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With Doctor Who launching its own Marvel-style Whoniverse, it MUST avoid some of the biggest mistakes the MCU has made.
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00:00Hello everybody, Ellie here with Who Culture yet again, and we are another day closer to the Star
00:05Beast, and I'm getting very excited. We are being spoiled by all the Doctor Who content that's
00:11coming our way at the moment. Very exciting times. Having said that, what I want to discuss today
00:16is us hoping that things aren't going to take a nosedive. And what I mean by that is, you know,
00:22obviously this, the new Who-niverse has now been confirmed, and we have this kind of wider
00:28franchise acknowledgement. But what we would like to discuss is the mistakes and the pitfalls of
00:33other such franchises that we hope that the BBC are going to avoid making, or would encourage them
00:40to avoid making, with regards to the Doctor Who franchise. Now I probably should say before we
00:46get too far into this, I mean, are we getting ahead of ourselves by making this comparison between the
00:51Who-niverse and the MCU? On the one hand, yes, absolutely. I mean, the MCU, I mean, it started
00:57in 2008, their movies make hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars, and they've already
01:03released a gazillion TV shows in quite a short period of time. But on the other hand, no we're
01:09not, because Russell T. Davis himself has literally cited the MCU as part of his inspiration with the
01:17Doctor Who franchise. I mean, just eight months before he was announced and confirmed to be
01:22returning as showrunner, this is what he said.
01:24There should be a Doctor Who channel now. You look at those Disney announcements, all of those
01:28new Star Wars and Marvel shows, you think, we should be sitting here announcing the Nyssa Adventures,
01:33or the Return of Don and Noble, and you should have the 10th and 11th Doctors together in a 10
01:38-part
01:38series. So basically, straight from the horse's mouth, as it were, Russell has said that Disney and
01:45the MCU were the baseline for his inspiration for where he thought Doctor Who should be moving.
01:51I mean, honestly, look, you can't look at the Who-niverse ident that was released and not make
01:55comparisons between that and the one for the MCU. It's very clearly been inspired by that.
02:01Now, for this discussion, I'm going to structure it slightly differently to how I usually would
02:06structure a discussion like this. I'm going to do something that we are quite good at here at
02:11WhoCulture. I'm going to form a list. I'm going to make a list. So let's start with point number
02:16one. Don't stretch RTD too thin. So one of the reasons that the MCU was so successful to begin
02:23with is because Kevin Feige was directly involved in every single one of those projects. I mean,
02:30he is a lifelong fan of Marvel and the comics and things like that. And he even had a hand
02:36in
02:36producing some of those earlier Marvel productions, such as Spider-Man and X-Men and Hulk and things
02:41like that. And so when he came into the MCU, he was already a massive fan of what was going
02:48on and
02:48had a clear idea of where he wanted all these stories to go. But the issue now is that the
02:53MCU
02:53is just pumping out so much content that it's not possible for Kevin Feige to be involved in every
03:00single aspect of it. I mean, we went from three movies being released in 2019 to four movies and
03:07five TV series in 2021. I mean, it's just impossible for one person to be able to oversee all of
03:15those
03:16things to the degree that they would like to in order to make sure that the quality doesn't slip,
03:22which unfortunately, that does seem to be the case with the MCU so far. Please don't do that,
03:29BBC, Doctor Who. Keep it small and simple and allow our great overlord Russell T. Davis to be as
03:38involved with each of these projects as he possibly can so that they come out at the best quality they
03:43can possibly be. Quality over quantity is very much a thing that we need to reiterate here.
