This Christmas, an era will come to an end. Not only will Peter Capaldi bid adieu to his time as The Doctor, the universe-travelling, time-hopping, trouble-making Time Lord whose adventures have bewitched and beguiled children of all ages across the globe for over 50 years now, but Steven Moffat will officially be ending his own tenure with Doctor Who.
Moffat has been a part of the show since Russell T. Davies resurrected Doctor Who in 2005. Originally, Moffat would contribute only a script or two per season, with his entries often regarded as the stand-out moments in their respective seasons. But when Davies left Doctor Who, Moffat was chosen to replace him, and he has steered the TARDIS ever since.
Moffat’s tenure has had its ups and downs, featuring some of the best, most rousing sci-fi ever seen on television, and also a whole bunch of regrettable nonsense.
Regrettable nonsense aside, it seemed fitting to take a moment to appreciate the thrills, chills, laughs, and shocks that Moffat has crafted over the last twelve years with Doctor Who. So, without further adieu (geez, there’s a lot of that stuff around these days), here are seven(ish) moments and scenes that highlight the best of what Moffat can do.
“Everybody lives! Just this once, everybody lives!” – The Doctor Dances
The Doctor is generally a cheery fellow, and Doctor Who is generally an upbeat program. But there’s a built-in layer of sadness in the very premise of the character and show, as an ageless wanderer jumps around in time and space and is repeatedly reminded that everything ends. When Russell T. Davies resurrected the show after a decade-plus in mothballs, he brought that melancholy to the forefront, reimagining The Doctor as the last survivor of a cataclysmic “Time War” that shook the universe. The Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) was still a figure of fun and adventure, but just underneath the chipper exterior was a traumatized, heartbroken survivor trying to make sense of a life he doesn’t rightly believe he should still have.
Eccleston’s early episodes follow this emotional trajectory, with most episodes ending with The Doctor and his companion Rose (Billie Piper) failing in their respective missions. Death and loss plagued the pair, no matter where they went or what they did.
Which makes the conclusion of “The Doctor Dances” all the more beautiful to witness. Moffat penned the rebooted series’ first two-parter, opening with “The Empty Child” and finishing with “Dances.” For two hours, The Doctor, Rose, and dashing scoundrel Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) run around London during the Blitz trying to stay out of the grasp of a growing army of gas-mask wearing zombies begging for “Mummy.” It’s as unrelenting a horror story as Doctor Who had yet told, yet the climax finds The Ninth Doctor discovering a way not only to end the plague, but to actually cure all those infected so that, “just this once, everybody lives!”
Eccleston’s joy is so pure, so infectious, that it makes what could have been a lame deus ex machina feel completely earned. Moffat would revisit this same sort of ending until it became almost meaningless, but for this first time out, it was the first ray of sunshine to remind our heroes of why they go on these adventures, of just how spectacular it feels to pull off the impossible, of the fact that there’s always something to hold onto even during the darkest nights.
“They’re mine. The DVDs on the list. The 17 DVDs. What they’ve got in common is me.”- Blink
Steven Moffat is an awfully clever fellow, so much so that the one of the biggest knocks you could make about his writing is that he often prizes clever narrative gambits over things like compelling characters or emotional engagement. At their worst, Moffat’s scripts can feel like puzzle boxes, not stories.
But at their best…well, at their best you get “Blink,” still probably the single best hour of television that Doctor Who has produced (or, if nothing else, the scariest). “Blink” is a puzzle box of a story, one in which the characters are vaguely defined archetypes whom we barely get to know. Doesn’t matter. The actors (especially a truly kick-ass lead turn by Carey Mulligan, right as she was just starting out) flesh out their respective roles enough that you love and care about this crew even as they get picked off quickly by the Weeping Angels.
As interesting as a confounding puzzle can be, the real joy is in the solving of it. There’s an almost frenzy of joy and excitement when the last pieces click into place and you grasp at last the picture that has been withheld all this time. With “Blink,” that moment comes when Sally Sparrow (Mulligan) realizes that she herself is the key to figuring out what is going on with the Weeping Angels, the collection of Easter Eggs left by The Doctor (David Tennant this time) on a seemingly random collection of DVDs, and the big blue box sitting in a decrepit basement.
Moffat would build many a twisting maze for his heroes and viewers to try and solve, but none felt half so satisfying as “Blink” to break open.
Meet the New Boss – The Eleventh Hour
Eccleston set the stage with his one-and-done season as The Doctor, but it was really Tennant’s turn as The Tenth Doctor that cemented The Doctor and Doctor Who as a modern, international institution. Not only was Tennant hugely beloved, but his final run of episodes played not as a changing of the guard, as regenerations in years past have been, but as a titanic, apocalyptic event. Russell T. Davies closed out his leading man’s tenure, as well as his own, with a long dirge of a finale that wiped the board completely clear of characters and stories for their successors to pick up on, and that truly ‘killed’ The Doctor.
How was anyone supposed to follow that?
Moffat and Matt Smith responded with “The Eleventh Hour,” a zippy bit of slapstick that opens like a fairy tale and ends with a full-blown alien invasion of Earth. There’s an effortless quality to much of “The Eleventh Hour” that neither Moffat nor Smith would ever really recapture, an easy sense of self-confidence in their own abilities.
That confidence is given actual life in the episode’s climax, during which Smith rattles off a classic bit of Moffat speechifying. The purpose is to threaten the previously-mentioned aliens into leaving Earth and never coming back, but on a meta level, the new kids are calling their shot and laying claim to their place in the decade-spanning legacy of Doctor Who. The speech closes with a projection of all the Doctors leading up to Tennant, whose face Smith promptly walks through to declare himself The Doctor.
