WHO KNOWS: Capaldi Breathes Deep

There’s a giant dinosaur in London and people are dying from what appears to be spontaneous human combustion, and the Paternoster Gang is on the case!
But the Doctor isn’t the man he used to be, and Clara doesn’t think she knows who he is anymore…

And so Series Eight begins, with Peter Capaldi as the Doctor.

I’m going to try and keep spoilers to a minimum, as there are folks out there waiting for the 25th to see “Deep Breath” in the theaters, but talking about this one will require a few, so yeah, my apologies about that. But before we dive into the episode, a little background is in order.

I… have a confession to make. I am a huge Peter Capaldi fan. When he was announced as the Doctor, I was more than pleased, because I knew he’d be amazing in the part. Yes, we’ve had all the discussions/arguments/debates/fanrage about casting another white male in the part, and I still want to see Chiwetel Ejiofor play the part someday, but for this fan, Capaldi as the Doctor felt right. Since the announcement, we’ve learned about his love for the show and childhood letters to the BBC, and there are tons of videos out there for fans to see just how much he loves playing the part. I’ve been watching him since 1983’s Local Hero, and while he’s not the best known over here in the States, he’s kind of a big deal in the UK, and is, in fact, one of the “biggest” actors to take on the role.

He’s also… older.

For fans of the Original Series, those of us who grew up on the PBS runs of Tom Baker’s 4th Doctor, an older actor playing the part is something we’re used to. William Hartnell and Jon Pertwee were in their 50’s; Patrick Troughton and Baker in their 40’s when they took on the role. Peter Davidson made waves by being 29 when he became the 5th Doctor, long before everyone was freaking out about Matt Smith being 27 when he was cast. Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy were in their 40’s, Paul McGann 36, and then… the wilderness years. When the show came back, we saw a steady decrease in actor ages, with Christopher Eccleston at 41, and David Tennant at 34. The 27 year-old Smith caused all kinds of speculation, mostly joking, that the next actor to play the part would be a teenager, but older fans noticed something else: The Doctor had kind of become a sex symbol.

That wasn’t really a part of the Original Series; well, not like it is now anyway. I do have a few friends who were a bit swoony over Tom Baker and Peter Davidson, but the whole “romantic hero” thing that has been a part of the new series was non-existent in the show’s original run. The Doctor was an alien, his Companions weren’t in love with him, and personally, I found the addition of the whole Unrequieted-Love Thing with Rose kinda awful; but then, I was never a fan of Rose. (River Song, on the other hand, for all the missteps of the characters’ writing over her run, worked for me, so go figure.)

The world-wide explosion of Doctor Who fandom also saw a huge growth in the younger audience, and since we’re in the age of the Internet, the rise of Tennant and Smith as “Sexy Doctors”. Not to leave Chris Eccleston out of that category, he certainly has his fans, but Tennant broke the collective heart of the fans, both with his tragic love for Rose and his leaving the show. Smith also built up a pretty sizable base of fans who had ideas of undoing that bow tie (Heh. And don’t get me started about what I’ve heard about fezzes. The Internet: Beware All Who Enter Here.), and Rose and Martha and Amy were all, to various degrees, romantically attracted to their Doctors. There was a reason that Catherine Tate was cast as Donna Noble, aside from being an amazing actress, and that was to derail the Doctor/Companion love affair thing.

We got some of that back with Amy, but Rory diffused that, and then we had Clara, who was… something. Her character — and there are a lot of fans who think that she doesn’t have much of one — seems to bounce around when it comes to the Doctor. Certainly flirty, but there was more sexual chemistry with River and Tasha Lem than with Clara on the Doctor’s side. We did get a “fancies him” moment in “The Time of the Doctor”, and the awful “boyfriend meets the family” bit, but overall, it was a lot more ambiguous.

Why, you may well ask, am I writing so much about all of this? Well, if you managed to miss it all, the fact that Peter Capaldi is the same age as William Hartnell was when he originated the role in 1963 kinda made the news a bit when he was cast, and believe it or not, there were cries of “He’s so… old!” out there amongst some of the fans. For us, ahem, older fans though, and certainly for many of the younger fans to be fair, there seemed to be a more of a wait-and-see approach, and here we finally are.

The first thing one must be aware of when it come to “Deep Breath” is just how self-aware it is. Steven Moffat and the cast know all too well that they are changing the show here, in several ways. We have a shift in tone, with the much repeated “darker” Doctor, the age thing, and the replacement of one of the most popular actors to play the part. If you thought they might just gloss that over, well, think again, because the script is all about addressing that head on. Clara fans and detractors will find a much more developed character here who asks the questions and says the things that any fan who is uncertain about Peter Capaldi will ask and say.