03:48Don't make the same mistake that has happened with the MCU. The thing is with Doctor Who in
03:53particular and the MCU is that everything is so connected. And so if you don't have at least one
03:58person who's involved with everything and has a clear vision of how everything is going to connect
04:02and how things are going to merge into the next story, you could end up with a complete and utter
04:07mess. I mean, if you think about, surprise, surprise, the River Song story arc, Stephen Moffat would not
04:13allow the other writers to write for that character so that he had all the control over how that story
04:20developed. And as much as, you know, people like me would get frustrated that River wasn't in it as
04:24much as I would have liked, I very much respect that the direction that that storyline was going
04:31to go was so definitive in Stephen Moffat's mind that he didn't want anyone else to come in and ruin
04:37it. And I feel like that's something we need to consider here. You need the man with the vision
04:42to be involved with everything so that it all fits together well and doesn't become
04:48a jumbled mess that makes no sense. So point number two, less is more. I mean,
04:53we've mentioned this already a little bit, but the MCU just releases so much content now that I don't
04:58know about anybody else, but it's hard to keep up with it all. I personally have given up with the
05:02MCU because there's just so much to keep up with. And because there's so much of it, it doesn't feel
05:09special anymore. I mean, every new film was like a pop culture, significant major moment. Everyone would
05:15go to the cinema. I used to go to cinema and watch them all. You know, I remember going to
05:17the midnight
05:18screening of Infinity War. You know, it was a big deal and there weren't that many of them. So
05:23you'd build up, you'd watch one and then you'd build up to the next one. Whereas now there's so
05:27many coming out that I can't keep up with it. And if you miss one, then you're screwed because
05:32you, you're, they rely on you having watched all of it now for everything to make sense. And some
05:38people like to dip in and out. So ideally what you want to see with Doctor Who is you want
05:42the main,
05:42the main series to come out, you know, let's just say around April time. And then perhaps a spin-off
05:48kind of midway through the year. And then you'll have the script, the Christmas specials and maybe
05:51a few specials dotted here and there. At the most, I would say three different series in a year,
05:57but any more than that. And there's just too much going on. You know, give the audience time to,
06:02to discuss what's happening and speculate about what's going to come. I mean, obviously we have not
06:08made it a secret that we haven't enjoyed these massive gap years. And we know that Russell T.
06:13Davis is abolishing the gap years. So that's great, but don't go too far the other way and bombard us
06:18with content just because you feel the need to make sure that we remain interested. The other thing
06:23with, with less content is you revisit characters quicker. I mean, if you look at the MCU, there are so
06:30many unanswered questions and big cliffhangers that have been left dangling. And you're going to have
06:36to wait probably years to get answers to those, if, if at all. What the hell was Harry Styles doing
06:41at the ending, ending of Eternals? Or, you know, has everyone forgotten about that big celestial
06:45that's just like popped up out the middle of the sea? Shang-Chi, for example, or White Vision.
06:49You know, these characters that popped up and seemed so significant and are significant with regards to
06:54the comics, but we're going to have to wait years to, to find the answers to that. Because in the
06:58meantime, we've got another 10 movies and TV shows to get through that introduce a whole other load of
07:04characters before we even get back to these ones. And then by the time they come back,
07:08you've forgotten their relevance or you've completely forgotten that they even exist.
07:12And you go, oh yeah, that happened. And as I said, one of the biggest issues, I think,
07:16I mean, I don't think this will be the case with Doctor Who. It's very much a series. There's no
07:20movies necessarily involved. But one of the biggest issues with the MCU now is that it spreads so much
07:25across TV shows and movies that it relies on you having watched all of those TV series in order to
07:31understand what's going to happen in the next movie. And not everybody has access to that.
07:35Not everybody has the time to do that. Not everyone is interested enough to watch every
07:38single thing, which I guess kind of, um, I've covered slightly then my next point. Point number three,
07:43connected, but not too connected. As I said, this has been a big issue with the MCU. It used to
07:49be
07:49that if you hadn't seen, if you hadn't read any of the comics, the film still made sense.
07:53If you miss one film, it didn't matter. If you watched the next one, there would be references,
07:58but it wouldn't matter to you if you hadn't seen it. Now, there's so much reliance on you having
08:02seen everything that you miss one tiny thing and it doesn't make sense. I mean, think, for example,
08:07if you hadn't have watched WandaVision, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness would have
08:11made absolutely no sense to you. Why the hell is Wanda all of a sudden evil? Why has she got
08:16kids
08:16all of a sudden? What the hell happened there? No, it never used to be like that. And I think
08:19that's
08:20what I used to love about the MCU is that you could watch things individually or you could watch
08:24everything together and it would make more significant sense, but it didn't matter either
08:28way. And this is what we don't want to see happen with regards to Doctor Who. By all means have
08:33spin-offs, but if you think about the spin-offs that we've had before, Torchwood made sense and stood on
08:38its own. And there were references to the Doctor, but it actually didn't matter if you hadn't seen
08:42Doctor Who at all, because this was a new story, new characters, and it didn't really matter. And
08:48likewise with the Sarah Jane Adventures. If you did know that backstory, then it gave you this extra
08:52level of understanding, but you didn't need it. You know, and for example, and then when they then
08:56crossed over with the main show itself, again, it didn't matter. You didn't watch Captain Jack
09:01running towards the TARDIS and suddenly think, what? You know, they didn't change him in any way.
