Oxygen

"I'm still blind!" 

The most melodramatic ending to a Doctor Who episode ever? Possibly. It's certainly a contender. Whether it wins that particular contest or not it renders the episode that led up to the revelation as little more than a footnote: Oxygen will always be, first and foremost, the episode in which the Twelfth Doctor went blind¹. 

This is a bit of a disservice to Oxygen. The thing is, Oxygen deserves it. It was a plodding, moralistic base under siege story. Nothing memorable happened beyond that final, melodramatic line. The plodding nature could have been fixed with another draft or two. Same goes for the sledgehammer subtlety of the anti-capitalist message that cropped up in seemingly every other scene. I mean, literally being charged for air, could it be anymore on the nose? The base under siege approach just wasn't made interesting enough. It can work in Nu Who (see 42, Mummy on the Orient Express(mosty) and, of course, Dalek, for examples of this). It just didn't work here.

While Oxygen was primarily just a string of disappointments it did achieve at least one thing of interest. It provided a good example of the different approaches Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat take as showrunners². 

A refresher: the pre-credits sequence featured a man and woman³ clambering about on the outside of a space station with the woman telling the man that she wanted to have a baby with him when "all this is over" before a problem with her suit's broadcasting equipment was revealed, meaning he hadn't heard her. She was then murdered by two corpses in space suits while the guy mended a generic prop in silence, turned round to notice, and escaped.

It's a sequence designed to achieve a few things. Firstly, it's there to introduce one of the key plot points of the episode: air being a valuable commodity that is rationed by the company funding things. Second, it's meant to show us that, hey, these are real people leading real lives out in the harshness of space. Finally, it's there to introduce the monsters of the week, the aforementioned corpses in spacesuits.

It accomplishes all of this. But it does so in a hollow, perfunctory manner that is striking. We're told, at several points throughout the episode that the air is valuable on this space station because it has to be paid for. We see the payment interface, we see signs reminding people not to waste oxygen, the pre-credits sequence has the man tell the woman. But none of the characters ever actually act like speaking should be avoided in the name of saving oxygen. All those details are great and good bits of world building, something I'm usually all over, but when the supporting cast witter on like the supporting cast of any other episode it makes immersion difficult. If rationing speech is going to be part of a Doctor Who episode it should to be a central theme⁴, something that dictates how the episode is structured. Television relies on heavily on characters talking to one another. If that ability is going to be taken away from them the reason for it needs to be explored and the opportunity needs to be taken to offer a unique experience in which they rely on other forms of communication.

But what really leapt out as something that warranted comparison to the RTD era was the interaction between the two characters in the pre-credits sequence. Having a child together is one of the most significant things two people can do, and it's use here was clearly intended as a shorthand for Real Living Couple With Functioning Emotions And Plans For The Future™. It was then undercut with a joke from the woman about repeating her heartfelt speech later, which is a very Moffat thing to do and also wonderfully highlights what I was saying in the last paragraph about not being able to take oxygen rationing as a serious thing within the episode. 

There's no way to know for sure how Davies would have handled this scene but it feels like a safe bet he'd have approached it differently. There probably would have been general chitchat about the banalities of life in place of "Hey, we're on the side of a space station, let's have a baby soon!"The whole faulty radio aspect would probably have been dropped or reworked so that there was at least some meaningful interaction between the pair.  The man one likely would have looked more emotionally distraught when he turned around to see the corpse of his loved one staggering towards him. The scene towards the end of the episode where the woman's corpse handed her oxygen supply over to her still-living lover would either not have existed or would have been rejigged so that the man shows some emotion at having his life saved in such a poetic way. Or, possibly, it would have featured a tear rolling down the dead woman's cheek⁵. I admit I would have preferred the former of these two.

The Davies approach was to make supporting characters feel like real people and focus on how things like killer spacesuits affected them. Moffat understands the importance of supporting characters but doesn't go to anywhere near the lengths to get us invested in them, which means we get a watered down approach where small scale human worries and ambitions are fumbled at but don't always feel fully formed. Yeah, Jamie Mathieson (who's been pretty good with previous Who work) wrote this episode but that's neither here nor there: under RTD the sequences in question would have received the rewrites needed to get the tone the episode needed them to have. Oxygen highlighted the difference between the two showrunners in how they go about writing the show. 

I think the fact that the relationship in question and the episode as a whole were so flat shows that Moffat's just not especially good when he's not overseeing "clever puzzle" episodes. He's well-suited to big event episodes, probably better suited than Davies, but they only come along every so often. Moffat's approach doesn't work well with more standard episodes, and that's what he's overseeing the majority of the time.

A less pressing issue: why do space set episodes have to be all grimy metal and shadows these days? The Girl in the Fireplace (to take a random RTD era episode) takes place on a spaceship but never falls into these traps of uninspired set design. Throughout Fireplace things are always tinted blue or red or green, avoiding the bleak visuals of Oxygen. Could it be that the sets were deliberately subdued so as to tie in with the fact that the Doctor goes blind, tacitly linking our visionary experience to the one he has by the end of the episode? It's certainly possible, but nothing in the episode backs that up. It also wouldn't explain why space set capers have gradually shifted to this approach under Moffat⁶.

