The Steven Moffatt retrospective thread

Six years. Phew. Settle in folks, this is going to be a long one. As always, everything said is subjective, but written with necessary politeness and respect to the analysed era in question.

1. The Matt Smith Years

I enjoyed his first year and a half on the show, it was an interesting change to the aesthetic style of the programme and Matt Smith did rather well assuming the mantle from David Tennant and what must have been considered the golden years of the show up until that point. Time of the Angels / Flesh and Stone, Vincent and the Doctor and The Big Bang struck me as highlights of that season, what could be done when the show was firing on all cylinders. The story with van Gogh remains one of my favourite NuWho episodes across both producers so far purely because of the human drama so deftly woven around such a tragic figure from history. I even enjoyed Moffat's very soft reset button with the cracks in time essentially being a story arc to clean up the previous producer's story arcs. Dropping the Doctor's overt angst over the Last Great Time War was a good step too, it was time for the show to start focussing on other things and pushing forward towards a new focus.

Unluckily, it was round about Let's Kill Hitler that I think this particular tenure lost the plot. Your mileage will vary depending on what you expect from the show, but I did not enjoy the tightening emphasis on the Ponds and their staying around for way longer than was necessary for their characters. I should not be wincing every time they are brought back after being given a departure, it's a move that makes me think you don't have any other ideas for companions. River Song is a fairly divisive character too, so unfortunately that didn't help to win me over either. Certain things began to become flanderised like the Doctor becoming so "wacky" that it was impossible to perceive him as a competent incarnation and efforts to mythologise him like his predecessors felt exceedingly out of place. Certain stories began to lack endings (who actually was Kovarian?) or were given the same ending repeatedly (Hide and Time Heist are a good example despite being spread across two separate lives) and there was a certain sense that characters were trying to morph out of Doctor Who into something different like Amy Pond and her Imaginary Friend. I loathed that tacked on opening they did for international releases with her monologue, it was the epitome of everything that the show was mutating into.

Nonetheless, there are still some highlights from the post-Let's Kill Hitler period. The Snowman is my stand-out pick of those later years, I'd have loved to see this extended into a NuWho three-parter (their answer to classic Who's six-parter) and just revelled in that setting and its characters, I was that pleased with it. The Crimson Horror strikes me as the kind of story that desperately needed to be a two-parter and could benefit from a really nice NA-style novelisation, it feels like there are large chunks of the narrative missing. Actually, that's pretty much my opinion of the Eleventh Doctor's twilight really. You get this sense that after The Angels Take Manhattan, everyone was idling until the eleventh hour arrived and spirited an entirely new man into the programme. Hide, The Crimson Horror, Cold War, all feel like missed opportunities. They're missing an extra dimension that could push them towards being really great stories rather than being just average.

However, it's The Day of the Doctor which I think is totemic of what the Moffat era didn't do well. The comedy is trite, stepping all over the drama, the characters farcical (You didn't try opening the door? No one thought to open the door? Seriously?) to the point of idiocy and the biggest flaw made itself manifest -- the reset button. Something that Doctor Who used to be very good at avoiding, but sadly not these days. Gallifrey wasn't destroyed as first thought, it was instead placed in a pocket dimension and each incarnation given amnesia... That's roughly half a decade of someone else's work dulled by a retcon that isn't even that imaginative. I like to remain as objective as possible because the man does try, but the decision to do it in such a way as it undercuts the whole RTD era really irks me even years later. It's like saying at the end of The Three Doctors -- "Oh, the Third Doctor was never exiled to begin with." Not that he was forgiven, not that we've moved forward, but that it never happened. What were we doing all those years?

2. The Peter Capaldi Years

Anyway, Smith vanishes and Capaldi is in his place. It's a bold new era for the show once again and to the Moffat era's credit, there is this spark of re-invigoration. True, Deep Breath feels a bit of a jumbled mess, even for a regeneration story and the sudden decision to question the Doctor's morality as an arc comes across as baffling considering his past history (just taking NuWho into account), but there's a real sense of experimental variety as almost every kind of story is tossed at the wall. It'd be difficult not to find at least one that's appealing, I had a lot of fun with Flatline. The Doctor and Clara's acquaintance deteriorated, culminating in a story that... You know, another thing I've noticed is how badly misused the great villains are. I'm not talking about Missy here (who's grown on me thanks to Michelle Gomez's performance), but the Daleks, Cybermen, even the Sontarans don't get out unscathed. The image of them milling about St Paul's Cathedral in Dark Water pales miserably in comparison to their march down the streets in The Invasion. We've lost something, you can feel it.

