Moffat-Era Who is lowkey GOATed?

I have pretty fond memories of it but I definitely prefer the Davies stuff. I liked Moffat's initial direction for the 12th Doctor, and I was disappointed when the backlash clearly made him pivot away from his original intent.

The eleventh doctor was the first one I ever watched as a child, so of course I still love that era of the show. Moffat definitely wasn't a perfect showrunner and I agree with several of the common criticisms of his work, but honestly I'd say he's just as good if not better than RTD was before him(and he's definitely better than RTD is now).

I keep forgetting Davies was running the latest series. Yeah, I'll clarify I prefer Davies' original run in the 2000s.

i hold early RTD pretty highly in my head but i remember when moffat came around i had a lot of Issues but i'm pretty sure it mostly stemmed from "change is scary and sucks" and looking back on it and rewatching stuff, it absolutely isnt as bad as i remembered. i love hell bent (admittedly the only one i can remember by name because i am Forgetful). said era definitely still had Issues but every era had its own issues

I'll always prefer the first RTD run by a long shot, but I can't relate to those who claim Moffat is straight up bad. Even if his run is where I dropped the show for a long while. Moffat is the king of bottle episodes, and several of his are some of the very best of Who. Where he loses me is on the overarcing seasonal plotlines and general aesthetic vibes, which I feel RTD is much better at. Unfortunately, from what I hear from many concurrent fans, RTD's return has been severely hamstrung by Who becoming a Disney sponsored product so even those are lacking now.

edit: i was thinking of the episode heaven sent, i do not think of hell bent as highly oops

I think every episode of Moffat-era Who is awesome and dope. Plus any "bad ones" are only bad cause Moffat was also stuck in the Sherlock mines at the same time.

Davies-1 Who was great because it was balanced. It straddled the lines between accessible episodic stories and ongoing plots well enough that nobody was really alienated. Like yeah, The Shakespeare Code is dumb and boring, I'm no fan of Tooth and Claw, or the Unicorn and the Wasp, but those episodes are bookended by the Doctor's Daughter and Silence in the Library, or Smith and Jones and Gridlock, all episodes I love (I don't have an example for Tooth and Claw because season 2 kinda has a lot of lame episodes. Nice seeing Sarah Jane at least, I suppose?).

Moffat-era is great on a rewatch because it was really trying to be prestige TV and when you know how everything works it's a pretty engaging story. Watching at the time was utter hell, I had no fucking idea what was going on and basically gave up on trying to follow the show. The plotlines blend together weirdly, I always forget season 6 even has some one-offs because the whole thing feels like it's about the silence and River and awkwardly stops and starts so when I run into Night Terrors it's like "woah, fuck, that's right, this show does episodic adventures". Season 7 replacing its principle cast halfway through and then doing a plotline that's supposed to end with Clara loving the Doc so much she shatters herself across time feels rushed, because you only have half a season for it!

Things definitely got better with Capaldi, I'd say. Seasons 8 and 10 are both way less-intrusive with their ongoing plots. I don't fuck with Season 9 unfortunately, the dalek episodes are messy (but what Dalek story outside S1 isn't?), Under the Flood and The Lady Who Whatevered are pretty meager as two-parters go, Sleep No More is dogshit, and Heaven Sent's message gets undercut by Hell Bent turning a story about grief into one about obsession. The Zygon episodes and Heaven sent on their own are okay. But Season 10, hoo boy. My favorite. It's just really tightly-constructed, nothing feels wasted, Nardole and Bill and Missy are all at their most three-dimensional, Capaldi's Doctor gets some of the edge he lost in S9 back without feeling like his S8 dickhead self (it's fine on a rewatch knowing he's just putting up a wall, but the first time is genuinely uncomfortable...) and it has probably the best season finale of the entire series.

I'm probably in the minority when I say most Doctor Who season finales don't work well for me, by the way. Parting of the Ways is probably second-best, but the "I rewrite reality so everything is okay" thing is convenient here and becomes a serious contrivance when they do it like five more times. Daleks vs. Cyberman has nothing to say about either villain, it's just watching someone playing with their action figures before punching you in the gut (it does okay at that part). Last of the Time Lords shares a problem that Empire of Death would take even further, namely that killing so many people stops being shocking and becomes a reassurance that everything will be conveniently reversed, which it is (a personal journey with lasting effects for Martha makes this less of a problem for S3, but it's still cheap). Journey's End is basically a giant fanservice clusterfuck with every friend they've made coming back, that again treats the Daleks and Davros more as props than something to be explored (much as I think S9 did a bad job, it clearly tried at this), and pandorica combines all these problems into one while also having some of the best music and direction to make you bawl your eyes out anyway (the wedding of river song tries this and fails, so its best virtue is not being two episodes long).

Everything since then...well let's be honest, they have no idea what the fuck they're doing. I could see the vision before, even if I thought it was dumb. Now it just feels like they're throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. I love Jodie's Doctor, I love Graham, there are still fun episodes here and there, but it keeps doing these big reveals of information that mean fucken nothing and the actual character plots are pretty thin. They keep trying to do social commentary but it's too shallow to be prescient and not weird enough to be entertaining in its own right ('man extols the virtue of Obama to Pakistani woman as proof racism died after the 60s' might be the one of the worst scenes in the show).

RTD-2 is definitely more focused on a per-episode basis, but it instead swaps the toothlessness of Chibnall for just being utterly confusing at times. Why don't the space babies age? Exactly what trait of music did Maestro have control over? How does a planet accidentally go to war with itself and not notice the enemy isn't even there? What the fuck was up with 73 Yards-Ruby (yes I know the curse did it but why all the other stuff?)? Why did the Dots make such a convoluted plan when they could just turn into bullets? It's a new strain of half-baked, but still half-baked. I haven't watched Season 15 yet but I imagine it does things pretty similarly.

Anyway I just spitballed a bunch of shit without really responding to anyone specific so there you go i guess