I'm sure the question we're all meant to be asking coming out of this episode (besides the clearly vital "Who's in The Vault?") is: "How will the Doctor's blindness impact the show?" But I wasn't given a reason to care, so I'm not.

***

¹ Assuming it's something that sticks for a significant amount of time. Judging by the way the revelation was framed I think it will stay at least through the next episode or two.

² Yes, this again.

³ They have names but truth be told every character outside of the regulars was so tedious that I can't be bothered to look them up. Deal with it.

⁴ Buffy managed an extended sequence of absolute silence about fifteen years ago. Surely Doctor Who, a programme that has far more tricks to employ to get to a scenario like that, is up to the task now. Maybe it just needs a better lead writer²...

⁵ I've never said Davies was perfect and a weeping corpse is right up his alley.

⁶ This is something that can be tangibly traced back over the last few years and seems to coincide with Matt Smith leaving. Kill the Moon, Sleep No More and now this story have gotten incrementally more basic in their depiction of space. I understand that it helps to emphasise the stark, unforgiving nature of a space setting but it doesn't half make things boring to look at.

Thin Ice

Thin Ice was written by Sarah Dollard, whose only previous contribution to the show was the excellent Face the Raven. This wasn't as good as her first contribution to the show but that's hardly a big surprise: Face the Raven was one of the better episodes of season nine and succeeded largely on the strength of its central ideas. Thin Ice suffered mainly from having less good central ideas. And really, the idea of secret (and delightfully albeit inexplicably Dickensian) streets hidden in London that house homeless aliens was so good, such a perfect fit for Doctor Who, that it's going to be a while before an idea of equal quality turns up again. 

Dollard was again tasked with finding an interesting spin on London. The idea of making use of the great frost fairs, held on a frozen Thames, was a good one. Having the plot centre on a giant fish chained up at the bottom of the river and being force-fed people for not entirely clear reasons was... a less good idea. It could have worked well but, ultimately, it didn't. Another draft was needed to make it as clear as possible what this giant fish was doing under the Thames, how it had gotten there, and (the big one) what the ramifications of its release were expected to be. These things were touched on but left a little hazy and undefined. Hazy and undefined can work in Doctor Who, but more in terms of, for example, something or someone's origins and less in terms of the nature of the threat the Doctor and his companion face. We need to know what's at stake and Thin Ice never quite got there.

Thankfully it succeeded in other areas. Like its tackling of race issues. A number of non-white faces cropped up as supporting cast and extras, and the lead human villain (the guy who's family had imprisoned a giant fish) was an open racist. Linking a TV baddie to something like racism, which is something that still hasn't been purged from modern society, is a good thing and sends the right message. It's not something Doctor Who as a show can do every week but it is something it can touch on more often than it does¹. Really, it's the approach I wanted when talking about the overloading of Smile last week.

There was other positive stuff too. Good material for Capaldi's Doctor, which there hadn't exactly been an abundance of in the previous two episodes of the series. A return to well made, convincing sets after the aberration that was Smile. An attempt at tackling the butterfly effect in a fun, playful, Doctor Who-compatible way. Although that last one is a little frustrating as the way in which it was brought up and dropped as a concept within the first fifteen minutes of the episode makes me suspect it was more prominent in previous drafts and got edited down for time or to let other themes come through. It seems like the sort of thing Dollard's style would mesh particularly well with. Maybe Chibnall will have her back to do a forty-five minute episode of the potential perils of stamping on insects. 

The other interesting thing to talk about now that Thin Ice has aired is how the opening three episodes of season ten parallel the opening three episodes of season one. This isn't some arbitrary comparison, each trio follows the same basic pattern: a contemporary Earth story in which the Doctor meets a new companion, a future story in which the new companion is confronted with the mortality of the planet they take for granted, and a historical story where the companion learns that the future isn't guaranteed to take the shape you expect just because you've seen it. This is a formula RTD used on every one of the seasons he produced (with minor tweaks and changes here and there) while Moffat used it at the start of his first year in charge and has stayed clear since². It's interesting that he finally came back to it for his final, maybe a tacit admission that it's a stronger approach than, say, starting with a two-parter and calling it the finale or something stupid like that. 

I don't think it worked as well here as it did in season one, and that's mostly down to Smile being a weaker episode than The End of the World. Comparing Rose and The Pilot feels unfair in many ways as Rose was tasked with relaunching the entire show, introducing basic concepts which are taken for granted now, along with two leads and a supporting character. The Pilot only had to introduce a new companion, both the Doctor and the lone supporting character of long term consequence (Matt Lucas as Nardole) were know to us. Shunting these burdens to the side both episodes have their strengths but it's Rose that's the more enjoyable of the two, not least because it has a more interesting visual threat in villainous shop dummies, something The Pilot's screeching puddle couldn't touch. 

