Period Drama

The Crimson Horror. It had to be a period piece really didn’t it?

Despite having written the third largest number of stories since Doctor Who’s revival, behind Steven Moffat and Russell T Davies (obvs) Mark Gatiss is not the show’s most reliable writer. Both The Unquiet Dead and The Idiots’ Lantern are amongst the dreariest offerings of their respective seasons. Utterly unambitious and happy to be mostly forgettable tales.

Victory of the Daleks feels like it should be a lot more special than it actually is (and is remembered mainly for the poorly judged Dalek redesigns). Night Terrors… well, isn’t too bad by the standards of the Moffat Era, but that’s not saying a great deal. It gets a little boring after Gatiss has run through all the clever tricks he can think of though. Which doesn’t take long.

Cold War I’ve discussed here. Suffice to say I didn’t think it was particularly riveting.

In short, he’s not built up a glowing track record for himself. He’s become known as a writer who gets brought in to deliver a script on time and to budget. He also has a habit of producing scripts that feel like they’d fit snugly into the Jon Pertwee era with just a few minor tweaks. There’s nothing wrong with Pertwee’s Doctor or the bulk of his stories but it’s not what writers should be striving for in 2005 and beyond, is it?

What I’m building to here is that despite his reputation as being little more than a safe pair of hands with a fixation on the first half of the 1970s and a distinct lack of scintillating Who credits to his name Gatiss managed to turn out one of the best episodes of the current series. The Crimson Horror was watchable. That’s not something that can be said about much of series seven.

Things were kept moving, there was a villain to be opposed and a mystery to be solved. These things are all too often missing from the show these days, leaving the regulars and whatever major guests are appearing to drift from one scene to the next gabbling quips at one another in a desperate attempt to fool people into thinking something, anything, is happening.

This is not to say it was perfect. The sentimentality of the mother and daughter relationship was laid on very thick. As was Diana Riggs’ accent. If she was going for comedy Northerner she nailed it. If she was going for anything else (and she should have been) she was way off the mark. Madam Vastra and her comedy menagerie were back. They’ve not been involved in anything worthwhile yet and I don’t expect that to ever change.

The name of Mr Sweet was pretty ridiculous too. That’s a minor quibble I know, but when you’ve got to hear a name said so many times throughout an episode it shouldn’t make you think of a paedophilic clown. Not that there are any paedophilic clowns called Mr Sweet (that I know of), but it’s the image that the name conjured up. Perhaps that says more about me.

The real gem was Matt Smith’s Red Skin Acting. It was his ropiest performance since taking the part. How nobody in a position of authority saw the rushes and demanded retakes that were more convincing is beyond me. It was an offensively hammy performance.

But, y’know, I still don’t think it was a totally bad episode. Which says more about the quality of the current run than the quality of this particular episode. I feel like I’ve said that before.

Wibbly Wobbly Whiney Time

The phrase "timey wimey" annoys me. When it originally appeared in Blink it was used as a means to add humour to the (plot-necessitated) explanation that things don't always happen in the right order for a time traveller. Which was fine. It made sense within the context of the episode and wasn't made out to be some iconic line. David Tennant delivered it perfectly.

It's what the phrase has morphed into in the years since then that I dislike. It pops up far too often in the show, almost always in totally different contexts to its original (perfectly satisfactory) one. Take Matt Smith's debut episode as an example. Upon examining the crack in Amy's bedroom wall he muses to himself "Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey. We know what the crack is." It means nothing within the context of the episode. It seems a peculiar thing for the Doctor to choose to say. Unless he's aware of the popularity of Blink, and that doesn't seem likely. 

It's used completely unironically in reviews and on blogs (just do a Google search for the phrase to see what I mean). It's no longer used as a funny bit of technobabble to acknowledge that sometimes things happen out of sequence. It's been transformed into a shorthand for allegedly clever time travel plots and a way for people to describe them to show they understand them (no great achievement frankly).

It's the latter use of the phrase that I object to more. Not because I think the phrase should be held sacred as a piece of Doctor Who lore or because it worked so well as a piece of technobabble but because it implies that Steven Moffat's time travel obsessed scripts are the work of a genius who is the master of this sort of thing. And he's not that. He's very far from that.

You can look at a film as simple (and as good) as the original Back to the Future for time travel fiction better than Moffat's. I know the man himself has looked back at that film because its referenced in a number of his Doctor Who episodes, most obviously Blink with the letter delivery scene towards the start. BTTF is a good film and a large part of it is about the idea of time travel. But that's not what makes it good. The writing does that. The style over substance approach Moffat has increasingly taken since Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead shows that good writing is needed far more than quirky ideas that any half-decent writer could pen.

