David J. Anderson, one of my favorite readers, asked me a while ago about my take on Steven Moffat's run thus far on Doctor Who (particularly the season that just wrapped).....
WARNING: Even though they are minor and don't take very much away from the viewing experience, there are small Day of the Doctor spoilers in this piece. Just telling you. Don't say I didn't warn you. Okay. Here we go.
The thing about Doctor Who is that it's, at its best, what I like to refer to as "pure sci-fi" that exists in a sandbox so wide, the possibilities are hard to exhaust. I mean, let's face it...."all of space and time" is a pretty big playground for a writer/showrunner. Eventually, a series like that stops being a series and starts becoming a tradition, hallowed ground almost, a family business passed down from one generation to the next in the hopes that they'll continue in the practices that have allowed that legacy to thrive in the midst of changing time. Who is a bit weird in that regard because, for years, it's been a very niche kind of sci-fi geared toward a very hardcore sort of geek whose reverence for the show has fueled its success for 50 YEARS. There haven't been a lot of shows in ANY genre that can lay claim to such a thing....certainly not in its primary genre. Though the series itself was short-lived, Firefly has one of the most rabid fanbases I've ever seen and even that's fizzled out a bit. A fellow blogger referred to Doctor Who as the Flintstones of science fiction. To make such a comparison is to underestimate Doctor Who and to vastly overestimate the Flintstones. A cartoon like the Flintstones appealed to a much wider audience that eventually got tired of it until it was replaced by The Simpsons which has been pretty much replaced by Family Guy (hot wife married to lovable dummy).
Who dwarfs these shows with almost no effort because of a simple fact that Steven Moffat understands better than people think. Doctor Who is the type of show that is, on a good day, any genre you want it to be. It can be (and has been) a romance saga, a revenge tale, a period drama, a swashbuckler story, etc. When your main character is a lonely guy who can go anywhere and do anything within the whole of everything that is or ever was, there really isn't any scenario that's too farfetched. Grant Morrison could very well be hired to write a Doctor Who crossover with Batman or Vince Gilligan could team him up with Walter White and either of those would, ideally, be within the confines of good reason. I mean, can you think of a story in which "Time Traveling Sherlock Holmes" (because that's basically what the Doctor is) doesn't work?
With that said, Moffat understands the necessity of doing something with a 50 year old series to not only keep it fresh, but to widen its audience. And Steven Moffat has certainly widened the audience in a way that I, for one, have never seen out of this series in my time. I can't remember a single time before Moffat where I'd seen billboards, ads in comic books and on the sides of buses, toy commercials, worldwide simulcasting of its big anniversary special (which was absolutely lovely, by the way...Smith, Tennant and Hurt all had ridiculously great chemistry together...the result was more of a game changer than people think...and I didn't completely despise Not-Actually-Rose Tyler's appearance even though I completely
despise Rose Tyler). I mean, Sweet Lord, Day of the Doctor even had a simulcasted post-show where people sit around talking about what they just saw a la The Walking Dead, a phenomenon I will NEVER understand if I live to be 100.
Honestly, I think the overall direction of the show and the kind of legend Moffat drives to remind us the Doctor is ("You decided the universe would be better off without you, but the universe didn't agree.") is actually reflective of the pop culture phenomenon Doctor Who has become. The reverence for his very name that oozes from the majority of characters' pores (even River Song...which is what became the problem with River Song) in most Moffat episodes isn't terribly different from the chill of excitement that comes over the growing fanbase at the first note of the theme song. I was at work and someone's phone rang, playing the Tennant era version and most of my coworkers grinned to themselves at the familiarity.
The other thing that I think some people don't quite see in Moffat's "Who" is that he's trying to keep it fresh by doing things that are haven't been done before (or at least in a while) with the stories. He likes making "that unsuspecting thing everyone has" into a dormant alien invasion like in The Bells of St. John, he has a thing for eerie sayings throughout the episode ("I don't know where I am"...."Can you help me?"...."Silence will fall") and he loves, loves, LOVES making the Companion and other supporting characters as important if not more important than the Doctor himself (Amy Pond, River Song, and certainly Clara). Last but not least, he recognizes that anything good, if it goes on long enough, starts basically being fan service. Moffat certainly demonstrates this in the 50th Anniversary with the callbacks (Tom Baker..."I don't want to go"...."timey wimey").
Overall, even though I will always hold a very special place in my heart for Russell T. Davies....mainly because his run gave us Martha Jones....I think Moffat is doing a fine job carrying the burden he's been given of being a geek messiah and a geek antichrist all at once. And who's to say it won't undergo another massive change in status quo as time goes on? After all, as I mentioned, the great thing about Doctor Who is that no matter what level of geek you are or how science fiction-y you like your science fiction, it always stands a very good chance of being exactly the sort of story you like. And in addition to being a huge part of what makes the Doctor such a compelling character (no matter who's playing him), it's also what's made for 50 years of television worth watching.
