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.
I hadn't quite consciously made that connection before, so thank you for sparking it. Moffat does seem to have a penchant for presenting any kind of "immortality" as being better than life lived until death, doesn't he?
When you started to talk about Moffat giving women particularly "special" treatment I was going to point to Rory and suggest that 2,000 years spent as a plastic guard over a tomb is a similar fate — and it is — but your nubmers do suggest there might be something sexist as well as simply uncaring going on.
I wasn't comfortable with Kathy Nightengale's happy acceptance of her fate, but at the time I could accept that Kathy herself really did. The character was written well enough that I didn't disbelieve it. More often though, as you've reiterated, Moffat's women (and his men! I still want to add, but I don't remember the previous series well enough to back it up (which is kind of saying something right there, I think) simply don't exist as anything but stock characters, so we never know what they might or might not want or like.
False immoratlity
I hadn't quite consciously made that connection before, so thank you for sparking it. Moffat does seem to have a penchant for presenting any kind of "immortality" as being better than life lived until death, doesn't he?
When you started to talk about Moffat giving women particularly "special" treatment I was going to point to Rory and suggest that 2,000 years spent as a plastic guard over a tomb is a similar fate — and it is — but your nubmers do suggest there might be something sexist as well as simply uncaring going on.
I wasn't comfortable with Kathy Nightengale's happy acceptance of her fate, but at the time I could accept that Kathy herself really did. The character was written well enough that I didn't disbelieve it. More often though, as you've reiterated, Moffat's women (and his men! I still want to add, but I don't remember the previous series well enough to back it up (which is kind of saying something right there, I think) simply don't exist as anything but stock characters, so we never know what they might or might not want or like.
Problematic indeed.