Talking to a friend about this helped me to clarify my main problem with the current era of Doctor Who.
Imagine if you made a whole Doctor Who season out of: The Impossible Planet/Satan Pit, Blink, Human Nature/Family of Blood, Midnight, and Turn Left, before heading into your finale.
Those are all great episodes. They're all regularly cited as highlights of David Tennant's run on Doctor Who. I can sing the praises of each at length and will do so on demand. You compare them to the other episodes that make up their respective seasons and they're clear standouts amongst the alien runarounds and celebrity historicals.
But you can't make a season out of them. Because if you do, you lose the characterization of Ten as the Doctor. These are all episodes that stand out because they're exceptions to the way that Doctor Who usually goes. They either put the Doctor in unusual situations where his 'being the smartest guy around' strategy doesn't work, or they hardly feature the Doctor at all and build their tension through his absence. And in each case, they work so well because they're subverting expectations the season has already built up. And though the past two seasons have featured some really great episodes, they are all banking on expectations the seasons themselves have not engendered.
Let me put it this way: if I put the list of Series 4 Doctor Who episodes in front of 1000 people and asked them to choose a favourite, I don't think anyone would pick the Sontaran two-parter from the middle of the season. It's as generic a Unit-Monster runaround as you're likely to find. But that was my first Doctor Who episode, and it hooked me immediately. I got it completely, and it's never let me go since. But if that first episode had been Midnight? I'm not sure. Midnight is a much better episode by every conceivable measure, but so much of its power comes from the fact that it puts the Doctor in a vulnerable situation that you are not used to seeing him in. It's cashing in the cheque that the 'normal episodes' have written. 73 Yards is also a great episode, but I don't think you could hook a new viewer by showing them 73 Yards.
And that's what 15 is lacking. Normal Episodes. In the crunch of the too-short 8-episode seasons, RTD has clearly prioritized the Weird Ones. And there have been some great Weird Ones! But without the Normal Ones, the Weird Ones lose their punch. Ncuti's never had the chance to do a proper Celebrity Historical (the Beatles don't count they were barely in it) or a Base Under Siege or any of the bread-and-butter sci-fi plots that make the experimental fantasy ones pop. And that leaves 15 as a Doctor undercharacterized, because we only ever see him outside of his natural narrative habitat. That's the tiny germ of truth in the (otherwise kind of silly) complaint about 15 crying in every episode - that every episode is one that pushes the Doctor way out of his usual role. And it's not like Ncuti can't pull it off - he clearly can - but I also need to see him in that usual role. And it just isn't happening.
