Peter Capaldi, who played the Twelfth Doctor from 2013 to 2017, sat down with The Times of London this week and offered fans of the show some unsolicited perspective.
Asked about the backlash to the castings of Jodie Whittaker and Ncuti Gatwa, Capaldi said: “It reflects its times and it’s a good thing in the world, though it’s become a bit too big, too important for the BBC or whoever. When I was a kid and watched it, it was just a monster show in the corner of the room. I don’t know why people take it so seriously.”
The fans Capaldi is talking down to watched the show hit its lowest ratings in 60 years under the same era his comments defend. Disney pulled its partnership after two seasons. The budget for upcoming episodes has been cut nearly in half compared to what the Disney co-production funded. Ncuti Gatwa exited the role barely two seasons in. The show that Capaldi says people take too seriously is now in survival mode, with the BBC uncertain about its future and the showrunner who drove it to this point having already publicly stated he doesn’t know what’s happening next.
Capaldi is not the only voice from the Doctor Who extended family waving fans away. Russell T. Davies, who ran the show during its revival and then returned for the Gatwa era, told Series Mania this year that critics on X are not real fans. “That online voice, which is hostile, exists on X, which is a hate site,” Davies said. “We shouldn’t be surprised to find hatred on it, because it’s a hate site. It’s very dangerously assumed that that is the fan voice.”
Davies also said he understood that longtime fans “don’t have to like the show,” but hoped they could “have a great time disagreeing” in a respectful way. He added: “Fandom is creative and brilliant and fun, but it’s all getting soured.”
The framing is familiar. Davies and the production called critics toxic. Now Capaldi says they’re taking it too seriously. The message from the show’s defenders, delivered consistently across three years of declining ratings, has been that the audience’s problem is the audience.
What Davies actually delivered was a show that lectured its protagonist on being a “male presenting Time Lord,” built a season 2 storyline around a villain described as running a “planet of the incels,” and inserted a transgender character the production expected viewers to accept without friction. When the audience pushed back, the response was not to examine the storytelling. Davies called X a hate site. Millie Gibson and Davies dismissed critics as “online warriors” complaining about diversity. The BBC CEO Tom Fussell declared the corporation “shares a lot of the same values” as Disney. Gatwa, asked about his departure, said he left because “I’m getting old and my body was tired.”
Fandom Pulse has covered this pattern since Davies returned to the show. These are not the words of a creative team that made an honest miscalculation and wants to correct course. They are the words of people who set out to make Doctor Who a political vehicle, watched audiences leave at historical rates, and responded by blaming the people who left.
Capaldi’s line that it “was just a monster show in the corner of the room” is doing a lot of work here. It was not just a monster show. Doctor Who at its best was thoughtful science fiction that took ideas seriously, put its characters in genuine moral jeopardy, and asked questions about time, consequence, and what it means to be human. The audience that takes it seriously does so because the show earned that seriousness across decades of genuine storytelling. Telling that audience to relax, delivered by a former lead defending the era that destroyed its ratings, is not a reassurance. It is a dismissal.
Davies has now moved on. His next project for Channel 4 is a show called Tip Toe, about which he said at Series Mania: “People will hate it. My word this show is going to get called woke on a colossal scale, but I’m happy to be called woke.” He described it as a show where “every good deed goes punished” and that it was political because “simply being gay in 2026 is political.” That is the man Peter Capaldi is defending by telling fans they take things too seriously.
Does Capaldi’s “it was just a monster show” argument hold any water, or does it expose exactly why the show’s defenders never understood what they were dealing with?
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