I have this really weird complicated relationship with both Doctor Who and Sherlock
It’s called “Part of me still loves you deeply, but the other part of me can’t even get excited anymore because Moffat”
Why? Because he wrote dozens of amazing episodes? Because he made one of the most interesting spin-offs ever? Because he has created incredible characters and even more incredible monsters? Because he’s an amazing writer but he is also human and says and does things other humans don’t like cuz, hey, that’s what we’re dealing with here.
If you want to sit in a circle and cry and circlejerk over how much you hate Moffat do it somewhere else (like reddit, they’ll join in) because that man made my Doctor Who experience. He created one of my favorite shows ever and I respect him for that. I may not like him as a person, but as a writer and a creator he is brilliant and I will always be eager to watch the newest episode of Doctor Who or Sherlock because I love those shows and I love what he has done with them through imagination and ingenuity.
So stop it. Stop being children. If you hate Moffat that much than stop watching his shows. You won’t, of course, because look at the amazing shows you would have to stop watching. So there then. Watch your amazing Doctor Who with your new doctor and enjoy your Sherlock because he’s back and stop with the idiotic winging because you’re just stopping yourself from enjoying something wonderful.
I’m not normally into wasting my time with complaining about Moffat, but I’m going to do it here because somebody just threw a tantrum on my dash about how people who disagree with them shouldn’t express their opinions in public and I’m cranky with sleep deprivation.
Also my reasons for not liking Moffat are not the ones most people voice, so what the hell. Might as well.
We’ll complain about Moffat here if we want to, thanks. Public space and all. And also, while namecalling about the childishness of others, you might have missed the part where many of the people complaining about Moffat have stated that they’ve ceased to watch his shows. I’m one of them.
And what pisses me off about that is that it wasn’t a decision I made, and it had nothing to do with his much-discussed sexist crap. It was because in fact he’s a really pretty CRAP storyteller whose hamhanded attempts to write the show I grew up on finally got to the point where I discovered I just didn’t care enough to go watch the episodes.
(Also he didn’t create the spin-off. Torchwood was Russell T. Davies’ baby.)
Moffat sometimes tells fantastic stories. He has a type of story he excels at, and a number of other types of stories he reeks at telling.
Props where the man deserves them: he’s spectacular at the type of stories that fit best with the motifs of classic Doctor Who: fairy tales, basically. He’s an amazing teller of fairy tales and children’s tales. Stories like “Girl in the Fireplace” and “The Empty Child”/”The Doctor Dances”; they’re award-winning, and rightfully so. The one-off episodes he’s written for Who are some of the best stories the show’s ever seen.
Unfortunately, he insists on continuing to try to tell the types of stories he sucks at. They’re the types with the long, dramatic plot arcs and the mythology-building and the deep explorations of characters and the rockin’ build-up of drama to an explosive conclusion. You know, most of what he tries to do on Doctor Who.
He’s utterly abominable at the long build of suspense, basically. He wants to be really fantastic at it; clearly he’s very taken with the idea, considering how hard he works for the big payoff. But his idea of attempting to build drama is by TELLING you he’s attempting to build drama. Someone makes a speech telling you all about how suspenseful and dramatic it is. Or we get the really exhaustingly tired “One thing. Just one thing” line that seemed so creative the first time I heard it—on Jekyll (well, it was “Two words. Just two words” at the time). Or the hackneyed dramatic symbol. ”IOU?” HONESTLY? Did we actually need a fucking CATCHPHRASE for it?
His monsters. Yep, props again, he’s invented some great monsters. He’s also overused and lost track of his own rules for those self-same monsters to the point where they’re back to being just people in costumes. Fair enough, I suppose. That in itself is a great Doctor Who tradition. I mean, the Daleks did it first.
And characters? Yeah, sometimes he’s good with characters. Say what you will, I find Rory and Amy and River to be very charismatic, engaging characters with strong personalities. I’ve got issues with the River/Doctor romance, but I recognize those may be my issues, so I’ll leave them out of this.
But sometimes he absolutely blows at characters. In particular, the reason I can’t drum up any interest in watching Doctor Who lately is because he sucks at writing the Doctor.
Here we have an alien from a race that is so at home with traveling in time that they’re called TIME LORDS. He lives God knows how long; potentially forever. He does this by changing his body and entire personality. He’s ancient, has seen literally the beginning and ending of the entire universe, can speak the tongue of every race ever born. He’s at least mildly telepathic. What kind of psychology would these traits reasonably give such a being?
And yet we see the Doctor flaunting human emotions, a human morality (a Western morality, note, not even one that is endemic to all humans), and human motivations. Why should his conception of love be so human, or even involve humans at all? Why would he have a WIFE? Why should his species even have a conception of ‘spouse?’ What does that even mean to him? How does that even work when, in a year or a century, he’ll be a completely different person?
Why should he believe in preserving HUMAN life over that of any other species in the universe, when he has the capacity to empathize and communicate with all lifeforms? How is that not, in fact, an evil trait? How can someone who was born with all of space and time as his birthright limit himself to almost exclusively human companions and human viewpoints without suffering from blinkering himself with ignorance and an artificially limited perspective? And WHY THE FUCK would he experience guilt like a human? Blowing up his entire species, yeah, I get that. But what’s all this “I’ve lived too long” bullshit? How would that even be a concept that a species evolved to be nigh-immortal even possess a native understanding of?
THAT pisses me off. Moffat writes the the Doctor into a human. That’s an unforgivable lack of imagination for a man who’s writing a sci-fi show. And not just a human, but the worst sort of angst-ridden “brooding over his terrible life but put on a fake smile” grim!dark caricature. And while doing it, he’s written us a whole new set of ‘Thou Shalt Nots’ about time travel that adhere to a shallow, limited and OUTDATED conception of how time travel might work. Can’t change what you already know happens? BullSHIT. 1: That one was stale 20 years ago. 2: It never stopped the Doctor before and 3: It is no sign of a good storyteller when they’re given all the universe to play with and what comes to mind for them is to tell everybody what kind of story they CAN’T tell.
And that’s all Doctor Who. On the front of Sherlock, let’s just address Irene Adler for a moment. No, not the sexist thing. The fact that he came out and admitted that his reading of Irene Adler is to pigeonhole her as a stock character. Never mind that it’s a sexist stock character. If you’re a writer and your first instinct is, “Oh, here’s a character I don’t understand. *shunts them into a stereotype*” then you are not a good writer. And yes, he first came to those stories as a teenager, but he’s read them since and never once gone beyond that.
I don’t hate Moffat as a human being. He’s got, so far as I can judge from my very having-never-met-the-man perspective, some stupid ideas about gender, but what the hell, who doesn’t. I have gotten to the point where I detest him as a storyteller, however. He’s a hack. He’s got potential, and when he works with a co-writer they can often bring it out in him, but left to his own devices, he’s a hack.
I’m going to be very surprised if anybody reads all the way through this. Why the hell are you wasting your evening on my bitching?