Doctor Who and the Terror of Success

Perhaps it's a function of the social media era, but in many ways the ten years of Doctor Who since its 2005 return have been perhaps the most contentious of the show's entire history. For all the discussion the show generates, though, the return itself is often seems consigned to the periphery. While fans have noted various ten year anniversaries in recent months, such as the premiere of Rose or the debut of John Barrowman as Captain Jack, overall the first "new" season with Christopher Eccleston doesn't seem to get quite the same fan appreciation as more recent ones.

This tendency has always struck me as odd, because a decade after its premiere the 2005 season remains a high-point - arguably THE high-point - of the show's 21st century revival. This feeling crystallized for me a few years back when I tuned into a repeat showing of Eccleston's final episode on BBC America. Though I'd seen it numerous times and don't even think it's that season's best story, it symbolizes the excitement of the show's return for me like almost nothing that's come since.

As much as I've enjoyed Eccleston's successors, there's still something about that single season with him as the Doctor that continues to strike a deeper chord for me. Some of it is certainly Eccleston's portrayal - the way he perfectly conveyed the sense of an alien whose sense of human values was as deeply felt as it was slightly off from ours, but ultimately it's about the attitude driving it, especially that of head-writer Russell T. Davies. Though Davies continued to write (and foster the writing of) some excellent episodes, there was a sense of urgency to this season that they never quite recaptured.

In those first 13 episodes, the production team, especially Davies and his group of fans-turned-professional writers, seemed eager to prove that the television icon of their youth could still appeal to a wide audience in the 21st century. As Davies observed in the liner notes for the DVD release, "it was really the thought of creating something new, and getting new viewers, young viewers, which drove on that team."

The good news, as the BBC's decision to commission additional seasons almost immediately after the premiere indicated, was that they succeeded well beyond expectations. On the flip-side, as Davies' team had to make the transition from a go-for-broke exercise in defying expectations to an ongoing franchise, some of that initial verve seemed to dissipate. While they still delivered some great stories, there was also a sense of the flexible format turning into formula, a feeling compounded by the overuse of the Daleks and a string of un-involving stories pairing the Doctor with characters from history books.

It was a great paradox, far more mind-bending than anything in a Steven Moffat script. The team who fearlessly reinvented Doctor Who in a valiant effort to prove that mainstream TV drama could be bold as well as entertaining now seemed to be motivated by fear of alienating the mass audience that had embraced their initial approach so readily. It was as if they had been prepared to face any outcome except massive success, and by the end of David Tennant's and Russell T. Davies' run the show's production team seemed to trust their audience less and less to accept more challenging storylines. The practical result was an increasing number of stories came across as if all they felt they needed to do was come up with an earthshaking premise, usually involving the return of old friends and/or enemies, and didn't have to worry about the story all that much. Despite some renewed spark and a desire to push the bounds of serialized storytelling on Doctor Who, the Moffat/Smith era often fell into that same trap, even as the show's popularity spiked.

Not wishing to be a complete curmudgeon, I'll be the first to admit that, even during subpar stories, there were great compelling character moments to be had. Scenes like the Doctor's heartbreaking goodbye to Donna in Journey's End and virtually every onscreen moment shared by the Doctor and Bernard Cribbins as Wilfred in The End of Time were beautifully written and performed, but they seemed increasingly at odds with increasingly more frustrating plot-lines. Here again, this pattern was often repeated during Smith's tenure, and - despite being optimistic on balance - the jury is still out on the tandem of Moffat and Capaldi. 

Of course, none of that matters watching The Parting of the Ways. Whenever I see it, I remember how exciting it was to have the show I'd loved for so many back after so many years and in many ways better than ever, with Christopher Eccleston's Doctor being exactly the one I wanted even if I never could have imagined him in the role before I read about the casting. And if Doctor Who has failed to be quite so revolutionary in subsequent seasons, it diminishes neither the quality nor the value of the special set of episodes that guaranteed its future.

Every Doctor Has Their Day

Based on his writing for television, one imagines that Steven Moffat's enjoys puzzles in whatever spare time his professional commitments allow. On the sitcom Coupling, Moffat showed a great affinity for making seemingly disparate pieces come together into a satisfying whole, often by playing around with time. Not surprisingly, this approach has been even more thoroughly explored in his writing for Doctor Who.

