https://youtu.be/bOnN8nEK_QA
-around 17:00
-this may change when somebody leaves and someone new and wonderful comes in’
https://youtu.be/knp5sf0rluA
-around 20:40
-‘as long as Steven Moffat is involved, Jack will not be back.
-Then mentioned about Chris Chibnall taking over and taking him for dinner.
Moffat has never had anything to do with Torchwood. Torchwood is RTD’s baby so if it’s not the BBC’s lack of interest in Torchwood why Torchwood hasn’t come back (or Starz) he’s a more likely candidate for why than Moffat.
Why is Moffat often seen as this all powerful figure who just needs to snap his fingers and the BBC does whatever he wants? He doesn’t even have complete creative control over DW, there are many producers and execs above him that things will need to be cleared with. If the BBC wanted to make more Torchwood there is nothing Moffat can say that would stop them. Showrunners just don’t have that kind of power.
Steven Moffat on twisting his words about gay representation to suit Johnlock conspiracy theorists (from With an Accent interview):
“What is irksome is what I am talking
about is quite a serious thing, a serious question, seriously answered
by both myself and Bryan Fuller who managed to answer much more quickly
than I did. I was talking about the representation of minorities in
science fiction shows and in popular culture. Using the example of
talking about gay characters and how you present them. I was actually
largely talking about Doctor Who, ’cause Doctor Who addresses children. And I was talking about how do you handle gay characters in a fiction like Doctor Who
when you are addressing very directly, children. You don’t want it to
be campaigning. You don’t want to be table thumping about it. You don’t
want to essentially tell children that there’s something to campaign
about. You want to say this is absolutely fine and normal. There is no
question to answer. You want to walk right past it, in a way. You don’t
want to… If you say, as sometimes other kinds of literature or movies
might, we forgive you for being gay. You’re just saying you’re gay and
it doesn’t matter. There’s no issue.”
“That’s what I was talking about.
Was not talking, I was very much specifically not talking about…”
continued Moffat, clearly passionate about the topic, and frustrated at
the way his words have been twisted, “It is infuriating frankly, to be
talking about a serious subject and to have Twitter run around and say
oh that means Sherlockis gay. Very explicitly it does not. We are taking a serious subject and trivializing it beyond endurance.”
[…] “I was talking about representation, as
was Bryan, in quite a serious way. What they did was scale back that
conversation and make it about something extremely silly. And that’s not
helping anyone. I cared a lot about what I said on that panel. I meant
it. And I don’t like it being reinterpreted as something else. [We’re]
not telling anyone what to think. Mark isn’t saying other people can’t
write that version of John and Sherlock getting together. We’re not.
We’re not engaging in a clever conspiracy to write something under the
radar, we’re just writing the show we’re writing.”
I clarified, at this point in the conversation, “That’s not the story you’re telling.”
“Yeah, that’s it,” Moffat responds.
“But they can. They can. Once we hand the show to them, it’s theirs and
we’re finished with it. They can do what they like.”
…I don’t know what to make of this, not in the slightest, beyond “I suppose that puts that Johnlock Conspiracy thing to rest” and “whilst I’m not qualified to talk about what counts as ‘good’ representation of gay characters, he…really isn’t either?”
There’s a moment in Hell Bent I deeply regret cutting. The Doctor reveals that he’s reassigned the High Council to the sewers, and Ohila remarks that only an aristocrat regards honest work as punishment. That’s the Doctor all over: he knows that the aristocracy must be deposed, but even in bringing it about he reveals that he will always be one of them. If he’s any kind of role model, it’s because he tries to be good, not because he already is. You certainly don’t have to be a white male to play all that – though you can see why it’s a decent fit.
Steven Moffat’s far more interesting quote about diversity in the most recent DWM
Yes. We decided that the new companion was going to be non-white, and that was an absolute decision, because we need to do better on that. We just have to. … I think I had this baffling idea that if we just threw open each part to everybody, it would work out in the end. I put my faith, inexplicably, in the free market. I don’t know why, I of all people would do that! It doesn’t work. You can only cast for talent – you’ve got to cast the best person, every single time – but you’ve got to gauge where you’re looking for that talent. … Sometimes the nature of a particular show – historical dramas, for instance – makes diversity more of a challenge, but Doctor Who has absolutely nowhere to hide on this. Young people watching have to know that they’ve a place in the future. That really matters. You have to care profoundly what children’s shows in particular say about where you’re going to be.
