Doctor Who: Does season 11 need an overall arc?

Doctor Who season 11 is nearly halfway over and there’s still no sign of a larger story arc. (Nor is there likely to be.) Will this help or hurt the show?

We’re over halfway through Doctor Who season 11 and thus far it doesn’t appear as though there’s going to be much in the way of a season-long story arc that unites each individual episode into a larger story.

And that’s okay! The show certainly doesn’t have to do that. It’s perfectly capable of existing as a series of standalone adventures connected by a common cast of characters. Doctor Who survived that way for years! It’s just that’s not quite what we’ve been used to seeing the past few seasons.

In all honesty, nobody should be that surprised about this development. From the very beginning of the season 11 promotion tour, the Doctor Who powers that be have been stressing how different this season would be from its immediate predecessor. During NYCC, we were told this new season would be comprised of standalone episodes, full of new planets and fresh monsters, with few, if any, callbacks to previous seasons.

Showrunner Chris Chibnall just told Digital Spy again back in October that there wouldn’t be a major thread linking all the episodes this season, aside from the growing friendship between Thirteen and the TARDIS team.

"In terms of a story arc, there’s a few little treats in there if you watch every episode, there’s a few little things, but no – mainly it’s standalone. The ‘serial’, if you like, is the growing relationship between the companions."

So why are some — maybe even many? — viewers so surprised that that’s exactly what’s happening?

Well, like so many other things related to modern-day Doctor Who, we can probably blame Steven Moffat.

Now, to be fair, Moffat didn’t train fans to expect a recurring theme each season, the show itself did that. Every season since Doctor Who returned in 2005 has featured some sort of consistently reappearing element, whether it was Bad Wolf or Torchwood or a mysterious crack in the universe. Moffat just took all of that up to eleven during his tenure as showrunner, making nearly every story about some larger mystery.

(It also doesn’t help that Moffat wasn’t always completely truthful about his plans in some of his interviews and public comments regarding the direction of various seasons, which is probably why no one seems to trust Chibnall’s word now. Just saying.)

This is also likely why there are still so many wild fan theories floating around about how season 11’s stories will ultimately tie together. The most popular is the idea that the Stenza — the villainous teeth-wearing baddies from “The Woman Who Fell to Earth” — will end up being some sort of overarching Big Bad after they’re revealed to be behind the destruction of various other alien civilizations.

To be honest, this isn’t a terrible idea, all told. But it also doesn’t feel super necessary, either.

Because, here’s the thing. Doctor Who doesn’t have to be a show with big, sweeping arcs and grand monsters all the time. It can be when it wants to, of course. But it doesn’t need to. There’s value in a simple story about one woman’s quest to better understand her family. An episode that simply puts our characters inside an important moment in history for a closer look. Something that’s simply fun, and not part of a larger mythology.

One of the problems with the Moffat era by the end was that literally everything had to have positively enormous stakes. Every companion was the most important person in the universe for some reason. Each adventure had to carry with it the promise of life and death. So on some level, it’s nice to have a season with smaller, quieter adventures. Not everything has to literally be the end of the world, right?

However, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, the era of Peak TV has slowly evolved into the era of Fan Theory TV. Prestige genre titles like Game of Thrones and Westworld, and even popular dramas like This is Us regularly trade in mystery box-style programming or other tricks designed to get fans talking, speculating and coming back week after week. Should Doctor Who be leaning more into telling that kind of story?

We may have to wait till the end of the season to see how it all shakes out. But it’s something worth discussing, for sure.

Doctor Who season 11 continues next Sunday at 8 p.m. ET on BBC America.