Things I Would Like Steven Moffat to Please Stop Doing

Amy:   You think you’ll just come back to life.

Rory:   When don’t I?

Doctor Who S7 E6, ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’ (2012)

I refer, more, specifically, to things I would like Steven Moffat to please stop doing in his capacity as head writer of Doctor Who, a programme for which, you may or may not know, I have a great fondness, but one which has declined in recent years – almost exactly, in fact, since Moffat was put in charge.1

Thanks to Cirt on Wikimedia Commons for this picture of Steven Moffat at the 72nd Annual Peabody Awards Luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on 20th May 2013. I have no idea what a Peabody Award is, but I hope everyone had a lovely time.

By the time you read this, the moment of truth will have arrived: the first episode of Series Nine will have been broadcast, and Moffat will have set the tone for the rest of the series.² I shall probably keep watching Doctor Who for as long as anybody is prepared to keep making it, out of the loyalty I developed during the Russell T Davies era and a stubborn optimism that sooner or later it surely must re-attain to the superb quality which caused me to develop that loyalty in the first place. Still, I would feel a lot happier about my continued viewing if Moffat were to correct three of what I feel have been the biggest problems with Doctor Who during his tenure as head writer.

1)      Making everything ginormous.

I’m talking in terms of plotline, rather than any physical aspect. Cast your mind back, if you will, to the end of Series One of Doctor Who (that is, in its relaunched version – I’m not expecting anyone to cast his or her mind back as far as 1963). In the finale episode, ‘The Parting of the Ways’, the Doctor wrestles with himself over whether to kill all the Daleks with a wave of brain-frying energy, considering that the whole of planet earth will also be within the range of the wave. That was what at stake: everyone on the earth. That sounds big enough for a series finale to me.

Moffat, however, seems to feel a need to go ever bigger, ever more significant, with ever more at stake. Series Five ended with a second big bang that reset the entire universe, Series Six with all of time collapsing because the Doctor had simultaneously died and not died, Series Seven with Clara stepping into the Doctor’s time-stream and scattering copies of herself throughout his entire life. Perhaps that last one doesn’t seem to demonstrate my point very well, but I think part of Making Everything Ginormous is a disregard for pre-established canon:³ the real issue is that under Moffat, whatever is happening to the Doctor right now is the most important thing that has ever happened to him.

There a few problems with this approach. Firstly, it quickly dulls interest: if everything matters so very much all the time, it actually becomes quite hard to really care about any of it. Secondly, it unceremoniously dismisses canon. I appreciate that a programme as long-running and timey-wimey as Doctor Who is bound to have some plot holes and inconsistencies, but being repeatedly told that some key event in a previous series never actually happened at all feels rather like being robbed: I was invested in those storylines. Thirdly, it’s hard to move away from the Making Everything Ginormous approach once it’s been set as the precedent for making the programme exciting: surely it would look anticlimactic and, frankly, a bit lame, to go from resetting the universe one series to the fate of perhaps one planet the next. Nevertheless, I think that’s exactly what Moffat ought to do. Bring the adventures back into a graspable, relatable sphere; make us care about minor characters; let the Doctor once again be a traveller, a mad man in a box, romping enthusiastically through space and time, instead of the lynchpin of every event that has ever occurred. After all, perhaps I missed an important memo at some stage, but I was under the impression that an alien romping enthusiastically through space and time in a box was pretty much the premise of the programme.

2)     Writing the female companions badly.

Perhaps you’ve seen the fascinating infographic put together by a certain Rebecca Moore for a university project about whether claims of sexism in Moffat’s Doctor Who scripting are well founded.⁴ The statistics certainly provide food for thought, but Moore also notes: “As I watched these episodes again with a fine tooth comb, I noticed many things that were not included with this study, as they were not quantifiable, which was the purpose of this research.” And indeed, the main problem I have with the way Moffat writes women isn’t quantifiable – the problem being, he doesn’t really write women: he writes puzzles for the Doctor to solve.

Look, a puzzle purporting to be a woman! It’s surely as appropriate a visual metaphor as one could hope to find in a stock photo.

The three main women of the Steven Moffat era thus far have been Amy Pond, River Song, and Clara Oswald. Amy was a puzzle because the crack in her bedroom wall (a fault-line caused by the explosion of the TARDIS, ultimately resulting in the second big bang I mentioned earlier – no, I didn’t really understand it, either) meant that her life didn’t make sense. River was a puzzle because the Doctor kept meeting her in the opposite order to that in which she was meeting him, meaning her identity and past were very obscure and she continually answered questions by saying, “Spoilers.” Clara was perhaps the biggest puzzle of them all: she had a habit of turning up in random times and places, saving the Doctor’s life and then promptly dying, hence her nickname, the Impossible Girl.

Frankly, it makes me long for the days when the Doctor’s companions were actually characters, when they were ordinary people who happened to run into him, when he thought they were brilliant because of who they were and not because their lives had some great cosmic significance he was desperate to discover. Here we link back into my first point.

Being a puzzle for the Doctor to solve also results in Amy, River and Clara being hugely defined by their relationship with the Doctor. Granted, spending time as a space-time traveller would have a big impact on anyone’s life, but the Davies-era companions (Rose, Martha and Donna) all retained their own lives, concerns and story arcs. They were relatable humans; one could picture oneself in their place, and to do so has always been one of the major thrills of watching Doctor Who. Moffat’s women, on the other hand, frequently feel to me to be less like humans and more like devices. Plotline carriers. Puzzles.

3)     Messing around with death.

