shakeup.
Series arcs were always going to be a challenge to make work within a vast series like Doctor Who with its limitless format. It takes place across all of time and space with very different villains and hops genres regularly. Therefore, the show's ability to pull off a consistent and well-developed story arc is prone to have mixed results as it's not tied down to one location by nature. It's reliant on bringing aspects of different stories together. The series finales of Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant centre things around a challenging returning villain, someone who pushes the characters and puts them through turmoil and prioritises high emotion. The finales act as a wrap-up of character and story arcs with things being concisely woven together. The story arcs exist as setups and pieces of foreshadowing, little Easter eggs sprinkled into the world-building of the series to culminate and come to mean something. It simply helps the world of Doctor Who and the series as a whole feel more tied together and it in theory elevates the finale, gives it an importance and helps the emotional catharsis to feel more satisfying and emotional with the Easter eggs that have been sprinkled.
The Bad Wolf arc that was set in motion in Series 1 is still arguably the best arc because it’s the simplest. The series doesn’t become bogged down by complicated arcs and questions, it’s a simple ingredient running throughout. It’s a word and a phrase that acts as a clever Easter egg that then gets paid off emotionally as a way to reward viewers who have been invested in the series. The brilliance of Bad Wolf is that it is so abstract and concept driven that it could have been resolved in a million different ways. It's wonderfully vaguely defined in a way that allowed Russell T Davies to resolve it creatively without boundaries, and still be able to tie it into world-building on a grand scale. Series finales since have had real trouble living up to Series 1. The themes, character arcs and story conclusions are so neatly tied together, and it feels so concise and isolated in a way which is masterfully done and difficult to match. It brings together blockbuster threat, emotion and arcs in a way which is extraordinary.
The rest of the Russell T Davies era had a very similar format in terms of arcs and finales, and as a showrunner he became very skilled at weaving things together and masterfully elevating the final story through world-building and character development. There was a need to elevate stakes gradually and build on the previous series finale with every subsequent series, and the approach to the story arc would have to become more sophisticated and layered.
Following Bad Wolf, the story arcs became less vague and had to be more concrete and developed throughout the series. However, I think the skill of the original Russell T Davies era is the subtlety of the arcs. The words and phrases of arcs like Torchwood and Vote Saxon act as integrated pieces of world-building that add intrigue and excitement; they are little teases that get effectively paid off in the finale. There is more story development from these arcs across the series, but this largely exists for the purpose of building excitement, creating powerful foreshadowing and setting up the building blocks for the finale. The strength of the Russell T Davies era is that the value of it is in the individual adventures. All the setups and story components of the arcs are only in service of creating a stronger final story. They don’t take over the whole series; they are simply small teases designed to develop things for a finale storyline which strengthens the finale and gives it foundations to evolve and develop.
Series 1-4 doesn’t just revolve around its arcs and its mysteries and the hype they create for the sake of it. The arcs exist for the purpose of setting up the final story and resolving the emotional themes and the drama of the story. It has to deliver on the characters and the menace of the returning villain to achieve its value. It has other priorities and purposes and the arcs function around that which, in my mind, is the way it should be. There is more to the finales than just the arcs and the mysteries, it’s the stories themselves and the journeys of the stories which makes the finales successful. Its power is in the heightened emotional conclusions and simplicity in structure. I enjoy the finales of the Eccleston and Tennant years because they feel satisfying and deliberately crafted for a purpose.
The concept of the Matt Smith era is that the whole era is centred around and leading up to the Eleventh Doctor’s demise. It's very grand and promising in concept, but in order to make this work you need very intricate and well plotted writing. The arcs and story need to have well plotted reason, be something that unfolds naturally and reward viewers for their investment and interest. This is where the Matt Smith era fails. As things go on, it falters in its lack of planning with arcs and threads that are abandoned, barely explained and come to mean nothing and you get more soulless mysteries for the sake of it and the era and mystery comes to feel very shallow.
The truth is, though, that the era did start out very promising. Series 5 is the best out of Matt Smith’s three series and is a pretty sound success and is very satisfying. I think the Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang finale is very underrated. You can tell that Steven Moffat was aware of the burden that lay upon him and wanted to make the finale to his first series as good as it possibly could be. The shift in Series 5 is that whilst you still have a recurring element running through all the episodes with the crack in time, it functions as more of a mystery box rather than just a piece of foreshadowing. You get more information and learn more about the crack in time as the series goes on and feel the consequences of the crack as the mystery evolves. Its mystery is a core part of the makeup, but it's well designed and incredibly executed. Its success and cleverness is in its intracity.
