As the second epoch of ‘new’ Doctor Who ends, I want to say thank you to Steven Moffat OBE for all that you have done. Those the masses generally wavered between loving them and hating them, you still gave us some of the greatest stories ever and guided us through seven years – not to mention three Doctors and some glorious TARDIS Interiors.
You’re earned Gold Stars for Blink, The Day Of The Doctor, and The Empty Child/ The Doctor Dances; Silver Stars for The Girl in the Fireplace, A Christmas Carol, and Listen; and a Bronze for The Impossible Astronaut/ Day of the Moon… Heaven Sent and Twice Upon A Time get a mention in dispatches.
I thank you also for bringing to us the wonders and delights of Vincent and the Doctor by Richard Curtis, The Doctor’s Wife by Neil Gaiman, Mummy On The Orient Express and Flatline, both by Jamie Mathieson. All works of genius that we might never have seen, had you not commissioned them.
An additional thank you for attempting to fix Russell T. Davies’s forgetting the Seventh Doctor was 953 at his beginning by giving the Ninth Doctor “Nine hundred years of phone box travel”.
You are forgiven for The Beast Below, Deep Breath, and Last Christmas (although mileage may vary), and we will try our best to forget you brought to us In The Forest Of The Night. I mean, even Verity Lambert gave us The Web Planet!
I hope that you do decide to write ‘just one more episode’, maybe in a few years when fans have decided that the world according to 42, The Hungry Earth/ Cold Blood, Dinosaurs On A Spaceship, and The Power Of Three is not as rosy and PC as they seem to expect, and when the institution itself decides that the Doctor needs to go back to tradition.
So thanks Steven. A great time was had by all, and with that, your epoch is at an end. It’s all over.
And now it’s down to you, DWC readers. Which episodes from Steven Moffat’s reign as showrunner are you most grateful for? Which are best left forgotten? And should Moffat return one day, to script another serial, albeit under a different showrunner?