Bringer of Darkness

Reposting of a post to JadePagodaTV:

Is anyone else finding that the 45-minute episode time is making it much more obvious -- rather ludicrously so, in fact -- that everywhere the Doctor goes, chaos immediately follows?

(This is nothing new, of course, and any of the old excuses might apply. But in Old Who there was usually some period of build-up before terrible things started happening.)

True, we don't know the timescale underlying what happens in Rose. But in The End of the World the Doctor gatecrashes a party, and straight away the venue is sabotaged and people start to die. (The countdown to the Earth's destruction suggests that this episode happens more or less in real time.) In The Unquiet Dead, he turns up in Cardiff a couple of minutes before a possessed corpse causes a riot in a crowded theatre. And from the looks of The Aliens of London, he's not back in modern London for more than a few minutes before a UFO demolishes Big Ben and crashlands in the Thames.

In all these cases, the seeds of the crisis (Cassandra's plot, the Gelth's manifestations, presumably whatever causes the aliens to crash) predate his arrival -- but that just emphasises the timely way he appears at the precise moment he's needed and no earlier.

As Clive says [in Rose], "He has one constant companion. Death." However, the reduced timescale of the new series is beginning to make the Doctor's attraction to disaster look a little farcical, I feel.