Doctor Who: A Good Man Goes to War?

The Doctor is never cruel or cowardly.
Terrance Dicks

1) Introduction
'You can imagine how much I hate them. It's only fans who do this, or they call themselves fans. I wish they could go and be fans of something else...I just hope that guy never watched my show again...”
Steven Moffat

Although it is not your show, is it Steven? Doctor Who is a mythology which, over the years, has saturated into the public consciousness and become part of people’s lives. The idea that you own it in any way is as absurd as wanting people to not be a part of the cultural landmark that is, and always was, bigger than you. I doubt it actually matters anyway; after all, you have done as much as possible to wreck the collective mythology.
The old show can be defined be the Terrance Dicks dictum “The Doctor is never cruel or cowardly.” As the show progressed the mythology expanded but the core principle and motivations remained unchanged.
So let me make one thing abundantly clear, what has been going on over the past seven weeks has nothing to do Doctor Who or the mythology it had created. It has the common archetypes we all know but they are merely scenery to a dangerous and devolved interpretation of everything it professes to continue.

2) Ethos
Looking at the title A Good Man Goes to War it is difficult to know who the good man is. It is not the Doctor. The side bar quips, though fanciful, attest to this fact. The Doctor as presently portrayed is not a hero or neither does he have any similarity to the ‘moral magician’ envisaged by Hartnell. Instead he breaks the Terrence Dicks dictum by being both cruel and cowardly.
Recently Moffats Doctor has re-written a mans life to suit his own ends, organised genocide, used the sonic screwdriver to go on a shooting spree with his girlfriend, killed an enemy that was beaten and at his mercy, made a pretence to care about the rights of duplicate life forms just so he can find their weakness and executed one with the knowledge he has acquired (with the now lethal sonic screwdriver) These are not the actions of a good man, or Time Lord, and lack the sense of morality, justice and compassion the Doctor previously stood for. There is little difference between this and the hypocritical liberal and faux morality which sits at the core of the Star Trek franchise. In many senses this new Doctor has more in common with American action heroics than any of his predecessors. Consider 24. This is a show about an anti-terrorist agent who kills and tortures to stop a mass-cataclysm from occurring. It works via an end justifies the means philosophy made plausible by post 9-11 paranoia. Justice and compassion are made redundant by the primitive notion of fear of the unknown. This fear of the unknown be it political, cataclysmic or philosophical is at the very core of right wing ideology. Any chance of change, evolution, progress and liberty become castrated through the right wings belief that maintaining present harmonies, no mater how disharmonious they are to the majority of people, is an end which justifies the means. The idea that the suspension of civil liberties or traditional notions of justice are inevitable in the fight against evil is fundamentally totalitarian.
This is at odds with the Doctor Who I knew and loved. The Doctor was about endless wonder, embracing the unknown and initiating change. The Doctor of old taught us to investigate and question notions of war, death, oppression, political autocracies. Violence was not a solution to a problem but part of it. Yes the Doctor had to fight, but it was not portrayed as heroic and the Doctor himself was always disdainful of violence as a resolution to conflict. This is not some pacifistic mumbo-jumbo, rather an Orwellian principle. If the present series looks to action heroes for its defining ethos, the old show drew from the principles of social justice and freedom that inspired Orwell. Yes, such principles have to be fought for, and the old Doctor did indeed make a stand, but they are hard won and the fight will always carry consequences. In essence any of the criticisms directed at JNT and Saward during the eighties can be multiplied and directed at the new show with relative ease. The problem is the people who made those very criticisms, Gary Russell, Paul Cornell, Chris Chibnall et al are the very people who have paved the way for something not just worse but something which is morally bankrupt.
The new Doctor has resorted to murder not reluctantly but casually, and even with a triumphant sense of glee – violence and the ending of life are shown to be the easiest route to resolving any conflict or problem. The new Doctor is not about change or progress, but a one dimensional reaction to any given situation and resolution through the most primitive of means.
The ethos at the core of the present show is not heroic, nor is it moral or ethical; the new ethos is banal and diseased.

