Reviewing Doctor Who: What Have We Learned, Class?
Now that I’ve watched every Doctor Who there is to watch, you may be surprised to learn that I have some opinions! So, since you’re all here, I suppose I may as well share.
The Classic Era. You know that old cliche about the one constant characteristic of Doctor Who being change? It’s absolutely correct. It started its life as a low-budget show about a grumpy old man with a very inaccurate time machine and became . . . a lot of different things over the years. But it started to feel like Doctor Who pretty early on in its run--much like the character of the Doctor, the themes and faces change, but there is a core idea that never quite goes away.
As such, it’s hard to give the classic era one defining trait--each Doctor is very different from most of the others--but I think it’s safe to say that characters are handled differently. In the classic era, character arcs are less of a thing. We seldom meet the friends and family of our companions, and there are very few character-driven stories. That’s not to say there aren’t excellent characters and excellent character dynamics, but the focus is generally elsewhere. (There are, of course, exceptions.)
The interesting thing is how casual this makes some of the companions’ departures. Modern Who won’t let a companion leave without giving them a whole climactic episode (and Moffat won’t let a companion leave without having them pretend to leave six times, then have them seem to leave forever only to come back and travel through space and time with some random interstellar badass); in contrast, many of the companion departures in classic Who are fairly abrupt. The Doctor ditches Susan so she can get married to the dude she was hanging out with; he leaves Sarah Jane Smith in the wrong city because humans aren’t allowed on Gallifrey and he’s been summoned; Nyssa decides that she’d rather stay and help plague victims than keep traveling; and so on. Sometimes they decide to leave, sometimes the Doctor leaves them behind, but the show seldom dwells.
On the one hand, if you don’t like a companion this is fantastic. Classic Who relies much less on continuity (due, I think, largely to the format): if a character is gone, chances are we won’t hear about them again. But it does mean that some interesting character dynamics aren’t fully explored.
All told, I had a lot of fun with the classic era, and I think a lot of it is worth revisiting. Due to the episodic nature it’s pretty easy to just drop in wherever; you’ll probably figure out what’s going on without too much trouble. (I think Romana is the only companion who benefits from a bit of explanation, and even then all you need to say is “Romana is also a Time Lord.”)
The Davies Era. When I started watching, of course, Davies was all there was. I think I picked it up right after the End of Time had aired, before Moffat’s era started. Davies loves his character drama (see also my “rose is sad” tag), and lingers a lot on the effect the Doctor has on the lives he touches--and on the lives of their family and friends. Though this sometimes goes spectacularly badly (see: Father’s Day), for the most part I appreciate it. The companions feel more real, and it adds a layer of complexity to the Doctor’s character and his relationship with his companions.
He also likes big explosive finales where the fate of the world/universe is in balance, and meta-arcs which aren’t so much story arcs as they are a series of references that make you go “ah-ha” when you finally hit the finale. I actually like that, for the most part: if the finale is bad, you don’t feel that the whole arc is ruined; if it’s good, it adds a little bit of extra satisfaction to the resolution.
Early on in Davies’ run, the Doctor was usually an unknown character. He later starts running into people he’s encountered before, and of course the Daleks have a personal vendetta, but only once (during a Moffat-penned episode) during the Davies era does the Doctor save the day by just saying “I’m the Doctor, look me up.”
The Davies era is still firmly in the classic style: the Doctor and his companions live on the TARDIS. In the modern era they now visit their homes with some regularity, but they’re still primarily travelers. On some level, even if they’re expecting to be able to go home again, they give up their lives to travel with the Doctor.
The Moffat Era. I was actually pretty stoked to hear Moffat was the new showrunner when time rolled around, because his episodes thus far had all been top-notch. And while doing this rewatch I did not dislike it nearly as much as I’d remembered. So why was it frustrating my first time through?
I think most of it is that Moffat likes to set up interesting mysteries without having a good resolution in mind. Sometimes he simply fails to resolve them, sometimes the resolution is a cheap cop-out, and sometimes it’s just unsatisfying. And the seasons are now woven into the meta-plot to some degree or other, making it harder to extricate.
Moffat’s meta-plots are more involved than Davies’ were, which also means they’re less subtle. They will regularly feature brief segments, usually at the end of an episode, where the ongoing mystery happens: In Series 5, it would be a shot of a Crack in Time; in Series 8, we had Missy; etc., etc. I didn’t like most of these meta-plots, as you can probably see from the fact that I gave most of their conclusions relatively poor grades.
Moffat is also much more focused on the Doctor as a character, and especially early on it’s focused on the Doctor as the Most Important Being In The Universe. This leads to some really goofy situations (the Pandorica Opens), and there’s a lot more reliance on “I’m the Doctor, look me up” as a resolution to plot devices. (There’s also a lot more reliance on “time travel!!!” as a resolution, which Doctor Who actually usually tries to avoid, I think because it’s usually not as clever as Moffat thinks it is.) He tries to back away from this later on, but there are still some lingering traces. (He literally makes the Doctor the President of Earth. This is wrong on so many levels.)
It also seems Moffat does not particularly like two-part episodes. So, so many of these stories I’ve had the thought on initially watching them that “if this had a second part, it would have been great.” The pacing feels rushed. Worse, often when we do have two-parters, they frequently follow the “part one is a completely different story from part two” formula. This is fine occasionally, but often it makes it feel like, rather than resolving the cliffhanger from the previous episode, we’re just assuming that was resolved off camera and we’ve got a new, related story going on. 45-ish minutes is not a very long time to tell a good story; it’s doable, but many of the stories want us to care about characters we’ve hardly had time to get to know.
For some reason partway through Amy and Rory’s time on the TARDIS, Moffat decided that his companions now lived primarily at home, and the Doctor only stops by occasionally for Adventure Purposes. I don’t think this decision made anything better.
Still, though I have many critiques of the Moffat era, it’s still Doctor Who. It produced some fantastic episodes, and Twelve is probably my second favorite modern Doctor (despite a seriously rocky start).
Stray Thoughts. Doctor Who experiments. I think that’s at the heart of the show. Sometimes those experiments fall flat, and sometimes they accomplish great things, but despite being a show with a strong formula, it’s never afraid to innovate. It’s true we’d probably have missed out on some of the less enjoyable stories if the show had been more conservative, but we also wouldn’t have stories like Midnight. (Hell, we probably wouldn’t even be here. I don’t know if I would have made the decision to have the Doctor transform from a grumpy old man into a bumbling clown way back in the day, and I think that change, more than anything else, helped bring us to the modern era.) It’s a show with the spirit of an explorer, and even when it falls flat it doesn’t diminish the effort.
By the time this gets published, it’ll only be a few months til the Christmas special airs, which will be the end of the Moffat era and the end of Twelve, and very probably will be our first “official” glimpse at Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor. The show’s about to change--that’s what it does. That’s why it’s still here, fifty-odd years later. I, for one, am looking forward to it.
