Continuing the wondrous catalogue of the varying achievements of Steven Moffat.
Chapter Two: The Matt Smith Years
When The Eleventh Hour came, it was universally greeted with rapture.
The impossibility of the show continuing at the great heights it had scaled
under David Tennant and Russell T Davies had become a distinct possibility.
Matt Smith was extraordinary. The whole programme felt different: new titles,
music, colour grade and cameras. Most of all though, even given the bizarrely
and unpredictably talented Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, it was the superlative
script from the pen of Steven Moffat that felt like the star of the show. As an
introduction to the series anew, it had everything: chills from the corner of
your eye, a sense of childhood wonder, scary monsters and a Doctor who was
brazenly spectacular. This was perhaps the greatest episode the show had ever
managed, given that it had the most weight upon its shoulders. To this day, it
remains masterful.
It looked as if the choice of
Steven Moffat as the new showrunner had been the best decision ever made in
terms of the ongoing longevity of the series. (Incidentally, I still believe
this to be true.) It also seemed that he was about to exceed the stratospheric
standards met by Russell T Davies. After the following week’s The Beast Below, however, things weren’t
so cut and dry. It was by a country mile the weakest script to bear Moffat’s
name so far. In 45 minutes, he had fallen from the unassailable rising new
boy-turned-King to another writer struggling to tackle what Doctor Who should
be. The Beast Below is unfocussed. It
isn’t really about anything. The messages at the end regarding the loneliness
of the last Time Lord feel like hammer blows for all they are signposted by the
writing, music and not least Karen Gillan. It is as if, in its clunky creation,
at the last minute, it finds a message and decides to sledgehammer away at it.
The reality of the world is unclear and ill defined. The politics aren’t
politics. Even Matt Smith is not quite up to his A-game after last week’s
bonanza of a performance. We were brought down to Earth sharply and it seemed
that for once, the cracks in Moffat’s scripting were showing. The following
week, Mark Gatiss’s Victory of the Daleks
was a slim one and Moffat took the flack for the new Duplo denizens of Skaro.
It seemed as if it was all about to go wrong…
Things turned up again though
mightily when The Time of Angels
struck. In that first opening pre-titles sequence, Doctor Who was more exciting
than it had ever been. The sequence takes place in multiple time zones, at a
rate of knots and looks completely sublime. River flies into space, the TARDIS
doors open, she lands on the Doctor and: “Follow that ship!” It was
breath-taking. Why did Adam Smith never direct after Series 5?! At the time, I
remember ringing my brother to tell him how this two-parter was perhaps the
best written adventure the show had seen since… well, The Eleventh Hour. In fact, this became the problem with the show
whilst Matt Smith was at the helm. Steven Moffat was clearly the best writer.
No other scripts touched his. The Time of
Angels/Flesh and Stone, The Eleventh Hour and The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang tower above everything else this
year. They are totemic Doctor Who stories, mountainous even. Yes, there are
other huge successes in Series 5 – Vincent
and the Doctor has as good an ending as any Doctor Who story is likely to
have (though it is, to coin a phrase, a bit boring in the middle). Amy’s Choice is amusingly off-beat and
strange The Lodger is – unusually for
a Doctor Who story - quietly beautiful. But The
Beast Below aside, it’s the Moffat scripts that show us who’s boss. They’re
frankly in another league. Under Russell T Davies’s stewardship, there was a
consistency to the scripting in terms of pitch, focus and energy. Under Moffat,
the show is more unwieldy. Its peaks are higher, its troughs lower.
And this is exemplified best in
Series 6. The Impossible Astronaut/Day of
the Moon and A Good Man Goes to War are by a vast margin the strongest scripts
in that first half season. They bristle, they live, they’re pulsing and in the
moment. The Curse of the Black Spot
and The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People
are diabolical pieces of scripting. The
Doctor’s Wife is far messier and duller than people ever admit. (The Neil
Gaiman Appreciation Society Effect, I think are partly to blame.) Day of the Moon in particular twists and
turns more energetically and forcefully than any script that came before it and
A Good Man Goes to War feels epic and
intimate in equal measure and includes the harrowing shock of a baby turning
into milk. Steven Moffat had written himself into a corner. Only he could deliver
his vision of Doctor Who and the shows surrounding his feel smaller, slighter
and simply not as good as his masterworks. The same thing happens again in the
second half of the season, Let’s Kill
Hitler throwing surprise after surprise at the viewer whilst Mark Gatiss
does nothing very original at all in Night
Terrors and in The Girl Who Waited,
Tom MacRae tries to tell a timey-wimey story in a series written by Steven
Moffat; It was only ever going to fail. Only Gareth Roberts, with his peculiar,
deeply charming voice comes close to matching a Moffat script in his very
funny, very melancholy and ultimately joyous Closing Time.
