You make a god point in that they all play on perception in one way or another. Not sure that's a weakness for me (although Moffat has plenty of weaknesses imo).

I feel precisely the same way about Time of the Doctor. Somehow, Day of the Doctor, sandwiched between the two, was pretty fkn awesome.

I suspect a good writer does not necessarily a good showrunner make.

There were people, notably on io9, who were utterly convinced that Capaldi would be a new character who took up the mantle of The Doctor.

Guys, I'm worried we might be starting to employ a 'Roman from Party Down'-level restrictive definition of science fiction.

Coriolanus was a great effort from Fiennes and I liked Abi Morgan's work on The Hour, but this seems like the kind of disposable period piece I rarely if ever get around to seeing.

Every bed is the Whoring Bed on Whore Island. So, that's probably where they go.

God gave you a gift.

Another minor example would be Whedon's Much Ado, which almost certainly wouldn't have gotten as wide a release if not for The Avengers.

If it helps, the Michael Allred art is pretty top-notch.

That would be really fascinating. I gather (from someone on another AV Club thread, actually) that there's a PBS doco called, From Jesus to Christ that covers a lot of that ground, and up through the early church fathers. It'd be interesting to see it dramatised, but I don't think it's the kind of thing US network TV,…

Actually, Moffat's budget has been smaller than RTD's since the coalition government has a huge austerity hard-on that's affected the BBC across the board

Why not? One of the joys of Who fandom is being able to come up with all kinds of delightful explanations for the the things left unexplained.

I KNOW RIGHT? I wept pretty openly.

I was stoked for Matt Smith after Tennant's run limped to its conclusion (Waters of Mars excluded, that was great stuff), but my excitement for Capaldi is some next level shit.

"Allow me to pop a jaunty little perception filter on your fucking purview and ram it up the shitter with a lubricated Zygon cock."

That is top-notch fan canon, sir. I like it very much.

I don't get the clamour for Idris Elba to play the Doctor - his ethnicity has nothing to do with it, I just don't see what people have seen Idris Elba in that made them think, "There's the Doctor!" Chiwetel Ejiofor, on the other hand…

I think The Moment was drawing from what it/she thought was the War Doctor's past, but was actually his future, because of timey-wimey ("Oh for god's sake!"). The Moment is Time Lord tech that scares the shit out of Time Lords, after all.

I had a slightly different reading of what happened to Eight - my impression was that he had actually died, truly died, in the crash and the Sisters had been able to bring him back for four minutes with some kind of mystical/tech-based whosamawhatsit so they could give him the option of regenerating.