Doctor Who 2005-2017 : The RTD & Moffat Years

[mjwilson]

I do think there's an element of exquisite corpse (actually any long-form improvisational process) to Moffat's era, and to RTD's too to a lesser extent.  Whenever something mysterious-sounding (like "the Medusa Cascade") was thrown in, none of the writers had a plan for it.  They were seeding terms for themselves to follow up in later series, and knew they would have the creative ability to expand on them with details when the time came.


This obviously applies to everything about River Song, and the silence/silents that were seeded in series 5 and built upon in series 6.  I think it's perfectly acceptable to do this for future series when you are only planning the precise details for the current series.  Do the current series in detail, and drop a few random seeds for the next series without necessarily knowing where you want to take them.  Follow them up when you get there.  It's a standard creative process.

The deeper issue comes when it's transparently occurring within a single series.  For example:  I don't believe that Moffat knew what the hybrid was when he was writing the first episodes of series 9.  This would be fine if he was using the writing process of later episodes to help himself know where he was going, then returning to rewrite the earlier episodes so it all tied up from start to finish.  The problem is that no such script revision was taking place - the first episodes of the series were being filmed before the finale was written, and therefore, I suggest, before Moffat knew where he was actually going.  So you get this kind of sprawling, maybe this, maybe that, sprinkling throughout the series without anything really stepping in to define the hybrid earlier than the finale, and then the finale just kind of goes "never mind; it never mattered anyway".

Last time I watched it I remember thinking that the finale is pretty clear about what the hybrid is (the combination of the Doctor smashing his way through the millennia to try and rescue Clara), it's just that it never pauses to say "viewer at home? this is what the hybrid is" so people don't feel sure about it.

[Replies From View]

It bundles through a load of possible interpretations, I thought, without comfortably settling on any of them.  It was only after watching an interview with Moffat where he said the hybrid was the Doctor + Clara, and still I felt that made no sense.

[mjwilson]

I think (and I would have to rewatch) it sets up a few options for what the Hybrid could be, and discards them all except for the idea that it's The Doctor and Clara. (A bit like a "That's Not My Hybrid" children's book, if you like.) And I think they do match the prophecy pretty exactly don't they? Destroying a billion hearts to heal itself, or however it goes?

(I should probably rewatch though.)

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Am I uniquely stupid for not understanding how two separate people are a hybrid?



I understood all the other concepts - the friend inside the enemy / the enemy inside the friend, the Zygon-Human indeterminacy, the Time Lord Daleks and whatever else was suggested.  The Doctor being half-human was irritatingly brought up as well but I understood it at least.  But Clara and the Doctor?  Why are they a hybrid?

[mjwilson]

It's a metaphor, probably.

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I wouldn't even have a problem with the Doctor-Donna being set up as a hybrid, as they were fused at some point.


But the Doctor and Clara are separate at all levels of their being.  What would the metaphor be, if it's a metaphor?

[Zetetic]

And if the hybrid is - somehow - the Doctor and Clara... how does either of them feel about this fact? Does it matter to either of them? Why?

[Replies From View]

I think (and I would have to rewatch) it sets up a few options for what the Hybrid could be, and discards them all except for the idea that it's The Doctor and Clara. (A bit like a "That's Not My Hybrid" children's book, if you like.) And I think they do match the prophecy pretty exactly don't they? Destroying a billion hearts to heal itself, or however it goes?

(I should probably rewatch though.)

To be fair, I should probably rewatch it too before criticising it further.


My overriding sense was that it came too soon after the Day of the Doctor to resonate properly.  The prophecy could just as easily have been foretelling the Time War, right?  I mean if you had that prophecy bubbling away in the past of Gallifrey, and the Time War happened, would you still be holding out for the prophecy to come true?  Or would you assume that was probably it.



Cheers Chibnall for erasing Gallifrey again, by the way.  I mean if you want to remember for a moment that all these flaws of Moffat were relatively insignificant....

[mjwilson]

Just that it's only the two of them in combination. The Doctor on his own won't fulfil the Hybrid prophecy, neither will Clara on her own. Yeah it's a bit of a stretch but I don't think that's too unusual in a storyline where an ancient prophecy comes true in an unforeseen way.

[Replies From View]

Just that it's only the two of them in combination. The Doctor on his own won't fulfil the Hybrid prophecy, neither will Clara on her own. Yeah it's a bit of a stretch but I don't think that's too unusual in a storyline where an ancient prophecy comes true in an unforeseen way.

I wouldn't have been looking out for the hybrid after the Time War, personally.  "Oh it must have meant that."  "Yeah, must have done."  "After all it had Daleks plus every incarnation of the Doctor."  "Stands to reason."


