maharg said:
I... can't even fathom this criticism. Not even a little bit.
Moffat writes stories that have a beginning, middle, and an end. He writes characters that evolve and change. And he writes a time travel show with time travel in mind. He plays with your brain and makes you question what's going on at every step, while in the end it all makes perfect sense.
RTD does none of those things. His characters are dull and flat and his stories always end in utter incomprehensible flashy nonsense. What is style over substance if not the Master dancing to a sickly sweet pop song while whiney robot spheres go around killing people, only to be defeated by a doctor supercharged by the whole world saying "I believe in fairies"?
Even Moffat's flashiest moment, the invasion of every alien race ever, had the self-deprecating turn with the Doctor's typical "I'mma save the world from YOU" before finding out he'd been had and that it was everyone else thinking they were saving the world from him.
I seriously don't get it. Moffat is a storyteller, RTD liked making things blow up.
I can't fathom this post, actually.
Moffat's characters are my biggest criticism with his era. We've had 16 episodes in the Moffat era so far, and the only memorable supporting characters I can think of are from Chibnall's two parter last year. At a stretch I could maybe add Canton from this two parter and Father Octavian, but that's all. Most of the supporting characters we've had have been flat and lifeless. RTD gave us so many memorable characters who were full of life. Even minor characters like the nameless janitor in The End of the World felt like living, breathing people. He gave us Chantho and all the people on the train in Midnight and the citizens of Bowie Base One, and helped to flesh out the members of the ship in The Impossible Planet, the freedom fighters in Rise of the Cybermen, the family in The Fires of Pompeii and so many more.
The Last of the Time Lords has an ending that is perfectly set up throughout the entire story, with the fact that everyone's minds have been linked together by the Archangel Network set up perfectly. We even witness Martha talking about the Doctor. It's poetic justice. The very creation that the Master uses to enslave humanity is turned against him. If Moffat wrote that story, the Doctor would just travel back in time from the end of the story to the start and fix everything by telling the Toclafane to run because "I am the Doctor".
Moffat makes Doctor Who too much
about time travel, which makes it all feel the same. Doctor Who survived for most of its existence with the time travel kept largely as the means of transportation, rather than what it was about. Yes, you had stories like The Space Museum and Day of the Daleks that put time travel and paradoxes as a central part of the story, but they were certainly not the norm, and they worked better because of that. When every other episode has time wimey stuff going on, it loses all meaning.
Moffat has also sanitized the show far too much. In The Empty Child, "everybody lives" was an amazing moment because it was so joyous and triumphant, and it subverted our expectations of what Doctor Who was. There were very few Doctor Who stories where everybody lives. "Everybody dies" was a far more expected out come than that. But now, Moffat has turned it into the status quo. He seems allergic to the idea of anyone dying. Instead, the Doctor always shows up and makes everything perfect. He also loves the idea of the Doctor "winning" by relying on his reputation and telling his enemies to run from him, and putting in precocious kids who repeat statements a lot. Moffat can be a brilliant writer when he brings his A game (The Empty Child and Silence in the Library rank among my all-time favorites), but now it seems like everything he writes feels same-y.
With Moffat, it's always "everybody lives and the Doctor saves the day". Davies had humanity evolving to the point where they sat around and watched reality shows where the contestants all died and then had the Daleks show up and wipe out 60% of the earth's population. He had the last survivors of the universe discover there was nothing left for them and travel back in time to wipe out their ancestors. He used Midnight to show the baser elements of humanity once all of their security was stripped away and showed how ready people are to turn on one another and tear them apart. He showed England devolve into a fascist state where foreigners were carted off to work camps, and he had the Doctor become the villain. Moffat has the Doctor pop back and forth in time to stop the mustache twirling super villains.
By far my biggest problem with Moffat's Doctor Who, however, is the lack of any real social commentary. This was central to RTD's Doctor Who, and it was key for most of the show's existence. There's a reason Robert Holmes, Malcolm Hulke and David Whitaker are held up as some of the greatest writers in the show's history. They (and Davies) could write tremendously interesting stories which also had things to say about politics, society, the human condition, and so much more. With Moffat, however, what you see is what you get. There's no attempt to tell stories which are About anything. The one time that Moffat tried this (The Beast Below) we still got a "The Doctor fixes everything" ending and a story that was more interested in precocious kids and making jokes about the Doctor hooking up with the queen. Chris Chibnall, to his great credit, was the one writer who really tried to accomplish anything with his story last year. Don't even get me started on Mark Gatiss, who managed to write a story with the Dalek's in World War II and turned it into a romp which glorified Churchill.
Hell, even RTD's weaker episodes were generally about something. Boom Town is full of problems, but it manages to create a legitimate moral quandary for the Doctor and make a statement about the death penalty. The Long Game is biting in the way it deals with the news media. Partners in Crime addresses the pressure society puts on people to conform to a specific appearance and the way that companies exploit that idea.
It pains me to say this, because I was really looking forward to Moffat's take on Doctor Who when it was first announced that he was taking over the show, but I feel like it's just way too hollow. There have been moments of the past year that I really enjoyed, but it all feels lacking in any real meat on the bones.
