Just wondering if the flirting and innuendo will be toned down now we have a more mature doctor. 10 and 11 were both "pretty" and had complicated love lives. Broken hearts across time and space.Elizabeth 1 and Marilyn Monroe to name a few conquests. Addiction to wedding cake even a in joke in DOTD. 11 even snogged a married lesbian last series!.Be honest is Clara really going to fancy 12 as much as she did 11 ?. I wouldn't mind Clara finding someone to love nearer her own age and hopefully fully human. However 12 should get on with his job of exploring and protecting the universe.Less hormones more brain power please.

I don't think he necessarily should be less flirty, or have conquest's, but I would guess that with the writers writing for an older actor, this will naturally be less of a part of it. I think they could still show river though, as they both seem to have done the early 'young love' part of their relationship when he was Tennant and Smith, so now they could be portrayed more as a comfortable, old married couple, which would be fitting for someone capaldi's age.

I think both Smith and Tennant did a good job of retaining a mixture of dashing hero and cerebral intergalactic smartie pants. Capaldi will be the same.

I've always voted for the absolute removal of romantic plot lines regarding the Doctor. I loved how in Classic Who the Doctor was entirely asexual, and there was never a need to pair him up with anyone. I really hope Capaldi goes back to that.

This is where we need the Doctor to return to. River needs to remain dead and in the memory banks of the library. If Clara wants a boyfriend then she needs to make a decision if she still wants to travel with the Doctor, no more of the Rose/Mickey situations or even of the Amy and Rory married couples. Lets go back to the guy and gal companion that can travel together without having a sexual encounter every 10 minutes.

God no, talk about sterile

I like the Doctor being celibate. "Tried it once and didn't like it" should be the Doctor's motto.

Steven Moffat's writing is always full of flirtiness so it's not gonna happen, alas. I predict more heavyhanded sauciness for the new Doctor, just as for the last one. (yawn)

Yes it should be toned down a bit. Moffatts not very good at writing very believable and convincing relationships. His soap elements just made me cringe and still do when I watch repeats. Maybe he should try Clara with a boyfriend but my concern would be that it would be as equally cringeworthy.

I'd go further than that: I think SM's writing is peopled with characters who don't seem real. They just seem like "characters". Nobody has an ordinary conversation; everyone chucks whip-smart, hilarious one-liners and then raises a wry eyebrow. Three years of it (four years maybe?) has become a bit wearing. River Song, Tasha Lem and others, with their flirty, sexy relationship with the Doctor are an extension of this, and I find it very boring.

Flirting and innuendo have nothing to do with celibacy.

And what does it matter, as long as we don't have anything on the screen that takes it into adult territory?

It seems there is a tradition of getting each Doctor to kiss each companion, so that kind of has to stay now.

It's a shame that people seem to think Moffatt can't write believable relationships and can only use one-liners for conversation... There are far more characters he has written than those people use as examples, but they are mostly ignored, as they don't hold up the argument. Yes, some characters Moff has over-written, but there are many more he hasn't. Not every single female character Moff writes has a flirty relationship with ihm, but those who do stick in the mind. It's confirmation bias.

One more thing, the show is not for us, it's for the next generations of Who fans. we should not (and I'm glad we don't) dictate what should and shouldn't happen in it. If many people here had their way, it would return to the classic Who format, and would disappear of the telly quick as a flash. Audiences nowadays just would not watch it - it would be dry and unpalatable to the general audience - and whether you like it or not, that is who the show is aimed at.

Why go back, in a show that's all about moving forward?

This may come as a surprise to the constantly at-it and/or the whipper-snappers, but even a celibate and/or older person can have a bit of a flirt, and I hope Capaldi's Doctor does just that from time to time.

Hardly, he had a Granddaughter... That implies sex at some point. 1 even got engaged, albeit accidentally.

He should be what Hartnell, Troughton, Pertwee, T Baker, Davison, C Baker, McCoy, McGann, Hurt (or not ), Eccleston, Tennant and Smith were. Whatever the lead writer/showrunner/executive producer wants him to be. The choice won't please everyone but what's new...

Was he? The First Doctor had a granddaughter, which suggests he whipped more than his sonic out of his pants on at least one occasion. And anyone who thinks the Third Doctor didn't have romantic - if not sexual - feelings towards Jo has obviously never seen The Green Death.

I don't think it was his grand-daughter by blood though was it? I seem to recall she was from another family but he just called her that as a cover for being on earth. Correct me if I'm wrong. I've just watched The Aztecs with William Hartnell and he got engaged to someone to get information out of her but she was in love with him! And he was rather flirty then.
I do feel sorry for Peter Capaldi as he is a completely gorgeously sexy man and there appears to be a lot of talk about him having a love interest, purely I think because he is so old and decrepit. Men do have sex at 55 you know.

