As we leave 2012, one of the worst years Doctor Who has had in an awfully long time, and enter the 50th anniversary year of 2013, it’s worth taking a look at where and why the show has been going so very wrong lately, and we will be doing so by standing on the shoulder (and nicking the best ideas of) former authors of Doctor Who novels from the ’90s. Long-time readers will know that your correspondent is a fan of the writings (if not necessarily the opinions) of Lawrence Miles, a curmudgeon of some repute in the Who fan community. Miles is also one of the most astute critics of modern Who (or was, before he stopped watching) and though he had a personal conflict with Stephen Moffat which might have coloured his opinions on the latter’s reign somewhat, he has been consistently correct about the show’s downward plummet in quality of late, and the nature thereof (though he called perhaps it a little too early). Lawrence Miles was right, ladies and gentlemen.
In the course of this post, I’ll be referring to things that Miles has said on his blog, but he has a peculiar habit of deleting some of his posts, so sometime in 2011 I scraped the RSS feed where a lot of the deleted material was retained – this stuff can be found in .pdf form here, – and there’s also Mileswatch, which used to mirror Miles’ blog (though it didn’t get everything), but seems to have given up of late. And for good measure, the .pdf for The Book Of The World, which is a spec script for a theoretical Doctor Who reboot that Miles wrote in 2007 and references several times. It’s quite good. Now that’s out of the way…
Keen-eyed observers will note that this year I’ve broken with my heretofore traditional post-episode Who reviews. There are, in this blog’s draft folder, several attempts at an explanation for why this is, written in the week immediately following the initial broadcast of ‘Asylum of the Daleks’ earlier this year. It boils down to this: I got about half-way through my Asylum review (the draft material from which I’ll stick at the bottom of the article) and gave up. If they can’t be bothered, why should I? Of the six Who episodes we’ve had this year, the closest approximation to a ‘best one’ was the Christmas episode. Really. If you’d told me a few years ago, etc etc. The second ‘best’ was a tie between that one episode Toby Whithouse keeps writing and (again, if you’d told me even last year…) a ‘comedy’ episode featuring Rory’s father as played by Mr Weasley (as it turned out, a good bit of casting) and written by Chris Chibnall (!)(!)(!). You can see that there’s a problem here.
What that problem is has been rather hard to pin down, but, as it turns out, Miles was right all along, and we (I) didn’t notice – still transfixed by Moffat’s older, better (i.e. actually good) stuff – that it’s Moffat’s cynicism that has ultimately done for Doctor Who as we know it.You’ll notice that the draft of the Asylum review says that one of the key issues with Moffat-Who is that it’s ‘Who-by-catchphrase’ (a slightly misleading phrase I would suggest you read the draft to elucidate). This isn’t incorrect as such, but I’ve come to realise that it’s a symptom rather than the illness itself. I think the actual problem is that it’s ‘Who-by-numbers’ – efficient, precision-engineered, and, as I said earlier, deeply cynical. Watching the Christmas special, one can’t help but be struck by how the whole thing feels as though Moffat set out with a set of bullet-points and wrote an episode around them. Even in the dying days of RTD’s stewardship, the stories, for the most part, felt like stories, nonsensical (or shit) as they may have been.
this image is at least as stupid as the preceeding images
Part of the reason I think most of the Moffat-era episodes, especially Series 6 and what we’ve seen of Series 7 don’t work is that many of the episodes (and especially the ones written by Moffat himself) aren’t even coherent. The Angels Take Manhattan is a good example. It functions if you think of it as a collection of setpieces, a list of things you’ve ‘got to have ‘ in an episode like that, but as a story, it makes next to no sense. So many of the elements are inexplicable, both in context and in and of themselves – the depressing nadir of this being the Statue of Liberty Angel, which doesn’t work for so very many reasons, and demonstrates that Moffat has forgotten a) how and why the angels work and b) how to write. The episode had a lot of bits – the apartment block, the PI, the cherubs, the giant angel, the book (respectively, ‘why?’, lazy, dumb, completely ridiculous and ‘what, really?’ which were bad enough separately, but threaded together with a nonsensical non-story and just dreadful. The suicide was stupid (and felt particularly unustified given that they’ve gone from complete marital breakdown to ‘I can’t live without you’ in the space of four episodes. To be honest, it’s been a while, and the all the specifics and the little irritating details that I’d normally nit-pick the hell out of have fled my memory, but in the words of Fitzthistlewits,
The more I consider the direction Moffat has taken the show, the more I find it difficult to disagree with Miles that most of Moffat’s decisions are about marketability, keeping viewers in their comfort zone and appealing to the widest possible sections of the audience. The most obvious reflection of this is in the casting of Matt Smith.
