Two Doctors, Some Companions, & A Detective

Just as pretty as Tennant: Matt Smith’s Doctor is just fine. But the show isn’t what it was. Yet.Compare some characters with me:

David Tennant’s Doctor.

Matt Smith’s Doctor.

Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock.

Karen Gillan’s Amy Pond.

Bernard Cribbin’s Wilfred Mott.

If you’re at all familiar with good television (there is such a thing) you know where this is going.

It’s going to Wales, where some of the best television has been produced in the last few years.

BBC Wales produces both the wonderful sci-fi series Doctor Who and the phenomenal Sherlock, a 21st century reboot of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series.

And if you’re a connoisseur, you might know too that Stephen Moffat is the producer of both.  He took over Doctor Who when producer Russel Davies left at the end of the fourth season when David Tennant’s Doctor regenerated into the charming Matt Smith.Don’t ask. If you don’t know, I can’t explain it.

After one season of vague discontent, I have concluded that Matt Smith is just fine as the Doctor.

But Stephen Moffat is not just fine as the Doctor-Maker-In-Chief.

He was a terrific writer for the show: his trademark was what my daughter and I think of as the creepiest repetitions in television history.  Watchers of Doctor Who will recognize Moffat’s outstanding creepiness in phrases like:

• Are you my mummy?
• Hey… who turned out the lights?
• Donna Noble has left the library… Donna Noble has been saved.
• Prisoner Zero will vacate the human residence or the human residence will be incinerated.

Great writing.

But the scripts of Moffat were in the hands of Russel Davies, who (along with a terrific team of directors who shared his artistic vision) focused intently on characters.

I think that Moffat is primarily a story kind of guy.Cribbins as Mott: with acting like this, how can you NOT let the camera love on him a little? He gives you whole stories with his eyebrows.

Davies was willing to take a few precious seconds of film-time to develop sympathy for apparently-unimportant characters.  Bernard Cribbins, a wonderful actor playing Wilfred Mott in the last episodes of the Tennant / Davies era, is told by a ghostly figure (Claire Bloom) to arm himself: Davies and director Euros Lynn lingers over Cribbins arming himself with an old service revolver in such a way that we see the fine line between Cribbins’ importance to events and his senility (an old man carrying a deadly weapon at the urging of a phantom guide?).  And in the end, the complexity of Wilfred’s place in the world is as important as what happens to The Doctor.  Davies believed in the characters as much as the plot.

Moffat though is a bit of a split personality, interested in the details about people that function as cogs in the plot; but not the details that serve the more important business of making us care deeply for them.    Under his leadership (both as writer and producer), the Doctor’s companion in the fifth season is a girl named Amy Pond whose importance to the universe is fairly absolute.  And the most hopeful moments in the fifth season were the most superfluous ones to the plot: for instance the lingering of the camera over her wedding dress and over her careful reflection over her own engagement ring.  Such moments are far more rare than they were in Davies’ time, and the season is weaker for that economy.Whassup, Holmes? With a name like Cumberbatch, he’s got to be good, and he is. Martin Freeman hits the mark as Watson.

The story is just fine.

But the camera doesn’t tell us what we need to know to care that much about Amy.  Too rarely do we get to see the small details that make us care about her and her friends as people.

But this post isn’t to slam Moffat: I think the new Sherlock series is positively outstanding.  But it’s concerned with facts, cold observations.  That’s where the interest lies.  And there’s a little too much similarity between the way the camera shows The Doctor and Sherlock seeing the world.  Matt Smith’s Doctor might comfort a crying little girl or always give help when asked: but the camera only records him saying so.  We don’t linger over the characters the way The Doctor’s eyes must do.

In Sherlock’s brilliant mind, such focus on the data is a virtue.

But The Doctor’s motivation is people, character, and compassion.

Update on Monday, June 20, 2011 at 9:17AM by Otter

After two seasons of Moffat's who, I have some conclusions:

(1) He loves story-arcs, not good stories.

(2)  He does not love his characters nearly enough, and so neither does The Doctor.

Comments

[~'mouse]

...not even remotely as pretty as Tennant :p