We weren't sure about the new Doctor. Mrs M T felt he was far too pretty to be the Doctor. I held the position that while he is insanely pretty, so were Mr Davision and Tennant back in the day, maybe include Smith. He was great at the enthusiastic babbling part of the Doctor, we're waiting to see what his "game face" is like before we decide.
Pretty is nice, even
too pretty if that’s possible. My concern is that the Doctor seems to be in the grips of a mid-life crisis.
The Doctor started off as an older man and a father figure. That made hugging him safe, and appropriate for a children’s TV series. The drift down the maturity scale seemed to be accompanied by a move up the weirdness scale, especially in the clothing, so perhaps that was supposed to make the Doctor still look safe and non-sexual.
I always believed they were casting based solely on the abilities of the applicants - nothing else explains how Sylvester McCoy got the part, since his stage act was anything but warm and cuddly! - but, thinking about it, they probably have an idea of what they want the next Doctor to be like, and cast accordingly. When they rebooted with Christopher Ecclestone, the darkest and most disturbed of all the Doctors I feel, it was surely a deliberate break with the past and perhaps an attempt to widen their audience. But once you start down that road you have committed to a fundamental change in the nature of the relationships he has with his companions, and that genie is going to refuse to go back in the bottle.
So now we are trapped in the revolving door of new loves and broken hearts which litter New Who; Ruby Sunday doesn’t look like she is going to break the mould. It was entertaining when it was new, but I am heartily sick of it now. Women in particular come out of it looking really cheap and easy. Worse, the Doctor is no longer all-wise and infallible, and his companions are no longer safe. He/She may promise that they will save you, but some companions come to terrible ends and the Doctor’s bitter regrets ‘butter no parsnips” as the saying goes. The character is now, at heart, needy and selfish, with no genuine regard for the flotsam and jetsam that gets caught up in the whirlwind of their passing - they must be, because there is a distinct lack of a safety briefing on offer before the next lot of cannon fodder signs on. If the writers and show runners still see the Doctor as a reassuring father/mother figure, it isn’t obvious.
A change for the better? Who knows. I am not sure that a kids’ SF TV series needs a tougher and more sexualised reality portrayed in it, but I am not the target audience I guess.
