The Rise and Rise of Steven Moffat: Exhibit #3

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

The Rise and Rise of Steven Moffat: Exhibit #2

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 23^rd 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

UNIT: Cyber-Reality

The new UNIT series has now clocked up a full 24 hours of drama. Its sixth box set presents us with an infiltration by the Cybermen of our reality and an advancement of the growing threat posed by the mysterious Auctioneers. The UNIT series has so far been a peculiar one. It is hardly Big Finish’s finest achievement, despite the absconding of Jemma Redgrave and Ingrid Oliver from the TV series over to the audio world and a team set-up that most blockbusters would die for. Despite some irresistible gimmicks (Old UNIT vs New UNIT/an Auton invasion via 3-d printers) the stories have not yet really taken off. Only in Silenced did the potential of the UNIT format really shine. Silenced was a political thriller, genuinely scary and ambitious in terms of its story structure and presentation with rich characters and a real sense of global threat. Above all, it felt vividly relevant.

Sadly, Cyber-Reality is another step backwards. The main problem with UNIT is that it is not really sure what sort of a series it wants to be. Is it action-adventure, political thriller, sci-fi, character drama or none of the above? It often tries to be all of them at once and fails at conveying any approach successfully. There is no winning formula for a UNIT story, in the same way that there is most definitely for a Counter-Measures or Jago & Litefoot tale. (We’d start in Sir Toby’s office or the Red Tavern where the regulars would be greeted with some new mystery to solve, for example.) After 24 hours of UNIT, I’m still not sure what to expect of a typical episode, other than Kate Stewart being badass and Osgood being technical. The fifth boxset decided for the first time to tell stand-alone stories so perhaps the series is still finding its feet. I’m not sure what the other regular characters do other than offer cannon fodder we know will never see the front line. James Joyce plays a nondescript Captain Josh Carter (whose name even after a full day’s worth of listening I had to look up on the Big Finish website). I’m not even sure I’d recognise Joyce’s voice if I heard it in a different production, so utterly nothing is his character. Warren Brown plays hardman Sam Bishop, a character who really should be Mr Charisma, the James Bond of the pack. Unfortunately, he’s played by Warren Brown, an actor more wooden than Sweden. The only other regular of note is Ramon Tikaram’s Colonel Shindi who offers at the most a re-assuring presence, Tikaram putting in a solid, distinguished performance. One of these three characters has an auton body but I’m not sure which, so irrelevant has that particular sub-plot become. It has to be said, Jemma Redgrave herself is not the most versatile actor, but her performance in this sixth series is markedly better than those before: in Code Silver she is desperate and vengeful and a force to be reckoned with. Ingrid Oliver is reliably consistent as Osgood but Osgood is by no means a second lead; at best she’s a techie. 

Please be advised, SPOILERS follow.

To be fair, the opening episode of Cyber-Reality does pack a punch. Matt Fitton opens with a thrilling pre-titles sequence, diving straight into the peril and promising a rip-roaring yarn. The following hour is indeed tremendously exciting, with Kate and Osgood suddenly in the hands of an unknown captor, given orders and time limits to complete dangerous tasks. Sam Bishop is also all at sea for want of a better pun. He’s repeating the same set of events over and over again, every time discovering his whereabouts in the Bermuda Triangle. This is an unnerving adventure which calls into question the nature of the realities we are hearing and the best the boxset has to offer by a mile, ironic considering that there are no Cybermen and no Master to be heard. It also sets up the very real threat the Auctioneers pose as this series’ big bad. However, their agenda is ultimately and simply to scare UNIT away and by the end of the boxset they are no longer very threatening at all.

Guy Adams continues apace into Telepresence. At its heart, there is a strong idea here: entry into another universe via VR headsets, but with the added caveat that death in the VR world could well mean death back home. For the most part, this is a thrilling tale, with each action set piece coming swiftly on top of the one before. The only trouble is, even after 5 box sets, the regular characters are still in no way relatable. I don’t know who Colonel Shindi or Josh Carter are, so the tale ends up feeling only superficially exciting without a genuine sense of jeopardy. Even on their journey across a parallel war-torn London, we don’t learn a thing about them. Only in the aforementioned Silenced do we see the characters outside of their UNIT roles and they seem so much more alive and interesting. Here was a golden opportunity to get to know them and they’re busy imagining they can jump really far.

