I love the sonic screwdriver, truly I do, it is such a handy dandy device and all, but...
It's become a wee bit too much of a deus ex machina, hasn't it? Sure, that is what it is, but I'd quite like it to go away for awhile, and actually have the Doctor work his way out of things, rather than wave the magic doohickey around.
I may well be misremembering the original series, since it has been ages since I've seen them, but they mostly only used it to open things up, didn't they? In New Who, it does pretty much anything and everything. It's become a bit of a crutch. "Well, how can we have the Doctor do this/get out of this? Oh! I'll just wave around the magic wand!"
J
