This post contains mild spoilers that range across all 5 series of Dr Who since it started in 2005.

Under the influence of Russell T. Davies, Dr Who was fab in more ways than one. Under Steven Moffat it’s a riot in a good way. I can’t be the first person, however, to feel that the 5th series of Dr Who lost something in the transition. This feels really odd to me, primarily because all of my favourite episodes from the first 4 series (with the notable exception of Midnight) have been written by Steven Moffat.

One thing is clear, Steven is a MUCH funnier writer than Russell and his episodes have a mechanical intelligence that far surpass all the other writers to have worked on the show since 2005. But something fundamental is definitely missing, or at least is not as ubiquitous under Moffat.

Obviously I’m grateful to Steven Moffat for a great number of things since he took over: first off only a single episode in the 5th series was set in London, which is an 86% decrease on the previous minimum by my count. What’s also nice is that Steven Moffat doesn’t have a hugely pervasive social agenda that he’s trying to push*; he just wants to tell great and entertaining stories and Dr Who is a marvellous platform for a storyteller such as Moffat. If you want the difference in their relationships in a nutshell, I would have to say that Dr Who, under Davies, was a comic drama, while under Moffat it’s a dramatic comedy.

What I feel is definitely missing, then, is the huge wealth of emotional intelligence that Russell brought to the show. I know this sounds weird, and I am male, at least I was the last time I checked, but I like to cry when it gets sad. Russell was great at this as someone he knows instinctively how to pull at the heartstrings, a particularly wonderful example is when Rose gets trapped in the parallel universe at the end of Doomsday, another is when the Doctor must erase all of Donna’s memories at the end of Journey’s End. It’s not that Moffat isn’t capable of this as we saw with his portrayal of the relationship between Reinette and the Doctor in The Girl In The Fireplace, but sometimes it feels like he can be too clever for his own good. That’s not a criticism I want addressed, but Steven has a wonderful habit of putting his characters in situations that are so impossible to get out of, that the only way to get out of them is to do something perfect, and by doing something perfect, everything ends up working out fine. Job done. On to the next problem. Something you found a lot in Russell’s episodes was that things tended to get quite messy. It’s not a coincidence that the phrase, almost a catchphrase for the series in fact, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…” barely gets mentioned in the 5th series.

And the funny thing is, is that you can’t even imagine the Eleventh Doctor saying it so sincerely. Matt Smith is extremely entertaining and he plays the Doctor wonderfully well, helped in no small part by the hilarious Steven Moffat, but emotionally he seems restricted to anger, wonderment, pride and frustration (plus some others but these are the main ones). He certainly doesn’t do compassion or humility in quite the same way as David Tennant did. Again this is not a criticism I want addressed, because I think this particular Doctor has a lot of mysterious energy that the Ninth and Tenth Doctors didn’t quite have, but, along with Steven Moffat’s writing, this goes some way to identify what’s been lost in the aforementioned transition.

In a way, this post is responding to the reported loss in viewing figures for the new Season: down 1.2 million from a strong average of 7.2 million while David Tennant was the Doctor. So I’ve argued that there’s been a significant, perceptible reduction in the emotional heft that we’ve been used to in Dr Who, which poses the question: why am I so hopeful about the series’ continuation? Because I honestly believe that Steven Moffat is genuinely capable of the same kind of heft that Davies was, it’s just that I feel Moffat’s style is a much more slow-burning breed of storytelling. As if his method is like carbohydrates as opposed to Davies’ fat and sugar…. umm… illustrative yet unfortunate analogy. If there were not already evidence obvious enough for this, I would point directly to the fact that the series never conclusively ended; as if The Big Bang was just the mid-season cliffhanger. I have a huge amount of faith in Steven Moffat, I sincerely hope that my faith isn’t misplaced, although that certainly wouldn’t stop me watching.

*I’ve mentioned that RTD had a social agenda he was pushing during his time as lead writer on Dr Who and you may disagree with this for a variety of reasons. I should point out though that I didn’t say it was unwelcome or harmful in any regard but seriously, I haven’t seen a more blatant agenda since a few seconds ago when I looked at the calendar on my wall. If you watched the first 4 series (as of 2005) of Dr Who and didn’t spot anything like what I’m suggesting, don’t worry about it, it really isn’t that important.

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