3) The Eleventh Doctor – Goofball Ass
Now the Doctor stopped being the Doctor a long time ago, but only now are the reasons bordering on the perverse. The greatest problem with Tennant was the need for him to be liked and accepted by the media peer group and fellow luvvies. Where this need came from it is hard to say, possibly the man himself, the BBC or even the production team. This resulted in the lead writer turning the show away from Doctor Who and into a romanticised portrayal of David Tennant in space. This is why almost nothing interesting happened in his tenure and the series was mainly coasting it on the charm of the leading man. It is also worth noting that all of Tennant’s major drama roles since Who have continued to be soft sell compromises designed to keep him in the public’s affection. True. I’ll recant the day I see him playing a paedophile struggling to find redemption (although such a drama is unlikely to ever be made, I know – it got rejected last year)
Alarm bells should have begun ringing like the cloister bell back in the Tennant days. The very first time we see the Doctor he is a renegade, a criminal on the run and hiding out in a scrap yard. Subsequently he became a traveller is space and time, exploring infinity, making friends and enemies along the way. He was never part of a group or clique and made a stand for justice and liberty. When Tennant took over something changed. The Doctor was no longer a lone traveller, he was a soldier. He fought in a war. This very notion was an anathema to the Doctor of old. Even the Eccleston Doctor seemed unlikely to be a soldier or have fought in a war, indicating he was the buffer stopping two forces tearing creation apart. By making the Doctor a soldier Tennant and RTD made him a conformist and, at the end, a snivelling coward “I don’t want to go”. These were traits the original character had always struggled against.
Now we have Matt Smith. He seemed like a nice guy and a better option at first, less of an ego getting in the way of the actual programme. Yet I am now at the point where my reaction to seeing him goof around borders on violent anger. I seriously want to smash the television at every forced expression and speech. Matt Smith is not just bad at being the Doctor, he is not the Doctor.
Part of his failure stems from immaturity. An easy accusation to sling considering his age but one proved by his performance and interviews. This is the man who summed up the Doctors reaction to the personified Tardis as “being a little turned on” The comment is as stupid as it is inane. The character of the Doctor is a 900 year old alien yet, according to Smith, he gets a boner as soon as some busty wench starts flirting with him. It is a juvenile take on a pre-established character.
Now it would be tempting to state he plays the character like a hormone crazed adolescent but that only covers part of his failing. His mannerisms border on the goofy and the delivery of many important lines lack brevity, gravitas or any sense of belief (the delivery of lines like “Another Ood I failed to save” are just offhand and lazy) In essence the character he portrays has all the grace and nuance of Scooby-Doo. Each gesture over compensates in cartoonish mannerisms, struggling to convey a forced sense of eccentricity but failing and becoming an exaggerated caricature. There is little difference between the real Matt Smith Doctor and the cartoon shown in the ident before the show.
What I cannot forgive is the way he is complicit in portraying a Doctor who is not only cavalier with the lives of others but prone to play with them as well. The Doctor never, ever played with life or lives, be they of friend or foe. The McCoy Doctor was often accused of such cruelty, which is odd because it was nothing of the sort. The Doctor in season 26 forced Ace to confront her past and become a healthy and emotionally stable adult – such growth is often painful and he stood by her as a true friend. It was only in some of the later fan fiction that the character became intent on wounding people (Nightshade, Love and War and to be honest I stopped reading as a result of those fiascos) Smith allies his Doctor with a casual cruelty only previously seen in the series villains. It does not matter if he is re-writing a mans life or toying with a sentient substitute of his companion before murdering her, the only principle this Doctor is becoming able to express is one of sadistic power at arbitrarily judging or killing those he encounters. These are principles the old show stood against and mean that Smith is not playing the Doctor but some gross perversion of the character bereft of any defining goodness.

