The publicists at the BBC weren’t thrilled, one imagines, when their Doctor Who leading man spoke candidly about why he loved the program so much. “People always ask me, ‘What is it about the show that appeals so broadly?’” Peter Capaldi said in 2018. “The answer that I would like to give—and which I am discouraged from giving because it is not useful in the promotion of a brand—is that it’s about death.”
He’s right (and as a fan since the age of five, he’d know). Underneath the whimsy of Doctor Who’s premise—an idiosyncratic alien travels time and space in an iconic blue police phone box—is a story of loss, exile, sehnsucht … of what it means to be mortal and immortal. Mind, it’s also about killer robots. One of its catchphrases is “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow,” and another the order a staid brigadier gives his men when confronted with a demonic being: “Chap with the wings, there. Five rounds, rapid!” The eponymous Doctor summarizes his life and the show’s tone well when he insists that he’s serious “about what I do … not necessarily the way I do it.”
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