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Reset for Adventure: Has Stephen Moffat Salvaged the Reset Button?

Next week sees the season finale of Stephen Moffat’s first season as showrunner on the rather excellent Doctor Who. I have to admit that – with one or two minor misgivings – I’ve had a (space)whale of a time, just we’ll save that for the inevitable review. However, being the sort of meta-textual guy that I am, I love that Moffat has managed to balance both integrating this new iteration of the franchise (created and, despite what some naysayers would have you believe, served very well by Russell T. Davies) and connecting with the established history (note, for example, how many times we have seen flashbacks of the original eight versions of the character in these eleven episodes alone). What, however, has really grabbed me about this run of episodes is that fact that Moffat has seemingly decided to take one of the most common elements of Davies’ season finales – a reset button – and stretch it out over an entire season. In effect, he seems to be attempting to reclaim one the storytelling crutches that his predecessor arguably relied upon too heavily, but use it in an interesting and creative manner.

If the walls had eyes...

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The Beastly Side: The Beast Below

Remember last week how I was said I was going to wait until the end of the year to post up one big post-season analysis of Matt Smith’s first season as the Doctor? Yeah, well I’m still gonna do that. But while the episodes still give us food for thought, I might want to post my thought on a given hour (or, in this case, the first episode of the show under an hour long in about two years). Maybe next week I’ll have nothing more to post than simply the fact that spitfires in space represent the coolest concept ever.

The belly of the beast...

Note: This post contains spoilers for The Beast Below, the second episode of the fifth season of Doctor Who (and if you’re going to argue about the given season number, you know exactly which season I’m talking about). I’ll flag them in the article below before I reach them, but consider yourself warned.

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