Geek Syndicate Issue 9 March 2014 | Page 22

Geek Syndicate

But what I find most interesting is when people state that
Moffat’s ideas are new and have never been done before.
In truth, they are anything but and yet interestingly as
the season of Who that he borrows so much from is often
panned. It lead to the sacking of the actor portraying the
Doctor, a forced regeneration by the Beeb and the show
hanging on for dear life like never before
So how come just a couple of decades later the same template has made the show more popular than ever before
and cracked the US? The season I am talking about is Season twenty-three of the original run. This season of four
stories was linked by an over-arcing story known as the
Trial of a Time Lord. This season was made after the show
had already been placed on an eighteen month hiatus and
the BBC were more ready than ever to permanently cancel it. As the show itself was effectively on trial in reality,
it was decided that so would Colin Baker’s Doctor as he
faced his people to look at the crimes he had committed.
All sound familiar? You might not think so but read on to
see how the bare bones template of this ill fated series has
become the template for the modern series in particular
those with Moffat at the head.

The Season Long Arc
Trial was written differently to the seasons before it.
Whether you like Colin Baker or not, the irony is that the
production team was well ahead of the BBC. The season
prior to Trial, the production team had altered the episode
length to be forty-five minutes long instead of the twenty-fives it had been before. The Beeb did not like the new
length, and the high-ups demanded it return to its traditional length when the show returned. It is interesting that
when Russell T Davies brought the show back in 2005 he
used the forty minute template.
With this series they continued to be trend setters by creating a story that did not just last over the usual four to six
episode length (as the precedent had been in the past) but
to instead make a story that would all be interconnected
together, with the viewer really needing to watch the entire season from beginning to end in order to get the ideas
that were being portrayed. For Trial there was not a show

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runner like there is today but a Producer and Script Editor.
For scripting of Trial the responsibilities fell to Script Editor
Eric Saward. Saward worked with the man who was possibly the best writer in Doctor Who history, Robert Holmes
to plot the arc of the season, understanding what was going to happen and when. Holmes was charged with writing
the initial serial and the final serial, whilst Saward would
make sure that the rest of the writing team wrote their
stories to fit where The Doctor had to be for Holmes’ final
episodes, The Ultimate Foe. Sound familiar? It should do. In
Modern Who Steven Moffat (and Russell T Davies before
him) worked out the season long (if not longer with recent
stories) arc, writing the first and final episodes. In between
he madesure that the plot flowed the way it should.

The Doctor and His Love For Speeches
Colin Baker’s Doctor did not get much air time. But one
thing that his incarnation often seems to be remembered
for is his iconic speech to the Time Lords in this story. A
speech where he triumphantly holds his argument, believing that everything will work out. This trait is something
that Matt Smith’s Doctor has used and run with. The Eleventh Doctor regularly made iconic speeches all the way
through his seasons often arguing with the enemy before
they were ready to attack him.

Image © BBC Worldwide

I find the amount of flak that Steven Moffat receives
quite fascinating. I myself am not his biggest fan (I
think that season six of Doctor Who is terrible). His
writing has its problems that is true, many of which
I would put down to the fact that he started his career writing sit-coms where the character will always
reset back to who they were at the beginning of the
episode whatever has happened during the course of
that story. But it seems to be often forgotten that he
has done a lot of good: the gas mask child, the girl
in the fire place, the weeping angels, season five and
what I will call “The Doctor trilogy” are all great stories.