Doctor Who star Peter Purves played Steven Taylor, the companion of William Hartnell's First Doctor, for almost 50 episodes between 1965 and 1966, during the first run of the very, very long-running sci-fi series. As someone who's been there from the start, there aren't many people who know more about the show's evolution as the decades have passed.
The 'Whoniverse' has undergone some of the biggest changes in its esteemed history over the past few years. With the arrival of Ncuti Gatwa's Fifteenth Doctor, the show saw an investment from Disney, meaning new episodes air on Disney+ as well as on the BBC. With backing from the House of Mouse, the show now has a significantly larger budget, allowing for more extravogent stories than the BBC could never accommodate. These changes have yielded mixed results. The new seasons have been very hit and miss.
Purves recently weighed in on the newest season airing right now, admitting that some storylines are "far too sophisticated for [his] simple brain".
"We used to have stories that were very simple," Purves told BBC News. "You went from there to there, had a cliffhanger at the end of an episode, the following week you picked up from there and went to another cliffhanger, then end of story, onto another one." He said that the magic of the show was that it had "very simple, very straightforward" stories that were "very clear and easy for kids to understand."
Is Purves right about the course of the show? Doctor Who was always going to evolve over its 60-year history. Viewing habits change, tastes change, and so on. For instance, Doctor Who used to be consistently scary back in the '80s, before taking on a more comedic twist at the turn of the century. It's mostly stayed in that mold after being revived in 2005; Russel T Davies, who served as showrunner at the beginning of the revival, is now back and managing the newest seasons. Perhaps in a few years the show will reinvent itself yet again by telling simpler stories that harken back to the early days.
In the meantime, the Fifteenth Doctor's adventures continue Saturdays on Disney+ and on the BBC. Sixty years on, the Doctor's current companion is Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu).