Moffat’s writing is starting to become a bad photocopy of itself. I sort of miss the days when he was just one writer on a team, and didn’t feel the pressure to impress people. He’s not very good at it.

He tries too hard, in all the wrong ways, and winds up with a grotesque caricature of the little bits in his earlier writing which at the time were fun in moderation — the naughty jokes, the wordplay, the puzzle box plots, the self-reference. And then he doesn’t really develop those ideas and themes; he just keeps wheeling them out again, with bigger arrows pointing at them. LOOK, DID YOU NOTICE IT THIS TIME? SEE, YOU LIKE THIS BIT. HA HA.

Aside perhaps from the volume of material that he’s putting out now, I don’t see a writer who is particularly challenging himself. I just see someone who is playing to who he imagines as his crowd. Sort of like Neil Gaiman, without the breadth or the subtlety.

Davies’ supposed homosexual agenda was fun and harmless, as it rarely amounted to more than the odd passing line or reference. Blink your ears and you’d miss most of them. If you caught them, you could appreciate the way the script talked right past the references; the way he almost buried them, made them subconscious. That was Davies just doing his own thing for his own sake.

With Moffat… I wish he’d quit it with the overt sexuality. Not because it doesn’t belong in Who, but because he’s invariably clumsy and adolescent about it. Increasingly so, to the point where it doesn’t just distract from the story; it repeatedly drags the story to a stop so that the script can point and shout HOMINA HOMINA as it drools over one lady or concept or another. It’s superficial, it’s creepy, and it’s not funny.

(Yes, Jenique. I see the irony.)

Davies expressed a constant sort of subjective glee — a passion, occasionally misdirected, for the way that big concepts and themes affect people personally and thereby achieve a greater meaning. Moffat’s glee is more objective and fetishistic, and it’s starting to embarrass me to witness.

Granted, this was a silly eight-minute sketch for a silly telethon on a silly night. It may not be at all representative of where he’s going, artistically, or where he’s at right now. It does sum up all his sleaziest qualities pretty well, though. If he’s just getting it out of his system so that he can move on, then great. Somehow I just think this is a more condensed version of what we’ll be seeing for years to come.