4. The Beast Below
At first glance, The Beast Below seemed like a great premise with a great setting. The idea of Starship UK a starship housing Great Britain after solar flares ravaged the Earth smacked of the sort of quixotic treat only Who can get away with. It was the sort of imaginative concept that makes you proud to be a Doctor Who fan, so it was a real pity that they couldn't follow through on their grand-standing beginning. Really, they had all the ingredients here the mysterious monk-like Winders, the obviously-going to-give-the-children-nightmares Smilers, Liz 10 and the whole strange mystery about what the hell is driving the ship (turns out it's a bloody great whale). But the problem here was that while the premise was brilliant, there was far, far too much to stick in one episode. Again, it wasn't that this was a bad episode, and you might turn around and say that if my problem with the episode was that there wasn't enough of it, then surely it's done its job. But that's just the thing I don't think it had. Moffat gave us a veritable cavalcade of brilliant ideas that to see them concluded so easily in an almost-glossed over fashion was a real shame. After all, I think the Smilers, Liz 10, the Winders and hell, even the Star Whale could've taken up half an episode's exposition by themselves to see them
all wound up in that same timeframe, never to return, made the heart sink.