The unfortunate truth is that the lack of plotting overall would end up plaguing Steven Moffat later on. Putting so much attention on the investment in the mysteries and story arcs means that he didn’t have many other elements to fall back on as a writer. Series 6 functioned as a large-scale mystery and conspiracy surrounding the Doctor’s death and the identity of River Song. River Song as a character was ruined and turned into an obsessive love interest and the reveal of how the Doctor got out of his death ruined and undercut the drama and the themes of the entirety of Series 6. Everything was leading towards a reveal moment and the twist ruined what Series 6 was hinging on which means it feels like a failed experiment. There are so many plot threads hanging across the era that by the time you get to the Time of the Doctor you have a mess of a story trying to juggle a bunch of jumbled plotlines, and it feels like a checklist of things to wrap up and everything collapses under its own weight.
The approach to mystery boxes starts to really grow tired with the Impossible Girl in Series 7. It’s a mystery you are barely given any information on episode to episode, and yet you are expected to be invested in it. You have the structure of the David Tennant era arcs, but crafted as a deliberate mystery. However, a mystery over one single piece of information by design feels poorly constructed and drawn out. It's tiresome and feels like a vehicle for internet fan theories. It feels too blatant and a poor form of storytelling. The Missy arc felt randomly stapled onto episodes in a way which was not integrated well and broke the flow and feel of the stories themselves. The mysteries of who Missy is and what heaven is are badly executed on the whole. There is no puzzle box to uncover, and it feels like fan theories are prioritised over the drama of the overall series, even when the revelation of Missy is so obvious.
For me, it’s the Hybrid arc which is the very worst of the modern series. It's so laughably idiotic and sinks to such low levels considering how things started with Bad Wolf that this should have been an indication to abandon this kind of series arc. The idea of the Hybrid is first introduced in the Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar and is clearly a very dumb idea. The concept of a warrior hybrid of Dalek and Time Lord feels idiotic with no real narrative pull. There is a lot of buildup across Series 9 and mystery about what the Hybrid is based on no information. The foundations and building blocks feel dumb and illogical. The approach to the Hybrid across the series is very strange with it being randomly tossed into conversations in a way that feels like a parody. Steven Moffat seemed to realise the silliness of the idea so turned the Hybrid into the Doctor in order to at least do something shocking. It’s still treated as a mystery across Hell Bent though and in the end it all comes down to the Doctor and Ashildr randomly tossing theories around until they land on one they like. It’s a storyline in Doctor Who that is absurd and has been rightly forgotten.
There was a brief period where it seemed like Doctor Who was going to move away from this style of mystery. The Series 10 arc involving the Vault is one of my favourite story arcs in all of Doctor Who. Whilst there is a mystery of who is in the Vault, they only bother teasing you across half of the series before getting into the meat and drama. Besides, the mystery had layers in inviting more questions about the Doctor’s history and encounters and how he got involved in this in a way that made him and the drama of the series captivating.
Once you get into the second half of the series and past the revelation that Missy is the one hidden inside the Vault, you get into much more interesting territory. You have a storyline that feels fresh and unexplored for the Master in a way that managed to salvage Missy’s character. I love the conflict that is shown for Missy between her good and bad nature, the regret and shame she feels for the evil and murder of the past, and the chaos and death she caused. You’ve got an arc that is more based in character and emotional development than for a functional arc. It benefits the series finale hugely as things aren’t bogged down by answering questions. John Simm’s Master functions as a tremendous conflict for Missy between the temptation of her past and the good inside her which the Doctor knows she is capable of. The Series 10 finale is excellent because it puts the Doctor, Bill and Missy through real suffering and hardship, and sees them shaped and changed because of it. Its brilliance is in its emotional endpoint and moralistic stance. It cleanly and concisely emotionally brings all the characters and emotional arcs to a conclusion in a way that feels both satisfying and perfect. The finale is satisfying by simply following through on the emotions and themes that were developing. It's rewarding as everything is centred on a good story and a satisfying ending and there is a lot to learn from that.