Sadly, things then take a complete nosedive. The third episode is a chore to get through. It does allow Jemma Redgrave a starring role (for the first time perhaps feeling like a worthy replacement for Sir Alistair) but the narrative is overcomplicated, overtechnical and to be honest, very dull. Nick Briggs’s Cyber voice is a weird mix of Tenth Planet and Nightmare in Silver and becomes very annoying very quickly given the vast amount of curiously emotive Cyber dialogue.  There is no real sense of place and the scenes become difficult to imagine. For all its technicality, the plot boils down to: the Cybermen are coming so Kate finds a big gun.

This is exacerbated in Matt Fitton’s finale, Master of Worlds, in which (SPOILERS) the Master turns up and saves the day because he wants to find his TARDIS. It’s that crass. Since Dark Eyes 3, I’ve been unconvinced by Matt Fitton’s ability to write dialogue for the Master. At the best of times, his general dialogue is workmanlike rather than imaginative, but his Master’s voice, as it were, is childish, petulant and sarcastic, lacking any genuine wit. As a result, Derek Jacobi ends up sounding more like his bitchy Stuart Bixby from Vicious than the Gallifreyan King of Evil. At one point, Kate snarkily remarks that all her soldiers earned their respective titles. He jibes back with, “Could you say the same of the Doctor?” Even without the presence of his nemesis, this Master can’t help but get his handbag out for him at dawn. The story goes from one nondescript location to another, finally ending up on the Sea Base Fort from The Sea Devils which UNIT had absolutely no involvement with whatsoever, not that it makes a difference. One shouty, noisy scene bleeds into the next until finally the Master switches the story off.

It’s always been a bit of a fan myth that Cybermen can’t choose a decent plot. To a degree one could argue that were true, but Cyber-Reality does nothing but add fuel to that argument. Once the Cybes turns up, you might as well stop listening.

Overall: 4/10

JH

The Fourth Doctor Adventures: Series 7 - Part Two

The first half of Tom Baker’s Series 7 back in January was a roaring success. Does the second half, featuring Sutekh the Destroyer, the late Keith Barron and a London made from cardboard houses, come close to matching it? The answer, despite the absence of K9, is a resounding affirmative.

The first story, Justin Richards’s The Shadow of London, begins in a slightly unremarkable way. The very title gives away the fact that we are somewhere else entirely and the revelation that this is not London at all comes almost at the precise mid-point of the narrative. This gives the first episode a languorous tone and the listener begins to feel they are being given clues to a mystery they have already solved. However, the revelation of the story’s precise location and the genesis of the monstrous creature hunting the TARDIS team are huge surprises and make up entirely for the first episode’s seeming lack of purpose. Richards was playing a much more elaborate game and the clues in the first half begin to pay off hugely. In fact, the revelations mean the story positively begs to be heard a second time. Quite often, I find Justin Richards’s scripts workmanlike affairs (The Darkness of Glass and The Beast of Kravenos were unsurprising and run-of-the-mill), after the great heights of Big Finish’s early days when he produced the astonishing Whispers of Terror and the criminally under-rated Red Dawn. Here, he shows the same deftness and cleverness prevalent in his early work and The Shadow of London, whilst not Richards’s masterpiece, feels satisfying and strong.

The Bad Penny from the pen of Dan Starkey is a curious affair. So unconnected with the rest of the Who world and so off-kilter its characters, the story begins to feel like it could be straight from a 70s annual. Its uniqueness makes the story memorable, as well as a final fruity turn from Keith Barron in multiple roles. The narrative structure is interesting – twisting off in various directions. Unlike The Shadow of London, however, the twists are fairly easy to predict. SPOILERS: The nature of Mr Tulip’s benefactor is obvious as soon as we enter timey-wimey territory. We see the Doctor in a mirror in Part One and know we have to revisit the moment again in Part Two. The inevitability of the second half means that it feels a little like marking time before reaching a preordained finish and in that respect the story falters.

Finally, we have Kill the Doctor! and The Age of Sutekh, two-disc season finale by Guy Adams and it’s a corker. Alongside January’s The Mind Runners and The Demon Rises, these tales represent 4-episode, future-world type stories common in the later years of Tom Baker’s television reign. They come from the same stable as The Sun Makers, The Armageddon Factor and The Pirate Planet, the sort of Blakes’ 7-y slate-metal-grey industrial zones of BBC sci-fi. In terms of pace, energy and structure they emulate the era extremely well. In fact, they cherry pick all the best bits, producing something that actually betters the TV stablemates. If the The Mind Runners and The Age of Sutekh were TV episodes, they’d be heralded as classics.

