I don’t think the resolutions have been poor so much as repetitive.

Stressing the importance of emotions is a nice theme and everything but perhaps a little variation in how the alien threat is resolved each week would be nice. Although the repeated use of emotion saves the day is preferable (at least for me) to flicking a switch followed by 30 seconds of techno babble that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense every week.

I'd personally prefer to have the vast majority of plot resolutions to be technobabbly because they're the solutions that make be think "That's brilliant" or "Why didn't I think of that".

But a bit of the soppy emotional stuff is fine every now and then

Agreed! 100%.

Night Terrors, The God Complex and now Closing Time have all been solved by a character feeling an emotion.

Let's Kill Hitler also used a sudden burst of emotion to solve a conundrum, but I'm not gonna include it in my list as it's not nearly as identikit as the other solutions - what with regenerations being transferred, the Teselecta security bands very cleverly laid into place, etc. LKH very tightly plotted.

But there are six episodes in this run. Of those episodes, three have been solved in a very similar way. Love quells a boy's psychic projections. Nihilism kills a minotaur. Love makes a spaceship blow up. That's a 50% hit rate. A full 60% of the episodes we've seen since the show came back, have had nothing else going on, solutionwise, bar a surge of emotion.

It's not inherently bad - although I didn't like it that much as early as Night Terrors - but I do sort of miss the meticulousness of Day of the Moon.

In series 4, they moved Midnight between Turn Left and Forest of the Dead to avoid running two parallel worlds consecutively. This series, they squeezed The Curse of the Black Spot in between Day of the Moon and The Doctor's Wife and threw Night Terrors into the second half of the series to avoid too many "indoorsy" stories... but, I think in doing so, they've created some completely different imbalances. So on that behalf, I don't blame poor plotting, just a bit of shaky admin. Worked S4, didn't S6. The series doesn't feel quite as elegant as the last few - probably down to behind-the-scenes turbulence. Not a million miles away from RTD's second series, so I don't think there are any pariahs, or poor screenwriters, or incompetent producers. I think there's just a bit of strain going on. There's no shame in that, but I can't say I'm enjoying myself quite as much as I was during series 5.

And yet I am still enjoying myself! So hurrah. Just not used to noticing the seams, and I'm finding it a little hard not to pick at them.