The Curse of the Successful Formula

Doctor Who’s twenty-first century regeneration has been refined into a well-tuned formula of adventure and excitement. Series 4 saw the show reach new heights of popularity, with its highest ratings and audience appreciation figures so far.

But this successful formula is both its greatest strength and greatest weakness. It’s a strength because it’s a successful formula, and so most episodes are never less than solidly entertaining and well-made, but it’s a weakness in that it’s a successful formula, and so series 4 couldn’t escape a certain air of familiarity, a sense of going through the motions, losing something of its ability to surprise and challenge the viewer.

Good art doesn’t just seek to satisfy the existing tastes of the audience, to merely meet consumer demand, but to give people a taste for something new. When Doctor Who was brough back, many in television thought the family audience was dead. Rather than just pandering to existing demand, it gave people something good and imaginative, and created the demand for itself by virtue of being original, high quality storytelling. Doctor Who, with its travels in time and space, and with its alien central character, is ideally suited to inspiring people with works of imagination.

The three two-parters this series, The Sontaran Stratagem, Silence in the Library and Journey’s End, each work to a formula, but in different ways and with varying degrees of success.

The worst offender is The Sontaran Stratagem, which a computerised Doctor Who Plot Generator could have written simply by filling in the “Insert Cliché Here” blanks in a standard template. Invasing monsters? Check. Everyday objects being put to sinister use? Check. Alien threat as media event? Present and correct. Awkward and badly-thought out attempt at topicality? Oh dear, yes. And there are a whole bunch of other clichés thrown into the mix, including the Doomed Journalist, the Child Genius, the Evil Clone, the Stooge’s Redemptive Self-Sacrifice.

My short story The Shopping Trolleys of Doom (available as part of Short Trips: How the Doctor Changed My Life from Big Finish and all good bookshops from 30th September, order your copies now!) is written to this kind of formula, but as an affectionate pastiche, a joke. The Sontaran Stratagem uses this formula seriously.

The Sontaran Stratagem is just like Eragon, an awful excuse for a fantasy novel that simply takes the exact plot of Star Wars and gives it the names and scenery from Lord of the Rings. They use tried-and-tested plots, and so can’t fail to function on some level as entertaining-enough mental candyfloss, but are utterly devoid of any originality or interest.

In Silence in the Library, even the Mighty Moff shows the same tendency towards repetition. Take a creepy monster with a repetitive catchphrase as in The Empty Child, add in a contrived love interest like Madame de Pompadour from The Girl in the Fireplace, add a few timey-wimey shenanigans like those in Blink, set it in a library, and viola!

But Moffat can make it work: his story still manages to have more imagination in the first 90 seconds than The Sontaran Stratagem has in 90 minutes, by bothering to have some cool new ideas like the Nodes and Data Ghosts, and to rearrange those the ideas it does reuse into new and interesting patterns.

Silence in the Library is a good example of how you can have a formula, in the sense of a format or a structure, without being formulaic. A background pattern or structure can be a good basis for variation on that theme, and variation or innovation is all the more pronounced for being set against that background.

It’s the most successful case of working within a particular formula or “voice”, but is still prone to the same dangers, and doesn’t entirely avoid the pitfalls. The story is still too self-consciously a “Moffat Script”, and relies a bit too much on his established repertoire of trademark tricks, making it his least satisfying story – but in this case, that simply means that the story is mostly brilliant rather than entirely brilliant.

Journey’s End shows another approach to formula. Basically, the finale just the “Go Large” version of Parting of the Ways. There aren’t any new ideas, just the same ideas done BIGGER! but slightly less well. We don’t just have Earth in peril… but EVERY universe! We don’t just have Mickey and Jackie back… but EVERY companion of the Tenth Doctor!

It’s silly, it’s fun, and I enjoyed it an awful lot. But inflating the same elements to ridiculous proportions doesn’t amount to originality. Journey’s End didn’t seem to quite hang together as well as Parting of the Ways either, as I examined in my series finale review.

That sums up series 4 for me… it’s got Doctor Who down to a well-refined formula, and on one level it’s a formula that works. The show never less than polished and entertaining, but it loses something of its freshness and excitement for following the same patterns as have gone before. Worse, it reduces the show to consumer commodity, giving the audience what they already want, rather than surprising them with what they didn’t know they’d enjoy.

Is this really such a problem, though? Is there anything wrong with the show giving the audience what they want? The problem is that if the BBC had taken this attitude five years ago, we’d never have had Doctor Who back on our television screens. The family audience was believed dead and buried. There was no indication that the audience in general particularly wanted Doctor Who to return, or to sit down and watch Saturday teatime drama.

That was one of the wonderful things about the show’s return: it was a glorious risk, inspired by imagination and vision rather than audience research and the focus group mentality. Let’s hope that in the specials and beyong, we’ll see more of that same imagination and risk that made the revival of Doctor Who such a blazing success.

Stay tuned for the next part of my review, where I discuss series 4’s portrayal of the Doctor, and why he is always at his most interesting when he is most unlike us.