A common criticism I've seen on this forum (I don't read any others, so can't speak for those) is that the series has started to suffer from poor scripts.
It's not intended as a criticism of that viewpoint; but, I'm curious to know, what's meant by that? Is it story / plot lines (either episode-specific, or overall "arc")? Bad characterisation? Unconvincing dialogue? Or a combination of all of the above?

In my experience of this forum the criticism of 'poor scripts' is usually just a thrown around random complaint that pops up when people are just generally irritated by it as a whole for some weird unknown reason. I'd be interested to see if it can actually be explained mind you. Some of the moaning about the scripts is so half arsed I can't really believe it's genuine. Just complaint for complaints sake.

To be fair, people have been saying that consistently since the David Tennant specials. It just changed from person to person, from minority to minority.

Frankly, I agree with LightMeUp, in the way that "poor scripts" is just a rephrase of "I didn't like it", but made to sound more factual, rather than opinion based.

Yep people imply that scripts don't get edited or checked in any way... Except there's a whole pool of people at the Beeb who do just that... They wouldn't bother paying them and crediting them if they didn't exist...

People have been saying it since Series 2

Perhaps even Series 1, but I haven't bothered to check.

Exactly, 100% right. Very rarely do I see any reasoning behind why the scripts are so bad, and very rarely do the dissenter's comments make me believe they know the first thing about writing.

Some people here think (or claim to think) that even Steven Moffat can't write. He may not be to everyone's tastes but if you seriously think Steven Moffat cannot write drama you are a fool. You read the most ridiculous things here, such as Steven Moffat is 'egotistical' because he will do such and such a storyline: 'writer has an idea and writes it' shocker! And the showrunner at that! What a dereliction of duty. As showrunner he should be passing the buck for all big storylines on to the next writer... obviously. Seriously, most of these criticisms come from people who have absolutely no idea about writers or professional writing or the creative writing process in general.

There was a thread a while back by someone suggesting, seriously, that the show would be better with fan-fiction writers scripting it

I don't actually think it's always the script ideas that are the problem, it's the lack of proper script editing.
In the Forest of the Night was a prime example.
The basic idea was good, and I'm sure they thought they could make it look good on screen, but the script editor (de facto Steven Moffat) should have said to the writer "yes, nice idea, but you really must put in some dialogue, however far-fetched and contrived, to explain things like where all the people and vehicles are, and why only one child's parent seems go give a hoot about where the children are and what's happened to them."
If you don't do that, the whole thing falls apart. You expect the audience to suspend disbelief with something like Doctor Who, but there are limits.
A good script editor would have sorted that, themselves if necessary, which often happened in the old days.

I don't think that's the fault of script editing, I think that's almost deliberate. There are a lot of things in Who that only work when they don't stand up to scrutiny. The other people and cars are a production problem that, while many people will notice, most will not - by hanging a lampshade on it, you only bring the problem to people's attention. The bottom line is there really isn't anything that could be said to explain it away without taking up valuable time and derailing the story. I think they made the best decision by focussing on the core themes they wanted to get across and not how implausible it all was.

Moffat and Minchin work on every script alongside additional editors (e.g. David P Davis for S8). What they do with it is another matter. Mathieson was very open about Moffat's involvement with his episodes. Other writers aren't so transparent.

Oh Christ that idea makes me want to hide under a rock for the next hundred years. Gone will be the days of the gorgeous well written drama of 'Listen' and it'll be replaced with The Doctor and Sherlock snogging floating around in space and whole stories centred around tumblr gifs of ten and Rose hugging a wall. Blah.

People have been moaning about poor scripts since day one (in 1963). It's just a complaint people throw around.

At the end of the day, what you like is entirely subjective so one man's poor script is likely to be another man's masterpiece. There are some stories which have a more negative general consensus and some which have a very positive general consensus, but there will always be outliers who love the poorly-received episodes or who hate the well-received episodes.

There's no objective measure of what makes a good script or a poor script.

Is it bad scripting, or just stories that feel like they've come from the mind of a bunch of eight year olds, playing 'Dr who', making up non sensical plot contrivances and situations that in no way make any sense when actually thought about.

To be perfectly honest, some of them seem to lack the first inkling as to what 'creativity' even is...

