Stephen Moffat as a Writer

Moffat seems to be one of those love 'em or hate 'em kind of writers. Being the head writer for both Doctor Who and Sherlock, the man has developed quite a following, which of course comes with a lot of critics. I personally love Moffat as a writer...but I certainly have my quarrels with him, and I'm going to talk about them today.

What brought this on was the latest episode of Sherlock 'The Six Tatchers', throughout which I kept thinking the exact same thing "Remember when this show was about solving mysteries?". Because that's what Sherlock has devolved into, when the show first started, it's main selling point-hell you could argue this was the main selling point for Sherlock Holmes in general-is that he's an incredibly unique and talented man in a very ordinary world. But as the show has gone on, Sherlock has faked his death with a bouncy ball, John's wife has turned out to be a secret spy so super that she could give Jason Bourne a run for his money, and seemingly every background character is secretly a genius, or assassin or some other impossibly good at figure.

This is where the main flaw with Moffat comes in, and it's something I've thought about for years now. Moffat is a great writer, when he has limits. Just look at Doctor Who, a show where he can do literally whatever he wants, set it on any planet at any time, and as the series has gone on since he took control of the season long plots, suddenly every event has to be a universe ending event, suddenly every supporting character has to be the most important character in history. Because of that, everything feels far too over-bloating, needlessly complicated, and when every event is a universe ending event, it's hard to raise the stakes when they're at the same level for every episode. When Moffat can do anything, he will do anything, and it all suddenly becomes very redundant and stupid.

Just think back to when Moffat wasn't the head writer of Doctor Who, he would only write one or two episodes per season, and they had to be contained and small scale enough to fit into a 45 minute episode. Because of this, the stories were a lot more simple, and lot more creative. What's often considered to be Moffat's best episode of Doctor Who was series 3's 'Blink'. An episode where The Doctor is barely featured, and our main antagonist is a monster who we never see move. This is when Moffat is at his best, when he's contained, when he can't do whatever he wants and there are very clear rules that are established, not continuing stories that take 4 years to resolve and have 3 dozen plot twists in between that just makes it incredibly confusing. In fact, I think this not only hurts the audience, but he himself, it's easier to forget the rules of your story when each one has about 50 asterisks next to them. Take the series 9 finale of Doctor Who, where The Doctor goes as so far to shoot someone and kill them. Yes they're a time lord so they'll regenerate, but The Doctor knows regeneration still feels like death. The Doctor, took a life, something he would never do. This is the same man that off the top of his head described The Doctor as thus "When they made this hero they didn't give him a gun, they gave him a screwdriver to fix things. They didn't give him a tank or a warship or an X-Wing fighter, they gave him a call box from which you can call for help. And they didn't give him superpowers, they gave him an extra heart. There will never come a time when we don't need a hero like The Doctor.". So you can hardly say the man doesn't understand the character, but clearly has contradictions.

Now in the sake of fairness, even when it comes to his bad writing, it's never completely bad. Moffat has always been superb at dialogue, there is no doubt, the wit, the word play, the seemingly endless vocabulary these characters have, he is a master at dialogue. These are all problems with the plotting of his shows, the overall stories, because while he can certainly give us some nice dressing, the meal itself is pretty piss poor.

So those are my thoughts on Stephen Moffat as a writer, consistently brilliant dialogue, but his stories need to be put on a leash and try and get through a pitch meeting without once shouting "But what if!" because there's almost never anything good on the end of that sentence.

-Danny