Last Friday marked the 10th anniversary of the announcement that Peter Capaldi would assume the lead role in Doctor Who. It seems like a good opportunity to take a look back at the actor’s three-season tenure as the Doctor, overseen by showrunner Steven Moffat.
Capaldi’s tenure was controversial at the time. Conventional wisdom argued he had “been good in the role, but [hadn’t] had the best stories to work with” and he had “divided viewers, alienating almost as many as he won over.” However, his tenure has been subject to a quiet reassessment. He was voted the show’s third most popular lead in a Radio Times poll in September 2020 and ranked second when Digital Spy compiled IMDb scores in July 2023.
The collaboration of Capaldi and Moffat led to perhaps the most ambitious and experimental era in the history of Doctor Who. Building off the show’s 50th anniversary celebrations, the duo pushed Doctor Who in bold new directions, interrogating concepts that the show had long taken for granted. During Capaldi’s three seasons, Doctor Who asked tough questions about its lead character and the show’s internal logic, and arrived at interesting answers.
This era of the show exists in conversation with decades of continuity that preceded it. It can be hard to properly assess Moffat’s vision of Doctor Who without understanding how it relates to the show’s legacy and history. In particular, Peter Capaldi’s version of the Doctor existed in contrast to his immediate predecessors, played by Matt Smith and David Tennant. This was most obvious in Capaldi’s age, which sparked much discussion after he was cast.
Matt Smith’s take on the role had — to quote journalist Matthew Sweet — “a quality of the old man trapped in the young man’s body.” Capaldi inverted that dynamic, feeling like a teenager who had discovered the universe’s most convincing fake ID. This self-styled “Doctor Funkenstein” would eschew the traditional sonic screwdriver for a set of sonic sunglasses and was constantly strumming an electric guitar. Capaldi’s Doctor was decidedly punk rock.
Capaldi’s Doctor was the most openly anarchistic take on the character since the version played by Sylvester McCoy towards the end of the 1980s, when the show was — according to script editor Andrew Cartmel — planning to “overthrow the government.” This was a version who would casually describe the monarchy as “an entirely pointless stratum of society who contribute nothing of worth to the world and crush the hopes and dreams of working people” in “The Husbands of River Song” and who would happily topple capitalism in “Oxygen.”
However, Capaldi’s take on the character was also more introspective and more vulnerable than earlier iterations. At the end of his second episode, “Into the Dalek,” he confronts his companion, Clara Oswald (Jenna Colman), with a question. “Clara, be my pal and tell me, am I a good man?” This question hangs over the character’s three seasons. To Moffat’s credit, this is not moral ambiguity for the sake of it. Capaldi’s version of Doctor Who honestly and meaningfully grapples with what it means both to be good and to be a man.
Under Moffat’s predecessor, Russell T. Davies, the Doctor had presented as something of a force of nature. “Do you know what they call me in the ancient legends of the Dalek Homeworld?” demanded Christopher Eccleston’s version of the character of his iconic pepper pot arch enemies. “The Oncoming Storm. You might have removed all your emotions but I reckon right down deep in your DNA, there’s one little spark left, and that’s fear. Doesn’t it just burn when you face me?” It’s a badass boast. The Doctor terrifies his enemies.
Davies’ Doctors routinely resorted to genocide, eradicating entire species in stories like “School Reunion” and “The Christmas Invasion.” As Latimer (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) stated in “The Family of Blood,” the Doctor was “fire and ice and rage. He’s like the night and the storm in the heart of the sun. He’s ancient and forever. He burns at the center of time and he can see the turn of the universe.” He was awe-inspiring. He was “the Lonely God.”
Moffat was somewhat ambivalent about the notion of the Doctor as a morally ambiguous figure sweeping through time and space with the force of a hurricane. Even writing under Davies, he turned “the Oncoming Storm” from a badass boast into a wry punchline in “The Girl in the Fireplace.” During his own era overseeing Doctor Who, the show tended to treat it like a joke (as in “The Lodger”) or as something worthy of derision (as in “Amy’s Choice”).
“When you began, all those years ago, sailing off to see the universe, did you ever think you’d become this?” his wife, River Song (Alex Kingston), asks the Doctor in Moffat’s “A Good Man Goes to War.” “The man who can turn an army around at the mention of his name. Doctor, the word for healer and wise man throughout the universe. We get that word from you, you know. But if you carry on the way you are, what might that word come to mean? To the people of the Gamma Forests, the word Doctor means mighty warrior. How far you’ve come.”
Davies embraced the Doctor as an archetypal pulp hero, “the gentleman explorer” wandering the cosmos destined to remain emotionally detached. The women who loved him, like Rose (Billie Piper) or Martha (Freema Agyeman), inevitably ended up heartbroken. The only woman to make a convincing claim to be his equal was Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), and the punishment for that hubris was to have her memory of her time with the Doctor erased.
