Archive of Our Own

It’s good once in a while to admit that you were wrong. So although everyone else on the planet decided what they thought of series 8 long ago, I thought I should just write a note to say: I was wrong about series 8. Sort of.

I made a lot of assumptions about what series 8 would be like based on “Deep Breath” and my knowledge of series 5-7. Many of these assumptions turned out not to be true. For instance, I expected that the clockwork robots lifted from "Girl in the Fireplace" would become the basis for the series 8 arc, whereas series 8--thankfully--really dials back the arc plotting, and the only thing from "Deep Breath" that remains important throughout the series is Missy (shudder). I also expected that Missy (shudder) would become the next River Song/Tasha Lem/Irene Adler; and though she shares the standard Moffat Woman morphology, her dynamic with the Doctor is fortunately very different, for reasons anyone who's already seen "Death in Heaven" will appreciate. IMHO, “Deep Breath” is still a comparatively weak episode and really undersells the series that follows. In terms of overall quality, series 8 is all right. I think I like it better than series 5 and 6. Certainly it knocks seven shades of shite out of series 7, although we all know that wouldn’t be hard. The series finale, “Dark Water”/”Death In Heaven,” is unquestionably the best series finale Moffat’s ever done, and I’m throwing in “Day of the Doctor” as well. 

So ultimately my verdict, in digest form, is: in series 8, Doctor Who works a lot better as entertainment than it did in 7. This is largely because of two things. Thing one: better character development for the companion. Thing two: At fucking last, in the Doctor Whoniverse, dead is once again dead.

Spoilers follow.

“And I’m looking at this, the same way I was looking at Mulder on that cruciform table, and thinking, I dunno. I kind of liked this better when [the Doctor] was a scrappy little eccentric rattling around in his own little world doing what he could with the crappy resources available to him, and not the Magical Great Man that everyone is required to spend their whole lives adoring.” –from Doctor Who, The X-Files, and Messiah Syndrome, by Me

So I said that the series 8 season finale is the best one Moffat’s ever done. That is in large part because it reverses some really bad trends established in Moffat’s series 5-7 finales. The climactic scene of “Death in Heaven,” the one where the turning point comes, is not worked out with all the scale and noise of a big-budget action film. Instead of trying to make everything bigger and bangier, as Moffat does in finales 5, 6, and 7, Moffat makes it smaller; indeed, for a moment there, it becomes almost Beckettian in its minimalism, as four people in a graveyard argue with each other. And the Doctor finally comes to the realization that so many of us were trying in our virtual way to pound into Moffat’s head: that he’s neither the Antichrist nor the fricking Messiah, and that he was never meant to be. “ I am not a good man!” he says, “I am not a bad man. I am not a hero. And I’m definitely not a president. And no, I’m not an officer. Do you know what I am? I am an idiot, with a box and a screwdriver. Just passing through, helping out, learning. I don’t need an army.”

Well done, Moffat. You’ve finally figured out how to write your main character. Shame it took you four series and that so many people had to suffer along the way, but still, the fact that you can learn ANYTHING gives me hope, after series 3 of Sherlock.

Seriously. I’ll put it in rhyme for you, Moffat, so it’s easier to remember: Fool, fool, back to the characters is the rule.

I know, it’s hard. The special effects have gotten so much better and you are all so in love with them and it is pretty cool what you can do now. But like Star Trek and like all shows developed before the 1980s,Doctor Who was never about the sfx. It couldn’t have been. Cause I mean really, this is what they were using for special effects, when this show started out:

The TARDIS and the starship Enterprise have this much in common: they were powered by people. The actors’ performances; the writers’ imaginations; and the spectators’ desire to visit other realities that could never be represented in an illusionistic and convincing way. It is perhaps not an accident that one of my favorite episodes from series 8 is “Flatliners,” which you can read, if you want to, as a meta-joke about Classic Who’s special effects (including tiny TARDIS models and tricks with scale that you can do without troubling the CGI department too much). “Flatliners” seems to me to recover some of the old spirit: it’s very dangerous and whatnot, but it’s also kind of fun, and Clara seems to be enjoying the weirdness of what’s happening to the TARDIS even as she is freaked out by the danger. 

When Series 8 is better, it’s because everyone’s remembering that this show is character-driven. I said in that messiah syndrome piece that the companion’s flattening-out is a side effect of the Doctor’s aggrandization; the companion just becomes the worshipper-in-chief of the Male Hero. Series 8 finally shows that someone at the top realized that companion has to be a real character. The one way in which I will say “Deep Breath” is representative of what follows is that Clara gets better character development during her five-minute standoff with the creepy clockwork robot than she got in all of series 7 plus the specials. Her relationship with Danny doesn’t get much screen time, but it is made real by the writing and the performances, and when Danny gets run over in “Dark Water,” that is legitimately heartbreaking.