The Only Water in the Forest – A Good Man Goes to War
In many ways, River Song (Alex Kingston) came to represent the worst of Moffat’s tendencies when he was running Doctor Who. More a collection of fetishes wrapped up in an endlessly convoluted mystery box than a fully-realized character, an appearance by River Song generally meant that the following episode was going to be half-baked borderline indecipherable. But, hey, a good reveal is a good reveal, and “A Good Man Goes to War” delivers one of the most stunning game-changers in the rebooted series’ long life.
The reveal that River Song is actually Melody Pond, the grown-up daughter of protagonists Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory Pond (Arthur Darvill), completely shatters everything we had known about all three characters, yet the twist still plays fair with everything we had known about River and her long-lost parents prior to the bombshell detonating. It’s a twist that both starkly redefines what came before and creates bold new opportunities for what comes next.
Those opportunities would be largely squandered, collapsing under the expositional weight of crashing timelines, secret societies, and twists upon twists upon twists. The story devoured itself until there really wasn’t much story at all.
But even today, even knowing that Doctor Who would trip over its own feet trying to pay off this, its grandest reveal, the reveal itself remains a jaw-dropping piece of plotting, beautifully set-up and delivered by Moffat’s script and Kingston’s performance.
“Did you ever count?” – The Day of the Doctor
Part of why Moffat’s game-playing and twist-turning ways came to rankle so much as his time as showrunner wore on was that the man was a strong enough writer that he didn’t need elaborate convolutions to make Doctor Who sing. Moffat’s writing, and cast, were strong enough that all he really needed was to put a bunch of his players in a room and let them go at it, and let the fireworks set themselves off.
No moment better articulates this than the scene in the anniversary special, “The Day of the Doctor,” when Ten, Eleven, and the newly discovered War Doctor (the version of The Doctor who fought in the Time War, and who committed such atrocities that future incarnations opted to pretend he had never existed in the first place) are locked in a prison cell and forced to talk through their issues.
The War Doctor (John Hurt), who has been plucked out of his own timeline just before detonating a weapon that will end the war but snuff out billions of innocent lives, asks his later-selves if they ever counted the number of children that died that day. Flippant Eleven claims no, while noble, doomed Ten asserts that yes, he did count, and expresses horror that a later version of himself could have forgotten such an important piece of information.
It’s a somber moment in what is largely the most triumphant story yet told in the modern Doctor Who, one that paints in stark colors just how heavy the weight of the various worlds in the universe hang on The Doctor. No version of The Doctor could ever be so painfully honest with any of their companions, but in a room filled with nothing but, well, himself, The Doctor(s) let themselves have it.
A Hell of a Bird – Heaven Sent
Gun to my head, “Heaven Sent” is the best episode of Doctor Who ever.
The previous week’s installment ended with The Doctor (now in his twelfth incarnation and embodied by rascally old Peter Capaldi) left powerless to watch his companion die in gruesome fashion before he himself was carted off to an unknown prison. “Heaven Sent” follows The Doctor as, you think, he’s arriving at said prison, and the episode follows him as he explores his strange confines, is pursued by a monster, and tries to figure a way out.
The vast, vast majority of the episode is just Capaldi alone, and he is tremendous, but “Heaven Sent” also functions as a refresher course on everything that makes Moffat a compelling writer, and why he’s worth following even through his missteps. The truth about The Doctor’s prison is teased out bit by bit, yet when the truth arrives it still hits like a sledgehammer. But even more shocking is the revelation of The Doctor’s own plan, and the extreme he has committed himself to in order to escape.
Over the years, Moffat had a tendency to over-power The Doctor to the point that he could come across as an untouchable god gliding through every story. But “Heaven Sent” finds The Doctor’s strength by bringing him to his lowest, stripping him of everything (his TARDIS, his screwdriver, his friends) and forcing him to drag himself to absolution through nothing but a clever mind and sheer will.
“It just means time.” – The Husbands of River Song
Coming full circle back to the sadness at the core of Doctor Who, “The Husbands of River Song” was a 2015 Christmas special. Doctor Who does one every year, and they are largely treated as a lark (one of Tennant’s found him trying to survive in a Titanic-replica, that was crashing, in space. Kylie Minogue was there); and for much of its runtime, “The Husbands of River Song” is a screwball bit of fun, with River and The Doctor bantering up a storm and dodging in and out of death traps.
But as the episode winds down, that melancholy begins to present itself and you begin to feel a mounting sense of dread as you realize what’s coming. This isn’t just an adventure between River and The Doctor, this is The Last Adventure, the one that we’ve known has been eventual since River’s first appearance years earlier.
As The Doctor and River take in an incredible vista, she realizes what we have learned and what he has known, that this, this beautiful moment, is their last together. She insists that he will save her, as he has so often in the past.
His reply is the kind of caustic that only Capaldi’s version of The Doctor could deliver: “Times end, River, because they have to. Because there’s no such thing as happy ever after. It’s just a lie we tell ourselves because the truth is so hard.”
But she’s not having it. “No, Doctor, you’re wrong. Happy ever after doesn’t mean forever. It just means time. A little time. But that’s not the sort of thing you could ever understand, is it?”
When River presses him on this being their last night, she asks how long nights last on this planet he’s brought them to.
“Twenty-four years.”
And there you have everything in this show that is both melancholy but hopeful. Everything that is jaded yet open-heartedly romantic. Everything wise but defiantly idealistic. There you have Doctor Who, in all its strange wonders and small beauties, and there you have Steven Moffat.
Addendum
“Good Night” is a minisode, and as such doesn’t really qualify for consideration in the official canon of Moffat and Doctor Who. But it’s a lovely little duet between Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, meditating on life, death, memory, and that great unknowable thing…Time.