Saturday sees the end of the current run of Doctor Who... with quite a lot to prove.
Now, I love Doctor Who. It’s been around since before I was born and yet one of my first tv memories is seeing Jon Pertwee changing into Tom Baker. For some reason that didn’t send me into years of psychotherapy and scarfophobia, but immediately engaged me as a story-telling device. Plus here was a hero who didn’t run into a room shooting things…(even Daleks)... for that I had Star Wars, Buck Rogers and countless American imports which I enjoyed in a different way. No, this strange eccentric character thought and quipped his way out of situations. In other words, British, by way of Gallifrey.
Over the years my attention-span varied and wandered. I was still there through Peter Davison, really tried to find Colin Baker’s era intriguing and squinted to make Sylvester McCoy’s tenure look as if it had a budget to match its ideas. I wasn’t an obsessive, but I enjoyed the show, though realised it might have passed its prime when Michael Grade self-fulfillingly put it out to pasture. Maybe it wasn’t Who, maybe it was me. I discovered girls. Sometimes I even discovered girls who liked Doctor Who.
The 1996 TV-film didn’t feel very 'Whovian', but it was at least an attempt to recapture what had been lost. I followed, personally and professionally, the decision to re-launch the series in 2005 under Russell T Davies - and despite worrying that a perky pop songstrel had been picked as a companion, was fascinated with the idea of casting Christopher Eccleston. I’d met him a few times when he was promoting films and I just couldn’t see him as a Doctor… which delighted my adult self. It meant they were trying something interesting. The rest as they say is history, even though some aspects of that history remain argued about. The show was a big success but for whatever problems behind the scenes Eccleston left and David Tennant arrived, bringing with him the perhaps most beloved era since Tom Baker. Matt Smith stepped in as the Eleventh incarnation and one of my favourite UK writers took over the helm of show-runner. I knew Steven Moffat’s template of playing with chronology and thought that such an aspect would work well with Who. Time, after all, was relative to the show.
I’ve been a fan of many of his works for years. I loved the likes of Press Gang, Coupling and the likes of his previous Who work (Blink, The Girl in the Fireplace, Silence in the Library are landmark episodes). At his best he can be one of this country’s best scribes. I don’t envy him his current workload, nor the fact that he has to please the Beeb, the cast and crew and not have a few million Whovians want to exterminate him. He’ll never please everyone and he’d be a fool to try. He could paint the Mona Lisa while composing a symphony and solving world poverty and someone would still question his methods. After all… it happens to Joss Whedon all the time, doesn’t it?
Equally, I’m well aware that running a show is not the same as watching it. I’ve known several show-runners over the years and each and every one of them has worked harder than they’ve ever been credited for and is wholly right when they point out that any fan’s opinion can be offered on high, but to actively prove they could do better they only need to contribute a million bucks to the pot to gain a bonafide seat at the creativity table. Otherwise, they’re just a commentator.
The thing is, there’s nothing wrong with being a commentator. That’s what water-coolers were invented for. Just ask Luther Haws. And given human nature such commentary gets to be high-praise, despondency and anything inbetween. Add the internet to all that and things get… opinionated. Just ask Al Gore or that cat who looks grumpy all the time...
So, in Who’s fiftieth year why are so many people I know looking at the current run and… well, shrugging. I’m not saying the current run doesn’t have its passionate fans or that EVERYONE dislikes it – for all I know the grumblers may be a minority. But of the large and diverse group of fans I know MOST are saying that they feel those dimensions are feeling less… relative. They don’t hate the show, far from it. But they’re disappointed. Something’s… off. Wibbly-wobbly in a gratey not greaty way.
Why? Because whether you like the current state of play or not, there HAS undeniably been a noticeable shift.
Companion Piece:
When Doctor Who returned in 2005, Russell T Davies was adamant that the companion should be a contemporary girl. He argued that fantastical drama and cosmic action adventure needs a 'one of us' character to ground it, one with whom an audience can identify and help us slowly find out little nuggets about this mysterious alien who loves humanity yet isn’t quite human. Whether you liked Billie Piper’s Rose Tyler (and how she ultimately developed) or not, there was a solid argument that through her we were initially re-introduced to the concept of the Doctor. She asked the right questions, she was the audience-by-proxy. The likes of Freema Agyeman and Catherine Tate followed - interesting, different characters to be sure - but each fulfilling the role of ‘us’ to some extent.
