I know, the BBC series has been around longer than I have been (and I'm 19). So there's a lot of history there, and there's always been an impudent sense of humour embedded in the whole enterprise. The Doctor is a lot of things, but he's always been a little bit mischievous. He's the guy who goes around the universe poking things with a stick (or a sonic screwdriver) just to see what might happen, and no alien crisis is without its share of quips and tart observations.
But I'm finding that the combination of Steven Moffat as show runner and Matt Smith as the Doctor is proving especially fruitful in the humour department. I've largely enjoyed the current season of "Doctor Who," which begins a 2-episode conclusion this Saturday on BBC America, but the sense of deliberate structure, the chemistry between Karen Gillan as Amy and Smith as the Doctor and the sharp humour may be my favourite aspect's of the Eleventh Doctor's first set of adventures.
I loved me some Russell T Davies but there was always a chaotic element to his seasons of the show. It's not that he never foreshadowed events or built up to big conclusions, but, under his leadership, the show sometimes hurtled from dud to brilliance to middling competence without necessarily giving the viewer an overall sense of where things were headed. Davies' finest hours tended to be the two- and three-partners on "Doctor Who" and the "Torchwood: Children of Earth" miniseries -- contained stories that always ratcheted up the dread and tension nicely. My sense is that Davies is a writer who works best when he knows the end point of a story before he starts to write it.
