Do you have your own autopsy on why RTD2 failed and why Doctor Who is being ācancelledā?
i mean the most obvious fact is like. the bbc/bad wolf fucked up the contract imo, what seems to have really killed s3 as planned (by forcing gatwa to quit) was the extremely long period of limbo during which the disney deal was up in the air. the writing on the wall made it so so obvious it wasn't going to keep going but they (presumably) had to wait on disney to confirm that to actually go ahead knowing that wasn't happening. i'm not an entertainment industry lawyer but surely there had to have been a way to make that agreement to avoid that situation
then i think the next biggest catastrophe was space babies. space babies is what i would make the first episode of my alleged 'soft reboot' if i was an ITV double agent trying to crater the show. as offputting as space babies was to adult fans, i simply have to imagine it was lethal to the presumable intended 12-16 target age demo. worst foot forward possible, i wouldn't be surprised if it poisoned the well on many of the potential new fans disney was hoping for
the writing was also pretty atrocious, it genuinely felt like so many of the scripts were first drafts. russel t davies has never been known for the tightness of his plotting but so many of the season 14-15 scripts were totally incoherent, and not in the purposeful, surreal, nightmare-logic way 73 yards was.
i feel very strongly that the 8-episode prestige streaming tv format also completely breaks doctor who, especially when rtd kept trying to write it as though it still had 13 episodes a season. a dud finale was bad enough before, but a dud two-part finale in this format (which both were) meant a quarter of the season down the drain. doctor who needs to be episodic, the premise inherently lends itself to episodic standalone wildly different adventures, and the more compressed your season is the less time you have to actually do that if you insist on also having a big Epic Lore Mythos Arc.
something also very obviously happened behind the scenes--i doubt there's juicy gossip there, it was likely just a health scare or family emergency or something--that led to a very late-stage change from two seasons of ruby to introducing belinda, late enough that the script essentially writes belinda as ruby in the finale. this cannot have been good for the aforementioned writing problems or dud finales
and finally i feel like there was a huge case of counting chickens before they hatch, so much screentime of the show was wasted on backdoor piloting the war between the land and sea, which itself also ate up five episodes worth of budget and streaming agreement that could have been used on something that wasn't atrocious dogshit. davies wanted to try and produce another torchwood apparently without realizing that torchwood and the sarah jane adventures both came off the back of two critically acclaimed and beloved seasons of television starring (in torchwood's case) a charismatic breakout character and (in sja's case) a beloved legacy character. Kate Stewart is just not jack harkness or sarah jane smith. the whole "whoniverse" vision, if grossly cynical, was at least coherent to aim for commercially, but the actual execution of it was idiotic.
so tldr i think rtd just fucked it honestly, every fairly promising idea about how to make this show work was either not followed through on or executed horribly
