Just about anything I could write about Midnight has already been said by LabRat. That was an example of RTD's writing at its worst -- clumsy, so obvious that you could see what was going to happen right from the start (so why bother watching?) and with plot holes and lapses of internal logic that rivalled Crisis On Infinite Earths in magnitude. And lousy characters, too.
Compare it to The Stolen Earth and the subtle, clever, logical way that he built up to the end-of-episode cliff-hanger. Looking back, what he was doing seems obvious, but at the time it was neatly hidden in amongst all the other larger plot threads. So he can do it; it just seems that he gets these bouts of so-called "cleverness" (which turn out to be nothing of the sort) and they spoil things. An example was the first half of Partners in Crime with the parallel investigations: the ultimate resolution of that was brilliant, but what led up to it was so obviously an exercise in choreography a la French farce that it had me just wishing that he'd get on with it. Praise the Lord and pass the Fast-Forward button...!
And then there is his obsession with torturing the Doctor, and with the idea that being around him is dangerous. Yet again, we have the inability to deal with the concept of a hero, much less a competent one, that pervades so much of modern media, from Smellville to Harry Potter. For the nth time, Davies rendered the Doctor helpless and pounded home his "message" with all the subtlety of the proverbial hand grenade in a bowl of oatmeal. Can someone please tell me why we had to put up with Davros, of all people -- the insane creator of the worst genocidal mass murderers in the DW mythos -- accusing the Doctor of turning his friends and allies into weapons and murderers and no-one objected?!?!?!
RTD has done a wonderful job but, after that, I'm glad he's going before he can plumb any further depths of hyper-angst for characters that I have come to love -- even if most of them have now been effectively written out. Hopefully, Moffat, the writer of two of my favourite episodes and a man with a penchant for introducing a little romance into his stories, will be able to keep up the standards set by RTD but without imitating his bad habits.