Thin Ice and The Unquiet Dead fee the most similar. Both take place during winter in the 1800s. Both tackle social issues (racism for The Pilot, asylum seeking for The Unquiet Dead). Both go for a fairly standard Doctor Who plot, mostly to ease in new viewers and give them an idea of what a "standard" episode of the show will look like. Really, the biggest difference (aside from advances in production techniques) is that Unquiet is a celebrity historical, a trope the show has largely moved away from under Moffat³.

What do these comparisons mean? Not much, in the grand scheme of things. I mostly just thought the parallels were worth noting. Thin Ice was a good enough episode, a welcome improvement on last week, and an episode that accomplished everything it set out to. Perhaps most importantly it was further evidence that Sarah Dollard is a writer we should want to see back once Chibnall's in the producer's chair. 

***

¹ In fact the last time I remember this being broached by the series was 2007's The Shakespeare Code when the Doctor told Martha to "walk around like you own the place, works for me." Which, let's be honest, was a bit of a cop out.

² I could veer off into a whole spiel about how this nicely encapsulates the differences between Moffat and Davies but I won't because it would be boring and out of place.

³ It's interesting to note that Moffat did do a celebrity historical during his first season, having the Eleventh Doctor and Amy meet Vincent Van Gogh. Again I'll refrain from comparing the two but it's clear ol' Moffles was using the Davies formula during his first season in charge and I'll be interested to see if that continues across his last.

The Girl Who Died

The Girl Who Died was the sort of Doctor Who story I like. We were presented with a series of scenes in which the Doctor and Clara were introduced to a world and got some amusing lines to deliver, things got fleshed out, and there was a closing sequence that made sense both on the episode's own terms and in terms of the mechanics of the show at large. When done right that's always a great approach for Doctor Who (though obviously it can work with any companion and not Clara specifically).

It was the series of twists towards the start that really stood out to me. The Doctor pretended to be Odin. A nice little thing in itself because it's the sort of thing many other incarnations of the character may have tried. Then a giant faced appeared in the clouds and claimed to be the real Odin. An amusing, well-placed conceit within the episode which instantly raised questions for the audience. From there the fittest, strongest people in the village (including Clara and Ashildr, played by biggest name guest actor Maisie Williams, because of course) were beamed onto a space ship by some giant alien robots and slaughtered for boring-but-sensible-within-the-confines-of-the-show reasons. Clara and Ashildr escaped because they were always going to and then the second phase of the episode began: the Doctor helping the remaining villagers to prepare for a battle Clara had stupidly (but handily for a TV show that has to feature #conflict) provoked the alien into a battle.

After that it settled down into a well written episode . We got some scenes that were determined to make us care about the guest cast and for the most part they did. Far more impressive was the material given to Capaldi. He got to play everything from courage to angst and was given excellent dialogue to do so, a refreshing change from the by-the-numbers material he's mostly gotten in the part (I think I remember this being a strength in last year's Flatline, also by Jamie Mathieson). Clara being split off for the brief sojourn to the ship made sense too, and gave her something to do after weeks of her being sidelined.

It was also nice to see the design work back on track after a severe wobble with the Fisher King in Before the Flood. Fake Odin was pretty much written and performed as a generic baddie but he was made to look enough like a futuristic Viking that it didn't matter. He looked like what he was meant to be, an alien (or possibly an alien AI, I didn't follow that bit closely enough) trying to pass themselves (or itself) off as a god using a basic understanding of human mythology. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that someone took inspiration from Lost Vikings 2 for that (and I'd be more surprised still if more than one person reading this understood that reference without the assistance of Google). The robot henchmen were better still. They were big and bulky and intimidating with rivets and bolts that you don't see in Doctor Who designs often. They looked convincingly alien and warrant a return. I could have done without the removal of their headpieces to reveal squealing flesh heads though. They were more appealing when they appeared to be some sort of enchanted clay-metal robot warriors.

In fact the episode's only weakness was something that was likely intended to be one of its highlights. The topic of where the Doctor's face came from was tackled more substantially than it has been since Capaldi's debut episode Deep Breath. This is something aimed at people like me, people who know and rewatch and study the show. But I didn't care. I didn't care because it's been handled poorly within the show. I could have been convinced that it mattered pretty easily. It is, after all, famously a theory that Russell T Davies cooked up as his own private fan theory then passed on to Moffat, who decided it was so good he'd include it in the show. That's my kind of thing! But it was so bland, not to mention wholly unnecessary, that I couldn't bring myself care. The Doctor chose the face of Caecilius, the man he saved from a burning Pompeii, to remind himself that he saves people. So what?