Moffat’s characters, particularly his female characters are interesting and sometimes dynamic creations, but they are no longer the access points they need to be – often they’re actually the dilemma, the maguffin at the centre of the story, one that drives the plot through a season rather than explains it. Sometimes, indeed often, they are the person who ultimately saves the Doctor rather than the other way around.
Introduced during the Davies/Tennant era Alex Kingston’s River Song is the Timelord’s thief / archaeologist / paramour who also happens to die the first time we meet her and then keeps coming back with the revelation that she’s the daughter of the Doctor’s next companion, Amy Pond, with whom he also shared a flirtation. Unless you’re a daytime soap star, those aren’t YOUR eyes she’s looking through. But that’s fair enough… River is a slightly risqué, delightfully sassy foil and a recurring character not a fully-fledged regular. She’s absolutely MEANT to be the distraction even if her identity is the anchor for a whole season. Karen Gillan’s Amy becomes the anchor for Moffat’s first hands-on season… the person who seems to have a big secret that she herself doesn’t know and for whom Moffat assembles his big ‘crack in the universe caused by the Tardis exploding in the future’. (No, don’t even ask me if that ever really got fully resolved)
And now, in the fiftieth year we have Clara… a fully-fledged companion who dies the first time the Doctor meets her and yet keeps coming back and sharing flirtations with him before dying again. And coming back again. And flirting again. (Stop me if this seems remotely familiar) She’s the EXACT OPPOSITE of the companion-as-access-point. She’s become the mystery. If anything, we’re now being asked to identify with the Timelord as HE tries to figure out the truth. But HE can’t be our access-point as we’re supposedly building to a finale that’s all about HIS secrets. Fifty years of secrets. Possibly a thousand years. He's our constant enigmatic enigma. The whole uneven Season 7B has no proxy…the audience is adrift and holding on by sheer force of will and nostalgia. If you don’t understand something it won’t be explained… we’re already too busy rushing on to something else…
Also, is it just me or isn’t ‘modern’ Clara anywhere near as engaging as ‘Asylum’ Clara and ‘Snowmen’ Clara ? The fact that Neil Gaiman was already well into penning a script for Nightmare in Silver featuring Victorian Clara - before the contemporary Clara was decided upon and changes made - also suggests some significant wavering.
Slutty Poster Stories:
It was Moffat who admitted that the whole remit of Season 7 was to have standalone stories that could be easily pitched in a few lines and illustrated by ‘slutty’ blockbuster-esque posters and titles. The problem with the Hollywood approach is that it rarely works for Hollywood in anything other than quick-fire financial terms. It’s a desperate, unapologetically unsubtle move to grab people’s wallets. Or as they like to call it 'SUMMER!' Every year there's a raft of such outings of which only a handful are deemed to have any specific gravity beyond their grab-everything-and-run opening weekend and word spreads on actual quality. Sure, the likes of Spider-man, The Avengers, Bond and Harry Potter are cornerstones. But though the Transformers franchise made the studio huge moolah… they were critically panned. The Fast and Furious is pretty but relatively vacant. The Expendables was OTT machismo. Prometheus was… well, God knows what that was. And please, for the love of zygons, don’t make me talk about Twilight…
So what Moffat essentially ordered was twelve-to-thirteen blockbusters (presumably needing/wanting at least a hit rate of 2/3 of those) …except they had to be produced on a tenth of the Hollywood budget and also fit into forty-five minutes, not two hours. Which, let’s be blunt, is like hiring great designers and architects and telling them they have six bricks, a chisel and a holiday weekend to turn their blueprints into a street of mansions. The very format suggests that character and plot must be secondary to pace - on-screen and off. It’s not impossible to generate drama in that period of time – 44 minute shows do it all the time and for longer seasons in the US - but most aren’t pretending to be movies. They’re a serial or series sharing out the momentum from week to week. Even the in-your-face ‘24’ knew you couldn’t save the world EVERY hour of the day… that there had to be connective tissue for it to feel whole. In the current run of Who the connective tissue is gone in everything but the briefest literal lipservice to lines of dialogue that often feel as if they’ve been elbowed in later.
