The Rise and Rise of Steven Moffat: Exhibit #1

The Empty Child	The Big Bang	The Bells of Saint John	Heaven Sent
The Doctor Dances	A Christmas Carol	The Name of the Doctor	Hell Bent
The Girl in the Fireplace	The Impossible Astronaut	The Day of the Doctor	The Husbands of River Song
Blink	Day of the Moon	The Time of the Doctor	The Return of Doctor Mysterio
Silence in the Library	A Good Man Goes to War	Deep Breath	The Pilot
Forest of the Dead	Let’s Kill Hitler	Listen	Extremis
The Eleventh Hour	The Wedding of River Song	Dark Water	World Enough and Time
The Beast Below	The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe	Death in Heaven	The Doctor Falls
The Time of Angels	Asylum of the Daleks	Last Christmas	Twice Upon a Time
Flesh and Stone	The Angels Take Manhattan	The Magician’s Apprentice
The Pandorica Opens	The Snowmen	The Witch’s Familiar

Steven Moffat has generated a vast amount of Doctor Who output. The list above details the episodes for which he receives a sole credit. There are also episodes such as Into the Dalek, Time Heist, The Caretaker, The Girl Who Died, The Zygon Inversion and The Pyramid at the End of the World for which he receives a co-writing credit. It’s also hardly a state secret that he rewrote fan-favourites Vincent and the Doctor and The Doctor’s Wife – virtually page one rewrites, uncredited. This is a man who has written more Doctor Who than Robert Holmes and arguably, perhaps contentiously, far less bilge. (All of these scripts are leagues in advance of Pyramids of Mars. I LOVE Pyramids of Mars but it doesn’t stop it being very badly plotted and Part Four is a right old mess.) Is it any wonder though that, given the longevity of his tenure, that Steven Moffat, once the fans’ golden boy who gave us The Empty Child would be viewed by those self-same fans as That Man What Wrecked Our Doctor Who. 

Of the above list, I can spot only three episodes I dislike. Two of those I dislike for directorial reasons. One I dislike because of the writing. Even when Moffat is at his wits’ end (during the well-documented turbulence that was Series 7B) he hits the mark with The Bells of Saint John and The Name of the Doctor, before knocking it out of the ballpark with The Day of the Doctor a few months later and majestically putting the cherry on top of all that icing with The Time of the Doctor.

Let’s take a look at The Moffat Era - as it were - and try to catalogue its creatively tumultuous journey to gain a better insight into quite why a section of fandom turned on the man and quite why I am still deeply in love with this stupendously clever writer.

Chapter One – The RTD Years

When the list of writers for Series 1 was announced in Doctor Who Magazine, I remember being thrilled by the choices of Mark Gatiss, Paul Cornell and Robert Shearman. I’d adored their Big Finish output and long heard older fans wax lyrical about the quality of their books. The only name I failed to recognise was that of the curly-haired, crab-eyed Steven Moffat (pictured). What the hell did he have to do with our programme? And, wait, what, he had two episodes! The others had one apiece and this geezer gets two?! I read the article to discover he’d written the – admittedly achingly funny – skit for Comic Relief and begrudgingly accepted that he’d most probably be as good as the others. I mean, Russell T Davies had made the call and from everything I knew and was discovering about him, he seemed pretty decent.

Along came the series. RTD was a bit more than pretty decent. Mark Gatiss and Robert Shearman were Good But Not As Good As They Were At Big Finish. Paul Cornell was amazing – fresh, breezy, heartrending. Steven Moffat, though, Jesus… He could make CLASSIC Doctor Who. Old School Classic Series, complete with darkness, body-horror, running, all the things we thought “Good Doctor Who” was (but had never really managed before). And he also delivered the happiest ending of all time. The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances were and are totemic examples of our programme. They are traditional yet far better than anything we’d ever had before. They sing. They inspire. If there were any man we wanted writing Doctor Who again, it was Steven Moffat.

And yet… If you read the introduction to The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances in the shooting script book, Moffat admits that there was once a time travel plot involving the German bomb and a time loop inside which Captain Jack could trap the thing. It was RTD who told him wisely to simplify the script, tone it down and deliver something less like a head-f**k. In helping streamline the script, RTD must take some credit for its success.

The Girl in the Fireplace felt a little less spectacular. We were expecting another Empty Child. We got a time travel love story instead. Yes, there were scares too: the monsters hiding under the bed is typical of Moffat’s childhood chills approach to the programme. But the majority of this episode is a beautifully woven tale of heartbreak. It's aged very well and on its own merits, can be counted as something unusual, strange and very, very special.

Blink came next. Or should that be What I Did on My Summer Holidays By Sally Sparrow. Yes, Moffat had already written this story a few years before in the Doctor Who Annual, even down to the video messages and the writing on the wallpaper. He then shamelessly recycled it here! What thrilled us here though were the insanely good monsters: the weeping angels quite rightly became a series icon and provided scares aplenty from here on in.

Finally, Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead proved to be Moffat’s most complicated scripting job yet. Again, the scripts formed a time travel love story with a scary monster thrown in for good measure. But this was a new kind of complexity for the show. The first scene we see is the little girl’s dream wherein she meets the Doctor and Donna. Next, we see the Doctor and Donna arrive in the library and meet what we know to be the little girl. Scenes are told from different perspectives thusly, the Doctor and River’s story back to front and Donna’s story is chopped up in the editing room, the bizarre jump-cuts becoming a part of the narrative itself. Later, Moffat would employ similar techniques to wrong-foot the viewers (see his out-of-order/different perspective scenes in The Big Bang). Silence in the Library was a story that didn’t tickle the fan muscles quite so much as something as traditional as The Empty Child but up to that point, it was perhaps the most layered, complicated and ambitious of Doctor Who stories. Even at the time, there were a select few bemoaning the fact that the story was perhaps too complicated for “the casual viewer.”

And then, gloriously, he was the head writer, the chief exec, the man in charge.

So what did we expect? Looking back on his stories, we longed for the show to go in the dark direction of The Empty Child and those early scenes in The Girl in the Fireplace. We longed for monsters as iconoclastic as the weeping angels. We saw Steven Moffat as the perfect man to take over our show.

Perhaps what we didn’t consider – that those who now complain about Moffat’s tenure should have considered – is that those four tales represent everything that he has done since. There are three time travel love stories (Reinette and the Doctor, River and the Doctor, Sally and Larry). Get that: in two of only four stories, the Doctor is in love! There are over-complications: Series 6 anyone? There are recycled ideas: under the bed, nursery rhymes, don’t blink, breathe or think. Moffat would go on to tell the biggest time travel love story of all time in extending River’s epic journey over the next five years. It was all there. Even the library tale is a re-telling of a Virgin short story. Moffat now openly admits he’s used every idea he ever had at least twice. So in all seriousness, the signs of what was to come were laid out for us all to see. And like most Steven Moffat scripts, what disappointed us most of all in the future, was that he didn’t do quite what we expected him. 

He did something arguably far, far better.

To Be Continued…

JH