‘Doctor Who’ Christmas Special: Saying Goodbye to Peter Capaldi

And hello to the first female doctor.

December 29, 2017 5:00 am
Mark Gatiss, Peter Capaldi and (BBC/BBC Worldwide - Photographer: Ray Burmiston.)
Mark Gatiss, Peter Capaldi and (BBC/BBC Worldwide - Photographer: Ray Burmiston.)

“You know what the hardest thing about knowing you was? Letting you go. Letting go of the Doctor is so, so hard.”

When Bill Potts (or rather a memory of Bill Potts) tells the Doctor this toward the end of “Twice Upon a Time,” this year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special, she’s meant to be speaking for all of us.

One of the greatest pleasures of being a Doctor Who fan, you see, is also its greatest challenge. It’s a joy to see a new actor embody the iconic role, finding new nuances and deeper depths, adding more dimensions to a character that has been developing for 50-plus years. But each regeneration is also an ordeal—we’ve invested emotionally in this latest version of the Doctor, and now they’re being ripped away. Now we have to start getting used to a new one all over again.

Thus the show wisely treats the transition as an absolutely wrenching experience for the Doctor himself—and seemingly more wrenching each successive time. David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor cried that he didn’t want to go. Matt Smith’s Eleven spoke a mournful goodbye as he tried to hang on to his memories.

And this go-’round, Peter Capaldi’s Twelve all-out refuses to go, stopping the process in its tracks until he can fully come to grips with what he has become in this particular iteration—and thus what he is about to lose. A fitting way to say goodbye, as we also get a moment to reflect on what Capaldi brought to the iconic role, who his version of the Doctor really was.

From the very start, it was clear this was an older version of the Doctor, a choice the producers clearly made in casting Capaldi: At 55, he was the oldest actor to take on the role since William Hartnell, the First Doctor (who, by no coincidence, we spend time within the Christmas special). Particularly coming after Matt Smith, the youngest-ever Doctor, it made a clear statement that this was going to be a less youthful Doctor, more inclined to be a father figure to his young companions than their love interest.

Capaldi took this contrast and ran with it, showing us a Doctor who (for the first time in a while) seemed truly alien. Often remote, aloof, abrupt, even rude, missing social cues that any human would have taken for granted. Sometimes he’d have to remind himself that people had feelings in order to be sensitive to them.

It didn’t mean he didn’t love his companions, but sometimes he needed to stop and really look at them before he could act lovingly. His gaze more often seemed fixed on the entire universe at once, rather than the people in front of him. At one point someone asks him, “What happened?” simply requesting a recap of recent events, and he replies: “The Big Bang, dinosaurs, bipeds, a mounting sense of futility.”

It’s a quip, of course, and as Capaldi grew into the character, it turned out that much of this alien remoteness was a bit of a put-on. He did, in fact, know that Clara was a winsome young woman, and not, as he often implied, middle-aged, ugly, or male. But her exasperation at his alien ignorance drew them closer. He’d claim “I’m not a hugger,” but he’d come through with an under-protest hug when it counted. His constantly furrowed brow and dour scowl made the occasional small grin like the sun breaking through clouds.

The contrast with his predecessors paved the way for a certain avuncular persona. Eleven often seemed like an attention-seeking child, an insecure teen who needed to constantly declare that the new iteration of his outfit was “cool.” Twelve, on the other hand, could be cool without seeming to try, a rad dad whose sonic screwdriver became a pair of classic wayfarers, who casually revealed he was a guitar virtuoso in exactly the way your best friend’s father might have. And yes, this was attention-seeking in its own way, and came with its fair share of dorky-dad qualities: awful dad jokes, cringeworthy pursuits—the dude loved his yo-yo—and missed cultural references.

Capaldi’s age was an effective way of measuring a certain philosophical distance as well. Where his predecessors emphasized the Doctor’s agelessness, Capaldi keyed into his unimaginable age. Where their sense of adventure was suffused with loss, his was weighed down with responsibility. They were caught up in the romance of the Doctor’s love for humanity, while he was concerned with the complex ethical implications of that love. Their madcap energy was still there but tempered by sadness rather than in desperate flight away from it.

As his original costume, with its red satin trim, suggested, Capaldi delighted in the side of the Doctor that had him act as a magician—something up his sleeve, casually withholding the crucial bit of information in service of the big reveal. But this love of the performative was sometimes at odds with his desire to be a teacher, tutoring humanity on the secrets of the universe, and how best to live in it. He was prone to lecturing, often hauling out an actual chalkboard, and in his final season, he became a university professor.

When these two tendencies worked together—bringing out the ways in which the best lessons have a bit of magic to them, while the best tricks teach you something about the world—the results could be stunning, as in the reveal at the heart of “The Zygon Inversion.” When they came into conflict with one another, as in the divisive “Listen,” whose antagonist may or may not have been only in the Doctor’s paranoid mind, they revealed the limits of always being the smartest person in the room.

Because the Doctor is generally always just making it up as he goes along, always on the verge of figuring out who he is, what it really means to be the Doctor. This is one of the major themes of “Twice Upon a Time,” a mostly conflict-free episode that allows Twelve to reflect on his time in the TARDIS and what is has all meant.

In the season 9 episode “The Girl Who Lived,” the Doctor theorizes that when he regenerated this time, he unconsciously chose a particular face from his past, to remind himself of a singular act of kindness. A day when he saved just one person (a Roman played by Peter Capaldi) out of twenty thousand. Even when he cannot save the day, he can still save one person. Because “I am the Doctor, and I save people.”

He does it again in “Twice Upon a Time,” saving the life of a World War I captain even though it has no effect on the outcome of the story, or the war; it’s just the kind thing to do. “Never hurts,” he says, “a couple fewer dead people on the battlefield.”

In the end, this is how the Twelfth Doctor distinguished himself. His predecessors fought epic battles, tried to win enormous wars, and often failed. But as he tells the Master and Missy in last season’s finale:

I’m not trying to win. I’m not doing this because I want to beat someone, because I hate someone, or because I want to blame someone. It’s not because it’s fun. 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. Just kind.

Bill suggests to the First Doctor that this is actually the Doctor’s real purpose in the universe—to maintain the equilibrium of good and evil, to balance out evil by stumbling around time and fixing the particular things that he can. This doesn’t involve winning any wars, beating any enemies, protecting any planets. It just means doing the small things that he does, being kind to the individuals he is able to be kind to, over many thousands of journeys throughout time and space, changing everything bit by bit. Balancing out the world through small acts of kindness.

Realizing this, the Doctor overcomes his reluctance and agrees to regenerate once again. But not before he takes the unusual step of trying somehow to give some guidance to his future self. And among the profound (“Hate is always foolish and love is always wise.”) and the nonsensical (“Never eat pears.”), he twice admonishes her (!) to be kind. “Laugh hard, run fast, be kind.”

Of the Doctors of recent memory, Peter Capaldi’s Twelve is the one who could perhaps most effectively deliver this message. With his alien remoteness and his stern face, a message of kindness shone through like a beacon in a dark universe. I look forward to her next incarnation, but his is a light that will be missed.

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