It raises more questions than it answers. How did he do this when he's seemingly had no control over his appearance before? How does John Frobisher, also played by Capaldi, factor into this? Why didn't the Doctor do it when he changed from the Tenth Doctor, who saved Caecilius, into the Eleventh? If the Eleventh chose the face to remind himself that he's a good man who saves people because he'd just run into the War Doctor and been reminded of some apparently horrible things he did and was having a crisis of confidence or something  then why didn't he make a more recent or relevant selection? Does Moffat really expect anyone who's not invested in this show more than the average viewer to understand the sudden appearance of David Tennant and Catherine Tate in scenes from an episode that first aired seven years ago? Maybe there's more to come on this. If so, good. Right now it looks like another example of Moffat building something up in interviews that turns out to be wholly underwhelming once it appears in the show.

After the predictable struggle against the bad guy worked out in favour of the overmatched villagers (funny that) we got the episode's final twist, the Doctor saving Ashildr with technomagic and making her immortal. This was a nice final flourish and kept the revelation of how two episodes (this and next week's The Woman Who Lived) written by two different people and not appearing to be a two part tale fit together.

This was easily the best episode since The Magician's Apprentice and possibly the best of the series so far (I'd need rewatches to decide for sure). It featured enough surprises, dealt out its revelations well, and contained enough strong design work that it was a joy to watch. If this was the average level of quality I think the show would be all the better for it.

The Witch's Familiar

I really wanted to like The Witch's Familiar.

The opening half of the story, The Magician's Apprentice, had been a rapidly moving bit of fun that fleshed out Moffat's take on the Doctor Who universe and made good use of both its leading man and its two biggest guest stars. This episode was never going to be that because the modern approach to writing two part stories is (sensibly) to leave the first half with a cliffhanger that changes the way the plot as a whole is approached by the audience, giving the second episode its own identity. That didn't mean it needed to be the frustrating, underwhelming and continuity-happy mess it was.

Which isn't to say there weren't good things in The Witch's Familiar. Julian Bleach and Michelle Gomez were both excellent, as was Peter Capaldi. Jenna Coleman, getting to do more than stride around being the inexplicable uber-boss of UNIT, was good too. The clever use of a limited number of sets¹ was impressive if you're into that kind of thing (I am). The emphasis on conversations helped to disguise that we were actually getting a relatively cheap episode only one week into the new series.

Said conversations are actually my biggest gripe about the story. The basic idea, pairing the Doctor with Davros and Clara with Missy, was a good one. It gave the two regular characters new people to play off and the chance to tackle topics and roles they wouldn't get to take on with each other. This also benefited Gomez, who'll presumably be a semi-regular throughout Capaldi's tenure and will get more scenes with him in the future, and Bleach, who, as a character far less likely to return in the foreseeable future, absolutely should have spent the majority of his time on-screen with the show's lead character.

The execution let the idea down. This isn't a complaint about Missy's plan being to trap Clara inside a Dalek and have the Doctor kill her. That fit perfectly with everything we know about her and of her previous incarnations, dating all the way back to Delgado's Master. It's not a complaint about Davros's plan being to steal regeneration energy from the Doctor to revitalise the entire Dalek race either. While that was daft it was no more ridiculous than any of the other plots involving him. Let's not forgot that his last story saw him attempting to bring about "the destruction of REALITY ITSELF-UH!" Davros and Missy are characters that have absurd plans.

Where the pairings failed was in Moffat not doing anything interesting with them. And the worst part here is that he clearly thinks he did do something interesting with them. If he didn't these episodes would have been rewritten until they were better. Coleman and Gomez were landed with a load of expositional tosh about Daleks never dying and being pasted on the walls of sewers and the lengthy sequence of Clara discovering that she couldn't express her personality after she'd been placed into a Dalek. The former took up too much time considering the simplicity of it while the personality stuff felt like a waste. Being denied the right or ability to express will is a big theme and could have been played with far more. Coleman was great with what she was given on this, really getting across her frustration, panic and eventually fear, but it felt like a theme that should have been developed more rather than being a small part of a ninety minute story. The rest of their scenes were mostly about Missy proving she knew the Doctor more than Clara, which had already been sufficiently covered the week before. Jokes about pointy sticks weren't enough to paper over these gaps.

The Doctor and Davros stuff was better but that was at least in part because Moffat was channelling one of the most famous scenes in the show's history, the confrontation between Davros and the Fourth Doctor in Genesis of the Daleks. Steven Moffat is a clever, talented writer (for all my bashing of him I do recognise he's a clever, talented writer) but his strength is not in emotional exchanges like this. Someone like Russell T Davies could have done something marvellous with the Doctor and Davros debating the merits of their respective compassionate and aggressive approaches to dealing with others. Moffat couldn't, because his strength lies in plot twists, disguising exposition and creating cool visuals. Are we really expected to believe that the Doctor, believing Clara to be dead, would share a laugh and a joke with the creator of the most dangerous race in the universe? I can believe he'd have helped cure Davros, because he's a good, kind and compassion man (the point of the scenes) but laughing with him over nothing was too much to accept and a mistake I can't imagine RTD making. Once Davros's plan became apparent and he started ranting things improved (and for the record this was my favourite stuff from Bleach even though I enjoyed his more sombre, restrained performance) but that was only the last ten minutes or so and we'd seen it before.

