More from Moffat: Outtakes From My Interview with Doctor Who Showrunner Steven Moffat
Not everything from the time I spent with Moffat made it into that interview, so below you'll find some of the outtakes that were cut for length from The Daily Beast Q&A with Moffat.
Among the topics: whether we'll see Torchwood's Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) in the TARDIS anytime soon (and why River is, in some ways, a replacement for Jack), why Moffat seems to relish killing Rory (Arthur Darvill) over and over again, why Season Six was split into two halves for broadcast, how dark the second half of the season gets, and a brief discussion of Doctor Who's episodic budget.
The Daily Beast: What went into the decision to split the current sixth season into two halves?
Steven Moffat: We got in the heart of summer, and in the second half it tends to get slaughtered a bit. Not in the ratings, just aesthetically: you can hardly see your television set for the sunlight streaming onto it. Also, it just gives you another event. Our ratings went up for “A Good Man Goes to War,” it became an event episode, it got a Radio Times cover, it got a lot of fuss and attention paid to it. That would normally have been the mid-series dip, where we bottomed out and then started climbing a bit… And now we’re going to have another big launch for “Let’s Kill Hitler.” Why do it all at once? We make enough episodes to have two bites of the cherry, so why not do it?
The Daily Beast: How dark are these upcoming episodes?
Moffat: We’ve got quite a range. Tom MacRae’s is very dark, Toby [Whithouse]’s is very dark, Mark Gatiss’ is very dark. On the other hand, “Let’s Kill Hitler” is an absolute hoot. And the same time, it’s got to be moving as well. We’ve got six excellent episodes coming up and you run the full gamut from dark to hilarious and some of the maddest stuff we’ve ever done, and that’s Matt Smith, the comedy Doctor.
The Daily Beast: Any chance of a Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) appearance down the line?
Moffat: Not in these next episodes... People talk as if there’s a rule against it. There isn’t. It comes down to one thing: do we have a good story? He’s obviously a resource. Russell [T Davies] said there’s an extent to which River has taken his place: she’s the cheeky, flirtatious one, but I was the first person ever to write Jack. I love the character. If there was a good story, he would come in. We would have to say, why him and not River? But yeah.
The Daily Beast: She does inherit Jack’s leftover blaster gun, after all.
Moffat: That was in my head and that gun must have ended up in the TARDIS, logically. That must be what it is: she just found it in a trunk and stuck in in her [pocket] on some night, doing who knows what.
The Daily Beast: Do you relish killing Rory off time and time again?
Moffat: The truth is he’s only been killed once and that has pointed out the other times that that has happened. What actually happened was we had two consecutive stories where it happened and I couldn’t make the scene work in “Amy’s Choice,” so I brought that in order to make that work. The Doctor’s companions are always on the verge of death. But we do pay it off, having found ourselves in that situation that wasn’t planned, we do pay it off.
The Daily Beast: There is a sense of responsibility in dealing with the franchise. It is an iconic series, an iconic character—
Moffat: There’s no shame in saying that it’s a brand, that it’s a franchise. Brands and franchises employ a lot of people and bring joy to a lot of other people… Running it is a responsibility and a joy and a thrill and a learning curve bar none. There isn’t any other job that teaches you what you learn here. Doctor Who should be kept going forever just on the basis that every so often it will manufacture a fully-fledged showrunner and a fully-fledged star.
The Daily Beast: How much is a typical episodic budget?
Moffat: £1 million-something, which isn’t really much when you consider that we have extensive guest cast, standing sets that we barely use, and you can’t really go to Venus. I never really think about the numbers, but I know you’ve got three too many sets there. It’s an alien species, but if we have more than three of them in prosthetics, we’re screwed.
Doctor Who returns Saturday, August 27th for the second half of Season Six, kicking off with "Let's Kill Hitler," at 9 pm ET/PT on BBC America and at 7:10 pm GMT on BBC One.