It was Russel T. Davies who brought the show back in 2005 and through whose wonderful first season many people like me fell in love with this show. He wrote most of the episodes in the first season himself, gradually relinquishing control to other writers throughout seasons 2-4 until finally, he penned the 2008-2010 specials as his (and Tennant's) goodbye to the show.
Many fans were excited to see Moffat take over as show-runner after Davies, because the episodes he wrote in the first four seasons were the best, most memorable episodes. Unfortunately, instead of improving the quality of the show and bringing it up to the level of his best episodes, he has slowly been sucking the soul out of it and replacing it with that terrible timey-wimey nonsense that really should never have been mentioned again beyond the wonderful season 3 episode Blink.
In this post I'm going to outline what I think are the differences between the two eras and the two approaches of the show-runners to show you why I dislike what Moffat has been doing.
MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD. Go watch Seasons 1 - 7 in their entirety before venturing forth!
1. Characterization of the Companions
One thing that Davies did that you don't really appreciate until you've seen Moffat's run is that he created some excellent well-rounded and believable companions for the Doctor. Say what you want about Rose, but the fact remains that she was written with care, developing over the space of her two seasons (especially during season 1) through some very well-written moments and episodes. She starts off being a scared shop girl who accidentally gets into trouble with those silly 'living plastic' mannequins at work and is intrigued with the Doctor's personality and through the episodes we see her develop.
Most memorably, the episode Father's Day gave us time to learn about Rose's dead Father and see her (very human) desire to go back and save him from his fate so that she can get some time with him. This entire episode is dedicated to Rose, her relationship with her family, and her relationship with the doctor, but it is by no means the only time we get to dwell on such relationships and just get to know Rose. There are countless tiny interactions and moments throughout the first two seasons in which her character is explored so that she feels like an actual human that the audience comes to care about.
Compare this to Amy Pond who doesn't even HAVE parents for some weird timey-wimey reason and never really cares about it. At one point the Doctor randomly changes time and she suddenly gets parents, but this is never really explained or explored and it makes no sense. Nor do we ever see her interacting with them or feeling anything about the change. It's really quite pathetic, but that's not the worst of it. We also eventually get things like Amy finding out that River is her kidnapped baby daughter who was also her best friend while growing up and - somehow - finding this out, seeing Rover grown out immediately robs Amy of any desire to go and find her baby and spend time with her. Yeah, right. You've changed almost everything there is to change including fixed points with the Doctor, but suddenly a woman who has just given birth and had her baby ripped from her doesn't even consider going back and getting her child and changing the past so she can be with her baby and properly bring her up.
I could say a hundred other things about characterization, but I will keep it at that for now, because River Song and Clara will be discussed later in the "mystery" section. For now, I'll end this section with saying that Moffat really doesn't do characterization well for his companions and it makes a huge difference. Yes, we got silly cheesy stuff from Davies on occasion, but at least we cared enough about the companions and their fates.
2. Characterization of the Doctor
Some have said that Moffat's characterization problems are because he doesn't understand women or something. I don't believe this is the case because I find his characterization of the Doctor equally lacking. Matt Smith's intro episode, The Eleventh Hour was great and I was prepared to like the new incarnation, but very soon I realized that the characterization was all over the place. At times he would be trying to copy David Tennant's tenth doctor in his mannerisms and his shouting, and then suddenly at another time he would, inexplicably, be ok with holding guns. Also, suddenly, he seems to be cured of any issues with the whole Time War scenario which for me came a little too suddenly. I could go on, but the worst thing about the Doctor's characterization is, in my opinion, his complete lack of knowledge/understanding of anything.
The Ninth and Tenth Doctors always either had a plan or had enough skill to fool their enemies, giving themselves time to make the plan up as they went along. There are some wonderful scenes where the Tenth Doctor is trying to remember something/jog his memory and you can see his struggle with his own memories through his wonderfully portrayed frustration. The Eleventh Doctor, unfortunately, not only has no plan - ever - he also doesn't seem to know what he's doing in the sense that he doesn't seem to remember things or have any alien knowledge up there to draw upon. What ends up happening, usually, is that he does a bunch of random things resulting in a miraculous timey wimey solution to the problem of the week and then, in the few situations in which an explanation is demanded, he speedily explains it away in babble that doesn't fool anyone. He's not a thousand-year-old genius, he's just an idiot with a TARDIS running around and doing random things.