The last failing the pairings gave us was a lack of a satisfying meeting between Missy and Davros. What could have been a great mad versus mad scene was instead cut down to a couple of lines from Missy in the midst of the episode's action-packed climax. Having seen Bleach's previous performance in the role and writing Missy's introductory story last series it's baffling as to why Moffles didn't capitalise on this meeting and give the two something to do together.

Other complaints are relatively minor. The sonic sunglasses are daft. Moffat's continual hammering at continuity (Missy has a daughter, reminders about Gallifrey returning, all those additions to Dalek lore and all the other extraneous references) were annoying. What I assume were references to the Faction Paradox series that most people reading this won't have ever heard of², irritating because it's Moffat either being snide or blatantly raiding ideas (again). The Daleks renewal essentially being meaningless, additionally annoying because Moffat has never bothered to pick up on the Progenitor device thread from Victory of the Daleks³. The reduced role of Colony Sarff, the best new element MOffat's given the series in a very long time. Daleks saying "Mercy" being such a big deal when they've said it before. The title making even less sense than last week.

Ultimately the most interesting thing I took from the script was the tease of Missy teaming up with the Daleks in her final line of the episode. Which indicates that, sadly, series nine will be business as usual for Moffat's Who. A great pity after the promise of last week.

***

¹ There were three: the Dalek Supreme's control room, Davros's lair, and the sewers.

² Last week it was the almost too enigmatic line "There's just The War" and this week we had mentions of The Enemy, both in the young Davros scenes.

³ Using the Progenitor device as Davros's way of revitalising the Dalek race would have been far more satisfying than having a talking snake dangling from the roof.

Last Christmas

When I first watched Last Christmas it seemed fairly innocuous. Some stuff happened, there were some laughs, and Clara and the Doctor made friends after having a Grown-Up falling Out at the end of series eight. But after I'd finished watching it I couldn't remember anything specific about it. Since then I've watched it a further two times in an attempt to work out the specifics of the story, the "stuff" that happens.

It's a difficult task. When Christmas specials first hit Doctor Who then-showrunner Russell T Davies made the sensible decision to tailor them to an audience that was not paying attention. Because on Christmas Day kids have new toys to play with, adults have booze to drink, and a fair number of people are being subjected to Doctor Who rather than choosing to watch it. Even when a Christmas special coincided with a Doctor debuting or leaving RTD managed to keep things relatively light. He’d smuggle things in for the fans but the plot was always simple, the threat always obvious and the resolution always happy.

Steven Moffat doesn't use this approach. His Christmas specials are like any other episodes but with festive motifs and framing tossed in where possible. It’s because he and Davies view the programme in completely different ways. RTD wants it to be about people and their relationships. Moffat wants it to be about ideas.

Personally I don't think there are enough things on TV (particularly the publicly funded BBC) that focus on ideas over character. More things like Moffat's Who wouldn't go amiss. But saying that isn't the same as saying Moffat's approach is right for this show. It isn't. It obviously isn't, because a flagship BBC drama is not the place to focus on ideas over characters.

And Moffat just as obviously knows this. That's why he never fully commits to episodes about ideas. But he doesn't move away from his idea focus either. This leaves us with Christmas specials that are an awkward mix of Moffat's preferred approach, Big Ideas™, and what the BBC want from a big budget drama, characterisation. In trying to accomplish two things at once he doesn't manage either to a satisfying degree.

This episode seemed designed to mix the best of Alien and Inception. That’s an odd combination anyway but it’s particularly strange that it was chosen as the basis of a Christmas episode. But then, as I’ve already pointed out, Moffat doesn’t seem particularly bothered with differentiating his Christmas episodes from his regular episodes in anything beyond the most obvious ways possible.

Which neatly brings us to the inclusion of Father Christmas. It’s an obvious idea but that doesn’t make it a bad one. It’s the sort of things Doctor Who can do well: make Santa a living, breathing, real person. It’s surprising that someone as avowedly in favour of Christmas episodes being Charistmassy as Russell T Davies is didn’t get round to the idea when he was in charge. It’s a simple, easy-to-follow concept and it holds a particular interest for kids (of the right age).

Sadly Moffat didn’t really do much with Santa. He made some funnies, revealed a dark edge and then dropped out of the episode, reappearing sporadically whenever a plot device was needed. By the end it was left unclear whether he’d even been real or not. The air of mystery was welcome. The half-hearted way Moffat used the character for the majority of the episode was not. It was a misfire and spectacularly wasted opportunity to explore the modern concept of Christmas using a world renowned, public domain character.

The layered dream sequence approach is what really made this episode feel generic. Had it been stripped of Santa and the vaguely Christmas setting it could have been comfortably moved to the middle of a series without any problems.

