Doctor Who 2005-2017 : The RTD & Moffat Years

[Gurke and Hare]

The Bill and Nardole series was great, especially after the previous series which was so dull Chris Bidmead could have written it.

[Replies From View]

I liked Extremis, the Pyramid one was okay, but yeah the Lie of the Land is terrible and does everything wrong. That fake regeneration was the worst part, along with the bit where there's what I assume to be ADR with the Doctor saying "oh yes, I was accidentally saving the world!" It's such a condescending moment, made all the worse by how great the rest of series 10 is (I was disappointed by the Ice Warriors one too, but not to this extent).

The fake regeneration scene was so horribly misconceived.  The Doctor tricks Bill into shooting him (why?), and he pretends to regenerate for a joke.  What unpleasant manipulation from the Doctor, rendering himself a cunt as he makes Bill feel wretched for no reason at all.  What was the point?  I don't even think anyone in the room, including Bill, knew about regeneration at that point so who was it aimed at apart from the viewer of the trailer for series 10?

So immensely nasty.  And such a shame because the arc of that story was otherwise great, with the Doctor blinded and vulnerable for a few episodes.

[M-CORP]

Agree. And it's a shame because otherwise the Monk trilogy is actually pretty good, I think Pyramid At The End Of The World has an excellent cliffhanger and leads very nicely into Lie Of The Land, which is going well until Bill shoots the Doctor. It's a nice idea having the Doctor change sides, but they can't follow through on it, because the Doctor would have to abruptly change back at some point. So they just throw it out, and at the end solve everything with memories of dead mums.

[Poison To The Mind]

That whole arc seems to have been written on the fly: Mathieson had the Doctor's sight being fixed, and Moffat added the blindness twist which leads into the next three eps; Moffat added his name to the Pyramid script m/l because so much had gone awry along the way that he didn't want Harness to take the blame for it; then Whithouse breaks his ten-year run of "quite good fun episode" / "pretty shit episode" with that absolute disaster. Although I can't remember anything about it bar the fake regeneration tbf, maybe it got better after the titles.

(Or maybe there was some actual plot and dialogue in the Pyramid ep that led up to the regen, but got lost in rewrites and editing.)

[Replies From View]

There's unfortunately a bit of a flaw in the show itself by this point, because we've seen endless iterations of injuries and other obstacles being overcome with the sonic screwdriver, regeneration energy or the TARDIS, so even though something like the Doctor becoming blind feels shocking, you kind of hold back as a viewer thinking there's an annoyingly easy fix around the corner.

So for example despite the dramatic impact of Clara flinging TARDIS keys into a volcano, I never fully detached from the awareness that the Doctor can easily open the doors by clicking his fingers anyway.  And we've seen the Doctor fixing River's broken wrist by spurting out a bit of regeneration juice, so I kind of held back from ever feeling the Doctor's blindness meant anything; something like a reveal that he was faking to gain an advantage over that week's villain seemed inevitable.

A simple line of dialogue saying that his stupid regeneration light show prevented him from healing himself would have helped matters in this instance (and actually justified that fucking scene).  But it wouldn't have fixed the larger problem that there are now too many easy-fix options in Doctor Who that make the stakes too low in the long term.

[Mister Six]

That whole arc seems to have been written on the fly: Mathieson had the Doctor's sight being fixed, and Moffat added the blindness twist which leads into the next three eps; Moffat added his name to the Pyramid script m/l because so much had gone awry along the way that he didn't want Harness to take the blame for it; then Whithouse breaks his ten-year run of "quite good fun episode" / "pretty shit episode" with that absolute disaster. Although I can't remember anything about it bar the fake regeneration tbf, maybe it got better after the titles.

(Or maybe there was some actual plot and dialogue in the Pyramid ep that led up to the regen, but got lost in rewrites and editing.)

