Moffat on Criticisms that Doctor Who Is Too Dark
Speaking to TV & Satellite Week magazine he said: “I wish those people would do a bit of research. Go and discover what children are reading now. Harry Potter’s very dark. All the Young Adult literature is very dark. And children are dark and serious people.”
Expanding in SFX magazine, he points out that Series 8 had plenty of lighter moments: “Not all the series was very dark. That’s been slightly talked up. People are forgetting “Robot Of Sherwood” or “Time Heist” or “In the Forest Of The Night”. We did lots of silly, silly things. Just because Peter frowned at you during them doesn’t mean that we’re any less barking mad than normal.
On the tone of Last Christmas he says: “We certainly pick up the threads of where we were. We don’t just say ‘oh, we’re stepping aside for Christmas to have a party and then we’ll pick up the plot again in episode one’. To be fair sometimes we’ve come close to doing that with the Christmas specials.
“This time you’re going to see the consequences of the last things you saw on screen, and it’s played out quite seriously. The darkness really comes from the complexity and danger in the friendship between the Doctor and Clara. A lovely and wonderful and warm and serious friendship though it is, if occasionally explosive, it’s a troubling one. It would trouble you if you saw it. I you were Clara’s best friend, you’d be saying “He looks barking mad to me”…”