Following his relatively straightforward first story* with the "empty child", Moffat has taken the time travel aspect of the show and run with it like no other writer in Doctor Who's 50 year history. From his first script for David Tennant's Doctor to the overarching story-lines of his time as the show's lead writer, time has been a key element of the narrative puzzles he's assembled. This was true even of the 2007 mini-episode "Time Crash", produced for the BBC's Children in Need charity event, which presented a brief interlude with David Tennant's Doctor and his 1980s predecessor, Peter Davison.

In some ways that brief vignette was good practice for yesterday's special episode for the show's 50th anniversary, "Day of the Doctor". Having the current Doctor meet his former selves was done to mark both the 10th and 20th anniversaries of the show and, despite the show not being on TV at the time, the 30th and 40th as well^. This precedent of celebrating the past in a way virtually no other show can added a particularly tricky piece to the puzzle, because while these stories had their moments none could be classified as Doctor Who's finest hour. 

Following an uneven run of stories that culminated in "The Name of the Doctor", I had my doubts as to how well Moffat would succeed at crafting a puzzle whose pieces included...

-celebrating Doctor Who's past in a way longtime fans would appreciate but didn't require decades worth of background knowledge for everyone else to enjoy.

-displaying the fun parts of multi-Doctor stories without succumbing to the pitfalls that made previous ones less than great.

-fostering optimism about a 60th anniversary (and beyond).

My doubts gave way to anticipation a little over a week before "Day of the Doctor" aired, thanks to one of two prequels that had been announced for the story. What made "Night of the Doctor" so good was not that it gave longtime fans like myself what we wanted, particularly a return appearance as the Doctor by Paul McGann, but rather that it did so in unexpected ways. In a little under seven minutes, Moffat managed to subvert our assumptions about some key elements of the show's mythology while also telling a sharply written story about gut-wrenching choices. It also helped explain how John Hurt as the mysterious "War Doctor" fits into the larger story.

The idea of a missing incarnation seemed to annoy a lot of hardcore fans, especially when it was announced that none of the show's pre-2005 Doctors would be in the anniversary episode. Despite three of those actors being dead and none of the others except McGann looking like they did when they were the current Doctor, an awful lot of "fans" seem to have prejudged the story as a disappointment solely based on Tennant being the only established past Doctor in it. This is amusing in retrospect because it was having John Hurt as this newly revealed Doctor that made the multi-Doctor element work in a way that I can't envision any of Tennant's and Smith's predecessors doing. 

Because he represented a shadowy period in the Doctor's story before the one that started with Christopher Eccleston's Doctor in "Rose", Hurt was able to embody the Doctor's entire past. On the one hand, his jabs at Tennant and Smith harkened back to William Hartnell putting his successors in line in "The Three Doctors", but he also personified the tension between who the Doctor was and who he's become. More to the point, having an actor of Hurt's calibre seemed to push Tennant and especially Smith out of their comfort zones. The end result is that a story that could have been an overblown mess feels believable on a character level, which enabled me to enjoy the icing on the cake all the more.

Admittedly, not all of the icing was to my taste. The war scenes on Gallifrey felt a bit too "Star Wars" for my liking, presumably intended to give more 3-D bang for the buck (or rather quid), but the return of the Zygons and seeing UNIT led by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart was great fun, as were other nods to the past like a return to the scene of the very first episode. Needless to say, it was also fantastic to see that the line about no pre-2005 Doctors appearing wasn't quite true either, and seeing a glimpse of incoming Doctor Peter Capaldi was a terrific touch. And then there's an element that's simply beyond objective assessment for a fan of my generation, Tom Baker.

Baker declined to appear in the 20th anniversary story "The Five Doctors", in which he was only seen in footage from an unfinished story by Douglas Adams. Coming just two years after the end of his seven year run as the Doctor, that decision wasn't surprising, though, Baker later said he regretted it and in recent years seems to have re-embraced Doctor Who. Seeing him as the museum curator who may or may not be another version of the Doctor may not have made total sense but here again on the level of character it worked, providing that elusive piece of the puzzle whose final form looks even cooler than I imagined.

*Technically, Moffat's first script for Doctor Who was a 1999 charity sketch called "The Curse of the Fatal Death" starring Rowan Atkinson as the Doctor and Jonathan Pryce as the Master. Like all the best parodies, it also worked as a good example of the thing it was spoofing.

^There a lot I could write about both the 1993 Doctor Who/Eastenders crossover "Dimensions in Time" and the audio drama "Zagreus", but I'll leave it at saying that both were done in good spirit but neither is especially good.

