And the reason it should be spoiler-free is that it's not actually about the final episode of the seventh series of this rebooted Who. Yeah. Bet you didn't see that one coming. It is a twist of which Steven Moffat would be proud.
First of all, before I get started, I'd like to direct your attention to an article called 'The Central Problem with Steven Moffat's Doctor Who'. Read that, inwardly digest, and consider the expressed opinion carefully.
Done that? Good. Because it's my opinion that the writer of the article has got it all the wrong way round.
It's true to say that Doctor Who has been many things over the years, and each showrunner has put their own mark on the show. Partly this has been the result of 'political' machinations, behind the scenes at the BBC (viewers have often complained about it being too violent or horrific over the years, so I've found the reboot episodes written by Mark Gatiss especially piquant because he's a huge fan of Horror as a genre and brings an almost Hammer-like flavour to his stories), but mostly it has been the writers' vision of who the Doctor is that has shaped the show. This has been no less true of the RTD and Moffat years.
Russell T. Davies brought the show back, eight years ago, because he was a fan. To him, the Doctor was the centre of the show, the reason for the show. His love of the Doctor is what fuelled every series, eclipsed all other themes, and this was brought sharply into focus when Christopher Ecclestone departed the show and made way for David Tennant.
Over the years, I've posted quite a bit on my feelings toward Tennant's Doctor, and the actor himself. The long and the short of it is that I really didn't like either. To put that in perspective, I didn't dislike David Tennant before his turn as the Doctor. The year before RTD resurrected Doctor Who, he turned up in a brilliantly quirky bit of British TV called Blackpool, in which he played a policeman sent to investigate the dodgy dealings of a local entrepreneur. He showed more dramatic range in that - even when not singing - than he has in almost anything since... But his portrayal of the Doctor could be where it started to go wrong.
That having been said, if it's true, then it's the fault of the writers and directors as much as it is the actor's... and I'm sure I've complained about the quality of writing and directing on the show during the RTD/DT era. The stories frequently didn't make any sense, the Doctor was too heavily idolised and, when you consider the purists' complaints about the change in the nature of the Doctor's relationships with his companions, I cannot fathom how some people believe this started with Moffat (Amy Pond pouncing on him the night before her wedding), when it was clear that the relationship between Tennant's Doctor and Rose Tyler was much more than platonic long before their little chat in Bad Wolf Bay.
Tennant's Doctor was mercurial - that, sure enough, is the nature of the Doctor, and has always been. The problem, for me, was that his range ran from Smarmy through Broody to Shouty, and his Smarmy phases tended to go that little bit too far (let us not forget several references to the Doctor and the Virgin Queen). That's not to say his other phases didn't... but the Smarmy phases just didn't suit the Doctor, and often just weren't appropriate for what RTD always called a kids' show. Part of the issue there is that the show never really was "a kids' show", it just so happened to be a show that kids enjoyed. Also, the disturbing sexual references didn't stop when the Doctor wasn't around - Love & Monsters concluded with a none-too-subtle hint at the goings-on between a man and the paving slab into which his girlfriend was transferred when the Abzorbaloff (a creature created in a Blue Peter competition to create a Doctor Who monster) was defeated.
The RTD/DT era is where Doctor Who got 'sexed up', there can be no question of that. While Captain Jack Harkness, the pansexual, time-travelling conman, was introduced while Ecclestone played the Doctor, the character came into his own alongside Tennant, moreso than in his offshoot series, Torchwood. I don't know about anyone else, but I was rather left with the impression that Rose Tyler became the Doctor's travelling sexual outlet, and it was that more than anything else that coloured his treatment of subsequent companions. Consider how catty things became when Rose met Sarah Jane Smith.
After Rose came Martha Jones, a character with huge potential - a medical doctor herself, here was someone with the smarts to deal with the Doctor at something approaching his own level. Sadly, RTD and the other writers decided that she came along that little bit too soon after Rose's forced departure, and so she was left forever pining - because, obviously, she loved the Doctor... everyone loves the Doctor - while the Doctor kept her at arms length. Some have said that the whole point of the Martha Jones arc was that the Doctor was grieving and didn't really want another companion... and yet he gleefully invited Martha along at the first opportunity. There was something very deliberate in his teasing in the opening episode of the third series.
And the hero worship didn't diminish in the face of the Doctor's palpable scorn. Despite episode after episode of ill treatment and disinterest, Martha ended up 'walking the Earth', spreading the Doctor's legend so that, at a key moment in the Master's plot, the outpouring of positive energy, of belief in that legend of the wonderful man who saves the world, time and time again, and never asks to be thanked, somehow transforms a pint-sized, shrivelled CGI caricature of David Tennant back into the full-sized version, his arms outstretched like some kind of floating Jesus-figure, ready to take on John Simm's pantomimic Master.
Does that remind anyone else of Tinkerbell's death and resurrection in Peter Pan?
