"Life is short and you are hot"
The greatest asset Steve Moffat will bring to the role of Head Honcho is his skill for character; in particular, establishing very likeable characters in a short period of time. Quite a talent for a show where half the extras exist as cannon fodder. Top prize goes to Blink - Kathy "you told him you were 18!" Nightingale, everyone’s inner geek Larry, and especially Billy Shipton. He only has a few lines to cement his identity, yet minutes later people across the country are pretending they've just got something in their eye. He can write leads just as well - the charming Sally Sparrow, supporting Blink so well you barely miss the Doctor; Madame de Pompadour, getting away with kissing, "dancing" and the Doctor being in love(?) with her, all those things Grace Holloway caused heart attacks with back in 1996. The Empty Child introduced us to a Captain Jack who genuinely hasn't been so interesting since leaving Moffat's hands. Silence in the Library has introduced six characters all with the life expectancy of a Spinal Tap drummer, yet he dredges sympathy for sacrificial lamb Miss Evangelista seemingly from nowhere, and gives Proper Dave and Other Dave real character just through their names.
“I let you keep Mickey!"
This goes for the regulars too. Lovely, lovely sparkly Doctor-companion dialogue. The good naturedly antagonistic Doc-Rose-Jack love triangle in Doctor Dances. The other good naturedly antagonistic Doc-Rose-Mickey love triangle in Girl in the Fireplace. It didn't work so well for Blink, where Martha vanished in the mix, but I've always thought she was an ineffectual and dull character except when placed center stage (she's brill in Human Nature and Last of the Timelords, but most authors gave her nothing of substance to do in series 3). It seems its impossible to go wrong with Donna, especially watching her react to the future of face-donation and neural communicators. Don't make me quote it all, I'm sure you have your favourite bit...
"Are you my mummy?"
Expect more catchy phrases in series 5, as every episode so far has been anchored in a key line or command. "Don't blink, blink at you're dead", more recently "stay out of the shadows". Silence in the Library also had the nerve to give us creepy repeated phrases "Hey, who turned out the lights?" and "Donna Noble has left the library. Donna Noble has been saved" at the same time. He's even started with his own running jokes in advance - bananas and dancing (see below for more of that).
“One day, just one day, maybe, I'm going to meet somebody who gets the whole "don't wander off" thing.”
Nothing beats having someone who loves and understands the show at the head. Just as RTD's claim that the new series of Doctor Who would feature “the same man who fought the Drahvins, The Macra, The Axons, The Wirrn, the Terileptils, the Borad, the Bannermen and the Master in San Francisco on New Year's Eve 1999," so Mr M has constantly proved he knows what he's dealing with. Silence's "spoilers", "Why does nobody ever just go to the police!" and Billy pointing out the TARDIS windows are the wrong size. I don't just mean in terms of humour - sneaking in all those cryptic hints about the Doctor's real name just because it feels right, giving him the "lonely angel" tag, and "everybody lives!" show a good understanding of our favourite Timelord
“It was raining when we met”
Expect a smart mix of comedy, heart and...ah hell, no interesting analysis here - I just wanted an excuse to use my favourite quote. It’s still a good point though - he doesn’t sacrifice tragedy for laughs, or vice versa - even the affecting Girl in the Fireplace had its share of smart wit.
“Why is it pointing at the light?”
Name me some great scenes from the new series. Chances are, you're thinking of the moment the tape runs out on the Empty Child, maybe the opening of Blink with the writing, the whole sequence with the DVD easter egg or the lights beginning to flicker in the basement…if there’s something the man can do really well, it’s set pieces - little chunks of brilliance scattered about. Expect more great solid and memorable sequences from series 5.
"It's not the books, is it? I mean, books can't be alive, can they?"
