I found that Season 8 actually works really, really well.
As a single episode.
I honestly think it’s probably one of the most “arc-y” Who series, in that the entire series had character development and change in both Clara and the Doctor. A lot of the early series didn’t really “work” with the Doctor being a dick, but if you binge rewatch the season, it’s actually much less grating than it was week to week.
The Doctor doesn’t really know who he is, or what he’s like. He’s stuck in this state of trying to kind of make the same sort of quips he did as 11, but they come off as assholish instead of endearing. He comes more into his own, and finds his own way by the time we get to Mummy, and he’s actually really fun and has great chemistry with Clara by the finale and especially the Christmas special.
It was really awkward, and I didn’t like Capaldi a lot as the first half of the series was airing, but on a rewatch, it works a lot better taken as a whole than it did as a weekly serialized monster of the week show.
(It doesn’t help that it seems like Capaldi wanted to play neo-Pertwee and the writers kind of wanted him to be Space Malcolm Tucker)
He was also quite a jarring transition from the My First Fantasy Space Boyfriend writing that the show had sunken into with Matt Smith, as well, especially for those who weren’t used to the idea that the Doctor wasn’t always about billing and cooing at new-found female fans; in the older shows, he was quite prepared to be aloof, arrogant and downright condescending. Given that Capaldi plays the first of the Doctor’s new round of regenerations, I think he’s very much a callback to William Hartnell, who was a rude, arrogant old man who refused to suffer fools at all.
Not only was she funny, she was EVIL. That was my beef with RTD’s/John Simm’s take on The Master. Crazy is boring. Evil is interesting. My favorite line in Nu Who was Derek Jacobi as The Master, “Oh good. Now I can say it was self-defense.”
Nobody makes a moue quite like Michelle Gomez. And yeah, her brand of gleeful evil was much closer to Classic Master {who, in his first incarnation not only shrank people until their corpses were dessicated dolls, but then left them in their own lunchboxes for someone to find} than John Simms Hi I’m Off My Meds Master.
Roger Delgato and Anthony Ainley had The Evil Laugh[sup]*[/sup] down pat. Perhaps if John Simm had done more sinister chuckling and less running around screaming, I might have liked him better.
The best Evil Laugh has to be Max Von Sydow as Ming the Merciless.
It has nothing to do with Game of Thrones, or Maisie Williams specifically. Susan Foreman was in the very first episodes of Doctor Who as the Doctor’s Granddaughter. Subsequently, as more canon was established, her existence started to go against what was being painted, and for some people she was effectively retconned away.
Since the revival, both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat have tried to reconcile some of the contradictions and untapped suggestions of the original series, so Moffat revisiting Susan and explaining her absence, and presence, is exactly the kind of thing he’d want to get his hands dirty with.
I’m going to make the same guess I make every time we’re introduced to a new female character with an uncertain connection to the Doctor’s past: Romana.