He's said in interviews that he adopted mannerisms for the character to make him seem older — wringing his hands, stooping his shoulders, etc. He worked them in increasingly as the Doctor the character aged (as he did by more than 1,000 years during Smith's tenure).

It also had a subplot about the dangers of creeping authoritarianism.

Aww, Evil Lincoln, don't hate to say something like that!

And "Tomorrow" is when this cricket match will finish, if we're very lucky.

"Midnight" and "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead" are good introductory options too.

My Commander Shepard was a tough-as-nails black woman who never met a problem she couldn't blast her way out of and had a remarkable knack for keeping herself and her crew alive, aside from that one unfortunate incident at Alchera. So that's my canon.

David Bradley in the special will be fun, considering the last time he was on the show, the Doctor straight up revenge-murdered him.

The comparisons I'm reading to James Bond and Sherlock Holmes are giving me a hearty chuckle. One, the Doctor is a time-traveling space wizard from another planet who changes into a different person every so often, and 007 and Sherlock are posh English chaps in a world closely resembling our own. Two, who the hell…

Poor white men, so fucking oppressed.

Hey, me too!

My usual approach for this is to curate a short list of Davies-era episodes and then say "or just watch 'The Eleventh Hour' and go from there".

Everyone doing what they want to do in life without need sounds like an amazing future. Want to own a restaurant in New Orleans? Knock yourself out. Want to be a Starfleet officer? You do you. Want to stoop over a desk writing experimental semi-fiction and waiting for your unstuck-in-time dad to materialize from…

Those people make me want to Tommen straight out a window. Idiots.

IMO, the quality of the writers is going to be key. I don't think Chibnall is a great writer, but that doesn't mean he will be a bad showrunner. Reserving judgment for now.

Sure fuckin' is

I'm sympathetic to that argument, but the character changes hands every two to five years, and I'm sure we'll get around to having Doctors of different genders and ethnicities in the not-too-distant future.

I used to be a regular Star Trek Online player and I never ceased to be flabbergasted at the political back-and-forth in social zones and how many players were somehow able to reconcile being Trek fans with their rabidly conservative and even fascist/Putinist views.

“We all change, when you think about it. We’re all different people all through our lives. And that’s OK, that’s good, you gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be.”

I dunno — I think she's pretty cute.

This is pretty goddamn cool, in my opinion. (Personally, I think the Moffat era has been brilliant and Capaldi has been an amazing Doctor, but there's gonna be a whole lot of people excited now for Doctor Who in a way they haven't been for a while or have never been at all.)