The TARDIS has returned. On Saturday, Doctor Who will return to television for a season of aliens, time travel, robots and lots and lots of British people pronouncing things in such a way as to make Americans giggle. With Peter Capaldi stepping in as The Twelfth Doctor (at least, I think he’s Twelve. Showrunner Stephen Moffat has timey-wimeyed the numbering sequence to shit) and Jenna Louise-Coleman returning as Clara Oswald, fans can barely wait to find out just where in time and space the big blue box will land.
It’s a precipitous time for the show. While the rebooted series is enjoying the highest popularity of the show’s five-decade run, there have been steadily mounting murmurings of discontent as Moffat’s run has continued. Between the absurdly convoluted mysteries at the heart of each season’s main story arc, and ongoing disgruntlement from older Who fans who dislike the new show and the fans it has spawned, Doctor Who is at an odd and unsteady juncture in its life.
To that end, it seemed like a good idea to jot down a few notes about what we would like to see from the new, possibly-improved Doctor and, by extension, Doctor Who. So here are the five things we are most hoping for the creative team to do:
1) Remember that The Doctor can be fun.
One of the more interesting threads that New Who has played with throughout its life is the question of whether The Doctor can be considered a heroic, or even good, person. We are introduced to him as a man who has just committed an act of unfathomable genocide to end the cosmic conflict of the Time War, and the guilt and horror of his actions hang over The Doctor in each of his three incarnations in the rebooted show.
When Matt Smith came on as the Eleventh Doctor, it was a masterstroke to embrace the idea of The Doctor as an ancient and unknowable entity. Smith’s performance perfectly struck a balance between The Doctor as lovable trickster figure and as terrifying, cold-blooded monster.
Somewhere along the line though, it became a question of diminishing returns. The show never really committed to The Doctor being unredeemable, instead ladling on the angst so that he might rise above it and be all the more noble in triumph. The show couldn’t decide whether it wanted to tear The Doctor down or raise him up even higher, and the resulting show has unfortunately been something of a drag for the last couple of seasons, give or take isolated episodes.
At the close of the Day of the Doctor special, Moffat rewrote the entire history of the show prior, retroactively un-genociding the end of the Time War. Beyond being a clever moment and an interesting story motivator, it suggests that Twelve will be the first of the modern Doctors to not be operating under the belief that he is a mass murderer. It’s the sort of change in perspective that could fundamentally alter the kinds of stories that Who tells, and redefines the very character. Speaking of defining characters:
2) Figure out who Clara is.
When Jenna Louise-Coleman first arrived in Asylum of the Daleks, her Oswin Oswald immediately jumped out as grade-A companion material. Oswin was smart and cheeky, but had a cold, survivalist streak that suggested she had a tougher bent than some of the other wide-eyed earthlings to discover that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside. With Coleman already announced as a new regular, fans settled in to watch how this great character would be folded into the show.
Then she died.
Which was odd, admittedly. But then Coleman showed up in The Snowmen playing Clara Oswald, a 19th century governess. We see that Clara is empathetic and intelligent, and witness how she feels wasted and hemmed in by the confines of her time period, how her strength and identity is tested as she is pulled in so many different directions by so many voices telling her what ‘proper’ behavior is. “Aha!” fans thought. “So here’s the new Companion! She’s great, this is great, I can’t wait to see what greatness lies ahead!”
Then she died.
Which is, again, odd. We finally, finally met the actual, permanent Clara Oswald in The Bells of St. John, and the character has been an almost complete bust ever since. Don’t blame Coleman, an actress possessed of ridiculous charm and crackling wit. Both previous Oswalds suggested that she had the exact right personality to thrive on Who and make a mark as a great companion. But Moffat and the other writers have left her almost completely stranded, playing a person who has no definition beyond vaguely likable hero traits.
Clara’s personality changes from episode to episode (if not from scene to scene) and the character has such little inner life that when her family visited for dinner in Time of the Doctor, it was baffling to consider that Clara existed as a person before The Doctor showed up. Moffat played a similar game with Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) in her first season, but it should be noted that that arc did a much, much better job of establishing Amy as a person beyond whatever vortex-related shenanigans the show cooked up.
