“Certainly I - I mean we - are hard to get rid of.”
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I was there in the wilderness years and it sucked not having Doctor Who on TV and never knowing if it would ever come back. There was the occasional bone thrown our way in books, related audios or internet animations, but it was generally thought that the show would never come back for most of that time, and that was a bad thing.
So, no, I don’t want another wilderness period.
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I’m a Wilderness Years kid as well - being born when I was meant that almost the entire show was past tense for me (I started watching in 1989, great timing) so being too young to fully engage with it in any other way but my own meant I didn’t really have an inkling of a hiatus going on too long, nor did I keep up to date with what whisperings were whispered.
So I just thought it was a show that was never coming back. And it wasn’t a nice feeling. So I don’t want it to go away again but I do think it’s on the cards at some point, but I firmly don’t believe it would be another 16 years before it came back again.
As has been said, it’s sort of a juggernaut of British pop culture and I think RTD’s revival in 2005 made sure that you genuinely can’t keep it down. I think, though, that a little time off can be a good thing in generating anticipation. While @deltaandthebannermen is right that sometimes it can come from a petulant standpoint, when I say that it isn’t that I think it should go away and think about what it’s done, it’s more that look at something like Squid Game. People waited 3 years for season 2 and the hype was fairly intense.
I’m not saying there should be that long a wait all the time, but I’m just using it as an example that it could occasionally be a decent marketing gambit. Even leaning into the whole idea that you can’t keep the Doctor down would make a return for Series 3 after say 15-18 months feel almost triumphant.
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Maybe instead of having Doctor Who cancelled, and having no Doctor Who, we could have the Doctor bi-regenerate again, into two new Doctors this time, and then have two Doctor Who shows going on at the same time, with crossover between them?
I feel like we don’t get enough Doctor Who these days, and I could cope better with 8 episode seasons if there were two 8 episode seasons going on at the same time…
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I’m still saying give Jo Martin her own show 
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I want an 8th doctor mini-series!
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Well, yes, I want a Doctor Who: Origins type Jo Marin show, too.
And I’d be agreeable to a 8th Doctor mini-series.
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With the two Doctor series, I’m figuring we could do occasional multi-Doctor episodes with them, but also have them landing in the same places different times, coping with the aftermath of what the other one did, and maybe even times where they are on opposite sides of a conflict without realising it.
(And eventually you’d probably merge them back together…)
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I just want a ‘full season’ of the main show 
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You must’ve missed Season 1 then! It’s available on the iPlayer, I’m sure you can find it!
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Eh, it’s missing Unearthly Child, and all the visuals for Marco Polo and parts of The Reign of Terror are missing. Hardly a full season…
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I wish I had lol. I mean episode count.
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Which I suppose posits the question - what constitutes a full season?
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I would call a season with 10+ episodes a full season. But it looks like that is a thing from the past…
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RTD1 era season length.
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Well, as a baseline, this was one season:
Unearthly Child (4 episodes)
The Daleks (7 episodes)
The Edge of Destruction (2 episodes)
Marco Polo (7 episodes)
The Keys of Marinus (6 episodes)
The Aztecs (4 episodes)
The Sensorites (6 episodes)
The Reign of Terror (6 episodes)
So, 42 episodes?
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And that’s kind of my point. Doctor Who has never had consistent season lengths and from what we can tell of the modern series, the 13 episode plus Christmas special tended to take a huge toll on the production team and regular cast.
As much as it would be wonderful, it doesn’t seem likely it will happen.
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My points exactly. That’s just how it is. It’s not feasible to have longer seasons with the way production is these days, even if most of us would wish for that to happen. As pointed out above, Season 1 in 1963-1964 had 42 episodes, yet no one complained about the seasons being too short during the RTD and early Moffat years when we only had 13 episods. Why? Because that was the new norm. And this is the new norm now, so we should just accept it since there is nothing we can do about it.
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I dont think we should accept this since it is hurting the show. The main problem with the last season is that it is too short. That hurts character development and makes the other problems more obvious. The season finally last season was about as good/bad as season finalises usually are but since that was 25% of the season instead of 15% that makes it seem that it was worse.
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Then the writing has to change to reflect the shorter season length. Maybe do something like Flux, a single plot over multiple episodes. 8 episodes can’t really accomodate the ‘adventure of the week’ format, Doctor lite episodes, Doctor+companion character moments etc.
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