Two-minute Time Lord

If Robin Hood had assaulted the Doctor with a quarterstaff, with a full-on “Ho! Ha Ha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!”, I perhaps would have bought in.

Spoiler: The Daleks are back.

Spoiler: The Twelfth Doctor is not especially warm and fuzzy.

Spoiler: There’s a lot of pew-pew-pew and boom-boom-boom.

Spoiler: For the second week in a row, it’s not the A-plot that has me so excited about Series 8.

Peter Capaldi delivers. Of that, there was no doubt. What else does “Deep Breath” have going for it, and does it measure up to Steven Moffat’s first crack at introducing a Doctor?

So the tabloids think that season is Clara’s swan song. I’m not ready to see her go, but…

Guess what haters – Clara is the best companion, second maybe only to Donna.

— Kyle Anderson (@FunctionalNerd) August 16, 2014

…really, Kyle Anderson of Nerdist.com? Let’s not go quite that far. Yet.

The Two-minute Time Lord Podcast will have no truck with the “so bad it’s good” notion. Instead, we celebrate the notion of “cleverdumb” storytelling: meticulous in certain aspects, and gleefully and purposefully washing its hands of others. Exhibit A: the US series Leverage. Exhibits that follow: certain episodes of our favorite family sci-fi drama–but why are there so few “cleverdumb” Doctor Whos?

(One guess who inspired the title for this podcast.)

A clickbait headline hurtles toward Ye Olde Compare-and-Contrast between the promised grim-‘n’-gritty Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and the widely inferred darkness of the Twelfth Doctor.

Two thousand years! That’s how old The Doctor is now, as stated by the Twelfth in the latest trailer and as implied in his predecessor’s swan song, “The Time of the Doctor.” That’s a pretty huge leap from roughly 900 years old at the start of Steven Moffat’s showrunnership. Is it a fair leap when you consider the assumed ages of his predecessors? Or is “fairness” even a fair issue?

On the power of the (leaked) written word (and the importance of Wheaton’s Law)…

With apologies, the War Doctor just doesn’t seem “real” enough to warrant a space on my shelf among the ordinally-numbered Doctor action figures in my collection. As magnificent as John Hurt was, why am I reluctant to include him in the tribe?

Herewith, three reasons why old-school fandom is buzzing with such excitement for Peter Capaldi, when the historic pattern has been more guarded.