Dear Steven Moffat: The Return of Doctor Mysterio

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Dear Steven,

By common consent 2016 has been one of the worst years since blogging about Doctor Who began. People talk about Brexit, Trump, the remake of Ghostbusters, but these were just iceberg tips that resembled bellends. This was a year when the worst people in the world got shriller, more self-righteous, condescending, self-promoting, boorish and confident. And those were the people I agreed with.

It made me nostalgic, in a Doctor Who free year, for my good clean internet opposition to your honestly inept, but arguably benign contribution to popular culture. When you’re making bad Who and I’m writing about it, all is well with this ugly rock. But strip us out and the planet plunges into unenlightened darkness – you know, the worst kind of darkness; a new gloomy epoch with no obvious readymade designation.

It’s been such a long year that I’d almost forgotten how much I dread your festive Who specials. It would be unfair to call them an obligation. For me it’s tantamount to an act of self-harm, like spending Christmas with my joyless family and their enviable collection of personality disorders.

The cat’s enlarged pupils and outstretched claws point to alarm and confusion at the perennial decision to seek out the start time for your Christmas episode in the Radio Times, ring said listing, then seek the appropriate clearances to watch in relative peace, unencumbered by the usual inane questions I can expect throughout every other yuletide show. But would your annual efforts play better with enquiries about Peter Capaldi’s hair? And why, if you have an actress called Charity Wakefield, wouldn’t you just call her character the same thing?

We’ve now watched enough of these tinsel time series fag ends to know how they’re conceived. Locked in your den, head in hands, a half-empty bottle of port casting a long shadow over a blank notepad, you finally let those mitts fall away, the nails bitten back and splintered, and your rubbed red eyes, sore from leaking panic, fall on that unrivaled DVD and Blu-ray collection – the pride of the Moffat household, that you promised you’d never raid again for inspiration, but must now turn to one last time.

Was it blind luck that your copy of Mr Nanny starring Hulk Hogan, was sandwiched between Back to the Future and Superman: The Movie? Was it destiny that the shelf below contained every Marvel movie to date, and that just as your mouth fell open your young son ran into the room in his Spider-Man pyjamas, asking if you’d come and watch “The Very Best of Shooting Stars”?

Oh, how you loathe the parenting thing sometimes. And you thought of that old Channel 4 shithouse, Supernanny, and somehow it all just clicked. Within ten minutes you had the premise for this year’s episode. In an hour you had a draft. It’s incredible how these things work out. You wouldn’t have to drink yourself to death after all.

So “The Return of Doctor Mysterio” starred an actor who looked exactly like a 30-year-old Michael J. Fox playing 18, as a comic book geek who swallowed a wish-fulfilling alien power source, which the Doctor set up housing for on the roof of a residential apartment block for no reason, and became a DC style superhero with a Marvel backstory. We learned he was obsessively stalking closely following his childhood fantasy fuck; a Lois Lane proxy; nannying her baby by day and attempting to impress her journalistic faculty by night, in a fashion influenced by, but NOT, DC’s hawkish lawyers, simply derivative of the books he read as a kid.

There was every reason to worry that this oddball’s romance was supposed to be the beating heart of the story, after all he hadn’t changed his haircut, PJ’s or glasses since he was eight years old (but then how would we recognise him as an adult – by intuition and understanding of narrative conventions alone?), and his persona was based entirely on comic book clichés. But I was prepared to accept this as an affectionate ribbing of the material you were ripping off. It was also nice to see a story based on comic book heroes, because there’s so few of those nowadays.

I’m sorry to read as a curmudgeon, Steven – particularly at Christmas, but I just couldn’t bring myself to care about any of this shit. Justin Chatwin’s creepy Marty McFly impression aside, there wasn’t any intrigue here. The Harmony Shoal corporation (I think I’ve eaten in one of their restaurants) was a pretty anaemic rent-a-threat, consisting as it did of brains in jars. And though it all hung together okay, the A-story of this would-be Clark Kent successfully completing the family (yawn) of his jilted Lois, integrated without drama or consequence with the invasion B-story, it was hard to escape the conclusion that “Doctor Mysterio” was less than the sum of all the junk that inspired it.

You got a reference in to The Rocketeer, the dinner scene from Superman IV: The Quest for Peace – movies I’m sure you’ve plundered before, if only I could be bothered to raid the letter archive, but I couldn’t have been the only person sitting at home, too tired to move, too broken to change channels, wondering why you couldn’t have written an original piece of, oh I don’t know, Doctor Who?

We’re left wondering if your successors will take your approach to these specials – making them light, irrelevant (autocorrects to irreverent in your brain) and self-parodic – or if they’ll interpret “special” the way we used to think of movie spin-offs from TV shows; an epic adventure with mythos deepening complications. An event. Remember those?

