Capaldi and Coleman: Bigger Than a Joke
I’m not so wild about Moffat; as a writer, he’d pretty much used up all his ideas by the end of 2007, and from then through 2013 mostly set about remixing them in increasingly self-aggrandizing ways.
But from 2014-2017, something rather astounding happened: he started to listen to people, and he started to look inward. He was still Steven Moffat, but he began to question how and why he did the things he did, and out of that came actual art. Some of the best writing, and best creative direction, the show has ever had; better than nearly anything in the previous 50 years of the show. Granted, this energy began to taper a bit after 2015 — understandably given that 2017 was a padding year, after he’d already resolved to go but before Chibnall was able to take the show off his hands, and that Moffat suffered some personal issues along the way — but his final series was still stronger than anything else he’d done outside of the previous two, and stronger than most runs of Doctor Who in general.
Before 2014, Doctor Who on television hadn’t really been big on character development. I don’t mean growth here; characters had grown, as far back as William Hartnell’s Doctor and particularly over Davies’ time. Even Moffat’s previous writing, stilted as it was on a human level, had characters increasing their RPG stats, if you will, as they went along. But this goes beyond the (wonderful) melodrama of Davies or the later Cartmel era. This is more out of literature: defining a character trait, establishing its logical dimensions, and then spending a book’s length exploring what that means, both in terms of the character’s inner life and behavior, and its consequences when applied to a world defined outside the character.
It’s kind of basic stuff for serious fiction, but it’s not really where Doctor Who has ever gone before. The show has always been too focused on the moment, and how to play up the brilliant, often abstract ideas (or, more likely, plodding base under siege) that it’s exploring right now, to spend much time on the, for lack of a better phrasing, philosophy of its perspective. Even Davies’ characters, as gorgeously as he maps out their minds and reactions and speech patterns, are defined as simple declarations that we’re meant to glom onto and just carry forward, nodding as events bounce off of their defined personalities in ways we can easily trace.
And Moffat has never really been much for psychology. He’s not interested in how other people think, in the way that Davies is. It’s a bit of a truism, yet still mostly true, that as a consequence he has mostly written ciphers. His writing serves to deliver sitcom jokes, often with plot revelations as the punchlines. He’s so manic about control over the narrative and the notion of spoilers for the same reason a comedian doesn’t want you yelling out the punchline before he reaches the end of his joke. That’s his thing. It’s always been his formula as a writer, and he’s only ever had so many jokes to tell. His first three series as showrunner were labored attempts at building bigger, more complex versions of those same few jokes, each retelling more tortured than the last as he tried so hard to cast the structure in a new light. In this model, Moffat’s characters are as two-dimensional as the foils in a vaudeville routine. They’re not meant as earnest explorations of the human condition; their function is vehicles to deliver jibes. Which is why in place of Davies’ carefully blended dialogue with Moffat we mostly get one-liners, put-downs, and pure exposition.
His run from 2014 to 2015 changes all of that. He’s still Steven Moffat, and he’s still carrying around his well-worn sack of tricks, but here he approaches the show from a different angle entirely. He’s more settled, more measured. More thoughtful. And somehow out of that convoluted, often tortured long-joke structure he carves room for meditation. A kind of meditation that hadn’t come before, from any writer or era; not at this kind of a length, not with this much time and control to keep on dwelling and prodding. And out of this we have the most psychologically complex Doctor and companion, and Doctor-companion relationship, in the show’s history. With this as the show’s new story and narrative baseline, Moffat is free to Moff off and toss his toys around the room, as in otherwise by-then trad scripts like “Listen,” and suddenly they take on a greater significance by the tricks acting in aid of a greater narrative cause rather than simply to conduct the story in their own right.
Of particular note is series 8. On top of the sudden focus on character development, there’s this excited shift in narrative structure, with a mix of nonlinear scene editing (e.g., that whole sitcom sequence in Into the Dalek where Danny fails to ask Clara out on a date) and longer scenes with more dialogue, a pair of minor innovations that play out to their logical extremes early on, in “Listen,” but then continue throughout the run. And then there’s the way it revels in recurring thematic beats, in a way I’m not sure the show has before. Nearly every episode, leading up to the finale, involves one or more of the following:
- Soldiers
- Cyborgs
- Cyborg soldiers
- A companion who wasn’t, possibly for one of the above reasons
That’s off the top of my head. When I was watching the first time I had a longer list of things the scripts kept riffing on, prodding from different angles, lending the whole run of episodes an unprecedented sort of thematic unity. But I’m sure it’s clear what character and story elements the above serve to reflect.
That’s the thing about a good story: however complex it may be, it tends to be a fractal, with any part representing the whole and the whole representing any part. Again this is fairly basic when we’re talking about literature, but — well, Doctor Who has never really aimed for literature before. It’s been doing its own thing, often rather well. Here, Moffat takes aim with his golden arrow and nails that space ship right in the bull’s eye.
Series 9 is an astoundingly good sequel, exploring the fallout of everything that drives series 8, and the two of them make a greater whole, but series 8 is where most of the hard work happens. It’s where Moffat learned to listen. So that’s the one that really stands out to me as a revelation.
(Although Series 10 is in more ways than one Moffat’s hangover series, and both stretched thin and disjointed in a way the previous two aren’t, it’s also often the most refined culmination of Moffat’s artistry, and individual moments over these twelve episodes are some of the best moments of the entire show. It’s an afterthought, but also a worthy coda.)
It helps that at this time Moffat also found a new backing band; a more sympathetic stable of writers, interested in pushing the show to new extremes and exploring its creative fabric more than the ultra-trad fan contingent on whom Moffat had largely relied to that time (when he wasn’t chasing down one-off celebrity writers). The likes of Dollard and Mathieson embody Moffat’s own shift in priorities, and their earnestness mixed with roiling creative insight give the show the added boost of energy to really develop it into its own thing. It’s interesting to see that even as the first half of series 8 mostly uses “safe hands” to pedal in the new Doctor, Moffat still co-writes nearly every script, shaping it to be a bit more than it would otherwise be. This is unprecedented for him, and it shows the extent to which he actually had a vision for the show, that none of the familiar writers were of much help in capturing.
None of this is new from me. I play my own familiar tunes. But I really think the last three years have been a creative renaissance of the sort we haven’t seen since Andrew Cartmel. But it’s all the more remarkable, because it’s more like Andrew Cartmel had never existed, and instead somehow those last three years of the 1980s had been Saward all along, after some major revelation, and they had turned out exactly as they did. I’m not sure we’ll see a progression like this again, and it’s a pretty damned interesting case study.