What's In a Name, Doctor?

After watching last night's season finale of Doctor Who, coyly titled The Name of the Doctor, there can be no doubt that Steven Moffat is the most amazing writer working in television. In case that sounds like hyperbole, it seems appropriate to point out that I used to think he was the best writer in television, but the past couple of seasons on Doctor Who have forced me to adjust my view somewhat. 

What makes Steven Moffat so amazing, at least as far as his recent work for Doctor Who, is that he has so many great ideas. Unfortunately, he also has a great many awful ideas. Moreover, because he has no apparent ability or desire to discern between the great and terrible, both end up on screen.

Last night offered the same mix of really great moments and things that made me groan. Thankfully, the episode started off with one of the former, a love letter to the show's 50 year history, before veering into silliness involving a spatio-temporal psychic conference call. Perhaps no other element of Steven Moffat's tenure as the show's head writer embodies his Jekyll and Hyde nature as the character of River Song, and her return displayed both sides of the coin. Having a character whose meetings with the Doctor are out of order was a perfect idea for Doctor Who, and her appearance in The Name of the Doctor fits very well conceptually. However, the romantic angle with her and the Doctor has been so overplayed that most of their scenes come across like a demented take on the manic-pixie-dream-girl scenario and undercut what should be key dramatic moments.

Likewise, Moffat's other supporting characters have quickly worn out their welcome. When Madame Vastra and her partner Jennie were introduced, the characters felt novel, but their subsequent appearances have just been bland. On the plus side, though, they're not as annoying as Strax. A Sontaran medic who owes an immense debt to the Doctor was a great idea - for a single appearance. I was tired of him after last year's Christmas episode, and neither of the two subsequent experiences has endeared him to me any further. There was a time when recurring characters were something to look forward to, but we're a long way from Jack Harkness, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart or even Sabalom Glitz. 

Underlying all this, though, are a pair of abiding truths that I believe are applicable to all fans of Doctor Who - at least those of my generation. We're as hopeful as we are masochistic. As often as we're disappointed by the show, we keep watching in the hope that things will get better. The advantage of a program built on constant change is that that's never a false hope. For all my frustrations about last night's episode, it would be churlish of me to deny that I'm looking forward to the next one. Somehow, even after all the years where it seemed like Doctor Who would never return to television, the six months between now and the special episode to mark the show's 50th birthday seem exceptionally long.

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.

A Member of the Wedding (of River Song)

It felt fitting that I watched the current series finale of Doctor Who on the same flight back from London where I watched The Hangover Part 2. Both involved weddings and told their story by shifting around in time. More significantly, they both resolved their stories using an answer hidden in plain sight.

I'm on the fence about whether the second Hangover movie is better (i.e. funnier) than the first, but The Wedding of River Song was the best episode of Doctor Who this season, more so even than the episode written by Neil Gaiman's whose appeal was based as much on being a love letter to Doctor Who as being a strong Doctor Who story in its own right. After a season full of disappointments, with good ideas colliding haphazardly with some truly awful ones, I have to give Steven Moffat credit. Though some specifics of the season-long story-line's resolution left me cold, the overall episode was a satisfying conclusion. More than that, it also felt like a nice reboot of the show paving the way for what I hope will be a slightly different (and less overblown) take on my favorite Time Lord, getting back to the things I liked about Matt Smith's portrayal in his earliest episodes.

It probably sounds odd considering the storyline has been running the whole season, but I think this finale would have benefited from being a two-parter or at least closer to an hour as in some earlier seasons. The temporally amalgamated Earth we see looked really fascinating and it would have been cool to explore it more. This could have helped better establish the threat to Earth (and time itself) rather than having it be the abstract dilemma it was portrayed as. In fairness, though, that's a minor qualm because the dilemma and danger for the Doctor himself did come across nicely as did the Doctor's way of getting around it.

My hope earlier in the season was that all the seemingly disparate elements were leading up to something satisfying and overall it turned out they were. My hope for the next season is that head-writer Steven Moffat will find a way to balance his grasp of Doctor Who's conventions, his love of twisted time structures and solid storytelling more effectively over the course of an entire season. He'll have a hard time topping The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, but I'd love to see him get there.

