Moffat's Master Plan - And it's f***ing brilliant!
I've been away and I only caught up with the new DW episode last night. I loved it simply on its own terms as a great bit of entertaining television, but even more because there was a particular moment when I had an epithany and thought, "Oh, that's what Moffatt's been doing!"
The rest is spoilers. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
A good few of my problems with post-RTD DW are shared by others - I've never felt I really got Amy as a character or found her marriage to Rory convincing as a relationship. I've become increasingly irritated, though admittedly also intrigued, by where River fitted in, and I could never see Eleven as any organic progression from Ten - not in S5, anyway.
Now I think there's a reason for that. Imagine the moment in the diner where the apparently resurrected Matt Smith walks out of the john and behaves like an absolute douche, followed by a particularly chilling Oncoming Storm moment. Now imagine it with David Tennant as the Doctor, and Amy swearing not on fish fingers and custard, but on the name of Bad Wolf or the Doctor Donna. It all fits perfectly.
Moffat is incredibly faithful to the classic character of DW, but he likes to push it to the limit in new directions. In most series openers, we (the viewers) already know the Doctor, but the companion doesn't, and the pleasure for the audience is to see how they acquire that knowledge. Even after a regeneration, that holds true to some extent because the audience knows the Doctor is an alien, that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside, and so on. But what Moffat wanted to do in S5, I believe, was to completely reverse that situation by giving us a Doctor whose companions knew more about him than he knew about them.
If Ten had walked through that door he'd have had some familiarity with River (though it would have been a distinctly angsty and awkward memory of their last encounter), but he wouldn't have had a clue how Amy and Rory came into his life and what they already knew about him in a future incarnation. Wow, what a fantastic twist, and wouldn't Moffat have adored it? No wonder he wanted David Tennant to stay!
So all the time we aren't quite getting a handle on Amy (in particular), that's because Ten doesn't know her either, and he's getting to know her along with us. The Silence have set up a situation where Ten is very vulnerable to accusations, false trails and incorrect information. A perfect example of that would be Amy's pregnancy claim. Ten knew he had a weakness for getting together with humans - what if he'd crossed the line as his future self? He might regret it, but he wouldn't dare to change it. What a dilemma.
And what of River? She's already a fascinating character and would have become more so if she'd been the one shaky bridge between Ten and Eleven in that relationship, the only one who'd met both. Now it becomes clear why Moffat was so keen to seed the relationship in SITL and FOTD, even though it blew apart the overall character arc for Ten and Donna at the time. It's an absolutely fantastic set-up for a new series, full of the kind of dramatic possibilities that make good writers get shivers down their spine. It also happens to be a lot more comforting and hopeful for the Tenth Doctor long-term than where RTD had him end up, since he knows that, no matter what his agonies right now might be, he does go on travelling and forming meaningful relationships with companions.
So that's why so many of us didn't get Amy. We weren't meant to. We were going to make that journey along with Ten.
Of course it didn't happen, and being the professional he is, SM went on to write a pretty good S5 and what promises to be an outstanding S6. But now, as I look back, I think that we can see the joins between the ideal and the reality far more clearly than before. I think he had such a clear picture of the concept he wanted for S5 that when it didn't work out it was really quite difficult for him to make Amy a rounded character. S5 felt unsatisfactory because we had two fairly opaque leads leaving the viewer without a way in to the story. I also think the crack was imposed on the narrative rather than organic to it, and although that worked up to a point I don't think it was thought out nearly as well as the Silence. It was odd that we got the Weeping Angels back in a way that repeats both Blink and certain aspects of the Slience. That episode gave us some lovely scenes about building trust but they felt forced and shoe-horned into a very different narrative. And it looks as if the Silence and their tunnel network is going to cover some fairly well-trodden Silurian ground as well.
