Darker And Edgier / Whoniverse

• Doctor Who:
  • After Verity Lambert's tenure where the companions enjoyed time travel for the most part and there's a happy ending every single time (except in the story where the Doctor never shows up), John Wiles' tenure as producer was characterized by extreme and nasty Downer Endings, the Doctor constantly getting called out for his more morally dubious actions, suffering after the departure of his favourite companions, and being defined by his relative powerlessness. And unlike Lambert's tenure of producing quirky stories with outrageous variety in setting and tone, most of Wiles' tenure was clearly in the Space Opera genre, with Arc-based plots for the first time and a colossal body count. When Innes Lloyd took over he reversed a lot of these changes and recast the companions and even the Doctor with younger and trendier people.
  • Season 7 boosts the darkness considerably, due to the "real world" Earthbound setting (except for a trip to an alternate universe Earth at the end of the season), the stories featuring more military attacks and harder science fiction, Grey-and-Grey Morality and Humans Are Bastards becoming a major theme of the show which had previously been very much about how Humans Are Special, and a new, more serious Doctor to contrast with the comedic Second Doctor. The second-to-last episode ends with an alternate version of Earth getting destroyed and the Doctor unable to save them.
  • Season 12 ended up much darker due to introducing a "detached" new Doctor who was unfamiliar to the child audience and had a more fragile personality, which created a feeling of genuine danger rather than the Escapist Character runarounds of previous seasons. The fact that the new Doctor was also funnier than the previous one, and the lighthearted companion team of Sarah Jane and Harry, kept everything fun enough to prevent Too Bleak, Stopped Caring.
  • Season 14 amped up the gore and horror from the previous two seasons as much as possible, and combined it with the departure of the Fourth Doctor's very popular and long-serving companion Sarah Jane, making the atmosphere a lot less cozy. Her replacement was a Proud Warrior Race Girl in a Stripperific outfit who liked to stab people, and her relationship with the Doctor was more distant and vertical, making the Doctor come across as a lot colder. The writing became more cynical, and half the stories were different genres of murder mystery. The Doctor was made a lot funnier to distract from the gore and horror, but it didn't work and Philip Hinchcliffe got fired due to Moral Guardian pressure.
  • The Master's portrayal in "The Deadly Assassin". Up until this point he had been a charismatic and almost friendly adversary to the Doctor played by Roger Delgado. This was the first time the character wasn't played by Delgado, and instead was made a rotting husk at the edge of his life and driven purely by hatred, especially for the Doctor. By the same token, the Doctor has none of the compassion for the Master he had before, culminating in a fight to the death after which the Doctor even admits that he hopes the Master has gone for good.
  • The stage play adaptation of "The Robots of Death" is even darker than the unusually dark story, partly due to Exiled from Continuity issues as the playwright did not have permission to use the character of the Doctor or the companions in the story. The result of this is to change the central character from a Cloud Cuckoo Lander Science Hero who's only there to explore and have a good time into a Deadpan Snarker assassin placed there specifically to murder one of the other characters. The ending also goes from a darkly funny hard-science solution that fits the Doctor's irreverent and ingenious personality to a last-minute hijack from the Fendahl resulting in a gun battle.
  • Season 18, due to a new script editor who wanted to make harder sci-fi about contemporary computer science, a producer responding to fanboy criticism that Season 17 was too fluffy and flippant and a lead actor whose mental issues were starting to bleed into the character. The cute Robot Dog and the funny Meta Guy get Put on a Bus, the Doctor is no longer an Invincible Hero and Gothic Horror elements like the 'zombie' Master and vampires start showing up after a long absence.
  • This continued into Seasons 20 and 21, though starting with Adric's death in "Earthshock". the vast majority of people in stories were forced to suffer death in various horrible ways catapulted by incredibly dark and brutal plots and the kinder and more human Doctor is forced to bear all of this, with "The Caves of Androzani" arguably being one of the darkest regeneration stories ever made.
  • The mid-1980s period where Eric Saward went to town with his "gritty realism" ideals, which led to a lot of stories with hardly any truly sympathetic guest characters, on-screen gore and almost all of the guest characters dying, and a Doctor who tried to kill his companion in a fit of homicidal mania and developed a nasty habit of making the odd Bond One-Liner.
  • The last two seasons of the Classic series focused heavily on increasing the emotional realism, with characters having more realistic reactions to the also-increasing horror and gore. It also began expanding the Doctor's mythos. The Doctor's The Chessmaster quality was cranked up to the point where even his friends may become pieces on the board. It's when I Did What I Had to Do moments become an explicit part of his character.
  • Many of the adult fan-aimed parts of the Expanded Universe, especially the Doctor Who New Adventures and some of the Big Finish Doctor Who sub-series.
  • When Steven Moffat became the head writer/showrunner and the Eleventh Doctor was introduced, the whole show became quite a bit darker — he's pretty much the undisputed king of Nightmare Fuel in Doctor Who, with many of his episodes bordering on pure horror. It stops short of an "every episode is 'Blink'"-level of ramping it up, but it's a scarier galaxy under his pen. The Series 5-7 Myth Arc deconstructs the Doctor's MO and his enemies sincerely believe he will be the undoing of the universe. Interestingly, while the stories get darker, the whimsical character of the Eleventh Doctor and Moff's sitcom-esque dialog maintain humor.
