IN THE DARK REVIEWS

Welcome to the Disney era of "Doctor Who."

Once upon a time, there was a globally popular, decades-spanning sci-fi TV series about a mythic alien trickster who changed into different lead actors every few years and who traveled through space and time in a disappearing blue box that was bigger on the inside than on the outside.

As the narrative became less accessible to casual viewers, due to the compounding complexity of its many backstories, it only took a handful of ill-considered revisions to that established canon, presented during less-than-deftly written episodes, to diminish the fandom...