I wouldn't say its stigma really, if it'd been announced beforehand I'm not sure there'd have been the sort of angry reactions that came out when it was announced Catherine Tate was gonna be a companion. People do/don't like them but they are aknowleged as a fine pair of commedians. Pesonally I'm a big fan and have been for a long time.
But you couldn't sustain Blink every week, and don't forget, when it was commisioned nobody expected Blink to be a classic, it was written to fill a particular slot, to tell a story sans the Doctor for the most part.
And again you keep going on about asking difficult questions and going to emotional places. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances is effectively a love conquers all story, the same as Closing Time.
TGITFP is about lost opportunities and, effectively, a girl who waited...same as, oh the 11th Hour, the girl who waited and a whole host of other Smith episodes.
Blink is a timey/wimey parlour trick of an episode, same as The Big Bang.
For my money The 11th Hour, Vincent and the Doctor, The Doctor's Wife, The Girl who Waited and God Complex are as good as anything from the pre Smith era. And yeah only one of them's a Moffat tale, so what, the best episodes of the RTD era were rarely RTD episodes.
I think people forget as well that Moffat used to write one/two episodes a year, and didn't have the added stress of being show runner. Whatever your job try cranking out 3,4,5 times as much work and maintining the quality (and yes I fully appreciate that he doesn't have to run sherlock as well but RTD didn't have to juggle SJA and torwchwood, and Whedon didn't have to juggle Buffy Angel and Firefly).
If you reduce every episode to one high-concept line, sure, most episodes sound the same. But you and I both know that The Doctor Dances is far more than a "love conquers all" story. It has a very well-conceived London-during-the-Blitz setting, which the production staff do their darndest to make as realistic as possible. It has a truly heartbreaking and heartwarming mother-son relationship at the centre of it. It has a slow pace, and takes its time with characters, even the small ones. The Doctor himself has a fantastic character arc throughout. The kids with the gas masks are intensely effective and memorable. The whole thing just screams class, and originality, and tension, and emotion - it's a great hour of science fiction. Nowhere does it wink at the audience or act zany for no reason. There is no sense that it's pandering to a particular demographic. It's telling its story slowly, confidently, and with a lot of heart.
I think the point is, with this particular era, my beef is less with the actual plots (the one-sentence synopsis, say), and more with the storytelling approach, the attitude, the tone, and the pace. Even the basic plot of Dinosaurs was great. A guy who throws an entire crew into space to steal dinosaurs has the potential to raise lots of tension and drama. It was the attitude of the episode that I found so off-putting, and the fact that its interesting plot was used as a set-up for more zany running scenes, rather than an end unto itself.
I could give the same kind of response to the other episodes you mentioned. Blink is obviously more than a timey-wimey parlour trick. It's sad, very sad, and it's about the nature of time, and how our entire lives and relationships are basically at the whim of where and when we are in time - it offers a suggestion that we're all trapped, and have far less choice in our lives than we think. That's my reading, anyway. You may have a different one. But that's the point - the episodes can sustain a critical analysis, and people could actually disagree about the themes, because they are presented with subtlety and ambivalence, and aren't screamed out at you as often. There was a confidence in the material and the premise before, and a tone, and a mature attitude, during those earlier episodes that are largely absent now, I think. Not all "love conquers all" episodes are created the same.
I think you misinterpreted what I was saying. It isn’t that I don’t think Blink is fantastic, it is, one of the top five of Nu Who episodes in my opinion, I was questioning your assertion that Blink somehow has a deeper meaning lacking in Moffat’s more recent efforts.
You’re completely right, Blink is very sad in part, and is about lost opportunities and also about how people can make the best of horrible situations. What I don’t understand is how you can miss the similarly deeper meaning behind something like Big Bang, in fact the entire of the 5th series?
From the 11th Hour onwards the entire series is about a whole host of things. It’s about the loss of childhood innocence, it’s about running away from your responsibilities, about being afraid of growing up and clinging to your childhood to forestall that process of growing up, and it all comes together in the Big Bang where Amy understands that she can grow up, can marry Rory, and yet still hold onto her childhood. A great message for a show aimed at people of all ages, a show that once had a Doctor proclaim that there was no point growing up if you couldn’t be childish some of the time. And as beautiful as the moment between Sally and the old version of the copper is, the Doctor’s fond farewell to Amy before he goes off into oblivion tugs my heartstrings just as much.
And it’s about love, and about loving someone even if you can’t be together (Rory guards the Pandorica for 2000 years) about loving someone even if you don’t remember them (Amy’s tears for Rory in Vincent and the Doctor). You claim Moffat Who isn’t about anything, when it’s about the girl who waited, the girl who’s still waiting, and oh, look, this deeper meaning is yet again evident in Dinos in space! It’s clear that Amy is still torn. Part of her wants to snip the ties that bind her to the Doctor, whilst part of her doesn’t. She wants to have her cake and eat it, that’s what she’s wanted all along, but it’s becoming clear that she can’t have both lives. Hence the fact that at the start they complain it’d been a while since the Doctor dropped round, yet at the end they want to go home.
It’s actually amazing how much is packed into this ep. The on-going story of the girl who waited, a story about a man going too far (depending on your point of view), hell it even introduces us to Brian and gives him a self-contained little arc!
And by the way, you never answered my question from earlier, how is Moffat’s silly bollocks any different from RTD’s?
Re The Empty child/The Doctor Dances, I’ll give you that, a fab story!
