Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: amy pond, arthur darvill, bbc, doctor who, Karen Gillen, matt smith, steven moffat

Doctor Who Season 6 Gave Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith Way, Way Too Much

Time for another compilation video of Doctor Who, this time of Season 6 of the new show, Steven Moffat & the Eleventh Doctor's (Matt Smith) second season. This was the season when the show was at its peak of worldwide popularity. This was the season where BBC America began to get involved with the show in helping co-fund and promote it to an already huge fanbase. It had its first big fan event in New York City prior to the season premiere where Moffat, Smith, Karen Gillen, and Alex Kingston showed up for a red carpet screening with hundreds of cosplaying fans in attendance. That was the moment when Doctor Who had arrived as a pop phenomenon beyond the nerd niche it was stuck in for decades, with millions of new female fans shoring it up.

And yet this was the first time the new Doctor Who had a season that was kind of a mess. Moffat was pulling out all stops for this one. The show got a chance to shoot in the US for the first time. It got a chance to look epic in scope on top of feeling. Waaaaaay too much was going on in this season. Way too much plot, way too many complications in the relationships, way too much weird emotional entanglements. Oh, don't get us wrong, it never stopped being entertaining. Moffat seemed to be going at warp speed with high concepts to keep the viewers from getting bored. It burned through high concepts that could have fueled nearly a dozen epic book series. It had Neil Gaiman's first Doctor Who script. It had several season-long arcs that really added to one big arc. And that became the problem. It was like being fed too much gourmet hamburger.

The season became exhausting in its complications. It's too much. The show hit its decadence stage here, but many shows tend to go off the boil after season 5, and Doctor Who proved no exception. Moffat seemed to take from the Marvel Comics school of endless complications piled on top of one another: the Doctor's predestined death, the true origin & identity of River Song, the excessive torture of Amy Pond as she goes through the trauma of a time paradox that leaves her abandoned for 40 years, then the agony of losing her baby when enemies of the Doctor steal it to turn into a weapon against him. The latter just felt more like a hoary Marvel Comics plot than a Doctor Who plot, hopelessly convoluted and contrived, and Amy's trauma is just glossed over. The Doctor's relationship with Amy and River takes on rather creepy dimensions. Arthur Darvill starts to display depths of pathos and rage that kick against the stereotypical nerdy beta male softbois that Moffat likes to write. It was the one season of the show that felt more like Marvel Comics than Doctor Who, and not always in a good way.

This was the first season where cracks beyond to show in the new Doctor Who, that it could be too much of a good thing and start vanishing up itself. Moffat's next seasons would become various forms of course correction before he left. What he showed was that the show's basic format was still strong enough to survive any rough patch, including the convoluted mediocrity of Flux, which will soon be mercifully forgotten as the show undergoes another major overhaul with a new (old) showrunner.

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