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Moffat will come up with the sickest concepts ever when writing under RTD's showrunning but when he's showrunning himself he creates the power ranger daleks

#doctor who #steven moffat #the empty child #that weird power ranger dalek moment i forgot the episode i think it was the churchil one

Eight: What a pity I can't speak cement. Nine: I'm resonating concrete. Fifteen: I AM LEARNING THE LANGUAGE OF ROPE!

#Doctor Who #Eighth Doctor #8th Doctor #The Chimes of Midnight #That's right. I'm siting my sources.#Ninth Doctor #9th Doctor #The Empty Child #Fifteenth Doctor #15th Doctor #The Church on Ruby Road #I texted this to the bestie and decided to post it too.

One thing that’s become really clear while watching Classic Doctor Who alongside the current era, especially starting with the Fifteenth Doctor, is how well the Ninth through Twelfth Doctor eras nailed the balance of episode length and story structure.

Classic Who usually split its stories into four or five 20 to 25 minute episodes per arc, which roughly equals the runtime of a modern two-parter. But while that format allowed for sprawling narratives, it came with a tradeoff: pacing. Entire episodes sometimes feel like narrative treading water, not because the writing was bad, but because of the constraints of mid-20th century television. (That’s its own fascinating rabbit hole, but we’ll save that for another time.)

To be fair, Classic Who did experiment with its format. Some stories, like The Edge of Destruction, a tight, two-part psychological thriller set entirely inside the TARDIS, used a smaller runtime to great effect. It’s still one of the strongest entries of Season 1, partly because it had no room to meander.

Later, the show dabbled in stories of two 45-minute episodes during Season 22. But those episodes often had the same problem: some stories still didn’t need the extra time. Take The Mark of the Rani, for example. It was padded out to fit that two-part, 45-minute-per-episode format (roughly 90 minutes total), but honestly? It could’ve been a sharper, more effective 40-minute story. There’s a lot of unnecessary fluff that drags the pacing down.

But then you get something like The Keys of Marinus, a six-parter (20 minutes each part) that essentially functions as a sci-fi anthology. Each episode throws the Doctor and co. into a new setting with a self-contained mini-plot. It uses its extended format to experiment and surprise without feeling stale. That’s when the long form works.

Then came the 2005 to 2017 revival era, and to me the show hit its structural gold standard: twelve episodes per season, blending 40-minute standalones with 80-minute two-parters.

Episodes like Blink and Midnight were tight stories that landed precisely because they didn’t overstay their welcome. Try stretching either one to feature length, and the tension would unravel. Meanwhile, two-parters like The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances had room to build atmosphere and layer in character development. They remain fan favorites for a reason: the format gave them the breathing room they needed, and then stopped.

Which brings us to the Fifteenth Doctor’s era.

Right now, we’re back to a one-size-fits-all approach but in the opposite direction: single 40-minute episodes across the season, with only the finale allowed to be a two-parter. And the result? Some stories just aren’t getting the space they need to land.

Doctor Who thrives on structural flexibility. Some stories need 80 minutes to unfold. Others are perfect little 40-minute excursions. Locking every episode into the same runtime is like asking every alien to fit inside a human suit: it works until it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, it’s obvious.

The point is: variety in format has always been one of Doctor Who’s strengths. When the show leans into that, it sings. When it forgets that, you end up with stories that could’ve soared if they were just given a little more space to breathe.

(Also I don’t mean to exclude 13. It’s just that her era experimented with structure so much across her run that it’s kind of its own thing. There’s a whole separate post to be written about what worked and didn’t there.)

(Fun fact for reading this far: The Edge of Destruction was only two 25-minute parts because the production team didn’t know if the show was getting picked up for more episodes. They wrote a short, self-contained story set entirely inside the TARDIS to avoid building new sets. It was meant to be cheap filler, and it ended up being one of the highlights of the First Doctor’s era.)