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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #42: Who Is Both Old And New Again

Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #42: Who Is Both Old And New Again

It's Easter Weekend, and DOCTOR WHO is back, so why wouldn't I join in the tradition here at Bleeding Cool and write about it too?

Rich has pretty much covered the images, themes and motifs that emphasis its Englishness and fannishness, while I found myself picking the premiere's script apart to examine a show with a new runner, a completely new cast and seriously high stakes. EASTENDERS or Corrie might get higher ratings than DOCTOR WHO from time to time, but WHO is worth far more to the BBC as a franchise with an annual net worth of £100 million in foreign and merchandise sales. It also pretty much keeps the BBC's credibility afloat as a broadcaster that still produces programs the British public wants to see, one of the family shows that keeps the BBC relevant. But in order to continue to be a success, DOCTOR WHO has to continue to be popular and bag the ratings. It's been a long struggle from its cancellation in the late 1980s when it was deemed an embarrassment and a joke by snobs and the likes of Michael Grade, and all it would take is a few creative missteps in scripts and casting to send it plunging back into those doldrums. The pressure was on for Steven Moffat to provide the scripts that would showcase the new Doctor and his companion.

The last five years of WHO under Russell T. Davies has seen Davies cover all the bases he could as a writer and fan of the show. While they ended with a high watershed in the ratings, Moffat must have known he couldn't coast on merely repeating what Russell T. Davies did, since his and Davies' personalities and styles are not the same, let alone their favourite themes. It's also common for a new showrunner to bring his personal stamp on the show to differentiate it from his predecessor's style, but to keep enough of the format and successful parts intact. Sometimes, a showrunner might throw out the baby with the bathwater just to impose his ego on it, and the show suffers. I trusted Moffat to know exactly what he was doing, since as a fan he wanted the show to succeed. He and Davies' careers began around the same time in the 1980s, so they avidly followed the McCoy Doctor stories right to the end of its run. The two of them were part of the fan scene in the 90s and also part of the circle of writers who contributed to the Virgin-published novels that kept the franchise alive when the show was off the air. Many of the elements that defined Davies' revival of the show a success were actually introduced in embryonic form during the McCoy era and then picked up, tested and played with in the Virgin novels, which also pushed the story towards a more sophisticated and adult tone for readers who were in their teens and university. Davies' one WHO novel, DAMAGED GOODS, published near the twilight of the Virgin line, is now a rare collector's item and goes for a lot of money on ebay. Moffat wrote a short story, "Continuity Errors", that's considered one of the funniest, most complex and character-defining WHO prose stories out there. And now Davies has handed the keys to the Tardis over to Moffat. Fortunately they've both been fairly simpatico in their views on what makes good WHO.

It takes a true fan's sincerity to understand and make a show that attracts, keeps and rewards geek devotion. Who doesn't want to create a geek franchise that's worth over $100 million? In Hollywood, there are very few shows like that, since too many of them are designed by committee. It becomes obvious in shows like HEROES or LOST (to me, anyway) that they were consciously designed to be geek-bait, but the creators and writers weren't necessarily sincere. I tended to find a strong whiff of contempt in HEROES for the perceived geek audience. And don't get me started on LOST… I really don't get the appeal. The "mystery" seems contrived to me, the characters are annoying ciphers and I always had the feeling the writers were making shit up as they went along. Hell, they're often not even able to stay consistent in the same single episode. I find it very easy to ignore the show and watch or do something else when it's on. I often suspect that HEROES and LOST got their followings partly because they were very well-marketed, and since the networks were starved of much else in the genre, held onto a core of faithful fans hungry for that sort of thing, even of the shows themselves were lacking in truly filling that hunger. Recent attempts to create geek-bait shows, FLASH FORWARD and the remake of V, have failed to engage the public's imagination because they're so damned bland and generic. To succeed, a geek show can't be generic. DOCTOR WHO is and has to be anything but generic, and Steven Moffat is anything but generic.

I tried to see the gears shifting behind the season five premiere. The show has been around for five years now, so there's room to build on what had come before, as well as acknowledge that a lot of children who first started watching five years ago are now older and maturing. Moffat, being a clever man and clever in different ways from Davies, must have known about the need to hand-hold the audience and ease them into a new Doctor and what's almost a new show. He's kept enough of the familiar and amped everything up to a more intense level here. There's a subtly different and tweaked visual style in the direction. The musical score has been completely overhauled so there are virtually none of the music cues from the last five years. It is now more referential, acknowledging the show's past and the last ten Doctors. The new Doctor is a physical throwback to the last one, Smith's performance is even reminiscent of Tom Baker's gleeful superiority and spontaneous eccentricity, yet all his own at the same time. There's also a fascinatingly complex mesh of keeping the show family and child-friendly, yet more adult at the same time. Moffat's script is a model for teaching screenwriters about the craft of escalating tension and complications for a beleaguered hero to overcome. It also walks the reader through a metaphorical journey from the heartbreak of a neglected, disappointed child to a wary adult with guarded hope. The new companion is a more sophisticated advancement from previous ones. Amy Pond is more than the basic archetypes of unfulfilled lives that realize their potential in the form when they meet The Doctor, like Rose or Donna Noble. She has very specific emotional baggage from a childhood of loss and neglect, and has grown up into a dysfunctional oddball you would normally find in a screwball comedy back when they knew how to write them in Hollywood. Her rich inner life and emotional chaos are actually exacerbated by The Doctor rather than resolved because he is the imaginary friend and rescuer who has already disappointed her twice and now she's taking a wary leap of faith into the unknown with him. This is a much more adult and complex relationship than with previous companions. This is both the same show as before and something magically new at the same time. It is designed to gain new young fans and keep the ones that grew up with it, which is no easy task.

Anyone that wants to study and work out how to create a successful crossover geek franchise could do a lot worse than to study what Davies and Moffat have been doing with DOCTOR WHO. It's always about the vision of a particular creative vision, not a corporate committee. You could say that DOCTOR WHO is unique and unrepeatable, which is the hallmark of a geek success. But it doesn't hurt to understand why it works, and not copy it, but to create your own from a place of sincerity, not just commercial calculation. The trick is to be able to combine both. An imbalance of either element is what causes a series to fail.

And anyway, it was refreshing to see more non-humanoid big aliens. Whoever thought up the giant eyeballs hanging from snowflake chandeliers must have had access to either really good drugs or very strong tea.

Insides are bigger than the outside at lookitmoves@gmail.com

© Adisakdi Tantimedh


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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