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Doctor Who Spoiler Thread

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Targetpractice8/23/2014 7:57:52 pm PDT

re: #85 hartly

I’m cautiously optimistic. I came around somewhat to Smith after watching some of his reruns as he could be very good when written well (which was unfortunately rare), but I think Capaldi can be much better than either him or Tennant. Loved Capaldi giving his enemy the choice between suicide and execution instead of reformation and execution. I’m hoping he’ll stay cold, but given how people have reacted in the past to the unfriendly Doctors (Hartnell and C Baker regularly place low in opinion polls, and Eccleston is easily the least popular of the new guys), I doubt this can last. Still, after two straight puppies in the Tardis it’s nice to see a grown-up again.

To be fair to Baker, he was largely the whipping boy of executives who by that point had decided they wanted the series to end and so wrote his character as schizophrenic. He’s actually gained a lot of praise in the audio adventures of the Sixth Doctor.

And I think Eccleston’s run to be very good, if mostly because he was perfect for the stories his Doctor was being handed. It was actually liking his version of the Doctor that got me into NuWho, because he could do dark and dramatic stories and he didn’t seem like a sad clown when doing them. Because that’s really how Tennant and Smith played their Doctors so much of the time, as grown children who were skirting around the universe looking for fun to have. When you gave them a dark and dramatic story, it always seemed like they were taken out of their comfort zone.