Dr. Who in Love?

Matt Smith as Dr. WhoAn article in the Congleton Guardian offers a preview of what to expect from the new DR. WHO. Actor Matt Smith, who recently replaced the departing David Tennant as the long-lived Time Lord, says his episodes will feature “madness, tenderness and recklessness with adventure and risk.”
The 26th-year-old Smith is the youngest actor yet cast as the  Doctor, who periodically “regenerates” into a new appearance (which helps smooth over the recasting that has kept the show going for decades).
The biggest surprise in the article comes from head writer Steven Moffat, who suggests the possibility of a romance between the Doctor and new companion Amy Pond (Karen Gillan). This strikes a somewhat sour note. DR. WHO began as a children’s show, and even after it attracted a wider, older audience, it kept to the tradition of an intellectual, advanced alien unencumbered by traditional human emotions. After a long hiatus, the recent revival of the series, starting in 2004 with Christopher Eccleston, poked fun at this tradition but kept it basically intact (company Rose Tyler’s friends and family kept assuming the Doctor was her new boyfriend, despite emphatic denials).
So, wil the new DR. WHO overthrow that tradition? Says Moffat:

“You take two attractive people and they will probably be a bit romantic about each other.”It is a complex story between Amy and the doctor, it is not simple. It is not a story you have ever seen between the companion and the Doctor before.”

Well, if that’s the direction they go, I hope they can make it work. The one previous move in this direction, with Paul McGann delivering a kiss to his leading lady in the disappointing 1996 American tele-film, was an awkward sop thrown in, no doubt, to appease the Fox television network. It does not bode well.

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