Stephen Moffat has one last season of Doctor Who before he steps down and lets someone else take over. To me, this is both good, and slightly worrying. Let me explain.
Stephen Moffat is a great producer. His work, combined with that of Mark Gatiss, on Sherlock has made for a phenomenal show that truly has something for everyone. I don't know a single person who has watched Sherlock and not wanted to watch another episode. He knows how to make a show interesting. The problem comes when you leave him with no limits. Sherlock has to fit within the realm of logic and possibility. That's not really necessarily true when it comes to Doctor Who, and Stephen Moffat knows this.
Stephen Moffat is probably one of the biggest fans of Doctor Who out there. He understands the show inside and out and he absolutely loves it. He has a profound quote about who the Doctor is and what he means to us, and I love him for that. He just gets the show better than probably most of its fanbase, in all honesty.
What happens, though, is that he wants to understand it more. He wants to test the limits and see how far he can take it. Doctor Who is the perfect show for someone to test limits on because its nature is just inherently forgiving of such antics as might happen. The plot is set to allow for those quirky episodes, the strange creatures, the improbable solutions, and the general illogicality of the scenarios. That's what this entire show is! So I totally get testing some limits to see what you can do and how far the Doctor can go.
What I don't agree with is what I think is happening with Stephen Moffat's attempts. I feel like he is trying to find the utmost outer limits of the show. He is constantly stretching Doctor Who more and more, trying to find its breaking point. I'm worried that, in trying to find those outer limits, he's going to break them and I don't know if the show would be able to recover from that. As I said, this show is pretty lenient, but if you go far enough to cross the threshold, I think you'll have gone too far, to a place that you can't come back from.
Stephen Moffat does some great work. The most iconic villains of New Who have been his (vashda nerada, the silence, the empty child, and the weeping angels). He makes sure that the show doesn't stagnate. He's always looking for a new angle, something different, a way to change it up, something completely unexpected. He's great at that and it makes for some pretty interesting episodes. I think that, sometimes, though, he is moving a little too far too fast. He has to remember that, while New Who isn't Classic Who, and we don't really want it to be, there are still some parts of it that have become so ingrained to viewers that changing them starts to alienate the fanbase. Daleks and Cybermen are so old, it's hard to do much with them anymore, but they are expected so we can't get rid of them. You have to be careful, though, that, when trying to come up with a new plotline for Daleks that hasn't been done before, you don't inadvertently change who the Daleks are because that would be changing 50 years of history. Same with the Doctor and his accoutrements, such as the TARDIS and the sonic screwdriver. Sonic sunglasses were funny for an episode or two, but when you keep them around, we start to worry that the screwdriver will be lost forever, and we don't want that. I've heard the reasoning for the sunglasses, to make being the Doctor available to anyone. Well, news flash, the Doctor Who fandom is inherently open-minded. We don't need our own sonic screwdrivers to become the Doctor. Any old stick, flashlight, or pen will do. If we want it, we can manage. Don't lower the Doctor below the standards of its fans.
Am I making any sense to you? I just think that Stephen Moffat, in exploring the limits of the Doctor, is going to take it one step too far, change the show just a little too much, and he won't be able to fix it and we'll end up losing this great show, just because one person wanted to see how far he could take it before it broke and ended up accidentally breaking it.
Back to this being his last season. Yes, I will be happy to see Stephen Moffat step down from Doctor Who. If he wanted to come back to write the occasional episode, I'd be totally down with that. He really does do some great work. But I am totally ready for someone else to take the lead. What I'm worried about, though, is that, this being his last season, Moffat is going to up his game even more. He only has one season left in which to test the limits, break and rewrite the rules, introduce new concepts, and to take the show as far as he can. With such limited time, I am truly scared that he is going to go overboard. I would much prefer if he didn't know that he had one last season. It's kind of like the last season of Psych. They knew it was ending, so they just had fun with it, which is all well and good, but I feel like it was slightly detrimental to the show itself. They just went all goofy and did what they wanted, had fun and made some interesting episodes, but I think they stopped putting any actual effort into them. They didn't matter any longer, so why bother? The knowledge of the end, knowing when it will happen, having it in sight, can really mess things up. I think it would have been better for the decision to happen after he had the season lined up and figured out already. I get that it's better for writing if you know when to end, so you don't end up leaving gaping holes for the next guy to try and fill without knowing the original ideas behind it, but this is a scenario that I can see the foreknowledge of the end bringing the show crashing down while Moffat tries to fit all his ideas into it and potentially stretching it far past its breaking point.
So my hope for this season is, Moffat, keep it classy. You get to bring in a new companion, write one last story arc, have a few last adventures. Donna, Amy, and Clara were a little too Doctor for my taste. Capaldi's Doctor really needs someone who is just so human, like Rose and Rory were. He needs that balance. The TARDIS is only big enough for one Doctor. Write an overarching story with a good ending. Something hopeful. Connect all the stories so that when we rewatch it, we can see just how carefully constructed the season was so that it all leads up to the final conclusion. Tennant's last season is a good example of this. 1) The episodes were leading up to that final conclusion of the planet being stolen by the Daleks, like the bees disappearing and the stars, and the little teasers of Rose. 2)The whole season, plus the specials, were leading up to Tennant's departure. The whole season was kind of saying goodbye, giving him one last adventure with everyone, companion and fan alike. Write a season like that, so that when we watch it again someday, we can see the effort that was put into it, all those little things that we missed the first time around because we didn't know where it was going, but now that we do, we understand it all so much better. And take us to some new places. Let us explore new worlds, meet new races. Earth is a pretty great planet, and the Doctor loves defending it, but he is, in the core of his being, a traveler. He likes wandering. It's just who he is. He is nowhere near ready to settle down, and I feel like he's been a little too stuck on Earth recently. Give him planets and galaxies, new races and old. And when he does stay on Earth, he has a time machine. Find an unexplored period, teach us some history. The future is fun, too, but we can only reimagine it so many times. The past is there for the taking. What events did the Doctor have a hand in? The Doctor in the present is interesting, but we can see that those events aren't actually happening in the world around us right now and thus become a little less real, but when you delve into the past, we can wonder about if the Doctor actually did have a hand in it. What was Charles Dickens' real inspiration for A Christmas Carol? Does the royal lineage of England have a centuries old secret? What was behind the missing days of Agatha Christie? Put a new twist on an old story. And most of all, have fun and remember who the Doctor is, deep down, and what he means to those who watch it.
"It's hard to talk about the importance of an imaginary hero. But heroes are important. Heroes tell us something about ourselves. History books tell us who we used to be, documentaries tell us who we are now, but heroes tell us who we want to be. And a lot of our heroes depress me. But you know, when they made this particular hero, they didn't give him a gun, they gave him a screwdriver to fix things." [*cough,cough*sunglasses?*cough,cough*] "They didn't give him a tank or warship or an X-Wing fighter, they gave him a call box from which you can call for help. And they didn't give him a superpower or pointy ears or a heat ray. They gave him an extra heart. They gave him two hearts. And that's an extraordinary thing. There will never come a time when we don't need a hero like the Doctor." ~Stephen Moffat.
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