One of the most interesting features of S5 is that in TBB and the Dalek episode we see Amy developing what appears to be a rather unconvincing ability to read Eleven's moods, sense a sadness and loneliness the viewer isn't seeing in him, and offer insight and comfort. It doesn't ring true, because nothing in Eleven is calling it out in Amy. But if she was working with Ten, those episodes would have had more depth. The point I'm making is that quite a few of the episodes in S5 suffer from being rewrites with Eleven substituted for Ten. Even if Moff had been aware at a fairly early stage that he wasn't going to get Tennant to stay, he'd have had to rethink his brief for those early episodes, and it seems to me that some of their issues are more understandable in the light of that knowledge.
It's great fun to reimagine the notorious scene where Amy tries to jump Eleven. Rather than coming out of left-field and being slightly tacky, it would have been a natural development if she'd been in that forest with Ten, who found it pretty difficult to get close to anyone without radiating sexuality. And how completely natural it would have been for Ten to go straight for the Mickey the Idiot solution after that!
It isn't really until Vincent and the Doctor that a credible picture of Eleven begins to develop, and we see him doing things that Ten would have handled very differently. That is the point when kindness becomes his defining quality. I can't imagine Ten taking enough time out from his essentially rather narcissistic viewpoint to care about showing Vincent his future, offering avuncular relationship counselling in The Lodger or being a father-figure to little Amelia in the finale. That was when Eleven came to life for me and I started to like him.
And Eleven in TIA comes through that door and we're right back to the blocking babble, emotional douchery and extreme mood swings we saw Ten exhibit all the time. Only RIver has a clue what's going on with him right then.
The more I think about it, the more I think S5 would have worked better with Ten rather than Eleven. In that sense, it resembles S2, which was halfway through being written when Billie Piper finally agreed to stay the course. Hence we got a very uneven first few episodes presenting a couple besotted by each other but still at a stage where either one could walk away at any minute. We can even see where that minute would have been - at the end of the Cybermen two-parter where Mickey jumps ship. And then suddenly everything changes and the epic romance kicks in, and builds to a devastating emotional climax that RTD wanted to write all along.
It's when the writers get to write the story they always wanted to that everything moves up a gear and a good show becomes great. For that reason, I can't wait to see the rest of S6.
The rest is spoilers. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
A good few of my problems with post-RTD DW are shared by others - I've never felt I really got Amy as a character or found her marriage to Rory convincing as a relationship. I've become increasingly irritated, though admittedly also intrigued, by where River fitted in, and I could never see Eleven as any organic progression from Ten - not in S5, anyway.
Now I think there's a reason for that. Imagine the moment in the diner where the apparently resurrected Matt Smith walks out of the john and behaves like an absolute douche, followed by a particularly chilling Oncoming Storm moment. Now imagine it with David Tennant as the Doctor, and Amy swearing not on fish fingers and custard, but on the name of Bad Wolf or the Doctor Donna. It all fits perfectly.
Moffat is incredibly faithful to the classic character of DW, but he likes to push it to the limit in new directions. In most series openers, we (the viewers) already know the Doctor, but the companion doesn't, and the pleasure for the audience is to see how they acquire that knowledge. Even after a regeneration, that holds true to some extent because the audience knows the Doctor is an alien, that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside, and so on. But what Moffat wanted to do in S5, I believe, was to completely reverse that situation by giving us a Doctor whose companions knew more about him than he knew about them.
If Ten had walked through that door he'd have had some familiarity with River (though it would have been a distinctly angsty and awkward memory of their last encounter), but he wouldn't have had a clue how Amy and Rory came into his life and what they already knew about him in a future incarnation. Wow, what a fantastic twist, and wouldn't Moffat have adored it? No wonder he wanted David Tennant to stay!
So all the time we aren't quite getting a handle on Amy (in particular), that's because Ten doesn't know her either, and he's getting to know her along with us. The Silence have set up a situation where Ten is very vulnerable to accusations, false trails and incorrect information. A perfect example of that would be Amy's pregnancy claim. Ten knew he had a weakness for getting together with humans - what if he'd crossed the line as his future self? He might regret it, but he wouldn't dare to change it. What a dilemma.
