Season 5/31: A Fairy Tale, Revisited

Aka the season overview that comes sooner than I expected, since I'm stuck on a real life thing and thought I might as well. A few things first: this is not an uninterrupted squee fest, since there were a few elements in the season I wasn't happy about along with many others I enjoyed. (Nor, if course, is it the opposite.) I welcome comments, of course, but I'd be grateful if they weren't phrased following the pattern of "well, maybe you didn't like thing X as you say, but OMG the unspeakable thing Y Rusty did!" RTD's flaws as a showrunner and/or episode writer don't justify anyone else's, including the Moff's. (And vice versa. I don't go for "well, okay, RTD did A and that wasn't so hot, but OMG Moffat did B which was way worse!" either.) Incidentally, while it's entirely possible the two gentlemen in question are faking their mutual admiration society and every single admiring and affectionate word about each other as writers and people has been a cunning lie, I still find their mutual fanboying more enjoyable to read than reviews that use one to beat up the other. Case in point, and as good a lead-in to my praising and nitpicking thoughts about the season under our new overlord, is a quote from The Writer's Tale describing the first post-Moffat accepts the showrunner job meeting between a certain Welshman and a certain Scot:

Benjamin Cook: I meant to ask, did you meet up with Steven Moffat yesterday, in London, for that coffee? (Nice coffee, was it? Milk? Sugar?)
RTD: It was a latte. Freezing, because I wanted to sit outside and smoke. Poor Steven. A kid called Karim recognised us and asked for a photo, and Steven said, 'You'll never know how historic this moment is!' But it was lovely. No great emotions. Well, I had a good time and we had a good chat, but I don't usually get emotional about stuff like that. Except in a good way. I like change. I love it when people move and leave and swap around. It felt good, healthy and natural. I went to our coffee, full of things to tell Steven. I was bristling with them. But as soon as we sat down, I thought very clearly: I don't need to tell him any of this stuff. He knows scripts, he knows writers, he knows what's what. And he knows what he wants to do. He'll invent his own way of doing things. Experience - it's useless! Mostly we talked about the rewriting process, though it's a hard thing to discuss. As I talked, I thought I sounded power-mad. Genuinenly. So I clammed up about it after a while. I didn't like the sound of myself. If anything, I felt a good old fanboy thrill down my spine, because Steven talked about the future in terms of... well, to the exent that I said, 'Don't tell me any more!' I want to find out as a viewer. Nothing quite like it.

( When I was a child, I had an imaginary friend )