yeah I saw that too, but that's another thing where I'm like -- why wouldn't that have come up in consideration before?
Other than maybe Series 4, RTD's way of handling series arcs was to tease out one word in the background over and over that meant absolutely nothing until the very end. And even then, still didn't really amount to much! :lol The recurring use of Bad Wolf and Saxon doesn't say anything about, or set up, Time Vortex Rose or the Master at all. The four knocks stuff and flashes of Rose in S4 were handled better though.
I actually think Moffat gets unnecessary shit for his arcs. As contained in their respective seasons -- the cracks in S5, the Doctor's death in S6, Clara in S7 -- they were threaded through and built up pretty well enough imo. For me the issue was more in how he tried to connect the dots between each of those seasons' arc (e.g. connecting two different factions of the Silence, the "silence will fall" voice and the exploding TARDIS all together, in one very cluttered conversation scene), which is where things got messy. His arc plotting definitely improved a lot and felt much more focused during the Capaldi seasons though.
Anyway! I caught up with The Witchfinders tonight, which I thought was solid but the plotting also felt really rushed. Almost like a two-parter that was collapsed into one. The jump from the witch trials to the mud aliens and how the two were connected just didn't gel well, imo. I liked the creepy woodsy atmosphere though and actually enjoyed Alan Cumming's performance, which wasn't as OTT hammy as I was expecting. :lol I feel like this episode really did crystallize one of my issues with this season, which is that the dialogue at times is just flat and terrible. This is one area where RTD and Moffat not just shone, but you took for granted was something that's just part of Doctor Who rather than a strength of those two writers. There are still some good lines here and there (which I feel mostly come from Graham, so maybe it's less the writing and more Bradley Walsh's performance that's elevating it?) but by and large a lot of the dialogue just doesn't feel as sharp as it used to.
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