Daleks! Maisie Williams’ mysterious character! A cat-person who breathes fire! It’s the new trailer for Doctor Who season 9, and it’s jam-packed with Clara and the Doctor’s latest adventures across time and space, plus the Master lurking at the fringes chirping “Hellooo!”
This trailer is a bit more action-packed than the last one, continuing the tagline of Born to save the universe. But while we saw the Doctor and Clara gleefully reuniting in the first video, they also have a cute hug in this one—maybe, as the cast mentioned at SDCC, she really is helping him interact better with humans. Along the way, there look to be plenty of chases, enigmatic artifacts, cyborg Vikings, and explosions.
Doctor Who returns September 19!
I have to say, I’m really not liking these notions of exceptionalism that have been plaguing Doctor Who in these last few years. The show now underlines its heroes’ privilege every chance it gets by constantly using precisely this sort of rhetoric: the idea that being “special” is somehow intrinsic to the special few and not the result of an individual’s choices or actions… I’m sorry, but this historically speaking, these kind of thinking usually led up to pretty vile things. The notion that someone is “born to save the universe” is precisely what the earlier Doctor Who was constantly and consistently subverting. Everybody could be extraordinary under the right circumstances because they were human and we are capable of extraordinary things. The awesome thing about Rose Tyler, Donna Noble et cetera was precisely how everyday they were. This made their heroism all the more heroic.
(I am assuming, of course, that this tagline is indeed referring to The Doctor’s companions. If it is about the Doctor himself, then he can doubly bugger off and leave us mere mortals be. I like a little psychotic misanthropy every now and then – hell, Eccelston is my favorite Doctor – but this *sincerely* smug megalomania that’s showing up constantly now makes me bristle.)
This trailer excites me.* Lots of interesting aliens that flashed to briefly for me to get a clear view of them.
The still of the cat-person looks lot like Vincent from the original Beauly and the Beast tv series.
* I am prepared to be disappointed. Last season’s arc Story was underwhelming/didn’t quite hold together.
Is it ok to say that Maisie Williams is an incredibly attractive woman?