maharg said:
See, I think this is just a really easy escape to any criticism of RTD's helming of the series. There's nothing at all to indicate that RTD was somehow duped by a poor director into allowing his 'dark, serious concept' to be twisted into a saturday morning cartoon romp with farting aliens.
RTD was the show runner. To a large extent, every failing of the show under his tenure is 'his fault.' Especially given how hands on he's constantly claimed to be by his apologists. You can't have this both ways. Either he single handedly, against all odds, brought Doctor Who back from death with a firm hand on the wheel and an excellent sensibility as a showrunner, he is equally responsible for the utter silliness it devolved into.
RTD has to take credit and blame for what happened in his era, but I also think you can't lay every shortcoming in direction on his doorstep. Rose and the Aliens of London were the very first episodes filmed of his era. He mentions in The Writer's Tale how within a day of filming they had managed to get two weeks behind schedule because no one on the staff had worked on a show of that nature before. It was a hugely hectic time, and some bad decisions got made, but they weren't indicative of the era as a whole. I think many of RTD's weakest scripts came in 2005, and it's not really a huge surprise. He wrote 8 of the 13 episodes in that season, and that was in addition to rewriting most of the other ones and overseeing production as a whole.
It's pretty clear that RTD did not consider Doctor Who to be very serious, or really very dark, from not only his execution as showrunner but also his attitude in interviews for the show's very own Confidential series.
I'd hate to see what RTD would consider dark or serious, then, if he really didn't think that Midnight, Turn Left, The Parting of the Ways and Waters of Mars were dark or serious, then.
I'd easily argue that Moffat's plots are dark in ways that "omg they kill people" doesn't even come close to matching. Moffat's stories are among the very most memorable of the series because they *genuinely* get under your skin and crawl around. The creepy kid with the gas mask, the Angels, and more recently the Silents all strike at a dark place in people's minds and it shows.
See, I don't really consider that dark. Moffat does atmosphere extremely well. I don't think that anyone is going to deny that. The Empty Child and Silence in the Library in particular are full of atmosphere and genuinely scary. Silence in the Library is especially strong in that it takes the most basic human fear (being afraid of the dark), and not only contextualizes it, but makes it real even to adult viewers.
But I don't consider that to be dark. Moffat has never really written something that I consider dark. (The Beast Below probably comes the closest in this regard)
Your posts suggest a focus on incidental and minor characters that I think I just can't relate to. Characters who have only 20 or so minutes of screen time in toto can be interesting, but they can't really have real depth. And even there I find almost all of Moffat's incidental characters far more compelling than any of the ones you listed from other episodes, most of whom I don't remember.
But I do remember the girl/mother in The Empty Child. I remember the Girl in the Fireplace. I remember Sally Sparrow. I instantly caught on to River Song while it still seemed like she was a one-off. I remember Kazran, in both forms.
I'll grant that his incidentals have been less impressive since he took over the showrunner position, but I'd argue that his efforts on that front have been entirely transferred to the companions. And I'd also point out that Moffat has possibly the *richest* set of companions running at the same time as there's been in a very long time. Since long before the old show died. Amy, Rory, and River as supporting have expanded the average cast of the show from maybe like 2.1 (Mickey and Jack's tenures were short and unmemorable) to somewhere around 3.5, and has done it in a way that creates actual relationships between all of them (River and Rory being the most unconnected of the bunch).
See, I feel like the focus on incidental characters has always been a strong point of Doctor Who, though. It's a show that changes the cast and setting each week. To truly get the viewer involved, you need to be able to have characters who the viewer comes to care about over a small course of time, because you'll probably never see them again. Most of the great Doctor Who stories have at least one, and often numerous characters who only exist in that story, but manage to come across as fully realized people. I think this was a great strength for Davies (and for Robert Holmes before him), and is a major weakness for Moffat so far.
As far as companions go, I'm a huge Rory fan, and I think he has been extremely well developed. I give Moffat a ton of credit for his character. He's a fully realized person with numerous aspects to his personality. However, I don't feel like Amy is much of a character at all. She makes quips and does that weird thing with her eyes, but if I tried to describe her as a character, I don't think that I could get very far. She feels very flat. River was much better in this two parter, where I felt like we finally got a real window into her, but up until now she hadn't shown much of that. I hope that we get more of this in the future. Compared to the great arcs that Mickey, Martha and Donna went through, Amy comes up way short in my mind.
No, I think it's just plain ridiculous to accuse Moffat's tenure to date of being less mature than RTD's glam filled tenure. I'd accept an argument that Moffat is targeting a younger age, but I think he gives them far more credit than RTD ever gave his target audience.
I just don't see that. RTD did so much with the show, and he made so many statements. He wrote episodes which explored human nature in great detail, but he did so without jamming it over your head (so much that many people don't seem to pick up on it). He wrote extremely clever resolutions to his plot, but he never stood up and had characters spelling it out for viewers. For my money, the resolution to Last of the Time Lords, with the Doctor turning the Master's weapon for controlling humanity into a force that turns positive thoughts into a conduit is far more clever and inventive than anything Moffat has done, but no one in the story actually comments on that. He leaves that stuff completely beneath the surface rather than having characters say "Look at how clever this is".
He gives his viewers a huge amount of credit, because he doesn't feel the need to spell everything out for them. It's all sitting there beneath the surface.
And he could write such variety. The same man who had the last humans traveling back in time to murder their ancestors and showed the UK becoming a police state wrote Gridlock (which is a hugely triumphant story about the power of hope) and a rollicking adventure with a hospital getting teleported to the moon. He wrote a story about the destruction of Earth, and made it a deeply personal story about a small number of people.
I think Moffat is a good writer, but he just doesn't have the depth and imagination that RTD had.
Regulus Tera said:
I dislike the implication that the show has to be dark in order to be good. I enjoy the grim stuff, but most of what makes Doctor Who appealing in comparison to the run of the mill American sci-fi is that it takes a light-hearted approach to the concept of travelling across space and time most of the time. It's less focused on the dramatic and more on being just fun.
I don't think the show has to be dark in order to be good, but Doctor Who has always had a certain darkness to it. It can be grim and lighthearted even within the same episode at times.
The biggest issue I have is that Moffat's stories don't tell me anything beneath the surface. They don't make any statements about society or the human condition, and when Doctor Who stops being About something, I don't feel like it's Doctor Who anymore.
