Posted 01 May 2011 - 11:17 PM
To be fair, Steven Moffat is insanely clever. No question that he's one of the best writers television has ever produced.
Mucking about with time isn't a cliche with DOCTOR WHO, it's the idea at the core of the show. Few writers have ever taken that idea to its logical dramatic conclusions; preferring (whether by design, by not seeing the creative possibilities or by budgetary necessity) to use the TARDIS as a simple means to get from one place to another.
Moffat takes the basic concept of a man who travels through all of time and space and says, "Okay, what does that mean? How would the Doctor experience time? What aspects of this concept can be explored or expressed for better drama than they ever have been before? Considering the format of the show, what can we do to make it even better?"
Certain ideas and themes crop up now and again. That's common in any writer's work. Russell T. Davies seemed to love presenting the Doctor as a tragic figure for example. However, when Moffat revisits something it's always to go in a completely different direction than we've seen before with it:
-The first episode of last season showed us that Amy was getting married the next day. I thought, "Didn't we see a wedding a couple years ago with Donna and 'The Runaway Bride'?" Then I saw the season finale, and realized nope, Moffat had bigger plans in store all along.
-The black cube at Area 51 seems like another inescapable prison for the Silence to keep the Doctor ...until we're inside it and we realize that it's actually part of the Doctor's plan and is in reality a room to keep the Silence out.
-The spacesuits in the library two parter contained the skeletons of those who'd had their bones picked clean by the Vashtinerada. The spacesuit in this episode has a different use and purpose and is seen in the context of the moon landing of 1969. Also, DOCTOR WHO is a science fiction show. Spacesuits are common features in its history.
-Moffat's first two parter featured a child with a gas mask repeatedly asking for it's mother. This one features a child in a spacesuit pleading for help. That's similar but then it's done to different effect and in a wholly different context that we aren't entirely aware of yet.
-In the first episode of last season, Amy asks the Doctor why he wants her to travel with him. He replies breezily, "No reason." Meanwhile he's looking at a monitor examining the crack in her wall. He's lying. Not telling her everything. Which is confirmed in the finale when he tells her his reasons for inviting her all along.
-At the end of the second episode of this season, the Doctor tells Rory and Amy that instead of going to go look for the little girl we're going to go have adventures. While saying that and unbeknownst to them... he's looking at a scanner showing that Amy is both pregnant and not pregnant at the same time (Schrodinger's Womb?!?!). He's already on the job about the little girl in the spacesuit and he's not telling them everything. AND they know what his future with the little girl in the spacesuit is and they're not telling him everything. Effing brilliant.
I like Moffat's monsters because they tend to have a quality that makes them universal and are scarier for it. The statues that can move only when you're not looking at them. Flesh easting shadows. An alien race that you only barely notice in the corner of your eye and immediately forget once you've turned away. I'll take that over Daleks and Cybermen any day.
We're at the beginning of the story so we don't know what the Silence's plan is. However, we do know that they have enslaved humanity for thousands of years and by their own admission, We have ruled your lives since your lives began. You should kill us all on sight, but you will never remember we were even here. Your will is ours. The Doctor takes them at their word and figures out a way to use their own power against them. Q.E.D. and standard operational procedure for the Doctor I'd say.
I know some people who prefer the RTD era to Moffat's but not me. DOCTOR WHO is finally as clever and mindbendingly weird as I've wanted it to be.
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