Finally, we come to the most recent season and the concept behind it was fantastically brave, if in need of fine tuning. Reducing the story count by having several appear as two-parters would have worked brilliantly if not for a few hiccups along the way. Aside from its seemingly meaningless title The Magician's Apprentice / The Witch's Familiar was a superb character study of Davros, one of the few characters whom you could place in a room with the Doctor and have him chat it out like what was done previously in Terror Firma. That could be the whole story and here it works really well, Missy and Clara too are nicely characterised and utilised. Under the Lake had good set-up, but was let down by not trying to switch genres midway and essentially repeating the same beats from the first half all over again. As an attempt to do a Seven Samurai plot, The Girl Who Died fared pretty well, but I honestly do not remember its follow up The Woman Who Lived at all. Not going to go into The Zygon Invasion and I didn't see Sleep No More. The end of the season started rather intelligently with Face the Raven and its lovely concept of trap streets in London, progressing into Heaven Sent's exploration of grief and fear, but...

Hell Bent fell flat on its face. Hard. I do not remember the Doctor's conversation with Me, I do not remember anything beyond him rescuing Clara because it was such a fundamental waste of a narrative. The return of Gallifrey was a bewilderingly plain affair, a story that could easily have been told on any other world with any other set of characters. This is one of the cornerstones of your mythos, a vital aspect of the show since its revival and to treat it in such feels like, well... What is there to say? It crosses over from being disappointing and just becomes depressing. The nadir of the Moffat era's burn out where they have been outdone by The Clone Wars television series. The Return of Dr. Mysterio was definitely a step in the right direction, but it is definitely time for a change.

I hope for the better and it's certainly not a moment too soon.

In short, it was an era of experimentation that perhaps tried to play too big in too small an arena. I imagine the'll be people who will come on and say that this was their favourite era, and of course they can, but for me, the negatives are dangerously close to outweighing the positives.

All the broken promises, unresolved story threads, the dramatically underdeveloped and ultimately wasteful arcs of Heaven and Hybrid, the cackhanded way Gallifrey was brought back in Hell Bent and the confusing shifts in tone and audience from a writing standpoint. I love Smith, Hurt and Capaldi, I love and like quite a few episodes and I've never been bored by a Moffat script (annoyed for sure, but not bored), but I can't help get the feeling that Moffat's passion was missing for a long time, and he just did what social media told him to do.

Thankfully, Heaven Sent and Mysterio showed he still has some drive in him, and the quality of Sherlock S4 could well mean he may have found the energy again that was in S5 and the first half of S6, but if he had left in S7 or 8, I would've been fine.

Moffatt spread himself too thin i feel. He came up with some brilliant stories and threads but because he was doing other stuff as well, some of the landings didnt stick and he threw bits away in one lines at times and others saying oh dont worry that may not be true.

Can I just say thanks to michaelhocking for this thread. I never knew it was there, but I feel positively liberated now that I've gotten all that off my chest.

Oh, if there had been a new series in 1993 I reckon it would have looked like Thirty Years in the TARDIS, which is by no means a bad thing.

Exactly. There's a very good reason that people keep coming back to series like Doomwatch, The Avengers, Quatermass, The Twilight Zone, Blake's 7 and Sapphire and Steel in spite of their stark production values. It's their fascinating ability to tell a really damn good story with very little to go off and they often manage to upstage those of a big-budget Hollywood film because they have time to focus on fully-developed characters rather than set pieces.

The unofficial Stranger story that Nick Briggs wrote round about that time called In Memory Alone is three figures, a night-lit train station and the mystery of their arrival. That's all and it's still one of my favourite not-Who stories to date because of how it uses its complete lack of anything to its advantage. It's very, very important to remember that Doctor Who is always about the people we meet from the Tribe of Gum to the Cheetah people and it's a show done as Jon Pertwee said with a genuine love for what's being produced because we care about the people on the sets, not about the sets themselves.

Escalation is a very easy trap to fall into as well, wanting to do the same but more, the problem there is that you're trying to replicate an old hit rather than channelling something that could be just as good if it stood on its own merits. Earthshock is a terrific serial, but I wouldn't want it to be every serial, just as Goldfinger is an excellent film, but I wouldn't want it to be every Bond film.

I agree. I think he's a great writer when he's working within another person's vision (or with a partner) and has another person editing his work. He did great things with/for Mark Gatiss and RTD. 

He gave RTD the best episodes for his era, but as show runner his love of "being clever" has marred every season he has been show runner

There have been good, bad, ok, poor & down right abysmal episodes but for me his love of leaving stuff unexplained, over complex story arcs, timey whimey stuff & resets has spoilt the show for me.

There have been some of my favourite episodes ever during his reign....although he has not written then

He loves his companions more than doctor, and that's never a good thing.

But he handled the 50th stuff with a masterful hand, after tennant left he handled what could have been a tricky change over well & he creates good companions just over uses them.

When we look back on his reign in 10 years I think time will have ironed out the annoying factors and the arcs will not feel as bemusing viewed as a whole & not weekly

The bloke is spent, he needs a rest, he has taken on too much.

Here's a question for you, Moffat has written for Seven canonical Doctors, which one did he write best?:

5
8
The War Doctor
9
10
11
12

12 and 8.

Actually I suppose you could argue he wrote for the 1st Doctor as well ''This is the Doctor calling the War Council of Gallifrey...'' not really enough to judge how he'd capture the character properly though...