4) Anti-intellectualism
It has to be argued that the series is pursuing an agenda of anti-intellectualism with an almost relentless vigour. If anything it is a reflection of the wider media attitude. There is a movement toward a rather cynical reductionism in television, how else can you explain the offensive cultural wasteland that is BBC3? Part of the problem lay with people like Mark Thomson, the BBC DG. He ruined Channel 4 by turning it into a cynical and creatively inbred shadow of its former self and he is now exercising his talent for reduction at the BBC. His contribution to our culture can only be paralleled by what Napoleon did to Venice.
Doctor Who is no longer separate to the whims of manipulative media execs but a part of their plans. As stated previously, in the days before the BBC realised the show could be a cash cow for exploiting the Harry Potter generation there was a relative freedom. Television, film and even literature is now becoming devoid of diversity. The pressures or need for commercial success mean progress is slowed to the point of stagnation; you have the same idea reproduced over and over simply because it is safer option than the new. Should something different flourish or find popularity it is turned to the ends of conformity. This is why Doctor Who, Robin Hood, Merlin and even Sherlock are indistinguishable from each other. The old series simply got on with doing what it did on its own, sometimes well and at others poorly but it rarely compromised its integrity. We now have a show without integrity.
This can be seen in the casting of Matt Smith and Karen Gillian themselves. Rather than doing something brave they simply got people not too different to the time before but younger. Media execs perceive audiences reject change or something different so, as a result, TV rarely progresses these days. We have a pair of youngsters cast for the fact that they will not alienate an audience; a primarily younger, toy-buying, audience. Yet the ratings are now at a level which saw the BBC describe the show in the eighties as “tired” and “languishing in a backwater”. The resolution to this will be painful and made by media executives with no interest in substance or drama or what has really been happening. As the series slumps various management non-entities will decide it is the show, the format and its archetypes, which are to blame, not the content as it stands. They will look to re-invigorate the series. The obvious answer they will leap to after many, many lunches and meetings will be to cast a female Doctor. Now I used to have a problem with this. I once viewed it not as a question of equality but an act of ideological appropriation. These days a female Doctor does not bother me, if anything Mary Tamm already proved it would work. If done properly, say by casting someone like Miriam Margoles, the show could return to the heights promised by Christopher Eccleston (The Unquiet Dead not included) and beyond. Yet, it will not be done for the right reasons or with the concept of substance in mind. I can see the trailer now. Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans marching, then they stop and move back slightly. Cut to a plastic faced, celeb wannabe, twenty-something who's acting career consists of a stint in Eastenders. She looks to the camera in a sultry manner and says “Hello boys...”She points the sonic screwdriver/gun at the screen and fires.
The arrival of Moffat was always going to be a problem for concepts such as depth and substance. After all this is the man who took a group of bland stereotypes (the cocky one, the frigid one, the wheeler-dealer etc) and made a name for himself by calling Press Gang a drama. Zombies in gasmasks, clockwork robots, living statues, living shadows/fishes/things that come out of books are all designed to provoke a base emotional response, fear. It is the basest form of writing, lacking substance and integrity. As I have also pointed out before Moffat is the man who wrote a story associating books with flesh eating shadows/fish – a demonstration of anti-intellectualism in itself. The idea that the show has to scare is based on the hype and misunderstanding of a bunch of right-wing puritans who thought they knew better than everyone else. In truth Doctor Who was about dealing with the nature of evil, violence and fear, and never tried to scarify a generation of children. To try and promote fear in an audience, which is what Moffat has been doing since the show returned, is manipulative and dangerous. Now he is in charge.
The mechanics of fear have taken a step back to allow a crazed and incongruent didacticism to run amok in its place. What we see is an insulting disregard for storytelling and emphasis on the nature of spectacle. Day of the Moon is a prime example. There is no thread of story or character relating to the previous episode. Suddenly everyone is on the run, being hunted by the man who was helping them. Then everyone is dead, oh no they’re not he was really helping them. There was no dramatic reason, nor story motivation for this opening – if anything it actually conflicted with everything which preceded it. Instead the writer, arrogantly out to impress and dazzle, believed a casual audience would accept the break in logic and congruency to whoop and holler like idiots on a rollercoaster. However simply telling an audience this is happening right now because a bearded Matt Smith tied to a chair looks dramatic (even though the context had nothing to do with drama) or having an alien species state “you should slaughter us all on site” rather than do anything remotely evil just smacks of complacency. Yes one of the Silence killed one person but considering the suffering and appalling conditions prevalent throughout the world this hardly justifies genocide. It is writing that believes those watching do not have the intelligence to think in anything but the moment, hence incongruent events are dictated to the audience rather than a story being told.
Segue: Yes, one day I would like to get through a whole article without mentioning story vs. plot and narrative congruency.
The rant about spoilers only serves to highlight how Moffat is concerned with style and spectacle over substance. Twists such as the regenerating child, Amy being pregnant, kidnapped or substituted are merely pyrotechnics. They should embellish the drama, not become it. Ultimately it falls back to what can be called the principle of writing for instant gratification. Rather than having a portmanteau like story where the drama and characters unfold gradually and congruently, everything has to be about the very second the viewer is watching. Failing to believe an audience has an intellectual capacity beyond that of a goldfish means there is a constant need to keep making attention grabbing scenes, even if they do not create a unified whole. Adhering to this philosophy can only distort and lessen.