Take the last half of Season 7B and shuffle… out of eight episodes you could probably place half of them out of order and despite a few lines of allusions to a story-arc it wouldn’t really make a single bit of difference – even the penultimate story, Nightmare in Silver doesn’t explicitly lead into the finale. Yes, you could argue that old Who stories often didn’t have much continuity from one to another either… but they rarely, with a few exceptions, had story-arcs for entire seasons and beyond. The parsing of the season and its lack of punctuation speaks much to the chosen format letting pace out-run character-development and makes the consistent (non)development of the Clara mystery somewhat telling. We ONLY know there’s a mystery at all about her because there’s the occasional line that says “Oi, her over there, she’s a mystery!’ Which is like going up to someone and telling them how charismatic you are. Show, don’t tell. First rule of drama. And possibly dating. And possibly dating drama queens.
To 7B or not to 7B?
One needs to remember that this is a flagship BBC show. It’s sold internationally and is a HUGE success in America. Merchandise, covers and coverage are plentiful and mostly positive. While that money isn’t ploughed back directly into the show, it is strange that a show that had thirteen episodes a year was then given only four specials and then has essentially reduced its output to thirteen over two years. It might be wholly necessary for business reasons, but hey, just admit that.
Calling the current run of Who episodes the ‘7b season’ is like deciding to call next year 2013b, rather than 2014. Under any normal non-semantics, this would be Season 8 and we’d have had to swallow the fact that for whatever reason - BBC politics, BBC budget, internal BBC accounting, production commitments elsewhere etc - that the days of thirteen full episodes and a special is now long gone. Make eight episodes or so a year, but make them count. Don’t mock and deny a Private Eye story about predicted cut-backs and then claim you’re not cutting back the show, merely making the same number of episodes over double the length of time. People will ask the difference? It’s surely not wise to try and package that reduction or irregularity as a deliberately-planned wholly-positive strategy to strengthen the show. Absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder if you see it less and less commitment. You can’t promise that you’re both delivering more AND yet rationing what people get without them noticing. People are noticing.
I suspect this won’t be the case, but if you need to, say, turn Who into Sherlock for 2014 – three specials a year at best – to survive the current climate, do that. Tell people that. But don’t call it Season 7C and that you’re doing it to keep the show fresh. That’s not creativity and innovation, that’s scheduling and semantics.
I still think that Steven Moffat, who consistently demonstrated in episodes of Press Gang and Coupling and previous Who stories, that he has a great grasp of telling stories with events out or order, could be an excellent fit for a time-travel based series.But structure is a tool, not a plot in itself. TIME is where the Doctor lives, not who he is. It’s the landscape, backdrop and architecture, not a character in its own right. A story that plays with structure can be huge fun, but less so if the format is the selling-point rather than the story. Sure, the excellent Memento works as a film because it’s told backwards... but it’s probably a film you’ll watch twice for that reason. The Usual Suspects is a film I’ve watched a hundred times and will do so again. Structure – good. Structure AND Content – better.
If Moffat and Smith are still around for the 2014 season – whatever that format or scheduling may be (your guess is as good as mine at this point) - then let us get back to the point where stories dictate length not the other way around, an arc that doesn’t make the companion the crux of the story-arc and saviour of the universe as we know it... again. Let’s meet ordinary people thrust into the extraordinary and preferably people who haven’t died yet. We don’t have to start shooting things like Bruce Willis, but can we also have a moratorium on singing things back to life with happy thoughts. And much as Smith's awkwardness can be endearing, the pratfalls and gurning are becoming a regular parody of themselves.
We’ve been there and done that. Or will be there and will be having done that. Or something. Yes, Who must reinvent itself for each generation and regeneration, but this recent experiment in format seems to have faltered somewhat.
Despite the insistence that Doctor Who is a kids’ show that adults love, that’s just not true. If it was, it would merely be CBBC’s top show, not the gem of Saturday primetime viewing on the BBC’s prime channel on its busiest night nor one of BBC America's greatest draws (when they're not accidentally releasing the finale on DVD ahead of broadcast to the public but preventing bonafide reviewers from seeing it)
No…if you truly understand Doctor Who you know that it’s that rare thing… a FAMILY show: where it’s okay to be a little scared and excited and entertained because there’s plenty of room behind the sofa for everyone.
Run, you clever boy... but remember THAT.
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