Interesting. I didn't/don't have a problem with the dialogue you mention. In the context of the scene and story they don't seem awful to me. And a bit of bad dialogue doesn't necessarily make a whole script bad.

What is it about that dialog that you find so awful?

For me bad lines would be things like "You stay here, I'll go for help", "Let's split up", "This place gives me the creeps", "Let's get the hell outta here", but only because they're now clichéd and hackneyed. I can appreciate though that anyone who's never seen a horror movie before would not have a problem with those lines.

I will say it's not uncommon for characters in imaginative fiction to draw ridiculous conclusions from the flimsiest of evidence.

For me the two most obvious flaws in "In the Forest of the Night" are:
1) It wasn't shot in the night
2) "Where are all the other Londoners?".

They're both production choices, not a script problem as such.
What else would you have to loose to shoot at night?
What else would you loose to either have extras wandering about or to add something to explain their absence?

You could argue that, given those "problems", they should not have chosen that script to produce in the first place, or reworked it another way. But they did make it and they compromised and prioritised in doing so.

The criticisms are probably unfair because they're not about the script and we don't know what we would have lost in fixing those flaws.

Put me down, I hate you

Hah. I'll raise you the horrendous "slightly too tight skirt." line.

(Can't think why I haven't rewatched 'Nightmare in Silver'! I will sometime just for Matt.)

Personal preference perhaps, but I honestly think if you go back and watch that episode and pay particular attention to the dialogue you'll find it's mostly dire.

Each to their own though.

There may be a slight bit of variability in what people mean by 'bad scripting' - if you take the 'script' as being dialogue only, then I think the show is consistently good, sometimes blazingly excellent. I think most people have so far taken this tack.

But if you're talking about 'scriptwriting' as a whole, then that includes plot and characters as well as dialogue.

Having read through the dialogue for Forest of the Night, I am forced to conclude, however, that idea, execution and dialogue are all consistently bad.

I'd have to disagree. The central idea, trees growing overnight in the city is a strking one, at least visually. The basic setup - kids on a school trip separated from loved ones, guided by their teachers, threatened by escaped zoo animals, one of them thinks it's all her fault because her sister went missing; all rescued by the Doctor. All those seem OK to me. Execution: More Londoners needed and it should have been shot at night, or presented as being at night. The problem is the science, which could have been fixed by better techno babble (hey if the moon can be a giant space egg, then why not trees being the saviour during massive CMEs). The script just needed to work harder to make it credible.

The biggest issue for me (as distinct from the most obvious issues), was the strangely passive Doctor. And that's a problem not confined to only this script in series 8 - Kill the Moon has that problem as well (I don't buy that he'd sit on his hands and claim he didn't know the outcome just to teach Clara something).

And, in your opinion, does that mean he never writes bad scripts? Even Moffat himself has admited that some of his scripts weren't so great.

And, in your own profession, are you good at every part of your job? I'm not. There's parts of my job that I excel at but other parts I don't. It's entirely possible to be good at your profession and still do a bad job. It happens.

Most commonly, a creative can be too close to their own work. They won't spot bad ideas or mistakes. That's why some of the best scripts come from writing partnerships. A second pair of eyes that's willing to tell the other partner when something just doesn't work well. Some of my best work has happened because someone else told me it sucked in it's current form

I personally believe that Doctor Who should not be creatively driven by just one person. Many shows have suffered from a single creative. Frankly someone should have had some frank words with Tim Kring during the 2nd season of Heroes for example


By that logic, nothing should ever be evaluated. IMDB should close their doors and stop allowing people to rate movies. These people aren't professional writers, what do they know!

I'd add a third in that as soon as the episode was over, everybody forgot what had happened. Yes, I know that the Doctor told Clara that forgetting is the human superpower, but even accepting that, even if the woodsprites themselves erased memory of themselves from the human consciousness...

Just when did Nelson's Column fall over and how the hell did no-one see it happen.

I was hoping for a shot of a miraculously rebuilt Column in the finale so I could point and laugh

The argument can be made that, to a certain extent, they already are.

How else to explain the final quarter of an hour of self-indulgence at the end of The End of Time?

That would be number 3 problem for me too.

Doctor Who has always had more than its fair share of plot silliness, but even more worrying for me was the handling of the Doctor / Clara / Danny situation. Not the relationships in principle, but the execution. The "beats" for that seemed all wrong to me.

The flip flop attitude of Clara to the Doctor in Deep Breath (first she doubts, then the speach about him having her back and trusting him to be there, and back again to doubt before the end of the story).

The sudden voicing of the Doctor's dislike of soldiers (not exactly out of character, but over emphasised (and worse, IMO, he seemed to pick on the lowest levels, not the generals and leaders, which seemed wrong and unfair - and unfairness is out of character for the Doctor). Just a contrivance to force a dramatic confrontation with Danny later? I didn't buy it. Similarly the Doctor sitting on his hands in Kill the Moon to contrive a heated argument with Clara.