Do you have a link to Moffat or one of the other writers discussing this arc? It does feel like a game of exquisite corpse, which is fun with a bit of paper and a pen on a Sunday afternoon, but ill-advised on a multimillion-pound TV blockbuster.

[mjwilson]

Moffat's mother died while he was writing Extremis, I seem to remember reading he was working from a hospital room for much of that time.

[Thomas]

Moffat's mother died while he was writing Extremis, I seem to remember reading he was working from a hospital room for much of that time.

Wow, didn't know that.

What was your biggest nightmare? You can't say The Day of the Doctor.
But it was. The level of expectation. The email I was getting in my inbox. People were savagely cross that we didn't have William Hartnell in it and I'm saying, "He's just not responding to my phone calls..." Um, what other nightmares were there? Around the middle of the last series when my mum was dying and then died – that was awful. I was writing [episode six] Extremis and still had the two-part finale and this Christmas special to go. And I was thinking that the only thing that's keeping me going at all is that I can see the finish line. I'm just crawling towards that.

https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/doctor-who-steven-moffat-interview-matt-smith/

[Replies From View]

(If she had left in Last Christmas, we might have gotten some dud Clara-alike companion in S9 anyway, not anything like the fantastic PCap/Bill/Nardole team. Nardole wasn't even thought of being added to S10 until halfway through the year's shoot, incidentally.)

In case anyone had ever wondered, apparently Shona from Last Christmas was being set up as the series 9 companion until Coleman decided to stay.


I wish I could find the source for this.

[olliebean]

In case anyone had ever wondered, apparently Shona from Last Christmas was being set up as the series 9 companion until Coleman decided to stay.


I wish I could find the source for this.

Here? https://youtu.be/styqnGNTffM?t=670

[Replies From View]

Here? https://youtu.be/styqnGNTffM?t=670

Yes, thanks.

[Natnar]

RTD, meanwhile, would have gone for 20 minutes of crying and bombastic sad music.

I think i'd rather that than Moffat's "Oh well, your baby has been kidnapped, never mind let's crack on and have a jaunty adventure".

[Replies From View]

I think i'd rather that than Moffat's "Oh well, your baby has been kidnapped, never mind let's crack on and have a jaunty adventure".

Except Moffat didn't do that, as I already pointed out.

[Lungpuddle]

I think i'd rather that than Moffat's "Oh well, your baby has been kidnapped, never mind let's crack on and have a jaunty adventure".

Possibly confusing that with the end of Day of the Moon. The arc-heavy nature of series 6 makes that easy. There's a line at the end of the second episode where the Doctor does pretty much say, "we could investigate this mystery, but let's just have some adventures." But in a different episode.

What Replies said, too.

[Zetetic]

Except Moffat didn't do that, as I already pointed out.

To be clear, is your argument "there was a bit of a gap where someone could have been reacting to events, so you can't say that they weren't"?

That comes across as more sarky than I meant it to, but there you are.

[Deanjam]

Big Finish have pulled the Torchwood story Absent Friends from release, presumably because of Barrowman.

[Replies From View]

To be clear, is your argument "there was a bit of a gap where someone could have been reacting to events, so you can't say that they weren't"?

That comes across as more sarky than I meant it to, but there you are.

Well I've already been quite clear.  Not sure it needs summarising into something quite so stupid:

I know that doing it off-screen isn't always ideal, but in this instance one could argue that the mid-series gap works as an emotional cushion for the Ponds to come to terms with it all, and for the viewers to not require an emotional resolution because so much time has passed.  What we didn't see on-screen was "never mind all this guff; let's just get on with more adventures!" but people tend to see it that way because all these emotional arcs were not attended to in any episodes we saw.


My view is that something tricky like that is better left off-screen than done badly on-screen.  I know that this arguably lets Moffat off some hooks a little too easily, but think of the way it was handled by Moffat (the audience can imagine it, if they want, in the mid-series gap) and the way Chibnall would have done it.

Isn't that fair enough?

