Day of the Moon

Can we all stop pretending this is Doctor Who? It's not. It's Lost, X-Files, Dollhouse or some other tedious American science fiction program pretending to be Doctor Who. RT Davies did a lot of things in Doctor Who that were wrong and messed up, but this Moffat stuff does not even seem to be trying to be Doctor Who. This is basically a new show.

Very little of what took place in the previous episode was resolved. What we instead get is more elements added; the stuff about Amy's child, the child regenerating, the mysterious eye-patched woman and the Doctor getting more physical with River Song. Just an increasingly complex set of story arcs just like we used to get in the X-Files.

Frankly, I don't care who River Song is, I don't care about Amy's baby or about any other story arc they want to introduce. However these things are played out, they will only give us one or two minutes of satisfaction when they are resolved and will probably be rather disappointing. I don't want to watch Lost. I want to watch Doctor Who, which is about the Doctor having adventures in time and space. It's not a show about River Song or Amy or any more irritating characters with big pointless story arcs that Moffat wants to inflict on us.

One of the things I love about Doctor Who is that the Doctor is a mysterious character. The show has always left us in the dark about him a good deal. We don't have to follow some complex story arc to find out the clues as to how he came to leave Gallifrey and who Susan's mother is because the show has never bothered too explain all this. We are left free to fill in the gaps with our imagination. I choose to believe that the Doctor's children were destroyed by Fenric. That's my personal non-canonical spin on it. I particularly liked the Cartmel era because of the way it dropped mysterious hints about the Doctor's identity. These hints would completely throw one's perspective on him, but they were not really part of some big unfolding story arc. The New Adventure Lungbarrow by Marc Platt made the mistake of turning the hints into a big revelation which ended up being rather a disappointment.

The fact that the Doctor is a mysterious character means that you can put him with companions who are relatively ordinary and who can be a counterweight to his esoteric person. In contrast, Moffat seems to be taking away our attention away from the Doctor and on to the supporting characters. He wants to give them all big, earthshaking storylines. Unfortunately, the show is not supposed to be about them.

The focus on story arcs has the tendency to trivialize the individual episode stories. The one or two episode nature of the BBC Wales series means that the individual stories are somewhat ephemeral already, but with so much attention being devoted to story arcs, they are further sidelined. This is very clearly seen in Day of the Moon. How much attention in that story was given to the Silence? What were their motivations? What were they actually doing? They appear in the first episode and then get defeated remarkably promptly in the next without us really learning anything about them. What we do learn is pretty unoriginal- they have been interfering in human history for thousands of years. Put them on the list, along with the Osirians, the Daemons and the Jaggoroth.

The opening of this episode is really annoying. We are treated yet again to the apparent deaths of the regulars. Moffat is rapidly proving that he is a one-trick pony, if we were not already aware.

On the positive, we get some great performances here. It is remarkable how variable Matt Smith can be. In the previous episode, his performance just did not fit the tone of the story. Yet in the very next episode he is quite stunning and fits the mood perfectly. He is a very hit and miss Doctor. All of the regulars shine in this one, even if Arthur Darvill seems uncomfortable in some of the scenes. I was also impressed by Kerry Shale as the mentally broken Dr. Renfrew.

This is mildly entertaining television, but it lacks everything that I love about Doctor Who. At least we get a nice reference to Warriors' Gate with the dwarf star alloy.