The Companions have always been, to various degrees, the audience stand-ins, but here Jenna Coleman’s Clara is you and me and all the fans of the show, all asking if this new fellow is going to be “our” Doctor. “I don’t think I know who the Doctor is anymore” has been part of the advertising for the series, and it’s here that those words are spoken more than once. It’s actually a fairly Clara-centric story actually, as she (and we) try to figure out this grey-haired Scot with a temper who has replaced our Madman With A Box.

And Peter Capaldi’s Doctor is different from Smith’s, although not so terribly different that he’s unrecognizable as the Doctor. Like Smith, he can talk a mile-a-minute and swing from funny to serious on a dime, but there’s certainly a different tone here. Gone is the flirting and the moments of childishness, replaced by a somewhat grouchy and colder demeanor. In the first half of the episode Capaldi is all over the place, as his Doctor is still dealing with the trauma of regeneration, but when the mental confusion settles, we’re left with a Doctor who can look the villain in the eye and offer him a drink because he has “the horrible feeling I’m going to have to kill you”, and we believe that he’s actively considering how he’s going to do it. It’s a different kind of alien than Smith’s: Capaldi’s Doctor has the love for Humanity that all the Doctors have, but the warmth, the cuddliness, that’s just gone. He’s not “a hugging person now”, but make no mistake, he’s still the Doctor. And even that claim belies the emotional core that hasn’t changed, because if you watch how the Doctor is backing away as Clara decides if she’s going to continue to travel with him… he’s afraid. He’s afraid she’s going to say no. Capaldi is great at the shouty and funny fast-talking bits, but it’s the quieter moments where he’s just wonderful.

When one is making so sweeping a change to a character, you have a couple of options the show has taken advantage of in the past. One, like Tennant to Smith, involved a new actor, a new Companion, and a new show runner. The other, like they did here, is to bring along some familiar faces to ease the way. Of course we have Clara, but we also have the Paternoster Gang to keep the audience’s equilibrium in check. Neve McIntosh returns as Vastra, Catrin Stewart as Jenny Flint, and Dan Starkey as Strax. For fans of the characters, it will be a welcome return, and a nice glimpse into the details of their relationships, including a long awaited kiss that some fans have been clamoring for for quite a while now. I know I’ve written a few times about Strax being played a little too much for laughs, and there is a little of that here, but Starkey is always a fun actor to watch, so I shan’t complain too much there. Vastra gets a pretty important scene with Clara that, again, is as much directed at the audience as the characters, and McIntosh is in fine form here. Stewart gets to give us more depth to Jenny, and have some nice banter with her wife, as well as poking some fun at the role of a domestic that she plays for the public.

And of course we must have a villain, and for that we turn to Peter Ferdinando’s Half-Face Man, a robot keeping himself “alive” by replacing his failing parts with both mechanical and organic versions. For the latter he is harvesting humans, leading to the aforementioned spontaneous human combustion to cover up the murders. Ferdinando is, in my opinion, just fantastic here, giving us a machine that has become so human that it is searching for, yearning for, The Promised Land. His interactions with Capaldi are pretty outstanding, and the effort put into giving us the physicality of the mechanical/organic creature is as well. Yes, it’s far from an earth-shattering threat, and yes, compared to “The Eleventh Hour” or “The Christmas Invasion”, the scale is much smaller, but there’s nothing wrong with having a “villain” whose body count isn’t in the millions. And that scene in the doorway — the emotion in a machine that knows it shouldn’t have any — really makes me want to see the Half-Face Man again.

And then there’s Missy…

Without the spoilers that she’d entail, obviously Moffat is setting up a arc for the season here, and calling back to a minor mystery from “The Bells of Saint John”. We’ll have to see what she has in store for us, but we do know that her title is The Gatekeeper of the Nethersphere, and that is intriguing. This also seems like a good time to praise Moffat’s script, which is really quite good, and gives us some great callbacks to the history of the show as well as great lines for our actors. The script is funny. The restaurant scene in particular, with Clara and the Doctor snapping at each other, each one talking at and past each other. Really, all the character moments are good when it comes to the writing here. Also deserving of praise is the direction of Ben Wheatley and the editing of Will Oswald, who give us a very cinematic look and feel to the episode. We’ve heard that the scenes for this series will be longer and less frenetic, and it shows in the edit. Things are allowed to linger, and that actually builds drama and tension, and it’s a trend I’m a big fan of.

But is it a perfect introduction to the 12th Doctor? Wellllllll… no. For all the benefits of the longer running time, there are some bits that drag just a bit. Capaldi’s alley scene is 85% genius, and has the benefit of giving him Brian Miller to play off of. Miller has played many roles in the history of Doctor Who, and it’s especially nice to see him here for another reason: He’s the husband of the much missed Elisabeth Sladen, our Sarah Jane Smith.

