All good drama subverts our expectations to one degree or another. Part of the reason Doctor Who has remained at television’s top table for so long is that it’s better than most series at surprising its audience.
Series 8, which we continue to scrutinise in this issue, began by surprising its own star. “I wouldn’t have thought it would be me, because of my age,” Peter Capaldi told US magazine Entertainment Weekly, discussing his casting in a July 2014 interview. “I would have thought they were automatically heading younger.”
Capaldi was 56 at the time, but this was irrelevant to showrunner Steven Moffat, who quite rightly pointed out, “there’s no right age to be the Doctor”. Capaldi himself wryly observed that, “I’m technically too young for the part, because he’s over 2,000 years old!”