A universal theme in his episodes so far has been terror in the everyday. Doctor Who likes to do this one a lot, from Atmos to Autons, but the emphasis here is TERROR in the everyday. The earpieces were just a way to get the Cybermen into the story, Atmos a massive Macguffin, and Magpie's TVs weren't scary. Ticking clocks, statues, the dark, small children - all obvious targets, but very well exploited. Expect more in the same vein. There's a flipside to this praise. Steven Moffat's episodes have all focused on very contained concepts, the sort of "monsters under the bed" horror which incidentally worked so well in Torchwood the few times they tried it instead of bolting an unlikely invasion into 45 minutes. Sorry, rant over. Doctor Who, being at its heart a kids show about an alien who considers celery the height of fashion, can get away with putting the Earth into dyre peril. Having not yet seen him try, it'll be interesting to see how he can handle the biggies, the end-of-series climactic double bills, and how they turn out. Moffat has so far had the luxury of interesting episodes - he can be experimental, because ultimately he’s never been in a position where he has to be generic. The same can be said for other fan-fave Paul Cornell - lets see them make challenging television when landed with an “invasion Earth” plot, eh? (and as a flipside to that, wasn’t it fun to watch the Davies-detractors shut up and gulp after Midnight?) He’ll certainly bring his own touch to the Big Episodes - the question is, will he merely kink the clichés or go for something completely unusual? Already Silence in the Library has given us the paradoxical casting of the Doctor as the villain (bursting through the doors before the credits, traditional monster role; not to mention sonicing the security camera), the mock reveal of the books as the bad guys and a door the Doctor can't sonic - not deadlocked, just wood. Another question is whether he'll be able to handle an arc. Daft question in my book, when you count the number of concepts he can bung into a single episode and still remain effective. But its not all sunshine and roses. Despite my enthusiasm for a change - I always loved RTD, but if he feels its his time to go then I’m excited to see what new blood will give to the show - I refuse to ignore the drawbacks. The following are all based on actual events and genuine quotes.
"Half this street thinks your missus must be messing about with Mr. Avistock - the butcher. But she's not, is she...?"
Behind the Sofa.org recently published a pre-reboot interview with some new series writers, before there was even a new series for them to write for (reread it here) One of the most disturbing quotes was our new Producer claiming it was, first and foremost, "a children’s programme. No ifs. No buts. Definitely!”. In fact the way he put it was "Now, a few of you might not like what I’m going to say next. Grip the arms of your chair, grind your teeth and wrap your head around this", and he's absolutely right. We like to have it both ways - we watch this stuff aimed at the 9-13s market, but we praise it when it gets challenging and dark. Which is why the farting Aliens of London gets consistantly derided, while the edgy, grim "real sci-fi" Genesis of the Daleks is held aloft as our highest beacon. Despite the quote, I don’t quite believe him - at least not from available evidence. Mr M. has written some of the most defiantly child unfriendly pieces so far. Most obviously, the terror factor - Blink scored "Off the Scale" on Fear Factor, and Empty Child/Doctor Dances came with a warning for parents to watch it in the daytime. A warning I, as a oh-so-brave 15 year old ignored, and then found I couldn't sleep after watching the last ten minutes from behind a cushion. But children do secretly like being scared (Empty Child's in my new series top 20), and there has never been anything I felt went too far. Maybe Doctor Constantine's transformation was on the line.
No, I mean the sex 'n' violence, and adult themes. Miss Evangelista's fading struggle is virtually a one off death scene in a kids show. Fine, she's already dead - that's the excuse. But imagine the same scene, only she wasn't killed in "less than seconds"; instead, she's got a wound in a major artery or a bullet somewhere unpleasant. You could leave the scene untouched, and the emotional impact would be as powerful. Only you couldn't show it on kids TV any more. How many other characters, in the whole history of the show, get three minutes of panicked last words before passing on? Daleks and Cybermen hit you with a nice, clean fall over blast; so do new series Sontarans. What about the other themes? The Empty Child/Doctor Dances combo packs the most gay agenda than any other episode yet, not to mention seduction, drunken threesomes, love triangles, the eponymous "dancing". Girl in the Fireplace gets the Doctor closer to a proper canonical shag than ever before, packed full of hints for people who remembered what "dancing" was all about last time around, along with being about loss, death and misery. Expect him to lighten up now he's responsible for everything...maybe? After all, it can't be this creepy all the time...can it?
"Us kids want Narnia, not the wardrobe!"
