Just not going to happen. NuWho is way too far through it's life cycle for that...
Doctor Who due a major shake-up as bosses aim for 'brand new show' in 2018
- Thread starter Haggis and tatties
- Start date
True but at the same time they need to try to reverse the current trend. Series 9, after all sources of viewing were counted, showed a sizable drop in viewers and I don't see anything about Series 10 reversing that.
As horrible and unfair as it is to say, as the public face of the series Capaldi is much more of a liability than an asset these days. Whatever else Moffat has done over the years thinking, "We'll have the Doctor be an arsehole for a year, everyone will love that!" has to be his worst decision.
But that's because the Eccleston-to-Tennant transition set the expectation that the Doctor would always be a relatively young, good-looking guy who talked a mile a minute et cetera. If they'd gone for a radical departure in the very first regeneration, then new audiences would never have learned to expect the Doctor to always be a specific "type."
I think the smartest decision the BBC made back in the '60s -- other than inventing regeneration in the first place, without which the show could never have endured as long as it has -- was not to try to make the Second Doctor a copy of the First, but instead to deliberately make him as startlingly different as they could in order to make a clean break. That opened the door to the enormous diversity of classic Doctors we got, and to the custom of making it a role that each actor redefined to fit his own personality. Certainly the new Doctors have done the same, but three in a row were cast from within a narrower range of types than before.
They had letters to the Radio Times and elsewhere. They had fan clubs and newsletters. Fans have always had ways to communicate with each other and with the public.
There was always a contingent of fans who vocally rejected any new Doctor and refused to watch anymore -- but there were always new fans coming in to take their place. After all, it was a children's show, so people were constantly aging in and out of the target demographic. That's why it was constantly changing its identity and paying little attention to its own history.
As I said, pretty much all the classic Doctors were the diametric opposite of their predecessors in one way or another -- Colin Baker no more so than any of the previous four. It's true that his Doctor was harder to like, in a similar vein to Capaldi, but if that cost the show popularity, it was a function of how he was different, not just whether he was different.
The ratings for Colin's first season actually weren't that bad compared to Davison I think; I think it was mainly Grade's bias (Toward both Colin and the show) and the BBC wanting to shift the money more toward soap operas, or something like that, that prompted the hiatus.
I think that it was Trial of A Time Lord that eventually sealed the show's fate-despite featuring a somewhat toned-down, more likeable Sixth Doctor, some improved FX (At least some of the model work and 'paintbox' stuff was kind of cool), and some other highlights, I think it was sunk by some poor scripts (again, with some highlights such as the Doctor's reaction to Peri's death, and of course the great speech in Ultimate Foe), no real endgame due to Robert Holmes's death, Bonnie Langford's awkward publicity (The Peter Pan stuff, mostly) and the trial format.
I think that it was Trial of A Time Lord that eventually sealed the show's fate-despite featuring a somewhat toned-down, more likeable Sixth Doctor, some improved FX (At least some of the model work and 'paintbox' stuff was kind of cool), and some other highlights, I think it was sunk by some poor scripts (again, with some highlights such as the Doctor's reaction to Peri's death, and of course the great speech in Ultimate Foe), no real endgame due to Robert Holmes's death, Bonnie Langford's awkward publicity (The Peter Pan stuff, mostly) and the trial format.
The what now?
It is precisely because Moffat is stale that Capaldi deserves better than to be cast aside at the end of 2017. I think it would be borderline criminal for them to do so. I think the BBC needs to consider that maybe, just maybe, the problem is that people have gotten tired of the show under Moffat and the production team - and the cast should not be made to carry the can for their own decision to keep Moffat on.
Catherine Tate was by far my favorite nuWho actress. Unlike Rose or Martha, who fell head over heels in love with the Doctor, Donna Noble was more than just a sidekick, she was a sounding board for his morals and such a grab-the-bull-by-the-horns (when she wasn't cowering in fear).
Clara and Amy were great too, but I think Donna was the best.
I haven't watched Series 8 yet, although i think the Husbands of River Song was one of the greatest Christmas specials of nuWho.
Bad publicity shots based on her career as a child performer.
http://66.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7booy8EzR1rzpygvo4_1280.jpg
Honestly, the only Matt Smith novel that really made an impression on me was The Silent Stars Go By. I know Dark Horizons also gets praise, but to be honest, that made so little an impression on me I've actually forgotten most of it by now. Maybe I should re-read it, whenever I find the time for that.