So Moffat was stuck in a place
where his guest writers were destined to fail because bluntly, not many writers
are as clever as Steven Moffat. It was time for a break…
What’s unusual about the Moffat era is that each season feels like a reaction against the one before, even if
the one before had been hugely successful. Series 5 is essentially a
traditional RTD year, leading up to a finale. Series 6 tells a finale story at
the start and tears itself in half, telling a longer, season-long intricate
tale. Series 7 pares things right back and offers up a movie-of-the-week
approach to Doctor Who. Whether this restlessness has strengthened the series’
longevity or made for declining ratings is unknown. But when placed against the
RTD years which seem like a uniformed body of consistently strong work across 5
years developed in a “house style,” the Moffat days are markedly more feverish,
less knowable and just cannot settle on a winning formula.
Series 7 begins with a
balls-to-the-wall hard-nut story in Asylum
of the Daleks. It is viscerally thrilling and much cleverer than it is ever
given credit for, presented seemingly as a linear, chronological, deceptively
simpler narrative. But this story tells the audience with big flashing lights
(or several thousand pairs of big flashing lights) that Doctor Who is back and
it’s brilliant. No one seems to talk much about Asylum but after Series 6 ended on a slightly murky, heavily-plot
centred and perhaps less affecting tale in The
Wedding of River Song, this is proof that Moffat still possesses boundless
life.
Unfortunately, it’s pretty clear
that Series 7 quickly fell into script trouble. There are several stories which
feel like underworked drafts: Journey to
the Centre of the TARDIS, Cold War, The Rings of Akhaten and Nightmare in
Silver but then Moffat delivers, several weeks late as it happens, The Bells of Saint John and The Name of the Doctor, two
masterclasses in how to write season openers and finales. Again, these two
astonishing tales tend to get overlooked in the face of The Day of the Doctor, perhaps Steven Moffat’s most acclaimed
script. On the 23rd of November 2013, Doctor Who was more famous
than it is ever likely to be, record-breaking even. And just a month later,
Matt Smith, that quite wonderful Doctor had gone and Steven Moffat was to begin
writing for a further three years – a fact he’d never anticipated.
During the Matt Smith years,
Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who was undoubtedly unsettled. Despite an excellent
start, his second season felt like it just about managed to hold together,
whilst the signs of a showrunner struggling were most evident at the end of his
third. What was also evident across the three years was an immaturity when
tackling The Big Issues. Amy and Rory lose a baby and – completely unforgivably
– a week later, they’re alright about that. The one wrong note played in Asylum of the Daleks is the trite and
cheap revelation that due to the events of Demons Run, Amy cannot have
children. It’s a cruel moment, a quick shorthand to explain why her marriage to
Rory has fallen apart. It is saved only by Karen Gillan’s wonderfully true
performance. This is a Doctor Who without consequence. Never do the Ponds
question the wisdom of travelling with the Doctor despite losing so much, not
least each other when Rory dies and Amy forgets him during Series 5. Many might
argue that sci-fi fantasy at teatime is not the place to tackle issues such as
the loss of a baby but in that case Moffat has no call to bring those issues up in the first
place if there is no intention to delve deeper. And remember this is a series
which did an episode on the suicide of Vincent Van Gogh with aplomb.
These brief moments of tastelessness
aside, there can be no doubt that this period in Moffat’s time at the Who helm
also pulls off some of the programme’s very finest moments. The era starts as
it ends, with a show that has the weight of history on its shoulders. Like The Eleventh Hour, The Day of the Doctor had millions of judgemental eyes on it. For he programme to be such a monumental success is testament to Moffat’s skill as writer and
utter resilience in the face of massive adversity. Everybody knew what they
wanted from the anniversary story. Steven Moffat delivered something
better.
Finally, The Time of the Doctor comes and Moffat wraps up the entirety of
the Matt Smith era in a tidy bow and it becomes obvious that since The Eleventh Hour this has been one
long, neat narrative. It was always heading to this. And when the intensity of
Peter Capaldi is revealed, one feels there might just be enough time before a Deep Breath to marathon
the Matt Smith years again, to reveal the enormity and imagination of this epic,
sometimes flawed, often spectacular, always deeply ambitious tale of a crack in
time.
JH
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