Will this be the cursiest Doctor ever?

[james_davis_nicoll]

Don't know. In related news

Moffatt apparently getting annoyed by people who want a female doctor whereas Gaiman points out a woman would not have done because replacing Smith requires "someone harder and older and more dangerous" than Smith.

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Was Moffatt always such a terrible writer? I wonder if there is something about working on Who that's bad for writers (Thinking of Children of Earth and RTD here)?

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

It might be the creative equivalent of that old joke about how bureaucracies tend to promote people to the level of their incompetence. Moffatt was fairly good at stand-alone short stories within someone else's framework, so he got promoted to do long-form storytelling for which he's ultimately responsible, which doesn't necessarily use the same skills.

[jwgh]

Working on Who generally, or being the script editor?

Douglas Adams's work on Who wasn't his best, though I love 'City of Death'. (Hey, look, a female Time Lord!)

[sivi-volk.livejournal.com]

Jekyll had some issues, but his writing of people who are not straight white dudes was quite a lot better than Sherlock or Dr. Who.

[seawasp]

He seems to me better working FOR someone, or at least inside a known framework on which he can hang his cool ideas. He wrote some really excellent eps under Davies, but once he got the helm he tried to be as awesome-epic as Davies but didn't actually seem to know how to carry it off.

I thought Matt Smith was an excellent DOCTOR but he had by far the weakest run of the new Who, and compares in terms of average quality of episodes with poor Peter Davison, who was totally shafted by the scripts he was handed.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

For that matter, Davies wrote some terrible crap when he was trying to be awesome-epic. There seems to be a price for hubris.

[seawasp]

Well, I'd agree in theory, but I have a gut feeling that the parts you'd point to and say "terrible crap" probably aren't the ones I'd point to and say "terrible crap" so the point may not be so strong.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Their sins are different. A cold wind blows through Moffat's Who; when he tries to go up to 11, his plot devices become ingenious and intricate to the point of absurdity, the characters all turn into hard badasses and there's a cruelty to the proceedings. (I have a feeling that he's cast Capaldi because he feels Capaldi is suited for this, which might be a bad sign; I'd much prefer a lighter Doctor Who at this point, but I'm willing to wait and see.)

RTD's epic stories, on the other hand, were all about angst and sentiment magnified to a cosmic scale, with rickety plots constructed out of extended jokes, fourth-wall-leaning speeches about how much everyone loves the Doctor (admittedly Moffat has pulled one or two of those as well), and clap-for-Tinkerbell endings. I think it worked better with Christopher Eccleston than with David Tennant, because Eccleston was better at underplaying the sentiment just enough to keep it from getting to be too much; Tennant had no such inhibitions.

(Both RTD and Moffat, though, have a disturbing tendency to mistreat female characters. I'm not even sure Moffat is the worse one about it.)

[peter-erwin.livejournal.com]

Both RTD and Moffat, though, have a disturbing tendency to mistreat female characters. I'm not even sure Moffat is the worse one about it.

Indeed. There's something a bit peculiar about how awful mothers can be in the RTD seasons, and about the only female characters I was halfway impressed with during the RTD years were the ones created by Moffat.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The problem with Davies was that he would write himself into a corner trying to be awesome-epic, and in pursuit of most-awesome-epic he would progressively eliminate all possible solutions, and then at the end he would "solve" the problem with Deus Ex Machina, a press of The History Eraser Button, or both.

Often both.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I think you meant to say Deus ex TARDIS there. :)

[daveon.livejournal.com]

While I think it was sexist - it was - he ran Coupling and did a god job. I just suspect that drama isn't his core still as a show runner. I'm also convinced you can't run more than 1 show at a time without stuff falling flat.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Moffat writing for RTD was an excellent combination that produced some of the best stories in the show's 50-year history. It was the reason I was excited that he was taking over the show.

Even Moffat's first episode as showrunner, "The Eleventh Hour", was really good. It was downhill from there.

I think he just needs to be denied total creative control.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Moffat wrote the best stories of Davies's run.

And his arc ideas for the first, maybe second, season were interesting. He seems the first writer interested in in-story use of the TARDIS as, gasp, a time machine, including setting up anomalies that got explained by intervention of a later Doctor.

Not sure he has that many good ideas. But on first instance, they're great.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

It's been bad for Gatis too.