N.B. This post contains massive spoilers for the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special. If you're not there yet, read no further!
I just
had a genuine "Dammit, Moffat!!" moment. I don't have many of those, really I
don't. But this really gets me.
So I just
re-watched the 2007 Children in Need special, Time Crash, written by Steven
Moffat (and to be fair, it has an absolutely hilarious and very witty script).
But I realised that its time laws completely contradict those in one of Moffat's most
controversial episodes, The Day of the Doctor.
In the short, the Doctor accidentally crosses his own timeline, and as we anticipate, the resulting paradoxes start to rip a massive hole in space and time. The Doctor averts the destruction of the universe by creating a supernova at the same place as the black hole, and the two cancel each other out - yeah whatever. But that's not the bad bit. He succeeds only through the use of an ontological paradox (think Bad Wolf). The Tenth Doctor
saves the universe in this short by remembering that he'd seen the Fifth
Doctor do the same thing earlier. But Five only knew how to do it in the first
place because he'd gone forward in time and seen Ten do it. Ontological
paradox. Right there, plain as day. And the only way that works is if the
Doctors remember what happened when they met. Now, the reason I
started to shout at the screen is because this blatantly contradicts what
Moffat did in The Day of the Doctor - an episode I really, really wanted to
like but found it very hard to. In DOTD, all the
Doctors meet. The universe doesn't threaten to explode. They hang out for hours and
nothing goes bang. And yet, this time they all get a convenient dose of amnesia. This time it's crucially important for all the Doctors to forget
what they did while they were together, just so that Moffat can go back and remove the fundamental reason for Nine, Ten, and Eleven's
years of traveling time and space and defeating evil - in effect, erasing the modern Doctor's entire raison d'etre. Screw you and your
retconning, Moffat! Aargh!!
Now, you
can argue that since this is just a comedy sketch, it's somehow "less
canon" than a regular episode. Which might be a fair point, but personally I'm a
stickler for consistency. Even if you're writing a fictional show about time
travel, yes. If you're going to write all sorts of timey-wimey convolutions,
that's fine, but be internally consistent. But sadly, as much as I love lots of things that Moffat has done for Doctor Who, and I do, it can't be denied that he's all
about the fireworks. His one fail-safe trick is the timey-wimey plot rollercoasters that leave us stunned,
undeniably impressed, but permanently confused as to what actually happened.
The importance of consistency, and overall logic, and things like coherent character arcs and realistic character psychology, are kind of lost on him.
The short
is also notable because it contains the "all of time and space is threatened with immediate destruction and
then is saved in a profound anticlimax"
Moffat trope, which appears and is resolved in a record time of five minutes. On the brighter side, and since I'm trying to be fair here, it also contains
exquisitely memorable and Who-esque dialogue like "You were my Doctor" - a feeling every fan knows -
and the farewell salutation "To days to come." "All my love to long ago."
But I am not happy. Not happy at all.
 |
| "You could be so wonderful, Moffat. You're stone cold brilliant, I swear, you really are. But you could be so much more - you could be consistent. You could write stories without trolling, or over-reliance on monsters, or re-writing the laws of time, or a hundred plot holes per episode. You could make Doctor Who better, without retconning the entire series to satisfy your colossal ego. Because you don't need to be The Moffat Victorious. Just be a decent show-runner for five years and then bow out like a good boy. That's more than enough power for you." |
