Monday, November 6, 2017

A New Doctor and New era for Doctor Who

Let's start with the obvious. The person to play the role of "The Doctor" in Doctor Who will now be played by a woman in the 2018 season. This is a first for the which dates back to the 1960s. Is this really a big deal? The answer is yes, and no.

The show ran from the '60s into the start of the '90s but came back in 2005. So in the thirteenth year of the current run the thirteenth Doctor will now be a woman. This is nice but that's not the big news coming out of this announcement. The real news is that we're finally getting a new showrunner.


Back in the beginning of the 2005 relaunch we had Steven Moffat as one of the writers on the staff. The showrunner or head writer if you will was Russell T. Davies. Moffat took over as showrunner when Davies time was over. With Moffat came his own new Doctor in Matt Smith. Matt did a great job as The Doctor. The role was his breakout role. After Matt came the current Doctor in Peter Capaldi. Here's where things got very silly.


Matt Smith was a young actor when he took the role. He was still growing and evolving as an actor. With Matts Doctor he brought an enthusiasm to the role that made you ignore something very vital to any show. Under Capaldi this something became glaringly obvious. Capaldi is any older more seasoned actor than Smith. His take on the character was very different than Matts. But his style showed the problem with Moffat type of storytelling, things didn't make sense.


With Matt Smith he has such a youthful energy and enthusiasm in the role that you could ignore the silly plot holes and rewrites that existed in the show. Capaldi who looked for more depth on the storytelling it made the plot holes, rewrites and bad storytelling more obvious. This problem was not the actors fault, the blame lands squarely on the writers. Especially the head writer meaning Steven Moffat.


Moffat benefited from the successes of the relaunch. There was a growing audience members people were interested in where the show would go. There was interested in where it could go since in the United Kingdom the show is considered a children's show. But outside the U.K. Doctor Who is programming for all ages. So Moffat had a blank slate to do what he pleased within reason. Over time he turned things into a disjumbled bad comedy.


By the time we got to Matts last season in the role you could tell Matt had changed. He was being more serious and trying to bring more drama to the role. It was his best season in the role but that's not saying much. The scripts that he was getting didn't fit with what he was trying to do. In the end it felt like he couldn't run away from the role fast enough. When Capaldi came in it was obvious to me from the beginning that he was going to bring a more serious tone to the show. But the scripts were still silly so many episodes were hit or miss.


Now that we're coming to the end of the Moffat era I can only hope that the future episodes, new showrunner and star give us something to enjoy. Also something that doesn't make me roll my eyes into my head while watching.  


Moffat did a good job on many things. Don't get me wrong, when he was good he was good. But that was not often enough. I know people will point out to his not writing every episode. That you can't blame him for one writers bad episode. By the way, he was the overseer of the series. He was the one in charge of the overall direction and tone of the show. Any of the small failings you can say weren't his but he has to carry the wait of the big ones in my opinion.



The story of someone who travels through time and space in a blue box can be a hard sell. Add monsters, robots, and all sorts of things it cab get ridiculous.  That's why you focus on the characters and their relationships to each other. It's why you focus on what the Doctor represents not Who he or she is. That got lost under Moffat and the shows storytelling suffered because of it.


Now with the upcoming crew we have the potential to have a Doctor that has a point of view that's never mattered to the show. You can't understate the idea of a woman's perspective in the lead role. Will this make for a good show? Not by itself. You still need good characters and good storytelling around the show to make it work. I just hope they learned from the mistakes of the last few years. 

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