I have another article up about why I dislike Steven Moffat as a person (not as a writer, and this most surely does not extend to his characters.) There was a quote from him in the pages of an old Doctor Who Magazine Special that has haunted me this long, I’m afraid.
Seeing the news that Moffat was coming back to Doctor Who spurred me on to write this article, Steven Moffat Was a Good ‘Doctor Who’ Writer, but I Can Never Forgive Him for What He Did to Amy Pond.
Ideally I would embed the article, but WordPress lacks that very basic functionality. Here’s a snippet:
My trouble in those days started when I fell utterly and totally in love with Amy Pond. She was the first of Moffat’s Who companions and she was everything I wanted in a female character. She was smart, she was witty, she was beautiful, she was… oh wait, this girl is messed up.
I didn’t watch along (I plain don’t have time these days) but I did put together some snippets from Sophia’s, RTD’s and Moffat’s twitters that I found interesting.
Good. He’s still the best.
(more…)As well as all the other stuff, The Eleventh Hour rewatch/tweetalong was today! I thought I’d do the same thing I did with Vincent and the Doctor and gather up all the most interesting tweets from the cast and crew.
Steven Moffat on how @doctorwho will be addressing the dangers of time travel for the new POC companion, Bill (played by Pearl Mackie).
‘What do you want to say to children?’ is the biggest thing here.
You don’t want to feel as though you’re apologising for them, or saying that there is something for which they have to make amends.
You want kids to see their kind of face on-screen and to know that that kind of face is absolutely fine and always has been. That’s what you want to say: there is no case to answer.
So if you do make a great big fuss about it, then you might be the first people to tell those kids ‘hey, there’s something about which you have to be afraid’. I don’t want to do that. I want to say ‘the universe is full of people like you’. And, y’know, we’ve started doing that in our historicals too, because, actually, it’s historically accurate. They didn’t invent people of different colours recently, in fact white is the most recent colour, so we address it but we address it in a positive, optimistic, Doctor Who way.
elphabaforpresidentofgallifrey:
steven moffat is just a british joss whedon
Okay, like … can someone please explain to me why Moffat is so hated? Serious question, no trolling, no antagonism. Tumblr seems to hate the ever living shit out of him but I have never seen anyone break down why, exactly.
That’s because at this point, 90% of the hate is totally unreasonable.
(There’s nothing wrong with people preferring RTD, obviously, but the blatant hatred for Moffat is what almost never actually makes much sense.)
As far as I know, I think some of it came from some interviews Moffat did back in like, 2012, where some of the stuff he said got taken the wrong way because he’s an awkward, sarcastic little shit who didn’t interview very well back then.
Also, people were struggling with the stylistic differences between the RTD and Moffat eras of Doctor Who. Moffat’s first season as showrunner was rather predominantly white (something I’ll go into in a second). Some people lacked the critical analysis skills to understand the nuances of River Song’s character or the entire point of Series 7 Clara’s arc.
Somehow, along the way, everyone decided that Moffat is obscenely sexist/racist/full of himself/loves white men or whatever. (Some of the stuff going on with Sherlock probably didn’t help, but I don’t honestly give a shit about Sherlock so I’m sticking to DW here.)
The ridiculous part is that none of those things could be further from the truth, or what I and many others have actually gone out of our way to observe as the closest to the truth we can discern.
Now, don’t get me wrong. He’s still a straight white guy, who has made mistakes, because the industry itself is too white and so he probably hasn’t had enough people around him to catch mistakes that come from his being straight and white.
But he knows he’s flawed, for a start. I have honestly no idea where the idea that Moffat is any kind of egotist came from, because if you watch him being interviewed around series 9 or 10, he’s extremely self deprecating!
He is a huge liberal who has admitted it was super stupid of him to think that open casting for Series 5 would result in a diverse cast, and that he learned from it. He’s really listened to a lot of the things people have said, and as a result, the background diversity in DW has gotten a LOT better as his era has gone on.
There’s a lot of opinion that he writes the same ‘flirty, feisty’ woman over and over, but it’s the people saying that which are reducing fully fleshed out female characters to something that basic. Amy, River, Clara and Bill could not be more different at heart, even if a couple of them share a few surface traits.
His last season saw a black lesbian co-lead who got a happy ending, and it’s pretty much entirely down to him that the general public were open to the idea of a female Doctor by the time Chibnall actually cast Jodie Whittaker. The opinions starting changing when he made the Master a woman, and then he continued to throw in line after line after blatant onscreen regeneration from white dude to black lady in order to make it clear that the matter of canonically genderfluid Time Lords was not up for debate. The Series 10 finale two parter had the Doctor confirm this verbally, too.
I think what confirmed the idea that so many people (not all, but so many) who hate Moffat literally have no idea what they’re talking about anymore, is when I saw someone celebrating Thirteen’s casting and going “a female Doctor is in defiance of everything the Moffat era stood for”.
