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In another of Moffat's episodes, "The Beast Below," the Doctor is confronted with a tortured space whale and is confronted with what he thinks is a choice: free the whale (which he assumes will lead to the deaths of millions of humans) or let the humans continue torturing it so that it will continue to power their city. His solution, which he tries to carry out? Lobotomize the whale. The idea of talking to the whale and finding out what it wants--and the Doctor is a telepath, so communication with other species should NOT be a problem--never occurs to Eleven.
And certain themes keep recurring in Moffat, don't they? Like the wise young girl or woman who is physically a prisoner. Abigail Pettigrew, stuck in her coffin-like freezer, could be an older version of Cal, the dying little girl trapped as the computer's core in "Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead" grown up. Amy Pond spends two thousand years asleep in the Pandorica. Or the women imprisoned in an altered space-time, often without their will or consent. This happens to Miss Evangelista, Donna Noble and the intrepid River Song within one two-part episode. Kathy Nightingale, Sally Sparrow's friend, gets flung back to the 1920s and is compelled to live out her life there. Even Liz Ten, the Queen of the ship of England in "The Beast Below" and who certainly knows where she is, doesn't know WHEN she is. She has had her time perception altered; she doesn't know she's hundreds of years old.
And the women who are so imprisoned have no say in it. They are put in that position by men who cannot imagine another solution. Cal's father has his daughter's mind joined to the Library computer; the Tenth Doctor puts a saved copy of River Song into the virtual reality of the computer for all time. Abigail leaves her cryogenic freezer once a year because the Doctor and Kazman want her to--KNOWING that she is using up what little time she has--and then goes blithely back into her refrigerator for another year. She never tells the Doctor that she is ill and dying, and the Doctor--who has all the medical knowledge of time and space at his disposal with the TARDIS--ultimately refuses to help her. Nor does the Doctor help the millions trapped in cryogenic storage on that planet--even after the ship is no longer crashing.
The recurring theme seems to be that women can affect the world for the better--can even save or create worlds with their knowledge and power--but that they are also fragile creatures incapable of knowing what's best for them, and that they must be protected from the worlds they can affect.
And that is about as sexist as you can get.
I would have liked Abigail to be a real person, rather than a tool the Doctor was using.