Howling:Paraphasing Moffat: Maybe I'll come back to that

Certainly hope this isn't against the rules, but hoping isn't going to stop me.

Is anybody else noticing/highly fed-up with, an apparent trend of Moffat's to just throw crap into the script with no definite intention of following it up?

Season 5 was (IMO) the best season of New Who, and AotD was (IMO) the best episode of New Who... but most of S6 and too much (so far) of S7 just leaves me angry and ashamed.

Doctor Who is not Lost. The mysteries and plot threads were fun, but now we've hit a point where it seems obvious that big plot threads are going to be left permanently hanging. Who piloted the Tardis out-from-under River, to Amy's wedding night? How did the Silence get to Earth, what was their original motivation? What links the Church and the Monks (who live in the 5,000s, right?) to this invasion by the Silence (which may stretch back to prehistory)? How did the Doctor get his sonic back from the Ganger Doctor? Big threads and small threads are being abandoned at such a rate that it's basically front-and-center to myself and all my fellow Who fans in real life.

Some of us are about to stop watching Who altogether... and I've been a fan for some 25 years. We've come to the conclusion that The Moff is peeved off at the audience and punishing us (not going to go into specifics, because it'll start a flame war... let's say, in addition to the popular points of finger-wagging in certain unpopular episodes, certain popular episodes have also rubbed us horribly wrong.) And there are also some just mind-crushingly obvious mistakes, like: if the Angels were repeatedly zapping people back to a time they had already been to when they tried to escape, then how is there any empty space left in the whole of Manhattan? It would be filled with thousands of copies of each person there.)

I'm not going to reply to any specific corrections or theories that were formulated off screen to explain these glaring omissions. I'm just asking: how common/rare is it for a Whovian, these days, to be impatient to the point of quitting their fandom over this? Agonaga ☎  14:37, October 12, 2012 (UTC)

Although I'm not anywhere near the point of "quitting [my] fandom", I do agree that the lack of follow-through is annoying.

(By the way, you say you've "been a fan for some 25 years." I've been a fan since An Unearthly Child first aired, so I can almost double that!)

"Who piloted the Tardis out-from-under River...?" is a question of fairly major importance. It's possible that Moffat hasn't forgotten it & will resolve it in conjunction with the Silence & the Question. However, the whole of Series 6 & the first chunk of Series 7 have gone by without any progress on this point. For me, it's the lack of progress, not the lack of resolution, that's the real problem. Had Series 6 given us just one small piece of information that we knew was related to the TARDIS hijacking, it would have been reassurance that the plotline is pending, not abandoned. It's the impression (which I hope is false) of abandonment that's the real problem for me.

The other main annoyance is that the "reboot" of the universe in The Big Bang was touted out of universe by Moffat as being a mechanism for resetting things so that the in-universe everyday world would be more like the real world. People wouldn't regard the existence of aliens as a known fact & would react to things much as real people would. That made sense, as far as it went. It was a drastic change, however, that would be worthwhile only if it allowed good stories that couldn't otherwise be told. So far, we've had no stories (good or bad) that couldn't have been told equally well had the "reboot" never happened. In short, Moffat did a major job of setting the scene, then did nothing at all with the scene he'd set.

There have been episodes that didn't work properly. Duff episodes occur in almost every show. They always have. It's unfortunate but not a disaster unless duff episodes become the norm instead of the exception -- or they coincide with a loss of trust in the showrunners. It's a loss of trust that's happening with Moffat.

It's bearable -- can even be enjoyable -- for the audience not to know where the show's going, as long as the audience has confidence that the showrunners know where it's going. Moffat is causing too many fans to suspect that he doesn't really know. Reassurance on this point is definitely needed. --2.96.16.185talk to me 22:44, October 12, 2012 (UTC)