5) The Beast with Eleven Backs
Contrary to the belief of the modern fan sex and sexuality were subjects discussed in the old show but without having to wave flags or resort to Carry On style humour as we see at present. Black Orchid, Kinda, Caves on Androzani and Survival all touched on the issues of sex and sexuality.
Now Caves of Androzani is deceptive. It would be easy to mistake it Sharez Jek’s motivation as lust. It is nothing of the sort. If CoA is about anything it is about the need for intimacy; the scars Jek carries are psychological and prevent him functioning as a human being. Kinda is about rape; Survival has the lesbian thing going on. The subtlest treatment is shown in Black Orchid. What appears to be an Agatha Christie pastiche is actually about sexual repression. For instance Tegan and Nyssa can dance = mature, healthy sexual development but Adric cannot dance = immature and sexually naive. It also discusses the Doctors relationship with Nyssa. The use of the harlequin costume (a nice metaphor in itself for trickster/trickery/duality) and the attack on Nyssa creates a parallel in the dramatic story. The Doctors relationship with Nyssa is based on equality, respect and mature notions of sexual dynamics. The son however is a tragic figure, desperately trying to reclaim the love and life he lost, yet the expression of this manifests itself in unhealthy ways (obsession, physical attack) The beauty behind the writing here is that, like most real people who could be described as psychologically wounded, he is both vulnerable, being in need of help and unpredictably mercurial at the same time.
So, in a small two parter from the eighties you have a dramatic and psychologically aware portrayal of sexuality. The new series cannot claim to reach this level of subtle storytelling or maturity. If anything, the way sexuality has been employed over the past year is regressive and prurient.
Casting our minds back to The Eleventh Hour what we see is a stream of innuendo, sex gags and porn references. This in a show primarily aimed at children. Now, as the above demonstrate, it is possible to discuss such issues without resorting to dressing the companion up in a kinky outfit and having her menaced by a penis monster. Moffat could get away with this immaturity in Coupling because (a) it was a comedy and (b) it was so ridiculous that any notion of maturity or psychological realism was negated from the start. Yet in a drama it is problematic simply because it begins to expose a rather distorted view of sexuality and women.
The greatest flaw in his writing is juxtaposing a girl with her sexually active, older self. Although, be clear that this is not in anyway paedophilic and would be inaccurate to suggest that it is. If anything it is a poorly thought out but re-occuring motif. Yet it is part of the mechanism which shows female characters being defined by their sexual relationships with men. The teenage mother in the zombie gas mask story – she is a single teenage mother and the plot defines her as so; the girl from The Girl in the Fireplace falls in love with the Doctor; Sally Sparrow gets pulled, twice by the end of the episode; River Song and her fixation with the Doctor (STOP PRESS this now turns out to be a relationship with a woman the Doctor knew as a child aka The Girl in the Fireplace); adult Amy Pond is first seen wearing a kinky outfit and working as a kiss-o-gram, gets married, pregnant. The women here are defined as characters by their emotional and sexual relationships with men, not as women or people in their own right. The image of Amy imprisoned in a cell because of her biological function is not so much a plot device but a metaphor for the way Moffats writing presents women.
If anything Moffat is a product of the industry he works within. Phil Collinson once stated it was obvious that the Doctor would fall in love with his companion. Well, no Phil. It was not obvious and it was not necessary. The reason it happened was because the modern conception of drama focuses on relationship issues and bourgeoisie neurosis, neither of which have anything to do with real drama. The idea of a platonic relationship between a man and a woman is not seen as dramatic; without the sexual dimension to the relationship there is no way writers/directors/producers can provoke the emotional response in the viewer. Once again, trying to deliberately manufacture an emotional response in an audience is the basest form of writing. In the modern world of TV drama it would be impossible to make a series like Tenko simply because it did not concern itself with voyeurism or worries about rising mortgage rates.

