Board Thread:The Reference Desk/@comment-88790-20130125153134/@comment-188432-20130125222622

Many, many story titles aren't in the dialogue of that story.

Some quite obviously aren't, like An Unearthly Child and Four to Doomsday, Tooth and Claw, The Unquiet Dead, The Eleventh Hour, and Time-Flight.

Others only narrowly miss the mark, like The Time Meddler, where the Monk is called "a time meddler", not the definitive Time Meddler. Or The Wedding of River Song, where you hear all those words, but not consecutively.

Then you have the case where the name appears, but there's debate about whether it's the actual title. The Daleks is the most obvious example, but there are any number of TV Comic stories where the name comes from dialogue out of necessity, but there isn't actually a name for the story.

Confining ourselves just to BBC Wales televised stories, I'd say the following titles don't appear:
 * The Age of Steel
 * Aliens of London
 * Amy's Choice (very nearly, but not quite)
 * The Angels Take Manhattan
 * Army of Ghosts (maybe, but I don't think those words appear consecutively)
 * Bad Night
 * Bad Wolf (I could be wrong, but I don't think it's actually said in the episode, though it appears on the Bad Wolf Corporation logo.)
 * Boom Town
 * A Christmas Carol (don't believe all words are said)
 * The Christmas Invasion (all words are said, but not consecutively)
 * Closing Time (I think the sales assistant says "we need to close up" not "it's closing time".)
 * Day of the Moon
 * The Doctor's Daughter (don't think this exact phrase is in the show, but obviously Jenny is "the Doctor's daughter")
 * The Doctor's Wife (don't think this exact phrase is in the show)
 * The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe (another literal title, but it's not precisely in the script)
 * Doomsday (don't think it's there, is it?)
 * The Eleventh Hour
 * The Empty Child (it's not exactly there, though all the words swirl around the script)
 * Evolution of the Daleks (this one might be there, but I don't think so)
 * Father's Day (is it there? I don't think so.)
 * Fear Her isn't there
 * The Fires of Pompeii
 * Flesh and Stone
 * Forest of the Dead is possibly there, but if so, the scene is not strongly coming to mind
 * The God Complex is so almost there. I think it's said "a god complex" by the Muslim nurse
 * Gridlock isn't there, I don't think. It's RTD using a 20th century term for a futuristic setting
 * Human Nature, as far as I can remember, isn't there
 * The Hungry Earth
 * ... and I could go on but I'm bored now.

Point is, as compared with other franchises, Doctor Who does seem to have a much higher percentage of literal, verb-less titles. Though the titles may not be in the dialogue, they are still terribly obvious once you've seen the story. It's like the writers feel obliged to just pick a noun in the story and plop it down on the plate with a great thud.

Compare and contrast with the titles of the more literary Deep Space Nine or The West Wing or M*A*S*H — all of whom weren't afraid to have titles in other languages, titles that made for neat puns, and titles that created great mystery — and it's immediately apparent Doctor Who has no flair for titles.

That's one of the reasons that Let's Kill Hitler was such a great title. It had a verb, it got people talking, and it retrospectively allows for a double-entendre, since the Doctor was potentially a kind of Hitler to the brainwashed River and the Silence she worked for. It was just damned fun.

But highly atypical. Mostly we get stupid, wholly literal like Inferno, The Invasion, Rose, Smith and Jones, The Mark of the Rani, The Curse of the Black Spot, The Twin Dilemma, The Crusade, Marco Polo.

Robert Holmes, brilliant a writer though he was, had absolutely no flair for titles. There's not a damn one of them that is anything but exactly what's in the script. The Ark in Space, The Brain of Morbius, The Krotons, The Space Pirates, The Caves of Androzani, The Mysterious Planet, The Ultimate Foe.

Really, Bob? Thanks for those titles. Helped out a lot.

Of course, I recognise there are times where you do want to be bland. Rose and Smith and Jones and The Eleventh Hour are acceptably bland titles, cause you don't want to give too much away. But you don' want to do it every single time.

Clearly, the winner of the "Worst Titler" award has to go to Robert Holmes. He might rightly be thought of as the best scribe of the old series, but we do have to remember he gave us the worst title of all time. The Deadly Assassin was so incredibly literal that Holmes felt the need to explain the last word of the title with the penultimate word. Just in case you kiddies at home don't get it, an assassin is someone who is deadly. Horrible.