What has happened to the magic of Doctor Who?

These words were famously written at the end of a excoriating review of ‘The Deadly Assassin’ in which the president of the DWAS, Jan-Vincent Rudzki picked the now well regarded story apart, highlighting the breaches in continuity, bemoaning the changes it was imposing on the myth of the series and generally attacking the ethos and cavalier approach of Robert Holmes to writing Doctor Who. It’s also a good indication of the grand cycle of history. After the recent, unofficial, trilogy of stories by Steven Moffat (‘Name of the Doctor’, ‘Day of the Doctor’ and ‘Time of the Doctor’) I was shocked to find that many fans positioned themselves at polar extremes. Half were praising the Moffat era as the greatest in the life of the show, the other half were claiming that Moffat was engaged in an insidious and monomaniacal attempt to destroy the series. This, perhaps, is indicative of the general polarisation of fandom in social networking sites such as Twitter populated, as they are, by such single minded, fame-blinded monolithic groups as ‘Beliebers’ or ‘Wand Erectioners’ and their corresponding ‘haters’. Needless to say; I’m sceptical as to the social or cultural merit of such extremist views and prefer, where possible (‘Time and the Rani’ excepted) to take the middle, measured, some would say, safe road. The point of this blog entry is that over the last few months I wouldn’t have been surprised to read the phrase ‘what has happened to the magic of Doctor Who’ plastered all over the internet and directed towards Moffat’s interpretation of the programme. So – what does this say about the current state of the series and about the ‘Grand Moff’s’ running of Doctor Who?

I’m not going to dismantle Rudzki’s review, Phil Sandifer did that in his excellent article on ‘The Deadly Assassin’, by which this post is inspired. Suffice to say Rudzki felt that Holmes had corrupted the depiction of Time Lords from their arch god-like status in ‘The War Games’ and ‘The Three Doctors’ and turned them into a mixture of Machiavellian political mandarins and fusty, comic OAPs. Over four episodes Holmes rewrites the mythology of the series, tweaks the character of the Doctor and introduces a whole new set of iconoclastic tropes for future stories. In a display of self-aware nerdery, Sandifer ticks off all of Rudzki’s objections and demonstrates how the story has become a key turning point in the series. He also, rather convincingly, presents a rather interesting thesis. In many ways, ‘The Deadly Assassin’ is, if not a sequel, then a thematic successor to ‘The Brain of Morbius’. Both feature renegade Time Lords and both stretch the Gallifrey mythology further than it had been in the Troughton and Pertwee years. Also; both were written (or at least heavily rewritten) by that flagrant teaser of fans and ignorer of the sacred history of Doctor Who, Robert Holmes. Looking at these two stories and positing that they may be linked, Sandifer suggests a theory that is, by any consideration, on the edges of possibility but is also extremely compelling. Towards the end of ‘Morbius’, the Doctor and the renegade Time Lord engage in a mental battle. On a screen between them, the previous incarnations (I’m refusing to use the mot just ‘iteration’ just yet) are displayed – each competitor dragged back through their past lives. This moment allowed the production team an opportunity to tease the viewer as Baker was shown regressing into Pertwee and then Troughton and then Hartnell and then… further faces appear. The tease here is that Hartnell is revealed to be the ninth Doctor making Baker the twelfth. It has since been retconned by fans who claim that these were previous faces of Morbius, but the scene clearly intends them to be the Doctor. Is it a coincidence then that later that year in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ the limit of twelve regenerations is imposed by Holmes? Possibly – although both stories were substantially written and edited by Holmes, and he has a habit of introducing running themes and jokes in his scripts. The implications are intoxicating: for one thing, the stakes in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ are raised when the ‘Fourth’ Doctor is revealed to be the final, and thus ‘mortal’ version. Also – this aligns the Doctor with the Master, a fellow renegade also at the end of his cycle. ‘The Deadly Assassin’, when read in this way, becomes literally a fight to the death. What I find interesting , however, is how it reflects what has happened in the fiftieth anniversary year.

Holmes, in a series of flagrant and egotistical fan-baiting acts, rewrites the central mythology of the series, changes the whole character of the Time Lords, imposes a limit on the number of the Doctor’s lives and tacitly suggests that the ‘fourth’ Doctor is no longer the ‘fourth’ Doctor at all. At the time, despite the fact the series was riding on a critical and popular high and was beginning to become popular in America, Holmes was accused of destroying the ‘magic’ of the series and jeopardising the fundamental nature of the programme. And as I’m writing this, I’m aware at just how obvious the parallels are: just replace Holmes with Moffat and ‘fourth’ with ‘eleventh’ and you have an exact description of the current polarisation in fandom. Holmes is now celebrated as one of the number of creative talents to have made a profound and positive contribution to the series. Along with his producer Philip Hinchcliffe, Holmes steered the series away from the Earthbound Pertwee years, he dispensed with the comfortable UNIT family, he introduced dangerously edgy plots and scenarios and he created numerous, enduring villains, including the Zygons who reappeared in ‘The Day of the Doctor’.

So is this really a defence of Moffat, that he adopts an approach to storytelling and to Doctor Who history that seems to be an elegant combination of Holmes and the equally notable Douglas Adams? My point is that Holmes was an iconoclast – derided by some fans (later to be in such a minority that they seem now to be almost like a misguided cult) for his disregard of myth and his tendency to introduce major ideas (such as the regeneration limit) seemingly for minor plot purposes. These are exactly the strengths that have made him such a popular figure in Doctor Who history, and exactly the aspects of Moffat’s episodes that the current showrunner is being criticised for.

John Nathan Turner always used to say the ‘the memory cheats’, that fans have a way of nostalgically raising old episodes of Doctor Who beyond their actual level of quality. He was wrong. Now that we can see most of these stories on DVD, we know that for the most part, history doesn’t act hagiographically, instead it gives us a clue as to how the present might be interpreted in the future. Moffat isn’t destroying the series, he’s Robert Holmes reborn.