Bye bye RTD, hello Moffat (warning – Doctor’s Daughter spoilers)

Well it’s not exactly news now but Stephen Moffat is taking over the reigns from Russell T. Davies after the three Doctor Who specials in 2009, which is rather pant wettingly exciting. Although the signs have been in the air for a while, apparently at the end of The Doctor’s Daughter, the doctor’s daughter was meant to stay dead, but Moffat apparently said she should be brought back to life, so obviously the change over has, behind the scenes, been known for sometime and it gives an early indication about who’s going to be featuring in the series once Moffat takes control.

I adore Stephen Moffat’s work, notably the hide behind the sofa Blink and The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances which has ensured I never look at gas masks in quite the same way again and is writing the upcoming rather scary looking double bill set in a library, darn you Eurovision, why can’t it be this week? He also wrote the excellent Jekyll (I still think the opening of one of the Jekyll episodes where they follow the security guy and you think “Ok this episode is going to be following the security guy, who’s going to do something really nasty to Jekyll because he’s this ace soldier guy” and then barely before the opening sequence ends Jekyll simply tosses the guy off the roof).

Don’t get me wrong, I loved what RTD did for Doctor Who, after all he brought it back, but it’s not just that, i think he can write with a real passion, the final episode of series 1 where Rose decides she doesn’t want to be ‘normal’ and rushes back to save the Doctor is fantastic. But he obviously wasn’t going to do it forever and it was a bit of a worry about who was going to take over, it could have been Chris Chibnell (sorry Chris, although I think your later  Torchwood episodes have been great, I haven’t quite forgiven the Cyberwoman episode). I think Moffat is definitely the man for the job and now that RTD will be ‘free’, it will be great to see what he comes up with next. It’s also interesting to see whether this will effect whether David Tennant regenerates at the end of specials, I suspect RTD will want to wrap up the time war storyline, will something happen that means DT will have to regenerate. I personally think DT will be around for at least one more full series, he just seems a nice bloke and I’m sure he wouldn’t have pulled the whole “only do three specials whilst I go and play Hamlet” if he was going to quit afterwards. And although this has not been the first time he’s worked on an RTD project, that doesn’t mean that he solely works with him, I imagine DT will probably relish working on some more Moffat scripts.

So, this all presumably means Moffat will be writing the opening and closing episodes of series 5 onwards and hopefully some in the middle, so it’s going to be interesting to see how he tackles the whole story arc of each series. As long as the fan boys (who are probably more pant wettingly excited than I am) realise that just because Moffat is in charge doesn’t mean that he can forget the 7 year old boy in the playground (well I hope for the series long term survival he doesn’t), which RTD was very good in writing for but I think drew some criticism.

Anyway there’s an interesting interview on BBC news here, apparently Moffat wanted the job at 7, so did I *sob*.