the doctor & rose vs. steven moffat

When you’re a pop culture, sci-fi obsessed junkie and you figure out that you’re missing out on a great fandom, you know you have to get involved on it right away.  Which is what I did with Doctor Who.  I’m new to Who, but I’ve fallen hard and fast for this show.  If I hadn’t have been so obsessed with a certain other sci-fi show back in 2005 (cough*lost*cough) and I had been paying attention to TV around the world AND had known my mom loved the old Doctor Who series, I probably would have been obsessed from the get-go.  But alas, I didn’t watch my first Doctor Who episode until about 2 months ago.  I think I watched series 1 through the first half of series 6 in about a week and a half.  Ask my roommate.  I never left my room.

Anyway, I’m re-watching Doctor Who starting from series 1 with Christopher Eccleston because I just got it and series 2 & 3 and the David Tennant specials on DVD.  Not series 4 because it wasn’t on sale and I didn’t want to spend $75 on it.  Same with series 5.  I’m going to just come right out and say it…I’m a HUGE Doctor/Rose shipper.  In my mind, they belong together.  It’s even said in Doctor Who Confidential by either Russell T. Davies or Julie Gardner or Billie Piper (or someone else) that even though Rose is only 19, she is in many ways the 900 year old Doctor’s equal.  She challenges him and teaches him to think before acting rashly and makes him a better man.  Which is why my heart broke when she got trapped in Pete’s World at the end of series 2, why I was elated when she and the Doctor ran towards each other at the end of The Stolen Earth in series 4, why I had mixed emotions, but mostly good ones, at the end of Journey’s End in series 4 when he left her on Bad Wolf Bay with 10 Two, and why I cried my eyes out when he visited Rose for the last time in her past in The End of The World Part II because he wanted her to be the last person he saw before he regenerated.  They had a beautiful love story.

I just finished ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’, which is a really great episode.  But not for Doctor/Rose fans.  What I’m noticing now while I’m re-watching it all is that someone wasn’t a huge Doctor/Rose fan.  That someone was Steven Moffat.  To prove my point, these are the episodes he wrote for the first 4 series of the new Who according to IMDb:

Before I say anything, I really just want to say that I actually love all of these episodes.  I think they’re brilliant.  Now that that’s out of the way…

In ‘The Empty Child’ and ‘The Doctor Dances’, he brings in Captain Jack Harkness.  Rose becomes absolutely smitten with him, until he outs himself as a con man.  And she realizes he’s a 51st century man who likes to “dance” with pretty much anyone.  Positive note: it shows the Doctor being jealous of Rose and Captain Jack, and they get to have that cute dancing scene at the end.  But for pretty much all of ‘The Empty Child’, Rose is off flirting with Jack and not anywhere near the Doctor.  And it was just the idea of bringing someone in that could take Rose away from the Doctor romantically.  Grr… 

‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ is a bit more obvious about how it doesn’t seem Moffat wants Rose and the Doctor together.  He creates a woman who, I would argue, has many of the same great qualities as Rose, but is more refined and perhaps wiser.  Either way, Madame de Pompadour fell in love with the Doctor at a young age, and I’m pretty sure the moment after she and the Doctor snogged, the Doctor became enamored of her as well.  He even left Rose and Mickey in the space station knowing that the time windows would close if he left them just so he could save Reinette.  It does ring true to the Doctor’s character to save someone’s life even if it means sacrificing his own.  But leaving Rose and Mickey on an abandoned space station in the 51st century with no way of getting back to their own time or really leaving that space station?  He clearly wasn’t thinking, which is something someone in love would do.  The Doctor knew what kind of person Madame de Pompadour was based on what he knew from history, but then seeing her as brave, strong, and poised as she was and the fact that she looked into his mind and saw his past and accepted him, he probably couldn’t help but fall for her a little bit (if not a lot).  My question is why?  Why did Steven Moffat feel that the Doctor had to have a love story with someone that would only last for one episode?  Julie Gardner said in the Doctor Who Confidential for this episode that it’s good to see the Doctor love and loose.  I agree, it is.  It makes him a greater character and one that we can sympathize with more.  And, really, more human.  But why with Reinette?  Why not with Rose?  Is it because this was the first episode with Mickey traveling with them and the Doctor might have been feeling a little jealous?  What was the point of giving him a one episode love story?  And why did you have Reinette and the Doctor go “dance”, Moffat?!  I hope it wasn’t the euphemism you came up with in ‘The Doctor Dances’ episode.  

I can’t say much about ‘Blink’ because it happened when Rose wasn’t even on the show and the episode didn’t really involve the Doctor too much.  Also because it’s actually one of my favorite episodes.

Then there’s ‘Silence in the Library’ and ‘Forest of the Dead’.  This was the first time we ever met River Song.  I can’t begin to explain how frustrated I was getting when River started flirting with the Doctor when I first watched it.  Reason being because we had seen several glimpses of Rose throughout series 4 and all I wanted was for her to come back and be with her Doctor.  Thank God I only had to wait 2 episodes for her to come back and 3/4 to be with her Doctor.  I will give Moffat credit for the Doctor kind of rebuffing River.  In my mind it was because he was still grieving over Rose.  

I think I’m overanalyzing all of this now because I know that Moffat takes over as head writer and executive producer starting the second Matt Smith shows up on screen.  Also because, so far, the Eleventh Doctor never utters a single word about Rose or any of his companions from the first four series.  The cynical part of me thinks that Moffat really just didn’t like Rose and the Doctor’s story together.  Cynical me thinks that as soon as Moffat inherited the crown as executive producer, he wanted to completely make the show his own and not really mention what had happened during the Doctor’s previous incarnations.  He laid the ground work for River Song, and now he gets to play with her in his series with his new Doctor.  Who needs to think about Rose Tyler now that we’ve got River Song, who actually has some Time Lord in her and therefore makes her ‘more compatible’?  Cynical me just can’t believe that the Doctor would never speak about the person who, we were led to believe, he loved more than anyone in the universe and had just left for the third time.  The realist me can think about things a little more sensibly.  The Doctor has had to leave Rose in an alternate universe twice, and the second time he left her with a version of himself that could actually age with her.  If he dwelt on Rose anymore in his life, he would be even more sad and lonely than he already is.  He has to move on.  Which is what Moffat provided the Doctor with a regeneration and a new TARDIS.  He’s moving on and letting the past be in the past.

It just strikes me as strange that in the 2, well 3, episodes Moffat wrote in series 1 and 2 when Rose was actually there, the episodes skewed more anti-Rose and the Doctor than anything.  Moffat went out of his way to create a new love interest for the Doctor in ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’, and then later on created a character, who many think is the Doctor’s real soul mate, in River Song. I feel like that for the most part, series 2 was really building up the romantic story between the Doctor and Rose, and 4 episodes in, Steven Moffat squashed it.  It built back up after that, but why did it have to happen at all?  His episodes from the first 4 series were all just hinting at what was to come in series 5 and 6.  No Rose, more Weeping Angels, and lots more River Song.  

Steven Moffat, why didn’t you like Rose and the Doctor?