Last week I found myself commenting that, on the basis of the last couple of scripts, I was looking forward to a Mark Gatiss one for a change. I was rather surprised to find myself in that position.

As it turns out, my better judgment… was the better judge. This certainly is a Gatiss script here. Mind you, I hate it less than his previous scripts. Though it has gained a certain incoherence present in the previous Moffat script. How much of that is down to the direction, which is some of the worst since the series has returned, and how much the script, I can’t say and I’m not really bothered to sort out. There’s just something so generic about everything Gatiss writes. He doesn’t seem to know anything but pastiche.

I have never been impressed when people merely channel the thoughts and ideas of others and wear them as a badge to brand themselves or lend their own words legitimacy. It feels intellectually lazy, and as such it tends to bore me. Which is one reason I’m not all that impressed with Neil Gaiman, as well as he tends to choose his words. He doesn’t so much create his own worlds as he cherry picks references that he figures his audience will appreciate, or perhaps rather that fit into the distinct cultural trope that he means to evoke, and then rather than breaking them down or analyzing them or undermining them in some way as to create a new argument or perspective, he kind of lets them sit there and speak for themselves. “You like these elements?” he asks. “Well, you’ll really love my work, because it contains all of these features!”

To get back to Who, that’s what I get out of much of Robert Holmes’s writing. A few stories from that era sidestep the problem, and come off to me as a little less obvious. I like The Hand of Fear, and The Android Invasion, and The Sontaran Experiment. Each of those is a little weird, and doesn’t quite do everything as it is supposed to. The Deadly Assassin is also rather a startling divergence from form. It’s got something of its own to say. By and large, though, I feel like the era is trying to impress and placate me simply by evoking things that I don’t care about. At least, not in their own right.

I’ll accept that Moffat was just settling in with his first couple of scripts, and that the second was partially damaged by an unfortunate choice of director. And I’ll accept that Gatiss wrote this episode early on, before he had a character for either of the leads — which is one of the larger problems. I am a little unsettled, though. I wonder how much control Moffat really has over the show. Maybe he’s not a big-decisions guy. We’ll see how the next few episodes present themselves.

The next two episodes are directed by the guy from “The Eleventh Hour” — which, if nothing else, was directed with skill and a bit of bravado. Aside from young Amelia, I’d say the direction was the highlight that week. So for the near future I remain optimistic. Mostly.