Wibbly Wobbly Whiney Time

The phrase "timey wimey" annoys me. When it originally appeared in Blink it was used as a means to add humour to the (plot-necessitated) explanation that things don't always happen in the right order for a time traveller. Which was fine. It made sense within the context of the episode and wasn't made out to be some iconic line. David Tennant delivered it perfectly.

It's what the phrase has morphed into in the years since then that I dislike. It pops up far too often in the show, almost always in totally different contexts to its original (perfectly satisfactory) one. Take Matt Smith's debut episode as an example. Upon examining the crack in Amy's bedroom wall he muses to himself "Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey. We know what the crack is." It means nothing within the context of the episode. It seems a peculiar thing for the Doctor to choose to say. Unless he's aware of the popularity of Blink, and that doesn't seem likely. 

It's used completely unironically in reviews and on blogs (just do a Google search for the phrase to see what I mean). It's no longer used as a funny bit of technobabble to acknowledge that sometimes things happen out of sequence. It's been transformed into a shorthand for allegedly clever time travel plots and a way for people to describe them to show they understand them (no great achievement frankly).

It's the latter use of the phrase that I object to more. Not because I think the phrase should be held sacred as a piece of Doctor Who lore or because it worked so well as a piece of technobabble but because it implies that Steven Moffat's time travel obsessed scripts are the work of a genius who is the master of this sort of thing. And he's not that. He's very far from that.

You can look at a film as simple (and as good) as the original Back to the Future for time travel fiction better than Moffat's. I know the man himself has looked back at that film because its referenced in a number of his Doctor Who episodes, most obviously Blink with the letter delivery scene towards the start. BTTF is a good film and a large part of it is about the idea of time travel. But that's not what makes it good. The writing does that. The style over substance approach Moffat has increasingly taken since Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead shows that good writing is needed far more than quirky ideas that any half-decent writer could pen.

Moffat's use of time travel is not a shining example of quality. It's just doing the same trick continuously and in a high profile, Saturday evening setting. He's made a name for himself as being perfectly reasonable at constructing that sort of story. He's done nothing that people before him haven't done, nor bettered existing techniques.

If you want good time travel stories check out Back to the Future or 12 Monkeys or The Restaurant at the End of the Universe or Terminator. Groundhog Day could arguably be included on that list too. Even Hot Tub Time Machine exhibits more charm than the average Moff script. Within Doctor Who go back to the 1979 run and watch City of Death. That uses the TARDIS's ability to move through time as a central conceit in a far more engaging fashion than the current showrunner ever does. And it did it decades before the phrase timey wimey entered public consciousness.