Don't get me wrong, I did love the last five minutes of last last night's DW, but the more I think about about everything before the Matt Smith farewell in the TARDIS, the more problems I have with it.
The direction was calculated to provide cool-looking individual shots to pick from for the trailer, rather than to carry a narrative. The editing wasn't up to it either.
I still think, overall, were given a shopping list of things originally intended for an arc. Look at some of the things that would have been so cool if they were given an episode- wooden Cybermen! The Doctor being allied with the Silents as they turned out to be the good guys after all - fuck me, that would have made a hell of an episode. But no, we get them all as throwaway lines in narration.
And what's with the town of Christmas? Why? If it had been a former theme park colony like the planet in Nightmare In Silver I could see that, but it was just... there because the brief says the Xmas episode has to be stuffed with irrelevant Xmas trappings.
The holographic clothes? What was the point other than padding? Yeah they got a couple of good gags out of it, but it still outlived its purpose.
Worst of all- why Trenzalore and all that, when that whole arc was meant to lead to the 50th... and did. I mean, that arc was all covered *in the previous two fucking episodes* - why go over it again, only worse?
Oh, which reminds me, of all the episodes you need to be accessible to the casual viewers, it's the Xmas one. This fails on that score.
The DW year as a whole has been like a magnificent charge along a rugby or American Football field, unstoppably great from season 7 all the way to the 50th anniversary special, and then tripping over its own shoelaces at the goal-line and the ball flying off into the crowd.
Actually, you know what the whole Xmas episode felt like - apart from the regeneration scene - ? That really stupid bit of wooly thinking in Tomorrow Never Dies when Bond's car has a cable cutter on an extending badge which could only possibly cut a cable if someone put one at exactly the height of the cutter, which they do.
I know, people are going to complain "oh, sour grapes or something" - but no, I've defended and praised Moffat's handling of the show most of the time, and am happy with most of his episodes, but if I'm gonna say "that episode was great because of..." then it's only fair that I should say the opposite when he fucks it up.
And everybody fucks up sometime, everybody has an off-day; there's no real shame in that. It's just that... if you fuck it up in the middle of a season, it's easier for the audience to accept cos it'll be better next week. But when you fuck it up and the end of the year, when there's no new episodes for nine months... The audience aren't going to be so sanguine about it. Well, not this audience here, anyway... And is such a shame after all the good stuff we've had this year in DW.
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