Doctor Who: 10 Characteristics Peter Capaldi’s Doctor Should Have

3. Colder

The Doctor has from day one straddled the line between alien and human. As he is constantly reminded, he looks like us and sounds like us€”or we look and sound like Timelords€”and that humanness seeks balance with his alien side. As the Doctor's time on Earth steadily increases he has arguably become more and human and with that humanness, more and more attached. After two of the most human-centered, companion-loving Doctors between the Ninth and Twelve Doctor I think it is time we see a more detached, cold, and calculating version of the Doctor when Capaldi takes on the role. A more callous Doctor seems a reasonable reaction to regenerating from the Eleventh Doctor. He has tried playful and disarming cleverness in this regeneration with disastrous and heartbreaking consequences not only personally, but to the multiverse. If this battle with the clearly ruthless Great Intelligence is to continue (debatable given the Clara solution, but since when is anything done for good on Doctor Who?), it is likely the Doctor will need to appear a little more steeled and detached, especially if he hopes to prevent more blackmail of the sort that we saw at Trenzalore. Moreover, I think Capaldi's version of the Doctor has good role models in several past Doctors if he chooses this direction. The Doctor started out a distant, hard-lined, very alien creature in all senses of the word. He was, in short, a curmudgeon, an element which echoed throughout his next few successors. This gradually diminished as within each Doctor and in the Doctor overall as he grew steadily more fond of humanity. This process was famously reset by the explosive performance of Eccleston's Doctor post The Last Great Time War. It is treading on familiar ground both for Capaldi and for the Doctor, sure. At this point it would be nigh impossible to find something totally new for either man. And I am certainly not suggesting anyone wants to see Capaldi as the 'grumpy old man' bounding about the universe, but there is something magical about when he is beyond caring.