Doctor Who Season 9 Is Steven Moffat’s High-Water Mark

Steven Moffat’s time as showrunner of Doctor Who was defined, for better and for worse, by ambition. The mischievous Scotsman – a famously uncontroversial figure that nobody has any strong opinions about – spent his tenure pushing hard, albeit affectionately, against pre-existing notions of what the show could be. If you were buying what he was selling, the results were often spectacular. 

The ninth season of the revived series (Peter Capaldi’s second as Doctor and Moffat’s fifth as showrunner) aired 10 years ago, and was arguably the apex of Moffat’s ambitions. Not necessarily in a conceptual sense – after all, his first season (a.k.a. season 5) climaxed with the destruction and rebooting of the universe, while his second (season 6) was an extended exercise in non-linear storytelling that was almost confrontational in its complexity.  

But in terms of the characters of the Doctor and the companion – and the format of the show itself – season 9 pushed things about as far as Moffat was able to go. Season 10 was rightly well received, particularly new companion Bill, and the first two-thirds of its three-part finale were stone-cold classics. However, there was a pronounced sense of things winding down, not least because originally Moffat hadn’t even intended to stay for another season. And while his vision of the show still had the capacity to charm and often thrill, it was hard to escape the feeling that this particular era had reached its wildest peak and was now coasting towards the finish line.

Season 9, however, was firing on all cylinders – while simultaneously inventing new types of cylinder to fire on. And at the core of this were the characters of the Doctor and Clara (Jenna Coleman).

Doctor Who Season 9 Is A Study in Toxic Friendship

The relationship between the Doctor and Clara was one of the more complicated and layered Doctor-companion pairings. A slightly tempestuous Doctor-companion dynamic was by no means new, of course – Colin Baker’s tenure famously started with him trying to strangle his companion (though if anyone ever holds that up as a model to emulate, you should probably smile politely and back away). Season 8 had seen Clara struggling to reconcile herself to the Doctor’s new, older face and spikier, more emotionally distant personality, with tensions memorably boiling over in their incredibly charged confrontation at the beginning of “Dark Water.”

But much of the drama of season 8 was framed via a question that was never really as compelling as the show thought it was – the Doctor questioning whether he was “a good man.” It always felt like a slightly artificial device, and Clara surely knew the Doctor well enough by then to answer “yes you are, if sometimes a bit scary” and move on. Matt Smith’s incarnation died of old age protecting children and building Christmas presents, for goodness’ sake.

Season 9, however, gave us a much more nuanced question to consider – what if the Doctor and the companion were actually bad for each other? The idea of toxic friendships had already been explored through the Doctor and the Master (and latterly the Doctor and Missy), and season 9 found other intriguing variations on the idea, as with opening two-parter “The Magician’s Apprentice” and “The Witch’s Familiar” and their portrayal of the shifting dynamics between the Doctor and Davros, and Missy and Clara. 

But when it came to the Doctor and the Master / Missy, the audience always had an escape hatch. Fundamentally, those two characters were at best frenemies, at worst openly antagonistic, so the darker, messier aspects of their relationship were the spice that made it fun, and not something we necessarily needed to interrogate too deeply.

A toxic friendship between Doctor and companion, however? That was much thornier. Throughout Doctor Who’s history, viewers have generally been encouraged to see that core relationship as a sort of wish fulfillment. Making friends with the magical imp who whisks us off to fantastic lands – dangerous, but with the implicit promise that our adventures will take us up against external dangers. Surely the dangers couldn’t come from within? From that special bond? From us? 

Additionally, the Doctor-companion relationship has always been built around a very specific power imbalance. The Doctor is in charge, the companion is subordinate, albeit with varying degrees of agency depending on personality and era. But season 9 built on season 8’s re-conception of Clara as someone with as much agency as the Doctor, as evidenced in her confrontation with the Half-Face Man in “Deep Breath,” her assuming of the Doctor’s role in “Flatline,” and eventually her assuming of his name and backstory in “Death in Heaven.” By season 9, they were effectively equals.

It was an exciting new space for such well-worn characters to play in, and it took the season to some electrifying places, culminating tragically with Clara’s hubris catching up with her in “Face the Raven,” and the Doctor’s hubris catching up with him in “Heaven Sent” and “Hell Bent.”

Peter Capaldi’s Run Features An Epic Not-Epic Conclusion

One of many striking things about what was effectively a three-part season finale was how different each of the installments felt from each other. In terms of format, “Face The Raven” mostly functioned like a traditional episode of the show, and its “alien trap street” conceit could easily have made for a memorable standalone adventure, with the characters investigating a mystery in a strange new location, meeting various weirdos. But once Clara took the chronolock from Rigsy, things started to build up a sickening velocity, leading inexorably to the companion’s genuinely upsetting – if visually poetic – death.

It’s important to point out here that the episode was written by Sarah Dollard, making a hugely impressive Doctor Who debut – it’s honestly ludicrous that she’s only been brought back for one episode since. Analysing “Face the Raven” as part of Steven Moffat’s overall design for season 9 doesn’t mean minimising Dollard’s work or giving Moffat undue credit, it’s simply a fact of the showrunner model that he was responsible for the overall shape and thematic / character thrust of the season, and would obviously have had a hand in shaping episodes he didn’t actually write.

The tragic ending to “Face the Raven” led directly into “Heaven Sent,” which – even in a season containing a found footage episode – stretched the show’s format further than ever before. Rather than a “Doctor lite” episode (where the titular character features either sparingly or not at all, usually due to production logistics), this was a “Doctor only” episode, with Peter Capaldi commanding the screen for nearly an hour in a mind-bending, baroque exploration of grief. Writer, star, director, and production staff all brought their A-game to an experiment that could have been disastrous, the kind of experiment that you only get when a creative team has the skill – and proven success rate – to justify astronomical levels of confidence.

Finale “Hell Bent,” while structurally more traditional than its predecessor, was still a strange and potentially alienating proposition. Previous season finales had seen the universe destroyed by an exploding TARDIS, all of time being squashed together, the Doctor defending a planet from an endless siege, and the return of the Cybermen (along with a gender-swapped Master). But “Hell Bent,” with its ostentatiously long scenes in which the Doctor doesn’t say a single word, wasn’t about returning villains. It wasn’t about Gallifrey or the Time Lords, despite featuring them heavily, or the (arguably half-arsed) “hybrid” plotline. 

It wasn’t even really about revenge, despite the Doctor’s threats in “Heaven Sent.” Ultimately, it was about the Doctor saving his best friend and going too far in the process, and finally realising that it was too dangerous for them to travel together. It was weird and uncomfortable and bittersweet, and rooted entirely in character, rather than epic spectacle.

None of this is to say that the season was perfect. Far from it – while Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman’s performances, along with the generally high production values, were enough to ensure a level of surface consistency, there were bumps along the way. “Under the Lake” and “Before the Flood” were kind of duds, and the Zygon two-parter – while audaciously weird and spiky – was, to put it mildly, politically confused, and added up to less than the sum of its often brilliant parts.

But if you were tuned into its wavelength, such bumps were a worthwhile price to pay for a season that felt like it was really striving for something. A season that was confident and ambitious, trying new angles and pushing at the boundaries, as a veteran writer found new ways to reshape a show that had been running for over half a century – and that he had already radically reshaped more than once. 

Of course, it couldn’t last. But to quote the Doctor: “Nothing’s sad till it’s over – then everything is.”

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