Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Series

[DWF]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

You forget that Capaldi was seen in the anniversary special and he did seem to know to pilot the TARDIS, so I'd say it's only temporary.

Well, we have no idea where that scene in "Day of the Doctor" fits within Capaldi's timeline yet. It could be well towards the end of his run for all we know.

Post regeneration ammesia as I've said doens't last and it's highly unlikely we'll ever know where in his time frame Day Of The Doctor happened.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

I think this Doctor may well be lighter, more of an innocent, by contrast with those roles. That's the impression I got from his brief debut scene this week as well; he came off as a quirky figure with a tenatative and polite speech pattern ("Just one question: Would you happen to know how to fly this thing?"), not unlike Patrick Troughton.

I'd like to see Capaldi play the Doctor as a kindly, avuncular type. Oh, maybe he tries the Malcolm Tucker thing once, but then he says, "You know, Clara, that screaming just isn't me." And then he turns into someone not unlike DuckTales's version of Uncle Scrooge.

 

[Christopher]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

^Okay, now you need to give us fan art mashing up the TARDIS and the Money Bin.

 

[DWF]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

Moffat talked about Capaldi's Doctor going though a "regeneration madness" so I think it'll be alittle while before he settles down, but screaming and yelling might be part of it.

 

[diankra]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

I suspect he may well be Troughton-esque... in the sense of being nice, and childish, and the most ruthless b!!!!!!!d of the lot underneath it.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

^Okay, now you need to give us fan art mashing up the TARDIS and the Money Bin.

Christopher, if you didn't know, I plotted out a Doctor Who/DuckTales story a few years ago because I thought it would have made a great comic book. I never pursued it, though, because getting Disney, the BBC, IDW, and BOOM! on the same page would have been impossible.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

Here ya go:

 

[Nerys Myk]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

 

[Hartzilla2007]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

and the most ruthless b!!!!!!!d of the lot underneath it.

Considering the sort of stuff the 10th Doctor did that would be kind of scary.

 

[The Wormhole]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

I think a lot of people are assuming Capaldi will go dark because that's what he did in his most famous role. But I think it's the other way around: Capaldi will have to distance himself from that famous role so that people will see him as the Doctor instead of Malcolm Tucker. Or Torchwood's John Frobisher, who also went very dark. I think this Doctor may well be lighter, more of an innocent, by contrast with those roles. That's the impression I got from his brief debut scene this week as well; he came off as a quirky figure with a tenatative and polite speech pattern ("Just one question: Would you happen to know how to fly this thing?"), not unlike Patrick Troughton. Granted, Smith was trying to be Troughtonesque, but I never really got that sense from him because he was so bombastic and cocky. So far, the Twelfth Doctor reminds me more of Troughton than Smith ever did. Although I freely admit I have an inadequately tiny sample to go by.

I can't quite articulate what it is, but there is something about Capaldi's scene that makes me think he's actually going to be similar to Colin Baker. I see him as being manic and abrupt but with a soft side toward his companion(s). Just my take on things, anyway.

 

[Kelthaz]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

I started watching Doctor Who with the Tom Baker era-- those days when Robert Holmes penned some of the series better episodes. I'd love to see nuWho take on more of that kind of feel instead of being the soap opera "As the TARDIS Turns..."

Of course, I'm probably in the minority as most folks seem to love Moffat's run.

There's a few of us out there not happy with Moffat's run. Of course, I didn't much care for RTD's run either. I prefer the Classic series. Io9 recently wrote an article comparing Old and New Doctor Who which I thought was quite interesting.

In the old show, the Doctor solved problems; in the current show he helps people, and sometimes himself.

The key point from the article is that modern Who is about the emotional impact the story has on the characters while the classic series was about telling a logical, coherent science fiction story. It's okay if the episodes make absolutely no sense as long as the right emotional chords are hit -- The Rings of Akhaten and Last of the Time Lords are the perfect examples of this and two of my most hated Who episodes. RTD did this too, but Moffat took this style into overdrive when he turned the show into a nonsensical fairy tale.

I do enjoy the better developed characters of the modern era, but I deeply, deeply wish that the show would make sense. I'm hoping that Capaldi, or if not him a future showrunner, will combine the best of both eras.

 

[Christopher]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

Here ya go:

Umm... okay. I was thinking more along the lines of an exterior shot playing off their similar shapes, but that's... interesting.

The key point from the article is that modern Who is about the emotional impact the story has on the characters while the classic series was about telling a logical, coherent science fiction story.

Err, I think you're overstating the point there. The io9 article said the original series was more driven by narrative and had less depth to the characters and relationships. It said nothing about "a logical, coherent science fiction story," because that's not what the original series was. There's always been a liberal dose of nonsense in the show, especially in the fantasy and random handwaves that passed for science. And the plotting has often been driven more by the need to generate a cliffhanger every 25 minutes and have the characters running back and forth tackling a series of weekly obstacles to pad things out until the final episode. It's always been a fun and clever show, to be sure, but it's not exactly Asimov or Niven.

 

[Kelthaz]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

The key point from the article is that modern Who is about the emotional impact the story has on the characters while the classic series was about telling a logical, coherent science fiction story.

Err, I think you're overstating the point there. The io9 article said the original series was more driven by narrative and had less depth to the characters and relationships. It said nothing about "a logical, coherent science fiction story," because that's not what the original series was.

You're right, I misrepresented the article. The part about "a logical, coherent science fiction story" was pulled from a discussion in the comments. My mind didn't separate the two.

