![]() Then the old footage morphs, all clever-cleverlike in that maddening Moffat way, into a modern recasting, and we felt our blood pressure shooting up. We start by referring back to The Tenth Planet. The result is a distillation of pure Moffaty horror. It's as if he's made a glass avatar of himself-as-Who-writer and puked into it all the crap that's been driving us up the wall these many years. It's nothing more than a giant spangly epitaph.Įven that wouldn't be so bad (yes it would, but work with us here) if in arranging said self-congratulatory tour, Moffat hadn't also repeated almost every mistake he's made all along. As a result, what this actually is is a self-congratulatory tour around the greatest hits according to Moffat. He's already tied everything up and there's literally nothing left. If you sat down to watch Twice Upon A Time under the impression that this was going to be an episode with the usual accoutrements, such as plot or an actual reason for existing, you would have been sorely disappointed. It's ego, ego, ego, stamped all the way through it. You know how we were coming into this with some regret for the end of the Moffat era? Well, our regret swiftly morphed into a raging desire to kick open the TARDIS doors and boot Moffat out through them.Įgo. Which brings us rather pertinently back to Twice Upon A Time, so we're going to stop being statesmanlike now. Because what has ultimately sunk the Moffat reign is Moffat's own ego. Moffat's tenure is an object lesson in why it's a bad, bad idea to a) have the showrunner also writing and b) have a showrunner too powerful to listen to criticism. And time and again they suffer from the exact faults that have plagued their predecessors. And that's what's been so frustrating about the Moffat years: he can do it, yet time and again success has slipped through his fingers So many episodes start with a hook that's quite grippy, only to fall over themselves. Of course, the ignominious thud part isn't exactly ideal. We'd far rather watch something that tried to do something big and failed than see a mediocre, hackneyed plodder. Obviously it would be nice if the vast majority of the episodes thus aimed didn't fall to earth with an ignominious thud, but, and we mean this sincerely, big points for trying. But despite all of those drawbacks, what we've always liked about his approach to Doctor Who storytelling is that, in a global sense rather with any particular episode, he aims high. Not only have we done that at tedious length multiple times in the past, this episode gives us an opportunity to visit many of them again, so we'll get to that part later. We're not going to go into a long peroration about all Moffat's faults here. We're hardly going to deny that Moffat has disappointed us far (far, far, far, far, far) more times than he's entranced us, but balanced against that, Moffat's tenure has included a number of our favourite episodes of the entire series. ![]() Some of that's about our lack of optimism about his successor, but much of it Moffat has earned all by himself. As a result, the Twelfth Doctor doesn't top the list of our favourite Doctors, but only a yoghurt would deny that he is nevertheless way, way up there and, when given the rare opportunity, is spine-tinglingly, hair-raisingly brilliant.Īnd Steven Moffat? In the hiatus since the end of the last season, we found to our astonishment we were actually quite sad at the thought of his leaving. Nor did much of it truly exploit Capaldi's talent, and given that they had an actor who can kill it like few others, it's a crying shame that far too often they used a diamond to prop up a wobbly table. There was some squirmingly ghastly comedy, he was vulpine and dark for a while, then it all seemed to be an act, but nothing was consistent for long and none of it hung together. There's been far too much writing that grated against his Doctor's personality and even more than just didn't seem to get what that personality was. While Peter Capaldi basically Doctors like a boss at every opportunity, those opportunities haven't come often enough for us. We haven't been quite as enraptured by his Doctor as a lot of people, granted. Obviously, between the two of them it's a lot easier to feel boohooish about Peter Capaldi leaving. (This is the part where we are measured, balanced and statesmanlike, so don't blink as it doesn't last long. And with Twice Upon A Time Moffat has handed us a priceless gift: he made it so annoying that any regrets we had about the end of either tenure were snuffed out faster than a candle on a mountain bike.Īnd that's a shame, because mixed though they might have been with many other emotions, prior to viewing this episode we really did have some sadness about the departures. Twice Upon A Time is an episode freighted with significance, drawing to a close as it does not only the tenure of the Twelfth Doctor but also the reign of showrunner Steven Moffat. ![]()
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