Last Saturday saw the return of Steven Moffat to Doctor Who – a fact that was initially met with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. Sure, he can write incredible Doctor Who, but has also written or been executive producer behind a good plurality of all Who stories ever made. Would this be the triumphant return of the legend behind the Empty Child, the Weeping Angels, the Vashta Nerada, the Silence and a large chunk of my generation’s childhood, or a reminder of why many viewers though Moffat’s style had worn thin?
In short… it was the first. Boom reminds me of Robert Holmes returning to Doctor Who for Peter Davison’s final story, The Caves of Androzani, after over half a decade’s absence. Holmes returned to the show as if nothing had changed and wrote the Doctor and the companion in the same style he always did, using the long time away from the show to refresh his style and bring a new perspective into his old tropes. Moffat has done this to almost an identical extent, except he didn’t kill off the Doctor. Moffat approaches every Doctor – from Ncuti Gatwa to Rowan Atkinson’s parody Ninth Doctor in The Curse of Fatal Death – in the same broad strokes. Under Moffat’s pen, the Doctor is a complex space time being of immense power, whose words are weapons and who buries that power under a demeanour of world weariness, quick quips and a deep love of his companions and children. This is why the Tenth Doctor in Silence in the Library can be taken out and replaced with Matt Smith and barely anything changes. Moffat allows the actor to interpret this broad strokes approach, and it’s why he would’ve also done great work for Jodie Whittaker – not because he’s inherently better than her writers, but because his approach would’ve been identical to his past Doctors and he would have focused on the story.