Doctor Who and BOOM

Doctor Who has always been a very writerly show. Part of this is due to the fact that it has always used individually-hired freelancers instead of staff writers or a single author, but also because the author is the one name that’s always been in the opening credits. This is part of what leads to the show’s anthology-with-fixed-cast vibe, with very different things promised by a show that opens with “by Robert Holmes”, “by Terry Nation”, or more to the point for this week, “by Steven Moffat’.

For everyone playing the home game, Moffat was the guy best known for the “Friends-but-British” sitcom Coupling before seemingly coming out of nowhere the first season of the revival show with the two best episodes that year—“The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances“—aka, “the one with the WW2 gas mask zombies”. It’s a trick he repeated the next three years, showing up and writing the best episodes of the season (“Girl in the Fireplace”, “Blink”, “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead”), before walking away from a movie with Steven Spielberg to take over the show himself for the Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi Doctors, while also doing Sherlock at the same time. Somewhere along the line, he ended up as the person who had written the most televised Doctor Who, and then left at the same time as Capaldi. He followed his immediate predecessor’s lead in not returning to the show after he left, spending his time writing perfectly acceptable adaptations of Dracula.

When Davies announced he was coming back, Moffat was the next person everyone asked about; after spending months as the worst kept secret in TV they admitted that yes, he was writing two—episode 3 and the ’24 christmas special.

And so for episode 3 we have a double showcase—an opportunity for Gatwa to really show what he can do with the part, while a returning Steven Moffat shows why he’s still the best thats ever written the show. The central conceit—the Doctor is stuck on a landmine and can’t move for the whole runtime—ends up being a phenomenal way to keep the show focused on what the Doctor is good at: talking to people and being clever.

One of the funnier aspects of the Doctor being literally the same character being played by different actors but in the same continuity is that you can’t get away with remaking old stories with the new cast. Unlike, say, Sherlock Holmes, you can’t just do “our version of ‘Hound of the Baskervilles’”, you have to find a way to run the standards while still doing a new story.

Moffat realizes that the structure of having the character in one place trying to disarm a landmine the whole time is great frame to hang a whole bunch of very Doctory things to see what he does with them.

Gatwa takes the material and makes it sing, occasionally literally. This feels like where his take on the character locks into place. He’s still doing big emotions at full speed, he’s still scared like other incarnations are not, but he’s thoughtful and charming and clever in a way he hadn’t quite ever been yet. For lack of a better vocabulary, he’s suddenly much more “Doctory”. Because it turns out the trick to writing Gatwa is to write like he’s Peter Capaldi?

And that’s not quite fair. One of the things you start to notice is that the very short list of people who’ve written for more than one Doctor tend to have their own take on who the character is, and write for “their” Doctor, and then trust whoever is actually in the part at the moment to put their spin on it. Moffat’s writing his version of the Doctor, so on the one hand, it’s very easy to hear Capaldi or Smith saying the same lines. But it’s not as simple as “he just wrote a Capaldi episode”, he’s a good enough writer to know that it’s Gatwa who is going to be saying the lines, and leaves him plenty of space to lean in with hit take on the part.

So you get moments like the Doctor explaining away that he can work out the exact weight of the cylinder based on the way it moved when Ruby tossed it into the air but that he didn’t want to look like he was showing off, which is scene you can easily imagine any of the other post-2005 Doctor doing, but none of them would have hit the same note of barely-controlled panic Gatwa does here.

And the beat where the Doctor looks like he’s being distracted by irrelevant questions at the expense of the immediate problem—“who’d pick a fight around here?”—is a great showcase for Gatwa to show what it looks like when the Doctor has actually figured out most of the real problem way ahead of everyone else, and then lets things unfold from there.

And “Give it time, everywhere’s a beach eventually” is a 12/10 Doctor Who line.

Ruby, on the other hand, Moffat writes as a sort of midpoint between Amy and Clara, which I think makes a lot of sense considering how thinly sketched that character is, and how much Ruby’s design owes to those two predecessors. The result is the best Ruby has ever worked by a wide margin.

Music continues to be a major thematic element, as it has since for the whole of the RTD2 era, with the Doctor singing to himself to calm down, and the shared song to determine the timing of the handoff. It’s unclear if this is going to be a plot point, or if this is like romance was in 2005, and this is just a part of how the show works now? Either way, it gives the show a sense of having learned a new trick.

It’s full of Moffat easter eggs and staples: Anglican Marines! Villengard! Glitchy tech! Characters who die and then end up in a sort of strange un-death! A killer robot-type thing that apologizes before it kills you! An absolutely furious satire of capitalism, the military, algorithms, and religion! Fish Fingers and Custard!