6) The Death of Imagination
The award for the most patronizing and ignorant comment made about the present show goes to a poster on Digital Spy who indicated that a general audience may get lost by the complex science fiction ideas in the new show. Well done that person for incorrectly assuming that a general audience is stupid, that the new show is complex and that it has anything remotely to do with science fiction.
New Doctor Who does not represent modern science fiction. Read Olaf Stapledon, Christopher Priest, Iain M. Banks, M. John Harrison or even Ian McDonald and you will see the genre is not so much an end in itself but an opportunity to explore what it means to be human. There is a limitless drive to question, explore and discuss – much like Doctor Who used to.
In his Cosmic Trilogy C S Lewis, a man I probably differ with on many issues, used the concept of scientific romance to portray his faith as universal. Now, this is unfashionable in the modern secular climate but Lewis did something interesting. In his first novel Out of the Silent Planet he makes a point of showing us that our fears of alien monsters are a projection of our own inadequacies as a species. The real aliens are more civilized than the human characters. Charles Chiltern did the same in Journey into Space. In essence they link the curiosity of wonder with goodness, intelligence and progress.
What the new show gives us is something quite different. Rather than inspiring the imagination it becomes limited by the weight of our fears. The unknown is portrayed as dangerous and that different to us is almost always hostile. The present obsession with plot twists, shocks and cliff-hangers does not suggest we look outside of ourselves with wonder but forces us to live in an insular and momentary present.
This is not in the tradition of science fiction or designed to make us think about the wonders of the universe. At the age of five I remember being exhilarated by Warriors Gate and Castrovalva. Even to the point that, after part three of Castrovalva, I ran around the house for two days pretending I was caught in a space-time trap. The complex notions in these stories were easily absorbed thanks to fantastic storytelling, they fuelled my imagination. Even the popular fan whipping horse known as Time Flight fascinated me when I realised people perceived two levels of reality.
Yet timey-wimey paradoxes are not exhilarating simply because they exist for the sake of existing and justifying a didactic plotline. There is a definite lack of romance or imagination in the new show. What the production team do is create ideas but in themselves ideas are both common and meaningless. For example...
Idea for a story - Doctor Who: Angels in the Endless Dark
A motley group of ships have made a pilgrimage to a newly discovered planet. Some believe it proves the existence of God, others the Devil. The planet is a violent red gas giant. On its surface the gasses form contorted and screaming faces, each marked by bulbous teeth and eyes. Some claim they hear voices from the planet. One in particular, a religious leader, decides to move his ship into the gravitational pull of the planet. As the ship is sucked down reality begins to warp and characters begin to experience aspects from their past, some welcome and others not. The religious leader becomes a possessed marionette, held up by his tendons and used as a mouthpiece by some unknown force. The Doctor is given a chance to move the ship out of orbit or face the consequences. He succeeds but many of those aboard are psychologically scarred and reduced to madness.
Now, it would probably take an hour or two to turn this into a script. It is a basic John Wyndham rip-off where some ancient, Lovecraftian power has stirred in its eternal slumber. Yet, beyond the basic level of horror fetishism there is very little, if anything, there.
The show as we now see it is not only an anathema to what went before but stands against the developments in science fiction. Merely re-writing a story line from Beauty & the Beast with a shock tactic plot or set-piece pyrotechnics is not complex. It is not about concepts, curiosity, wonder, imagination or what it means to be human. It is a sequence of moments designed to engage the attention and nothing else. As I said, ideas are common. Substance is the defining factor and there is no substance in Doctor Who anymore.

7) Radio Times 4-10 June 2011 – Deconstruction of an Interview.

“The only clue to Moffats genius...”
“...does that make Moffat a sort of everyman?”
In an institution like the BBC there seems little ability to intelligently and objectively assess. The above comments made by the interviewer demonstrate a schism between honest journalism and misleading gossip. It is pathetic and pandering to describe Moffat as genius. The interview is not an article but an advert designed to inflate the ego of the man himself and persuade the audience to agree, even though there is no qualification of the claims made. Moffat is no genius, even in an age when the term is over used its use here is just plain sycophantic.