Moffat's use of time travel is not a shining example of quality. It's just doing the same trick continuously and in a high profile, Saturday evening setting. He's made a name for himself as being perfectly reasonable at constructing that sort of story. He's done nothing that people before him haven't done, nor bettered existing techniques.

If you want good time travel stories check out Back to the Future or 12 Monkeys or The Restaurant at the End of the Universe or Terminator. Groundhog Day could arguably be included on that list too. Even Hot Tub Time Machine exhibits more charm than the average Moff script. Within Doctor Who go back to the 1979 run and watch City of Death. That uses the TARDIS's ability to move through time as a central conceit in a far more engaging fashion than the current showrunner ever does. And it did it decades before the phrase timey wimey entered public consciousness.

The Unconventional Companions

Steven Moffat seems to have something against traditional companions. It’s not enough to introduce a new girl and have the Doctor invite her to travel with him because he gets lonely by himself. Moffat’s companions have to have something extra. They have to have a mystery attached to them.

This habit first became apparent with River Song. She knew the Doctor’s future and the Doctor’s name. The Doctor cryptically stated that there was only one time he could reveal his name to someone. This was designed to let viewers know that River was someone incredibly important to the Doctor’s future. It was done in a ham-fisted manner but it was at least something new: a companion who meets the Doctor out of sequence. That that vaguely interesting idea was tangled up with what appeared to be Steven Moffat’s teenage fantasy was a drawback but there was hope River would progress into something interesting.

She didn’t, of course. She predictably became the Doctor’s wife (though not in the episode of that title, that would be too simple) and failed to be written into any episodes that use of her non-chronological interactions with the Doctor for anything other than allegedly scintillating and-or hilarious intro sequences capped off with the words “Hello, sweetie”. The potential was there but Moffat blew it.

To clarify I’m not saying that River could have been the best companion ever or that giving the Doctor a time travelling wife is the greatest idea ever. If the concept became overused (and it could be argued that it has been already) then it would be just as boring as everything else in Moffat’s bag of tricks. My point is that had she been used in a more creative fashion River Song could have been involved in some innovative and memorable episodes of Doctor Who.

Following River was Amy. She was never characterised terribly well but Moffat did at least make a few token tries at the start of her time on the show. Her defining attribute was intended (I think) to be her undying love for Rory. Unfortunately Karen Gillan played the role with such an air of icy pomposity that this never came across. We were told about how she and Rory loved each other but never had any reason to believe it.

Waiting outside a box for two thousand years doesn’t show love. It shows an incredibly needy human being (or Auton replica). No wonder Amy walked all over Rory and tried to cop off with the Doctor mere hours after getting married.

Moffat’s attempts at giving Amy a history didn’t really succeed because he was more interested in furthering the crack-in-the-wall plot. That’s the main problem with Amy. She was written to be the focal point of a hazily defined story arc about time collapsing rather than a character in her own right. Her second series saw her involved in a similar plot: witnessing the death of the Doctor. She got to stick around for that because Moffat required a companion with an established rapport with the Doctor. Not because audiences had warmed to her or because she’d established a particularly good on-screen connections with Matt Smith, but because she already had the job.

By all appearances this trend is continuing with Clara. She is not a character in her own right, she’s in the show to be a part of an ongoing mystery for the Doctor to solve. Moffat’s not even made the token attempts to give her a backstory that he did for Amy. She’s four episodes in (as a regular character, six if you count her guest appearances) and we know nothing about her beyond the fact that she worked as a nanny and has somehow become splintered across time.

This approach is problematic mostly because it doesn’t give us a reason to care about the characters. The Doctor’s a wacky boffin with a short attention span and a love of the word “Geronimo” and Clara is a vacant, pretty-faced riddle who snarks her way through adventures without exhibiting any awe or wonder at what she’s seeing. It’s not that Moffat’s writing things too complex to be followed, it’s that it’s not worth following what he’s writing because the characters don’t deserve it.

The man himself has stated in interviews that everything regarding Clara’s nature will be revealed by the end of the season. That’s a mercy. Hopefully we can take this as evidence that he’s learned not to carry these things on for years (see River Song) because nobody beyond the superfans (those people he’s adamant the show shouldn’t be aimed at) cares enough to follow all his clues.

I want the next new companion to be more character than gimmick. At this rate the only way I’m going to care about Clara is if she’s revealed to be a Jagaroth.

Ice Time

I'm not going to lay into Cold War too much. It may have been a dull episode but that hardly makes it stand out considering the direction Doctor Who’s been travelling in over the last couple of years. It also felt like this was a cheap episode, designed to take place on a finite number of sets and cost as little money as possible. That may be cause to grant it a little leeway. The cheapness would explain the lower than average number of effects shots and the single Ice Warrior outfit. Gems like The Rings of Akhaten have to be paid for somehow.

