steven moffat | the m0vie blog

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Hour (Review)

Posted on January 11, 2013 by Darren

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the longest-running science-fiction show in the world, I’ll be taking weekly looks at some of my own personal favourite stories and arcs, from the old and new series, with a view to encapsulating the sublime, the clever and the fiendishly odd of the BBC’s Doctor Who.

The Eleventh Hour originally aired in 2010.

So, coming?

No.

You wanted to come fourteen years ago.

I grew up.

Don’t worry. I’ll soon fix that.

– the Doctor and Amy

The arrival of a new producer on Doctor Who always represents a shift in some way shape or form. The change from Barry Letts to Philip Hinchcliffe must have seemed radical, even at the time. Graham Williams following Hinchcliffe represented a similarly strange departure. The departure of Russell T. Davies, the producer who had brought Doctor Who back to television after over a decade, was always going be a pretty significant change for those watching. Steven Moffat’s first episode as producer might not seem like it’s a shocking departure from what came before, but it also quite efficiently and effectively distinguishes Moffat’s tenure from that of his direct predecessor.

While by no means as radical a shift as Spearhead from Space, there is a very clear feeling that The Eleventh Hour brings with it significant tonal and thematic changes to the tale of the Doctor.

A mad man with a box…

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Doctor Who: Rose (Review)

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Darren

Rose originally aired in 2005.

So, I’m going to go up there and blow them up, and I might well die in the process, but don’t worry about me. No, you go home. Go on. Go and have your lovely beans on toast. Don’t tell anyone about this, because if you do, you’ll get them killed.

(beat)

I’m the Doctor, by the way. What’s your name?

Rose.

Nice to meet you, Rose. Run for your life!

– the Doctor and Rose

It’s amazing to think of the pressure weighing down on Rose. Sure, Doctor Who has gone from strength-to-strength since its revival in 2005, but there was a time when its resurrection seemed unlikely, to say the least. Although fans had kept the show alive in various media, it must have seemed highly unlikely that they show would ever return to television, let alone as a massive success. Producer Russell T. Davies might have seemed like an unlikely choice. Although he had written some spin-off material, like other British television writers including Steven Moffat and Paul Cornell, Davies was best known for producing shows like Queer as Folk and The Second Coming. Nevertheless, he had been campaigning to bring the show back for quite some time, notably in 1998 and 2002, before finally bringing the revived show to screen in late March 2005.

Although the edges are still a bit rough in places, Rose serves as an effective introduction to the Russell T. Davies, and contains the seeds of what would become the show’s success. Borrowing (and reinventing) heavily from perhaps the last seismic re-tooling of the series in Spearhead from Space, the show presents a version of Doctor Who for a new generation.

Run!

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Doctor Who: The Snowmen (Review)

Posted on December 25, 2012 by Darren

Snowmen are rubbish in July. You’ll have to be better than that.

– the Doctor points out that the Great Intelligent doesn’t seem especially… intelligent

The Snowmen is a return to the sort of plot-driven Christmas Special that we occasionally saw during the Davies era. Much like The Christmas Invasion was concerned with introducing David Tennant and The End of Time, Part I was focused on wrapping up the Davies era, The Snowmen feels like it’s more concerned with setting up the fiftieth anniversary half-season ahead than it is with being a Christmas Special in its own right.

Sure, The Snowmen has all the festive trappings you might expect. There are killer snowmen, as the title implies. There’s a rich lonely old miser, as we’ve come to expect in these sorts of tales. There’s a nice Victorian setting for all the action as well. However, The Snowmen devotes a considerable amount of time to developing the mystery surrounding the Doctor’s new companion, and setting up a recurring foe for this fiftieth anniversary half-season.

The result is somewhat unsatisfying, as if The Snowmen is working harder to check the requisite boxes than it is to provide seasonal Doctor Who viewing.

What white teeth they have…

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Doctor Who: The Angels Take Manhattan (Review)

Posted on September 29, 2012 by Darren

The decision to build Steven Moffat’s third season of Doctor Who around a series of done-in-one stories has been a bit of a mixed blessing. Asylum of the Daleks was suitably madcap Saturday tea-time telly, and A Town Called Mercy was an affectionate homage to Americana, but Dinosaurs on a Spaceship barely had room to breath, overloaded on cool moments with little room left for plotting.

The Angels Take Manhattan suffers the most from this sense that it is being compacted. Watching the episode, it feels like Moffat is trying to cram too much story into a single forty-five minute episode. It makes the viewer long for the days when Russell T. Davies would gleefully run his episodes over the allocated forty-five minute slot. Here, Moffat’s big high-concept “timey wimey” ideas and his farewell to his two companions eating up so much of the run-time that the plot itself still feels like an afterthought, running on contrivance and coincidence rather than anything more substantial.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t an affective farewell to Rory and Amy, or that it doesn’t draw fantastic performances from its central quartet, but it does mean that The Angels Take Manhattan is never quite as sturdy as it should have been.

A walk in the park…

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Doctor Who: The Power of Three (Review)

Posted on September 22, 2012 by Darren

The Power of Three is Chris Chibnell’s best Doctor Who script to date. While a little heavy-handed in the way it deals with the relationship between the Doctor and Amy and Rory, it’s still a nice change of pace. It’s a thoughtful episode exploring the Doctor’s relationship with time. (And that shared by his companions.) While the alien invasion seems a little tacked on, to the point where it only seems to serve the final pun, The Power of Three is still a solid penultimate outing for this trio of adventurers.

