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This post uses the wrong framework to understand the problems with the last three seasons of Doctor Who. Yes, Moffatt has a hard time killing off characters, or dealing with grief, but it’s not a psychological problem, it’s a narrative problem. Moffatt, you see, doesn’t like consequences.

Russell T Davies was all about consequences, really he was obsessed with them. Every action the Doctor took during the Davies years had consequences: The Doctor ends the universe-threatening Time War, but utterly destroys the Daleks and the Time Lords both in the process. Rose Tyler is trapped in a parallel universe, and the pain this causes the Doctor ultimately drives Martha Jones to leave the TARDIS a season later. The Doctor hides from the Family of Blood in 1913 to avoid having to kill them, that act of mercy causes nothing but heartbreak, misery, and death. In ‘Rise of the Cybermen’, the Doctor forgets to tell Mickey to stop holding a button for a few minutes, forming a hole in the universe that leads, seven episodes later, to whole armies of Cybermen and Daleks killing humans and each other at Canary Wharf in ‘Army of Ghosts’.

Davies used every trick available to visualize consequence, and one of these methods was constant death. Davies introduces good, likable, ordinary people with charming backstories and turns them into heroes just so their deaths will have impact. Lynda in ‘Bad Wolf’/'Parting of the Ways’, a reality TV contestant who follows the Doctor, trusts the Doctor, gets caught up in his battle with the Emperor of the Daleks and dies. Daniel Llewellyn, a small man who learns about consequences when the space probe he launched aids an alien invasion, who dies, along with the equally good and noble Major Blake, trying to reason with the barbaric Sycorax in the very next episode, ‘The Christmas Invasion’.

And it was exhausting. Davies’ passion for showing consequences led to Gordian knots of story lines, and angst, angst and more angst. Simply coping with consequences of being the Doctor becomes the conclusion of the series: in ‘Journey’s End’ when Davros forces the Doctor to confront how he weaponizes people, in ‘The Waters of Mars’ when the Doctor loses control and allows his sorrow at all that has come before to turn into hubris until he finally does break at the sight of an Ood and the sound of the cloister bell.

Moffatt, on the other hand, avoids consequence. Everybody lives, because it wraps up the story and allows the Doctor to move on to his next whimsical adventure that changes nothing. If you need to see the difference, watch the Tenth and Eleventh count the dead on Gallifrey in ‘The Day of the Doctor’… “the man who regrets” and the “the man who forgets”.

Moffatt has spent his three seasons as show runner attempting to disassemble the giant framework of consequences that Davies built up. Due to the cracks in the wall, Amy Pond doesn’t remember either of the Dalek invasions. Oswin Oswald erases everything the Daleks know about the Doctor. We learn in ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’ that The Doctor has taken this a step further by erasing all record of himself from a universe that already thought he was dead since he faked his death in ‘The Wedding of River Song’. And the Time War… Moffatt began erasing the Time War in ‘Victory of the Daleks’, when he apparently brought back the Dalek race for good, but now, it appears, we’ll also have Time Lords again.

Series finales under Moffatt have become grand, convoluted and absolutely without consequence. The Silence spend a season being beautifully creepy, they’re ultimately wiped out without a trace due to a video tape. We spend a season wondering what happens at Trenzalore, it turns out there’s a door into the time vortex and if three people step through it, everything cancels out. Moffat’s problem is not that he doesn’t understand death, it’s that he doesn’t want to deal with it, or anything else. It’s true that this lack of consequence (and death) leads to a lack of grief, but more significantly, it leads to a lack of gravitas. Entire story arcs build up and then fizzle, because an explosion would leave a crater.