Doctor Who has given us plenty of rhetoric, but is Peter Capaldi’s bark worse than his bite?
After eight years and three incarnations of good looking, swashbuckling heroes with plenty of wit and oddball wackiness, Doctor Who set its sights on a new vision for the show. Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor was billed as the ‘darker’ Doctor. In fact, just about every piece of marketing for the show’s eighth series hyped up the no more Mr. Nice Guy approach. Souls full of hatred, companions having second thoughts and even the Doctor himself questioning his moral integrity. It all sounds like pretty gritty stuff for Capaldi to get his teeth into.
But half way through his debut run, we’re wondering just how dark the new Doctor really is.
And the answer is: well, not really.
But maybe that’s the point. If the Twelfth Doctor was anywhere near as dark as the BBC’s marketing hyperbole suggested, he’d probably be an unlikable character and a real turn off for the younger viewers. Still, while we’re not asking for a Doctor written by Quentin Tarrantino, there’s a happy medium between what the show is currently offering us and what they promised before the start of series 8. And somewhere between quirky magician and bad man with a box lies the perfect way to tackle Capaldi’s Doctor.
Flashes of promise
We may not feel the Doctor is especially gritty right now, but we’re not denying there have been a fair few moments of questionable morals and, well, “darkness”. The first is probably the most significant: at the end of ‘Deep Breath,’ the freshly regenerated Twelfth Doctor either killed the Half-Faced Man, or convinced him to kill himself. Whichever way you look at it, his actions in this episode are a world away from “Everybody lives!”
And though nothing else quite matches up to the intensity and moral ambiguity of “Big Ben gate,” there are other moments of darkness. In episode 2 for example, he made Ross believe he could save him, then proceeded to make jokes about his death (“he’s the top layer, if you want to say a few words”). Then there’s the occasional angry outbursts at Clara and others, with his end-of-the-universe “Do as you are told!” rant in ‘Listen’ coming to mind.
More of the same
So, morally ambiguous deaths, outright lying and angry shouting matches. Sounds dark, right? Sure, but the problem is – we’ve already seen it all before. Every Doctor has his moments. Remember Christopher Eccleston shouting at the lone ‘Dalek’? How about David Tennant destroying the Racnoss children, or Matt Smith wiping out the ‘Vampires of Venice?’ The latter even had plenty of epic angry rants, several aimed at his companion (“Nobody human has anything to say to me today!” for example).
But the problem isn’t even that the darker tone is just retreading old ground – but that it’s also retreading the whacky and whimsical things we’ve seen before. Peter Capaldi, billed as the no-nonsense, serious incarnation is still running around fighting people with spoons, making plans up as he goes along and telling people to do “a clever thing.” We’ve seen all of this before, and it seems to directly conflict with Capaldi’s performance and the general foundations of the character. What’s the point in having the Doctor push someone out of an air balloon in one episode, and undermining it a couple of weeks later with something stupid?
The writers of Doctor Who do deserve some slack: there’s a lot of them trying to get to grips with the new character while they’re used to writing for the more generic version of the Time Lord. You also get the sense that this is a series in transition, and maybe at this half-way point we’re nearing the type of series defining moment which will solidify the image of the Twelfth Doctor and lead to a more consistent vision of him from the writing staff.
But until then, we’ll just have to sit through even more snide quips about Clara’s wide-face and lack of make-up.