Has Doctor Who fallen in quality in Season 11? Were other Doctors better?

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Photo credit: “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” Doctor Who. Acquired from BBC.CO.UK /

To put it mildly, Doctor Who Season 11 has received a mixed reception from fans. But has the show actually gotten worse?

Although this season of Doctor Who has garnered the show its best reviews in years, fans haven’t received it as warmly. This season’s current Rotten Tomatoes rating stands at 95% among critics and an abysmal 43% among users. While that one metric can’t accurately represent the show’s entire global fan base, that fact reviews among viewers are so much worse than in Season 10 is notable. As are the high-profile laments by long-term Whovians that Season 11 has caused them to abandon the show.

It should also be noted that while some fans of the show believe the Jodie Whittaker-era Doctor Who is worse than previous seasons, its ratings have improved considerably. After debuting with 8.2 million watchers in the United Kingdom, the series is consistently drawn an average of 6.45 million viewers.

The first eight episodes of the Peter Capaldi-led Season 10 averaged 5.67 million viewers in the UK. The program’s US ratings have similarly increased, rising by nearly 40 percent year-to-year.

So, with critics singing its praises and viewership increasing, why isn’t the current season of Doctor Who resonating with some viewers like it used to? I think it comes down to four key factors.

The Doctor isn’t the show’s driving force anymore

In addition to being played by a woman, the biggest difference in the Thirteenth Doctor and her immediate predecessors is that she isn’t the show’s driving force. As there appears to be no central arc to the season, the Doctor isn’t working to unravel a great mystery or match wits with a hidden enemy. Instead, she’s just kind of bouncing around time and space with her friends at random. And as noted in “The Witchfinders,” the current TARDIS team has a pretty flat organizational structure.

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The Doctor still usually comes up with the plans that resolve that week’s action, but she doesn’t direct her companions and that week’s costars like Doctors past. Her leadership style is much more collaborative in nature, which has the effect of making her a good leader but a less than dynamic main character.

As Doctors’ past have largely fixed problems with big speeches and elaborate secret plans, Thirteen’s laid-back style is jarringly different.

To be fair, I don’t think this is a flaw. The Doctor has always tried solved problems without brute force and aggression, so a pivot to seeking collaborative solutions feels like an evolution of the character’s core traits. The problem is this iteration of Doctor Who doesn’t make the Doctor’s influence on events as clear as it should. And as a result, this can make the new Doctor come off as too passive. Hopefully, this will be an issue that showrunner Chris Chibnall irons out as his tenure continues.

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