This dream sequencing stuff is, of course, what led to one of the most awful scenes of the episode: Clara waking as an old woman and accepting that she was close to death. Except of course she wasn’t: she had a Dream Hugger attached to her face making her think she’d lived a full life without the Doctor and was near death. I suspect the scene was included to play into the rumours (which Moffat had helped fuel) that Jenna Coleman would be leaving the show. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d had two endings in mind, one for Coleman staying and another for her leaving, in which Clara did actually die of old age. The return of the wooden Samuel Anderson as Danny Pink (for the record I think this was his worst ever performance on the series) was practically welcome by comparison.

Basically there were a lot of things that were worth including here. Father Christmas, the dreams within dreams, and the creepy aliens all had something to offer. But, as I’ve written before about Moffat episodes, too much was crammed into too short a time. You have to wonder what exactly was “special” about this Christmas special.

Moffat Stays Hyped

You wait for months and months and then a bunch of Doctor Who news comes along at once. Earlier in the week there were a couple of comments from King Showrunner and Keeper of the Canon Lore Steven Moffat that assuaged fears that he might have stopped overhyping things. Then the week ended with the announcement of series eight’s premiere date, a trailer and a publicity still of Clara and the Capaldi Doctor stood in a new TARDIS.

I’ll get to the series eight stuff in another post. For now I want to look at The Moff’s comments.

As far as I’m aware they stemmed from the page Moffat writes for DWM. The first was a mention of series nine. Yes, that’s the series that will air next year, not the one that will air this year that Moffat should be building interest in (because, y’know, it’s his job). He revealed that he’d just written a “whooper” of a cliffhanger for the series’ penultimate episode.

So we know Moff’s writing the episode, which in turn confirms that he’s intending to stay in charge at least until the end of series nine. While it was the done thing for the lead writer to provide the final two episodes of a series under RTD it’s not always been the case under Moffles. Series six featured a penultimate episode from Gareth Roberts (Closing Time, featuring the return of hilarious scamp Craig Owens) and series seven saw Neil Gaiman in the spot (giving us his take Cybermen and space circuses). It’s incredibly unlikely Moff would entrust another writer with the series finale so it’s looking like he’ll be back to writing the final two episodes himself.

Does this mean a proper two part send off to series nine? Well, it’s possible. But… well, it’s not actually been Moffat’s style since taking over. The Chibnall-penned Silurian two parter and the Ganger debacle in the middle of series six aside Moff has tended towards two parters that have a second half that’s distinct in style, tone, story and (often) setting from the first. It was a trend that developed as early as series two as Russell T and the production team realised that the pacing of two part stories for a modern audience just didn’t work without a significant change coming at the halfway point.

The trait has been accentuated under Moff’s reign. It’s one of the things I think he’s gotten right. It’s not only helped to distinguish his era from RTD’s in a positive way (I tend to find most differences negative, as anyone who’s read this blog before will know) but it’s also made for better two part stories than the Davies era could generally muster.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that series seven featured no two part stories at all. Instead Moffat went with his much ballyhooed movie poster approach, which produced such classics as A Town Called Mercy, Hide, and, of course, The Rings of Akhaten. Moffat made a deliberate move away from two parters, saying he felt the show needed a fresh approach. He was probably right, but that he gave us such an average series without them may have caused someone at the BBC to request they be reinstated. Or perhaps The Moff himself has decided they’ve had enough of a rest. Either way it wouldn’t have done his budgets any good: two parters were introduced by RTD specifically as a money saver.

Of course the real thing we should focus on here isn’t two part stories or that Moffat’s sticking around for at least another year. It’s that overhype’s coming into play again. He’s written a whooper of a cliffhanger has he? Great. It’s not like he’s got a history of letting us down on those sorts of promises…

No, hang on a second. He does. The “game changing” revelation that River was Amy and Rory’s kid is my favourite example but there’s also his promise that we’d find out the Doctor’s name in the series seven finale. I enjoyed his promise that Doctor Who would be all over people's screens in 2013. I could point to more but, well, Moffat’s actually provided some fresh material so let’s focus on that.

His other DWM comment saw him say that it’s never been explicitly stated that the Doctor is not human. Having only sat through a small selection of black and white era stories, possessing only a hazy familiarity with Pertwee era works, and only really enjoying the first half of Tom Baker’s stretch I’m not familiar enough with all of Doctor Who to argue with him. Not that I feel compelled to because to be honest he’s probably right: it probably isn’t ever stated that the Doctor’s not human. But so what? Does that mean Moffat has to write a story (or stories) addressing the issue?

Is it not enough that Time Lords and humans are presented as different species and that the Doctor has always been identified as a Time Lord? Probably not, knowing Moffat. The comment seems to hint (or is at least designed to hint) at Moffat gearing up to present Time Lords as future humans. Which is about the most fanficish story he could go with. I’m reliably informed it was a passé idea in fan circles during the eighties and it’s notable that even when the BBC Books line (which had descended into an awful sort of official fanfic itself by this point) went with the idea they saw the error of their ways pretty sharpish.

