Boofer wrote:Do you think the superhero narrative has had a pernicious effect on the character of the Doctor at all?
To me, the Doctor's character has changed in irrevocable ways, nudged towards more traditional heroic values and a far cry from the reflective, compassionate anti-hero he/she used to be.
Look at the way he points the sonic screwdriver like a weapon and the way RTD would give him hyperbolic labels like the oncoming storm but they are superficial similarities. The modern TV emulates cinema and we have the fast paced action that lacks suspense.
The Doctor started to move away from the anti-hero with Troughton but he was still the underdog and it was Cartmel that made him more god-like. In his book, Script Doctor, I am pretty sure he mentions being a big comic book fan.
I was watching Robocop the other day and it feels like a SF superhero film. A single protagonist with extraordinary abilities in a good vs. evil duel and no shades of grey.
Again Hartnell was an explorer, at least to begin with, and with Troughton and the introduction of more regular monsters it becomes more superhero-ish. This last series, though, has had a lot of antagonists that weren't as evil as they seemed.
Heather the puddle, the mistaken robots in Smile, Missy was turning good and in the finale he said "People get the Cybermen wrong. There's no evil plan, no evil genius. Just parallel evolution." Capaldi's whole tenure started with whether he was a 'good man'.
Evil has been shown to be more of a choice in the Capaldi era rather than 'Might makes right' that Letts spoke of when he compared Doctor Who to Bond and Superheros.