Who Goes There

Yesterday turned out to be a doubly interesting day for Doctor Who. Not only did the latest run of episodes start on the BBC (including BBC America), a publishing glitch led to the hasty announcement that the show's 50th anniversary story in November would feature at least one past Doctor in the form of David Tennant. The March 30th timing of that news was amusing because it marked eight years since another hasty BBC announcement involving the show's casting - that Christopher Eccleston would be leaving the role which was followed immediately by talk that David Tennant was the favorite to succeed him.

That 2005 announcement turns out to have been a turning point in the show's history, in many ways directly responsible for both of yesterday's main events. The casting of Tennant coupled with the BBC committing to two full series all but guaranteed Doctor Who would be on TV for new stories when its 50th anniversary came around, making it highly appropriate that Tennant should be a part of the upcoming celebratory story. At the same time, the BBC's decision - after years of ambivalence - to embrace Doctor Who not just as a regular part of its lineup but also a key commercial brand largely marked the end of 21st century Doctor Who as an attempt at melding serious drama with crowd-pleasing spectacle.

Instead the balance shifted - gradually at first then accelerating as Tennant gave way to Matt Smith - almost entirely to the spectacle with the dramatic underpinnings becoming simultaneously flimsier and more overdone, however enjoyable the results turned out to be, which leads to last night's episode. The Bells of St. John was certainly fun and clever in many ways and included some well-executed nods to the show's history. In those respects it was far better than each of the two stories - both written by Steven Moffat - that preceded it.

Being neither fun nor clever, Angels in Manhattan came across mainly as a live-action marketing brochure for Doctor Who's renewed fandom in America. The only truly distinctive element was its attempt to manipulate viewers' emotions without any real dramatic foundation, expecting us to accept that the man who's coped with the deaths of numerous friends over hundreds of years is suddenly devastated by his separation from a couple of relatively recent additions to his life that he knows pretty much lived happily ever after.

The Snowmen was a better story, but it was dragged down by the pointlessly dour portrayal of The Doctor and the return of the Sontaran Strax. Though Strax was intended, as comic relief, it still brought to mind the mid-80s approach to continuity where a lot of potentially good Doctor Who stories were undercut by having established monsters and villains grafted on to them for no good reason.

In contrast, the references to past stories in The Bells of St. John fit perfectly. It's tempting to suggest that it harkens back to the Christopher Eccleston season, but I'm reluctant to go that far. There are good signs that Steven Moffat is approaching the mystery of new companion Clara in a way will be worth watching for the payoff, but his tenure to date as head-writer makes it seem equally likely that he'll fall back on his normal bag-of-tricks, which are already providing diminishing results.

However, for all my reservations, the fact remains that Steven Moffat is probably the best writer in the show's long history, better even than old-school fan-favorite Robert Holmes, another Doctor Who writer who also deployed an established bag of tricks with varying results. Like Moffat, Holmes was a writer who could take many of the same plot elements and in two different stories create both one of the show's dramatic triumphs (The Caves of Androzani) and its most ridiculous (The Power of Kroll). In a similar fashion, it will be interesting to see which Steven Moffat shows up over the rest of the year.