Still, for how good both men are in the scene, it goes on a bit too long, as does the medical examination scene with Clara and Strax. Actually, that scene could have just gone altogether and I would have been fine with that. And the self-aware audience thing is a double-edged sword, because while it gives Jenna Coleman some quite good material to work with, it does ring a bit odd. Clara is The Impossible Girl, the woman who has had fragments of her self spread through time, aiding the Doctor throughout his entire life, and yet here she’s freaking out over how much he’s changed? She’s met two of his other incarnations in this timeline, and she’s still upset that he’s different now? Uhhhhhkay. That part was problematic, to say the least. Especially after that wonderful restaurant scene. That said, it did lead to a pretty great cameo and a wonderful scene between Clara and the Doctor that kicks off the new season nicely, so… mixed bag there.

I will certainly say that the reviews I’ve seen where people have complained about half of the episode being the Doctor disoriented by his regeneration seem to be forgetting “The Christmas Invasion” and Tennant being asleep for half the story, or some of the Original Series regeneration episodes. And the odd comments I’ve seen about the TARDIS getting a redesign are curious as well, as all that’s changed is the addition of some bookshelves and a new lighting scheme. Other than that it’s the same.

Of course, we must discuss the new credits and the change in the music. The new credits were designed by a fan, Moffat liked them, and paid him to use them. That’s awesome! The Doctor Who production team loves the fans, we’ve seen that time and time again, and this is a great example of seeing the work that so many fans do for videos and props and costumes and rewarding them for their creativity. Looking at the credits throughout the run of the show, the new ones are quite striking and interesting, and I’m happy with them. Same for the new theme arrangement, which, like so much of this new Doctor, harkens back to the Original Series in its sound. Is it different than the last 7 years? Yes. Is it evocative of the theme from the Original Series? Yes. And I’m perfectly fine with that.

So! An excellent, if not perfect, start to what seems to be a really exciting new period in the show, and a great performance from our new Doctor. Here’s to another great season and Peter Capaldi’s Doctor.

Right. So. Serious SPOILERS after this point. Read no further if such things are not on your agenda today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Still here? OK then.

So let’s get this one out of the way, shall we? Did the Doctor push the Half-Face Man out of the restaurant? Not physically, no, but certainly he pushed him with his words. OK, that’s my opinion, but it’s based on the scene itself, and that incredible exchange about both men’s “programming”. Watch Ferdinando’s not-quite-blank face and listen to the way he says “Yes” and it’s pretty clear that he wants to die. Yes, we have that great shot of the Doctor looking right at the camera to muddy the waters, but the great tragedy of the Half-Face Man is all in that scene. He doesn’t want to keep going on AND he desperately wants to reach The Promised Land. Again, Ferdinando is an excellent actor, and I am really looking forward to his return.

The Matt Smith cameo: Loved it. Again, so much of this episode was about telling the fans it’s all going to be OK, and here is the actual goodbye that Clara really didn’t get in “The Time of the Doctor”. And it’s playful in the midst of the sadness too… just look at the way Smith’s mouth smiles just a hair when he asks about his new self being grey. And it leads to one of my favorite scenes in the episode, where the Doctor asks Clara, and us, to look at him, see him, standing in front of us all, ready to be the Doctor. Watch him back away from her with each line, until he reaches the TARDIS door. He’s ready to bolt if she says no. Sublime work.

And then there’s Missy. OK, so she’s crazy. All the crazy. Her comment about the Doctor being her boyfriend and keeping his accent are really creepy, and set up some really interesting questions. Fan speculation has exploded, with the Master and the Rani being popular theories, of course. My two favorites, as much as I think they are completely mad and so not at all likely, are an insane version of one of Clara’s fragments or a Romana driven mad by the Time War. Bonkers, yes, but I admire the ingenuity of the fans who came up with those. Personally I think she’s a new character who will somehow connect with the “mistakes” the Doctor talks about making, and it will factor into the idea that this is a “darker” Doctor.

By the way, that “darker” thing? Don’t worry about it. The Doctor has always been “dark”, right from the beginning. He never really stopped being an unpredictable character, even if we had some more pacifistic versions (such as the 5th) along the way. And we all know that the Doctor can, and will, kill. The 3rd Doctor used a gun quite a few times, the 4th had a pretty high body count as well, and the 10th and 11th left their fair share of bodies behind them. It’s about not having killing being his first choice that always matters. Even here, the Doctor tries to reason with the Half-Face Man, before giving him a version of the Sycorax and Atraxi speech. The most important part of all of that? That the Doctor doesn’t think he’s worthy of Paradise. He’s aware, has always been aware, of the blood on his hands.

This Doctor just seems to be more open about it.