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Shake it up, Mr. Lyon. Shake it up
I wasn't expecting him, but I am perfectly fine with Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor. He's not a chameleon, except insofar as he's shockingly young in Local Hero (1983) if you noticed him first in Torchwood (2009), but he's an actor I watch out for. The Angel Islington, John Frobisher, Danny Oldsen, Angus Flint, Malcolm Tucker, Randall Brown; I'll be very curious to see what he does with this role. Especially if it means I get to see him and John Hurt in scenes together.
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I think one of the things I like best about Capaldi as an actor is that I don't like his characters all for the same reason. His Islington in the 1996 Neverwhere is in no way the angel of the book, but he has very nearly the face of a Renaissance statue, all graceful classical bones and darkly curling hair, and even the series' famously awful production values cannot put out the chill of the audience's realization that he is mad and fallen, his beauty curdling as suddenly as a Breughel painting as the white light of the door slices over his sharp-winged brows, his eyes like glass inlay, the dog-points of his teeth—it is not a naturalistic or a human performance and that is what I like about it, because anything else would have come off wrong. At the other end of the spectrum, Frobisher in Torchwood: Children of Earth is an arresting portrait of a character in moral crisis who didn't think that was part of his job description. Local Hero's Danny is an adorable gawk with a knack for physical comedy; Malcolm Tucker is a high-wire act of verbal fireworks and seething rage at a level usually reserved for psychopaths in action movies. And I would have enjoyed him as the clipped, enigmatic second-season Head of News for The Hour no matter what, but he did something in the last episode that blew me away. It was purely physical: Randall Brown in the grip of unmanageable shock and grief organizes his desk in the familiar, repetitive patterns that this time do nothing to calm him, throwing down papers and books and binders faster and faster until he collapses gasping over the chaos, and when the woman who has been in the room with him all the while moves to put her arms around him, he flails her off full-body, an instinctive, choking startle; she starts to stroke his hair and he reaches in one jerky motion to grip her hand tightly, holding it hard against his skull—he can't be caressed, he can barely be touched, but he needs to be held. They stay that way, both of them grieving. If Capaldi himself is not touch-defensive when stressed, then he knows people who are. I'd never seen that in a screen performance. It rang very poignant and very true. So I don't know what I'm going to like his Doctor for, but I know there'll be something. I just hope Moffat can write a better season of scripts. Watching this last round of the Eleventh Doctor with