Ricky Young takes a belated rummage through Steven Moffat’s slightly whiffy leavings.
Tag Archives: Steven Moffat
And The Whole World Has To Answer Right Now Just To Tell You Once Again
Ricky Young escapes from his ultimately-pointless vault to look at series ten of Doctor Who.
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Then You Have To Make One
Sixteen months on from the last non-Xmas episode of Doctor Who, the two grumpy middle-aged Scotchmen in charge return for their swan-song. A third one – Ricky Young – is just pleased there’s no other songs involved, especially ‘River’ ones, in season-opener ‘The Pilot’.
The State Of This
So that was Season 9 of Doctor Who, then. Ricky Young punches a diamond wall in the face, and wonders if the shredded knuckles were worth it.
Doctor Who: The Magician’s Apprentice.
In which Ricky Young brings the now-traditional MostlyFilm HOT TAKE to the Who series opener, and is just glad that hot takes are supposed to be short.
Trail of a Time Lord
Ten years ago today, a much-loved, oft-maligned and thoroughly-cancelled television programme returned to the BBC. Join the writers of MostlyFilm as we trace the new history of Doctor Who…
The Solitary Psychopath
The BBC’s Sherlock ended its long-awaited, if brief, run last week. Yasmeen Khan argues that despite accusations of self-conscious fan service, it remains compelling viewing.
I Will Not Forget One Line Of This
As The Doctor faced up to fifty years in the spotlight and the end of his regeneration cycle, the BBC went on an all-out Who binge. Ricky Young picks the bones out of the buffet.
It Feels Different This Time
by Ricky Young
Few things are certain in life, but one thing is for sure: Zoë Ball cannot start a sentence without preceding it with that weird teeth-sucking-then-“er” sound she makes. As a nation, we had forgotten quite how annoying it could be. But on Sunday night, for reasons likely to be forever lost to all of space and time, she was chosen to introduce the bizarre one-off special Doctor Who: Live – The Next Doctor, and we all got to be really quite irritated by it again, together, as one.
Yes, Peter Capaldi’s the next ‘Doctor Who’, lead character in the BBC’s television programme Doctor Who. It’s a bold move – brave, even. It’ll shake up a show in desperate need of being thrown into a completely different direction, and it might even raise the prospect of Capaldi using his Oscar to belt Steven Moffat across the face in an ‘I’m not saying this shit’ incident, which even if it never actually happens will forever exist in my head. In fact, I’m thinking about it right now. And again now. No, hang on…BAM! There it goes again!
Trans-mundane Emanations
By Ricky Young.
From the moment the 11th Doctor crashed into Amelia Pond’s garden while still wearing the 10th Doctor’s suit, Doctor Who has existed in a dream-world. The very first person he met was unhooked from reality, without origin or backstory, sitting on a crack in time and ready for her first chapter title; she wasn’t a real girl, she was The Girl Who Waited. From that point on, we’ve been shown a woozy and off-kilter version of reality, where things only made sense if they really, really had to, and exists a million miles away from the council estates, shopgirls and urgently-flickered news-broadcasts of the previous era. Doctor Who has certainly never been world you visit for unflinching docu-realism, of course, but the self-conscious focus on ‘stories’, meta-stories, and the consequences of myths and fairytales has led to an airless and looping feeling where nothing moves forward, nothing changes, nothing ends and nothing ever truly dies.
When MostlyFilm last talked about Doctor Who, immediately after the loud, deeply-unsatisfying semi-mystery that was the departure of the Ponds, we hoped that fans of loud, deeply-unsatisfying semi-mysteries would have had their fill by now, and that the audience, the actors, the production team and show-runner Steven Moffat could move on from loud, deeply-unsatisfying semi-mysteries into a new and exciting phase of The Programme That Can Be Anything. (After all, we’re not haters for the sake of it – we thought S5 was pretty damn good.)
What fools we were.
Season 7b existed as little more than another loud and deeply-unsatisfying semi-mystery, its final moments setting up yet another loud and probably deeply-unsatisfying semi-mystery as a 50th birthday present. Shh, though. MostlyFilm has angered the show-runner before, and an angry Steven Moffat isn’t anything we ever want to experience again..
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