Who Done It (But Not All That Well)

As with the first half of this season of Doctor Who, I wanted to withhold judgment on the second half until a couple episodes into things. Unfortunately, neither story so far has shaken my feeling that this is the hardest season to watch since Sylvester McCoy's first as the Doctor in 1987. In some ways, it may even be harder. As dicey as that stretch of episodes was, you could at least see signs that the production team was in the process of finding their way forward, and it paid off in 1988 and 1989 with stories like Remembrance of the Daleks and Ghost Light. Watching the current season, there's no sense that the current team, especially head-writer Steven Moffat, thinks that what they're doing is anything less than great. They should be right about that, but they're not.

They have great raw materials in the form of a wonderfully alien Doctor, a good supporting cast and a head-writer with an understanding of the show's conventions and a gift for plotting that enables him to turn those elements skillfully on their head. Unlike the late 1980s, the show also has the full support of the BBC, which means it has a decent budget. Expectations are justifiably high for the current season to be as good if not better than any of those with David Tennant or Christopher Eccleston. The difference seems to be that that, however much then head-writer Russell T. Davies went off-track at the end of Tennant's run, you could sense his desire at least in the early seasons to push the show forward in content and quality. In contrast, the current regime seems to be driven mainly by a sense that good enough is good enough. The manifestations of this attitude vary, but they seem to follow the theme that if you throw in enough appearances by established characters and monsters (however ill-conceived they were in the first place) it will seem like there's a coherent plan at work rather than a grab-bag of intermittently clever ideas, snappy dialogue and some suitably creepy imagery.

 

To some extent, both episodes that have been shown so far exemplify that trait, though, one was far more frustrating than the other. Let's Kill Hitler was a mess, but it least it was an entertaining one that made me wonder if the script had started life as an episode of Coupling. Moffat answered at least some of the questions raised by previous episodes while advancing others that will hopefully lead to a satisfying pay-off. It also featured an intriguing concept in the form of the time-traveling war-crimes avengers that made the episode's use of Hitler somewhat less bogus.

Night Terrors on the other hand is all the proof I need that Mark Gatiss should not be allowed to write for Doctor Who anymore. Even the relatively good moments felt pointless and uninvolving. While there were some superficially creepy moments with the dolls, they felt grafted on to the plot rather than being anything truly relevant to the story. As for the plot itself, which was more than a little reminiscent of the 2006 story Fear Her, it managed to be 100% less clever than the earlier episode while cramming in 100% more superfluous references to Doctor Who continuity.

I'd been trying to keep an open mind about Gatiss' writing after last year's Dalek story, because there were some really good character moments, especially involving Bill Patterson as Professor Bracewell, that helped offset idiotic things like "Danny Boy" and the Spitfires in space. Night Terrors didn't even have that much to recommend it. In short, it committed the cardinal sin of any drama, more so even than being bad, it was boring.

So, all in all, the second half of the season isn't off to an auspicious start, but I'll keep watching. Wading through some crap on the way to something stellar is part of being a fan of virtually anything and, unique though it may be, Doctor Who is no exception. Beside, next week's episode looks interesting. Fingers crossed.

Shell Shocked by a Good Man's Battlefield

As a long-time fan of Doctor Who, when I watch newer episodes I sometimes find myself thinking about how certain stories are almost companion pieces to older ones. For instance, Neil Gaiman's The Doctor's Wife brings to mind the very early TARDIS based story The Edge of Destruction while 2008's The Unicorn & the Wasp, with its Agatha Christie trappings, pairs nicely with 1982's Black Orchid. This line of thought has also helped me home in on why the current mid-season cliffhanger A Good Man Goes to War doesn't quite work for me.

In 1989, the final season of Doctor Who's original run opened with a story called Battlefield. Battlefield was an interesting attempt to mix Arthurian legend with an updated take on the Doctor's 1970s allies from UNIT, but it was by no means a great story. Aside from some great character moments, especially the Doctor's final confrontation with Morgaine, the most noteworthy thing about it is the way its events suggest a multitude of other, far more interesting, stories (perhaps one reason why its novelization is better regarded than the TV version). That same questionable mix of good and bad ideas combining to suggest a larger world of events is on display in A Good Man Goes to War, as it has been in all of Steven Moffat's episodes since last year's Weeping Angels storyline.

Prior to last year's season finale, Moffat's Doctor Who episodes were typically the best of any given season. The combination of fanciful ideas and the discipline required to write the well-structured farce that was Coupling made scripts like The Girl in the Fireplace and Blink some of the most sharply written in Doctor Who's history. Since then, things have felt a bit more haphazard with some truly great moments vying for attention with things that just feel wrong, such as the ridiculous alliance of monsters in The Pandorica Opens. Without giving anything significant away, A Good Man Goes to War features more alien armies that shouldn't be there, at least not on the Doctor's side, and it just felt wrong.

