Originally the Paternoster Gang, Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax, were something fresh within the series. Here were a trio of associates to the Time Lord who didn't have hokey origins or contrived resurrections - they emerged fully formed and unexplained; Vastra was a lizard serial killer, Jenny was her servant/lover and Drax made some funny jokes about not being able to understand human biology. What's not to like? Despite becoming a recurring group since A Good Man Goes To War, they're still as irritatingly unexplained; their latest appearance was still leaning heavily on Drax's incompetence and Vastra and Jenny being a couple, just as they had three years before. It's repetitive and makes even the initially adorable Drax annoying. All they really seem to add to the show is an obsession with Victorian, over modern-day London. It's emblematic of how once the show has found something that works it's happy to just run with it rather than push forward. As evidenced from the Daleks always being the ultimate, universe-wide threat in the Davies-era, this isn't just something from the head writer tenure of Steven Moffat (who created and wrote most of the gang's appearances), but a general draw back of being a genre family show pushed up to mainstream epic.
