I started this post at the beginning of the most recent season of Doctor Who, but I put it aside. Now, with Moffat retiring as showrunner, I feel compelled to return to it, in order to make my case for the position.
At the time, I was talking with some friends about how to go about fixing Doctor Who, after they complained about a recent episode. (“Hey, Arya Stark was on Doctor Who this weekend! It was...somewhat watchable. :/”)
Josh's Friend: “It wasn't a terrible episode but for one thing it gave us yet another ‘most dangerous warrior race in the galaxy’ which gets defeated in a manner that wouldn't fool a kindergartner. I want it to feel less corny and disposable. Ever since Tennant left, I feel like it's been foundering and it almost never pulls me in and makes me feel something. I want concrete emotional reactions like it used to, and like I do with other shows. TV in general has been getting better than ever and yet this particular show feels like it's headed in the opposite direction. It's more about special effects than characters or something. It's hard to explain.:
Josh's other friend: “I don't really connect with the characters or care about them. It's villain of the week or special effects instead.”
Now, mind you, this is my plan to make a show I’d enjoy, not how to make the show a commercial success. I find the Big Bang Theory unwatchable, but it’s been one of the most popular shows on television for a decade now.
I contend that Steven Moffat turned Doctor Who into the Big Bang Theory.
I'll outline my plan to fix Doctor Who if I were the autocratic showrunner with an unlimited budget, with a general outline in the first post, and then with the specific way I would follow that outline in the posts that will follow.
Josh’s three point plan:
- Write for adults.
- Have a better class of villain
- Have a sense of scale.
Write for adults
Don’t write for the dumbest person in the room. Don’t write for the lowest common denominator.
Unsurprisingly, I blame Steven Moffat for everything that’s wrong with the show. Whenever he’s criticized on just about anything, he falls back on the excuse that Doctor Who is just a kid’s show. And yet, Day of the Doctor had a lot more genocide and dick joke than I remembered from Sesame Street.
The show right now combines the worst elements of children and adult programming. The writing is for the kids, and the humor is for the adults, because Moffat loves his sex jokes.
It should be exactly the other way around, stories aimed at adults, but enjoyable for kids, even if they don’t grasp the story on the same level.
Part of this is foregoing cheap laughs about how the most super-intelligent being in all creation is utterly baffled by common human customs.
Better Class of Villain
I'm not impressed with easily bested villains, and Doctor Who has entirely too many. I think RTD did a lot of stuff right during his tenure, but raising the stake with each finale was the wrong way to go. (They threatened the universe last time and now they're threatening ALL THE UNIVERSES!!)The Cybermen kind of work for me as adversaries. They're a bunch of goofy second-rate metal jobbers, and nobody really thinks they’re going to take over the universe, but sure, I’ll believe a story where they menace an isolated research base. Maybe they even succeed, and that’s an important component. We know the Daleks aren’t going to destroy the universe, because that would mean that there would be no show. But it’s not the end of the show if the baddies kill all the photogenic scientists in a given locale. So, we’re going to lower the stakes once in a while and let the baddies win.
The Master is a lot of fun, but he's practically self-foiling.
 |
| He's regenerated again, the cad |
(And always has been, if you want to be honest.)
I don’t think I’d use him. I think he peaked with Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords.
I really enjoyed the Sixth Doctor: The Last Adventure audio story. It was structured like the old GI Joe five part stories, where Cobra needed to collect so many plot coupons from exotic locations in order to assemble the MacGuffin, and since the goal is something other than "kill the hero", they're permitted to succeed.
This story had a similar structure. In each episode, the adversary (spoilers, "Timothy Yardvale" is actually the Valeyard in disguise) gets the better of the Doctor. And in the final segment, the Doctor is only able to thwart the Valeyard’s plan of universal domination at the cost of his own life.
And side note, Time Lords: I like the idea of the Doctor having peers. My preferred interpretation of the Time Lords are the godlike aliens of the Troughton era and not the hidebound fuddy duddies of Tom Baker’s run or the omnicidal warmongers of latter day Who.