I already mentioned Clara’s repeatedly dying and then not being dead, but this is far from Moffat’s only foray into killing characters only to promptly resurrect them. We already know that Osgood (played by the wonderful Ingrid Oliver⁵) is set to return this series despite having been killed by Missy last series finale.⁶ The death but-not-actually of the Doctor himself is the major component of the overarching plotline for Series Six and then again, in a separate instance, for Series Seven. In fact, it’s got to the stage where Moffat isn’t even trying to explain his characters’ failure to remain dead. Daleks, Cybermen and the Master have all reappeared to do battle with the Doctor with no information as to how they survived being respectively blown up, sucked into the Void or killed when the Time Lords got blasted back into the Time Lock containing the Time War (well, Time does feature pretty heavily in the programme). I expect that various of these events are supposed to not have happened now, thanks to the second big bang, the fact that the Doctor never destroyed Gallifrey after all (‘The Day of the Doctor’), and other timey-wimey business, but we the viewers never actually have this explained to us – and besides, it still amounts to messing around with death.

Probably the most famous example of Moffat’s playing with death is the series of fatal ordeals to which he subjected Rory Williams. YouTuber Josh Sundquist points out in his excellent video ‘Doctor Who for Math Nerds’⁷ that Rory died and came back to life no fewer than seven times – six more than Jesus.

And here we hit the heart of the problem. Oddly enough, it was kind of a big deal when Jesus rose from the dead, because – oh, let me think – people don’t usually do that. Yet in Moffat’s Whoniverse, people do it left, right, and centre. If a dead character is important or interesting or popular enough to warrant a role in another episode, he or she will be back regardless. Life and death become meaningless. I suppose I should have seen the seeds being sown as early as Moffat’s Series One episode ‘The Doctor Dances’, in which the Doctor says, “What’s life? Life’s easy. A quirk of matter. Nature’s way of keeping meat fresh.”

Only life and death aren’t really like that, are they? According to the normal human experience, the dead stay dead and are lost to the living. We grieve when our loved ones die and rejoice if they narrowly escape death. We know that life and death do actually matter, very much, in fact. Moffat’s insistence to the contrary is wearying; it belittles the very real and significant impact of actual bereavement, and it once again makes Doctor Who as a programme less relatable, less heartfelt, less human.

And I suppose that, in the end, is common to all three problems I have outlined. Doctor Who may be about an alien who spends much of his time fighting other aliens, but at its greatest, it comments profoundly on very, very human matters. So, if only Moffat can recapture some of that humanity for the coming series – bring his plotlines down to a more human level, write companions as actual humans, and have a bit of respect for the importance of what is famously the one certainty of human life other than taxes⁸ – we might just be in for a good one.

^Footnotes

¹ It’s not that Moffat is a bad writer. I have very much enjoyed his work on Sherlock, and he wrote some excellent standalone episodes while Russell T Davies was head writer: ‘The Empty Child’ and ‘Blink’ spring to mind. Somehow, being made head writer just seemed to ruin him. Power corrupts?

² That said, I’m not sure that much can be judged from the first episode of a series any more, since Series 8, in my opinion, swung rapidly between being really rather good (for example, ‘Deep Breath’ – the opening episode itself – ‘Mummy on the Orient Express’, and especially the utterly marvellous ‘Time Heist’) and being frankly awful (for example, ‘Into the Dalek’ and, above all, ‘Kill the Moon’).

³ Even when Moffat doesn’t directly contradict canon, he casts it into insignificance by such means as causing the Doctor to age hundreds of years within the course of one episode (I have in mind ‘The Time of the Doctor’), so that it emerges that the entire course of his ninth and tenth regenerations took up only a tiny fraction of the time his eleventh did.

⁴ If you haven’t, or have but would enjoy a reminder, here it is: http://rebeccaamoore.com/2014/05/29/university-study-on-sexism-in-bbcs-doctor-who-infographic/. If you’re unfamiliar with the Bechdel Test, Anita Sarkeesian is happy to explain it to you: http://feministfrequency.com/2009/12/07/the-bechdel-test-for-women-in-movies/.  

⁵ I urge you to check out the delights of Ingrid Oliver and Lorna Watson’s sketch show, imaginatively named Watson and Oliver. It’s not particularly well known, and the humour probably isn’t what you’d call laugh-out-loud, but something about it just ticks all the right boxes and I think it’s an absolute gem. Here’s a small taster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTr-hNTSIhA.

⁶ If you don’t believe me, believe the Radio Times: http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-05-08/osgood-returns-from-the-dead-for-doctor-who-series-9.

⁷ It’s entertaining whether or not you’re actually a maths nerd. I’m not a maths nerd and I enjoyed it a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLH6GprKhsc.

⁸ The relevant quote is usually attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but it always puts me in mind of a track on Relient K’s 2004 album MMHMM, called ‘Life After Death and Taxes (Failure II)’, which is as lyrically brilliant as many of their songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rnkFHjc8vs.  “After all the stupid things I did, there’s nothing left that you’d forgive, because you already forgave me,” is a particular favourite line of mine, but the song ends with, “Death and decay can’t touch us now.” Death matters, but Jesus broke its power when he rose from it, and he offers us resurrection not back into our current, fragile, sin-stained existence, but into a perfect eternity with him, where death really can’t touch us any more (for the details, 1 Corinthians 15 is a good place to start: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians+15&version=ESVUK). So Jesus may only have had one resurrection, as opposed to the multiple ones of Moffat’s Doctor Who characters, but, at least as far as I’m concerned, Jesus’ definitely seems like the better deal.