They are quite often well coiffed, well couture-d women of a certain age.
His heroines are young, sprightly, wild haired girls in impossibly high heels. Moffat’s own version of a manic pixie dream girl.
Madame Kovarian, Missy, Rosanna Cavalierri, River Song (when she qualified), Tasha Lem, Miss Kizlet, Ms Delphox AND her clone, and on and on…
I know I’m not the first to notice this, of course.
But it smacks so much of Nice Guy thinking. It’s nearly identical to the way Nice Guys jeer at and then run from women who are more complex than they imagine we should be…which doesn’t take much, actually.
Kind of gives you the idea that what he is afraid of, what he thinks we should all be afraid of, is a woman of a certain age, successful in her career, and obviously strong and a bit complex.
Except… this is blatantly untrue? I mean, this could retain some actual credibility if you had actual focused on Moffat’s “big bads”, which yes, are often women. In this case, looking at your list, you definitely have Madame Kovarian and Missy, who are both women past the age of being considered “young girls”. The rest of the list just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and simply proves you wrong in places.
First of all, neither Rosanna nor Ms Delphox (who IS the clone) are actually characters created by Moffat. He had a hand in writing Time Heist, but his name was added to the credits so late, we can be pretty sure that its characters are Stephen Thompson’s creation. They are also not “big bads” in any feasible way – they are one-off antagonists who are given genuine, non-evil reasons for their actions (saving her species, doing her job and not getting murdered, respectively). Miss Kizlet is written by Moffat, but she is not even the main antagonist of the episode she appears in – that would be the Great Intelligence. She is for most intents a victim and has been since she was a small child… which is a chilling scenario but not one which fits your accusation.
Tasha and River aren’t “big bads”. They aren’t even antagonists. Tasha may have complex motivations, a peacekeeper who finds herself in the middle of a war, and she is the one who sets the “Silence” in motion, but she’s in no way a bad person. She’s genuinely trying to do the best for the universe and this is never condemned – and she’s a friend to the Doctor, to the end. River Song is series 6′s foremost heroine. She grows from a kidnapped, abused child to someone who fights to shape her own destiny, and even when she is pure chaos as in Let’s Kill Hitler, we are never asked to do anything but love her.
So why am I making such a fuss about this? Because I know how much this actual means to people. To have a woman of Alex Kingston’s age play a heroine, confident in herself and her sexuality, intelligent, undaunted, mischievous. “Melody Pond is a superhero” and this is so, so important.
Women over 40 are so significant in general. Are they scary sometimes? Oh yes, they are, because whether Moffat writes religious leaders of huge futuristic churches (Tasha), royalty at the heart of a mystery of a Starship (Liz X), the Doctor’s re-occurring childhood best friend turned over-the-top egomaniac villain (Missy), or a military leader with a vendetta against the Doctor (Kovarian) – he puts them in power. He’ll also write a lesbian Victorian detective, a mothers coping with the loss of her husband, a seemingly cold-hearted business women working for the Great Intelligence, a physically disabled grandmother dreaming herself into a science base on the north pole, and the (very successful) woman in charge of all of UNIT’s operations… and River Song herself. And that’s just his own episodes.
They are varied and different, they are powerful or they are being used, they were being used and they reclaimed their agency, they are smart and courageous, they shape the fate of nations, the universe, or their family, they are good-hearted, complex or evil. They are woven into the very foundations of this show – and genuinely one of Moffat’s very best contributions to it.