1st Thoughts on the 12th Doctor

So it has now been announced that Peter Capaldi will be the new Doctor Who.

I must confess that I don’t know much about Capaldi, but I do have a couple of initial thoughts.

 

The Right Man for the Part?

The first is that I’m glad they cast a man instead of a woman for the part.

The latter, while not out of keeping with what they’ve established about timelord biology, would have been a net negative for the show.

Changing the sex of your main character is not something to be done lightly.

In this case, doing so would have:

• felt like artificial “stunt casting” done out of slavish political correctness,
• invited endless discussions of sex that would have overshadowed what the program is about,
• invite endless and unflattering comparisons to the performances of previous Doctors, and
• made the show feel unfamiliar and different on a bunch of levels.

The time to something like that, if you’re going to do something like that, is not when a show is at the peak of its popularity–which this one is. It has never had a bigger audience, globally.

The time to do radical shakeups in a show’s formula is when it’s about to get cancelled or when it’s just being revived after a hiatus.

 

Regressing to the Mean

My second thought is that I’m glad that they went with an older actor to play the Doctor.

I’d been (mildly) concerned about the increasing youth of the actors who have been cast for the part. The current, 11th Doctor (Matt Smith), was the youngest ever.

While I don’t mind young actors in the part (I liked Smith, as well as Peter Davison, who was only 30 when he was cast as the 5th Doctor), there was a clear trend toward younger actors, and the show was in danger of becoming too young-actor oriented.

We were nearing a point at which the apparent age of the Doctor needed to regress to the mean.

I mean, could an 18-year old Doctor even try to bring the gravitas needed for the part without looking foolish (as well as teenage angst-y)?

Just for fun, I did a quick table of the ages of the various actors who have played the Doctor at the time they got the part:

This chart covers the twelve actors who have been cast to play the role on television on an ongoing basis (even though McGann’s incarnation didn’t get picked up for a regular series).

It does not include actors cast for movies, webisodes, or on a purely temporary basis (such as John Hurt, who is playing the “mystery incarnation” of the Doctor, whose story will be explored in the 50th anniversary special).

Now here’s a chart showing what I mean about the Doctor-getting-younger trend:

As you can see, until Capaldi’s casting as the 12th Doctor, there was an unmistakable trend toward casting younger actors.

Of course, there were ups and downs, but the overall trend toward younger doctors is unmistakable.

We needed to regress to the mean, and they did that in a big way by casting a 55-year old (that also being the age that the 1st Doctor was when the series began).

In a way, the series is returning to its roots, with the Doctor as a man of mature years rather than a twenty-something romping around space and time.

 

Getting Darker?

My third thought concerns the way that Capaldi will play the role and what kinds of stories he will be offered.

I’d have a better sense of this if I knew more about his work, but I suspect that we’ll see a couple of things that will be different than Matt Smith’s Doctor and other recent Doctors.

For one, I suspect that he will play the part more seriously–and be given fewer zany antics (though there will be some of those).

Matt Smith apparently patterned aspects of his performance off Patrick Troughton’s 2nd Doctor (who is, perhaps, my all-time favorite Doctor), and I’ve seen some online suggesting that Capaldi may come across more like Jon Pertwee’s less-playful, more action-oriented 3rd Doctor.

So this transition may feel a bit like the transition from Troughton to Pertwee, which would be fine by me.

I also suspect that the performance and the show will be getting darker because we’re apparently at the Doctor’s (allegedly) final incarnation.

Timelords can only regenerate 12 times under normal circumstances, meaning 13 incarnations total.

Assuming John Hurt’s Doctor is a previous incarnation (either pre-Hartnell or during the gap between McGann and Eccleston, when the Time War occurred) then Capaldi is the timelord’s 13th incarnation (even though he’s only the 12th “Doctor”).

That means that when it comes time to replace Capaldi there will likely be a big, pathos-filled story in which he is miraculously freed from the 12-regeneration limit.

They’ve already indicated that this can be done, as the timelords offered the Master a whole new cycle of regenerations (another 12) back in the 25th anniversary special. And, even without their help, the Master managed to get several more regenerations, leading to his appearances in the current revival of the program.

They’ll do the same for the Doctor–somehow–but they will probably (and should) milk the approaching, apparent end of his life for the drama it naturally contains.

That means that the 12th Doctor’s time should have the Shadow of Death hanging over it.

It also may have the shadow of the Valeyard hanging over it, if they don’t pay that off in the 50th anniversary special.

And, as much as I’ve enjoyed some of the zaniness Matt Smith brought to the role, some aspects of the 11th Doctor’s run were over the top (particularly Steven Moffat’s fairy tale-inspired series finales).

I’ve already been enjoying the more serious feel of the show that arrived with Clara Oswald becoming the main companion, which harks back to the way the show felt in its–uh–first incarnation (1963-1989), and the arrival of Peter Capaldi as the Doctor may bring back more of that classic Who feeling.