Duality would have been a more appropriate label for the idea (and all its variants in series 9).  I wish it hadn't been called a hybrid.

[Catalogue Trousers]

The main problem for me with both RTD and Moffat (apart from the former's tiresome dei ex machina season endings) is the whole thing with ooh, mysterious, ooh, cool, things that they never really explain. Bad Wolf, the Hybrid, the Nightmare Child, the Medusa Cascade...and don't tell me 'oh, but they do say what the Nightmare Child was (for example)' - do we ever see it? Find out why it was given such a pretentious name? Why, exactly, was 'Bad Wolf' such a compelling phrase for Rose and/or the TARDIS to seed through all Time and Space?

They almost always (bar Torchwood and Saxon) gave the impression of writing cool-sounding cheques that the author couldn't dramatically cash.

[Replies From View]

I don't know whether I ever needed to see the Nightmare Child though.  That kind of thing is origin story stuff, and best left as mysterious-sounding but vague as possible.


Both RTD and Moffat stayed on the right side of alluding to 'origin story' events.  What they did was world-building in that regard.  Putting in mundane details and ruining all mystery is what the Matrix names the Chibnall Hubris.



As for series arcs, yes they were mostly clunky.  RTD's main issue was his need to keep upping the universe-destruction stakes until after 4 series there was nowhere left to go.  I've already talked about the hybrid in posts further up this page, but Bad Wolf could have been any set of words - it was completely arbitrary.  The cracks of series 5 were good, I have a soft spot for series 6 despite its flaws, series 7 didn't know what 50th anniversary story it was seeding yet, series 8 didn't quite nail exactly why Missy needed Clara to hang around, but by the time of series 10 I think Moffat had got the balance right again.

[mjwilson]

The main problem for me with both RTD and Moffat (apart from the former's tiresome dei ex machina season endings) is the whole thing with ooh, mysterious, ooh, cool, things that they never really explain. Bad Wolf, the Hybrid, the Nightmare Child, the Medusa Cascade...and don't tell me 'oh, but they do say what the Nightmare Child was (for example)' - do we ever see it? Find out why it was given such a pretentious name? Why, exactly, was 'Bad Wolf' such a compelling phrase for Rose and/or the TARDIS to seed through all Time and Space?

They almost always (bar Torchwood and Saxon) gave the impression of writing cool-sounding cheques that the author couldn't dramatically cash.

I actually really like RTD's approach to describing the Time War, which is just to drop in these evocative phrases without any attempt at explanation. Tennant saying "I was there at the fall of Arcadia" is so much more interesting than the attempt to show that in a minisode.

[H-O-W-L]

"The Could've-Been King and his Army of Meanwhiles and Never-Weres" is also way more evocative as a name than any explanation could've ever been. An almost fairy-tale, Arthurian or Mad Max style crazy title that could never be lived up to by any descriptive or displayed explanation. IIRC the comics and books have elaborated on what it was (some time bollocks) but just the title alone is evocative and frightening IMO.

[Catalogue Trousers]

Conversely, I don't. (Yeah, shock, opinions differ...) It sounds like someone trying too hard to be Neil Gaiman. More to the point, it's not anything that Daleks or Time Lords would call anything. They're both far too pragmatic.

[Ambient Sheep]

I actually really like RTD's approach to describing the Time War, which is just to drop in these evocative phrases without any attempt at explanation.

Agreed.  In my head I always imagined "The Nightmare Child" as a huge evil version of

Spoiler alert

the Starchild

[close]

at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As some of you may recall, I was incredibly disappointed and rather annoyed that it turned out to be just

Spoiler alert

an extra-cross Dalek

[close]

.

(Yeah, shock, opinions differ...)

Which is fine. :-)

[purlieu]

Although I actually inherently dislike the idea of the Time War, if only because it made The Doctor the Last of the Time Lords rather than just a guy bumbling around the universe, righting wrongs he comes across, I agree that it's generally portrayed very well. Night and Day of the Doctor managed to show just enough of it all without spoiling it. No idea what I'm going to come to when I reach the Big Finish Time War range.

The Could've Been King stuff sends it slightly further into fantasy territory than I like my Who, but "I was there at the fall of Arcadia" is a great example of an evocative phrase that doesn't need building on.

Bad Wolf can fuck off, though.

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"I was there at Buttocks Ridge" is more pragmatic.

[Mister Six]

Conversely, I don't. (Yeah, shock, opinions differ...) It sounds like someone trying too hard to be Neil Gaiman. More to the point, it's not anything that Daleks or Time Lords would call anything. They're both far too pragmatic.