[Moffat] cast the silliest possible actor as the leading man, purely so he could continue his own mad campaign of pretend-populist squee… Matt Smith has been given a demographically-tailored Quirky-Yet-Somehow-English costume, to make sure everyone feels comfortable accepting this as the same mass-produced product we got in the Tennant years, while the 2010 series has (it seems) been carefully stripped of any new or peculiar features and involves episodes written by the authors of “Exit Wounds”, “The Idiot’s Lantern”, and Love Actually.
This (from the article In-Between Days) perhaps goes a tad overboard – I don’t object to Matt Smith quite as much, even if his idea of acting does consist of wriggling his fingers in front of his face, but he does seem like the result of a box-ticking exercise (with lazily conceived boxes) rather than the answer to the question ‘what’s the best/most interesting thing we can do with the next Doctor?’. Another way to look at it, as mentioned by Miles elsewhere, is to consider if Matt Smith makes sense as a Doctor, rather than as a successor to David Tennant, and the answer, I think, is no. From ‘After The Eleventh Hour’:
If Matt Smith had come straight after Christopher Eccleston, then it would’ve seemed ridiculous, like replacing Richard Burton with Sooty. Smith only makes sense after Tennant’s stint as Britain’s Top Adventurer Pin-Up. He makes sense if you’re trying to replace a specific actor. He doesn’t make sense as Doctor Who. He guarantees that the programme will never be able to develop beyond its current parameters, but then, what did you expect? Moffat doesn’t like taking risks.
We can see the same risk (and interest)-aversion in play again again this year (though to a somewhat lesser extent) with Oswin (or Kara, or whatever she’s called). Though Jenna-Louise Coleman is doubtless a fine actress, her character is little more than Rose 0.5 – managing to be less interesting by substituting any character or personality Rose might have had for an irritating Mary Poppins act and some gimmick about not dying or being reborn as someone who looks the same, or some shit like that.
(Christmas episode tangent: despite probably being the best episode this year, it wasn’t very good, mostly because (per my Asylum review draft) there was too much ‘human interest’ and not enough stuff actually happening. Had the episode actually been about the monster it might have been halfway interesting – the psychically reflective snow (as stupid as that looks when written down) could, potentially, have been good, and silly though they looked, the ‘choose the form of the destructor’ snowmen/Ice Governess at least had something. However, the episode wasn’t actually about any of that. It was about introducing the new companion, and re-introducing the Doctor*, which is fair enough, but I think even at an hour, the episode wasn’t able to thread the needle three ways. Remove one of the two additional things and you might be able to have a decent episode as well, but as it was, the story and everything else fell in service to the writer’s broader goals. Internal tangent: though I like the redesigned TARDIS and the new opening theme, and to a lesser extent, the title sequence (all harkening back to Classic Who in their own ways, which is nice) the confluence of their introduction – all following relatively closely from previous changes, especially the titles – gave (to me, at least) the impression of desperation, of the knowledge that something was wrong, and changing things that it was possible to change, and that they could be seen to be changing. Mind you, one of my Twitter correspondents informed me that the new TARDIS interior was actually a result of a studio change which means that I might just be viewing this with an overly jaundiced eye. I’m still not sure, though. One last thing - I’d also really appreciate it if we could stop trying to be ‘clever’ with new companion’s introduction to the TARDIS. Genre awareness is fine, but just stop, please, it’s not interesting or funny any more.)
chibnall noooooo
In a way, it feels as though the whole aesthetic of the show has shifted. Rather than being about the joy of discovery and exploration and a fascination with the different and the unknown - I know ‘what is Doctor Who about’ is a discussion/argument that could go on forever, but in broad terms, if Doctor Who can truly be said to be about anything, I would say it’s that - it’s become a vehicle for the Doctor to quirk his way around the universe (I would suggest reading Miles’ ‘The Squee Doctors’, which coveres this in more depth and detail) and rather than appealing with open-hearted sincerity, it does so with an almost upsettingly clinical precision. Slightly more pithily:
I think one of the reasons Doctor Who is so special is that it is (or can be) all things to all people -not because it’s been geared to appeal to as broad a range of people as possible, but rather as a direct consequence of its traditionally scrappier, riskier, and (genuinely) eccentric nature, which I feel is stifled in the slicker, but ultimately more shallow and far more heartless interpretation purveyed by Moffat. The man has written some of my very favourite episodes, but regrettably, his skills don’t seem to have transferred to showrunning. Yet worse than this, though, it seems as though Moffat might be considering leaving the show. For the (many) reasons above, this is a move that I’d be fine with. However, (and it’s a very substantial ‘however’ indeed) the augers seem to indicate that his replacement will be Chris Chibnall. Oh no. Oh no no no.
