2. Bigger Doesn't Equal Better
The show has never felt more cinematic than it has lately. There was a colossal shift in styles when Moffat took over from Davies. Before Russell left, the show felt a little cheap. Big in ideas but a little shabby on the presentation side. This is not necessarily a criticism. Doctor Who has historically always looked a little shabby. It's part of its British charm, after all. But Moffat is on a permanent crusade to go big. For Series 7, his edict to the writers was to 'Go Hollywood'. There would be no two parter episodes and every individual episode would get its own Hollywood-style poster with big action, high concepts and everything big big big. A cowboy episode! Yeah! A Dalek planet! Hell yeah! Dinosaurs on a spaceship, YEAH YEAH YEAH. Episodes find themselves populated with huge ideas (the Statue of Liberty is a Weeping Angel! Everyone who ever died is now a Cyberman!) but the problem the show runs into is that the storytelling of the show is not able to match the ambition. Ambition is good. Doctor Who always will be a show that's fuelled by its own ideas. The most successful episodes of Doctor Who are the ones in which those ideas are allowed to breathe and be fully explored. These episodes are often quieter affairs. Midnight was the best episode Russell T Davies ever did. It was all set in one room. Blink had a tiny intimate cast. Listen, the best episode of Series 8, was graced with a beautiful slow pace, allowing dread to bloom. The series finale, in comparison, was about a huge idea (dead people Cybermen) but the audience were never allowed to get to grips with the scale of it. Moffat is too obsessed with big set pieces, like the Doctor jumping out of an exploding plane and saying something witty... then another big thing! Bigger doesn't always equal better.