The Daleks just wouldn’t be the Daleks if they didn’t trundle around screaming Exterminate!, but before Nu-Who (or “the RTD era,” as some would prefer the beginning of the Doctor’s on-screen return to be called), they pretty much had the monopoly on catchphrases.  These days, everybody’s got one, from the Cybermen (Delete!) to the Sontarans (Sontar-ha!) to the Doctor himself (the repeated use of Geronimo! is the one thing that really rubs me the wrong way about Eleven).  Even the Companions are getting into the act (Spoilers, anyone?).

Since when was having a clearly identifiable catchphrase cool?  Somehow “fantastic!” didn’t sound as inane coming from Nine’s lips, but perhaps I just wasn’t yet inured to the idea of the same word popping out of the Doctor’s mouth every other episode.  It gets much worse with Ten, who even goes so far as to consciously cultivate a catchphrase in Army of Ghosts:  “I like that: allons-y! I should say ‘allons-y‘ more often.”  And, of course, after that he does.  He even gets to uncork his self-proclaimed ideal catchphrase (“Allons-y, Alonzo!”) in Voyage of the Damned.

It’s getting out of control.  For a particular example, put yourself in the Doctor’s place.  I mean seriously – you’re about to sacrifice everything in a last-ditch effort to save the entire universe, you have one last chance to say something to your beloved friends, and you choose… “Geronimo”?!  What sort of shitty “famous last word” is that?  I mean, generally speaking, I dearly love Moffat’s writing (The Curse of Fatal Death still puts me in danger of snorting my drink out my nose every time), but c’mon…

In a sense, there were also a few catchphrases Back When, but – when they existed – they were somehow cooler.  (Note a key difference here, too – each catchphrase in question is an actual phrase, rather than a single word.)  They were more like an Easter egg than anything; there was a bit of fan-service thrill to it.  Who didn’t love to hear Two say, “when I say ‘run,’ run!” or, “oh, my giddy aunt”?  Most famous, of course, is Three’s “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” (used just twice as the complete phrase, and more often as simply “reverse the polarity”).  In its shortened form, it was also later uttered once by Four and twice by Five.  Even Ten claimed to have been out of practice to have taken so long to reverse the polarity of Lazarus’ machine in The Lazarus Experiment.  It may, thereby, be the only catchphrase to span multiple Doctors (and the pre-/post-2005 eras).

Why can’t there be more of those cool little sayings these days instead of one-word-character-definers?  Granted, there will always be “Exterminate!” but that’s pretty firmly in the cool/terrifying camp – a shorthand, if you will, for “now you should be really, really scared!” – rather than the pithy utterances that have been cropping up in scripts everywhere since 2005, like literary daisies.  Eleven’s “[insert item of clothing here] are cool” is a great step in the right direction – see, quotable whole phrases can’t be that hard to concoct – but there needs to be a simultaneous reduction of the copious single-word memes in the scripts overall.

In other words, I’m really ready for the writers to Pith Off.