Other things not quite adding up such Orson / Danny with Clara (maybe resolved later, I suppose). Why the Orange spacesuit? In the restaurant?

The total silliness of the golden arrow thing in the Robots of Sherwood. The conversation with Robin at the end, which seemed to hint towards something but did not go anywhere (so far, at least).

I was also quite disturbed by the morbid emphasis on death in the climax, although Missy was utterly brilliant, and the use of the Brigadier in that way.

Individual eps were very good (Time Heist, Mummy on the Orient Express, Flatline) and one was quite brilliant (Listen).

Someone said the pacing of the character development and overall arc was the problem with season 8. I'd agree with that. More inconsistency apparent in season 8 than in previous years.

You didn't actually need to show all or any of the other parents, you just had to put a throwaway line in to try to explain why they apparently had no interest in what had happened to their children!
Likewise the lack of vehicles and other people generally. We were supposed to believe that the only other people in central London were a few guys trying to set fire to the trees for God's sake!

Again not enough cars or people is a budgetary issue not a scripting issue. However the title suggests that it was supposed to be shot at night a lot of the issues were production issues rather than scripting ones.

Its the same as how the hell did the statue of liberty walk around mannahatten without no one noticing. It looked good so what the hell. I didn't actually have a problem with the episode, it was ok, but I cant see the scripts are any worse this year than last year

By that logic, nothing should ever be evaluated. IMDB should close their doors and stop allowing people to rate movies. These people aren't professional writers, what do they know! [/quote]


I think its because people are saying the scripts the problem rather than they didn't enjoy the episode.

Yes, I agree. And the same with other episodes which appear to be less popular.

That was what jarred with me too. I know he's had his differences with the Brigadier in the past (the end of The Silurians for example, but the downright aggressive and (dare I say it?) bullying attitude toward the PBI struck me as grossly unfair. It was a lead-in to Danny's characterising the Doctor as an "officer" which again isn't really the Doctor's character either. And if it was supposed to be a deliberate character change resulting from the regeneration, then it should have been developed rather than just dropped into the narrative so abruptly.


Ever since The Big Bang when Amy's memories brought the Doctor back from whatever Limbo he'd been sent to in restoring the Universe, he is essentially a fictitious character within the Doctor Who universe. Every now and then there seems seems to be a line that might just be a reference to this (the end of Robot of Sherwood, for example), or a storyline such as Kill the Moon that kind of makes me hope that the whole thing is being played out in some Land of Fiction, as in The Mind Robber.

Unfortunately, that would also mean consigning the better* stories to the same apocryphal status.

* All right, I'll admit it - the stories I liked better.

BIB: That was the gist of Tom's (and others') posts!

Many people come on here saying a script or the writer is rubbish without saying why. They're actually confusing "not liking" with "poor script". Ultimately, quality is a subjective opinion and one person's masterpiece is another's piece of rubbish.

The nearest you can get to objective quality is when there's a broad consensus that something is "good" or "bad". Even then, there will be some who have the opposite opinion.

I've always tried to say why I've disliked or liked a story and I accept others will disagree.

Yes but that wasn't my point. The poster was suggesting that only a professional writer could criticise the quality of the work of another professional writer. Which is a nonsense statement in my opinion. It's the type of statement used by fans to protect the thing they love - it's a poor attempt to invalidate opinions. Quality might be subjective (as you say), but you can't dismiss an opinion with that kind of argument.

Apparently there are also good scripts in Doctor Who.

I say we form a committee to look into this, a "down with that kind of thing" committee.

What I did enjoy about this series, I felt there were proper conversations between the Doctor and Clara which I felt was missing from last season. In my opinion the dialogue felt slower than last season which I preferred. Possibly this made the 'script' seem different and why people feel the script is bad.


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


"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 think that's had dialogue and I never went omg when it was spoken in the epesode. It just explains what's happening in the show

Careful now...

I think you countered Tom's point quite well, however he wasn't saying that no-one but other professional writers should ever criticise (I think! ). That would obviously be taking it too far towards the opposite extreme. Something of a straw man argument?

Some opinions are better informed than others. It's too easy to come along and say "that's a bad script" or "he's a bad writer" and even the equivalent of "he's a bad and arrogant person". Showing some knowledge of the process and a little humility would be a step forward. Having that understanding is not the same as making excuses for the show makers when there are problems,

If you can't back up an opinion, at least with examples of why you think that, then the opinion is worthless and, worse, it cannot be debated and it becomes just dogma.

All the negativity is in danger of creating a "Doesn't she look tired?" effect.

To quote myself, there are some very good and excellent episodes in Season 8, and, even in the poorer episodes, still much to be admired and appreciated (e.g. witty lines and PC's and JC's acting).