But that's not the worst of it... Anyone remember that Easter special that was a thinly veiled rip-off of Pitch Black featuring a London bus and lacking any sense of payoff? Lee Evans played a scientist? The one that got dragged off, repeatedly chanting "I love you!" at the Doctor (Tennant at least had the good grace to look uncomfortable at this). It struck me almost immediately that Evans' character looked - and behaved - remarkably like an interpretation of Russell T. Davies, finally confessing, after however many episodes where no opportunity was missed to remind the audience how "wonderful" the Doctor is, that the show had degenerated into little more than a wank-fest of Doctor-worship. Now consider Tennant's final episode where, having been killed not by the Master, but by one of the many humans who loved him, he travelled space and time burning bridges - not only between the Doctor and his companions, but between RTD and the series he helped bring back to our screens - before the most execrable regeneration scene in the history of the show (and, yes, I'm including that one with Sylvester McCoy in a curly blond wig).
So... 'The Central Problem with Steven Moffat's Doctor Who' is that it's all about the Doctor?
Of course it isn't. If Steven Moffat has a great sin in his running of Doctor Who, it's that he's made it all about the assistants. The Doctor becomes our means of solving their mystery.
Think about it, his first two series were focussed wholly on 'The Girl Who Waited' - literally everything that happened had some connection to Amy Pond, from the crack in her wall and her mysterious disappearing family, to the forging of River Song - Amy's daughter - into a weapon against the Doctor. Next up, we've had Clara Oswald, 'The Impossible Girl', somehow appearing at points in time where she meets and, more importantly, somehow saves the Doctor.
Moffat brought Time Travel to the fore, too - not least in that Christmas special where he was playing the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future to an embittered Scrooge-like figure living with the regret of a love not lost, but in permanent cold storage. Virtually every previous series treated time travel - and the TARDIS - as nothing more than a means of getting from one story to the next. Under Moffat, the TARDIS has become a character in its own right, just as important as the Doctor, despite there being nothing new in the suggestion that, if the TARDIS almost never takes our heroes where they want to go, it always gets them where they need to be.
And the idea that it is Moffat who has been focussing on how the Doctor affects the universe and the people around him is clearly absurd, because that very theme was stated quite openly and clearly (not to mention quite repetitively) in the RTD/DT era. That theme may have been central till the very end of 'The Girl Who Waited' arc, but it's been a core part of Doctor Who since the very beginning - maybe not visibly in the TV show, but certainly in the minds of the fans. The whole responsibility/consequence debate is neatly summarised in a few lines from Tom Baker's Doctor in 'Genesis of the Daleks':
"Just touch these two strands together and the Daleks are finished. Have I that right? ...some things could be better with the Daleks. Many future worlds will become allies just because of their fear of the Daleks... the final responsibility is mine, and mine alone. Listen, if someone who knew the future pointed out a child to you and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives, could you then kill that child?.. Do I have the right? Simply touch one wire against the other and that's it. The Daleks cease to exist. Hundreds of millions of people, thousands of generations can live without fear, in peace, and never even know the word Dalek... But if I kill, wipe out a whole intelligent lifeform, then I become like them. I'd be no better than the Daleks."Likewise, the debate on whether or not his actions over the years have gone too far - refer, if you will, to the rant from Davros in 'Journey's End' (reboot series 4), wherein he very clearly compares the Doctor to himself :
"The man who abhors violence, never carrying a gun, but this is the truth, Doctor: you take ordinary people and you fashion them into weapons... behold your Children of Time, transformed into murderers. I made the Daleks, Doctor, you made this."...or the Christmas special, 'The Waters of Mars', where he arrogantly decides to rewrite history, thus forcing one of the people he 'saved' to force it back on its original path by killing herself. Even earlier than that, in 'The Fires of Pompeii', where he's persuaded to rescue one family from the volcano, only to later find himself - and/or the TARDIS - represented as some kind of hearth-god.
Addendum #1 7/6/13: Also, let us not forget that RTD dealt - very effectively, I thought - with the impact on those left behind when someone goes gallivanting around the universe, in his very first series. As Christopher Ecclestone's Doctor took Rose back and forward in time, to distant worlds and to Victorian Cardiff, we saw Mickey's heartbreak and recovery, a direct and very personal effect the Doctor had on the people around him. Caught up in the adventure, Rose barely realised what was happening to her friends and family and, when she found out, she had become so detached from that life that she found it quite hard to genuinely care.
And the idea that it's a problem for the Doctor to be the absolute centre of his universe is just plain daft... Everyone is the centre of their own universe, we all affect our worlds around us every day, to greater or lesser degrees. The show is called 'Doctor Who', it's always been 'about' the Doctor. In any TV show, the protagonist(s) will be the central character(s), particularly if they are the titular character. Any cutbacks in screentime for characters other than the eponymous hero are more likely due to the requirements of the 45-minute 'American hour' format of the show, when it previously had a full sixty minutes per episode and, often, more than one episode per story.