A sense of scale
A big problem with Dr. Who is that the writers seldom have any idea of the scale of the universe. While we're fixing things, we're going to make the Daleks something scary. No more gimmicks. No more forehead penis Dalek puppet people.
I want Daleks that drop from orbit and obliterate London with their impact. I want to see them rise from the crater they made ten seconds after they hit and slice the Eiffel Tower in half from that location with something out of a God Warrior's attack run.
One Dalek should be a threat to every living thing on that land mass, three or more are an extinction level event.
Fuck Daleks that repeat their orders five times and flail impotently when someone sticks a hat over their eyestalk. If you say they're dangerous, prove it.
Josh’s Roadmap
I really like the structure of Veronica Mars/iZombie, where things get worse for the characters every episode, and the only victories they get are hard-won and small and temporary. Veronica Mars is, at its heart, noir, and Doctor Who, is about optimism, which is about as un-noir as you can get, but bear with me throughout this post, because I'm going somewhere.
I think that a season structured along these lines would do the show a world of good. For the first couple episodes, we establish the Doctor’s new home away from home. His UNIT HQ or Coal Hill school. A real community. The Doctor is a part of it, but not the center of it. He likes the people there and they like him. Say it’s an idyllic colony somewhere peaceful. Maybe have some of the popular characters from previous seasons. Have one or two stories set here in the early part of the season, but make this the place where the Doctor goes between adventures.
In episode five or six (assuming a thirteen episode season), show some rot at the core. Let’s go with Daleks.
The audience gets the reveal, but the Doctor doesn’t know yet. They’ve infiltrated the city. I’m tired of false utopias in sci-fi, so let’s say this really was a great place to live until the Daleks got there.
Have another few episodes without them, then bring them to the fore at episode eight. Make their goal something other than killing the Doctor. Let them succeed. Sometime he blunts their efforts (at great cost) and they only achieve a partial success, but every engagement moves them closer to victory.
Episodes nine, ten and eleven are open war. We start with a large scale base under siege episode, and escalate from there. It’s the end of Pacific Rim without the happy ending. It’s last book of the Chronicles of Prydain where characters you’ve come to love are killed one after another in doomed last stands, just to buy a little more time for their loved ones to escape. Sometimes they work, usually they don’t. Something like the quote from Babylon 5: The humans, I think, knew they were doomed. But where another race would surrender to despair, the humans fought back with even greater strength. They made the Minbari fight for every inch of space. In my life, I have never seen anything like it. They would weep, they would pray, they would say goodbye to their loved ones and then throw themselves without fear or hesitation at the very face of death itself. Never surrendering. No one who saw them fighting against the inevitable could help but be moved to tears by their courage…their stubborn nobility. When they ran out of ships, they used guns. When they ran out of guns, they used knives and sticks and bare hands. They were magnificent. I only hope, that when it is my time, I may die with half as much dignity as I saw in their eyes at the end. They did this for two years. They never ran out of courage. But in the end…they ran out of time.”
The Doctor builds his deus ex machina machines, but they fail or are countered or anticipated and turned to the advantage of the Daleks at every turn, and the story progresses, the goal of these devices evolves from stopping the Daleks to saving everyone in the colony to merely delaying the extermination of everyone in the colony, the latter in a series of desperate stopgap measures. In the end he’s beaten at his own game. They were just better than he was. He evacuates a handful of survivors to the TARDIS, and then ventures out for one final gambit. End of episode.
Open with a flashback to the city in its heyday. The Doctor in an happier time with people smiling and laughing, at a parade, in a park, beside a stream, next to a distinctive sculpture. After each cut, we flash to the current, ruined location of the memory, often with the charred remains of the survivors lying near.
For the final memory, we see the ruined sculpture, but when we flash forward to the present, the woman in the flashback is there, alive in the TARDIS. She places a hand on a shoulder of the Doctor’s distinctive coat, and speaks to him. Something along the lines of how he did what he could. He doesn’t answer. She speaks again, and this time the camera shows us the Doctor, to reveal an unknown figure, the regenerated Doctor. still wearing the clothing of the old.
To be continued...
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