A Petition for All

Whatever your opinion... we can all agree here.

The first thing I have to confess is this: I don't know who you are. I don't know who's likely to be reading this. I don't go anywhere near any forums (technically fora... no, never mind that now), and my source of Doctor Who news dried up halfway through the last decade, when I put a sonic screwdriver down a very obnoxious young lady's bum-cleavage and became a social pariah. I get the impression that some of you take this blog quite seriously, and discuss it among yourselves, but I don't know who or how many.

The second thing I have to confess is that I quite like it that way, although it does mean that I don't know what's really happening. I'm automatically sceptical when I'm told that "The Massacre" has turned up on Betamax in Finland, but beyond that, I'm unsure how much credence to give to whatever rumours I end up hearing. I was told about the casting of Billie Piper on the 1st of April, 2004, and naturally assumed it was a joke. I was amazed when it turned out to be true. Even more amazed when she turned out to be quite good.

I'm wrong a lot of the time. We'll come back to this.

So: on to the rumour I've been passed, the reason I'm writin'. Is this a true thing, a half-true thing, or a suggestion of fandom's which has somehow snowballed? Has it been the talk of all the newsgroups, or dismissed as moonshine and neutrinos? I have no idea. But...

...but I've heard that a certain spin-off has been mooted.

Yes? No?

All right. More specific.

The possibility of a series revolving around the adventures of River Song and Captain Jack.

Very well, then. True or not, discussed or not, the same conclusion applies. I'd like to start a petition, or - if one already exists - I'd like to add my voice to the choir. Please... please... please... do everything you can to make sure this series comes into being. Make it real, I beg you.

It makes perfect sense, and in a way, it's made sense all along. You may recall that when Chris Chibnall was making such a rotting hog's carcass of Torchwood, I said this:

However much the recent work of Steven Moffat may have been overrated ("Blink"… I could piss that in my sleep), surely a gadget-heavy sci-fi show about spunk-filled twentysomethings should rightfully be his gig?

Sadly, and not for the first or last time, many of you focused on the snidey part in brackets while ignoring the point of the sentence. But with hindsight, it was one of those occasions when I was absolutely right: as Moffat's work on Doctor Who has shown, Torchwood under his control would have dominated sci-fi telly like a belligerent and vaguely misogynistic colossus. And kicked the crap out of Battlestar Galactica with its massive metal boots. All the worst excesses of what we might call the Moffat-Smith era would be ideally-placed in a deliberately "cult" show, post-watershed, in X-Files faux-darkness, with story arcs involving time-traveller pregnancy and imminent lead-character death, plus jokes about kinky sex between regular cast-members. The design specs for Torchwood even cited This Life. Moffat wrote Coupling. You can see the misapplication of staff here.

But a River Song / Captain Jack series is perfect. Absolutely, unquestionably perfect. It has every element necessary to (a) be saleable to TV producers even beyond the UK, and (b) please the demographic that Moffat's been trying to attract while he's been alienating children, teenagers, casual viewers, and former Doctor Who fans who don't happen to like kind of sci-fi you get on Sky. Consider what it demands, and what needs to be removed from the parent-series beforehand. All the squee, techno-fetishism, moronic gunslinging, and action-movie set-pieces that fuel Moffat scripts can be rewarded with their own programme. If you like that sort of thing, then go to it! Watch it, please! I'm honestly, non-sarcastically sure it'll be a huge hit. Meanwhile, the rest of us can have Doctor Who back. To Hell with it, RiverJack can have 95% of the BBC's effects budget, if it means we can have scenes with actual characters speaking actual dialogue again, instead of bits nicked from Indiana Jones scripts. This new BBC controller seems a reasonable man. I'm sure he'll agree to give the lion's share of the budget to the guys with the blasters and the sexual tension.

After all, does Doctor Who really belong in the twenty-first century? Russell T. Davies made us think, just for a while, that it might. But though I bow to no-one in my love for the Eccleston one-year-era (I only hated two episodes, and unwisely said so, enough of a crime to ensure that I was banished from the BBC as if I'd put a sonic screwdriver down its bum-cleavage), there was always something missing. Even in the weakest strata of the 1963-89 prehistoric record, Doctor Who was a programme about discovery, about finding the alien and making sense of it. About asking questions, if you like. Moffat has neatly and efficiently removed that, and who can blame him? Soap-opera with super-powers; story arcs leading to pitched battles in places with no past and no future; hi-tech weapons to butcher the baddies, with a computer-generated halo to surround the sexy young leads, and to draw attention away from the worlds they visit. The nature of adventure in 2012 is to feel contempt for unknown places, but to have a morbid fascination with the personal lives of the people who might end up there. Don't River Song and Captain Jack fit the bill much better than a core character who used to be driven by curiosity...? Of course they do. Moffat even had to twist the Doctor's motivation from "curiosity" to "cool" in order to make the series fit a more modern aesthetic.

Yes, it's perfect. And I may say this with bitterness, but as I hope you've gathered, I'm no less serious. Petition now. Demand now: ask for a series that combines River Song, Captain Jack, and... oh, you know... all that superhero stuff. It will work, and it will be more popular than Doctor Who (which is, as far as I can gather, what fans of the current series want most of all: validation, even if only in ratings). So let it be. I'm told that the voice of fandom can be quite powerful, these days. The campaign is in all our interests, whether we'd actually watch the bugger or not.

Because whenever something terrible and heartless infects the world, whether it's plague, zombies, or cynical fan-wank, the solution is the same. Moffateers can call it a spin-off. I call it quarantine.