Doctor Who: 10 Biggest Missed Opportunities Of Series 8

4. Not Making Listen

This requires its own subsection.

As the epitome of Moffat tropes (full of timey-wimey, corner of your eye, whatever you do don't X, a 4 line poem recited in full at a climactic moment for use in the trailer), this is the ultimate argument for more talent to refresh the series when the head writer doesn't have the ideas to honour even his own scripts.

Moffat fills the pages, which could have been used for other writers, with his rehashed drek, to the point where there is really no reason for it to have been made at all. The storyline regarding his youth and his entire internal strength as a character is set up and paid off within the same episode, leaving it hushed immediately without affecting events in the series at all. It appears that Moffat's plots will either be fixed within the episodes themselves, ultimately leaving them hollow or unearned (Amy and Rory's divorce in 'Asylum of the Daleks' and the Brigadier wanting to be saluted in 'Death in Heaven', for example) or not being fully explaining at all (the crack in time).

If Listen was the finale, with the motifs of conquering fear within the story being scattered throughout the series to where they are paid off in the context of the Doctor's childhood and his companion's descendants, this could have been interesting and spectacular. Instead, confusingly, this is shoved into episode four and then never even mentioned again.