It’s the end of 2009, and Doctor Who fans are riding out the last few moments of their tenure as Russell T. Davies’ many beaten wives, and boy was The End of Time an arrestable offence. I don’t know what RTD got out of giving The Master the ability to fly, shoot lasers from his hands and consume vast amounts of food at lightning speed like a Friedberg & Seltzer superhero ‘satire’, nor do I know how much he got for having The Doctor instigate human race circle jerks at every available opportunity, but it should have been ten to fifteen years.

The Whovians took this final mauling in their stride, knowing that Steven Moffat was primed and ready to breach the production office with two bandoleers of brilliance strapped across his chest, canisters of genius gas lining his buckle. Doctor Who was to do away with convoluted, epic for the sake of epic stories that you couldn’t get a rope around, let alone your head, and introduce some sound, logical and entertaining storytelling. After all, Steven Moffat penned the outings of the gas mask boy, the clockwork robots and the weeping angels, while Russell T. Davies created a cross between E.T. and Zippy from Rainbow (or the Slitheen as he insists on calling them). It made perfect sense that Moffat would be the one to eradicate the cloying sentimentality and full blown cobblers that the series was belching forth with aplomb by that stage.

But like his stories, Moffat’s handling of Doctor Who subverted our expectations. Steven Moffat is being hailed for his superiority over Russell T. Davies, because RTD allowed the monstrous Love and Monsters, the fearful Fear Her and the idiotic Idiot’s Lantern to be filmed. Moffat, on the other hand, gave us Victory of the Daleks, in which the Daleks are thwarted by a Professor remembering how much he loves his old girlfriend, Closing Time, in which the Cybermen are thwarted by James Corden asserting his love for his son, and Night Terrors, in which the Dutch dolls are thwarted by a father emphasising the love he has for his son… notice a pattern, here? It was also the power of LURVE that resolved the plot to Moffat’s The Big Bang. LURVE is fast becoming a shamelessly flaunted throwaway resolution that takes Doctor Who out of the realms of sci-fi and unceremoniously stuffs it into the fantasy genre—a square peg in a round hole that Moffat is pioneering.

Yes, Moffat has undone the perception that the TARDIS is a big blue comedy bus, and has worked hard to replenish Doctor Who’s creepy, unsettling air for the 21st century, but the optimistic thunders of his openers aren’t followed by the flashes of lightning the audience anticipates. The tone is better, but the former focus on the Doctor as some kind of demigod has been shifted to the next extreme, and the story-arcs are now barely about the Doctor. Instead, we have to ponder Amy’s highly improbable connections to the latest spree of universe fuckups and her largely dull relationship; taking the “you’re married to the force” sentiment of crime dramas and giving them to Rory to inflict upon Amy (and the audience). We get it, Amy and Rory love each other very much, and every time there’s a bit of doubt as to who Amy loves the most, it’ll always be Rory no matter what because he was ‘the only one out of all the boys that I liked’ and he was the thousand year centurian (he got through that with the power of LURVE, no less) and he died sixty eight times and cut off some of his hair just to be with her; this does not need to be the centerpiece of every arc and every plot. Simon Nye’s superb Amy’s Choice got all of this across in 45 minutes, even managing to balance it out with some Doctor-centric dilemmas along the way; any more flogging of this idea and we might well end up with a hole in the Universe and Moffat’s next plot.

Steven Moffat has made a good start—he is a better writer than Russell T. Davies, but he needs to do away with story arcs that are never satisfyingly resolved and focus on delivering a series of 13 standalone episodes, linked only by continuity, that are scary, funny, sound and pleasing. That way, we might have a consistent stream of excellence on par with episodes such as The Doctor’s Wife, The Rebel Flesh, The God Complex and Flesh and Stone, and not mind molesting carnivals like Let’s Kill Hitler thrown in purely for the sake of having something to expand upon in a later series.

(Reprinted from SCAN Online with permission from the author.)