Subject: Uncle Rusty never embraced the stranger aspects of Who...
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Posted on: 2014-05-15 00:42:00 UTC
Merely the more camp ones. It's what he felt more at home writing - hence the barrage of crap comedy during his tenure. I do amateur stand-up, so maybe I feel it a bit more keenly than you do, but RTD's near-total inability to tell a decent joke just makes me want to tear my own face off, closely followed by his fingers.
Look, if you want to claim he embraced the weird side... why get rid of the Time Lords and Gallifrey? There's nothing stranger than Time Lord society, and believe me, there's a hell of a lot more potential for stories set there than there is in Love And Monsters. Oh, wait, we know why. It's because RTD didn't want the Time Lords hanging over him so he had the Doctor wipe them all out. And the Daleks, except not really because they're iconic and nobody'd let him get away with it.
And frankly, that's another thing I disagree with you on. Maybe Moffat doesn't take as many risks as RTD, but the risks he takes? They tend to have a much higher success rate. Yes, he screws up, lots of people do, but when he's on, he's really on. Uncle Rusty's approach to risk-taking was to dive head first into a burst sewer main in the hopes of finding a lucky penny; a whole lot of shite for precious little reward. None of the "more successful" episodes were written by RTD, with the exception of Midnight - and that episode's one that I can take or leave, personally. And don't even get me started on his arc writing compared to Moffat's - well, actually, you can't, because he never really did any. He started to, but then he just got bored and wandered off to look at some trees so some poor sod had to turn up and hang it all together with chicken wire and hope.
Uncle Rusty's great mission in his time as showrunner was to make Doctor Who more child-friendly, but you can do that without making something childish. Rather than tell accessible stories well with good, memorable characters, we wound up with flatulent mutant Teletubbies and Victorian kung-fu monks. Every single time he brought up Classic Who references, he screwed it up. For Christ's sake, he made the Macra into the interstellar equivalent of guests on the Jeremy Kyle show! One of the vanishingly few aliens that's actually, y'know, non-humanoid, and he gets it just so totally arse-backwards, we can only be grateful he never got his mitts on the bloody Rutans... guh.
This is just rambling now, so I'll get to the point. Moffat makes television of a higher standard of quality than RTD does. The worst of RTD's asinine campness got thrown out the window as soon as he lost power, and I consider that a good thing. You are well within your rights to disagree, but I still don't think that anyone who makes something as pathetic as Love And Monsters - the episode for which the denouement is "man vigorously and repeatedly rogers a paving slab with Moaning Myrtle stuck inside it" - ought to be defended, particularly since he stands by the episode. I just - no. No, no, no.
I'mma watch The War Games again. And then the Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, because that is how you do comedy.