I think celibate might be a step too far, but I would like to see the flirty nature of the recent Doctors scaled back a bit.

Alway's feel like I don't connect with the moffat era companion's in the same way as rose/martha/donna, and I think you've put into word's perfectly the reason's why. I should say though, I think river work's okay because people who only pop in and out occasionally are okay to be a bit smug and flirty like that, just as jack was, but a more permanent companion need's to be more complex

RTD's characters were at least as bad as Moffat's for talking in speeches. The tone is slightly different; with Moffat the characters tend to speak pithily, as noted above; with RTD they tended to use unnaturalistic, dramatic speech: "that's the kind of man I am" etc.

As for 'complex' companions: I've never seen one in Doctor Who and never expect to.



You may have read that in a novel somewhere, or in an audio story or just made it up in your own head :P Nothing like that has ever been suggested in the show, which is the only canonical source in Doctor Who. As far as the show has ever intimated she is is his natural granddaughter.

No that's not true. She absolutely was his biological granddaughter. I think there was some nonsense in a novel saying she wasn't but that doesn't count

Moffat never does write the most naturalistic dialogue but then nor did RTD (lets not even start on Classic Who).
The difference is in tone. Whereas often Moffats characters almost wink at the audience in a knowing 'This is ridiculous but isn't it fabulous' sort of way and engage in pithy repartee RTD tended to make it alot more earnest. That may have given it the appearance of being more 'real' but actually written down it is just as bombastic. I could fill a page with Tennant lines that were written more like speeches or lines from a trailer than anything someone would really say in a conversation, Timelord or otherwise. But then I don't watch Doctor Who for realism. I watch it for the fantastic. Yes its nice to have a grounding in reality and both eras have that. But equally they are often silly and grand and many other things.

So yes alot of the time Amy was Miss Sassy Pants but then other times her and the Doctor would just talk (The God Complex, The Power of 3)
Same as Donna and Ten who would occasionally break from their bizarre Morecambe and Wise double act to actually have a conversation with a ring of truth about it.

It is one of my main problems with River though. As she appeared more and more she seemed to speak entirely in dialogue waiting to be made into a t shirt slogan and worn to a convention. Far too arch and self aware. Whereas Jack for instance managed to be witty and quotable as well as feeling like a more rounded character. It wasn't just quip after quip after quip relentlessly.
Its why I have never been that keen to see River and Jack meet. They would just cancel each other out and it would become sitcom-esque.
Its part of the Kevin Williamson and Joss Whedon legacy of overly verbose, painfully self aware and post modern characters.

I tend to agree, and we can't please all the people, all the time, and so on.

But for the RTD devotees to deny his 'soap' leanings is to ignore the evidence; he spent two years developing a day-time soap for Granada, some time exec'ing on Corrie, and broke through with the sexually explicit Queer as Soap (sorry, Folk).

The imprint of that genre is all over the 10 era; refined, yes, but still there.

Very true. Even RTD himself would admit to this. But it seems to be a contentious issue and one that tends to attract the rage of some of the more rabid RTD devotees. I suppose they see it as a slur when its anything but. Then it becomes an argument about how Moffat is soap opera too because he features relationships and personal drama (Shes her mother!) etc. But that isn't soap opera. Its drama in general. RTDs era used recognisable tropes of British soap opera that extend beyond the actual plot to the characters and the setting etc. It purposefully set the mundane in contrast to the fantastic. Whereas Moffat has always favoured things that are a little bit more 'out there'.

If Moffats Who has soap opera elements then its in the same way as one could argue that Twin Peaks was a soap opera. RTDs is much more Eastenders. No worse for it. But true all the same. Indeed its a frequent criticism of Moffats era that it doesn't have this 'everyday' grounding.

12 should absolutely not be celibate. He needs offspring who, one day, will be suitable kidney donors.

I totally disagree. I actually rewatched the story this week and it's very much played as a paternal fondness on the Doctor's behalf. His melancholy was one of a loss of companionship but tempered with a "child leaving the nest" vibe. It was really well done.

Jo on the other hand very much idolised the Doctor and fell for Cliff because he displayed many of the qualities that the Doctor had. The interviews with the cast and crew suggest that Cliff is a proxy for the Doctor. The Doctor being unattainable to Jo so she fell for the next best thing.

It might seem a bit distasteful for him to be so flirtatious, because people are just going to see it as lechiness. Capaldi looks his age, if not a little older. There's no reason to say that he couldn't give off Byronic vibes so the viewer gets a little crush but then they don't seem to be going for something Byronically sexy.

The irony is that in real life people tend to speak in cliches, because of the influence of TV and cinema. We tend not to be endlessly witty.