So, in order of best to worst:
1) The Rebel Flesh.
2) The Almost People.
3) The Curse of the Black Spot.
4) The Doctor's Wife.
5) The God Complex.
Those were the episodes I did kind of like.
6) The Impossible Astronaut.
7) Day of the Moon.
8) Closing Time.
I didn't really like those episodes, but they had their moments.
9) Let's Kill Hitler.
10) A Good Man Goes to War.
11) The Wedding of River Song.
12) The Girl Who Waited.
13) Night Terrors.
And these... well, better luck next time, eh?
Not for the first time, I find that my tastes put me in opposition with 'the agreed wisdom'. But I stand by my choices, and I'm particularly sorry to see how little people think of the flesh 2 parter. Though it did perhaps suffer from a constrained budget at times, I found it to be full of interesting ideas, and had some actual emotional weight, unlike most of the smoke and mirrors we get from Moffat's era.
As for Moffat, I'm surprised how highly I ranked some of his episodes, but that's perhaps more down to how truly self-harm inducingly dull I found The Girl who Waited and Night Terrors, as well as the sheer volume of clunkers from Moffat. In deference to the fact that the 'death' sequence of the Doctor in Impossible Astronaut was well executed, and because I kind of like the Silents, I was willing to mitigate my belief that the opening 2-parter was a painfully slow, confusing mess (plus I like Mark Sheppard in anything).
I also continue to defend Curse of the Black Spot against its many, many detractors. The opening 5-10 minutes are fairly painful, as is the presence of yet another 'dying man's last words' (averted in this case, but we're getting quite a few of those too...) But otherwise, I found it a very solid and enjoyable episode, mercifully free of the all the fanwank and impossibly uninteresing arc material (what little COTBS did include at the end, was back when it seemed like it just might be interesting, but that didn't last long).
Speaking of fanwank - The Doctor's Wife. Although I didn't like this anywhere near as much as everyone else seems to, it was still one of the better episodes of this tepid season. It still felt like Neil Gaiman by numbers, brought in something that I wished had not been (the TARDIS given a tragic human form etc etc - how many times have we seen this kind of thing from Gaiman and in sci-fi shows of all kinds?)
But still... it was alright, and worth it just for the scenes with the 'Timelord collection'. Gaiman also wrote very well for Smith's Doctor, giving him much better dialogue than most did, this year.
So overall then, this was a pretty awful season IMO. The first half was fairly enjoyable, once the stodgy 2 parter with Moffat endlessly recycling his bag of tricks was out of the way. But from 'A Good Man...' onwards, it all fell apart. The arc quickly shifted from 'reasonably interesting' to 'utterly dreadful', and with the exception of the alrightish God Complex, the second half of the season was just appalling.
(And no, I can't believe I put Closing Time so far up either, but I really hated the episodes below it, so...)
As should be plain, I do not approve of Moffat as showrunner. He had a decent start up until about 'Flesh and Stone', but since then, his episodes have been very, very poor. Very disappointing season, IMO - right 'up' there (od down there if you like) with Seasons 4 and 5 as the worst of the new series.