Kill the Doctor! starts with Tom Baker and Louise Jameson being brilliant on an unusual planet. It’s still quite wondrous that we repeatedly get to hear these two incredible leading performances bouncing off one another. We really are spoiled. I suspect we have years’ worth of Tom adventures backed up at Big Finish – a theory that excites me enormously. The story has a tiny cast but this serves to streamline the narrative, telling an epic story from more intimate viewpoints. Leela is given the chance to rebel and be wonderful. Tom flies around on a space bike as the city residents chant “Kill the Doctor!” If the story has any failing, it’s that the chanting almost, almost becomes wearying. This is as classic era Tom Baker as it gets.

The Age of Sutekh changes emphases. Problems are now planet-wide but wisely Guy Adams again chooses to follow his three guest characters in their insurgency on Sutekh’s new world. The mid-way cliff-hanger is a punch-the-air valedictory moment and enables us to race into an excellent final episode which wraps things up in clever ways which, like the best endings, prove unpredictable yet inevitable: Leela’s promise to the locals is played out, Sutekh – again blissfully voiced by Gabriel Woolf – is hoist by his own petard and the otherwise compromised Rania Chuma is allowed her moment of vengeance. This epic of an adventure ends the series on an incredibly high bar and leaves the listener in eager anticipation of Series 8 and a new companion.

Overall, with only The Bad Penny letting the side down: 8/10

Addendum

For the first time this year, The Fourth Doctor Adventures have been released in two batches. This is wonderful news for my wallet and one I’m extremely grateful for. (Last year, 9 adventures cost £75. This year, 8 adventures cost £45.) However, both have contained 2 one-part stories and a two-parter. This gives the sets a feeling of being bottom-heavy and unbalanced, the two one-parters in danger of looking like precursors to the main event later on. Ravenous last month felt similar, as if the two opening instalments were a bit of fluff before the real deal stuff at the end. Thankfully, next year’s Tom stories are being released a month apart and this should definitely alleviate the problem.

It has to be said though, that despite the Big Finish team going with the “1977 all over again” tagline, 2-episode stories actually feel nothing like 1977. The real gold of The Fourth Doctor Adventures have been the 4-parters: above I mentioned January’s The Mind Runners and The Demon Rises, as well as the superlative Kill the Doctor! and The Age of Sutekh. Elsewhere in the range, The Dalek Contract/The Final Phase, The Paradox Planet/Legacy of Death, Trail of the White Worm/The Oseidon Adventure and The Skin of the Sleek/The Thief who Stole Time feel like serious competition with the television series. The 4-episode novel adaptations and Philip Hinchcliffe offerings also feel like sprawling, heavyweight tales. The 2-parters have seemed a little slight, a little perfunctory on occasion and by comparison. (Which is not to say there haven’t been terrific 2-parters – I’m thinking The King of Sontar, White Ghosts, The Crooked Man and Last of the Colophon in particular!) David Richardson has promised that there is a definite movement towards 4-parters in the future though, and this sounds promising. For Tom Baker, the 4-part format just feels so right.

In the meantime, we can enjoy these incredibly strong Series 7 boxsets, which are the best Tom stories, in my view, since 2014. (A year that ironically didn’t have any 4-parters at all! - Am I talking jive?) For the record, if I were to order the season from top to bottom, it would be as such:

KILL THE DOCTOR!/THE AGE OF SUTEKH
THE CROWMARSH EXPERIMENT
THE MIND RUNNERS/THE DEMON RISES
THE SHADOW OF LONDON
THE BAD PENNY
THE SONS OF KALDOR

In January 2019, the Fourth Doctor meets Ann Kelso in The Syndicate Masterplan. And I cannot effing wait.

JH

The New Target Books

The old Target Books are publications of true beauty. I was never as attached to them as fans of a certain age. I could watch the TV stories on VHS or UK Gold and in my teens didn’t really see the point of re-living a story by spending hours reading a book I knew the ending to. However, the artwork I was always thrilled by and amassed quite a collection from second-hand shops in my youth. I read a good deal of them in my twenties and it remains a giddy thrill when I spot one in a car boot or jumble sale that isn’t already proudly displayed on my bookshelves. I am just old enough to remember seeing a brand-new copy of The Space Pirates in WHSmiths (one of the last to be published) and thinking how wonderful a story it looked. That there, in microcosm, is the power of the Target.

