Doctor Who: 10 Overused Tropes Of The Steven Moffat Era
1. Children
Moffat’s first series began with the TARDIS crashing into a rural English garden, where the Doctor was nursed back to health by young Amelia Pond. He revisited Amelia – now Amy – in later life, where it turned out she had grown up believing him to be her imaginary friend. This original take on the companion introduction story set up a dynamic very different to anything in the Russell T Davies era.
But then we had the child versions of Kazran Sardick, River, Clara, Danny Pink, Grant, and even the Doctor himself! Several other episodes focused on child characters, including Night Terrors, The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe, The Beast Below, and In the Forest of the Night.
There’s a logic behind this. A lot of the show’s viewers are children, and seeing characters their age on screen will have helped them feel welcomed into the world of this kindly old Doctor. But by the time the Doctor met super-powered New Yorker Grant first as a child and then all grown up, we couldn’t help but feel that we’d seen that story too many times before.