Who I am is where I stand. Where I stand is where I fall.

This is not a post that is going to make me popular with some folks. This is not a post that is going to appeal to those without a liking for sci-fi in general, or Doctor Who in the specific. And while I will do my best to avoid spoilers, I can’t promise that.

I think, of all the new Doctors, Peter Capaldi was one of the best. I’ve watched through them all over the last few years, from Eccleston to Capaldi. And I like Peter Capaldi best, followed by Chris Eccleston.

Why? I hear you ask. Maybe not. Maybe it’s just a ghost, annoyed at my incessant tapping away at the keyboard. With the Doctors, it’s important to look at the character development between the incarnations. They move sensibly and with glacial slowness through emotional arcs that make sense, when viewed in the bigger picture.

Eccleston was always my favourite. Eccleston was tortured, never thinking that he was good enough. He’d failed in the Time War, and that haunted him, and the idea that he might be a good person was a million miles away. And as he dies, regenerating into Tennant, he closes by admitting that maybe he wasn’t that bad. “You were fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And you know what. So was I.”

Tennant fights, to hold in the darkness, to maintain that admission of goodness. And he doesn’t always manage it. And so he still tortures himself for letting it out, but he internalises it. He tries not to let himself get too close. And with his companions around, to reinforce that image for him, he can be good. He was bloody good too. And as he dies, he does the best he can for those around him.

Leaving Smith without companions right at the start. Matt Smith’s Doctor schisms into two separate entities. He slices off the dark side within him, so as to face the light. So as not to let the companions around him see that darkside at all, if possible. Because, perhaps he reasons, if they can’t see it, then all they can do is reinforce the good. There becomes a dissonance between how the outer world sees the Doctor, and how the companion sees the Doctor.

Which led up to Capaldi. Who doesn’t split those sides now, who indeed, internalises the good, letting the dark side have the exterior facing. Who needs to accept the dark side of his character. Indeed, sometimes he leans into it too much. But he is still good. The brightness there, enclosed in a casing of dark. More so in his later episodes, but Missy gave him something to lean against – a benchmark to measure up to.

And I can’t help but wonder if those two sides can find a balance. If the next Doctor will find a way to make those parts live in harmony. If the Doctor and the one with no name can find some way to work together in that fractured brain. I like Doctor Who, not so much for the sci-fi, as for what it says about the universality of human nature. I like it, I like him, most where I can see myself in his shoes.