The article read to me like some editor said "There's a lot of hyping up of the 50th anniversary programme at the moment - here, Chris, write something that has the opposite view".

And the stance he takes seems to be that big special effects are what counts, rather than intelligence. While I think that the intelligence aspect is missing from many of the more recent Doctor Who stories, a lot of the ones since Ecclestone are quite deep. I think its often true that older shows and films had more thought in them before special effects gained so much status. One of the earliest Star Trek episodes was an exploration of racist attitudes, for example. Similarly, I saw an ancient Kung Fu episode recently about a girl who had been raped by soldiers who had seen many of their comrades killed confederates, and so on: an intricate web of responsibility was woven. And at some point almost every character had the line 'If I am not entitled to revenge, who is?'. The closing line of the film was 'No-one'. That's more thought provoking and intelligent than the vast majority of programmes and to my mind shows up remarks about how impressive the Millenium Falcon as irrelevant.

In the Tennant final series there are quite a few (short!) mediations on death, both individually and of species. All quiet and conversational. Of course, if your idea of a good programmes is lots of explosions and flames with bodies and vehicles thrown everywhere with almost all the killing of anonymous people who you have built up no rapport with ... well, its not mine.