I really enjoy watching Doctor Who. And more than that, I enjoy dissecting Doctor Who. During the Russell T. Davies era, I enjoyed watching Peter Kay wobble around in a fat suit that had been drawn up by a small child for a Blue Peter competition, a green blob with the smudged words of “ABZORBALOFF” that was turned into a fantastic and fun episode, ending with a heartfelt moment where Elton starts a relationship with a paving slab as his amore (Ursula) has been transferred from Peter Kay’s fat suit to a stone slab and they try to make a go of things despite this setback. A sweet ending, and perhaps even a little bit relatable to audience members who have partners that themselves have particular setbacks, or live their lives having to deal with otherwise normal events  as challenging circumstances. But it’s not an allegorical mallet to the head or a “stare directly into the camera and wink” moment.

I enjoyed Moffat and his twisting mazes of ideas, rarely caring if there were holes or otherwise issues, because it was always fun. Moffat had a tendency to run with ideas that were very big and not particularly controllable, such as “The Pandorica Opens” (S5, Episode 12). His inventiveness also created excellent standalone episodes such as “The Lodger” and my favourite episode of all time, “A Christmas Carol.” Although Moffat struggled with very long-winded plots that required graphs or a sly re-watch, he knew how to build an episode. And, more importantly, how to make it fun.

Chris Chibnall is by far the worst writer that Doctor Who has had the misfortune of hiring.

I wanted to keep this entire essay about screenplays, because a majority of you will have experience of Chibnall through the weekly show, but a few of you may bring up his short stories that the British Broadcasting Corporation put up on their website as some sort of defence of Chris as a creative or artist. I will tell you, plainly, that his written stories are rancid.

If you do not believe me, here are a few excerpts from his newest accursed story, “Things She Thought While Falling”:

She was cold.

The Doctor was cold.

The ragged clothes weren’t helping. She was cold, and in someone else’s ragged clothes.

The Doctor looked up, mid-plummet. Oh dear, she thought.

Far above her, the TARDIS was exploding.

That is very unhelpful, she thought.

No, wait, not just exploding. Now the TARDIS was dematerializing—while it exploded. Dematerialexploding, thought the Doctor. That’s not a word, chided the Doctor. Alright, replied the Doctor, I’m only a few minutes in here; you’re lucky I’ve got any words at all. Will you two stop arguing, chimed in the Doctor. Only if you stop sub-dividing us, replied the Doctor, this is all the same brain. Don’t confuse matters.

With a bit of luck, any injuries would be taken care of by the still fizzing regeneration process. Like those injuries the Doctor had got after he’d crashed through the roof at Naismith Manor. Or the hand he’d managed to grow back after the Sycorax had lopped one off. Watch out Doctor, she thought, your personal pronouns are drifting.

The Doctor jumped up, zapped a creature she couldn’t quite understand, and immediately made new friends.

It’s truly hot garbage, and I’m fairly confident that nobody would want to write like that or aim to write like that. The story is 1,004 words, and it is likely that Chris kept a solid eye on the word count rather than the fucking piece he was developing. This is not a good story. Any editor can see it, any writer can see it, any reader can see it. Repetitive, poorly planned, unbelievable, unintelligible, rushed. I would say it reads like a twelve-year-old boy turning in an English report on creative writing that he’s written whilst the teacher is collecting, but a twelve-year-old might actually pull something together.

This reads like all the monkeys with typewriters found a particular monkey, ill-suited for existence itself, complete with head injury and spinning helicopter hat, and forced him to write under duress whilst he screamed and crammed his tiny monkey paws into the keys with such little knowledge, just a basic lack of consciousness and humanity that the other monkeys read the result and mercifully beat the little monkey to death and stole his spinning hat as a trophy.

So those are his short stories.

Onto his godawful screenplays.

My girlfriend and myself look forward to our weekly “Sunday Roast,” so that we can sit down with Doctor Who and make fun of the tropes, dialogue, and general hammy-ness of the show. (Not that it’s the fault of anyone; it is probably hard to balance a show for children with nuance or important messages that don’t come across as little cliche or overly trite.)

But one thing that I’m interested in in the new series of Doctor Who is a character that breaks all the rules of the show, is frustrating to see on screen, and goes against everything that Doctor Who stands for.

