“And tell me, how did you enter this world?”
“I’m a two-dimensional character, you can’t expect backstory.”
There has been a lot of discussion about the reduction in the number of episodes of Doctor Who produced within a year. These discussions are often alarmist in nature, and framed in some sort of despairing lament about how the show is not what it once was. However, there is less discussion about how this compression of the show affects its format.
While Davies can be a chaotic writer within individual episodes, particular rushing towards a climactic resolution to a story or a season, he has always had a very vision of the structure of a given season of Doctor Who. Both of Davies’ successors, Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall, experimented with different season structures.
Ring-a-Ding-Ding…
Moffat’s fifth season was structured identical to the previous four, and then his sixth season was structured as an inversion of that – opening with an epic two-parter, closing with a single run-around episode. His seventh season was all stand-alone episodes, while his ninth season was comprised primarily of two-parters, most of which adopted an interesting approach to the basic structure of a two-parter.
Chibnall’s first season was comprised entirely of standalone and disconnected episodes, with the Stenza serving as recurring antagonists. Chibnall’s second season was much more arc-focused, opening and closing with two big two-part adventures, with The Timeless Children rewriting the show’s lore. Chibnall’s third season was a single narrative spread across six episodes, Doctor Who: Flux.
An animated discussion.
However, Davies had a structural formula and he largely stuck to it. Davies’ seasons often opened with triptych of present-past-future stories to orient new viewers in the world of Doctor Who, before leading into a toyetic monster two-parter. This would be followed later in the season by a more high-brow two-parter, and then a two-part season finale that had been seeded through the season to that point. Davies adhered rigidly to that structure.
That structure worked within the confines of thirteen-episode seasons, but obviously cannot be applied to an eight-episode season. After all, just counting through the “obligatory” episodes within that structure eats up nine of the season’s episodes. So Davies has had to come up with a new structure for the show’s seasons. Space Babies and The Robot Revolution effectively compress those opening three episodes into a single story, while The Devil’s Chord and Lux suggest an entirely new narrative archetype.
The next stage of the show…
There is some online debate about whether Davies is repeating himself, whether his approach to Doctor Who is meaningfully different now than it was twenty years ago. While it’s easy to focus on the places where Davies’ writing is similar – notably the premieres and the finales – it is also worth acknowledging where it is different. The Devil’s Chord and Lux are two episodes that are of a piece with one another, two episodes as similar to one another as Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel are to The Sontaran Stratagem and The Poison Sky, fitting within Davies’ season structure.
However, they are also new and exciting. They are a type of episode that is fundamentally different from anything that Davies even attempted during his first tenure as showrunner. Indeed, they are fundamentally different from anything that Moffat and Chibnall attempted as well. They are big, bold and self-aware. They represent a clear evolution of what is possible on Doctor Who. If nothing else, they prove the show is still alive – that it is still animated.
Rave about this episode until you are blue in the face…
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Filed under: Television | Tagged: alan cumming, animated, cartoon, doctor, doctor who, film, lux, media, mister ring-a-ding, ncuti gatwa, russell t. davies | 1 Comment »
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