Subject: Literally Satan?
Author:
Posted on: 2014-02-21 18:30:00 UTC

I never said anyone was literally Satan. I said that Moffat was not a good writer. There are a lot of steps between those two points. Besides, if the literal Satan ever wrote an episode of Doctor Who, it would only be broadcast during the End of All Things, and the egregious idiocy contained within it would compel everyone to run from their houses in droves and smash everything in sight up with hammers. I have no idea how he'd get it past the producers, though.

In response to your first point: ugh, I am just so tired of everyone harping on and on about Love and Monsters, holding it up as the worst thing to have happened to the show in any and all of its thirty-three seasons. Yes, it's a bad episode. The pacing is a mess, the characters are all idiots, and being condemned to spend eternity as an immobile face fused to a concrete tile is a fate worse than death but it's treated as a good thing and handed to us with a side helping of unfortunate implications. But Love and Monsters was also an untested prototype for a new episode format that eventually, once it was perfected, brought us Blink, and it was primarily created as a scenario in which the villain could be a silly-looking green face-coated guy in a loincloth created by a nine-year-old boy. Considering the restraints, I think that they did an okay job. If someone were to do a similar episode, about ordinary people who encountered the Doctor in the past bonding over their experiences and trying to find out more about him, and just gave it a better villain, made its characters less dense, and cut out the padding, it could easily do well, since the premise is actually pretty good.
There are so many more bad episodes that, even without controlling for the two factors I mentioned above and just accepting it as it was, are worse. Even in the same season, you find the abysmal The Idiot's Lantern, which for some reason I never see anyone talking about, and once you put Classic Who in the running, since people who say it's "the worst of all time" would thus have to factor in all episodes of all time, it has to stand up against the incalculable nonsense of The Twin Dilemma and The Happiness Patrol. Love and Monsters isn't good by any standard, don't get me wrong, but it's more an episode that tried to do something new, only to crash and burn in the attempt and give us something mediocre at best, rather than an aberration for the ages.

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