More Money Than Sense

I think part of the problem with Steven Moffat's current Doctor Who is that it has access to too much money. It allows Moffat to go for style over substance, something he seems all too willing to do. I'm not against these on the whole, but they should be included in moderation. Opening episodes, such as last week’s The Bells of Saint John, generally need this sort of thing because they exist to be exciting and fun. But Moffat goes overboard, overloading on action and squeezing out plot.

Another example are those strange sequences we get when the show comes back from a break. You know the ones. The Doctor's been hiding or hanging out somewhere using a pseudonym or an alias and there's a needlessly convoluted setup to reveal that the mysterious character that's being referred to is, in fact, the Doctor. The most recent example was the scenes which saw the Doctor posing as a monk last week. That had the added bonus of including what I assume was deliberate misdirection for continuity hungry fans with the Doctor being named the Monk. We’ve also seen it done in the most recent Christmas special and in Let’s Kill Hitler.

Going back to the Meddling Monk reference: it’s ironic that Moffat chose to hint at him as he is precisely the sort of villain that could work in the Moffat Era. With his time-bending shenanigans and general status as a non-threat he'd fit right in.

I'm obviously not intimately familiar with the budgets Moffat and his predecessor Russell T Davies have had access to during their respective times running though show but looking at the greater amount of CG shots and number of scenes Moffat employs it seems fair to assume his budgets are greater than those Davies worked with. Doctor Who has become bigger and made significant strides in cracking the US market since RTD left.

I don't blame Moffat for the inflated budgets. It's the nature of television. Popular and successful shows get given more money, the logic being that it will allow the programme's makers to make the popular and successful bits even more popular and successful. TV companies, even the BBC, want a return on their investment.

The trouble with Doctor Who is that what made it popular and successful in the first place, at least the 2005 incarnation of it, was the approach taken by Russell T Davies. That's a fairly broad point and I'm well aware there were other people to write for and work on the show but it was RTD's vision that engaged the British public and ensured further seasons would get recommissioned. His focus on characters made the show engaging. His plots more often than not included a real threat too, meaning that there was something at stake. Something that couldn’t be sorted out by weak time-travelling trickery.

Unfortunately the extra cash has allowed Moffat to become complacent and lazy with his writing. The Doctor is written less as a character and more as a gaggle of catchphrases for female characters to flirt at. Amy was a dull and vapid vaguely pretty face who seemed to exist to get into perilous situations, be sarcastic, and explain the plot. Moffat may as well have admitted in interviews that she was "something for the dads". It’s too early to say that Clara is definitely the same but nothing I’ve seen yet makes me think she’s going to turn out significantly different.

Cutting the budget could provide a solution to the problem. It might encourage Moffat to come up with some plots that aren't aimless forty five minute action films, endless series of teases hinting at something that he'll never pay off properly (see River Song), or a bunch of smug time travel scenes that quash the possibility of dramatic tension entering the show and come across as mid-nineties fan fiction. Without an immense budget to back up his self-indulgences Moffat would probably begin to focus more on plot, giving us longer scenes and some decent characterisation. As that's what helped the show become big under Tennant and RTD and what's missing now, I can't see that being anything but a good thing.

Of course the alternative is that he’d carry on exactly as he is now but the show wouldn’t look as good. But let’s ignore that.