Peter Capaldi as The Doctor

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Imp-Chan
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Peter Capaldi as The Doctor

Post by Imp-Chan »

So, thoughts on the new Doctor? I am pretty okay with this choice, I think he's a great actor and will probably be a warmer Doctor than 11 was.

Also, I wrote this up the other day and nobody has commented or shared anything they'd like to see over on Google+, so I'm gonna post it again here and hope some of you have other things to add...

THINGS I WANT TO SEE IN THE NEXT FEW SEASONS OF DOCTOR WHO:

1) COMPETITION

I want to see a female Time Lord with her own team of companions occasionally tackling the same problems that the Doctor is, and doing it better, just with a different set of priorities. The Doctor should question whether or not she's evil, but she absolutely should not turn out to be evil. This is very important, because the Doctor cannot be The Only Good Guy without becoming crazy and the series becoming boring. The Doctor NEEDS to lose to someone without it destroying the world, because he needs to be humbled or he will stop questioning himself. And so will we.

River Song was initially set up to fill this role beautifully, before that whole storyline went off to DestinyLand. I am deeply disappointed that no one else has done it since. My sister suggested that perhaps Jenny could return and do it, and I am totally down with that idea. I really liked Jenny as pure bottled possibility, and I'd like that narrative thread to not be left hanging... and since she has a completely different background and has had a couple hundred years of the Doctor's life to grow into her own person now, I think that could be really neat to explore... but only if the Doctor doesn't know who she is, because otherwise it's still all about him and there's no humility at all.

2) SHAKING UP THE TARDIS

I want the Doctor to pick up a cowboy as a companion, someone who will gravitate towards the quick and simple solution to problems and doesn't particularly respect or idealize the Doctor's cleverness. I want this companion to be a man, because we're all getting a little sick of female characters who are feisty as their biggest character trait, and this will force them to change the approach at least a little. Developing a genuine friendship out of that, with the Doctor as he is now compared to back when he had a kilt-wearing friend, I think could be very rewarding for the series.

I also want the Doctor to pick up a non-human, non-gendered companion. I think it's important to start breaking the ties to modern day Earth and to challenge the audience a little, and this gives us the possibility of having someone in the room with the knowledge to explain the alien cultures without sounding like the biggest prick in the universe. We also need to start having an exterior view of the Earth, from someone who doesn't necessarily care about it. The Doctor does care, and it sometimes makes him stupid, and we need someone who can show us that.

I also want to see an old woman as a companion. Someone who can't help but remind the Doctor of his aging, who demonstrates grace and wisdom with her own. Someone who gives the Doctor an ideal to live up to, and gives female viewers a softer future to aspire to without fear. This woman stands up to the Doctor, too, but not with the feisty, combative enthusiasm of the young female companions, rather with the calm, immovable security of maturity.

3) BETRAYAL

I think we're all becoming a little too used to companions who love the Doctor. We're becoming too used to the Doctor taking care of his companions. Let's shake things up a bit and have some good old-fashioned backstabbing to work through and make us question the morality of everyone involved, instead of just assuming that if they're siding with the Doctor, they must be the good guys.

4) EXPLORATION

The Doctor of late has been going to a lot of times and places that he knows about or has visited before. He's been meeting a lot of the same enemies. There is a vast, infinitely interesting universe out there that he is not paying much attention to. I want to see him challenged to step outside of his box, and to learn new things. Let's have him go someplace where his first words don't demonstrate his familiarity, but instead reveal his wonder and discovery.

5) DEATH

Nobody important stays dead anymore. The Doctor these days never really loses people, only extras. Even the Ponds weren't so much lost as they were haphazardly abandoned, and they had quite a few false starts and revivals before they even managed that. Let's see the Doctor develop some quick and unfortunately terminal friendships. For example, in the Christmas episode with the Titanic, the Doctor liked some of the people he was rescuing, and those people died. Most of them, he couldn't even spare the time to try to bring back. Let's have more of that. If the Doctor is only losing people he doesn't care about, then so are we, and that has to stop. Death hurts, and it NEEDS to hurt. Sometimes, love and judicious creativity with space/time just isn't enough to save someone, and that has to start mattering again.

So there you have it, my top five wishlist items for the future of Doctor Who. I welcome discussion and more ideas! What do you want to see?

^-^'
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Graybeard
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Re: Peter Capaldi as The Doctor

Post by Graybeard »

I must say, Impy, I'm a bit disappointed at the (non) response to this. Somehow one would think there would be more Who fans out there within the ES readership demographic. But where are they?

Anyway, not being one of those fans, I can't address your question, but I do wonder about the things you want to see. Are they realistically achievable? TV series tend to play to the lowest common denominator, and while I suspect that may not be as low for Doctor Who as for *cough* reality shows :oops: and such, you still have to wonder how these hopes will survive the inevitable dumbing-down that TV would inflict on them. Or am I too cynical?
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Alberich
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Re: Peter Capaldi as The Doctor

Post by Alberich »

Well, from my younger days, I'm more of a twentieth-century Whovian - my absolute favorite Doctor was Patrick Troughton (who had the aggressive "kilt-wearing friend," Jamie McCrimmon); I was turned off entirely by Sylvester McCoy's first episodes and never came back to watch the newer stuff. But I will note that at least a couple of Impy's wishes have come true in the past -

The Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) had to deal with disloyalty and treachery, particularly from his companion Turlough, who was secretly an agent of the Black Guardian, and briefly from his companion Adric (who wanted to side with one of his villains).

One of his companions was a nonhuman robot called Kamelion (though as his name implies he spent a lot of his time disguised as various humans, and while his voice is male, you can see that he's about as effectively nongendered as K-9).

And one of my buddies, who like me enjoyed the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker), once gave me a CD recorded adventure (never part of the TV series, maybe not "canon," but I don't care because it was great). This was a "Hartnell Historical" starring Colin Baker and called The Marian Conspiracy - the time travel part is set during the reign of Bloody Mary - and his companion for this episode was a cocoa-drinking female history professor who was definitely getting on in years, though of course we don't see her. She was a lot of fun, too, and the story ended so that he could have more adventures with her, though I don't know whether he did. I hope so because they had great "companion chemistry" - in fact, one thing I liked about Colin Baker's Doctor was that he was well matched with companions who would stand up to him and question his judgment. (Also true of Troughton though in different ways for different reasons.)
Last edited by Alberich on August 10th, 2013, 9:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Peter Capaldi as The Doctor

Post by Imp-Chan »

The fact that we've seen these things before is a big part of why I want the writers to play with them again. My primary concern is balancing the show and making it less laser-beam focused and more like the older show in breadth.

^-^'
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