Credit: BBC/Steve Brown
In Handing Over the Sonic Screwdriver I wrote:
Nine-hundred odd years of knocking around the universe, you’ve got to see in the Doctor’s eyes when it’s just not funny any more.
In Stephen Armstrong’s article for Radio Times 17-23 May, he reports Steven Moffatt as saying of Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor:
He’s not a human being, however much he larks around pretending to be … He’s not apologising, he’s not flirting with you – that’s over.
Now, I’ve not been lurking in Steven Moffatt’s brain, or indeed Peter Capaldi’s; the closest I’ve got is sitting on a sofa, drooling with admiration at the results of their work six feet away on a television screen. But we have
a match.
We have a match, which comes down to No More Puppying Around in Who. Steven Moffatt explains it as pre- and post-Day of the Doctors and who are we to argue with the screenwriter who has satisfied thousands of fans (and non-fans) with an anniversary episode that could have played safe but really, really didn’t.
Steven Moffatt says the two Doctors who met up with John Hurt’s brutal old warrior from the Time War were “puppying around the place” trying to prove there’s too much light in them to do anything very dark. Now that whole doing-a-dreadful-thing has been reversed, the Doctor:
… goes back to being the trickier version of the Doctor, the fiercer alien wanderer.
Cor, bring it on.
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