Does Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who pass the Bechdel Test?

So far, ‘Moff Time’, the most recent season of the staggeringly long-running British science-fiction series Doctor Who now run by Steven Moffat, has had four episodes: ‘The Eleventh Hour’, ‘The Beast Below’, ‘Victory of the Daleks’, and ‘The Time of Angels’. When Moffat took over from Russell T Davies, there were some concerns raised about Moffat’s gender politics and competence writing female characters. Moffat got his start with the children’s drama Press Gang in the early nineties and then moved into broad, mediocre sex comedies before finding his true calling: scaring the everloving crap out of the younger generation of the United Kingdom. This history, plus some unfortunate statements that he’s made in interviews, gave rise to a legitimate concern that his tenure on Doctor Who would have far more problems with gender politics than Davies did. Since Davies had already racked up an astounding track record of genderfail in his own right, this was seen as a huge, huge potential problem, particularly since the show revolves around the dynamic between a sequence of mostly-female characters and an extremely powerful male character, the Doctor.

With these concerns in mind, I think that a good way to gauge Moff Time so far is to apply the Bechdel Test, a series of criteria enumerated by the lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel. For a work to pass the Bechdel Test, it has to (1) have multiple female characters who (2) talk to one another about (3) something other than a male character. I’m not going to sift back through the entire history of Doctor Who gauging the series’ entire forty-seven-year history and then comparing it to the last four episodes. That would take too long, although I can say off the top of my head that the 1963-5 run with William Hartnell, Carole Ann Ford, William Russell, and Jacqueline Hill produced by Verity Lambert and the 1987-9 run with Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred produced by John Nathan Turner had pretty good Bechdel Test scores and the 1971-3 run with Jon Pertwee, Nicholas Courtney, Katy Manning, and Roger Delgado produced by Barry Letts had pretty poor ones. The Hartnell-Lambert period benefited from having two female leads, the McCoy-Turner period benefited from having a companion who coded as lesbian, and the Pertwee-Letts period suffered from having a relatively large cast of dynamic male characters and only one prominent female one.

The current series features Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, and as of last week Alex Kingston (a girl Alex, not a boy Alex) and is produced by Steven Moffat, Piers Wenger, and Beth Willis, but with Moffat in creative control. The first episode, ‘The Eleventh Hour’, introduces Amy Pond, an orphaned Scottish girl living in England who meets the Doctor as a child and subsequently develops a complex of rather obsessive and rather avoidant personality traits. In the next episode, ‘The Beast Below’, the Doctor takes Amy on her first off-Earth adventure, in which Amy notices something that the Doctor doesn’t and prevents him from needlessly lobotomising a whale (it makes sense in context). ‘Victory of the Daleks’ brings the Doctor and Amy back in time to wartime London, where the Doctor has to confront the fact that Winston Churchill is unwittingly in league with a faction of alien super-soldiers that the Doctor has been fighting on our screens since 1964. And in ‘The Time of Angels’ the Doctor and Amy are shanghaied into helping a character who previously appeared in a Davies-era Moffat-penned episode and a shady-seeming Christian bishop fight a race of evil angels that exist on a quantum level.

‘The Eleventh Hour’ has no female characters other than Amy, an old woman whose house the Doctor has to use to check something at one point, and one form of a shape-shifting alien. It does not pass the Bechdel Test.

With ‘The Beast Below’ we have Amy, Queen Elizabeth X of the United Kingdom (yes, this one is in the future), and a little girl named Mandy. The first scene in which Amy and Mandy interact is also the first scene in Moff Time that passes the Bechdel Test:

Mandy: You're following me. I saw you watching me at the marketplace.

Amy: You dropped this…

Mandy: Yeah. When your friend kept bumping into me.

Amy: What’s that?

Mandy: There’s a hole. We have to go back.

Amy: A what? A hole?

Mandy: Are you stupid? There’s a hole in the road; we can’t go that way. There’s a travel pipe down by the airlocks if you’ve got the stamps. –What are you doing?

Amy: Oh, don’t mind me! Never could resist a ‘keep out’ sign. (To herself, in a fairly disturbing Ladd Russo sort of voice) What’s below there? What’s so scary about a hole? Something under the road?

Mandy: Nobody knows. We’re not supposed to talk about it.

Amy: About what?

Mandy: Below.

Amy: And because you’re not supposed to, you don’t? Watch and learn.

Mandy: You sound Scottish.

Amy: I am Scottish. What’s wrong with that? Scotland’s got to be around here somewhere.

Mandy: No. They wanted their own ship.

Amy: Good for them. Nothing changes.

Later on in the episode Amy shouts at Liz X and grabs her hand.

In ‘Victory of the Daleks’, the Cabinet War Rooms have several female operators and radiowomen. This is historically accurate, and one of the women does get some characterisation, but it’s centred around waiting for her husband and she never talks to Amy, which I feel was a huge missed opportunity because I’m fascinated with women’s roles in World War II. ‘Victory of the Daleks’ was not penned by Steven Moffat, though. It was by Mark Gatiss, and I don’t know how much control Moffat had of the exact dialogue or lack of dialogue that went into it.

‘The Time of Angels’ has a lot of conversation between Amy and River (Alex Kingston’s character is called River) but most of it is Amy trying to guess what River’s future relationship to the Doctor might be. She guesses ‘wife’. Most fans guess ‘con artist’. But there is one point at which Amy is telling River about how she killed a Weeping Angel that infected a television screen by turning the screen off at a point when the Angel wasn’t visible, which sort of counts. The Weeping Angels, whatever else they may be, aren’t really male in any humanoid sense, after all.

I hope that in the next episode, ‘Flesh and Stone’, which continues directly from the end of ‘The Time of Angels’, Amy and River interact more. I hope that Amy talks to the vampire girls who are apparently going to show up in a couple of weeks. Even though he’s obviously not female, I really look forward to Amy teaming up with Vincent van Gogh later on in the season. And, I can’t think why, but in spite of the undeniable issues that Steven Moffat does seem to have, all of this strikes me as a hell of a lot better than how Davies did it.