So you mean the very essence of what Doctor Who, and a boat-load of sci-fi? You could pick apart many sci-fi stories. In fact, most whodunnits and murder mysteries need plot contrivances.

It is personal as to whether you feel they stick out and are implausible or not, in the most.

And to answer your actual question: neither. It's your viewpoint. Just that.

Further back than that CD93 - people have been complaining about so-called poor scripts since the early Hartnell days! Really.

However, I doubt that TV scriptwriters give a flying fig about ill informed and dopey posts on an internet forum, as frequently the people who moan the loudest about allegedly poor scriptwriting are those who have very little idea of what it actually takes to write a TV script, all the drafts it goes through, all the changes that have to be made to get the thing on screen.

Oh dear God.
No. A thousand times No.

I don't actually think it's always the script ideas that are the problem, it's the lack of proper script editing.
In the Forest of the Night was a prime example.
The basic idea was good, and I'm sure they thought they could make it look good on screen, but the script editor (de facto Steven Moffat) should have said to the writer "yes, nice idea, but you really must put in some dialogue, however far-fetched and contrived, to explain things like where all the people and vehicles are, and why only one child's parent seems go give a hoot about where the children are and what's happened to them."
If you don't do that, the whole thing falls apart. You expect the audience to suspend disbelief with something like Doctor Who, but there are limits.
A good script editor would have sorted that, themselves if necessary, which often happened in the old days.


However that's not a script error or script editor problem or a fault of the writer. I would say that's due to budgetary constraints and 45 mins to tell a story. If you have 45 mins to tell a story to waste I dunno or more mins on introducing various parents would take a lot of time plus more money to pay for each actor.

So probs the easiest solution would to have one parent to represent all of them. I cant see a problem with that

There are issues with some of the scripts in DW (errors that scriptwriting students would be berated for) but most of the problems are to do with the overall construction of the series.

There needs to be a much tighter control on the character's journeys through the series because it feels very uneven right now. The show runner and producers don't give the individual script writers enough guidance here because they don't plan the beats - the best show runners talk to their writers and they decide where a character should be in their arc every episode and make sure it's weaved in. This is why DW is starting to feel so shallow to me; too little depth to the main character in particular. They've clearly attempted to give him an emotional arc but it stalled and fizzled and ultimately came to nothing.

Moffat admits a similar thing with his series plots - he doesn't write them down and keeps them all in his head. Hence why they sometimes lack coherency.

I'd advise you look up Robert McKee (a screenwriting guru) - there are loads of videos on YouTube about scripting techniques and what makes up bad scripts.

One that I think is particularly pertinent to Doctor Who over the last few years is this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAhSc6akNPo

I have to agree with some of the previous comments - the 'bad scripting' comments tend to be more about a forum member not enjoying an episode than it actually being poorly written.

I've not enjoyed a lot of Steven Moffat's work over the past few years, but I would never accuse him of delivering poor scripts. In fact, I can't think of single script since 2005 that I would say was poor.

There have definitely been some rubbish scripts since the show was brought back.

Fear Her, for instance, (aside from being a weak story) had a terrible, terrible script.

What exactly was it about the script for Fear Her that made it so 'terrible', compared with any other script? And, personal preference aside (which is no basis for objective judging of quality) what criteria do you use in your assessment of the scripts?

What was it about Fear Her that made it a bad script?
I personally found the episode boring but there was nothing I remember about the writing which stood out as glaringly awful. It was just a dull story.

I'm not going to go through the pain of watching that episode again to look for examples.

However I do remember an awful piece of dialogue about "the council's van, the council's axe and the council's tarmac" and at one point the Doctor delivers this beauty:

"If living things can become drawings then maybe drawings can become living things".

As Cinemasins would say - "...What?!?!"

There were other clunkers as well.

I don't really think it's *that* bad, tbh. Not an episode I'm ever in a hurry to revisit (indeed haven't seen it for years) but the concept of people trapped in drawings appealed to the Sapphire and Steel fan in me (Ripped off Paperhouse though, I think? Haven't seen that) and there are a few nice touches. The whole "Olympic flame" stuff and the bits with Huw Edwards (Poor Bob! Think it was Bob anyway) didn't get past my Cheese-ometer, though. And I have quite a high cheese threshold.