‘“...it has to be the level of horror that a man with ridiculous hair and a bow tie can deal with.”' As a philosophy this proves just how lacking the modern show is in morality or substance. For a start the show was not obsessed with horror but the Freudian concept of the uncanny. This was used as a means of motivating a drama which sought to demonstrate that, with courage, obstacles can be overcome. The obsession with horror in the Moffat era is no different to the aims of the Hollywood splatter factories – use base notions of fear to generate shocks for the emotionally stunted and nothing else.
What is more disturbing is the reference to the Doctor. He is now defined by his hair and a bow tie. Forget the notions of character or the figure the old mythology created, the Doctor as perceived by Moffat, and portrayed by Smith, are a superficial figment based on what the Doctor should appear to be like rather than how he should act.

‘“Matt Smith is signed up forever.” ‘
My first reaction was horror and then profound depression. Then I realised Smith is not signed up forever. The series is pretty much dead already and for the first time in my life I would not be sorry to see it gone and you know what, this institution the BBC believe they have will be forgotten by the audiences they are targeting.

“There have been a few grumbles of late about the plotlines and their perceived complexity.”
It is patronising to describe a complaint as grumbles and questions the intelligence of anyone who voiced the opinion to use the word perceived. The interviewer is again so busy fawning on behalf of the BBC publicity machine that she acquiesces to dismiss such complaints without representing them. It is not an issue of complexity but congruency and respect for the basic notions of writing and storytelling. As I have previously said Moffat is not writing drama but factious exercises in instant gratification which lack story, character and sense.

‘”And what a great role model for children...”’
Really? I suppose the message is that as long as you’re goofy, smile and waffle on like a twat then the odd bit of murder and cruelty doesn’t matter. As I have been trying to explain for several pages this new Doctor Who made by Moffat, this new Doctor portrayed by Smith, is no role model.

‘”And the Silence. You can’t remember them, so that’s good.”’
The Silence are an enemy designed to scare rather than be interesting or an exploration of immorality. They represent something quite nasty, essentially their evil stems from living on earth and nudging human evolution every now and again. The actual fear the Silence represent is the blind prejudice against immigration. If anyone had actually thought, just for one second, about substance rather than provoking fear in the audience this could have been avoided.

‘”When the Doctor is standing at Stonehenge speaking to all the spaceships, that was good.”’
My, you are modest Steven but no, it seriously was not good. It was arrogant and fatuous. It simply represents the idea that the Doctor can become the object of almost messianic idolisation without having to do anything. It is only since Tennant arrived that the Doctor needs to constantly remind the audience that he is clever or dangerous or capable of destroying entire fleets of spaceships. It is just another example of didacticism, tell the audience and hope they do not notice that the opposite is actually the case.

‘”Or when the spitfires go into space to attack the Dalek spaceship”’
If anything it is the perfect example of spectacle over substance.

8) A Good Man Goes to War or A Bad Man Enjoys Death and Mayhem?
So the tag line Dreading the moment River turns to Amy and says “You’re my mother” I had below the title last week turned out to be right. Wow, you cannot underestimate just how bored it makes me. What was the point? Seriously, what was the point?
Really it was nothing more than the episode of Beauty & the Beast where Linda Hamilton dies crossed with a Star Trek style time paradox, only not as good. I’m pretty sure he also just wound up re-writing whole sections of Jekyll.
Incidentally just inserting a few lines about the warrior Doctor to try and explain away recent events does not work. Raising an army, destroying whole cyber fleets and having rules of engagement is used to satisfy the attentions of the audience but then Moffat attempts to distance himself from the moral catastrophe he now presides over. He has been happy to have the lead character being cruel or cowardly for entertainment. It just makes him cynical and manipulative to exploit such actions and then try to justify them.
Perhaps worst of all it takes the messianic idolisation associated with this Doctor to whole new levels – he is no longer a Time Lord. He is now a god able to influence the conception of a child.
The nature between content and the desire to constantly engage the attention on only one level has created a schizophrenic schism at the heart of the show.

As for Let’s Kill Hitler, give me a break.

9) Conclusion
What’s the bloody point? The show I loved is dead and its mythology lies in ruins.