Thinking outside the box…

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Doctor Who: Asylum of the Daleks (Review)

Posted on September 1, 2012 by Darren

You’re going to fire me at a planet? That’s your plan? I get fired at a planet and expected to fix it?

In fairness, that is slightly your M.O.

Don’t be fair to the Daleks when they’re firing me at a planet.

And more wacky structural hijinks ensue.

The sixth and seventh seasons of the revived Doctor Who are strange beasts, for a number of reasons. The decision to split the seasons stands out, but there is also a sense that they are structured in a counter-intuitive manner. The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon served as a two-part season finalé, despite opening the sixth season. In contrast, Let’s Kill Hitler played like a frothy season premiere. (The Wedding of River Song is perhaps the most difficult to place; while certainly not a light run-around season opener, it was nevertheless a bit light for a finalé.)

Things are looking up…

The seventh season arguably streamlines the structure a bit. The Name of the Doctor plays almost like a season premiere, revealing the origin story for “the Impossible Girl” and teasing ideas like the War Doctor and Trenzalore relentlessly. In contrast, Asylum of the Daleks feels like a season finalé, teasing a new companion as the existing companions struggle to get on with their real lives, featuring fleets of Dalek ships destroying planets and massive amounts of continuity.

Indeed, the biggest problem with Asylum of the Daleks is that it has not enough time to establish all its core elements. Plot points come out of nowhere. Character beats are established in the same scenes that resolve them. Asylum of the Daleks is a big episode in keeping with the “blockbuster” aesthetic of the anniversary season, but it also establishes the limitations of that approach.

Moffat’s crack at writing a Dalek episode…

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Doctor Who: The Doctor, The Widow & The Wardrobe (Review)

Posted on December 25, 2011 by Darren

Where are we?

In a forest. In a box. In the sitting room. Try to keep up.

– Lily and the Doctor sum things up

I could get used to this “coopting a holiday classic” thing that Steven Moffat has going. After all, last year riffed on A Christmas Carol (right down to the name), and this one leans pretty heavily on The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe. I imagine a Doctor Who episode themed around It’s a Wonderful Life can’t be too far away. Still, strangely enough, the episode worked best as an illustration of the show’s wonderful heart and its charming understanding of childhood psychology – even if the actual science-fiction plot was a little disappointing and the ending felt like a bit of a copout. Certainly not quite as good as last year’s entry into the Doctor Who Christmas canon, but not a waste of time either.

It left me a bit cold...

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The Doctor Is In? Is Doctor Who “Too British” For American Audiences?

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Darren

Well, it’s been about a week since the news broke that David Yates would be directing the new Doctor Who movie, being produced by the BBC, aimed at American audiences. Perhaps Steven Moffat’s rumoured commentary was perfectly apt: it seems that neither the director nor the studio have any idea what exactly they are planning, and the announcement might have been more than a little preemptive. There’s a lot of chatter out there about what this means for the television show, which is rumoured to be running severely over-budget and under pressure from the BBC executives. Because, you know, it’s not like the show makes enough to justify its costs.

I don’t know if this means potential cancellation or a reboot after the fiftieth anniversary, or even if the show and the movie will run alongside in two distinct continuities (and people said Moffat’s “timey-wimey” plots were too complicated!). Being entirely honest, I’m not sure if Yates knows either. However, something does fascinate me about this. Bringing Yates on-board represents a vote of confidence, suggesting that Doctor Who could be somewhere in the region of “Harry Potter” success stateside.

I can’t help but wonder if Doctor Who is simply “too British” for mainstream American audiences, and if launching a movie franchise to appeal to the demographics will be able to keep the core of the character and the show, while courting North American movie-goers.

States of play?

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Doctor Who: The Wedding of River Song (Review)

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Darren

The Wedding of River Song originally aired in 2011.

“I had to die. I didn’t have to die alone.”

– The Doctor

That was a really crammed 45 minutes. If I’m ever looking for an example of how much plotting Steven Moffat can fit into a single regular-sized episode of Doctor Who, I think I only need to look back at The Wedding of River Song. It’s a piece of very smart science-fiction writing, bristling with ideas and tying up quite a lot of the questions that Moffat raised over the course of the last two years, while raising even more.

It’s something that Moffat’s Doctor Who seems to struggle with, balancing the show’s appeal and accessibility with long-term arc-based story telling. It’s a conflict that’s playing out across a variety of television shows, building off the massive success of Lost, and demonstrating that television shows with serialised plot elements can draw (and, for the most part, keep) large audiences.

It’s still a risky gambit for any television show, particularly one like Moffat’s Doctor Who, where the episodes are so few and so far spaced across the television season. Arcs like this run the risk of extending some of the problems with the season as a whole, rather than playing up the individual strengths of the episodes.

Death of the Doctor…

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Doctor Who: Closing Time (Review)

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Darren

Look! They gave me a badge with my name on it, in case I forget it… Which is very thoughtful, because that does happen.

– The Doctor shows off his name badge

I have to admit, I liked Closing Time. It wasn’t quite as good as The Lodger, but it was an entertaining diversion at the end of what has been a pretty gloomy run of episodes for Doctor Who. And based on the previews for The Wedding of River Song, it isn’t going to get any lighter next week. I do have to admit, I kinda like the idea of Craig as an almost “stationary” companion – one whose life is constantly interrupted by the return of the Doctor to his relatively quiet existence, something that works quite well in contrast to the relationship between Amy and the Doctor.