River Song and Amy Pond - the two most important female characters that Steven Moffat has created for DOCTOR WHO
Teresa Jusino loves the way Steven Moffat writes female characters for Doctor Who. (See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.)
Nivair Gabriel hates the way Steven Moffat writes female characters for Doctor Who. (See here.)
Funny thing is, I’m largely in agreement with both Jusino and Gabriel; they just focus on different things. There are good and bad aspects of Moffat’s portrayal of women, and Jusino and Gabriel between them provide helpful analyses of each.
(In related news, I enjoyed Moffat’s satire on gender roles in his earlier series Coupling; but he clearly takes those roles to be largely innate whereas I take them to be largely constructed, so I actually enjoyed the humor in a somewhat different manner from what Moffat intended. It’s like the different ways one would enjoy Yes, Minister depending on whether one thought that a viable alternative to bureaucratic government was possible – laughing at foibles that one takes to be inevitable features of the human condition versus laughing at foibles in a way that can lead to discrediting and combating them.)