09:06He doesn't suddenly have like a wooden leg and an eye patch and all these things that had happened to
09:10him in Torchwood that then suddenly when he reappears in Doctor Who, it didn't make sense because you
09:13hadn't seen Torchwood. You know, it just kind of went, oh, here's Torchwood. Here tells you what's
09:18happened to Jack in the meantime, but it actually doesn't matter. And likewise, further on in that
09:23story, he then says to the Doctor, I've rebuilt Torchwood. You don't need to have seen Torchwood
09:28to understand what that means. They're connected, but not too connected. You know, and that's what
09:33we would hope in the future for Doctor Who. You don't want anything to be so connected that if you
09:37miss one thing, you completely don't understand what's going on. And I guess the final point being,
09:42don't skimp on the episode counts and the run times. When the MCU first announced that they were
09:46going to be releasing TV shows, they were advertised to be, you know, movie level blockbuster level TV
09:54shows. We were promised big budgets and massive events and basically to feel like each episode
09:59was like watching a feature film. They have clearly spent a lot of money on these projects. The
10:03storytelling seems to be lacking. You know, a lot of them, they feel very underdeveloped and rushed
10:09to the point where some of them are only coming out at 30, 35 minutes long. I mean, if you're
10:14waiting
10:14weekly to see the next episode and then what you actually end up is a 30 minute episode that
10:19doesn't really develop anything very much and at least five minutes of that is credits,
10:24you're going to feel really disappointed and just like, what did I just, why have I invested my time
10:30in this? Secret Invasion, the total runtime for all of those episodes was three hours and 43 minutes.
10:36She-Hulk was three hours and 53 minutes and Ms. Marvel was three hours and 57 minutes. I mean,
10:43at this point, really, what are you doing? You've basically got a really long film or a really
10:49naff TV series and really what you should be doing, if this is the case, is making some cuts and
10:54creating
10:55a film. And then by comparison, you've got things like House of the Dragon or The Last of Us or
11:01The
11:01Rings of Power, which were all coming out at, you know, between an hour or even an hour and a
11:05half.
11:06Obviously, we're not saying that Doctor Who needs to have 90 minute episodes in order to be
11:10great. But what we are saying is that each episode needs to feel like it's a really strong story and
11:18that every element of it is really vital and important. We don't want any of this six episodes
11:23at 35 minutes and it's just utter nonsense and rubbish. Now, if you're going to have a reduced
11:29number of episodes, then those episodes need to be really, really jam-packed with everything that
11:35makes the episodes so powerful and dramatic. And then following on from that, you know, with
11:40spinoffs, you want them to feel like they've been given just as much love and attention as the main
11:44show itself. You don't want to switch on a spinoff like Torchwood or the Sarah Jane Adventures,
11:49for example, and go, oh, well, there's the cheap version. You know, you want everything to feel like
11:53it's being given just as much attention. If you then compare that to the Doomsday material that we
11:58did have over the last year, it had been criticised for its very low-budget feel, the kind of really
12:03iffy acting. Everything about it just felt like no one was really giving it that much attention.
12:09And that's not what we want to happen with the spinoffs going forward in this new Who-niverse.
12:14Everything needs to be given as much attention as it possibly can in order to feel like it's a major
12:20event. And as I've said many, many times already in this video, the mantra for Doctor Who going forward
12:25should be quality over quantity. If there is any takeaway from this entire discussion,
12:31quality over quantity all the way. Please and thank you, RTD, our one true Doctor Who God.
12:39And that's everything for this discussion, but make sure you check out our latest editorial
12:43about why the Who-niverse might not be available in your country. In the meantime,
12:49I've been Ellie with Who Culture and in the words of Riversong herself, goodbye, sweeties.
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