I remembered this pithy quote of his for two reasons. The first is that it is well phrased and witty. The second is that it is wrong. The fundamental difference is that a wardrobe really is just a wooden box - the TARDIS has a swimming pool in Evolution, a garden in Genocide, lovvely big leafy cloisters in the TV movie and Logopolis, endless corridors in Castrovalva, companion bedrooms in the Visitation. The most the new series has given us has been the console room and an oversized wardrobe. With the changeover, looks like we're even further away from seeing that massive, ancient, chaotic library which we all know must be in there somewhere. Its an especially mean comment from one of the few people writing for the new show who have actually used time travel as a plot device, in both Girl in the Fireplace and Blink. The TARDIS is at its worst as a walking plot randomiser. Most episodes follow the pattern of land-leave-lose, have adventure and then conveniently find it in time for the "next week on". But maybe all is not lost - if I recall correctly, the powers that be vetoed his idea of his keeping Arthur the horse in the TARDIS stables. So I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
"Children are no respecters of reputation and are bored by tradition, so keeping faith with the past they never knew means nothing. They want, and are entitled to, their own hero and their own show.”
Fair enough. But that doesn't mean he's going to cut gratuitous referencing out of the series? Does it...? Despite the fact the word Gallifrey didn't get in until the end of series 2, old-series referencing has steadily been on the increase. Now naturally, the new series lives and dies on its own merits. But it doesn't negate the flush of love we all feel when the Master reminisces about Sea Devils and Axons. I'm a passionate, flag-waving member of that cabal that believes there is no "classic" or "new", and certainly one is not better than the other - it's all one ongoing canon. Letting the Eternals round up the Carrionites, or walk out on the Time War just give me ammunition to prove it's the same chap who was striding about in Enlightenment. Will Steve Moffat ditch old series referencing entirely? I hope not, although it has been absent in his regular episodes so far. On the other hand, he did get to head up Time Crash - and that gave the new series "Nyssa and Tegan, Timelords in silly hats". Nice to see the Doc remembering Arc of Infinity, even if some of us would rather not. We can only live in hope. And speaking of living...
“Everybody lives!”
When this line first came out in Doctor Dances, it was a true airpunching moment. Because the last thing you want to be is an extra in Doctor Who, and after decades of gutpunching misery as they are wiped out in droves, finally a complete and joyful success. Its what came afterwards that worries me. Jenny’s departure from the show annoyed me by trying to have it both ways - a tragic death, but one undermined by her then resurrection. He didn’t write the episode, but he did persuade the author to keep her alive. A few weeks later we had River Song - even more affecting for not involving the lame “step in front of a bullet” trick. But again, we were cheated of real death. The horrific otherworld that we and Donna were meant to fear, that Miss Evangelista stalks in black with dyre warnings, suddenly becomes a glowy-white afterlife. The image of the Doctor realising his future self had come up with a way to save her was priceless - but the way it was done, and the voiceover in particular, undid the pathos of their parting. Even in Blink, the emphasis for both Billy and Kathy was not that they had died, but that they had had good lives. Girl in the Fireplace has proved he can do uncompromising tragedy properly. So please - no more lame almost-deaths. Either kill them or don’t. Most of my favourite episodes, both classic and new, are the downbeat massacres - the ones where things get so dire the Doctor starts shooting things, the ones where he has to abandon whole parallel worlds to destruction or resign himself to losing the entire cast at a rate of one every two minutes. And while we certainly can’t have that all the time, one every now and then never hurts.
In the excitement of the new series most acclaimed writer getting into a position where he gets more than two episodes a series, lets not forget to give thanks where thanks due. He put emotion back at the forefront of the show, when in the past we mostly had to grip subtext (and, as flickfilosopher.com puts it, sometimes we had to imagine the subtext too). For the first time, he put the focus on the emotional cost of such a life for both the Doctor and companions, and whether the attempt to broach an openly romantic plot and giving companions a family was too kitchen sink for you, or the highlight of the show, it remains a brave effort to so something new. It'll be fun to see what influences stay and what goes - both from his own work and the series plan set up so far.
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