Treadmill Reviews: Steven Moffat's Doctor Who

Unfortunately, today's post is going to be another one of those that only a few of you will care about (At least I'm not talking about video games again). I'm sorry for that, and I'm getting back to regular posting again this week, after a couple weeks of rocky updating.

On Saturday, the final episode of the 6th season of the revived Doctor Who series aired, and since that's such a mouthful I'll refer to the revived series as just plain "Doctor Who" and the original series as "Old Doctor Who" from now on. I didn't actually watch the episode until yesterday, but since this has been the first season I watched entirely as it aired, and since I watched most episodes while walking on the treadmill, I want to do a review.

There are many things I could discuss, such as the differences between David Tennant's and Matt Smith's portrayals of The Doctor; I wont, however, because I have some pretty set feelings on that matter that I'm sure no one will care about. Instead, I want to talk about the differences between Russel T. Davies' and Steven Moffat's approaches to the Doctor Who narrative.

"Blink," the one episode of Doctor Who to see
if one episode is all you ever see.

Russel T. Davies came on as Executive Producer and chief writer when BBC finally decided to relaunch Doctor Who, with writers such as Steven Moffat working under him. During the first four years of the show's run, Steven Moffat was the only other writer besides Davies to contribute full episode scripts of his own for every season, quickly becoming a fan favorite for his "clever, darker" episodes and arcs (Which were "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances," "The Girl in the Fireplace," "Blink," and "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead." All received Hugo nominations, and only the last arc failed to snag the award itself).

It made perfect sense to everyone, then, that the role of Executive Producer should go to Steven Moffat when Davies stepped down in 2008.

Moffat's first season, the show's fifth, aired in 2010, and had a distinctly different flavor to it. For one, the actors had all changed, along with the logo, the theme music, the Time Vortex as seen in the title sequence, and the inside of The Doctor's TARDIS. There was something else about that first episode, however, that just seemed different. Moffat's whole season had an air of surrealism to it, as if the "Doctor Who Universe" had completely severed from our own. When I finished that season, I realized that not a single episode had taken place in London, the primary location for most of Russel T. Davies' arcs.

As much as I enjoyed Moffat's writing, there was one thing he continued to do that bugged me; every single episode during the fifth season would dramatically bring the audience's attention to some mysterious thing that was going on behind the scenes (yes, for those of you following along, I'm talking about the 'cracks in the universe').

I love the season over-arc idea. Russel T. Davis always had something bigger going on behind the scenes each season, and it wasn't until the end of the season that we could fit all the pieces together and realize what it was. In truth, it's kind of hard not to do that in television, even if your show tends to be more episodic. What bugged me was not that Moffat had a deeper story going on, but that he seemed to have a driving need to impress us with that deeper story, right from the get-go.

I feel like Moffat is a wonderful writer who can tell a single story with force and power, but when given charge over a series of story arcs, his attempts to string them together are lacking. The fifth season of Doctor Who didn't end satisfactorily, instead leaving the viewers hanging with no promise that he even knew where he intended to go.

WANT.

With that in mind, I feel like season six did much better. Moffat and his writers still left metaphoric flashing arrows all over the place, and many of the episodes dealt solely with the over-arc instead of an episodic mini-arc, but I felt more satisfied with the pacing and the way the over-arc was dealt with. There were enough mini-arcs along the way to make the progression feel more natural, and the over-arc itself seemed to be dealt with in an episodic manner (though I may only be getting that impression because they split the season in half).

Season six of Doctor Who also made a genius move by including an episode written almost entirely by Neil Gaiman. Without spoiling anything (for the few of you still reading this who haven't seen the episode yet), Neil Gaiman's episode cuts to the chase by bringing back and giving more depth to the one character every Doctor Who fan has been wanting to see more of. I already knew Neil Gaiman was an amazing writer and storyteller, but to see him so easily deliver to the audience exactly what we wanted increased my respect for him greatly.

The season finale left a bit wanting, but I feel like Moffat's direction has certainly been improving. I had mixed feelings about him spending 90% of the episode trying to convince us that The Doctor was going to die. Hint: he doesn't. Of course he doesn't. We know this because, as people who watch TV, we know how this works (Besides, Matt Smith's contract doesn't run out until 2013, I believe). On the one hand, I was a bit annoyed that Moffat seemed to believe he would surprise us with the revelation that The Doctor was still alive, but I also got the impression that he respected us enough as an intelligent audience to know that he was lying to us.

Obviously, I'll be looking forward to the next season of Doctor Who (which looks like it wont be starting until next fall). Moffat's storytelling seems to be getting better, though I would hope he would cool it on the dramatic flashing arrows ('Oh no, is there a crack on the TARDIS? Le Gasp!' OK, dude, we get it), and there's some interesting character development that I'm interested in seeing how they play out. Even if Moffat's work doesn't impress me as much as Davies' did, Doctor Who is a show based on the idea of constant change, and I can learn to live with that for the sake of overall good fiction.

Did I write an entire post about Doctor Who without posting a single picture of The Doctor?
Not anymore.