For years now, a section of fandom has clamoured for re-tellings of the New Series in Target book form. I was always convinced that new fiction was the way forward. Having read the four new editions over the last month, however, I’ve completely changed my mind. They are glorious, beautiful and utterly worthy of the Target title. I so hope that more are on their way!

TWICE UPON A TIME

I started with Paul Cornell’s novelisation of the most recent Christmas special. The story was the freshest in my mind and, despite featuring my beloved Capaldi, it was the book I was the least excited by. More fool me. 

Paul Cornell has clearly set out to emulate the master, the great Terrance Dicks. He manages to do so with utter aplomb. There is something so familiar, so re-assuring about Twice Upon a Time, that one feels like they’ve known the story inside-out a good deal longer than is practically possible. Cornell also deals with a few scripting niggles: he explains why the First Doctor is so uncharacteristically outrageous in terms of his sexism. He explains how he can pilot the TARDIS back to World War One (I expect this information was edited from the finished programme) and unpeels the reasons why the Twelfth Doctor is so keen not to regenerate. The book is thrillingly easy to read, with clear, cut-throat prose, perfectly reminiscent of those early 160-page dazzlers. To be compared to Terrance Dicks I’m sure Paul Cornell would consider very high praise. To suggest that he is on par with the man I hope would make him very happy indeed, just as his re-telling of this odd, little gem of a story made me.

ROSE

If Paul Cornell is the Terrance Dicks of the Target world, then Russell T Davies proves to be a very welcome substitute for Malcolm Hulke. Rose deviates from the TV episode on which it was based with some sketching of characters and new scenes featuring Mickey’s housemates, just as Hulke had shaded in backgrounds for the IMC people and the future world of The Doomsday Weapon. Truth be told, Rose had a very specific agenda in 2005: it had to re-introduce Doctor Who to the masses in a slick, swift and vibrant way. It was written, more than any other episode up to that point, for Saturday night, prime time television. As such, the plot is very, very slight. It is not honestly very good book material. Davies’s flourishes whilst full of heart and character serve to slacken the pace and at times, getting to the end of the book feels like an uphill struggle. Take the first chapter on Wilson: in its own right, it’s a perfectly lovely opening with lots of emotional shades. In truth though, it doesn’t help propel the story onwards or even have very much to do with anything that follows. Mac Hulke managed to tell the life of Shughie McPherson in the first few pages of The Dinosaur Invasion  whilst thrillingly engaging him in the plot. Similar passages by Davies later in the novel end up brining proceedings to a grinding halt. Even the scenes in Clive’s shed, whilst including a few fannish nods, is longer than it needs to be. A straight re-telling would probably only last 100 pages but it might have been more energetic and that’s something Davies’s novelisation lacks, despite its very strong character work.

THE CHRISTMAS INVASION

Somewhere betwixt Cornell and Davies, comes Jenny T Colgan. Perhaps unusually, for a story that quite brazenly shouts RUSSELL T DAVIES at us in terms of content, Colgan manages to allow her own narrative voice to come through. There are small turns of phrases which are quite, quite beautiful and lift the prose from the page like only a natural novelist could. Despite these ornamental touches, the text breezes by with pace and efficiency. There is an unexpected sub-plot between Llewellyn and Sally which adds a bittersweet romantic weight to their scenes together and works wonderfully. New subsidiary characters also help bring this world to life. It is in the exploration of Rose, however, where Colgan really cements her credentials. This is her story from Page One. It is a very canny move for Colgan to start with the Children in Need post-regeneration scene to really cement Rose’s ambivalence towards her fresh-faced Doctor substitute and the last few pages are made yet more beautiful thanks to this early character work. If all future novels were as good as The Christmas Invasion, then they’d be very, very welcome. 

