Last Saturday's episode of Doctor Who has been described by some as the worst episode of the show ever. I should clarify that by “ever” I’m pretty sure most of these people will mean “since the 2005 relaunch”. I don't think anyone could sit through both The Rings of Akhaten and, say, The Visitation and then say that the Peter Davison story is the better piece of television, no matter what favourable criteria are used.
I don't think it's the worst episode since 2005. I don't even think it's the worst episode produced under Moffat (that would be charmless lump The Curse of the Black Spot). TROA managed to give us some nice sets and prosthetics to look at and it wasn't badly directed, so it can't be wholly without merit. Of course all the nice looks in the world can't make up for an absence of plot and, judging by the outcry, The Rings of Akhaten is the episode that finally made a lot of viewers realise that.
One of the most irritating aspects of the show was the singing. Endless, needless, embarrassing singing. From the moment that aspect was first introduced to the plot I knew I wasn't going to enjoy the rest of the episode. And I’d really wanted to enjoy it. Based on a preview I'd read in Doctor Who Magazine (yeah I buy DWM, deal with it) I'd thought Rings was a contender to be one of my favourites of the Moffat Era. Not that that's great praise or anything because I felt his first series was a let-down and it's been all downhill from there.
Singing aside there just wasn't anything going on. Or rather there were lots of minor, uninteresting things going on which we were given no reason to care about nor try to make sense of. If any episode of the last eight years proves the point about budgets that I made last week this was it. The show culminated with a god we were told was bad being defeated by people singing at a leaf. It struck me as an insulting, forced-feel good ending tacked on by writer Neil Cross simply because that's what he thinks Doctor Who writers do.
Which leads me to another problem of the current Era (one that has nothing to do with budgets): Moffat does not seem to involve himself in the scripts of others as much as he should. Having read The Writer's Tale, a series of email exchanges between Russell T Davies and Ben Cook (a journalist from the aforementioned DWM), I know how heavily involved RTD got when it came to rewrites. Moffat's predecessor approached the job like it was a cross between a lead writer position and the sort of script editor Robert Holmes and Terrance Dicks were for the show (as opposed to the sort of script editor Helen Rayner and Gareth Roberts were for the show). Based on the five years of the show he produced that strikes me as the correct approach. He didn't always get things right or produce scintillating episodes but he did a better job on a more consistent basis than Steven Moffat.
The current showrunner has stated on several occasions that for the episodes he writes he'll do two drafts. That indicates that he's not going to spend a massive amount of time on the work of others. Having a lead writer and final draft editor who isn't particularly interested in doing the work necessary to make the show the best it can be (which, in RTD's case at least, meant rewriting as much as ninety per cent of a less than great script) had to have been a large contributing factor in last Saturday's Who-by-numbers approach.
Moffat is well qualified to write Doctor Who. He does it very well, as evidenced by the acclaim heaped on him for the episodes he wrote before he took over. He's not a man well suited to running the show though. An inability to come up with new ideas, preferring to retread old ones, and a seeming disinterest in tightening things up to make the best programme possible is evidence of that.
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