Why 'Doctor Who' Has Plot-Holes

We’ve established earlier in this blog that the current version of Doctor Who is the creative child of Steven Moffat, and that, as a result of certain underlying presumptions on his part, some conscious and others not quite-so-conscious, the show has gone off on a particular tangent of which I am not particularly fond. Let’s be clear, though: I am a Doctor Who fan from 1963, since ‘An Unearthly Child’; I will watch some episodes over and over again with delight, classic and new; and I will even ‘sit through’ the really awful parts of the programme’s long history because loyalty demands it. Doctor Who is like faith or riding a bike -once you’ve ‘got’ it, you can’t really ‘unget’ it, even though that might lead you into all kinds of trouble.

Why don’t I like today’s ‘take’ on Doctor Who? For reasons I have touched on before, really: the current show-runner, Steven Moffat, says he has a different core concept of who the Doctor is (though I think that, perhaps unknowingly, other ideas of the Doctor make it through that predilection at times). He doesn’t think that the Doctor is ‘Gandalf in space’; I do. He thinks that, in accordance with modern society’s ironic focus on subjective emotion and psychology, as opposed to external reality and uplifting adventure, plots aren’t senior to mood and that therefore plot-holes don’t really matter. There have been some u