TV: Doctor Who - Sweary Man In Space

Since 2006 The Doctor has been an unambiguous hero, with even Christopher Eccleston’s prickly Doctor Nine being the guy you can trust to be your friend.  After the departure of Matt Smith as the lead Peter Capaldi is now The Doctor and the show has taken a complete departure as well.  

This is of course the beauty of a show like Doctor Who – it has its own built in reboot button meaning that every few years it can regenerate and become something completely different.  It can and does rebel against itself, meaning that Matt Smith’s cuddly Doctor Eleven has been replaced with Peter Capaldi’s spiky and truly alien Doctor Twelve.  The Doctor is now a very ambiguous hero, and a much more interesting one.

The infamous Capaldi eyebrows...

Peter Capaldi is best known (in Britain at least) as being the sweary spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in The Thick Of It.  That role involved a lot of swearing and that probably isn’t going to figure much in his portrayal of The Doctor… It hasn’t yet, anyway.  He’s the first actor to play the Doctor in the new series to be so closely identified with another cult role.  Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant were established character actors and Matt Smith was virtually unknown.  To a lot of people Peter Capaldi is Malcolm Tucker.  This isn’t necessarily a problem, especially as Doctor Twelve shares a lot of Tucker’s character traits – it means there’s a shorthand way in to getting a hold on the character.  There were jokes aplenty when Capaldi’s casting was announced about how the new series of Doctor Who would be ‘Sweary Man in Space’, but I don’t think anyone expected that to actually happen to the extent it has.  In fact The Doctor is an even more intimidating figure than Malcolm Tucker ever was and that’s saying something.  He’s perhaps not as aggressive but he’s a highly volatile personality handling life or death situations and that’s worse, especially when you’re used to The Doctor being a friendly and open person.

In the second episode of this latest series, ‘Into The Dalek’, a soldier seems to be about to die and The Doctor throws something to him, smiles a crocodile grin and says “trust me”.  The soldier then dies quite gruesomely, and it turns out The Doctor was just using him to measure the radiation levels (or something).  Everyone is shocked but The Doctor brushes it aside irritably, saying “He was dead already, I’m saving our lives”, and moves on.  This is maybe something other Doctors would have done, in a tight corner; but no other Doctor would have behaved so callously.  David Tennant’s Doctor for instance would have said his trademark line in this sort of situation, “I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry”, and looked… well, sorry.  Peter Capaldi’s smiles like a predator in order to manipulate the situation then gets on with the job.  This moral ambiguity has made for more complex themes so far.  For all of Christopher Eccleston’s angst in playing Doctor Nine, he was still playing a broadly heroic character that you could relate to.  This new Doctor makes you ask the question – does saving the day automatically make you a hero?  In the last episode, ‘Kill The Moon’, he actually walks off and leaves the humans to it – he says it’s their home at stake and he has faith in Clara to make the right decision.  Then buggers off, mid-adventure.  This is not typical adventure hero behaviour – but then when was The Doctor ever meant to be a typical adventure hero?

"Be my pal, tell me - am I a good man?"

Speaking of Clara – she’s great nowadays.  I never really took to her as a character when she started, mainly because she seemed all wrapped up in being a gimmicky ‘Impossible Girl’ plotline, but also because she didn’t seem to have as much chemistry with Matt Smith as he had had with Amy and Rory.  She really clicks with this new Doctor though, and has a real dramatic purpose as an audience identification figure.  There’s not actually been that much need for an audience identification figure for ages because The Doctor has been played as an essentially likeable eccentric.  Now he’s being played as a character just the right side of unlikeable she’s absolutely necessary to the show – The Twelfth Doctor, as with Malcolm Tucker, can only work well as part of an ensemble.  It basically feels like Clara’s regenerated as well, and definitely for the better.

The last few years have shown us The Doctor in a touchy-feely light – basically as a bit of a weird human.  Well The Doctor hasn’t been this alien since well before we actually knew he was an alien, back when William Hartnell was the guvnor.  The Doctor isn’t your fun uncle or eccentric older brother anymore – he’s your grumpy Scottish grandfather, and you were sorely trying his patience even before he walked into the room.  He’s still your friend, just, but he’s the kind of friend you worry about introducing to other people.

It’s quite shocking, and it’s refreshing after the charming characters we’ve got used to having as the lead.  The Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors all have scenes where a great deal is made out of The Doctor being what monsters have nightmares about, or about being the ‘Oncoming Storm’ or the ‘Last Of The Time Lords’.  Most of the time however, they’re fun to be around.  The reverse is true with this one – he is witty, but he’s not a comedian and he’s more serious and alien than not.  Compared to the Classic Doctors, Doctor Twelve is like a cross between One and Six.  Colin Baker’s Doctor was meant to have a character arc where he started out brash and unlikeable and gradually became more and more at peace with himself.  It didn’t really work out that way because the cack handed way it was approached nearly killed the programme.  But it’s a good idea for a character arc and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s exactly what they’re trying to do with the character in his Twelfth incarnation, but this time doing it right.

And does it work?  Personally I love Peter Capaldi as an actor, and at the moment I’m enjoying seeing him be The Doctor a lot.  The character has obviously been designed to rub against the previous characters of the new series – sometimes this is overdone   when scenes make him just a bit too unlikeable, seemingly just to remind you that Peter Capaldi is not Matt Smith.  It works because it does what every new Doctor should do which is to shake the viewer out of their comfort zone and put them in an entirely different type of show.  His debut episode dropped Doctor Twelve into what would have been a fairly standard Doctor Eleven story and showed how different the series would be – Matt Smith’s Doctor wouldn’t have poured his enemy and himself a whiskey before throwing him to his death.  It’s a whole new game and one that's turning our to be a different kind of fun.