3. Overarching Season Plots
It is my opinion that Moffat just doesn't know what to do with these. Russel T. Davies had one for ever season he headed (with varying levels of success) but Moffat just doesn't seem able to find a balance with these. I never found that Davies' overarching plots intruded on the individual episodes. There would be very subtle hints dropped from the beginning of the season and slowly building up to take shape into a large-scale showdown of some type in the finale. This was great and it worked well. Yes, the season 3 finale sucked big time, but that never took away from the well-written episodes that came before it. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for Moffat's run.
In Season 5 we not only have to deal with the loss of sympathetic/well-written character, but we also have to contend with this looming crack in the wall thing that keeps popping up literally everywhere. It becomes so overwhelming that it takes over the individual episodes and you are eventually only watching to find out what the stupid crack in the wall is all about. So when the underwhelming season finale rolls along it not only robs you of a good wrap-up, it also invalidates most of what went on before it.
The problem becomes almost ten times worse in Season 6. There are many elements carried over from Season 5 that audience members hoped would be resolved this season. Add to this the really shocking season openers which seemed to promise a plot on a scale so epic it was going to blow out minds. The overarching storyline here takes over completely with many episodes being there simply to serve as check-points in the larger progress of the astronaut timeline, that weird regenerating kid we never got to save/properly meet, and the weird images Amy keeps having.
Take the Flesh two-parter for example. The only reason they went there was to have this check-in with the flesh and "learn about it" so the Doctor could know what to do about Amy's weirdness. He never ends up doing anything much about it, nothing that makes sense or has any reasonable outcome, anyway, and then the reveal we were all waiting for, the thing that was supposed to explain and wrap everything up, ended up being so stupid, so nonsensical, that it leaves you a little upset with the Flesh episode and its pointlessness/the false hope it gave you that this might be worth it.
What makes me really angry is that we still had no real idea what the Silence were (and yet the Doctor had no problem telling everyone to start killing them off from the beginning), we never got to fully explore the regenerating kid or even attempt to save her for real, and we never got to see real, human concern on Amy and Rory's part for their kidnapped baby. Instead of all this, instead of actually attempting to live up to the hype of all these sub-plots that he'd laid, Moffat gives us randomness with River Song.
And then Season 7 rolls along and all of this is forgotten, including any loose ends that delusional people like me were hoping he'd address and he purposefully fives us a "blockbuster a week" style of Doctor who. (By this time Amy and Rory had far outstayed their welcome so I don't understand why these blockbusters couldn't be done with Clara as the companion.) Also, the Blockbuster-style really shows that Moffat doesn't know what he wants/what he's doing with the season arcs. He blew them way out of proportion in seasons 5 and 6 and then, suddenly, when he sensed people were annoyed with how far he'd gone he just scrapped the arc thing altogether and started doing completely unrelated tales. There is a balance. I don't think he knows that, or perhaps, he just doesn't know how to get there.
4. Endings
Some people refer to Moffat's endings/devices as Deus- ex-machina, but I don't agree with this label. Deus-ex-machina means God in the Machine. So a completely unsolvable corner that the writer has painted himself into is solved by some handwaving nonsense excuse allowing us to move on. That's not what Moffat does. What he does is use a bunch of random pointless time travel to create the illusion that there's a problem that needs solving THEN he proceeds to solve it with more of the random pointless time travel/time paradoxes/nonsense. I'm not the first person to call this laziness, but I do think it bears repeating, because laziness is no excuse for this type of mess that we get instead of endings in his era.
5. Mystery
Moffat uses Mystery a lot. He uses it instead of plot to give us the illusion that things are progressing and that we should care. He uses it instead of characterization because he thinks it makes characters seem more interesting. He uses it again and again and again. What is the crack in Amy's wall? Ooooh, a mystery. What is River Song's relationship to the Doctor? Oooh a a mystery. Why does Clara keep dying and then popping up in different places? Oooh a mystery.
