I think we all do! I personally feel as if Moffet has more or less given up... but there are a ton a good writers out there that would love a chance to write for DW... I think it's time Moffet hung up his typerwriter for awhile... you gave us some good show Moffet... some very memorable storylines, but we can tell you're tired and I think it's time to pass on the torch to someone who really cares about the characters and can make Capaldi shine as the Doctor.
It's less his flaws as a writer and more his flaws as a showrunner. He makes the larger scale creative decisions, but the individual writers write the episodes. I think the real flaw this season was the lack of clear characterization beyond the most superficial aspect of Clara (namely "She thinks she's the Doctor."). Clara has never been consistently written, but this season really took it to extremes, coming hot on the heels of last season and her supposedly having been almost destroyed by the experience of Danny's death. And ultimately, that falls on Moffat. Managing the continuity, having a clear sense of direction for the show, all of THAT is on Moffat. He gives the writers their marching orders, they go off and write an episode, and then he's supposed to be exercising quality control over them after the fact.
You know what it's really like? It's like every season with Clara she has "regenerated" a new personality with maybe only passing reference to what came before. Clara's the Impossible Girl! No, wait. Now she's a thrill-seeking adventure junkie, torn by her love of Danny Pink and her desire to continue adventuring with the Doctor, and ultimately shattered by Danny's death! No, wait. Now she's a wannabe Doctor herself, and basically acts just like the Doctor!
There are other things that have happened over the show during the Moffat period, and he's just totally abandoned/forgotten about them. Remember when Rory was an Auton? Then he somehow just...uh...wasn't, and managed to knock Amy up? Remember when Clara split into a billion aspects of the Doctor's timestream? Oops. Guess that doesn't matter anymore, either. Remember how Orson Pink -- Danny's descendant -- exists out there somewhere in time? We still don't know how he came to exist. Even in this season, we see the introduction of the Sandmen, the Morpheus pod, and their (literally) viral video message. Does any of this matter? Will it
ever be addressed again?
Probably not, because Moffat doesn't really give a ****. He introduces stuff, treats it like some big mystery, and then just moves on as if he's bored with it and doesn't want to bother answering the question he allowed to be raised. Moreover, he doesn't want to play within any rules that the story has set for itself.
Ultimately, I think this is the single biggest weakness of Moffat's tenure, and it's one which even spills into the characterization of the Doctor. It used to be that this show had internal storytelling rules. You establish a rule, and then you have to either live with it, or create a new rule to explain how you can break the old one. The number of regenerations is the classic example. 13 and that's it. EXCEPT that we saw -- in the old series -- the Time Lords granting the Master additional regenerations, so there's your escape hatch. It's similar with storytelling. When you tell a story, part of world-building is in establishing the in-universe explanation for how/why things work. Some stuff is explicit (e.g. the regenerations rule is clearly stated multiple times), other stuff is implicit (e.g., we know that identical characters with the same last name have to come from
somewhere or have
some connection to each other). When you touch on the implicit rules, you have to explain them. Otherwise, you're doing ineffective world-building and it looks like you're just making **** up as you go.
So, too, with characters. We, the audience, know how people behave. We know how events affect them. We know how personality traits tend to be reasonably internally consistent with each other, or at least have an explanation/root cause/motivation behind them. So, you have a character who is acerbic and brusk with strangers, except for children, and who has a hatred of female authority figures. When the character's backstory is revealed, we learn that they were orphaned at a young age (explains the bruskness with strangers -- fear of attachment, and the kindness to children -- self-identification with them), and left at an orphanage with a tyrannical headmistress (explains hatred of female authority figures). Likewise, when we see the character go through events during the story, we expect those events to register on the character because we know that people change based on their experiences. So, if the character travels in time and confronts or otherwise finds peace with the headmistress, we wouldn't be surprised if they then react less negatively to female authority figures.
Moffat, though, doesn't give a **** about these rules at all. He's just as happy to have a character be an isolated collection of personality quirks with zero backstory or explanation for them. Likewise, he doesn't care about the experiences characters have. So, if we see Kate Stewart cry at the death of a subordinate in one episode, it's purely written for the moment and will have
zero impact on her the next time we see her. That experience might as well never have happened. Likewise with the world-building. He's happy to introduce some random question-raising plot element....and then never touch on it again because he doesn't care. Or to the extent it's ever explained at all, it's some half-assed dashed-off answer because he can't be arsed to really work at world-building.
Some people say "Oh, well, that's just a fantasy show." I say, "No, that's just an excuse for poor writing."
I don't expect every writer for Doctor Who to know all the ins and outs of the show and its intricate history. But I DO expect that from the showrunner.
