Continuing the wondrous catalogue of the varying achievements of
Steven Moffat.
Chapter Three: The
Peter Capaldi Years
The Complete Eighth
Series of Doctor Who
is one I find myself returning to time and time again. More than any other,
this is Steven Moffat writing without an agenda. Its sole purpose is to be
good. After what he thought of as a “miserable” year in 2013 - a script situation
out of control and then finding that not even Matt Smith had been contracted
for the anniversary special - Moffat had
his chance to put things back on the right track. Subsequently, Peter Capaldi’s
first series feels truer and consistently better written than any series before
or since (perhaps possibly excluding Christopher Eccleston’s one glorious
year). There are dynamics aboard the
TARDIS, fireworks even, with the Doctor and Clara’s relationship feeling
viscerally simmering and real. The awkward and tragic tale of Danny Pink is
gut-wrenching and ultimately he has to make amends for his terrible mistake in
Afghanistan. Death in Heaven is
Steven Moffat’s best finale, the apotheosis of his time writing for the show.
Its huge hearts beat furiously and in terms of its emotional content, this is
the most complex and interesting of episodes. Gone are the fairy-tale days of
Series 5-7. Here we have a Doctor Who with real and vital consequence. Even
Clara, after her introduction as an impossible nanny, suddenly feels utterly believable
as a down to Earth, occasionally bossy teacher. Perhaps the only hiccup of
Series 8 is In the Forest of the Night
which is ill-conceived from the get-go but the rest of this unusual,
complicated run of stories is astonishing. Its greatness lies in the simple
fact that Steven Moffat just wants it to be good. It doesn’t try to make the
audience “like” it, it doesn’t even try to be particularly warm given this
Doctor’s distant, spiky and sarcastic manner (all the more alien and strange –
I love this Doctor!). It just wants
to be and definitely is a good
series.
And then Series 9 happens. Bluntly, Clara should have gone at
the end of Series 8 because she is the biggest problem here. Her story was
over. She’s absent from two episodes of Series 9 because she has nothing left
to do and nowhere left to go (three if you include The Zygon Invasion). Yes, her apparent death fuels the majestic Heaven Sent but for the most part, she
becomes more and more irritating and distant.
Steven Moffat also makes the seemingly arbitrary decision to
“do 2-parters.” To be honest, only Under
the Lake/Before the Flood seems to warrant its length, the story clearly a
tale of two halves. The Magician’s
Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar feels laborious. Compare the opening to
that of The Stolen Earth in 2008: we
zip from one location to the next (both include the shadow proclamation) at
dizzying speed in The Stolen Earth;
in The Magician’s Apprentice time is
made for lingering establishing shots, moody lighting and a creeping
atmosphere, thus slicing through all that fun and spectacle and pace with an
enormous bore-ometer. The story is flat, its narrative motor seriously spluttering.
The actual number of events in The
Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar are minimal. To be honest, if
you’re doing a Davros 2-parter, it’s an epic planet-shredder, not a chamber
piece which is very much how this feels. The scenes between the Doctor and
Davros are admittedly cracking but it takes an age to get to them while the
Daleks talk about conquest but do very little. They don’t even leave their one
big room before getting covered in and killed by faeces. The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion
is a little better, but still feels underdeveloped. Why is the Zygon called
Bonnie? What exactly are the arrangements of the Zygon-human pact? Why does
nobody react when the Zygon changes outside the shopping centre? Are they
zygons too? Just what does truth or consequences actually mean? There are just
too many unanswered questions for the shows to feel solid and watertight. In
the meanwhile, there’s a flat cliff-hanger and an all-female UNIT support cast
who look more wet than a roomful of Captain Yateses. Of course, that final
anti-war speech saves the show and Series 9, and for the first time in 2015,
Doctor Who is affecting. The Girl Who
Died/The Woman Who Lived are essentially two stories (which should have
been split up in the running order, the better to illustrate Ashildr’s passage through
history if not to make her appearance as the highwayman more of a surprise).
Funnily enough, once the 2-parters stop, the series’ quality
takes an upward turn. Sleep No More
is unfairly maligned. It enjoys its vivid originality, a good deal of tension
and looks and feels unique. Face the
Raven has got that last 15 minutes of pure excellence following a fairly
run-of-the-mill tale and Heaven Sent
is, as has been noted all over the internet, something of a modern-day
masterpiece. Hell Bent seems to get
ignored in the light of its preceding episode but it constitutes an unsung,
very strong finale despite the fact that Gallifrey is now rather unexcitingly
returned, and Rassilon is now played by the clearly flailing Donald Sumpter.
