Doctor Who, season 5
Well, I'm caught up on Doctor Who now. After seeing two episodes of the latest season on free-to-air TV, then missing the next two, I gave up on it and waited for the DVDs. They were released last week, and I've been steadily churning through the episodes (starting with re-watching the first two).
I've heard a lot of people raving about it, about how Moffat has stepped in to save the series from Davies. I did like season 5 overall, but I don't think it warranted that strong a response. I don't think the writing was really much better under Moffat than Davies. However, it was different under Moffat, and it really needed to change. Davies beat a good drum, but beat it too long and didn't seem to know how to beat a different drum. Moffat does, and the series needed that... but I don't think Moffat actually improved the quality.
I thought the series started out very strongly. I love Amy (and I like how Moffat let Amy be a sexual creature - she's 21, and how many people that young aren't sexual? - and be attracted to the Doctor but change the dynamic between them so she's not another Rose). I like the themes they used - "The Doctor lies", "Time travellers meet out of sync", "Messages to the Doctor", etc. I like how they dealt with some of the ongoing issues of the universe head-on, like actually saying that the rewriting of time can cause some of the stories of the past to never have occurred, hence not being remembered by anyone but the time travellers.
But I thought the writing faltered as the season went on. A few episodes, including the last episode, got very Bill-and-Ted's in their use of time travel to help the heroes, what with the "we got out of this deadly situation due to something we will do in our future which we are now alive to do". That only worked in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey because that was a comedy and they explicitly played up the nonsense of it. The big cliff-hanger of The Pandorica Opens was defused in anti-climatic fashion within the first few minutes of The Big Bang. Yes, we all know how wonderful the Doctor is, but if all the evil forces of the universe can't even delay him for ten minutes, well, the whole series starts to seem a little pointless. The Doctor's near-obsessive opposition to violence came and went as the writers found convenient - tragic semi-accidental killing ("I only meant to wound it") brushed aside because hey, pretty paintings, but an offhand comment concerning football gets the "I am the Oncoming Storm, and nobody dies today" speech.
I'll be looking forward to season 6 (especially since there's unresolved plot threads from season 5 that will be dealt with - the Doctor himself pointed them out, so presumably we will learn more) but I'll also be hoping that Moffat works on doing things a little better, not just a little different.