"Labyrinth" and "The Dark Crystal" are darker and no one's calling them unsuitable for children.
Now if you do want an example of something that did give me nightmares as a kid I give you "Return to Oz".
People did. In fact, they were PG. (I saw Oz in the cinema aged about five. I was more fascinated with Tik Tok, and Fairuza Balk, but not every kids the same. He was a magnificent prop in person too.)
PG means parents exercising their common sense, or knowledge of their kid — and rules for cinema were different for telly (Return To Oz was a TV Christmas afternoon fixture, Labyrinth never was. I wonder why that is…)
Older Doctor Who carries a different rating on home media than would be expected, but again different rules apply. (TBH telly usually runs on it being easier to apologise than to ask permission)
Judging appropriately for time slot and intended audience is part of the game though — 7:35 is fine for Curse Of Fenric, but I wouldn’t put that on Christmas Day, nor would I put it in an earlier evening slot. The Capaldi era, for a more modern example, swung darker and was therefore on later. The darkest the Christmas specials got was probably Husbands of River Song. Again — no threat to child characters there though, and plenty of weird context. (Like with Return to Oz, and some Eleventh Doctor stories, the worst it got in that regard was headless characters and still talking separate heads.)
In addition to that, there are careful rules and decisions to be made around *prolonging* any given threat etc. If you have time for an unnecessarily long musical number, you’re probably doing it wrong. Don’t know enough on that in direct correlation to the episode as televised, as I got my ‘Trigger Warning’ just fine from the songs release on YouTube. (and confirmed by clips and reviews afterwards)
So, I didn’t watch.
It’s not for me, and in my educated opinion isn’t really suitable for the typically intended audience either. Other opinions may vary — some parents and adults think Robocop is perfectly fine kids entertainment after all. Some audiences get hand wringing over nudity in BBC Dramas, some are quite happy with a light spot of irrelevant to the story buggering. Fortunately neither of these have been in Doctor Who. (And whilst I am mostly thinking of Giri/Haji, it’s fair to say Torchwood has plenty of both.)
Will I try again when the series proper returns? Maybe. But I am seeing no ‘pull’ factors beyond my lifelong Who fandom. It got me to bother with coming back to Capaldi (which paid off) and even to Jodie (can’t say Whittaker without thinking of David instead, Who fans have two methods of era definition at least) who… was poorly served, as were the audience.
The tone-deaf handling of ‘issues’ and what have you really pushes me away to be honest, not to mention other little things and not just the weird costuming decisions. (Trans people are not the magical result of Timelord magic juju, non-binary doesn’t mean what they think it does, there’s nothing wrong with being male or female or NB, etc, and dear god how fumbled was that ‘bigeneration’ into *not* making a Black British Actor the de-facto Doctor *again* and keeping your safe option handy. Not to mention Donna’s line about colours. Fucks sake.)
They aren’t making the show for the intended audience (families) anymore, and I don’t think they actually understand the nature of the show at its core (it changes, but at its core it is stable across 50 odd years) nor do they understand he power and purpose of its wider genre. (Good SF doesn’t preach to the choir, it allows its audience to question things and maybe nudge in the direction of possible answers) Moffat handled things much better, frankly, in every regard.
What little I have seen of Ncuti hasn’t hit me as ‘Doctor’ but has hit me as ‘RTD Character’ which is not the same thing alas.
