Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The end of Season 7 seemed like a good time to give up on the revived Doctor Who. Showrunner Steven Moffat appeared to have disappeared deep up his own TARDIS, endlessly repeating the same timey-wimey tricks with the same Doctor and running into the same problems with his shallow female characters and poor sense of seasonal structure. And the casting of Peter Capaldi as the Twelth Doctor, though not unexpected, brought its own share of backlash. But the just-ended eighth season of the new Doctor Who has quietly been its second-best. (Coming in behind season five, Moffat’s first, when all his narrative gimmicks were shiny and new.)
These episodes should win back fans ready to delete the show from their DVRs (ahem), but why? What changed? The answer might surprise you: Moffat actually responded to most fan complaints. Here are the ways season eight fixed most of the problems with Moffat’s Who (which are also reasons to actually be excited about the future of the show).
The Doctor is old and cantankerous
The casting of Peter Capaldi was widely expected after Matt Smith announced he was vacating the role of The Doctor. But in this case, the predictable choice was also the right one. Capaldi’s Doctor is, to a much deeper extent than either Smith or his predecessor, David Tennant, unknowable, in part because of the authority that still implicitly comes with his apparent age. Doctor Who can never really do a definitive story about The Doctor (because the show has to keep going and regenerating ad infinitum), but season eight still did an excellent job of interrogating what it meant to be, if not The Doctor, at least this Doctor, and the psychic toll of the kinds of decisions that Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor often rakishly dashed into.
The Master is a woman
Having The Doctor’s most potent enemy who’s not encased in metal regenerate as a woman is an inspired response to complaints about casting another white man as a theoretically fluid cultural symbol. It’s possible to see this as cynical, but really, it’s cool to just introduce new wrinkles into the Doctor-Master relationship and see a formidable female Time Lord. Besides, even if the casting is just an attempt to draw complaints away from Capaldi (which wouldn’t matter since Capaldi is an excellent Doctor), it doesn’t matter—Michelle Gomez is a winner in the role, and given that she’s returning for next season, her Missy seems likely to become the revived series’ first truly successful recurring villain.
The season arc is simple
Moffat’s seasons have been more like prestige dramas, in the sense that they’ve embraced serialization, to the point where season six became consumed in a bizarre arc that involved The Doctor getting married, being murdered by his wife, and using Neil Armstrong to commit genocide. But season eight relegated the creation of Missy’s “Heaven” to the tail end of a few episodes, letting us know something was coming without harping on it too much. This correction borrows heavily from previous showrunner Russell T. Davies, who was fond of running images that presaged the finale (season one’s “Bad Wolf” comes to mind). Instead, the most important arc this season is the relationship between Clara and The Doctor.
Clara is a real person
This might be the most surprising change of all. After a half season of Clara serving entirely as a mystery for The Doctor to unlock, barely differentiated from her immediate predecessor Amy, we get a run of episodes with a better emotional arc for the companion than for The Doctor. Through the tension of her relationship with Danny Pink (which anchors her to Earth), Clara is pushed to the breaking point and revealed to be as ruthless as The Doctor in her attempt to save him. By the end of the season, it’s unclear which of the two lead characters you’d rather have with you in a fight against an army of Daleks. Moffat himself admitted how insignificant Clara had been in season seven—and good on him.
It uses Moffat’s tricks for pathos
The characters in season eight are characters, not action heroes or cardboard cutouts. Clara and The Doctor’s arc ends with the pair parting ways at the end of the season, a decision caused not by parallel universes or mind wipes or time-crossed romances, but by human emotions. (Clara will be back for the Christmas special, at least, but baby steps.) And that depth extends beyond the end of the season to the resolutions of specific episodes—in the season’s best installment, “Listen,” Clara finds herself initiating a crucial moment in The Doctor’s development as a child, in a strikingly powerful moment in a barn on his home planet. It’s a fantastic use of Moffat’s time travel preoccupations for an emotional purpose, rather than a simple narrative puzzle.
It’s fun!
Season seven drags under the weight of the Ponds’ departure, and the rest of Moffat’s darker tics—it’s the Doctor Who version of Low Winter Sun or The Leftovers. But even this season, which went to some seriously dark places, had more tension and genuine enjoyment to them than many of Smith’s outings. A sense of excitement seeped from the entire season, coming through in everything from the snappy romp “Time Heist” to the gripping, clever instant classic “Mummy On The Orient Express.” Maybe all the show really needed was to reshuffle the deck in order to get the ideas flowing. Welcome back, Doctor.
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