Well, this was when the Time War was implied to be some mad, reality-twisting multidimensional fuckfest full of erased timelines and warped realities, rather than a bunch of Daleks shooting at a planet and somehow blowing each other up instead. I like it, and all the evocative weirdness that was tossed out there and should never have been turned into a comic or minisode or whatever.

[JamesTC]

"I was there at Buttocks Ridge" is more pragmatic.

Barrowman is back on set?

[H-O-W-L]

Conversely, I don't. (Yeah, shock, opinions differ...) It sounds like someone trying too hard to be Neil Gaiman. More to the point, it's not anything that Daleks or Time Lords would call anything. They're both far too pragmatic.

This was way back when the Daleks and Time Lords were merely the center of the Time War rather than the entirety of it, and it encompassed untold millions of species and thousands of planets, bear in mind. Shit like the Gelfth and all that. So big and vast that you had the odd Dalek getting shat out of space and plummetting into the year 2009, that sort of thing.

Day of the Doctor reducing the Time War to just, as Mister Six put it, a bunch of daleks shooting a planet was total shite. Sort of like how the Clone Wars was a far-off terrible thing that we didn't see, a Big Deal of things that was intentionally left vague to create dramatic aftershocks. Then it turned out to be a bunch of old men in rooms talking about boring tax shit along with electronic old men talking about a techno union like some early 1990s indie DnB label.

I really like the Could've-Been-King because it sounds so fantasy-like. It makes you think "how fucked up were some cultures by the Time War that they started spouting protoArthurian shit like that?", makes me think that whole planets were regressed into stone-age-dom by time-guns and dalekanian snozzbanglers and stuff.

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I always thought Day of the Doctor was only part of the Time War, rather than its entirety.  It doesn't directly contradict anything you may have imagined was going on.

[purlieu]

I kind of took it as the Time Lords and Daleks were the only ones left by that point.

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Does Day of the Doctor fit in with The End of Time stuff?

[Thomas]

Does Day of the Doctor fit in with The End of Time stuff?

There's a single line in Day - 'to Hell with the High Council, their plans have failed' - which acknowledges The End of Time events as having recently taken place.

[Talulah, really!]

Frankly Doctor Who would be a lot better if the whole Gallifrey/Time Lords thing had been kept off screen, I've always found every appearance of them post Genesis of the Daleks to be atrocious wank.

Doctor Who should aspire to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes rather than a venture of trying to be Game of Thrones in my opinion.

[Mister Six]

I kind of took it as the Time Lords and Daleks were the only ones left by that point.

Yeah, I was being a bit reductive and daft. By the time of that episode the Time War has been going on long enough for the Eighth Doctor to avoid the whole thing while it ravaged civilisations and led to the Time Lords being feared across the universe (cf. Night of The Doctor), then for The War Doctor to get pulled into all kinds of gruelling Time War adventures (long enough for him to go from young John Hurt to old John Hurt). By the time of Day of The Doctor it's a last stand situation.

I think Moffat did as good as anyone could have possibly done in depicting the Time War on a BBC budget (and the episode itself is a classic) but The Day of The Doctor does seem to have left many under the belief that the Time War was just the Daleks and Time Lords firing pew-pew lasers at each other, rather than the much weirder, reality-warping event RTD (sensibly) only hinted at.

[olliebean]

Frankly Doctor Who would be a lot better if the whole Gallifrey/Time Lords thing had been kept off screen, I've always found every appearance of them post Genesis of the Daleks to be atrocious wank.

On occasion, though, it can enhance one's appreciation of the show to reflect on the fact that the Doctor came from a race of atrocious wankers.

[Replies From View]

Both RTD and Moffat appreciated that the Time Lords were boring, but made sure Gallifrey stayed locked away even when it still existed.  Whether through one of those cracks in time or the confessional dial, it was made pretty clear that the Time Lords were not easy to reach, just available if any story needed to make use of them.

Chibnall was very stupid to not just leave the idea of Gallifrey alone for a while.  The Time Lords were not being oppressive, the Doctor was free to get on with stuff, but now everything is tied back to Gallifrey and whether the Time Lords can return and other yawn-festery.  "NOW THE TIME LORDS ARE GONE, HA."  No, you've brought them back from the possibility of just being ignored, you dunce.



Sorry to clutter this particular thread with waves of suddenly remembering how crap Chibnall is, but he is such a palimpsest of shit that he smothers everything in his past and future.

[purlieu]

Again, I would have been happier without the Time War, and just having the Time Lords as a bunch of stuffy old people we rarely see because The Doctor doesn't want to have anything to do with them. The Last of the Time Lords stuff immediately makes The Doctor a significant, tragic hero of a character, rather than an anti-authoritarian traveller who fixes problems as he stumbles across them. I know the former fits a 21st century TV landscape better than the latter, but it's never sat right with me.