Radio Free Tomorrow

Let’s start out with the obvious: Russell T. Davies ressurrected Doctor Who. In the process, he also completely re-created the concept of “family television”, meaning television the entire family actually watches together, as opposed to something the kids watch while the parents ignore them. He did two things that everyone, himself included, were fairly sure were impossible, and in a way that appears to be sustainable without him ¹

Given how savage I’ve been about RTD’s writing in some of my recent reviews, you might find this praise surprising, but it’s nothing but the documentable truth. Doctor Who had collapsed in the late 80s, and languished as a television property for nearly 15 years. Lots of people wanted to see it revived, but nobody was quite sure how to do successfully accomplish it.

Until RTD found a way.

He didn’t do it alone, by any means. He had help from his fellow executive producers, Mal Young and Julie Gardner; from a stable of extremely talented actors, topped by Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant; and from a talented production team. Many of the better ideas, especially the Time War background, were modified from concepts that had first played out in the Eight Doctor Adventures that BBC Books had been publishing. He also had the advantage of a huge technological leap compared to what was available in 1988, the last time the original series was produced, or even 1996, when the TV movie aired.

But a lot of the ideas that shaped and drove the new series came from RTD. No matter how I feel about some of his writing, especially his approach to season finales, it would be churlish and foolish not to give him tremendous credit for that. Indeed, if anything, my complaints about those things are as much because of expectations he himself set, and failed to meet, as anything else!

RTD did more than bring Doctor Who back, of course. He refreshed it entirely for a new generation. The pacing was faster, the production less stagey. Most of classic Doctor Who predates the Hill Street Blues watershed, that moment when people finally learned how to produce for television and not basically for taped stage plays. The new series builds on the nearly 25 years of experience since Hill Street Blues first aired.

He also changed some of the fundamental assumptions about the relationship of the Doctor with his companions, and the companions with the rest of the universe. Most classic Doctor Who companions were fairly unconnected — no close family, few close friends, possibly orphaned or marooned somewhere. In short, the fact that the Doctor’s wonky, unreliable TARDIS could not be counted on to ever get them home, let alone on a regular basis, was not an issue for them. They were content to wander with the Doctor, free of whatever ties formerly bound them, until they found something better to do or luck finally wound them up home or, in a couple of unfortunate cases, their adventures proved fatal.

But from the first, we actually meet the ties that bind Rose to Earth, 2005–her mother and her somewhat feckless boyfriend. Both became recurring characters for the rest of the Davies era, with Rose not just wanting but almost insisting on periodically visiting and checking in with them. The Doctor doesn’t just change Rose’s life, he changes all their lives, permanently.

Which leads us to another major motif of the Davies era: that the Doctor is an exceptional being, almost godlike, not so much in his ability to do anything he wants as that his least movement changes the fate of those around him. It’s not something he does consciously or seeks out. It’s his fate to be the person who changes things, and not always in ways he would have chosen.

And finally, we come to one of the key themes running through the classic series to date: the concept of the Doctor as a “lonely god”. The Doctor is set apart not merely by being a Time Lord, but by being the Last of the Time Lords. Always before, in the classic series, he could have gone home if he’d wanted to. Perhaps there would have been consequences to face, but he could have gone home. Now, there’s no home to go to, and every time he starts to think of Earth as his second home, something happens to remind him of all the ways he’s not human.

What we get from this is that RTD successfully managed two seemingly contradictory things. On the one hand, he grounded the series in a more realistic view of how people would react to traveling around the cosmos with a 900 year old man. On the other hand, he introduced a renewed sense of mystery and magic to the character of the Doctor himself. He’s not just a bloke with a time machine. He’s a lonely Time Lord who occasionally yearns to be a just a bloke, so much so that he values the companionship of people who might otherwise seem quite ordinary. Some of his last conversations with Wilf highlight this better than anything else in the series.

The downside to the more realistic relationships of companions with their families is that a significant number of stories were set on present day Earth. Now, this isn’t entirely strange–we had five whole seasons of the classic series set almost entirely on present day Earth–but the Doctor isn’t stranded there. He just keeps coming back. That part is less realistic. The universe is really really big. Even given that the Doctor has adopted Earth as his second home, there’s a lot more to see than Cardiff, 2007.

Of course, some of this, maybe even most of this, was budgetary. It’s far cheaper to film Cardiff as Cardiff (or London or other British cities that it can reasonably stand in for) than try to build a set or redress Cardiff as something alien and strange. But some of it was also philosophical. RTD was betting that the audience would respond better if the show was anchored in the familiar.

The end result is that the new series feels significantly different from the classic, even allowing for the fact that the classic series itself evolved over the years. The Doctor’s own trauma makes him a darker character (“I used to have so much mercy…”), as does his growing lack of restraint. He now contemplates doing things he never would have done before knowing there were Time Lords around to call him to account if he stepped too far out of line. His companions now serve a much more useful function: keeping him from going too far. The more realistic setting and relationships actually heighten the darkness of the series. Having these dire events take place in a less fantastic context makes them more frightening, because it’s more believable.

So, ultimately, there’s a lot to like about the Davies Era of the mythos.

Where it falls down the most, however, is in the wild inconsistency of the quality of the individual stories. Some of them — even some of RTD’s own — are brilliant: well constructed, emotionally impactful, with well realized characters and sometimes even a quiet lesson or two² But some of them are really kind-of not, and unfortunately many of those are the stories where the stakes are highest, the season finales.

Perhaps the real problem is with the concept of a season finale, itself. Doctor Who never used to really bother with the idea. Oh, it’s true that a lot of the season-end stories were strong and memorable. But they weren’t really “event stories”. In fact, I’m willing to bet that few people could name most of the Classic Era season-ending stories, at least, not the ones that weren’t also regeneration stories³.  There was no strong urge to make them radically different from any other story of the season, and no compulsion to make each one bigger than the previous one.

Unfortunately, Davies fell into this exact trap. Having set the stakes incredibly high with his first season finale–which was actually a great pair of stories–he had to stretch further and further to find bigger and better for the subsequent ones, culminating with the massive fanwank that was “The Stolen Earth”/”Journey’s End” and the only slightly less wanky “The End of Time”.

Thus, as much as the Davies Era can be remembered for breathing new life a show everyone thought couldn’t be brought back, we also have to remember the degree to which he demonstrated that even a real live producer can produce bad fanfic.

As time goes by, I expect I will come to have a less harsh appraisal of the negative aspects of the era. I know right now that a lot of my irritation lies with how high expectations got set by the show’s genuine successes.

Even now, however, when I am still irritated by them, I also fully acknowledge the achievement of RTD and his team. Now, it’s time to look ahead and see what Stephen Moffat can do with the program.