And what of River? She's already a fascinating character and would have become more so if she'd been the one shaky bridge between Ten and Eleven in that relationship, the only one who'd met both. Now it becomes clear why Moffat was so keen to seed the relationship in SITL and FOTD, even though it blew apart the overall character arc for Ten and Donna at the time. It's an absolutely fantastic set-up for a new series, full of the kind of dramatic possibilities that make good writers get shivers down their spine. It also happens to be a lot more comforting and hopeful for the Tenth Doctor long-term than where RTD had him end up, since he knows that, no matter what his agonies right now might be, he does go on travelling and forming meaningful relationships with companions.
So that's why so many of us didn't get Amy. We weren't meant to. We were going to make that journey along with Ten.
Of course it didn't happen, and being the professional he is, SM went on to write a pretty good S5 and what promises to be an outstanding S6. But now, as I look back, I think that we can see the joins between the ideal and the reality far more clearly than before. I think he had such a clear picture of the concept he wanted for S5 that when it didn't work out it was really quite difficult for him to make Amy a rounded character. S5 felt unsatisfactory because we had two fairly opaque leads leaving the viewer without a way in to the story. I also think the crack was imposed on the narrative rather than organic to it, and although that worked up to a point I don't think it was thought out nearly as well as the Silence. It was odd that we got the Weeping Angels back in a way that repeats both Blink and certain aspects of the Slience. That episode gave us some lovely scenes about building trust but they felt forced and shoe-horned into a very different narrative. And it looks as if the Silence and their tunnel network is going to cover some fairly well-trodden Silurian ground as well.
One of the most interesting features of S5 is that in TBB and the Dalek episode we see Amy developing what appears to be a rather unconvincing ability to read Eleven's moods, sense a sadness and loneliness the viewer isn't seeing in him, and offer insight and comfort. It doesn't ring true, because nothing in Eleven is calling it out in Amy. But if she was working with Ten, those episodes would have had more depth. The point I'm making is that quite a few of the episodes in S5 suffer from being rewrites with Eleven substituted for Ten. Even if Moff had been aware at a fairly early stage that he wasn't going to get Tennant to stay, he'd have had to rethink his brief for those early episodes, and it seems to me that some of their issues are more understandable in the light of that knowledge.
It's great fun to reimagine the notorious scene where Amy tries to jump Eleven. Rather than coming out of left-field and being slightly tacky, it would have been a natural development if she'd been in that forest with Ten, who found it pretty difficult to get close to anyone without radiating sexuality. And how completely natural it would have been for Ten to go straight for the Mickey the Idiot solution after that!
It isn't really until Vincent and the Doctor that a credible picture of Eleven begins to develop, and we see him doing things that Ten would have handled very differently. That is the point when kindness becomes his defining quality. I can't imagine Ten taking enough time out from his essentially rather narcissistic viewpoint to care about showing Vincent his future, offering avuncular relationship counselling in The Lodger or being a father-figure to little Amelia in the finale. That was when Eleven came to life for me and I started to like him.
And Eleven in TIA comes through that door and we're right back to the blocking babble, emotional douchery and extreme mood swings we saw Ten exhibit all the time. Only RIver has a clue what's going on with him right then.
The more I think about it, the more I think S5 would have worked better with Ten rather than Eleven. In that sense, it resembles S2, which was halfway through being written when Billie Piper finally agreed to stay the course. Hence we got a very uneven first few episodes presenting a couple besotted by each other but still at a stage where either one could walk away at any minute. We can even see where that minute would have been - at the end of the Cybermen two-parter where Mickey jumps ship. And then suddenly everything changes and the epic romance kicks in, and builds to a devastating emotional climax that RTD wanted to write all along.
It's when the writers get to write the story they always wanted to that everything moves up a gear and a good show becomes great. For that reason, I can't wait to see the rest of S6.