There has been much discussion of the ending of the BBC television series Doctor Who. Nobody knows what its future will be, even if it has a future. Everybody seems to have some opinion about what went wrong. Since I fit in the category of “everybody” I have an opinion as well.
Disney Didn’t Help
The joint venture of Disney with the BBC for Doctor Who did not help anything. I admit I don’t know any of the backend details, but there did seem to be some Disney-like characteristics. For example, franchises like the Marvel comic universe had their movies build and build into a crescendo until the story grew so big that there wasn’t anywhere to go afterward. Since then, there haven’t been many Marvel movies.
We can feel that in some parts of the later Who series. I don’t know if this was a Disney influence or if it started some time before and Disney encouraged it. But this sort of growth was seen in the Timeless Child
God of the Timelords
Before the Timeless Child story arc, the Doctor was just a particularly clever and well-intentioned member of the Timelord social class on the planet Gallifrey. For story purposes, this made the character a standard trickster who went around defeating enemies by being clever.
With the Timeless Child, that no longer applies. Now, the Gallifreyans are just a scientifically advanced group of normal humanoids and the Doctor is a godling from who-knows-where from whom they stole a power. The Doctor is no longer just the trickster Gallifreyan who ran off to do good in the universe.
Now, with a much more important character, the enemies have to be made larger as well. The stakes have to be far more extreme. They had to have the Doctor’s perennial enemy the Master convert all the Gallifreyans to Cybermen, leaving the Doctor to destroy them. It couldn’t stop there, though.
With the Flux, the threat had to start eating up the entire universe. When your main character becomes a god, the existential threats must be cosmic in nature. There is just no way to go back to the old storylines because you no longer have the old characters.
Even then, this added far more incarnations of the Doctor, such as the Fugitive Doctor and Garda. So many times we’ve seen somebody gather up “all” the versions of the Doctor, such as the Five Doctors special, and completely miss the “bio scan” results for those countless others.
Is There Hope?
As an opinionated fan, I have suggestions that could still fix the show, return to the previous glory, and get things rolling smoothly again. Much of this relies on the absolute deviousness of the Master.
Throughout the old and new series, there were many mentions of the Old Days of Gallifrey with many myths and mysteries. The concept of a Timeless Child who kept regenerating and was subject to unethical experiments at the hands of Tecteun (the supposed finder of the child). It is possible that this child was an anomaly created by proximity to the Time Vortex that shows up in so much Timelord lore. It is also possible that this is the source of the Timelord ability to regenerate. It does not have to be the Doctor.
It would be easy to imagine the Master using the ancient myth to mess with the Doctor to convince the Doctor that they are the Child. Given the Doctor’s mental state so long after the Time War, this is plausible. The Master is the type to get another Doctor, through cloning or kidnapping a future incarnation, and hypnotizing them to think they are an earlier version.
Finding Gallifrey deserted, the Master could populate that world with Cybermen augmented enough to register as Timelords. All of this could then be used to create a situation where the Doctor, who really doesn’t want to be alone any more, must destroy what remains of the Gallifreyans, even if they are modified. The absolute despair of such a choice would be excruciating for the lonely do-gooder.
All it would take would be to run into another Timelord, one from Gallifrey, who tells the Doctor how they abandoned their world due to some threat and were seeking another. They weren’t on Gallifrey when the Master did the Cyber conversion. They are all fine and out in the universe.
This would put the Doctor on a new path, as their original self, to help the Timelords, defeat the Master and those who helped, and still spend time meandering around getting into trouble.
Still Special
If you want the Doctor to still be special, that’s easy too. Back in the Key to Time series of the Tom Baker days, the lore established the existence of the Black Guardian and the White Guardian. The Doctor defeated the Black Guardian and was pursued for a while until another defeat.
It would be easy to extrapolate that the White Guardian has been guiding or otherwise interfering with the Doctor to do good things in the universe. This still lets you think of the Doctor as a “chosen one” without needing them to be an actual god in the story.