There are plenty of valid reasons to complain about the Moffat era... though I'd quibble such complaints as 'wafer thin characters' and 'one-dimensional women', because the requirements of the episodic TV format are such that one cannot give each and every character a full backstory. I have discussed at length with my girlfriend that the relationship between Amy Pond and Rory Williams was not skimped, as such, but we only learned what we needed to learn to enable us to extrapolate the rest. In my opinion, the only point on which he failed was when we learned - quite suddenly - that they were going through divorce proceedings. One the one hand, it seemed contrived, something forced to allow a particular plot element to unfold... On the other hand, it was a reasonably able demonstration of a very real and very sad fact that some couples just don't communicate. Rory thought Amy didn't love him as much as he loved her. Amy thought she was shielding Rory from her grief at having lost the only child she would ever have. If Moffat had stated that early on, within the context of the story, its impact would have been lost, so he just had them arguing - arbitrarily, on one level, because that's how some relationships do degenerate - until they finally got to a point where the necessary information exploded out of them.
There's another significant difference between Moffat and RTD's handling of characters. Moffat doesn't feel the need to spoon-feed characterisation to his audience. We're not told who's good and who's bad (Moffat actually seems to prefer working within the grey areas) and, more importantly, we're not told who to like. We get to read between the lines (both as in dialogue and behaviour) and make up our own minds. He doesn't even ask us to like or trust his protagonist.
Davies, meanwhile, often seemed to have little idea of which of his concepts could stand as stories in their own right (most recently demonstrated in Miracle Day, with the historical 'alien parasite plot', the 45 Club and the Soulless getting a few minutes apiece), so episodes often got crammed with so much 'story' that there wasn't a story anymore, just a sequence of character scenes, action set-pieces, and one-liners. Again on the subject of Miracle Day, surely it's more than a little worrying if the writer and star have to introduce each episode, telling the audience how high the stakes are, and how emotionally charged the episode is.
The cleverness of Moffat's Doctor can be a bit grating... sometimes it's almost as if he's playing dumb or not paying attention at the beginning of a story just so the plot can actually happen before he saves the day in the nick of time. Sometimes, with varying degrees of success, this is presented as the Doctor misreading a situation ('Hide' was a rather jarring example of this, with its Silent Hill-style twisted 'monster'-that-wasn't).
Addendum #2 7/6/13: Moffat also doesn't shy away from grandiose displays of emotion that somehow just don't work... Such as the conversation between Amy and Rory, in 'The Angels Take Manhatten', just before they leap from the top of a building to escape the Weeping Angels. There, certainly, a greater exploration of their relationship in the show might have helped... but the show isn't called 'Amy and Rory Pond'.
But, ultimately, my main complaint with Doctor Who under the leadership of Steven Moffat is that the 45-minute 'American hour' format just isn't enough to do any of the stories justice. What started, all those many years ago, as an episodic drama evolved into a show where a single story might span four or five episodes (an entire series in its later years before the reboot). Then some of these 'wafer thin' characters could be fleshed out more than is strictly necessary for the telling of the story, and there wouldn't be such frequent need for deus ex machinae.
But Moffat isn't attempting to turn the Doctor into any kind of god, quasi- or otherwise... if anything, he's trying to demonstrate his flaws and mistakes in ways that Davies occasionally seemed to want to, but never really focussed on to the same degree, perhaps because it would have made his Doctor somewhat less "wonderful". And while the Davies era was stuffed full of tertiary characters who almost invariably loved the Doctor, Moffat's gives us far more who openly express doubts about him. Moffat/Smith's Doctor is mercurial in the same way as many of the earlier regenerations (particularly the version played by Tom Baker, for many the quintessential Doctor). He references his earlier selves in a way that Davies version never did, which brings Moffat's run a sense of consistency that Davies' lacked.
That said, consistency isn't always Moffat's strong point - witness the peculiar behaviour changes in the Weeping Angels... and he actually created them!
I would never describe myself as a Moffat Apologist (I actually detest Sherlock for the most part, but then I grew up with Jeremy Brett's interpretation of Holmes, and feel that no-one will ever compare to him, and that the period setting is important)... I am simply a fan of Science Fiction generally, and specifically a fan of Doctor Who. I started watching it in the Tom Baker years, catching a few reruns of the William Hartnell (snore), Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee years once in a while. I've liked all of them to some degree (though the production values in the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy years took a real nosedive... and I damn near gave up on the reboot during the Tennant years, with Donna Noble almost making up for Rose Tyler and Martha Jones) because I like the show and the ideas it explores. I also rather admire Moffat's 'sleight of hand' because it rewards those who actually pay attention to what they're watching.
Addendum #3 7/6/13: I would also argue that Moffat has gone to great lengths to rein in the 'sexing up' of the show. Sure, there has been some snogging... and it has been unnecessary... but Matt Smith's Doctor has outright stated that he is not interested in his assistant(s) in that way. Tennant's Doctor only became that way with Donna, having been quite curt with his denials with Martha.
Also, on the subject of time travel being the way to escape from escape-proof prisons, I have this to say: Isaac Asimov - 'Gimmicks Three'. (Look it up. It's in a collection called 'Earth Is Room Enough').
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