110 - Worldbuilding

 The news. or rumour, of some kind of Harry Potter spin off TV show has got me to thinking again... if there can be a whole load of HP spin offs, a host of Star Wars spin off TV shows, mountains of Marvel TV shows and films, and a rapidly growing number of Star Trek series... why isn't Doctor Who doing the same...?

This was something that had actually started when Russell T Davies (him again!) was in charge of the show, with the two spin offs Torchwood, and The Sarah Jane Adventures, which all ran for a few series. The only other spin off, which aired much later, Class fared rather less well, only lasting a single season. 

So, why did the spin offs falter? Where are the new ones? Where are the limited run series?

I mean, seriously, who (at least prior to the Day of the Doctor storyline nixing it continuity wise) wouldn't have loved a ten part Paul McGann starring Time War TV show? (Or possibly even longer?)

Looking at the most recent, run, how about a spin off with Jo Martin's pre Hartnell Doctor? Or maybe something else with this whole seam of continuity opened up by the Timeless Child revelations? I know the reaction to this was, shall we say, mixed, but if something decent could be done with it... it could redeem it. 

Heck, how about more Torchwood? Or if that couldn't happen, a new Captain Jack series? Heck, there's still Jack's missing years of memory that's never been filled... 

(The BBC tried to do a thing recently called "Time Lord Victorious", with stories in pretty much every medium... except the TV show. The impression I had was that it was rather a mess, in that there were suggestions you could just dip in and watch/listen to/read whatever you wanted and you'd still get the jist of the thing, which made no sense. It was just confusing. The little of it I read I didn't get any real notion of what it was all about. So much for just being able to dip in... put me off the whole thing.)

It would be a fairly easy thing to set up spin offs in the main show; I mean, there are all sorts of stories where once the Doctor leaves a planet/space station/esatate on Earth and you wonder what happened to the character next. That in itself could be a spin off... an anthology called "What next...?" where we see what happened after the Doctor left, and whether things did all go well for the characters. It wouldn't work for many stories, but there's enough it would. 

The most obvious potential "What next...?" would be what happened next to the meta-crisis Doctor and Rose trapped in that parallel universe? They'd be without any kind of Tardis, and thus no time travel, but there's a whole world there to deal with. 

Personally, I'd love a Romana and K9 spin off... but I suspect that could never happen. 

But there is so much potential there. So much possibility, and it's all being wasted.