Without a strong relationship between The Doctor and the companion, the show just doesn’t work (see: pretty much every one of the fucking Christmas specials) and Who has so far failed for over half a season to define Clara at all. Now that the ‘Impossible Girl’ mystery has been resolved, the show can hopefully commit to an actual character. And speaking of committing…
3) Shit or get off the pot with character deaths
This may seem counterintuitive to wanting a more positive Doctor, but hear me out. Moffat’s first episode was a The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances two-parter. Famously, the episode ended with the Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) being overcome with joy as he realized that the nanobots had healed and revived the hundreds of gasmask zombies (by the way, if you didn’t know by now: this show is frigging weird). “Everybody lives!” he cried through tears. “Just this once, everybody lives!”
It’s a beautiful moment, and one which Moffat has now repeated so tirelessly that it’s become cliché. Every single time it seems that Who is bringing real stakes, real tragedy, it is immediately undercut with the knowledge that by episode’s end, the status quo will be restored and all the nice people will more or less get what they want.
The defense, I’m sure, is that this is at heart a show meant for kids. But, come on, Harry Potter was meant for kids and no amount of letter-writing convinced Rowling to save Dumbledore because she is a MONSTER WHO DRINKS YOUR TEARS AND PISSES IT OUT ONTO WEEPING FACES AND- whoa, sorry, some stuff came bubbling up just then.
The reason “Everybody Lives!” works is because it has to be a rare occurrence. When major characters repeatedly die during the body of episodes only to be right as rain by the closing credits, it devalues tension from both the individual episode and the overall arcs. Moffat ‘killed’ Amy and Rory (Arthur Darvill) Pond so many times during their run as companions that when they were finally shuffled off in The Angels Take Manhattan it had next to no effect.
Say what you want about Joss Whedon (and I’ll say that his stories at their worst border on misery porn) but there’s a reason his shows and movies maintain such power even years after their conclusion. It’s because he and his writers work so hard to make sure there are real, often punishing, stakes for the characters struggling through the absurd worlds of vampires and space pirates. By refusing to allow the toughest moments to have any weight, Doctor Who is training its viewers to stop investing emotionally into the stories it is telling. The more authentic the emotional reality of the show, the more those scenes of triumphs will actually count. And the more we invest in the characters, the further into weirdness The Doctor and Co. can go. Speaking of…
4) The Doctor and Co. should go further into weirdness.
Russell T. Davies made a brilliant choice when reimagining the passé old sci-fi serial as a vibrant modern show. By co-opting the structure of procedural storytelling, Davies and his writers gave themselves license to tell stories across the entire spectrum of all time and space. Each week, The Doctor (the ‘good’ alien) would arrive at a new location and discover that something was wrong (the ‘bad’ alien) and he and the companion would work to figure out the plot and defeat the bad alien. This basic, easy structure allowed the show to shift from contemporary, speculative sci-fi to space opera to historical fiction, with pit stops into horror, farce, romance, etc. Throughout the monster of the week episodes, a master arc/mystery would be gradually revealed with a Big Bad waiting at the end.
These last couple seasons have really shown the stretch marks of the format. Moffat loves mysteries which invert the basic language of time, television, and fictional drama, and at first there was something exhilarating about watching him and the other writers subvert the show’s story out from under itself.
But just as Davies rode his own favorite trick (giantGiantGIANT armies of unstoppable monsters that could only be defeated via Deus Ex Machina device) into the ground, then burned the ground, then salted and pissed on said ground leaving it infertile for all life for at least a generation, Moffat has kept trying to one up himself to the point that his larger narratives now play as uninvolving gibberish.
That puts all the more weight on the monster of the week episodes to carry the show, and they have unfortunately not been up to snuff of late. While there have been obvious bright spots and stand out episodes, much of last year felt like a jumble of ideas picked out of a hat and slapped together with little rhyme or reason. Coupled with the now-rote procedural structure, the weekly installments have too-often trended towards boredom, no matter how hard the cast works.
Thankfully, there’s no reason why Doctor Who can’t right that ship. The joy of the show is the limitless opportunity for stories that the premise allows. All of time, all of space, all of existence is fodder for adventures. With that knowledge, all involved should take the coming of a new Doctor as permission to indulge the fantastical and odd. Take Capaldi’s arrival as a chance to break free from any hints of staidness or complacency.
Throw back the switch and fly that TARDIS into the heart of the vortex and see what unfathomable wonders await. Maybe then you’ll feel brave enough to give the Daleks a rest for a while.
5. Give the Daleks a rest for a while.
Seriously. Enough.