Steven Moffat on the casting of Pearl Mackie and Diversity in the BBC (Doctor Who Magazine #500)
some highlights of Steven Moffat’s female Doctor agenda
It saddens me that there’s misinformation like this out there
Yes, Neil Gaiman was responsible for the Corsair line. However, Moffat chose to expand that line, as Gaiman has stated. Moffat’s been arguing for this possibility since the 90s. Never once has he said he is opposed to it happening.
This was followed by recounting his answer the previous year where he said:
“Well, I think my opinion is fairly obvious from the show, isn’t it? What I think about the possibility and whether it would work or not? I think I’ve expressed myself about as clearly as I could, in the context of the show. If you’re not reading the subtext, then I’ll lend you. But believe me, some people aren’t reading that subtext, ‘cause it’s too subtle.”
He was saying this while wildly gesticulating towards and jazz-handing around Michelle Gomez who was sat next to him.
It can’t just be people’s hatred for Moffat rubbing off on Amy, surely. It took two series of Who, two series of Sherlock and a hamfisted pregnancy arc for Moffat to really build up a hatedom – coming into Doctor Who series 5, people actually generally quite liked him. He’d given us Sally Sparrow and Nancy, for a start, and goodwill for Russell T Davies had really, thoroughly run out after the resolution of Donna’s story and quotes like “nine hysterical women [were the ones upset at Ianto’s death in Torchwood]”.
Amy was Moffat’s creation, we all know that – but back then people hated her even whilst quite liking her writer, way back in 2010. Complaints were plenty: why does she get to save the day two episodes in a row (The Beast Below and Victory of the Daleks), why is she so stroppy, why is she so sulky? SFX Magazine had an ‘Amywatch: A log of (mostly) infuriating Pond moments’ for their reviews of Series Five, with comments like “There’s a rare instance of Amy looking cheerful here. Pause and savour” and criticism about her “defensive barrier of irony”. Posters on Gallifreybase etc complained a lot about how immature she was, or how spoilt she was (???) or how there was just something off about her.
…..Which was her mental health! The same thing that’s off about me!
Anyway. Literally one of the first things we learned about adult Amy Pond is that the various bad things that have happened to her throughout her life have given her some deep-seated mental health issues. “Four psychiatrists!” she spits at the Doctor in her very first episode. She shows symptoms of PTSD right from the beginning, she even does some hugely unsympathetic things in her first few episodes that hint at her state of mind.
And yet, no matter what, “Amy was just Moffat’s hot redhead wank fantasy” is pretty much the preferred narrative now. Which is discouraging, to say the least, because there’s a lot to her. All those complaints about her up there? Those are my favourite things about her – her immaturity and grouchiness and defensiveness. Not to mention her fearfulness, her self-esteem issues, her love of history, her love of art…
So I still can’t work about where this idea that she’s a Nothing or worse came from. Because her personality and trauma and relatable-ness is there! It’s all there, it doesn’t even take much looking to find! So, well-
I’m at the point now where I wanna know why Amy doesn’t get the divorce from her author that so many other characters do get, I guess. No-one comments on gifsets of Princess Leia in her slave outfit with anything like ‘lol, Leia was such a sexist wank fantasy", they call the outfit itself – and the men who put her in it – sexist. S’like, Buffy’s generally thought of as being a separate entity from Joss Whedon, even after people started to call him out on his sexism. Martha Jones is likewise quite rightly considered a separate entity from Russell T Davies even though he’s made racist jokes (often involving his own characters) more than once. So I don’t get why Amy doesn’t get that, I guess. She gets to be an offshoot of the guy who made her and no-one’s really cared enough to look for more.
But why? Why didn’t people care enough? Okay, so lots of people dislike Amy as a character because of Steven Moffat, we’ve established that pretty thoroughly. What I really want to know is why people dislike her as a person. Because she hasn’t really done anything to be so written off except –
(you knew this would probably come around to this eventually)
– show a lot of the symptoms of mental illness. Like, a lot. (This is the woman who puts herself into a potentially fatal situation after Rory dies because “if this is real life, I don’t want it”; who responds to someone else holding a gun to their head with “I understand. Really, I do”; who has sobbing breakdowns a lot. Like, even if you really do feel she’s too unwritten to have a mental illness, you can see how she’d be quite valued to people with mental illnesses, right?)
So, uh, I guess what this comes down to is: what is it? What’s making Amy so unrelatable, such a blank slate, so unworthy of further exploration?Someone’s bound to jump in here with a “Maybe she should try being better written”-type comment, but we’ve already covered that.
