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Our Vultures peck at new Doctor Who: Exterminate or, er ... carrion?

Peter Capaldi – best Time Lord yet, or worst?

Gavin says:

Doctor Who is lot like James Bond - everybody has their favourite.

Mine was Tom Baker, the Uni lecturer Time Lord who arrived packing jelly babies. Coming a close second is Matt Smith, the young fogie with a love for fezzes and bow ties.

Peter Capaldi in costume as Doctor Who

But as with the arrival of Daniel Craig to 007, Peter Capaldi’s Doctor Who in Season 8 could force me to re-assess my list. I say "could".

Capaldi’s is a tart refresher to the sugar-coated Doctoring that started with David Tennant.

He’s irascible and irritable, glorious assuming and unselfconscious – a one-liner king. For once, this Doctor doesn’t coo over humans – he finds them a bit stupid and they get in his way. The writers have energised the Doctor’s relationship with Clara Oswald. “I’m his care worker,” Jenna Coleman’s Oswald explains in one episode. “She cares so I don’t have to,” spits Capaldi.

Capaldi is fast becoming the reason to watch Series 8 – no: the only reason.

Season 8 continues the writers’ tradition of Borging and stitching together big-screen sci-fi plots.

The Caretaker was the latest, with the ruthless Skovox Blitzer. In a word: Predator.

Rather than engaging new sci-fi, the writers mine the exhausted: “the Doctor as flawed hero or lost man” and “there are consequences to the Doctor's actions.”

Deep Breath episode Doctor Who

Are we really back in Victorian Blighty again?! Clara and Doctor Who in Deep Breath

Plots and settings are weak as a result. Already, there’s a disturbing predilection for episodes set on Earth, in Victorian Britain. We have the start of a new story arc: People and things that get offed find their way to an afterlife run by a character named Missy. But, I fear, we’re building to a repeat of the promising destruction of the Tardis and the killing of the Doctor by River Song that failed to deliver.

And issues getting bolted: inter-species relationships between Madame Vastra and the human Jenny Flint in Deep Breath. Yes, tackle issues – that’s the brilliance of sci-fi: it’s a blank canvas. Star Trek went interracial on US TV between Kirk and Uhura in the 1960s as black and whites battled for civil rights and an end to separation in the South.

Did the campaign on inter-species marriage pass me by? It’s a metaphor too far.

Should I revise my list of top Doctors, based on Series 8 so far? I like you Peter, but your writers must try harder on the science and the fiction bits.

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