Series 11 then seemed to continue this with an arc based around Graham and Ryan’s relationship, the grief and aftermath of Grace’s death and the conflict with Tim Shaw coming to a head in the Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos. It’s a series that works in concept but with a questionable and weak execution with a hypocritical and questionable moralistic message. It should have all the strengths of the Series 10 finale, but it's built on weak foundations and falters as a result. I don’t think this should have been a reason to shove a new style of a finale aside, though, as the problem with the Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos was in the execution. The mistake Chris Chibnall made in Series 12 was that he just reverted back to the same tropes and the same mystery boxes, which had regressive and tiresome results. The teases of the Timeless Child especially mostly amount to elaborate Easter eggs, little moments created to excite the audience that have lost their effectiveness and are too far gone from the subtlety, world-building and weaving that made them successful in the first place and it all hinges on a reveal moment.
Flux should be a change of pace as it's one long serial story, but it's still focused on questions and mysteries and unwisely left all the tying up and resolving of things until quite late in the series. It becomes obvious that everything is built upon hollow ground and the whole story collapses entirely as a result with things that make no sense, feel underwhelming or that are left lingering.
Season 1 and the Disney+ relaunch gave the show the chance to branch out and try a new storytelling approach and revive the series finale. It became clear early on that the mystery boxes were going to be a core part of the series with Mrs Flood, the mystery of Ruby’s mother and Susan Twist’s appearances. However, with the return of Russell T Davies, the man who cultivated this kind of storytelling within the show, there is a lot more skill and success to be admired in the way the arcs are executed and handled. There is more subtle integration in the Easter eggs with things that get planted and woven into the narrative and world-building and then tie together and pay off in a satisfying and rewarding manner. The mystery boxes are used to heighten the final story in the same way that was the design during the first run of Russell T Davies. The flaw in this method is shown in Empire of Death.
This style of storytelling works efficiently when the end result is satisfying, and you get a delivery of a solid villain and storyline. Things are usually centred around villains during Russell T Davies finales, but Sutekh was a major disappointment and a damp squib. He was a generic antagonist that didn’t live up to his earlier appearance decades before. When the end result doesn’t live up to expectations, the ingredients from it feel like they are worth less and not as effective. Arcs usually need to feel like they serve a purpose to have an impact on an overall story. In a great story, everything feels defined and deliberate, serving the purpose of the themes. Here, everything works in isolation, but things start to fall apart when you consider the grander perspective. The ingredients are meshed together and there is a lack of overall cohesion.
This is personified by how Sutekh’s plotline fits in with Ruby’s search for her birth mother. Sutekh being obsessed with the identity of Ruby’s birth mother makes no sense for his character and creates a letdown of a return. He is a villain forced to fit into a storyline which he doesn’t really meaningfully have a place in. The revelation of Ruby’s mother is handled with enough emotion and supernatural logic in order to work, but I’m not gonna say it isn’t contrived. This is the result of arcs becoming more and more complicated over the years and shows the shortcomings of the internet age of storytelling, where creators are trying too hard to out-think the audience. The problem with this is that it centres things so heavily around a mystery and plot point that they are more likely to fall apart and more difficult to resolve due to the unnecessary layers.
Right now, mystery boxes aren’t going anywhere as we still have the mystery of Mrs Flood to resolve and we’ll see how that unfolds and if it works or not, but I’d like to see another approach to finales from either Russell T Davies or a future showrunner at some point. Doctor Who finales have a weak track record, and I think it's time to fix that. They suffer from the fact that everything comes down to revelations and mysteries. I’d argue that this stifles creative freedom as creators write themselves into a corner. The success of a series is, as a result, a lot more dependent on the revelation and finale as the overall series has been leading up to it. This is a reason I prefer the classic series as it feels less hindered by its arcs and something with more wriggle room would be a good idea.
There are two new methods I can think of. The first is to do a quest style of story across the universe, much like the Key to Time. There is already some foundation for this, and it would allow for various connectivity and build up whilst allowing individual stories to shine with things not as heavily dependent on the finale. The pressure on it would be more based on delivering a solid story and a conclusion rather than having the precise pressure involving fan theories and revelations. A format similar to the first two series of the Mandalorian could work well. My preferred method would be one similar to Series 10. Focus the arcs on the character development within the Tardis where you see specific character changes and evolution week to week. The show already does this to some extent, but focusing the arcs purely around this feels a lot looser and more satisfying. The use of a recurring villain like with Missy would be a solid way to do this and make the finale mean something. If mysteries are going to be integrated, it should be secrets revolving around the Doctor or other major characters which can be dealt with in the relationships and character drama of the show rather than constant teasing. It would be very refreshing to get something that feels new and exciting in terms of finales.
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