The Capaldi novels are actually the same length as the other NSAs, usually around 240-250 pages, the same average length all the NSAs were since the line was launched with Eccleston a decade ago. Also the same average length of Torchwood novels.
Moffat seems to have gone out with a bang several times now, often setting the stage on fire and asphyxiating the crowd in the process. It's the bit about actually leaving that has always stumped him.
Ten and Eleven were definitely more similar than most adjacent Doctors. They even played this up in 2013 with the sonic screwdriver hijinks.
I wouldn't get too caught up in the hype about how next year will be a radical shake-up that will fundamentally reinvent the show. We've heard it all before...
Ten and Eleven were definitely more similar than most adjacent Doctors. They even played this up in 2013 with the sonic screwdriver hijinks.
I wouldn't get too caught up in the hype about how next year will be a radical shake-up that will fundamentally reinvent the show. We've heard it all before...
Huh. Maybe it's the larger font in the Capaldi novels that makes it seem more skewed to younger children than before.
I checked the page length too. "The Silent Stars go by" is 279 pages.
Capaldi novel for "Silhouette" is 245 pages
Starkers made a great point that overdoing the variety can have a negative effect, such as Davison --> Colin Baker.
I'd agree with you that it was a great choice to not reproduce Hartnell's Doctor during recasting. If they went the duplication/similar route, I'm pretty sure the series wouldn't have last long.
That said, I'm always shocked when I see how low Troughton's ratings were. True, they were declining near the end of Hartnell's time, but casting a very different Doctor didn't reverse that and in fact seemed to make it worse. It wasn't until Colin Baker came along that ratings were consistently that low again!
Variety is a double-edged sword. I'm sure it has contributed to the longevity of the series but it can also be problematic. I'm sure from the marketing standpoint alone, it makes complete sense to return to a young dashing hero type of Doctor.
Personally, I prefer the variety and echo those who really wanted to see Capaldi work with someone else besides Moffat. Capaldi has been great but hasn't served well by Moffat's show running.
ETA: Looked back at the ratings. Minor correction. Season 18 (Tom's final season) was the first season with ratings lower than Troughton's. However, it wasn't until Colin took over that the ratings were consistently lower than Troughton's and that persisted through the end of the Classic series.
Mr Awe
Last edited:
I don't see how that was any more drastic than Tom Baker to Davison. Particularly since the former had been the Doctor for a record seven years, so it was a shock going to someone so completely different. Troughton-Pertwee was a pretty massive change too, although the Troughton-era storytelling had already begun laying the foundations for the UNIT era.
That's why, in the early years, the Doctor always had a dashing young male companion as well as a pretty young female companion. It wasn't until the Pertwee era that the Doctor himself became the action hero. And then, of course, you eventually got to the point where the pretty female companion could be the action hero, as with Leela or Ace. (They touched on that possibility briefly years earlier with Sara Kingdom in "The Dalek Masterplan," but once she actually joined the TARDIS crew, she became quite passive and her story arc was basically forgotten for the rest of the serial.)
I wasn't trying to debate the severity of each different regeneration change. Just pointing out that sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. The Hartnell to Troughton regeneration didn't work strictly in terms of ratings. It wasn't until Pertwee came along the ratings were consistently improved.
The variety of Doctors is both a key to the series longevity but it can also be a negative. Apparently the BBC executives are currently in the mindset that more variety is a bad thing, if the report is true.
Mr Awe
But that's exactly my point: That it's not about the general concept of massive change, just about whether a specific one works well. A single failed instance doesn't invalidate the whole practice.
Tennant's was my least favourite interpretation of the Doctor, so I wouldn't be happy with such a decision.
Silent Stars is actually longer than typical NSAs since it's actually part of the "Adult" line, that usually applies to novels first published as proper-sized hardcovers as opposed to the "mini-hardcovers" the NSAs are.
Sometimes I think the Peter Davison/Colin Baker transition isn't quite as radical as some seem to think now. The Fifth Doctor was fairly argumentative with his companions-especially in the first season-and his last season was fairly violent (Warriors of the Deep, Ressurection of the Daleks & Androzani in particular), although perhaps a bit less gory. Davison also has an air of more sarcasm and defiance in his last season as well.
The coat, on the other hand....
The coat, on the other hand....
Last edited: