Excellent little break up of the directors/names =D I quite like the titles “The Impossible Astronaut” and Day of the Moon” - Intriguing!

However, you may want to add that Episode 11 (Toby Whithouse) is entitled “The God Complex”. And yes, that has been confirmed by DWM!

Posted by Theta Sigma  on  03/14  at  07:01 PM

Andrew: D’oh. That’s what I get for putting that together at light speed. It’s Moffat.
Theta: I completely forgot about the Toby Whithouse title, so I’ve put that in!

Posted by Graeme  on  03/14  at  08:37 PM

Given DWIN’s policy of not discussing spoilers in this blog. I will only say that I am looking forward to this season’s stories with great anticipation.

Is this season the first in which the lead writer has written less than half the episodes? It will be very interesting to see how this affects the season’s internal cohesion. A priori, I think this will be a good thing, not least to generate (I hope) some new and exciting ideas.

Posted by Andrew B  on  03/15  at  06:57 AM

The fact Moffat isn’t overextending himself is probably a good thing. One of the things that seemed to accelerate the animosity towards RTD (see my “Fandom Goes Sour” post) was the fact Doctor Who nearly became a one-man show (consider he wrote or co-wrote every full-length story and mini-episode produced between Midnight and The End of Time Pt. 2); back in the dark days of Enterprise there was also a period where the same couple of writers wrote nearly every episode of a season. While having a single voice creates perhaps a consistent tone for a series, SF fans in particular seem to prefer different voices and visions.

That’s not a criticism - if Moffat were to write all the episodes, where would the NEXT Steven Moffat come from. It was due to RTD allowing him in to write The Empty Child/Doctor Dances that set Moffat on the road to becoming the show’s most popular “guest writer” and now the showrunner. For all we know, this newcomer to DW, Steve Thompson, could end up becoming the next Moffat thanks to being given a chance this season.

Posted by Alex  on  03/15  at  07:05 AM

RTD and Moffat are doing the job of a head writer. It’s the head writer’s job to either rewrite or supervise rewrites of everyone’s scripts on every TV show. Watch The Good Wife, NCIS and Grey’s Anatomy, just to name three dramas randomly, and there’s the credited writer on the show, the writers room that probably cooked up a large chunk of the episode, and a head writer who probably did a polish and broke the story originally. That’s television.

And that’s done not just to create a consistent tone, but to ensure all the things fans love about the new show: characters, relationships, the story arc…those are all elements of new Who that are under the watch of the writing executive producer.

I think it’s just fan reaction to Russell more than anything. The Impossible Planet was lauded to the skies on transmission in 2006 when people thought just Matt Jones wrote it. Of course, it later came out that Russell, in fact, substantially rewrote it.

Not everybody likes Russell T Davies. A lot hate him (hi Ryan!) His vision of Doctor Who may not to be everyone’s taste. But I find it silly when people say “Oh Russell and Moffat are overextending themselves” when in fact a) they’re doing what TV dramas require from a writing executive producer and b) They’re writing the same number of episodes every season they’ve always written since 2005.

And um, next Moffat. That might be Toby Whithouse, who’s actually executive producer on a fairly successful drama, Being Human.

Posted by Graeme  on  03/15  at  07:27 AM

Graeme: I wasn’t trying to suggest that Moffat was slacking by only writing 5 episodes for this season!

I also regret that I didn’t check whether this was the same number episodes that RTD penned each year. I guess it only seemed that he was the credited writer on most stories. 

Of course, the head writer has a hand in every episode, from conception to completion probably. I should think that the process of reworking another author’s script would generally work to improve overall quality, two heads often being better than one afterall.

And I’ll just state that I enjoyed the “RTD years” (OK, perhaps not the ‘specials’) but was very happy with the direction taken in the last year by Moffat and his team. Hence my enthusiasm for the coming season.

Posted by Andrew B  on  03/15  at  09:16 AM

Graeme: That is pretty much as I thought. It’s difficult sometimes to know when to post or not.

I bit like this post I guess.

Posted by Andrew B  on  03/15  at  09:47 AM

@ Graeme. Oh, I agree it’s possible Curtis might have at one point been considered for this season. The rumors are saying that a Curtis episode is scheduled for Season 6, which clearly isn’t the case. I fully expect to see him in Season 7, though I could see him writing the Christmas special, too, especially if Moffat needs to turn his attention to Sherlock.

That’s the other thing we have to bear in mind: unlike RTD, who wrote for DW and primarily oversaw and did not write for the spin-offs, we have a situation here where Moffat is in charge of, and involved in writing, two TV series at the same time. Granted, if Sherlock stays with its (rather dinky) 3-episode seasons I can’t see Moffat becoming another JJ Abrams and spreading himself too thin at the expense of one of his shows (Alias suffered while Lost thrived, in the case of Abrams), but I could see him deciding to delegate rather than do all the work himself though, as noted, he still would be involved with rewrites, and commissioning of the stories, and coming up with the basic plots in many cases. Also, he has to be on call to replace a script if needs be, which is what happened when RTD had to write Midnight at the last minute to replace another script that had failed. (Ironically, this last-minute script ended up being one of the few with RTD’s name on it that even the bashers seemed to like!)

Posted by Alex  on  03/16  at  08:30 AM

Well it’s still basically 3 2-parters presuming 7&8 is a two-parter.

Last year was like a 13 parter anyway in a sense so this is probably going to have something like that though maybe not so tight as before.

With a distinct change in season form and depending how it’s done maybe the a 2 part finale is not really necessary.

Also it could be that the finale will be special length on the other end as opposed to starting with a extra long story (TEH)

“Not everybody likes Russell T Davies. A lot hate him (hi Ryan!) His vision of Doctor Who may not to be everyone’s taste.”

Big G! Why are you still under the misapprehension that I hate RTD? Next time you can make Tavern we should have a talk about that. I certainly disagree with many aspects of what he did and I have to say that with perspective given with the Moffat run I am coming to the conclusion that the show runner format of one person is a very limiting factor in producing the show. Maybe a two person team which is in effect what the show was on the original series is just better. The best thing about the new series has been the consistency. The worst thing about the new series has been the consistency. More voices are needed to supply the great expanse of stories that Doctor Who can achieve. That doesn’t mean that I “hate” any one story in particular for what it is but I do find that generally we get a very narrow story palette.

I think of my favorite era in particular S18-21 and the incredible variety of stories which range from story styles of the 60’s and 70’s plus ones particular to the 80’s stories both on and off Earth on different worlds with humans on other worlds or non-Earth origin humans or a mix of both. I find it kind of sad that after 6 years not one Dalek or Cybermen story has been off of Earth and that stories that Moffat himself has praised from the Davison era just can’t be made today not because of SFX but because of where they are set and because the people in them aren’t just everyday english people.

Just a few stories types that are seemingly nigh-impossible nowadays:

The Leisure Hive
Full Circle
State of Decay
Warriors’ Gate
The Keeper of Traken
Logopolis
Castrovalva
Kinda
Snakedance
Terminus
Enlightenment
Planet of Fire
The Caves of Androzani

Just because a story isn’t on Earth won’t make it automatically brilliant anymore than simply setting it on Earth or an Earth familiar setting will. Things can go wrong either way. RTD lightened up a bit in Series 4.

BTW I am starting to rewatch the RTD era and the single biggest blocking factor is one I have removed.

I posted the following on GB:

I finally got around to doing an experiment I thought about for a long time.

I have a DVD player with 6 seperate plug ins for the 6 channel sound so I took out the RL plugs and the rear RL plugs and then used the jack for the centre speaker and split that into the RL jacks and voila! I can now watch the new series with NO MUSIC!

Now I can watch the RTD era with only dialogue and sound effects with nary a bit of music that is as above stated too much, too loud and too busy.

I watched Midnight last night and it was totally amazing to have a story with only the actors carrying it.

What a relief now I can watch the show in a totally new way without my ears being bothered.

Sure there are some parts where you want music that will be silent but new things will be discovered.

Did you realize that when CE regenerates they used the sound effect of the extended Tardis take-off?

Posted by Ryan  on  03/16  at  01:43 PM