The series has, all along, been gearing itself towards the moments we never get
to hear: when the Doctor and Clara finally talk. And that’s a beautiful ending.
When Series 9 finished, it felt
to me like something of a wasted season. Where the year before we’d had 10
terrific stories (and only 1 poor one in In
The Forest), here we had only 2 or 3 strong episodes, out of only 8 stories (if The Girl Who Died and The
Woman Who Lived are counted as one). The stories that don’t work are twice
as long as usual! The Series 9 Moffat Master Plan simply wasn’t as impressive
as it had set out to be. Nevertheless, there is no denying the fact that he
wanted to shake things up a bit, change the rules and give the Doctor a
different playing field to train on. It was the grandest of follies.
Ironically, he got it so very right in Series 8 that I’d have been happy with
another few years of that, thank you very much.
It’s perhaps unsurprising then
that in his final year at the helm of Doctor Who – another year he never
expected to be writing - Steven Moffat reverts to the now-traditional structure
of a season, breezy and light and “Welcome aboard!” to start with, 2-parter
heart-wrencher to finish. Bill Potts is a breath of fresh air, the Monk trilogy
in the middle is an unusual and mostly very successful departure, whilst the
return of the Ice Warriors and the Mondasian Cybermen are massively triumphant
victories. Series 10 feels as if the show has had an airing, a bit of a spring
clean. The Pilot is a “hopping-on”
point, free from past continuity and beginning to create a continuity of its
own: the story of the university professor who has been there for 70 years. Smile, Thin Ice, Knock Knock and Oxygen feel similarly free to do whatever they like and that
massively melodramatic, hair-raising cliff-hanger at Oxygen’s close is the start of something new again – The Doctor
Goes Blind 4-parter. Only let down by its underdeveloped finale, the strange
tale of the monks is unnerving, radical and just what you wouldn’t expect a
showrunner on the way out to come up with. The
Pyramid at the End of the World in particular is spectacular, a tension
permeating every scene. It’s often overlooked in the face of the similarly
brilliant but very different Extremis,
but both are peaks in Doctor Who’s history. Finally, we end with a Scottish
folk tale from Rona Munro, a Classic-Who homage in Empress of Mars and then another blistering season finale from Mr
Moffat. World Enough and Time is
unbelievably strong and harrowing, The
Doctor Falls the perfect ending for this most emotional and stoic of
Doctors. Whilst it’s not quite as interesting as Death in Heaven, it’s doing a different job. It’s giving this
Doctor his valedictory cry. His calling out of the Masters positively sings.
Watching him race through the woods, blasting away Cybermen with his sonic, we
see a desperate but ever-trying Doctor. And it’s clear how wonderful a hero he
is. It has to be said also that Peter Capaldi is never less than completely
astonishing. Bill’s story ends somewhat abruptly and Twice Upon a Time doesn’t really help our understanding of the
reality of what we see here, but with incoming showrunner Chris Chibnall around
the corner, it’s clear that things have come to an end…
Under Steven Moffat, the Peter
Capaldi era constitutes as mixed a bag as Matt Smith’s three years as the Doctor.
Each series feels starkly different. Even Capaldi’s Doctor changes over the
period. In fact, many could argue that this was Colin Baker’s Doctor done
right. He begins acerbically and ends with a call for kindness. What is
clearest of all again though, is that Steven Moffat just cannot settle. He is
continually revising what he thinks the show can do. From “just 1-parters” to
“just 2-parters” to a “great big 4-parter in the middle,” structurally the show
changes all the time. If this restlessness, however, does make for the vague
feeling that Doctor Who isn’t quite as confident as it once was, Moffat
punctures that illusion at every turn, delivering scripts of the standard of Deep Breath, Dark Water, Last Christmas,
Heaven Sent, The Pilot, Extremis and World
Enough and Time. Far from lessening the show’s popularity, Moffat’s ability
to alter the goalposts have ensured that the show stays fresh and vital. It has
always changed. But when Russell T Davies took over, he put a stamp on it:
Doctor Who was made in a very certain way. When Moffat took over, he showed
that there was no such thing as a “certain way,” that the show could flourish
in a thousand formats. This was not the work of a troubled Scotsman with
writer’s block; this could well be the work of a genius.
To Be Continued.
JH
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