Doctor Who: 10 Overused Tropes Of The Steven Moffat Era

3. Tech Gone Wrong

Doctor Who Series 10
BBC Studios

Something’s been killing off our human characters! What evil, malicious entity could this be? The Doctor investigates, and it turns out it’s just a computer which think it’s healing people. D’oh! The Doc fixes it, somehow everyone comes back to life, they all drink lemonade, the end.

It’s a nice moral – that sometimes where we see evil, there may just be misguidedness and mistakes, and if we keep an open mind and address those mistakes, things could work out well for everyone. But it’s a resolution that’s been overused, appearing in Moffat’s first ever Who story The Empty Child, and then to varying extents in The Girl in the Fireplace, The Lodger, The Curse of the Black Spot, The Girl Who Waited, and, most recently, The Pilot and Smile.

And as nice as that moral is, some of these episodes have fallen short on dramatic tension because of their lack of a real antagonist – can anyone say the puddle girl from The Pilot is going to be a classic villain?

Contributor
Contributor

Kieron is a human male from the planet Earth. By day he writes for various publications, including WhatCulture, Starburst, Doctor Who Adventures, and Campfire Graphic Novels, and edits The Big Picture. By night he's either asleep or watching Netflix, depending on what time he has to get up in the morning.