Five Reasons 'Doctor Who' Is The Strongest It's Been In Years

We're now five episodes deep into the eighth revived season of Doctor Who, and I think it's pretty safe to say that, even now, it's swiftly shaping up to be the best run of episodes the show has enjoyed since before David Tennant departed in 2010. I know it seems early to make that call, but I have good reasons to do so, and not just because the opening credits are the coolest they've been since the start of the revival.

peter capaldi's doctor

It makes sense to start with the core of the show, new Doctor on the block Peter Capaldi. Even with only a handful of episodes under his belt, he's asserted himself as a cut above the majority of his peers; mark my words, he will be a fan-favourite Doctor for the ages. He has quite simply waltzed on in and stomped all over Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor's hand-waving, bowtie-wearing corpse and declared, "I am the Doctor. Everyone else was just waiting to be me."

To be totally fair to Smith, he came into the show following the departure of one of the oft-cited all-time best Doctors in the show's history across both revival and vanilla eras. Pretty much his entire first season was spent trying to convince viewers that this youngish, twee-as-balls archaeology-professor-looking eccentric who was claiming to be the Doctor was actually worthy of stepping into David Tennant's shoes, so by the time we'd accepted that he was indeed the last Time Lord of Gallifrey, it was because he'd had to work so hard to grow on us. And, to be sure, throughout his three-season run, Smith was a good Doctor. And, for a while there, we could have even argued that he was really a great one.

But not any more.

Simply put, having seen what Capaldi is capable of in the role — his nuance, his ferocity, his humour, his physicality, his general ability to evoke the Doctor's sense of wonderment flecked with centuries' worth of incidental cynicism... all of it makes the entire Smith era seem weaker than it did before Capaldi's Doctor existed. You just can't go back to thinking that Rice Bubbles are the best cereal ever once you discover there's such a thing as Coco Pops, you feel me?

the doctor/companion dynamic

I was praying for it, and I got it. Remember the other week, when I ranked the revival's companions, and went on at length about how the best dynamic that existed in the show's first seven seasons was between Tennant's Tenth Doctor and Catherine Tate's Donna Noble because they were, above all else, just good mates? ...No?

Whatever, let me briefly recap. Ten and Donna were an inherently watchable pair because they were not romantically entangled or interested - in either direction, whether on his or her part - or a fascination or something to solve. They were two friends travelling time and space, ribbing each other, saving people and hunting things and having a grand old time (until they weren't) and it was glorious (until it wasn't).

I don't know why this particular dynamic has always appealed to me more than when there's been some "special" reason for the partnership, but it has, and Capaldi and his companion, Jenna Coleman's Clara Oswald, have it in spades.

Upon Twelve's introduction at the start of this season, head writer Steven Moffat took pains to deconstruct the way Eleven and Clara interacted, and, through a defiant chat with ancient lizard-woman Madam Vastra and a frank admission from the Doctor himself that it was he who was in doe-eyed error, not Clara, we see an immediate shift in the way Twelve treats his old companion and new friend — no longer a pet project, but a valued travelling partner and human being.

And it works, on a few levels - not only does Coleman bring out the youth and vibrance in Capaldi, but the new standard of interaction between the two central characters has given Clara room to breathe as an actual human being, which she was lacking pretty sorely throughout her "Impossible Girl" arc with Eleven. They have wonderful chemistry, and I'm a little sad that she's on the way out at Christmas, now. Especially since...

the stories are better

Season seven had some decent episodes, I guess. Asylum Of The Daleks was pretty cool on principle (insane alien robots? Yeeeea boiiii), and The Angels Take Manhattan was a decent swansong for ex-companions the Ponds, even if the Angel Of Liberty is the stupidest fucking thing I have seen on television in a long time.

But, other than that, seasons five through seven consistently got kind of shittier as time wore on, to the point that Moffat got all experimental with season seven and tried to make a different-genre blockbuster-style episode each week, from the objectively awful (ill-advised western episode A Town Called Mercy) to the just sort of there (The Power Of Three). So, in total fairness, it's not like the team would've had to have worked too hard to put out something a little better than we've seen over the past few years.

And they haven't been totally without stumbles, either — the Robin Hood-inspired Robot Of Sherwood was a pretty polarising piece; I didn't hate it, for the record — but for the most part, the early episodes of season eight have been way more intriguing and engaging than what we saw in season seven (with the exception of the end-of-year specials), most recently demonstrated by the uniformly lauded Listen, which has quickly come to be broadly regarded as one of the best episodes Moffat has offered up in a long time.

It almost makes up for the Angel of Liberty. Actually, I don't mean to harp on it, but...

there has not been anything as stupid as the angel of liberty so far this season, and i cannot stress how important that is

SERIOUSLY. LOOK AT IT AGAIN. IT IS SO FUCKING STUPID. WHY DOES IT HAVE SHARP TEETH? WEEPING ANGELS DON'T EVEN EAT THEIR TARGETS. THEY ARE STATUES. GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER, MOFFAT.

God, it's depressing. Let's just move on to something much less depressing.

the promise of the future

Don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy to revel in the now of Doctor Who, especially if it stays as consistently good as it has been since the arrival of the silver fox — but the reality is that, just like his predecessors, Capaldi, too, will one day (hopefully after a good few seasons, because he's amazing) hang up the longcoat and pass the torch on to another Doctor, and the prospects are arguably better than they've ever been.

Yes, Capaldi's Doctor is (technically — let's not go into it) the Twelfth Doctor, but in a way he is also a new First; the inaugural incarnation of an entirely new, thirteen-lifetime regeneration cycle. It's fitting that he is the same age as original First Doctor William Hartnell and has at least a partially Hartnell-esque vibe about him, carrying an air of finality/symmetry as much as he does newness, and as such upon regeneration represents an opportunity for the show to move into the remainder of the 21st century as an entirely different entity, taking the path not taken — the non-white-guy path.

I'm not saying we couldn't or shouldn't ever have a white guy for a Doctor again, but definitely at least not well into the second half of this cycle's allotted lives, if the show stays on air that long. Before that, it would be nice to see a long uninterrupted, non-token line of women/people of colour/women of colour controlling that TARDIS, because, aside from the long overdue boost to representation such a casting would create, if you want to keep a half-century-old show fresh for another fifty years, a good start would be giving your central character an entirely unexplored perspective.