Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: bbc, doctor who, jenna coleman, peter capaldi, steven moffat

Doctor Who: A Look at Peter Capaldi's Flawed, Fascinating First Season

And now, a supercut of Season 8 of Doctor Who, the Twelfth Doctor's (Peter Capaldi) first season. New Doctor, new feel, new season-long theme, and arc. That's the beauty of Doctor Who – the basic premise of the show remains the same, but each new Doctor and cast let the showrunner make a completely new show in their own image.

It's a flawed season, to be quite frank. For all the interesting experiments like the one exploring Fear as an abstract concept, there's the episode about the moon that many viewers think might be the worst episode of this era, especially it defies all the laws of Physics. There's an attempt to expand Clara's (Jenna Coleman)'s life by giving her a life outside the TARDIS by giving her a job teaching at the Cole Hill School and a boyfriend. Danny Pink (Samuel Anderson) was a character who didn't quite work because he was written from the outside as a foil for Clara and the Doctor

The recurring theme of this season was of the place of soldiers – soldiers recovering from war (Danny Pink and his PTSD), reformed soldiers (Rusty the Dalek), soldiers om search of a mission (the mummy on the Orient Express), soldiers used for a new war (the Cybermen commanded by Missy), and the Doctor, an ex-soldier refusing to take up arms again to reassert his pacifism.

Moffat's real experiment of this season was the Doctor himself. With Capaldi, he could explore the question of who the character was and what he stood for. Moffat and Capaldi conducted a commentary on past incarnations in comparison to the new one, examining the Doctor's dark side more than previous versions, referencing the First Doctor's menace and prickliness and going even deeper, daring to make him unlikeable and even unsympathetic at times. Capaldi's performance frequently suggests his Doctor's lack of social graces and unease with emotion comes from being on the autism spectrum as he struggles to understand what kind of man he is before he figures it out at the end of the season. The next season seemed to be a course correction with a hipper, "Rock-n-Roll" Doctor, and Season 10 saw a "purer" classic Doctor unencumbered by the emotional baggage of Season 8 or 9. Capaldi was a different Doctor in each of his 3 seasons and his hair expressed that – he had short hair in Season 8, slightly longer hair in Season 9, and wilder hair in Season 10.

Capaldi was the finest actor to ever lead the show, and Moffat seemed to know it. He threw all kinds of things at him to act, including some of his finest speeches, starting with Season 8. It's too bad fans overlooked Capaldi's run because he wasn't a handsome young boyfriend substitute for female fans anymore. His run featured some of the most ambitious and emotionally complex stories Moffat ever wrote for Doctor Who. You could say it was the last hurrah in many ways.

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