What? No, there’s nothing wrong with changing the race, gender or sexuality of Doctor Who. Who the hell is sad enough to care about that?

I am talking, of course, about the introduction of the CyberMasters in “Timeless Children” (S12, Episode 10)

Cybermen are the anathema to the Daleks, who wish to destroy everything unlike themselves, because the Cybermen wish to create only more of themselves. The Doctor is easily incompatible with the Mondasian technology as the Doctor, and by extension, the Time Lords would never wish their own immortal lives upon other beings, even if they could grant it. The Doctor—and, by extension, the Time Lords—are much more compatible with Daleks, given that with enough time, most emotive and immortal beings grow a sense of anomie against the living and simply wish to destroy. This is, of course, why the Hybrid can exist and why Daleks can sap Time Lord regeneration energy.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg of things that have happened in the current season that shouldn’t, wouldn’t, or couldn’t.

Krasko in “Rosa” went back in time to stop the civil rights movement. There is nothing written on why he did this; it is just generally assumed he is racist.

Good ol’ Bradley Walsh sits in down in front of the Doctor in “Can You Hear Me?” and chokes up over his deceased wife, worrying that her cancer might metastasise inside him, running through a gamut of emotions. You can see Graham struggle to deal with his feelings, including a strange quasi-survivor’s guilt, and he almost feels as if he should go through the same horrors that his wife went through. He himself went through cancer and met his late wife whilst in remission. It is truly heartfelt.

The Doctor responds by saying “hm” and “I don’t know what to say.”

This received complaint letters for good reason.

In fact, the entirety of Series 11 has a 90 percent critic score on Rotten Tomatoes (Certified Fresh) out of 42 reviews and a 20 percent (Rotten) audience score with a staggering 7,983 aggregate reviews.

You’re welcome to go and read them and, to give credit where credit is due, a lot of them may be reactionary trolls or people who enjoy jumping on the “Thanks, I hate it” bandwagon after a particular episode that has polarised just about everyone (“Orphan 55”). The problem, for me, is not an environmental message, given the Zygons ruining the ozone layer and other environmental parables and proverbs that are staple Whovian material; the problem is the multiple timeline infraction that steps over a big timey-wimey no-no line for what is, let’s be an honest, a filler episode.

There’s the episode where the Master dresses up as a Nazi, only to have his disguise blown. A lot of criticism that came from that wasn’t “that’s a horrendous idea,” it was the sudden arrival of the Master in the future, having survived Nazi death squads off-screen somehow.

When we discuss Chibnall, we do not discuss what he does. Within the realms of Doctor Who, you may do anything, with even the most hardline rules a suggestion in order to be neat and tidy with your synopses and your season arc. It is a science fiction show. What we do discuss is what he does not do, when he openly moralises but absolutely fails to put in any reasoning whatsoever. To bring up a delicate or difficult topic and take the easy way out is somehow much worse than either dealing with it artistically and painfully or dealing with it crudely and bluntly. The point is that Chibnall is clearly not doing the best he can, and to phone it in so often on such a mainstay of British television at a time when TV license costs are rising and there are fewer and fewer reasons to watch anything on the BBC as it drains away original content and pushes to the forefront the dregs of BBC3 that somehow revel in being the lowest common denominator, rarely even trying to showcase relevant art or talent.

We want independent series that can be watched from new and up-and-coming cinematographers. We want fresh and relatable content that isn’t just included by a weary executive who’s spent the last decade earning £50,000 per annum. We want to see ourselves on the screen, not gaudy or listless parodies of ourselves that mock us in an endless hall of mirrors and offend the sensibilities by refusing to be offensive or even interesting.

And whilst we’re at it, we do not want Eating Out with My Ex or Football Stars in Bad Cars or Nailed It! so we can applaud people who do not deserve to be applauded or “dating” shows or boring ideas based off of YouTube skits where kids ask celebrities dumb scripted questions off a teleprompter.

Just bring back good television.

Bring back good writing written by the youth, not pot-bellied 50-year-old ex Sky Sports managers who should have stuck with admin. Chris wouldn’t know a good story if it was stapled to his glasses.

Doctor Who should get rid of Chris Chibnall immediately.