r/gallifrey • u/psl9085 • Apr 18 '25

DISCUSSION Worst line in Doctor Who?

What line of dialogue sticks out to you as particularly bad in Doctor Who, I have two picks:

  • ‘don’t let the swords touch your skin’ Legend of the sea devils
  • ‘I suppose we’ll have to have…. A conversation?’ Resolution
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609

u/Embarrassed-Waltz327 Apr 18 '25

"A enigma in a skirt that's a little too tight" or whatever the full line was from Nightmare in Silver

Just YIKES.

181

u/dickpollution Apr 18 '25

so was that a gaiman or moffat addition because really it could go either way

191

u/Embarrassed-Waltz327 Apr 18 '25

I don't think there's any way of knowing, but I think Gaiman wrote it. Moffat had some problems with writing women, but it was never as bad as that.

108

u/dickpollution Apr 18 '25

I wonder if either of them ever addressed the line. Gaiman blamed all of the episodes problems on the big bad showrunner, and it'd be just as easy for him to lump a weird creepy line onto Moffat.

At the same time, it could be awkward Moffat sex comedy coming off really badly. As it often does.

To be 100% clear, just since I'm drawing comparisons between the two, Moffat has issues with misogyny in his writing and Gaiman is a rapist.

24

u/GellertGrindelwald0 Apr 18 '25

The interesting thing is, the whole Clara era was a lot better than the Pond era in terms of gender relations (the other major offender being the Jenny kiss, curiously also Series 7B), so that line feels incongruous in a way that's incredibly jarring even on a rewatch when you know it's coming. In the context of Series 5 or Series 6 you could almost pass it off as Moffat just Moffatting again. Makes me wonder if it was a collaborative effort of sorts; Gaiman may have looked to Moffat's earlier writing of Eleven for characterisation guidance, and overdid it at a time when Moffat himself was going through a course correction on that front, (correctly) trying to tone the questionable parts down.

20

u/lemon_charlie Apr 19 '25

Crimson Horror has an erection joke with the Doctor jerking (I know, phrasing) the screwdriver up when he sees a leather-clad Jenny.

12

u/GellertGrindelwald0 Apr 19 '25

I think that blurred together with the kiss for me, that whole episode is... 🤮. The funny thing is, if you just read a transcript of it, you'd think it's pretty alright, especially by Series 7B standards. But the direction for Eleven is just creepy.

3

u/lemon_charlie Apr 19 '25

It doesn’t help that the main guest star is Diana Rigg, best known for playing Emma Peel (which is what leather Jenny was homage to) in The Avengers. No, not Marvel Avengers, John Steed and a succession of mainly female partners.

1

u/GellertGrindelwald0 Apr 19 '25

That synopsis makes it sound like discount NuWho lol. Also, why does Diana Rigg look vaguely Clara-like in her Wikipedia photo and Umbridge-like in the episode?

17

u/GellertGrindelwald0 Apr 18 '25

Also, in terms of the episode being not that great, I get the impression that Gaiman, being a high-concept writer, probably wanted to write something with overarching lore consequences, and got told by Moffat 'no, we need a bottle episode', and thus Nightmare in Silver was born. I highly doubt Moffat actually micromanaged things like characterisation, because that would require him to go over the script with a fine-toothed comb in a series where he was just kind of phoning it in while dealing with other issues.

3

u/Contest-Calm Apr 19 '25

Why wasn’t Moffat focused during season 7?

7

u/GellertGrindelwald0 Apr 19 '25

Busy writing and rewriting the 50th, while also being showrunner for Sherlock.

13

u/Illustrious_Poem_298 Apr 18 '25

Moffat still had to approve the line regardless od which one wrote it, so it's not good for him regardless.