The pupil in denial.

Copied over from Tumblr, written in response to someone's post on the current lack of cohesion in Doctor Who:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Steven Moffat doesn’t know how to write big. Or, to put it another way: Moffat doesn’t know when to stop.

There’s no denying he’s capable of writing well, and will do so again. His best work came about when he wrote under a number of arbitrary restrictions, or limited himself to a small scale - one to two episode stories, or six people talking about sex and couches. His poorest work, so far, has been after he got the showrunner’s position, when they turned him loose on the Doctor and let him have his way with things.

If he’d been given a specific number of seasons from the start, if he’d been told he had only thirteen or twenty-six or thirty-nine episodes and knew that before he ever turned on his computer or set pen to paper, I think we’d all be marveling how well he’s stringing the plots together, how well he’s balancing all the time travel threads. His first season as showrunner was balls-out awesome on a number of levels, quite possibly because it pretty much did end after thirteen episodes. And then, like Supernatural, it just kept on going. There are still moments of genuine entertainment, great joy and clever quips, but they’re getting lost. The wheat isn’t separating from the chaff because nobody’s thinking about the eventual bread.

In time, Moffat will step down. The show will go on. That’s the tidal nature of Doctor Who, and sometimes, it’s easy to forget. To put it into perspective, it’s been running, with more hours, than all of Star Trek put together. Even counting the animated series. Give it a couple of years, and the BBC will find someone new to take the show into another direction. Or, step back from Moffat and hang out with some of the older Doctors for a while.

The tide comes in, the tide goes out, the ocean remains.