  • Then there's the Twelfth Doctor. Series 8 alone has Clara Oswald and the Doctor having numerous arguments, her throwing his TARDIS keys into a volcano in an attempt to blackmail him over her boyfriend's death (good thing it's in a dream state), and the season's Big Bad imprisoning dead people in a false Heaven (a stretch that included the infamous "Don't cremate me" line) as a precursor to turning them into an army of Cybermen. Peter Capaldi also gives a far darker portrayal of the Doctor than the last couple of incarnations; he's much more rude, alien, and aloof even when people are dying around him. Over time it becomes clear he is actually amazingly empathetic and compassionate, and he grows even warmer and more whimsical in Series 9... just in time for near-nonstop emotional trauma involving many near-death experiences for him and Clara and the long-term consequences of many of his well-meant decisions. This culminates in a three-episode Season Finale in which his inability to cope with both a cruel betrayal and Clara's actual death, exacerbated by imprisonment in a torture chamber, result in him temporarily becoming The Unfettered Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. A most Bittersweet Ending follows.
  • Also, companions becoming more badass as time goes on is portrayed as not a good thing in this era. (Yeah, we had Davros saying he makes people into weapons in Series 4, but, well, it's Davros.) Going back to the final Eleventh Doctor episodes, Clara takes the usual progression from civilian who's a little smarter than the average governess to someone able to keep up with what's going on around her, but starting with "Flatline" she does a good job of stepping into the Doctor's role — too good, in his opinion — and becomes increasingly willing to gamble her life, directly leading to his aforementioned climactic ordeal in Series 9.
  • Series 10 plays with this. The first third is Lighter and Softer as new companion Bill Potts is broken in, but come "Oxygen" things get grim again, with the Monks Trilogy that follows showing things going from bad to worse for a long while before a happy ending is managed. The Vault Story Arc involving Missy's possible redemption serves as a dark backdrop to the whole season, culminating in the Season Finale "World Enough and Time"/"The Doctor Falls", which unleashes Hell on the Doctor and especially Bill on the way to a denouement flush with death, destruction, and straight-up tragedy even as the Doctor reaches new heights of goodness. And then there's a "Ray of Hope" Ending for the broken, death-seeking Doctor, leading directly into a Grand Finale ("Twice Upon a Time") in which he helps inspire his original self to regenerate, faces an antagonist who isn't actually an antagonist, gets positive closure regarding the fates of all three companions, sees that Everybody Lives, and finally decides to regenerate and keep living to help others — using his Final Speech to encourage his next self to "Run fast, laugh hard, be kind." Thus, unlike most Doctors, his Myth Arc sees him become a more uplifting character as it progresses, ending with him proudly embodying kindness (just not niceness).
  • Series 11 was a light season of the show, with a much friendlier Doctor than how Twelve started out. The stories were fairly low key, with the majority of the drama focusing on Graham and Ryan's reconcilation as a family. There wasn't much continuity shifts either, as Chris Chibnall wanted to ease new viewers into the show. Then Season 12 opens with the unexpected return of the Master and Gallifrey being destroyed for a second time. This sets the tone for the series and we see the friendly Thirteen retreating into herself as becoming more somber and ruthless. The first part of the three-part arc that ends this also has severe Body Horror in a Gothic-inspired story with a partially converted Cyberman who helps maintain a grim tone throughout all three episodes. And then, the season finale severely darkens both the Doctor's backstory and the Time Lord's motivations as the Timeless Child is revealed.
• The YA-aimed Doctor Who spin-off show Class (2016) was rather darker than the parent show, though not as dark as Torchwood. The show featured two out of five regulars being Last of His Kind (and one of them being the actual slave of the other), late-teens characters being clearly depicted as sexually-active, a lot of on-screen gore, and towards the end of the series a grim deconstruction of Recruit Teenagers with Attitude that sees the characters becoming increasingly traumatised and finally committing full-blown genocide on the Always Chaotic Evil recurring villain species. The BBC's discomfort with all this may have led to the show receiving little promotion and low-profile scheduling, and being cancelled after a single season.
• Torchwood, a spinoff of Doctor Who, was billed as "Darker and Edgier" than its family-aimed parent, which amounted to quite a bit of sex and violence. While not as overt, series 2 still had far more sensitive material than could ever be shown at 7 pm, and the miniseries Torchwood: Children of Earth upped the depression and utter hopelessness of the show to eleven.
  • And then they took it to an entirely new level with the Torchwood: Miracle Day in 2011. "Dark" doesn't begin to describe it. It may have gotten too dark though, as it was the last series of Torchwood on television.
• An In-Universe example in the online supplimentary material for the Bernice Summerfield novel Down by Lawrence Miles. The bibliography for 26th century pulpzine character Mr Misnomer, the Man of Chrome, explains that when the original autolit stories were created, between 2529 and 2535, Earth was going through a puritanic period, and so, despite some BDSM subtext, the zines were largely straightforward moralistic adventure stories. The licenced revival by an underground publisher in 2544, on the other hand, makes his sidekick a gay depressive, claims Misnomer's Depending on the Lit-Engine characteristics are the result of an incipit Split Personality and mind-altering drugs, and moreover that the Ancient Timeless Evil he's been fighting all these years is actually the manifestation of his own angst. Apparently, this didn't go down well with fans, who insist it can't possibly be canon. (Some aspects of this may possibly be intended to satirise some of the above, including Miles's own work.)

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