And the plotting has often been driven more by the need to generate a cliffhanger every 25 minutes and have the characters running back and forth tackling a series of weekly obstacles to pad things out until the final episode. It's always been a fun and clever show, to be sure, but it's not exactly Asimov or Niven.

That's true, but I'm not talking about hard science fiction. Power Rangers tells "a logical, coherent science fiction story". The big bad sends down a monster with a unique gimmick, the teens work towards solving the problem of the week, and their work directly results in their inevitable victory. Moffat's Doctor Who doesn't do this.

For example, In the Rings of Akhaten, a monster the size of the sun is defeated by showing it a leaf. From an emotional perspective this makes sense -- the lost life of Clara's mother is important to our characters. However, from a logical perspective, it's completely nonsensical. Most Fairy Tales operate the same way -- they make no god damn sense, but the problems and solutions, insane as they are, serve the moral tale.

 

[Christopher]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

^Seriously? Power Rangers coherent? If it were coherent, then the bad guys would send down all the monsters at once and have them start out in giant form, and the Power Rangers would be dead by sunset. Failing that, since the Rangers usually make no effort to hide their secret identities from the villains -- only from civilians who pose no threat to them -- a coherently written villain would bomb their houses while they slept, and bam, no more Rangers. PR is built around a very silly, contrived formula by design, because it wouldn't be able to exist as a weekly show if its premise made any sense. It's pure fantasy and arbitrariness as much as anything Moffat has written. It's totally a fairy tale.

"The Rings of Akhaten" is about a monster that feeds on memories and is defeated by an overload of sentiment. Power Rangers does things like that all the time. For instance, in the recent season there was a monster that fed on people's dreams so that they had no hope and ambition and fell into comas, and one of the Rangers also fell into a coma but went into a dream dimension where the other despairing victims' minds were imprisoned, whereupon she encouraged them to hope and dream again, thereby freeing them from the monster's control and weakening him enough for the Rangers to destroy him. That's exactly the same kind of storytelling, using the plot as a flimsy framework for a story about emotion.

I don't disagree that Moffat's approach to the series has been even more fanciful than usual for Doctor Who. But your counterexamples are, frankly, terrible.

 

[Venardhi]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

That Power Rangers plot still sounds better than "The Rings of Akhaten."

 

[JoeZhang]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

I can't quite articulate what it is, but there is something about Capaldi's scene that makes me think he's actually going to be similar to Colin Baker. I see him as being manic and abrupt but with a soft side toward his companion(s). Just my take on things, anyway.

I would read nothing into that brief scene as it is pretty likely they are still figuring out what his character will be like.

 

[Venardhi]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

Hasn't Moffat said before that he mostly just writes The Doctor as The Doctor regardless of who is playing him and leaves such choices up to the actor? Obviously there are a few distinctions with the catchphrases and such, but the major bits are for the performer to decide. I might not agree with him on that, but the first Smith series certainly could have been performed almost line for line by Tennant.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

Hasn't Moffat said before that he mostly just writes The Doctor as The Doctor regardless of who is playing him and leaves such choices up to the actor? Obviously there are a few distinctions with the catchphrases and such, but the major bits are for the performer to decide.

Yes, Moffat has said that. And that's true even of things like "The Night of the Doctor"; I could "hear" Tennant or Smith saying those lines.

The one exception, in my opinion, is the War Doctor, who was (with a few exceptions, like when he first meets Ten and Eleven) written as something other than the Generic Moffat Doctor (TM).

I might not agree with him on that, but the first Smith series certainly could have been performed almost line for line by Tennant.

I think that remained true in the Moffat-penned episodes at least through "The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe." I thought Moffat's freelancers did a better job writing the eleventh Doctor as a separate character from the tenth than Moffat did.

 

[Christopher]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

Indeed, I felt that the Tenth Doctor in "The Day of..." was too similar to Smith's Doctor in the way he talked and acted.

What I recall of Capaldi in the talk show a few months back where he was introduced as the new Doctor is that he struck me as a charming, kindly sort, and I thought I'd like to see him play the Doctor in that vein. He can certainly play dark or nasty characters, but that's just acting; indeed, you often hear people say that the actors who play awful characters are frequently extremely nice in real life (e.g. Roger Delgado). If it's mainly the actors' own personalities that shape the Doctor, I think we may well end up with a charming, kindly, avuncular Doctor.

 

[Mr Awe]

Re: Steven Moffat Talks About The "Raw", "New Direction" For The Serie

I think a lot of people are assuming Capaldi will go dark because that's what he did in his most famous role. But I think it's the other way around: Capaldi will have to distance himself from that famous role so that people will see him as the Doctor instead of Malcolm Tucker. Or Torchwood's John Frobisher, who also went very dark. I think this Doctor may well be lighter, more of an innocent, by contrast with those roles. That's the impression I got from his brief debut scene this week as well; he came off as a quirky figure with a tenatative and polite speech pattern ("Just one question: Would you happen to know how to fly this thing?"), not unlike Patrick Troughton. Granted, Smith was trying to be Troughtonesque, but I never really got that sense from him because he was so bombastic and cocky. So far, the Twelfth Doctor reminds me more of Troughton than Smith ever did. Although I freely admit I have an inadequately tiny sample to go by.

I can't quite articulate what it is, but there is something about Capaldi's scene that makes me think he's actually going to be similar to Colin Baker. I see him as being manic and abrupt but with a soft side toward his companion(s). Just my take on things, anyway.

That's actually my take as well. And, it fits with some things Moffat has said previously. In fact, I thought Capaldi's lurching was going to lead into him attacking Clara (ala Peri). Maybe next episode.

Actually, I'm really hoping that's not the way things are heading though!

Mr Awe