Moffat pushed back against this romanticized masculine ideal. The Doctor isn’t a force of nature. Instead, “Doctor” is a title to which the character aspires. “The name I chose is the Doctor,” explained Matt Smith’s version. “The name you choose… it’s like a promise you make.” As Capaldi’s version confessed to archenemy Davros (Julian Bleach) in “The Witch’s Familiar,” “There’s no such thing as the Doctor. I’m just a bloke in a box, telling stories.”
Capaldi’s Doctor tended to deal with smaller threats in smaller ways. In “The Girl Who Died,” the Doctor saves one species by luring their enemies far across the universe and draining their weapons. “What’s to stop them re-arming and trying again?” Clara asks. “Nothing,” the Doctor replies. “It’s the best I could do, Clara.” This is key to understanding Capaldi’s Doctor. He is trying to be “a good man” rather than a “lonely god,” simply doing the best that he can.
Moffat has described his conception of the Doctor as “an angel who aspires to be human.” One of the more interesting aspects of Capaldi’s tenure is its recurring fascination with the idea of what it means to be good in a universe that is not. After all, Capaldi’s final season overlapped with political developments like the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum, which were likely shocking to Moffat’s self-described “wetly liberal” sensibilities.
That final season confronts the Doctor, who Moffat describes as “the number one liberal do-gooder of the universe,” with the inevitability of his own failure. In “Extremis,” he confronts an alien invasion only to realize that he is just a simulation and there is nothing that he can do to stop the real invasion. In “The Pyramid at the End of the World,” he fails to convince humanity to reject fascism. In “The Doctor Falls,” he sacrifices his life to buy a colony ship a few more years and in a doomed effort to redeem his old friend, Missy (Michelle Gomez).
As Missy abandons the Doctor, he makes a final case for his moral philosophy. “I’m not trying to win,” he argues. “I’m not doing this because I want to beat someone, or because I hate someone, or… because I want to blame someone. It’s not because it’s fun and God knows it’s not because it’s easy. It’s not even because it works, because it hardly ever does. I do what I do, because it’s right! Because it’s decent! And above all, it’s kind. It’s just that.”
Moffat and Capaldi’s exploration of what it means to be “a good man” is also gendered. Much like Moffat used the character of Clara to interrogate the gendered assumptions about the role of the companion, he also used Capaldi to ask the same questions about the Doctor. Much of those three seasons is spent deconstructing stereotypical ideas of masculinity. “The Girl Who Died” finds the Doctor outwitting a race of space Vikings who drink smoothies made of testosterone through the power of farce, embarrassing them into retreat.
Under Moffat, the Doctor learns what it means to be a good man, becoming emotionally present and cultivating meaningful relationships instead of retreating from emotional intimacy. Matt Smith’s Doctor spends the first half of his final season checking in on companions Amy (Karen Gillen) and Rory (Arthur Darvill) after they leave the TARDIS. Smith’s final adventure finds him taking up long-term residence on the planet Trenzalore, becoming “the man who stayed for Christmas.” He’s no longer just a reckless cad running around the universe.
For Moffat, the masculine ideal is that of a healer and a listener rather than a warrior or an adventurer. Sontaran soldier Strax (Dan Starkey) finds new purpose as a medic. As a nurse, Rory is initially less exciting than the Doctor, but he quietly proves himself “the most beautiful man [Amy] ever met.” This applies just as much to Capaldi’s Doctor, whose arc becomes a rejection of the archetypal portrayal of the character as “a learned and patrician white male” who had spent most of the previous fifty years as an absolute and unquestionable authority.
Capaldi’s tenure inverted the show’s classic structure in which “a dominant male character is accompanied by a succession of subordinate, mainly female companions”. Clara was a governess, then a nanny, finally a teacher. The Doctor was her student, and had much to learn. After asking if he’s a good man, the Doctor reassures Clara, “I think you’re probably an amazing teacher.” Clara responds, “I think I’d better be.” Clara pushes back against the Doctor’s patronizing grandstanding in early episodes like “Kill the Moon,” warning, “Don’t you ever tell me to mind my language. Don’t you ever tell me to take the stabilizers off my bike.”
Capaldi’s Doctor is the first to have a relationship of genuine equality with the women in his life, learning that being a good man often means supporting those women. He so internalizes his “duty of care” to Clara that he burns billions of years to bring her back to life after she dies in “Face the Raven.” In “The Husbands of River Song,” he spends 24 years with his wife River Song on the planet Darillium, knowing that this is the last time they will have together. In “Extremis,” he promises to give up his life of cosmic adventuring to devote himself to rehabilitating Missy, even though he inevitably relapses. He may fail, but the effort counts.
At the end of “Into the Dalek,” Clara returns to that question he asked her at the start of the episode. “You asked me if you’re a good man and the answer is: I don’t know,” she admits, honestly. “But I think you try to be and I think that’s probably the point.” This was the beauty of Capaldi’s tenure as the Doctor. It was a version of Doctor Who that argued that the lead character could still change and grow, even after fifty years. That capacity to evolve, to try to be better and do the right thing even when all is lost is what it means to be a good man.
Published: Aug 9, 2023 11:00 am