Steven Moffat/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
/wiki/Steven Moffatcreator
  • Magnificent Bastard: His fans supposedly hate him for his evil plot twists, but yet think he's fantastic.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The man has his own folder on the Doctor Who Nightmare Fuel page.
  • Paranoia Fuel: Among the things the Moff has managed to make terrifying: clocks, statues, darkness, cracks, and birdsong. Oh, and the ground.
    • Don't forget cupboards, in a throwaway line about face-spider creature that evolved specifically to scuttle up the back of cupboards and live inside your mattress. Sweet dreams.
    • Also, gaps in one's memory. Crafty, crafty bastard.
    • Also, Cab Drivers.
  • Recycled Premise: Moffat really likes to reuse certain plot elements. Compare Doctor Who's "The Girl in the Fireplace" to the opening of "The Eleventh Hour". In both episodes we find a little girl who has something scary in her house. Then the Doctor shows up and there's a cute scene of him befriending the little girl before tackling the scary thing that's in her house. Then the Doctor leaves not to be seen by the little girl again until she's grown up.
    • As of Flesh and Stone, this includes monsters using the voices of the dead to communicate.
    • Years before the new series he wrote a short story called Continuity Errors, in which the Seventh Doctor visits the biggest library in the universe with his companion Benny (not created by Moffat), a snarky archaeologist from the future who knows several incarnations of the Doctor (and possibly sleeps with one of them) and has an important diary. The Doctor needs a particular book to save the universe, but the librarian is a bitter, obstructive person and refuses to help. No problem; the Doctor travels into her past to change history and make her a happier person in the present. At one point he rescues a little girl from a monster in her bedroom and they have an exchange about how "even monsters have nightmares" ("what do monsters have nightmares about?" "Me.") Bits of this have been recycled into at least three different stories.
  • Running the Asylum
  • Uncanny Valley: His creations, especially the Smilers from series 5 frequently come under this.
    • Series 6 ramps it up a notch with the Flesh Gangers.
  • Unfortunate Implications: Tends to wrap his female characters around male ones in ways that compromise their independence.
    • Not to mention his remarks on Sherlock's sexuality, claiming Sherlock can't be asexual because it's "boring," and insistence that anyone who thinks the canon has homosexual subtext is clearly Doing It Wrong.