The thing is that having Time Lords presented as future humans is something that could be presented as A Big Shock Twist™, quite possibly the Big Shock Twist™ he’s mentioned for series nine’s penultimate cliffhanger. If there’s one thing that can be said for Moffat’s approach to writing and running the series it’s that he has a proclivity towards Big Shock Twists™. I’m not against them in principle. They can work if they’re properly prepared for and people are encouraged to care about the plots and characters involved. But nothing about Moffat’s four years in charge indicates that he understands how to make people care. He just understands how to make people anticipate a revelation, and there’s a massive difference.

Oh, and he also wrote “Fandom, to your work.” Because he’s a twat.

The Fiftieth

Like most people interested in the show (for some reason I can’t bring myself to write “fans” – I’ve no idea why) I watched the fiftieth anniversary episode of Doctor Who on its original November 23^rd airing. Something that struck me as odd then and still strikes me as odd now is the time at which it aired. Starting at ten to eight meant that the anniversary episode didn’t finish until gone nine o’clock. This has nothing to do with anything, up to and including my thoughts on the episode, but I wanted to make note of it because it felt strange to have an episode of Doctor Who finishing after the watershed. It’s an odd decision given the age group they’re targeting. Then again I’m not a parent so perhaps kids are up until gone nine as a matter of course these days.

I watched the episode from start to finish and, to be honest, didn’t really think much of it. It was okay, certainly a lot better than the average episode that’s been produced under the reign of the Über Moff, but then most of them have been pretty bad so that’s not saying a great deal. I was a little surprised at how light the central plot was, how little the Zygons actually had to do, and how the secondary human-Zygon negotiation plot was completely dropped and not paid off at all. I was downright perplexed that an episode marketed as an anniversary episode was so light on nods to the past. A programme with fifty years of TV episodes, books, comics, audio dramas and various other tie-ins and spin-offs to call on should have had no trouble featuring such touches. The average RTD era episode featured more mentions of the past than The Day of the Doctor. Even if Steven Moffat doesn’t like continuity references surely he should understand that this episode, more than any other previously written demanded them?

Did I say Moffat doesn’t like continuity references? I did, yes. I think I should clarify that. He’s far more interested in referencing his own stuff than the work of anyone else. Just look at River Song. She’s less a character and more a string of increasingly drab reveals. The Silents received similar, albeit more subdued, treatment. And I think it’s telling that the Weeping Angels notched up more proper adventures and cameos against Matt Smith’s Doctor than the Daleks. It could, if you were generous, be said that it’s his style of writing. To an extent I’d agree, but not enough to excuse the approach completely. Basically Moffat is more interested in playing in his own corner of the Doctor Who Universe than in revelling in it as a whole and that hurt the anniversary episode’s ability to be seen as something celebrating five decades of a varied, imaginative and creative programme. If ever there were a time for a writer to embrace the entirety of the show’s history that episode was it.

But let’s get back to my viewing experience.  When the show first came back I had a habit of watching every episode for a second time immediately after its original airing. That’s a habit I was still in by the time Matt Smith’s first series started. I’d dropped it by the end of that run. There are still a few Matt Smith episodes I’ve only seen once: the gangers two parter, the Narnia one and most of the second half of series seven spring immediately to mind. I’ve watched every episode of the Tennant and Eccleston eras at least twice each, in most cases more. I bring this up to illustrate how Moffat has, fairly speedily, blunted my enthusiasm for the show.

That said I have generally given “important” episodes a second look in the days following their original broadcast. A Good Man Goes To War, for example. That’s “important” not because it’s a good episode (although it’s probably among the best of the Moff era) but because it features so many of Moffat’s tedious revelations that a second look helps to assimilate it all and give you a chance to hunt for a plot, a hunt which usually disappoints. Episode where Moffat is clearly dropping in big bits of continuity to pick up again later are the sorts of things I’m thinking of when I say “important”. Notice that plot doesn’t come into it. I’ll get back to this momentarily.

The Day of the Doctor is the sort of episode (“important”, basically) I would have watched again on the Sunday if I’d had the option. But I didn’t: the DVR had malfunctioned and not recorded. I’d paid enough attention and formed enough of an opinion on the plot to write a blog post about it at the time but I never got around to it. The enthusiasm just wasn’t there and as the weeks went by it became harder and harder to bring myself to write about the episode. Eventually I decided I’d get it on DVD, watch it again to refresh my memory and write about it then. I ended up getting it for Christmas and watching it on Boxing Day.