THE DAY OF THE DOCTOR

Steven Moffat sets himself up as the Donald Cotton of the new Target authors. This version of The Day of the Doctor is not a re-telling of the TV episode at all; it is a novel in its own right. He has clearly set out to write the ultimate Doctor Who story and sod everybody else. It starts with Paul McGann and ends with Jodie Whittaker, encompassing Doctors-past having adventures, saving the children of Gallifrey. The framing device is a masterstroke and keenly engages the reader by inviting them to solve the book’s secrets. The chapters themselves work brilliantly, contrasting each vividly different event from the episode against the next. Whilst the TV story sags a little as we reach Tudor England, here Moffat chooses to tell the tale from three perspectives, giving us new takes on familiar scenes. The Brigadier’s in it. River Song’s in it. It is a book filled to the brim with all the things that make Doctor Who so special. It is not a remotely contentious thing to say that this is perhaps the best Doctor Who fiction ever published. Even after his time on the programme, Steven Moffat delivers his final magnum opus. I applaud you, Sir!

And so what’s next? Hopefully, we’ll get another batch. They’re clearly selling very well. All four novels sing. I was surprised to find Russell T Davies’s my least favourite but then again, if a novel written by Russell T Davies is a least favourite, surely that says more about the grand quality of his associates than it does about Rose? And to have a book as powerful, intricate, beautiful and clever as The Day of the Doctor, is utterly, cherishably joyous. Long may the Targets continue!

JH

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

Torchwood: Believe

What is it with Torchwood? It’s the spin-off that just won’t die. After two niche stylistically and tonally awkward seasons on BBC3 and then 2 respectively, we had a blistering 5-part season “stripped” across weeknights on BBC One, followed by a fairly silly, often tedious 10-part American epic. The iterations of the programme on TV were massively inconsistent, even across seasons. Episode lengths varied, we had 1,2,5 and 10 parters. This was a programme that was never quite comfortable with what it wanted to be. It could only be identified by its very Welsh bent, Eve Myles and John Barrowman beautifully overacting, immature adult content and a fairly loose grip on reality.

Big Finish have adopted a similarly sporadic approach to their Torchwood tales: there are monthly one parters, two handers, 12-part full-cast epics, 3-part pre-Torchwood boxsets, an anniversary special set thousands of years in the future, and two 3-part full-cast “stripped” stories. The only difference between the adventures produced by the BBC and those produced by Big Finish are that, by and large, the Big Finish stories are absolutely phenomenal. Apart from perhaps, Children of Earth, the Big Finish output eclipses its mother-programme in terms of immature adult content, vivid imagination and ambitious horizons. Also, you almost don’t notice John Barrowman and Eve Myles doing their beautiful over-acting thing. Almost don’t notice.

Believe is a 3-part full-cast drama with a difference: all the original cast are back. Well, actually, that’s how it’s been marketed but the group don’t actually spend a large amount of time together and the actors were clearly scheduled around each other. It must have been a nightmare: The Five Doctors of the Torchwood world. Having said that, it is a bit of a giddy thrill to have them all back together and the early scenes in the hub really feel like stepping back in time.

Surprisingly though, the story doesn’t really feel much like one from 2006/7. For a start, it’s a 3-parter and it’s also far less melodramatic, on-the-nose and rough-around-the-edges than early Torchwood. It’s as if the original Torchwood viewers have grown up, become writers and written new episodes as their younger minds imagined it used to be. Guy Adams’s scripts are excellent. The threat here is one posed by the human race and feels far more dangerous and insidious than any alien threat, especially given that the aggressors target the weak and the lonely. This is Torchwood at perhaps its most mature.

Burn Gorman and Naoko Mori stand out specifically amongst the cast and are given the best scenes. There is a bitterness between Owen and Tosh, given the genuinely uncomfortable events of Episode One, which culminates in a terrifically – and characteristically – clumsy conversation in the final instalment which is completely riveting. This is as real and vivid and painful as their relationship has ever been. There’s a star turn from Arthur Darvill here too which is definitely worthy of note, playing against type and leaving a stark and loathsome impression.

Episode Two focuses on Ianto and again, he is given some terrifically uncomfortable scenes. We fear that he is not a million miles away from the victims of the church with whom he is trying to infiltrate and so there is a more tangible sense of threat posed towards him than perhaps our other leads. 

The final episode ends quietly, in a series of stages, which is indicative of the way Guy Adams goes not for spectacle but for heart in the telling of Believe. It doesn’t need to flex its muscles as much as other Torchwood episodes (and feels comparatively straight judged alongside them) because Believe’s greatest strength is its confidence: it knows it doesn’t have to be showy to be tremendous. For once, this Torchwood episode could happily call itself brilliantly subtle. All told, Believe is a triumph.

9/10

JH