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.