Like. What the fuck. You might as well have painted I haven’t watched Doctor Who in the last four years on your forehead. Because a female Doctor is exactly what the Moffat era has been trying to build, this whole time. Twelve’s whole era has been a setup for Thirteen, for “yes, this can and should happen”.
There are legitimate criticisms about his work to be made. And about him too, I’m sure. Moffat is far from perfect, but he has very actively worked to make Doctor Who much more diverse, and as far as I’m concerned, his obvious good intentions mean more than the fact that sometimes he doesn’t manage to deliver in the way that he might have intended, or has bungled something somewhere.
I’m not going to tell you what to think about him. But I’m telling you to not listen to what most people say about him, and to go and find facts, and keep in mind that he has shown remarkable growth in the last few years (but god forbid people on Tumblr get their heads around the concept of people growing and learning).
#literally in every interview recently he’s so excited for jodie#how do people think he’s against that? (via @scriptscribbles)
honestly, if anyone thinks THEY’RE excited for Jodie Whittaker as Thirteen, they got fucking nothing on Moffat he’s like a five year old bouncing up and down I swear to god, it’s adorable
He said some really casually misogynistic things… nine or ten years ago. Then he got his act together and generally started behaving much, much better. When he cast Pearl Mackie as Bill I think he even came out and said (although unfortunately I’ve lost the link right now) “This is what showrunners should be doing, I don’t deserve phrase for it.” And of all his lesbian characters, not a single one died as far as I remember (although he is a little too fond of the fake-out for my tastes) – and dang, he’s even outright apologizing for stuff now, having previously once said, I believe, that he never listens to criticism?
He’s not the British Joss Whedon. He’s the opposite Joss Whedon.
There are loads of things I’d change, I’d change all my mistakes but that would be exhausting so let me just choose one mistake, I’ll choose one mistake because it just rankles me to this day that I got this wrong. There’s a scene at the end of a season five episode, called Flesh and Stone, where Amy comes on to the Doctor. It’s a very good idea for a scene, it’s a very good idea because she’s been through this traumatic experience and she doesn’t quite know who or what the Doctor is and she actually doesn’t quite know what his interest is and there’s a brilliant scene to be written there and I entirely avoided writing it. I played it for laughs and it was so wrong.
Very interesting to have some sort of retrospective look on that scene seeing as it’s one that has always made me (and many other fans I know) fairly uncomfortable. Not sure I entirely agree with everything he says but it’s nice to see him acknowledge that it was a bad move to try and put it in a humourous context.
(via the-perennial-outsider)
“History is always white washed. How do we manage to have a diverse cast despite that? The way that we did it was … [to just] say that you will see people of different colors there. In fact, there were. People all didn’t arrive in the twinkle of an eye.”
–showrunner Steven Moffatlooooool i would buy moffat’s bullshit if it wasn’t for the mountain of receipts proving he doesn’t and never has given a rat’s ass about diversity….it’s just an attempt to make himself more marketable
“So, just to be clear: we are not expecting any kind of round of applause or pat on the back for that. That is the minimum of representation on television and the correct response should be: What took you so long? Not that we’re so great.”
–Steven Moffat
So tell me more about how he’s supposed to be just doing this to sell himself.
The Moffat Stans cometh.
Be gone, film studies major.
You do realize I’m the OP of this gifset, right?
How is “film studies major” an insult in this context
Counterpoint: Moffat grew up, looked at his past work and decided to improve it/himself.
You know, just like we all did at some point.
honestly……… no more clara references……… that’s enough……………
And he could have literally reminisced about the fact that he did that to donna. it hurt him a lot a you know. Just for one second he realised how wiping Bill’s memories would affect him – can you imagine him having to go through all that again? I swear to shit when Bill told him to think about how he would feel, he literally thought about this exchange
“Donna I was just going”
“Yeah. see ya.”
i mean knowing moffat, he simply refuses make references to things that he didn’t create, so
but honestly that would’ve been a great Donna flashback.
Bill keeps begging him to not wipe her memory, and all of a sudden we flash to black and white, back to that moment between Donna and Ten, with no audio other than Bill’s pleads as the scene of Donna’s own pleads plays out.
we flash back to our current moment, and the Doctor quickly pulls his hands back. “get out”, he says quietly, trying not to let it known that his voice is quavering.
to be fair, the line was “imagine how you’d feel if someone did this to you”, as in if you had your memory wiped, so honestly clara’s theme did fit better than donna’s moment
im also convinced that for him to have considered wiping bill’s memory in the first place he had to have been blocking donna or something
actually, it doesn’t fit the situation better.
if my memory serves correct, twelves memory wipe was consensual, while donna’s was not. twelve wanted to wipe bill’s memory, and she begged him not to, much like how donna begged the doctor not to do the same.