Watching the episode again for a second time with a not insubstantial gap since my first viewing made something immediately clear, something I wouldn’t have been able to pick up on after just one viewing. Watching TDOTD for a second time knowing what all the twists and revelations were and when they were coming made the episode boring to watch. All the big shocks only contribute anything to the episode on a first watch, the red herrings and false leads mean nothing when you sit through them again. Revelations only work once, a good plot will last forever. Once you get passed the War Doctor’s true identity and nature, Billie Piper’s purpose in the story, why the statues have been smashed, why paintings that are “a slice of time” have been introduced, and, the big one, Gallifrey being brought back, all you’re left with is Tennant and Smith’s bickering, the needless tale of why Elizabeth I considered the Tenth Doctor and enemy, and the Time War (something else that never needed to be shown. Honestly, the thing that impressed me the most is that they made one bloke in a Zygon suit into a convincing squadron. That’s not glowing praise for an episode of this magnitude is it?

Chris Eccleston. It’s a real shame he didn’t want to come back and do the episode. He and his Doctor have a lot of fans (I feel fine using the word here) that would have greatly enjoyed seeing him back. It would have been nice to see the man who made it possible for Tennant, Smith and Capaldi to take on the role involved. It’s obvious to anyone how the plot would have differed had Eccleston said yes, and it clearly would have been preferable to the “secret Doctor” nonsense that was concocted to get around his lack of interest. But as clever (“tricksy” would probably be a better word) as Moff’s solution was, it wasn’t necessary. Nobody had told him he had to have three Doctors involved in the episode. He could just as easily have strung together the same non-plot with just Doctors Ten and Eleven. Why he didn’t I couldn’t even begin to guess. It seemed obvious to me from the start than Eccleston was going to say no to an appearance. He’s that sort of fella.

A final thought: if the Doctor didn’t remember freezing Gallifrey in a slice of pocket universe (or whatever) until towards the end of his life as the Matt Smith Doctor (phrasing chosen to avoid confusion) how and why was it that every previous incarnation turned up to help accomplish the feat? They shouldn’t have known about the Time War, let alone about shunting Gallifrey out of existence.

Thanks, Moff. Another bungled offering!

A Song Too Far

Last Saturday's episode of Doctor Who has been described by some as the worst episode of the show ever. I should clarify that by “ever” I’m pretty sure most of these people will mean “since the 2005 relaunch”. I don't think anyone could sit through both The Rings of Akhaten and, say, The Visitation and then say that the Peter Davison story is the better piece of television, no matter what favourable criteria are used.

I don't think it's the worst episode since 2005. I don't even think it's the worst episode produced under Moffat (that would be charmless lump The Curse of the Black Spot). TROA managed to give us some nice sets and prosthetics to look at and it wasn't badly directed, so it can't be wholly without merit. Of course all the nice looks in the world can't make up for an absence of plot and, judging by the outcry, The Rings of Akhaten is the episode that finally made a lot of viewers realise that.

One of the most irritating aspects of the show was the singing. Endless, needless, embarrassing singing. From the moment that aspect was first introduced to the plot I knew I wasn't going to enjoy the rest of the episode. And I’d really wanted to enjoy it. Based on a preview I'd read in Doctor Who Magazine (yeah I buy DWM, deal with it) I'd thought Rings was a contender to be one of my favourites of the Moffat Era. Not that that's great praise or anything because I felt his first series was a let-down and it's been all downhill from there.

The Rings of Akhaten felt like it could redeem him a little. A story about an ancient, hungry god being awakened that features a little girl enigmatically referred to as The Queen of Years? It sounded very promising.

Singing aside there just wasn't anything going on. Or rather there were lots of minor, uninteresting things going on which we were given no reason to care about nor try to make sense of. If any episode of the last eight years proves the point about budgets that I made last week this was it. The show culminated with a god we were told was bad being defeated by people singing at a leaf. It struck me as an insulting, forced-feel good ending tacked on by writer Neil Cross simply because that's what he thinks Doctor Who writers do.

Which leads me to another problem of the current Era (one that has nothing to do with budgets): Moffat does not seem to involve himself in the scripts of others as much as he should. Having read The Writer's Tale, a series of email exchanges between Russell T Davies and Ben Cook (a journalist from the aforementioned DWM), I know how heavily involved RTD got when it came to rewrites. Moffat's predecessor approached the job like it was a cross between a lead writer position and the sort of script editor Robert Holmes and Terrance Dicks were for the show (as opposed to the sort of script editor Helen Rayner and Gareth Roberts were for the show). Based on the five years of the show he produced that strikes me as the correct approach. He didn't always get things right or produce scintillating episodes but he did a better job on a more consistent basis than Steven Moffat.

The current showrunner has stated on several occasions that for the episodes he writes he'll do two drafts. That indicates that he's not going to spend a massive amount of time on the work of others. Having a lead writer and final draft editor who isn't particularly interested in doing the work necessary to make the show the best it can be (which, in RTD's case at least, meant rewriting as much as ninety per cent of a less than great script) had to have been a large contributing factor in last Saturday's Who-by-numbers approach. 

Moffat is well qualified to write Doctor Who. He does it very well, as evidenced by the acclaim heaped on him for the episodes he wrote before he took over. He's not a man well suited to running the show though. An inability to come up with new ideas, preferring to retread old ones, and a seeming disinterest in tightening things up to make the best programme possible is evidence of that.

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.