Also very important is the fact that Danny, ultimately, remains dead. 

At some point in season 7 I was moved to talk about why it was a major problem that, in Moffat’s Whoniverse, dead was not dead. Logically, of course, it’s just offensive when people (and, in the series 5 finale, entire universes) come back from oblivion for no good reason. However, it’s also a problem emotionally:

“The knowledge and dread of death is at the bottom of a lot of our emotional responses. A permanent separation (such as happens with Rose at the end of Season 2 or in a different way with Donna at the end of season 4) is painful in part because it reminds us of the great tragedy of being human and mortal: that nothing is permanent, and that not only will you die, but so will everyone you love. Our knowledge that our mortal and vulnerable bodies can be permanently harmed or killed at any time is what makes watching characters in peril exciting to us….When dead is not dead, you’ve got MAJOR problems in terms of getting an emotional response out of your audience. On some level, for us, death is what’s always at stake. No death, no stakes. No stakes, no feels.”

And that, IMHO, is what “Dark Water”/”Death in Heaven” is really about: bringing death back into Moffat’s Whoniverse. The basic concept of using humanity’s fears about death as a way of sneaking an army of Cybermen onto earth was more or less lifted from the series 2 finale, “Doomsday,” in which people believe that the dead are appearing to them but it turns out to be Cybermen pushing through from another dimension. What really matters about the series 8 finale, however, is not the mechanics of the world-domination plot, but the way it is grounded in what humans REALLY fear about death. Not the creepiness of the skeletons in tanks or the dead arising from their graves–though both effects are used lavishly–but the fear that we or our loved ones, after death, will enter into another existence about which we can know absolutely nothing, and which might actually be really awful. My daughter, just the other day, said spontaneously at bedtime that she wants to be cremated because she doesn’t want to be turned into a zombie. She understands, of course, that zombies are not real; but the idea of it really, really bothers her. She asked me whether I want to be buried or cremated and I said I didn’t know, I didn’t think it would matter too much to me so it should be about whatever my loved ones want. The scheme Missy’s come up with exploits the fear that actually, it matters a lot, because we can never fully leave our bodies behind. “Death in Heaven” plays on the fear, of which we cannot quite rid ourselves, of an afterlife too horrifically literal, in which we remain somehow connected to our lifeless bodies and trapped in a deathly existence that can only be misery. Early Christian conceptions of hell, for instance, assume that the dead retain some kind of corporeality and that they will still feel pain when tortured. 

But “Death in Heaven” also works the other fear we have about death, which is that it is nothing more or less than loss. And this is why it is so important that Danny doesn’t come back. It’s kind of cheating that Moffat still sneaks in the idea that there is a real afterlife and that Danny’s there and he’s probably OK; but the fact that Danny sends home the civilian he killed instead of himself is really important in re-establishing the emotional stakes. It’s finally true–again–what Twelve tells Clara at the beginning of the episode: “The dead don’t come back.” Which is, for all kinds of reasons that “Death in Heaven” demonstrates, really kind of a good thing.

So. Is series 8 great? No. Moffat’s still gonna Moffat. I particularly hate the very personal and Moffat-specific cheapness of his take on Doctor Who’s anti-war and anti-violence etho.: Danny is a great character, and he earns our sympathy partly because he’s been a soldier and he understands how destructive and wrong war is for everyone involved; but in the end, the show never gets outside the logic that creates war in the first place, which assumes that we will always need soldiers and killers because violence is the only way to deal with violence. Just as Rory gets turned into the Faithful Centurion, Danny in the end earns his redemption by accepting his soldier identity, playing on it in his big final speech to the cyber-army in order to convince them to destroy themselves. That to me is really the most tragic thing about the finale–that Danny, who worked so hard personally to get away from his soldier persona, is forced into an existence where he has nothing else left BUT his soldier persona. And that this in fact remains true even in the afterlife, where he has to pay his debts before he does anything else.

I don’t have time to really go into the extremely limited picture “Death in Heaven” gives us of the ethics of war, but let me just say this: the idea that a British soldier who fought for any length of time in the recent wars in either Iraq or Afghanistan would only have *one* civilian death on his conscience is a fantasy, and not one Moffat should be pandering to. And one other thing: Danny’s victim never speaks. He’s not even given a name. He is there as a mute emblem of civilian suffering. He is not given the opportunity to talk back to the man who killed him, or to establish any identity other than Danny’s Collateral Damage. And that shows you the kind of failure of imagination that perpetuates war.

Also Moffat still can’t apparently conceive of the Doctor-Companion relationship except in the context of heterosexual romance and masculine competition for The Woman. So there’s that.

Still. It does give one hope for the future. In a way.