AGAINST DR WHO by Steven Peacock

As the mid-season cliff-hanger episode 'A Good Man Goes to War' (6: 7) airs, the break from Steven Moffat's Doctor Who until autumn affords a timely opportunity to consider the story so far.

In December 2008, I wrote a piece for CSTonline extolling the virtues of three of Moffat’s early Doctor Who episodes, when the series was under the reign of Russell T. Davies. The achievements of the episodes emerge in their simplicity. 'The Girl in the Fireplace' (2: 4) finds depth in the use of a hoary piece of set-dressing: the revolving wall. Most of 'Blink' (3: 10) unfolds in a small backroom, keeping the Doctor trapped in a television set. 'Silence in the Library' (4: 8) introduces River Song (Alex Kingston) and the little blue book of spoilers: all of the Doctor’s tales held in a scruffy bundle of paper.  At a time when Davies’ supremacy started to spoil, Moffat’s clarity of vision and light touch lifted the TARDIS out of the mire.

So what went wrong? Why are the latest episodes, now held tightly in Moffat’s hands as writer and executive producer, leaden and contrived? Such claims will, I am aware, ruffle a few feathers. Moffat’s re-shaping of the series with a new Doctor (Matt Smith) and sense of direction has received almost unanimous approval in the press, fan forums, and academic circles alike. People are falling over themselves to offer hyperbolic gifts of praise. There is the sense that such is the sway of this series, to question its value may be, well, out of the question. I have an unexpected ally, though, in the guise of AA Gill. In an excoriating review that has won the scorn of various Who bloggers, Gill queries received wisdom, seeing the series as 'creative cowardice covered up with cash'.

For me, there are two important aspects that weigh heavy: complication and detachment. It is a well-known fact that Moffat favours the challenge and intricacies of puzzle-box narratives. This trait reaches its visual and verbal apogee in 'The Pandorica Opens' (5: 12) and 'The Big Bang' (5: 13). 

The Doctor is locked inside the Pandorica prison-box, only for the door to be opened at the beginning of the second part, to reveal, instead, his companion Amy Pond (Karen Gillan). Amy opens the door, and Moffat the episode, with a knowing declaration, filled with relish: ‘This is where it gets complicated’.

The latest season turns such plotline playfulness into hard work. The opening brace of episodes - 'The Impossible Astronaut' (6: 1) and 'Day of the Moon' (6: 2) delights in setting the viewer riddles: who is in the space suit? Is the Doctor really dead? Such enigmas wrap around the old Who chestnut of the TARDIS dropping in on a beleaguered historical figure, this time, floundering in his own set of conundrums, Tricky Dicky Nixon. The episodes mistake convolution for complexity, tricksiness for new tricks. Like the Doctor in the Pandorica, Doctor Who becomes encased in an impenetrable shell. As in the case of (much of) Lost, the episodes' involvedness is in no way involving. They are so busy handing out plot details that scream YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS YET (BUT IT IS VERY CLEVER), that they forget to give us something we can fully appreciate, here and now.

For a while now, I’ve put aside nagging doubts and stood (sat) towards the latest Who episode with an open mind, waiting for something that strikes me as comparable to the qualities of those early Moffat pieces. Yet, as soon as another super-charged sequence barrels out of the titles, engulfing all in its path, any appeal to intimacy is smashed to pieces. This Who bullies, rather than befriends. It shouts about its clever plot-twists and leers into the lens, waving its cash about like Harry Enfield’s ‘Loadsamoney’.

The series stands proud as an untouchable behemoth, a contender to the monolith from 2001. The BBC is more than aware of its worth as a franchise. Season six opens with an odd nod to courting the American dollar on home turf. Scenes play out as if ready to be chopped up into online trailers, with lots of sound-bites filled with URGENCY! Its dazzling confidence, breakneck pace and hectoring tone make it impossible to get close to this new Who, to take it in all at once and appreciate its particularities. Settling down in anticipation of the next instalment reminds me of the ‘Event’ management of a solar eclipse: gathered together excitedly, we have to shade our eyes and gain only an oblique sense of the whole experience, until we see fragments of it later in still pictures, online, or in pithy packages at the end of the News.

The human elements of Doctor Who should provide a hook to grasp onto, to pull the series towards me. For a while, in the opening episode 'The Eleventh Hour' (5: 1), I was struck by Smith’s performance: an intoxicating blend of Professor Yaffle and little boy lost, at times, troublingly, seeming to channel the bubbling transient energies of an elderly person on the edge of mental decline. However, Smith-as-the-Doctor seems locked in this repertoire, unable to open it out.

In a similar manner, Christopher Eccleston’s attempts at a sporadically grinning Doctor fell foul ('Fantastic!'). The decision to try to inject light-heartedness when clearly more at home playing a sombre figure, recalls the shock appearance of Gordon Brown’s forcedly weird mouth-jerks masquerading as smiles at election time.  And Sylvester McCoy’s impish Doctor conducted an infuriating symphony of burred proverbs with his ‘I’m mad, me’ jazz-hands until he killed the series through sheer enthusiasm.

Recently, the comedian Stewart Lee, in his Comedy Vehicle (BBC2, 2011), was asked ‘What, apart from the IRA, makes you proud to be British?’ The incendiary, ironic question came from regular contributor Armando Iannucci, who, with characteristic brilliance, appears as a kind of Rottweiler Jiminy-Cricket to Lee’s Pinocchio. Lee’s answer is ‘Doctor Who’. From a performer so attuned to the potential artistry of minimalist repetition, Lee’s response (however wry) seems directed by memories of a Who past.

Just as Moffat’s affinity to puzzle-boxes is best encapsulated in the appearance and explanation of the Pandorica, so too is the earlier Who’s play of low-key repetition and variation brought to great heights in the four-part serial 'City of Death' (1979, from the seventeeth series). Tom Baker’s Doctor and his companion spend much of their (and our) time crossing and re-crossing the streets of Paris, delightfully recalling Eric Rohmer’s contribution to the portmanteau film Paris vu par (1965). The invocation of a spirit akin to the French New Wave seems an apt way to close. That project was borne out of a desire to free cinema from expensive-looking, overwrought, and dead-eyed productions, drunk on their own sense of importance. Moffat needs to think outside the puzzle-box, and reconnect with the inherent, simple, lovely, and eccentric charms of Doctor Who in its prime.

Steven Peacock is Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Hertfordshire. He is the editor/author of Reading 24: TV against the Clock (2007), and the co-editor of The Television Series for Manchester University Press. He is also the author of Colour: Cinema Aesthetics (2010) and Hollywood and Intimacy: Style, Moments, Magnificence (2011).

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