It’s likely no one will be talking about this episode in the weeks to come. In fact, by the time the new series begins, your last, we may have forgotten it completely. Generating that kind of indifference is, I suggest, highly dangerous for the prospects of a show with a fan base as big and obsessive as the Doctor’s. In a superfluous hour of TV, the only question likely to be torturing the internet in the weeks to come is, what does Matt Lucas want, and why did you imagine we’d ever want to see him again?

Yours in time and cyberspace,

Ed

P.S: “Vomiting, hair loss and death.” If that’s not a pitch for a Spider-Man reboot…

P.P.S: Just so you’re clear, no one can remember Lucas’s character from last year, so reviving him here was tantamount to introducing a new character sans context or background. There was just this curious degenerate following the Doctor around. George Dawes without the spite.

P.P.P.S: “We’ll be laughing all the way to the slab.” Wishful thinking on your part.

P.P.P.P.S: Once again Capaldi’s world-weary cynicism won us over for much of the time. But it’s dangerous to have an audience proxy who so closely mirrors their viewing experience. Every time he did a double take, looked bored, or plain confused, I didn’t expect to occupy his consciousness so completely.

P.P.P.P.P.S: Might the aliens have tried a little harder to perfect their surgical technique? Once word got out that the imposters each have an incision scar across their heads and flashing eyes, I think the round up would be short and brutal.

P.P.P.P.P.P.S: You’re to be congratulated. New companion Bill looks awful in just about every way. I can wait to meet her. For years if necessary. As a parting gift to critics of your work like me, it couldn’t be better. I can see our last episodes together will be the most difficult yet. It really is going to be a fight to the death; a fight I’m already prepared to concede.

Last Christmas (literally, not the episode of the same name):

The Old Man and the C: 

The Clara Oswald Show:

Smith – The Dark Suit Jacket Years: 

Smith in his Pomp:

Deep Time:

Published in: on December 26, 2016 at 12:52  Comments Off on Dear Steven Moffat: The Return of Doctor Mysterio  
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Dear Steven Moffat: The Husbands of River Song

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Dear Steven,

I’ve often wondered if your Doctor Who Christmas specials would be better if the BBC lied to you and said they’d be going out in April. It would surely change the way you approached the task, so instead of staring at that flashing cursor with a mind to crowbar in festive iconography or stuff the pudding with sentimentality and yuletide whimsy, you’d just write the best script you could. Sure, I don’t know what that means these days and neither do you, but it could result in a story with a little dramatic integrity…and no snow…and no comedians hamming it up in key roles. Can you imagine it, Steven? Because I can, and did while “The Husbands of River Song” made light of bigamy and gold digging on Christmas Day.

So this was a romp then and a relief for you, no doubt, because the Christmas brief allowed you to play to your strengths (jokes, surrealism, lashings of shtick) while giving licence to dump all the stuff we expect of the series proper (drama, plot, stakes, consequences). This was an episode for the fans, and by fans I mean pissed up geeks masturbating furiously at the re-introduction of River Song, revelling in her sexually liberated, mercenary brand of sass.

This was, we inferred, the occasional companion’s final (from her point of view) chronological appearance – the last staging post on the journey to Tennant and Tate, so you were determined to make it celebratory. This walking headfuck, possibly the most problematic subject of Who Do You Think You Are? ever, would have one last chance to shine while the Doctor retained a respectful supporting role – anonymous for the most part, due to the comic conceit of River having no knowledge of his thirteenth face.

Did we buy the idea of River not recognising the Doctor? Well at first it was enjoyable enough, but as the story went through its inconsequential paces there was the sense that Song had taken a dose of horse tranquilisers. The man she mistook for an intergalactic surgeon answered to the name of “The Doctor”, which in isolation was no give away, but he also seemed to be a know-it-all who took the piss, feigning amazement at the TARDIS interior, and had useful suggestions on how the time machine worked which just happened to be exactly right. That, plus the constant prompts about his identity, ‘don’t you recognise me?’, ‘don’t you know me?’, should, I feel, have been enough to tip off a woman of River’s intelligence. But for comic reasons alone the misunderstanding continued for most of the episode, denying these two long standing characters a chance to engage in a reunion of any substance.

Instead you used the conceit to tease the suggestion that River wasn’t the Doctor fan girl we always supposed. As someone who believes that each of us is different with different people, that in effect there’s no such thing as a consistent character, I was pleasantly surprised to find this idea gaining a little currency on my Christmas drool box.