[Mister Six]

Nah, because the real issue is in the lack of reaction after the Mels revelation, which came after the gap. The episode ends with Amy offhandedly saying "Do you think we'll see [River] again?" like she's referring to a quirky one-off guest star and not the daughter she'd carried in captivity for nine months then had snatched from her twice.

It's shit, it spoils an otherwise fantastic season, and Moffat totally dropped the ball.

[Replies From View]

I haven't seen it since 2011, so I may or may not agree in retrospect if I were to rewatch it.


At the time, as a Moffat apologist (which I still am when the current comparison is Chibnall), I didn't think it was brushed off, just that the trauma wasn't shown.  If you can accept that trauma is usually dealt with in private you may end up enjoying series 6 more; I don't know.

[purlieu]

It's not handled brilliantly - there's basically not a trace of "we lost our baby, then it turned out she was our childhood best friend, then she tried to kill us, then ended up marrying The Doctor and we only really saw her for a few months of her life" in the Ponds' behaviour, largely because Moffat doesn't know how to write that. He can do beautiful intimate moments, but bigger emotions and he just falls apart.
I still think it's a billion times better than the angst of RTD's "oh no my companion is still alive but I can't see her so I'll cry on screen for the first time in 29 years of my character because this is far sadder than any of the other times I've never seen companions again and look the scene will go on for ages with an obnoxious Murray Gold score because Russell thinks common people are too stupid to get emotions unless they're hammered home excessively" patronising bullshit.

[Kelvin]

I haven't seen it since 2011, so I may or may not agree in retrospect if I were to rewatch it.


At the time, as a Moffat apologist (which I still am when the current comparison is Chibnall), I didn't think it was brushed off, just that the trauma wasn't shown.  If you can accept that trauma is usually dealt with in private you may end up enjoying series 6 more; I don't know.

I agree, more or less. I think they do address it. It's just that Amy is meant to be someone who supresses her vulnerability, so when she first meets the Doctor after the gap, she's demanding to know where her baby is, and then in the final episode we see her literally torture - and for all we know kill - the eyepatch woman for stealing her time with River. The fact they knew Mels all their life is also meant to (retroactively) diffuse some of the raw emotion once they find out.

[Mister Six]

I haven%u2019t seen it since 2011, so I may or may not agree in retrospect if I were to rewatch it.


At the time, as a Moffat apologist (which I still am when the current comparison is Chibnall), I didn%u2019t think it was brushed off, just that the trauma wasn%u2019t shown.  If you can accept that trauma is usually dealt with in private you may end up enjoying series 6 more; I don%u2019t know.

Except it's a TV show and there is no meaningful privacy for the characters. And it's a massive moment coming off the back of a very emotionally intense cliffhanger, so leaving it to the viewer to assume Amy went and had a bit of a cry off-camera at some point just isn't good enough.

Moffat fucked it. Still a good season though. And he's still be best writer the series has ever had.

[Replies From View]

Let's Kill Hitler is a bad episode.  Moffat knew that the mystery value of River Song was in her foretelling of the great times the Doctor would have with her, so why he chose to render her first moments as the Alex Kingston incarnation as this kind of childish "cor I fancy him" runaround I'll never know.  You've got this promise of great depth to their connection that never really comes to fruition until The Husbands of River Song, which is far too late in her own timeline to warrant her earnestness or aloofness in series 4, 5 and the first half of series 6.

[Kelvin]

Yeah, River is awful in series 6. Her actions in the finale, where she's willing to let billions die until he agrees to marry her, feel totally misjudged. It also doesn't make any sense why the Doctor continues that relationship once they get "married", other than because he's heard they do. There's no chemistry or deeper connection between them, and imo, that's far more serious than the baby stuff we've been discussing, since it's at the heart of the entire character.

You've got this promise of great depth to their connection that never really comes to fruition until The Husbands of River Song, which is far too late in her own timeline to warrant her earnestness or aloofness in series 4, 5 and the first half of series 6.

