While I remain perfectly happy to stay well away from any hot takes around the current state of Doctor Who - still the best television show in the history of the medium - some of it is unavoidable, and I did recently see someone advocating for a full reboot of the Who.
This is, obviously, a terrible bloody idea.
Beyond the sheer appeal of a vast sprawling narrative where everything is as canon as you want it to be, I couldn't imagine anything more boring than endless reiterations of things we've already seen before. There would obviously be all sorts of new ideas, themes and monsters, but also reintroductions of things we already know about.
This would, crucially, put the audience ahead of the good Doctor, which is not the order of the universe. And you'd lose so much story time to the Doctor getting his head around things instead of barreling forward. We don't need the Doctor to learn the Daleks are bad, actually, and no amount of of ironic subversion of tropes is going to gloss over the fact that we've seen it all before
And there is no way it could last, because any bold new direction will be inevitably retconned back into the narrative that has been running for more than 60 years now. Nobody would be able to resist bringing back David Tennant for the next big anniversary (and Tennant would never say no). And it'll be all one big story again, all adventures in time and space.
And ultimately, there is just no need for a full reboot of Doctor Who, because the kind of thrill you get from starting over again is already baked in to the concept. That's what happens every time you change out the lead actor, and it always feels new and refreshed, every few years.
The little chatter that has broken through my self-imposed media fog suggest that there are a lot of people concerned about the direction of Doctor Who, and they all have ideas on how to keep it going. But going back to the start again is boring and unnecessary, and those are two things lethal to all things Who.
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