You took a chance and had River be a bit of a bitch – someone who was happy to kill a man to get the diamond in his brain, who presumptuously stole the TARDIS without the Doctor’s permission and helped herself to the brandy and, when talking to a man she believed to be a stranger, categorising the Doctor as no one special but ‘terribly useful’. Capaldi played the disappointment beautifully, with great understatement, yet remained on side when most of us would be thinking of taking Song straight to the date and place of her death without further delay.

But this was a Christmas episode of course, so we ultimately learned this was all self-protecting brio on River’s part, and that she did love the Doctor, but liked to pretend otherwise as her feelings almost certainly weren’t reciprocated. In an ideal world, one in which the Doctor remained in character, he’d love her the way you and I regard the cat or our favourite jumper, but on this most mawkish of holidays there was the unwelcome suggestion that Capaldi’s Time Lord felt a bit more than that. There was even an idiotic fairy tale caption at the end to underline the point.

River and the Doctor lived happily ever after? Well only if you count a 24-year long night out as forever and ignore Song’s certain death. Incidentally I tried to work out how a restaurant that served a clientele who booked for 24 years at a time would operate, but was defeated. When the manager told the Doctor to come back in four years, did she mean four of hers or four of his? Did she really mean, ‘come back in 96 years’? And why do they celebrate Christmas on Darillium anyway? Or indeed anywhere else in the universe bar Earth? Are we exporting it in the future? I mean, why should any alien culture be interested?

So “The Husbands of River Song” was just good natured filler, really; an episode you had in your pocket in the event you ran out of ideas for festive specials. Effectively an emergency episode, it was light hearted, fun and a few of the jokes raised a smile; I suppose if that’s the test for a Christmas special then it passed. But do these seasonal farts have to be throwaway? Would it not be better to use the guarantee of a captive audience on Christmas Day to unleash a feature length slab of knockout, mythos-deepening drama, with implications we’d talk about for months to come, ahead of the new series premiere? What’s that, be grateful for Greg Davis and Matt Lucas? Well I hope you have a real fire at Chez Moffat because you’ll be getting coal next year.

Yours in time and cyberspace,

Ed

P.S: This year’s movie reference was Spies Like Us and a reprise of the fake Doctor surgical procedure. It was funnier when Chase and Aykroyd did it.

P.P.S: Did the Doctor need to retain his sonic sunglasses now he has a new screwdriver? Did the TARDIS not generate a fresh one as a polite way of saying, ‘ditch the shades, idiot’?

P.P.P.S: Was it me, or was the 54th century street on Mendorax Dellora just the London alien street from Face the Raven with added snow and Christmas decorations? How cheap do you have to be to reuse a distinctive set from 3 episodes ago?

P.P.P.P.S: “The pandorica opens; that sounds exciting.” Not as exciting as it could have been, sadly. But we won’t get into that.

P.P.P.P.P.S: Catching a diamond with your tits. Great party trick.

P.P.P.P.P.P.S: “How are the twins?” “Still digesting their mother, thanks for asking.”

P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S: “You wouldn’t know if I look nice or not.” A nice bit of backtracking from you there. Of course Capaldi professes not to have any understanding of what constitutes a pleasant human appearance – an idea given some credence by his choice of clothes in his sixth incarnation – but this didn’t really seem to be a problem for his predecessors. Anyway, why the fuck not? Does anyone really care anymore? See you next year!

The Old Man and the C: 

The Clara Oswald Show:

Smith – The Dark Suit Jacket Years: 

Smith in his Pomp:

Deep Time:

Published in: on December 28, 2015 at 13:29  Comments (5)  
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Dear Steven Moffat: The Time of the Doctor

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Dear Steven,

Christmas in Graubünden isn’t bad, even when you’re confined to a sanitarium for sci-fi victims and can only enjoy the winter wunderland through a three by two window covered in gauze. The orderlies are nice here, they let you pull a cracker, though the chemically impregnated card strip has been removed in case the bang triggers seizures. I got a great present too; my friend Hayley sent me a Starship Enterprise pizza cutter, though it was confiscated and destroyed in a controlled explosion on Christmas Eve.

Still, since November I’ve had hope. The discovery of a portal in my room, a wormhole that lead to Central London, gave me cause to believe that I’d get to see the final adventure of Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor after all. You and I have been on his journey together, Steven. Despite the risk to my recovery it felt right that we should be together at the end: you as writer, me as a web pest that insists on reviewing your work at interminable length, despite your earnest (but I feel sure, insincere) legal letters, begging me to stop.

So today I waited until we’d finished our dinner of Turkey feet and parsnip bulb, taken the beating we’re grateful to accept as dessert and been thrown into our rooms, lights out, then took my chance to use the gateway. In a flash I’d returned to London and just an hour and fifty minutes later I’d used the city’s peerless public transport network to travel the 1.8 miles to Saggy Membrane’s place in the demilitarised part of Bermondsey. He wasn’t there but I knew he wouldn’t mind me breaking in and using his TV to enjoy the broadcast. I later remembered I had a key.