Postscript: I would suggest you read your way through the Lawrence Miles archive, as he presents many of the arguments I’ve butchered here in a better-written and more interesting way. There’s plenty of good stuff in there, and it’s worth your time. If you want to read some of Miles’ published work, he’s wrote several BBC novels (including Alien Bodies and Interference) and (with Tat Wood) an six-volume episode-by-episode guide to Classic Who called About Time which is jolly good. Also, read the sidebar on his blog. Seriously, it’s very funny.
*as someone pointed out on Twitter, when you consider (sniffy though the fans might get about it) that children do make up a substantial proportion of the Who viewership, there will be some kids too young to have had a proper ‘introduction’ to the Doctor, especially given how insular the last series and a half has been.
*DRAFT* Review: Doctor Who: Asylum of the Daleks
SPOILER WARNING.
As I’ve mentioned before, my introduction to Doctor Who was by way of a CD rip of the Genesis of the Daleks LP, given to me by a friend of my father when I was very young. As such, I’ve always had a fondness for Genesis, so as this episode began, and it became clear that this episode was nodding very much in Genesis’ direction, I was rather heartened*. Maybe Moffat, after the problematic last series, is back on form! Maybe we’ll get some ‘have I the right?’ moral discussion of which {that guy I always refer to in these things} has bemoaned the lack! Maybe… not.
So, from the beginning, things start going a bit silly. Human Daleks (which look terrible, but there you go), a Dalek parliament (not sure the Daleks would be huge fans of democracy, but fair enough) and the surprise! introduction of the new companion about five episodes early (her introduction was a surprise, but her character’s ‘twist’ was obvious from the moment it was implied that something about her was fishy her, given that there were about one thing it could have been).
Then we have the singularly ill-judged infertility subplot and instant marriage-fixing, which are, at root, symptoms of the same problem: focusing on the companion’s boring, weirdly fragile relationship. I mean, the Doctor’s gone for a few months and it just dissolves completely, apparently. Much as I’ve dissed Rory in the past for being a bit of a milquetoast, I’m on his side here. 2000 years, and Amy ditched him speculatively? As Phillip Purser-Hallard said on Twitter, too much human interest (though I’d say calling it ‘interest’ would be a bit of a stretch – Ed), not enough Daleks blowing things up.
I think I’m close to properly pinning down my major problems with the Moffat school of Doctor Who. One is its childlike** tendency to literal-mindedness – the whole ‘removing love’ thing, good grief – but another, more significant one is (and, like so many things, with the benefit of hindsight this is so very, very obvious) is that he’s slowly turning Doctor Who into Little Britain. This is a rather obtuse (but quotable) way of saying he writes Who-by-catchphrase***. I said this was obvious from the beginning – remember ‘are you my mummy?’ – but that was /good/, and now it’s become problematic in the extreme. When Oswin referred to herself as ‘the girl who could’, housemate S. Chladek’s immediate response was ‘that’s what she is now. It’s the new Girl Who Waited.’ But this is a symptom of a deeper problem, and it goes all the way back to Blink.
Remember Blink? Really, do you remember Blink? Rewatching it recently, I was reminded that it’s not as scary when it’s not dark and you’re not twelve, and though it’s good, it’s not quite as good as I remember it being at the time, though given how well it worked for me on first viewing, it remains a favourite. However, it is, in a way, the source of all the ‘catchphrase’ problems.
[the rest of this is specific points about the episode which I noted down during or immediately after the episode and would have spun into slightly more coherent sentences, had I continued - Future Ed]
Daleks seem to like their nice white rooms.
Called it.
What’s there to be afraid of? Never see why Daleks are so scared of these things. Why was Oswin in a special room? Daleks aren’t Cybermen! ‘Genius’ daleks (see Dalek)
If it’s that easy to get the jump on the Doctor…
Is Amy still a Dalek?
Database wipe quicker that door? Still a good idea
Higher production values.
Moffat can’t help himself – intertextuality with the ‘eggs’ thing.
Next episode? Oh, please no.
*bear in mind the most interesting thing to me about this episode going in was the promo image which had the Heavy Weapons Dalek in it. That’s sad in several ways, really.
**to my mind, a regrettable example of a writer talking down to the kids and boring everyone else stupid.
***obviously, Doctor Who has always /had/ catchphrases. This isn’t the best way of putting it, to be honest. What I’m talking about here is his tendency to substitute catchphrases (and other script elements that appeal to the sort of people who post Doctor Who gif sets to Tumblr****) for plot, characterisation, etc blah blah blah. The most significant example being – from Blink – ‘wibbly-wobby timey-wimey’, which has become possibly my least favourite line of anything, ever.****the bad sort of people who post Doctor Who gif sets to tumblr, I mean.
