I found the Moffat story arcs bewildering and overly contrived. I loved Dr Who as a kid, loved even more the Eccleston & Tennant series. I loved Smith as the Doctor and thought Amy one of the best companions ever (and the Rory thing was great). But by the time their tenures were coming to an end, more than anything the show made my head ache in trying to follow spurious arcs and trying to figure out if something was part of an arc or just there for that storyline. And my daughter (who'd been a devout Who fan since we watched the first reboot series together) was utterly confused and asking questions all the time (which I didn't have the answers for half the time!). She lost interest totally.
I know RTD could go a touch too melodramatic and cut corners for convenience, but he was a far better show runner (and I was excited when Moffat got the job, because the previous episodes he'd written were amongst the absolute best).
The upshot was that I couldn't summon any enthusiasm for the Capaldi Doctor and never bothered watching any of his series. And I've not watched the Whittaker incarnation either.
Gets me a bit sad, as I was a huge fan. But the strung-out Moffat arcs sapped all the joy out of it for me and I've never bothered trying to get back into it.
That's a shame. Some of Capaldi's later stuff was among the best in the show's history. Once they finally got rid of Clara, at least a year too late, and introduced Bill, it really found its feet.
The good news is that Chibnell has definitely done away with the huge plot arcs and bringing back minor characters all over the place. The show is now clearly pitched younger than at any time since it was revived. The stories are simplistic, not much in the way of twists, and the sci-fi elements have been toned down. So where in the past they might have used the Ood to make a commentary on an issue like slavery or segregation, now they just go and actually visit Rosa Parks. The episode was well done, and it harks back to the earliest version of the show, as much about teaching history as science fiction, but then there was an episode on the partition of India, again with a very minor, almost apologetic, sci-fi sub-plot.
It feels like a very different show now. It's lighter in tone, despite being much more up front with some fairly heavy issues. There aren't any cool new aliens who you might imagine fans wanting to see again and again. But all of these things, that people are holding up as criticisms, they do seem to be deliberate choices, presumably made for a reason. There's a gap before the new series films, and I expect they will be looking carefully at it, maybe tweaking a few things. They never came close to justifying having three companions, and none of them got the attention they deserved.
But there are positives. The effects have really stepped up a level. This now looks like absolute top-tier sci fi, even if it's not being written as it. (Talking space frogs aside.) The new version of the theme tune is easily the best since the reboot. Dark and thumping, instead of diddly-diddly, much closer to the weirdness of the original. And they've also got rid of the awful incidental music, which has consistently been the biggest weakness of the show since 2005. The music now is atmospheric and pitched to the atmosphere of what is happening on screen, rather than just being really loud all the time for no reason at all.
So in production terms, it looks and sounds fantastic, the cast are all pretty good to great, if woefully underserved, and it has swung from overcomplicated plots spanning years to barely enough story for a single episode. Loose ends abound, but you don't get the feeling those are setting anything up, it's more like they rushed the edits on the final draft and left in stuff that should have been cut because it originally led somewhere totally different.
