New Doctor
Who tonight! Its been too long and I can't wait to see what Moffat
and Capaldi have in store for their final season. What the trailers
have revealed have more than whet my appetite: Ice Warriors, proper
Cybermen, Missy (oh, Bill's going to love her).
Then
there's the future...
Now,
absolutely nothing is known or announced about Chris Chibnall's
Doctor Who and this time I don't even have tea leaves to read. With
Davies I'd seen Bob & Rose
and the odd episode of Queer As Folk
and I was a massive fan of Coupling
so I had some idea of Moffat's style before he blew all our minds
with The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances.
Chibnall?
Well, to my mind his Doctor Who
and Torchwood episodes
are a bit of a mixed bag and Wikipedia lists for me a bunch of things
I've never seen like Law & Order: UK
and Broadchurch.
There's
another aspect to it, though, in that up to now the modern series has
been massively influenced by the wilderness years material. Russel T.
Davies and Steven Moffat both contributed to the Virgin novels
(albeit only a short story in Moffat's case), both have employed
other multiple writers from that era including Gareth Roberts, Paul
Cornell, Mark Gatiss, Matt Jones and Gary Russel as well as early Big
Finish stalwart Rob Shearman.
A
lot of motifs the modern series plays with extend pretty naturally
from things the various wilderness years spin-offs did: pansexuality
as the future majority; Daleks straight from the Nick Briggs school
of thought; the destruction of Gallifrey; Rassilon as a living
villain; companions who live on the TARDIS part time and even have
their own adventures and agendas (River in particular has a lot of
Benny Summerfield about her and not just because of their joint
profession); and four of the first five seasons have an adaptation in
them, though admittedly a loose one in series two.
Its
not exactly a massive debt the modern series owes to the wilderness
years, everyone who wrote for both did a lot between times and
developed a greaty deal, but it is unavoidable.Potentially, this
season is where that train of thought ends and the generation of
fandom that I grew up with checks out, Moffat and Gatiss really being
the last ones standing at this point.
And
that excites me. I got into Doctor Who in 1992, in the wilderness
years. In a way, I've only experienced the evolution of one era of
Doctor Who in terms of influence and core beliefs. Its been a hell of
a ride but I am so ready to see what a series that doesn't come out
of that long tradition looks like.
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