I'd argue that you do start to see them have a more intimate bond over the course of her last few appearances, but it's still far too late. They needed to form that connection in series 6, so that, even if their marriage did end up being a means to an end, you still believed there was something deeper there. I never get any sense of that whatsoever: he's suspicious, then horny, then... respectful enough to stay with her?   

[Kelvin]

I suppose that was kind of the point; that it was a one sided thing, with River being far more obsessed with him, than he was of her. But I just don't think it works, even on that level. They just don't seem to have any connection, other than wanting to fuck each other. They needed something more, sooner.

[Replies From View]

I suppose that was kind of the point; that it was a one sided thing, with River being far more obsessed with him, than he was of her. But I just don't think it works, even on that level. They just don't seem to have any connection, other than wanting to fuck each other. They needed something more, sooner.

I suppose the obvious solution would have been to show many moments in the earlier stages of River's own timeline where she'd develop an attraction for the Doctor for who he is, but weirdly all we get is her learning about the Doctor from the Ponds, then she fancies him when she meets him, then she is told that he is amazing so she uses up regeneration energy saving him.

An argument would probably be that we have seen companions being mesmerised by the Doctor's brilliance loads of times, and Moffat presumably wanted to use shorthand for River considering everything else he wanted to pack into series 5 and 6, and just to not be too repetitive - it just means that the methods by which the Doctor normally develops a bond with his companions never happened for him with River.  All the stuff she foretold and drove him mad with curiosity seemed to not really happen.  And I can't mesh together all her flirting/'you'll see!' stuff with the revelation that she's Amy and Rory's daughter, either.  That's what was presented as the ultimate reveal for her character but I can't believe that's what she's holding back in the series 5 angels two-parter.


I wonder if the Ponds' grief and this missing Doctor-River content should have been handled at once in a single or double episode in series 6.  The Ponds at home grieving while the Doctor and River galavant on their own journeys without them.  A weird juxtaposition and, yeah, maybe the wrong thing to do after a mid-series break.  I can completely understand why a few mini-episodes were made around this time, but they weren't enough.  Does Big Finish do anything worthwhile with River?  Maybe her deeper connection with the Doctor makes more sense when those are taken into account, but I'm confused about her meeting pre-Tennant incarnations considering what she says in series 4.

[Poison To The Mind]

Do you have a link to Moffat or one of the other writers discussing this arc? It does feel like a game of exquisite corpse, which is fun with a bit of paper and a pen on a Sunday afternoon, but ill-advised on a multimillion-pound TV blockbuster.

I've just pieced little bits together from tweets and interviews by Mathieson and Harness, but I bet there's a full-on Pixley DWM special with lavishly-researched details about the various script drafts.

[Replies From View]

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".

[Zetetic]

I suppose the difference for me (and I'll try not to pretend that it's more than that for once) is that it far more often felt to me that RTD would try to sell whatever resolution he'd plucked out of the air as mattering to the characters (even if this frequently meant an emotionally overwrought conclusion) while Moffat would try to sell it as a clever and somehow intellectually satisfying (certainly to some people, it seems) tidying away of the plot and jargon[nb]And I like the introduction of to-be-made-sense-of jargon, in itself.[/nb] that had gone before.

[purlieu]

I think they both managed to pull it off and fuck it up. I like the way series 4 subtly seeded the finale in numerous ways, and, much as I hate Journey's End, I can admit he tied all those elements together really well. Similarly, series 5 was very satisfying, especially in that it didn't tie everything up, thus making the show feel slightly less constrained by the 'season long arc concluding with a Big Bad' formula. On the opposite end, randomly throwing in the phrases Bad Wolf and Hybrid, only for them to have very little actual meaning at the end is just really tedious.

I'd argue that Chibnall actually structured his Timeless Child arc really well, it's just a shame that's it's such an offensively shit idea.