I appreciate that the story plays up the question of how far down the path of war the Doctor willing to go. At the same time, anyone who's been watching the past few years knows that the answer is that he's been willing to go pretty damn far if the stakes are high enough. Put another way, it's an idea I'd like to see explored in a way that really adds to the character's moral dimension rather than just retracing the steps of Eccleston and Tennant.

All that said, by virtue of being anxious to find out what happens next, I have to admit that at least on some level the story ultimately did the job. I'm still not sure where it's all going, but I haven't lost faith that Moffat's path is leading to something really good. I just wish he'd trust the audience to enjoy the show without throwing in old monsters where they don't belong and let the regulars do their thing, because as with Battlefield back in 1989, A Good Man Goes to War is at its best when the focus is on them.

"Day of the Moffat" or "Are You Leading Me On?"

I wanted to withhold judgment on Doctor Who's season opener until seeing the conclusion. On reflection, this was pointless because head writer Steven Moffat has set up his version of Doctor Who as an ongoing storyline even more so than his immediate predecessor Russell T Davies', who largely took things year by year. As a result, it's hard to even review the tandem of The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon on their own terms, because they're obviously meant to be seen as steps on a journey more so than a trip in their own right.

While Moffat's ambition is admirable, the execution has been uneven. In particular, there's something out of balance in the interplay between the plot of these specific episodes and the character moments that feed into the ongoing drama. The lack of focus on the plot side is especially surprising because it was an area where his scripts for previous seasons had been excellent. Based on those scripts, it was also the aspect many fans expected Moffat would return to prominence after what they perceived as Russell T. Davies turning Doctor Who into a soap opera. Of course, what that notion ignored was that the difference between being the head writer and being a guest writer who does one story per season is comparable to the difference between a parent and the relative who stays with the kids for the night so the parents can go out to dinner. When you consider that none of Moffat's episodes during Davies' tenure as head writer really tied in with the over-arching story-lines for their respective seasons, it makes one wonder if Moffat got an overly easy ride from fans (aside Lawrence Miles, but that's another posting).

As things stand, the dissonance between the beautifully handled character moments and the ambitious but messy plot really encapsulates this particular story. There's no question that Moffat loves his lead characters and it's fun to see their interaction. As much as the story set-ups might strain credibility, the dynamic between the Doctor and his friends (including guest-star Mark Sheppard as Canton Everett Delaware III) feels very natural. The events surrounding them, however, didn't draw me in like some of Moffat's earlier stories.

Perhaps it's unfair to compare these new episodes to The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, which may be the best Doctor Who story ever, but their use of similar central images (i.e. a child separated from the world by a life-support device) kind of calls out for it. While the earlier earlier story unfolded with a sense of urgency, balanced by some quiet moments to step back and get to know the characters, the more recent story meanders a bit and sometimes takes our affection for the characters for granted. As a result, the many intriguing ideas Moffat packed into the story feel like isolated flashes of greatness rather than parts of a coherent whole.

It's certainly possible that this seemingly unfocused structure is part of a cunning plan that will pay off later in the season, and Doctor Who will always get the benefit of the doubt from me. Still, much as I enjoy an ongoing storyline and seeing how disparate threads come together, part of the appeal of the show for me is the way it walks the between ongoing drama and anthology series, with each story intended to be enjoyed as its own entity. Having to guess which of the (too) many seemingly trivial elements will be relevant five episodes later takes some of the fun out of it.

Thankfully, even the weaker stories under the current production team have been fun thanks to one key contributor. As a reviewer said about Francis Coppola's 1992 Dracula movie, if you're only going to have one great performance in your Dracula movie it had better be the guy playing the vampire. A similar thing could be said about Doctor Who, and thankfully Matt Smith is a joy to watch as the Doctor. Some have suggested that he was somehow an overly safe choice as a successor to David Tennant, but they couldn't be more wrong. In many ways, Smith's take on the character is more alien than his predecessor, with more of the prickly nature that characterized the performances of William Hartnell and Christopher Eccleston on display. In particular, he captures the sense of an old soul in a young body better than anyone since Peter Davison. Here again, Doctor Who and especially this Doctor will always get the benefit of the doubt, even as I hope the next episode will stand up better on its own.