and even when she says, “imagine how you’d feel if someone did this to you”, he CAN’T remember his own memory wipe, he DOESN’T remember it. so that moment was just to tug at the heartstrings of the viewers, and he doesn’t have the memory of clara and his own memory wipe in order to use that experience in order to decide not to wipe her memory. it JUST BARELY makes sense, if that moment truly makes sense at all.
it would have made much more sense if bill had continued to beg him to not wipe her memory, and the doctor had remembered how donna had begged the same, and how badly wiping her memory hurt him, which would make him decide against wiping bill’s memory.
so it’s an example of the situation not truly fitting, moffat refusing to callback to anything that isn’t 100% of his creation and/or design, and moffat not really making any sense.
12 does remember that his memory was wiped.
When something goes missing, you can always recreate it by the hole it left. I know her name was Clara. I know we travelled together. I know that there was an Ice Warrior on a submarine and a mummy on the Orient Express. I know we sat together in the Cloisters and she told me something very important, but I have no idea what she said. Or what she looked like. Or how she talked. Or laughed. There’s nothing there. Just nothing.
He knows what it feels like to be missing something.
Whereas if he’d been comparing the situation to Journey’s End, he would’ve wiped her mind anyway then found some rain to feel sorry for himself in.
“Moffat refuses to reference things he didn’t create” is a really fucking weird thing to say about an episode that prominently features a photograph of Susan
I’d say it’s not even a fucking weird thing to say. I’d just go all in and say it’s fucking idiotic.
look he knows his memory was wiped but he doesn’t remember it
re: clara references: i really just did not like her as a companion but the ghost of rose did linger for a really long time so it’s not unprecedented … i do agree donna would have been the better reference there though and like i don’t fucking know why after donna the doctor who force mind wipe someone so i’m blaming moffat
and for the record moffat does entirely ignore cannon his doesn’t create. even cannon he does create lmao okay like susan is there fucking sure because she’s not new who honestly catch him references anything from new who he didn’t create ever? no. besides, he wasn’t the one that brought sarah jane back. moffat has his head so far up his own ass and that sentence is true as shit not only does he not reference things he doens’t create he borderline refuses to admit they even happened or held any source of narrative importance (an example here, if we are being petty, could be the doctor on mind wiping and donna) and sometimes just writes them as though they didn’t happen (literally countless examples)
References from specifically RTD’s Doctor Who that featured in Moffat’s series (With images and gifs this time, as I have them with me and I’m bored)-
Holograms of all the past Doctors, including Nine and Ten, in The Eleventh Hour:
Magpie Electricals seen in The Beast Below:
Nine and Ten (and Rose too, apparently, though I haven’t got a shot of her) seen (briefly) in flashback in The Lodger:
A ton of past villains, including RTD’s Judoon, in The Pandorica Opens:
RTD-era TARDIS featured very prominently in The Doctor’s Wife:
Holograms of Rose, Martha and Donna in Let’s Kill Hitler, there to give the Doctor guilt and remind him what he’s capable of doing to his companions:
Rose and Jack both mentioned in The Wedding of River Song as reasons the Doctor doesn’t want to die:
(who made those original gifs?)
Ten, RTD’s creation, written by Moffat in Day of the Doctor. Keeps his last words “I don’t want to go” as the last words ever said by him on screen:
Rose/Bad Wolf:
The War Doctor seen regenerating into Nine (Moffat on that scene):
A wall of past companions and friends, including some pretty obscure RTD-era ones like Erina Magambo:
The relationship between the Doctor and Elizabeth I, something RTD created back in “The Shakespeare Code” and Moffat carried on (now we know why she hated him so much in TSC. He never went back for her!)
Clara views some past companions in a Moffat-written minisode:
The references to where the Twelfth Doctor got his face:
Reference to Rose and Martha in Before the Flood:
Flashback to Donna in The Girl Who Died, inspiring the Doctor to save Ashildr (this was not a small part of the episode):
(You want a Donna reference that works really well? There it is. After thinking of her, he saves another woman to make himself feel better, dooming her to a life she doesn’t want. He never learns.)
Reference to Jack Harkness (co-created by RTD with Moffat himself, but still) in The Girl Who Died:
And finally we’re due for the return of John Simm’s Master, as seen in the trailer:
Soo… there’s that. (Sorry for the long post). But one other thing I haven’t seen mentioned? Doctor Who is for children. I bring this up a lot because everyone constantly forgets it. The audience Moffat has been writing for for the past couple of years were not actually alive yet when “Rose” aired. They probably have, at best, a passing familiarity with Donna. To them, Nine is just another Doctor. Rose is just a random pretty lady with sparkly eyes.
That all these references to RTD’s era are in there anyway says rather a lot I think.