It certainly displays a lot of Moffat's themes/tendencies - e.g., he's clearly very interested in possible (usually digital) afterlives. I wonder if his repeated use of the militarised church also links in somehow with the way he bought the star of Bethlehem into this or if it was just a slightly ham-fisted attempt to make the whole more "christmassy".
I think several people feel that the writing of the fifteenth Doctor, both here and in Boom! was slightly out-of-kilter with the trajectory of the character and I have a feeling that Moffat had relatively little awareness of what was going on around this when it was written (which I think was before The Giggle had even aired - though I could be wrong). The fact he was only writing it because RTD was too busy, possibly also explains why RTD was not, perhaps, excising as much of an editorial hand to keep the overall story consistent as one might have liked.
Personally, I put The End of Time in my bottom 10 of modern who, so this easily beats that. I also wasn't keen on Time and the Doctor which I thought got bogged down in tying up too many loose ends, nor Voyage of the Damned which felt too misanthropic for Christmas Day. I'd rate this somewhere around Twice Upon a Time which I also enjoyed, but it struggled a bit with what it wanted to say about the afterlife and for many fans suffered from a depiction of the first Doctor which was more about people's experiences of dealing with elderly relatives than the actual character Hartnell was portraying.
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dancing_serpent
(no subject)
Date: 2025-01-09 09:28 am (UTC)I think several people feel that the writing of the fifteenth Doctor, both here and in Boom! was slightly out-of-kilter with the trajectory of the character and I have a feeling that Moffat had relatively little awareness of what was going on around this when it was written (which I think was before The Giggle had even aired - though I could be wrong). The fact he was only writing it because RTD was too busy, possibly also explains why RTD was not, perhaps, excising as much of an editorial hand to keep the overall story consistent as one might have liked.
Personally, I put The End of Time in my bottom 10 of modern who, so this easily beats that. I also wasn't keen on Time and the Doctor which I thought got bogged down in tying up too many loose ends, nor Voyage of the Damned which felt too misanthropic for Christmas Day. I'd rate this somewhere around Twice Upon a Time which I also enjoyed, but it struggled a bit with what it wanted to say about the afterlife and for many fans suffered from a depiction of the first Doctor which was more about people's experiences of dealing with elderly relatives than the actual character Hartnell was portraying.