Well Steven, I’ve now watched The Time of the Doctor, got over the shock of Matt Smith’s perfectly bald head and formed my impressions. First, kudos: you convinced the BBC to put the show on before Danny Dyer’s debut on EastEnders, knowing that viewers coming off that shock would be in a far more critical, embittered frame of mind. By getting in first and setting the episode in a town called Christmas where the days are short and the snow ever falling, you stood half a chance of investing Smith’s farewell with a bit of Yuletide spirit. Did a story that had cock all to do with the festive period really need those seasonal touches crowbarred in? No, but I suppose that’s one of the directives that comes from on high along with the requirement to cross promote BBC products. References to Strictly Come Dancing and the iPlayer really brought it up a notch though, so well done.

Okay, so to the plot, which tried and almost succeeded in tying every 11th Doctor arc together to give the impression that his was a single story that had been mapped from the outset. Perhaps too much lore turned up on Trenzalore, or maybe I was just too tired having spent half the episode trying to stop Saggy’s cat dangle his tail in front of the screen, but I confess to feeling disappointed that this was a tidying up exercise and not a story with a strong backbone of its own.

Like many of your stories it had the feel of a tale made up on the spot, like a sci-fi version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? At one point I’m sure I heard Clive Anderson’s voice shout “Doctor Who finale” but that could have been Saggy’s ginger wine. There was lots of expository patchwork, enough to make a quilt in fact, and a fair bit of retconing: the Silence’s attempt at killing The Doctor adjusted to include a forestalling of the Time Lords’ return, but I wasn’t quite convinced you knew about any of this before you sat down to belt out a first draft. Still, it just about worked (if you concentrated). Amy’s crack turned out to be a simulacrum of the one hiding Gallifrey, The Silence were just monks that feared another Time War so set out to kill the galaxy’s version of Gavrilo Princip (the so-called Destiny Paradox being an ontological by another name, you bastard), and despite the weight you’d attached it it, it turned out there’s nothing in a name after all, as The Doctor’s was, er, The Doctor: a moniker that explained who he was in essence. By that measure you’d be The Bullshitter.

As always, you took the risk that a story built on a swamp may sink if leant on too hard. For example we could just about accept The Doctor being oblivious to his 13th incarnation’s participation in the previous episode’s fight for Gallifrey; ignorance required to sell the scene in which he told Clara he was out of lives; but it was harder to believe that faced with perpetual stalemate and the prospect of being marooned in space-Berkshire until death, The Doctor wouldn’t simply whisper his name into the crack and summon his people to tip the odds his way, or that it didn’t occur to him to parlay for more lives using either Clara’s argument that he was basically a bloody nice bloke, or the more persuasive one, namely that anyone listening at the other end could only do so because our hero had saved them from oblivion.

So yes, it didn’t make much sense but there were nice touches. You borrowed from, of all things, the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away, to build an unlikely friendship between The Doctor and a severed Cyber-head. Making Smith’s stay centuries long and ageing him was smart: it prepared the audience for the appalling psychic shock that awaited them; the insane, revolutionary, mind melting idea that the next Doctor could be an older man with a lived in face. Alright, the reset was a risk; it made the transition more stark for moist tweenies and semi-retarded viewers; and you made the regeneration lightning fast, as though sneaking it in, wrapping the episode up quick before the kids could process what had happened, but this was a swap well handled. The Doc’s got a fresh set of regenerations, which hopefully won’t be wasted by future Christopher Ecclestons, and we got one last sensuous look at Amy, whose appearance, although utterly contrived, made my loins’ Christmas dreams come true.

And with that the Smith era was over; three years of good jokes, paradoxical plotting, conceptual masturbation and intrusive contemporary idioms. Cometh 2014, cometh Capaldi and maybe hope that reminders of past missteps included in this episode like Clara’s libidinous urges toward The Doctor, references to “apps” and so forth, will be permanently consigned to the past.

I can’t see the craggy faced Scot filling in as the boyfriend at Clara’s 2014 family Christmas and I hope his reaction to any pop cultural nonsense would be curmudgeonly incredulity. I expect he’d like a little more drama too; plots built on strong foundations rather than sand and sleight of hand. Still, as Tom Baker recently pointed out, “who knows?” Only you, Steven, but get the 12th Doctor wrong and you’ll soon know a thing or two about a letter writer’s bloody revenge!

Merry Christmas.

Ed

The Matt Smith Years:

The Distant Past:

Deep Time:

Published in: on December 25, 2013 at 23:34  Comments (1)  
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