Because it’s my blog and I can do whatever I want. Plus I don’t feel good, and it cheers me up to talk about something that’s not totally depressing.
Earlier this week, the BBC gave nerds around the world our first look at Peter Capaldi as the new Doctor, in costume:
All week I’ve been trying to pin down what I like about this so much. I finally figured it out:
He’s menacing.
In one indelible image, we know who this Doctor is: an intensely unsettling weirdo who’s having none of it. “Why is he gesturing like a constipated Dr. Strange? Why is he glaring at me like that? [shudder]”
Because he’s a nearly thousand-year-old super-genius from another planet who can travel anywhere in time and space at his whim, who has had more distinct physical forms in the last 50 years than the United States has had presidents, who is held in fear and awe by bad guys all over the universe, and you’re not. That’s why.
The Doctor has always been an eccentric to say the least, but in recent years he’s become more and more cuddly. David Tennant never met a problem he couldn’t solve with an arch of his eyebrows, and Matt Smith was like a big, floppy-haired puppy bouncing all over the place. (In retrospect, Eccleston doesn’t really make much of an impression. Sorry, Chris.) I liked them both, but this is a welcome change. The producers of the show have turned it into The Twilight Saga in Space in recent years, with the Doctor forever making gooney eyes at his latest companion, and I’m a little tired of it.
The Doctor should kind of creep you out. He should make you think, “I’m in the presence of someone I don’t know, someone I can never know, because he is utterly alien. But he still wants to save us from these even creepier space guys, because he’s smarter than them and he’s not about to let them forget it.”
As for the outfit, I guess the idea is the same as the show itself: Past Meets Future. As Capaldi puts it, “Simple, stark, and back to basics. No frills, no scarf, no messing, just 100 per cent Rebel Time Lord.”
I like the sound of that. Sounds like:
