Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Modified rapture!

7 comments:

richard_L said...

Do we sing "Ding, dong the witch is dead" now or later?

Jez Higgins said...

I said yay and punched the air. Surprised myself actually. My immediate thought thereafter was that I'd have to wait for the Rilstone verdict.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Balanced Rilstone verdict.

All of Moffat's stories have been at least "all right".

RTD's stories have been "all right" at best.

But Moffat is an unknown quantity as a producer.

I suspect dream ticket would have been "RTD stays on as producer, but someone restrains him from writing any actual stories and force him to commission four or five Moffat's per season."

But "Less fart jokes and more girl's in fireplaces" is almost certainly a cause for celebration.

Louise H said...

They are both gods, in their own ways. But RTD was starting to become Loki. I think there's a hint of the season 5 B5 problems creeping in there.

Moffat was one of two exec producers of Jekyll, as well as writer, which is a good start.

I hope RTD gets back to writing good stuff because I've just finished watching Queer as Folk which was brilliant.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Andrew, you complete fool: Stephen Moffat is the only person to have written a Doctor Who story that consists of NOTHING BUT fart jokes.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Come to think of it, "Curse of Fatal Death" is pretty much the template on which new Who is based,

a: A heartfelt affection for the show's icons (the Master, the Doctor) which expresses itself as a need to caricature them. The Master and the Daleks represented, not as they were, but as people remember them being.

b: A peculiar desire to sexualize the Doctor (engaged to a companion, ends up going off with the Master.)

c: The whole thing a big exercise in metatextuality, the death and rebirth of the Doctor representing the death an rebirth of Doctor Who

d: Fart jokes

Andrew Stevens said...

We shouldn't judge Moffat off of what he wrote for a comedy special several years ago as a parody of Doctor Who. It's certainly not reliable evidence of where he intends to take the show. I'd judge him off of the scripts he has actually written: The Empty Child, Girl in the Fireplace, Blink.

Of your four points, the only one which applies in those three is B, and this is my biggest objection to Steven Moffat. Moffat seems to believe that being sex-obsessed is what adulthood is all about, so in his view "asexuals" like the Doctor and Doctor Who fans are people who haven't yet grown up. What Moffat has not figured out is that being sex-obsessed is actually what adolescence is all about and most of us outgrow it. Adults learn how to restrain their sexual urges. Mr. Moffat badly needs to read the C.S. Lewis article We Have No Right to Happiness.

Moffat is a brilliant writer. Watch The Empty Child and marvel at how three time-traveling ships (the TARDIS, the pod, and Captain Jack's ship) all arrive on Earth during World War II and it's not a coincidence. Brilliant. Contrast with Mark of the Rani, where the Doctor, the Master, and the Rani all arrive on Earth during the 1820s and it's just one big honking coincidence. There were brilliant science fiction ideas throughout all three of those episodes. Moffat, you see, is an enormous geek who pretends he's cool for the cameras. It's that latter point which makes Moffat fairly unlikable, since he feels the need to slag off geeks at every turn so nobody discovers he is one. He throws in all the sex and adolescent nonsense to cover up the fact that what he's really interested in is the science fictiony bits. This is an upgrade on Davies who is genuinely uninterested in the science fictiony bits.