6. "Thank You" For Convincing People Quality = Scaring 12 Year-Olds
I am sick to death of people raving about the Weeping Angels. They were kind of interesting for one episode, but how much good material can you write for a monster that does nothing but lunge at the screen and make children jump? Apparently, hours. We've had "Blink", "Time of Angels", "Flesh and Stone", "The God Complex", and "The Angels Take Manhattan", each one trying to push the bounds further of what will make us jump and teenagers giggle with fake fear. It would be bad enough if this were the only one, but now it seems everyone who writes for the show has the same mentality. "This show is only good if we get a few screams out of people!" Even Neil Gaiman - who wrote season six's best episode - got sucked into this thinking and tried to give us an episode making the Cybermen scary (and failed miserably). Here's something fun to try. Look at an audience poll to see what the best episodes of Doctor Who were
before Moffat, or episodes that he had zero involvement in. You have 'The Caves of Androzani', which has no scary monsters. You have 'Genesis of the Daleks', which has no scary monsters. You have 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang' which has no scary monsters. You have 'Human Nature/The Family of Blood' that had no scary monsters. Huh. It's almost as if the show used to focus on telling an engaging, interesting story, rather than scene after scene of pointless attempts to scare us! I mean, I have no problem with there being scary monsters and scenes in Doctor Who (the Daleks themselves were famous for terrifying children in the 1960's), but what I take issue with is when it becomes the
sole driving force of the show. When you rob the good story in favor of traumatizing the audience, especially when you fail time and time again.