Yeah Allons-y came way late! And yeah they tend to use the former Doctor's catchphrase in the first episode to remind the companion that he IS still the same Doctor... sort of.
I kinda like "The question is..." It can be used in so many different circumstances, many of which naturally come up when you're the Doctor. It reminds me a bit of Colin Baker, who didn't have a catch-phrase per-se but did do this recurring thing where Peri would say something and then he would repeat one of the words that she said multiple times with increasing incredulity. Example: "Is that bad?" "Bad? Bad?! BAD!?!" IIRC, the first use of "Allons-y" was at the end of Season 2 in "Army of Ghosts." But after that, I don't think he used it again until "Voyage of the Damned" over a year later. It didn't really become a catch-phrase until Season 4. Oddly enough, I was using "Fantastic" quite a bit before Christopher Eccleston. (I was trying to say it like how David Warner said it in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II.) I stopped once Eccleston started hogging it.
Well, there's this: http://www.mtv.com/news/1905178/doctor-who-peter-capaldi-no-catchphrase/ I miss the corniness of Russel T. Davies. Moffat did the "bowties are cool", "____ is cool" thing by accident, but I absolutely love it even if it wasn't intentional. You can justify anything by having Matt Smith saying it's now cool.
Yeah, honestly, "Bowties are cool" caught on a lot better than "Geronimo." I suppose it's because "Geronimo" felt like a forced catchphrase while "Bowties are cool" just kinda naturally defined the character. Then there was Matt Smith's single episode catchphrase from "The Curse of the Black Spot": "Disregard all of my theories up until now." (Also would've worked really well in "The God Complex" & "Hide" but I don't think he used it there.)
I've always loved the "Oh you're beautiful" phrase, usually uttered in the presence of a deadly creature. It sounds so Doctor-ish.
^Yeah, especially in "Vincent & the Doctor." "Oh, you poor, murderous, marooned thing." (Or something like that.)
Catch phrases should come about naturally. Geronimo was just stupid because the writers figured 11 had to have one. It reminded me of the Jim Carrey film Bruce Almighty when Bruce would say, "B, E, A, utiful" almost as if the writers decided, okay, Jim's used "allrighty then" so we need a new one. Other than "Shut-up" I also heard -and really liked - was Capaldi uttering an "ooooohhh" noise when he had an insight especially when he discovered his Scottishness.
I don't see it that way. It's the Doctor who thought he had to have one. He probably thought it sounded cool, but everyone felt it was a little embarrassing. That's the eleventh Doctor in a nutshell.
It was Matt Smith who thought up Geronimo and inserted into episodes against Moffat's wishes until Moffat relented and began writing it in.
'Insert thing here..is cool' and bow ties, and fezzes, caught on a lot more amongst fandom, than 'Geronimo' ever did
Thats interesting, because I always assumed it was a Moffat line, mainly down to a certain joke that revolved around the word in an early episode of Coupling