Comments on: The Doctor Will Be Back: Doctor Who and the Showrunner’s Cliffhangers http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2011/06/13/the-doctor-will-be-back-doctor-who-and-the-showrunners-cliffhangers/ Responses to Media and Culture Fri, 12 Feb 2016 19:35:04 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.5 By: Sean Duncan http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2011/06/13/the-doctor-will-be-back-doctor-who-and-the-showrunners-cliffhangers/comment-page-1/#comment-97878 Mon, 11 Jul 2011 21:17:42 +0000 http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/?p=9764#comment-97878 “Where’s the emotional realism here? It’s disintegrated into Doctor Who‘s SF novum, no longer working to ground the series in any plausible, ‘relatable’ way. I don’t think the issue with Moffat’s Who is simply that it’s too complicated or convoluted. More precisely, the difficulty is that the show’s crucial levels of meaning (soap drama/SF) are no longer qualifying and enhancing one another, but instead have collapsed together in a flesh-like gloop.”

Thank God. I’d rather have a TARDIS full of this particular kind of “gloop” than the “emotional realism” of the RTD era, which wasn’t terribly “real,” and slathered on in the roughest of rough strokes. You’re wise to identify Moffat’s continual deconstruction of the RTD era in this way. Perhaps this alienates some viewers, but those kinds of viewers (the ones who were drawn to the show because they could relate to Jackie Tyler or somesuch) have made being a Doctor Who fan very difficult these last few years.

I appreciate what RTD did to restart the series, but appreciate what Moffat’s done to simultaneously return it to the kind of geeky realm the old series inhabited, while also pushing it into new, “fan service” directions that reward those of us who have stuck with the show for a while.

I didn’t much care for “A Good Man Goes to War,” but this series is fantastic so far.

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