Yes, the thing with the cuckoo in the nest resolution, you could almost look away from the TV for a few seconds and miss the "he's an alien" revelation, yet's it supposed to be a big stumbling block. It was dealt with very quickly and yet very heavy handedly.
My feeling about the season-long plot vs individual episodes is that we've got this situation where only the showrunner is seemingly allowed to do the big stuff, which leaves everyone else to do stand-alone episodes with references to the story plot crammed in. And to be honest, I would be quite happy to lose many of those stand-alone episodes. Aside from the Richard Curtis episode and the Neil Gaiman episode, I think they generally tend to be of a poorer quality.
The problem is, the River Song stuff alone (not to mention the Silence, the companions storylines and the Doctor's death) necessitate that all of Moffat's episodes are big on plot. We can't really have Moffat stand-alone episodes anymore, which is a bit unfortunate because it means we're never going to get another "Blink." I still think the Moffat episodes stand out way beyond the others, but it does sort of leave everyone else to slot round those big episodes. There's this feeling now I think, that we're always treading water until the next Moff episode.
(My main thing with Torchwood right now is that I think it should have been five episodes. There are some great ideas in there, but not enough for Torchwood themselves to actually do, which leaves them looking a bit silly as they go around doing fairly unnecessary things that don't really have much impact on anything. Also, that omniscient computer system they have really needs to go.)
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My feeling about the season-long plot vs individual episodes is that we've got this situation where only the showrunner is seemingly allowed to do the big stuff, which leaves everyone else to do stand-alone episodes with references to the story plot crammed in. And to be honest, I would be quite happy to lose many of those stand-alone episodes. Aside from the Richard Curtis episode and the Neil Gaiman episode, I think they generally tend to be of a poorer quality.
The problem is, the River Song stuff alone (not to mention the Silence, the companions storylines and the Doctor's death) necessitate that all of Moffat's episodes are big on plot. We can't really have Moffat stand-alone episodes anymore, which is a bit unfortunate because it means we're never going to get another "Blink." I still think the Moffat episodes stand out way beyond the others, but it does sort of leave everyone else to slot round those big episodes. There's this feeling now I think, that we're always treading water until the next Moff episode.
(My main thing with Torchwood right now is that I think it should have been five episodes. There are some great ideas in there, but not enough for Torchwood themselves to actually do, which leaves them looking a bit silly as they go around doing fairly unnecessary things that don't really have much impact on anything. Also, that omniscient computer system they have really needs to go.)