Perhaps there only being one Ice Warrior knocking about was for the best, considering it was one of the weakest aspects of the episode. The design was the let-down. Previously when monsters have returned from "the classic series" they've done so with an updated look that's influenced by the past but is designed to work for a modern audience (and sell some toys).

The Sontarans are a good example here. With them the production team took a few bullet points. They're short, they're a clone race, they're warriors, and apparently RTD said their armour should be reminiscent of stone so they stood out from races that had been used in previous seasons. The race was successfully recreated for a 2000s audience, melding the credible with what had gone before. The outfit we saw in Cold War may as well have been an original. It was that similar and uninspiring.

I admit that’s partly a personal taste thing. I'm sure there were some kids watching who are now convinced the Ice Warriors are the greatest Doctor Who monsters ever (they won’t amount to anything but they exist). But for that effect to be achieved only one suit was needed. More would have been a waste.

I'm less convinced anyone watching thought the unmasked Ice Warrior was a triumph. That looked like what it was: some shonky CG work based on a generic design. There were more interesting-looking aliens on offer as background extras in The Rings of Akhaten. For that matter there were more interesting-looking aliens on offer as background extras in The End of the World.

I'd say the production team didn't need to show an unmasked Ice Warrior but of course they did. It had never been done before. That alone is reason (or excuse, take your pick) enough to do something in their eyes. It seems that the question of whether something is necessary or can be successfully achieved never comes up over at BBC Wales.

Also, it was written by Mark Gatiss. In the DWM preview of the episode he waxed lyrical about the lore of the race and wanting to show more of their history. He also said he wants to explore them in further episodes, so he's clearly hoping that suit gets another outing. He was always going to want to be the man to show an unmasked Ice Warrior. This is what the less disciplined fanboys working on the show (Gatiss and Nick Briggs for the most part) do. Someone would've done it eventually, so why not him?

The reason to that is that the production team supporting him didn't have enough time to do a good enough job. Or simply that they couldn't be bothered to. Or that he himself had no clue what he wanted to see so left it to the design team, who didn't understand the added “importance" of what they were working on.

Cold War was the best episode of the second half of the series so far. But considering it opened with an urban thriller that forget to thrill and continued with a large amount of cash smeared smugly onto our screens with no story to back it up that's not saying much. Not even the efforts of Gaiman and whatever Moffat’s cooked up for the Grand Finale™ can save this run now.

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.

Ten in Fifty

Two hours before Doctor Who returned to TV yesterday the BBC announced that David Tennant and Billie Piper would be guest stars for the official fiftieth anniversary episode. Filming on that starts this week and will air some time towards the end of the year, most likely in the latter half of November. The casting is A Good Thing in that it will see the return of arguably the most popular, and certainly most successful, actor to ever play the part.

The timing seemed off though. When you’re two hours away from launching what is essentially a new series (technically it’s a continuation of the one that started last autumn) the last thing you should be doing is running the risk of upstaging your leading man. Tennant coming back to the part of the Tenth Doctor definitely does that.

I can understand the timing of the decision. Having the announcement of Doctor Ten’s return coincide with the airing of the first new episode of 2013, the fiftieth anniversary year, makes sense. But was there a need to make that announcement before it aired?

I think it would have been better to tack the announcement on to the end of the episode, after or instead of the next time trailer. Filming may not have started but some sort of visual teaser could’ve been cobbled together from the more than ample amount of existing footage of Tennant and Piper in the show. Even a simple announcement would have been fine. That would have insured the news reached more Who viewers, the only people even remotely interested in this news, than something being released at four in the afternoon and would have avoided upstaging Matt Smith’s performance and the (proper) introduction of Jenna-Louise Coleman as the new and instantly generic companion.

Like I say, the move to bring back Tennant is A Good Thing. It’s going to create the feeling of event television that most people seem to think is necessary for the official anniversary episode. That feeling is never going to be adequately met but Tennant’s involvement will get the production team closer than they’d come otherwise. The other option they had, bunging all the major villains into a single hair raising tale, was already frittered away on The Pandorica Opens, Moffat’s first dire attempt at an all-singing, all-dancing season finale.

Realistically it’s hard to imagine what Tennant and Piper are going to be given to do. A few in-jokes from Rose about having witnessed regeneration before and some sniping about “the new model” from the Tenth Doctor seem like a safe bet. But if we want that sort of thing all we have to do is jam The Three Doctors into our DVDs players. Every other multi-Doctor story since has just been a riff on that flimsy theme.

Is there a plot out there that could necessitate a multi-Doctor story, or at least make it funny or give it a fresh spin? Absolutely. But based on his current body of Who work I do not think Steven Moffat, familiar bag of tricks and all, is the man to give it to us.