Doctor Who: 10 Overused Tropes Of The Steven Moffat Era

Extremis’s flashback sub-plot ended with the Doctor asking his enemies to look him up... and then they simply legged it. Even ignoring the fact that the information they’d found, that he’d supposedly died hundreds of times, doesn’t exactly make him sound like a winner, this was a much too easy way to get these villains out of the picture.

And yet it’s a trick the Doctor (and Moffat) has pulled several times before – first back in Silence in the Library, and then in The Eleventh Hour, The Pandorica Opens, and to an extent in A Good Man Goes to War. Moffat’s over-the-top idolisation of the character has also led to the Doc being made President of Earth – a far cry from the aimless wanderer in space and time he was originally portrayed as.

In some cases, it provides pretty awesome hero moments – that Eleventh Hour speech convinced a lot of viewers that Matt Smith was a worthy replacement for David Tennant. But in others, his reliance on his own reputation over ingenuity is just too easy a way to resolve a plot.