My favorite callback, though, was this slightly spooky poem or nursery rhyme the Doctor recites to calm himself down:

”I went down to the beach and there she stood,

dark and tall, at the edge of the wood.

“The sky's too big. I'm scared,” I cried.

She replied, “Young man don't you know there's more to life,

Than the moon and the president's wife?”

I love this, because it’s an absolute perfect way to handle continuity in Doctor Who. On it’s own, its a strange little poem that vibes with the mood of him trying to calm himself down that he recites almost like a mantra. It sounds like it might be from something, one of those late 1800s poems from the part of high school english you sleep through? On it’s own, it works!

But then, for a certain kind of detail-retaining viewer, the last line does a little twist and reveals that the young man in the poem is actually the Doctor himself? (And it wasn’t the president’s wife, it was his daughter. And he didn’t steal the moon, he lost it. Or so he claimed.) Because this is a callback to some event in the Doctor’s past that both he and Missy mentioned back in series 9.

Critically, this wasn’t a nursery rhyme about hybrids, or pandoricas, or cracks in the universe, or planets where you have to tell the truth, or time-traveling religious orders with priests you forgot you talked to, or immortal lesbian vikings, or bad wolfs, or time wars, or any other actual plot elements from the last 20 years. Instead the deep cut reference is to what amounted to a throwaway call-and-response joke from the fall of 2015, which at the time sure sounded like it was something that “didn’t really happen.”

And even better, nothing anyone said back in series 9 even remotely implied there was a dark woman, or a wood, or that someone wrote a rhyme about it. This is exactly the way this show should build up these little references, callbacks with a twist, adding pieces that don’t fit in ways that imply even more we didn’t see, and in a way where you know they’ll never actually pay off, it wont ever become a big plot point. Just layers of texture, built up over the decades. It’s not “fan service” in the usual sense of the term, the recognition if the source is pure value add.

The fact that the thing being called back to was from Series 9 is also appropriate, because content and theme-wise, this story could have slotted cleanly into that year, and not just because it was a story about toxic capitalism where someone goes blind. It’s an interesting revival-with-updates of what the show was concerned about at the time.

I’ve seen a couple of comments here and there that the satire wasn’t “pointed enough”, and I don’t know guys, a story about turning decision-making over to an algorithm which then immediately turns ambulances into murder machines to keep sales up feels like exactly the right amount of pointed for 2024. The fact that it’s an “algorithm” and not a skynet-style self-aware AI feels right on the nose for our current moment.

And speaking of right on the nose: Thoughts and Prayers! It was during Moffat’s run as showrunner with Matt Smith as the Doctor that the show really broke out in the US so he’s certainly familiar with that audience; “Thoughts & Prayers” with that font sure felt like it was tacking directly towards the new American viewers on Disney+.

On the less positive side, the direction is a little dull, even considering there’s only one location. Scrubbing back through the episode to get the words to the poem right made it really clear how the whole show is 2 or 3 camera angles at 2 or 3 zoom levels. They couldn’t have convinced Rachel Talalay to stick around for one more?

On top the direction, something seemed off about the whole episode visually that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, especially the strange locked-off head-on but distant shots of the Tardis. Turns out, this was the show’s first use of a Volume-style stage, with the crater being a set and then surrounded by LED screens. And I’m just delighted that Doctor Who has enough money now to do something like that, but still doesn’t have enough money to make it look as good as Star Wars. Just perfect.

The Susan Twist character has to pay off soon now, right? The show has been very careful to make sure the Doctor never saw her, but that’s over now.

And speaking of mysterious ladies, it was a genuine shock to see Varada Sethu a year early. Since this season and the next filmed back-to-back, she got spotted at several filming locations for next season’s esisodes, leading to some wild rumors that Gibson had been fired and replaced as the companion. After that simmered for longer than it probably should have, they finally announced that, no, Gibson wasn’t leaving but Varada Sethu was joining the cast for the next season. And that seemed to be that, until here she is! Now we get to wildly speculate about if this is a case of they liked the actress and brought her back, or if this was actually a case of launching the character early. Puts a whole different spin on the “you should get married” joke.

All-in-all, tremendous episode, and really feels like the show is properly back. Moffat is my favorite writer for the show not named “Douglas Adams”, show-ran my favorite period of the show, and was the guy in charge for my all-time favorite Doctor (Capaldi, for the record.) I was sorry to see him go when he seemingly left for good. I’m glad to see him back.

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