Mystery might adequately stand in for a season arc, but as I mentioned before, it should be resolved properly so the audience doesn't feel cheated. It cannot, however, stand in for good characterization. We found out who River Song was at the end, but do we care? No, we don't, and this is because she's not a character, never was, she was just a mystery to be solved. We don't know what kind of person she is, what she likes, what she hates, how she feels about her parents and her lost time with them, why she changes her mind about the doctor and decides to give up ALL HER REGENERATIONS to save him within seconds of killing him herself. She doesn't make sense and she doesn't draw any sympathy despite the traumatic things she's been through. She doesn't seem human so how are we supposed to relate?
The same goes for Clara, of course, who has no personality and it only interesting because we wanted to know why she kept dying. Now we know, so... what next? Am I supposed to care what happens to her next? Do I have a clue how she feels about anything in order to care? Again, no, because Moffat didn't think he needed to bother.
6. Timey Wimey
Blink, one of the most beloved episodes of revived Doctor Who, is the first time we encounter the timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly substance that is Moffat's take on Time. Within the context of Blink is not only worked, it worked wonderfully. It was a very tightly plotted episode in which, yes, weird things happened and a lot of time travel was involved, but it all made sense and was all tied up wonderfully at the end. You get the sense someone who cared actually spent time writing this story and they followed up all the details laying clues and pieces all along the episode and making good use of them in the end. it was even funny when the Tenth Doctor used the phrase timey-wimey, because he didn't have time to explain it so that Sally could understand it and really it didn't matter. It wasn't used in a cheap way to get Moffat out of having to explain things, it was just a phrase, used to sort of poke fun at the complex nature of the story, and the plot was still coherent.
This timey-wimey business should have stayed in Blink. By re-using it over and over to actually explain things away Moffat takes it from being something awesomely funny to something very frustrating. It also cheapens the effect. Blink, the angels, the complex back and forth tie travel, and the phrase timey-wimey, were cool because they were different, unique, but when all of these things are used again and again and again and again ad nauseum well... it's no longer good. We are not amused.
7. Rules
Something that hasn't been as well commented upon is the lack of rules in Moffat's era. With Davies and especially the Ninth Doctor we knew that once the Doctor had become part of a specific Timeline he could no longer use the TARDIS to just jump back in time and try again. We also knew that if he or Rose interacted with their own past selves that could cause destruction of a type that even he couldn't fix like giant dinosaur bat things that literally eat people to cleanse the wound of the changed timeline, like the paradox Rose creates when touching her own past self actually allowing said monsters inside a building they had previously not been able to enter. I don't really care if the rules were sel-imposed, imposed by the laws of Time, or were just random, the point is there were rules. We understood why the Doctor couldn't just hop back into the TARDIS and fix something, but now, during the Moffat era... not so much.
There are no longer any rules here. The Doctor can apparently go back and help Rose with her homework, go back and change time so that Amy has parents out of nowhere, go back and change time so that things just don't happen the way they're supposed to, and go back and interact with his past self. No, not just that, he can actually go jump into his own timeline scar tissue or whatever the hell that was and save Clara from saving him as well as talk to John Hurt/some mysterious incarnation of himself. (I think Moffat thinks that at this point the audience is going "Oooooh, mystery!"
At this point, I really couldn't care less. This era of who has broken so many of its own rules that it no longer makes any coherent sense so why should I attempt to follow it? What I'm really sitting here thinking is that I really, really hope Moffat steps down and returns to just writing a couple of episodes per season allowing someone who cares a little bit more to head this show. I'm also, at this point, quite eager for Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor to go away.
The great thing about this show is that built into it we have a way for the show to completely renew itself and change. The fact that I had so many problem with the Moffat era does no mean I should give up hope. We could easily get a new Doctor and show-runner and then everything could go back to normal or become even more awesome than it was before.
Agree, disagree? Leave your thoughts below.
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