Allons-y! Geronimo! Fantastic! For each Doctor on “Doctor Who,” there’s been a signature catchphrase to accompany him. That is, until now: prepare for both of your hearts to break, because Peter Capaldi’s new Doctor won’t have a pithy saying at his disposal.
“Who needs a catchphrase? What’s so great about a catchphrase?” Capaldi said when we confronted the star about the surprising development at the blue carpet premiere in New York.
Well, Tumblr, for one. Won’t you think of the GIFs?
And as a second, more pressing point, it’s a tradition that started back with the rebooting of “Doctor Who” in 2005, but stretches even farther (though more sporadically) through the show’s 50 year history.
Though as it turns out, Executive Producer Steven Moffat only continued that tradition with the last Doctor by mistake.
“This is a ridiculous thing for me to say in particular, but I don’t like catchphrases very much,” Moffat said. “They always happen by accident! I never put one in for Matt [Smith]. Matt just liked the word Geronimo, so [he] started shoving it into different scripts where I hadn’t put it. And ‘bowties are cool’ was just my nervousness of him wearing a bowtie.”
Though we won’t see Capaldi’s new iteration saying something like, “Here we go,” or even his “Thick Of It” catchphrase of “F–kity bye!” there is at least one recurring bit we can look forward to.
“What I like, which we should do more is the ‘oh, oh!’ ” Jenna Coleman, who co-stars as the Doctor’s companion Clara noted.
“We have a little routine we do when we’re terrified,” Capaldi clarified. “Our catchphrase is ‘oh!’ That’s not much of a catchphrase.”
Despite all that, though, the veteran actor isn’t sweating it too much.
“I don’t mind not having a catchphrase!” Capaldi said. “I have a TARDIS. A Companion. And a crusade. So I’ve got an embarrassment of riches.”
“Doctor Who” returns to BBC America on Saturday August 23 at 8pm ET.
Alex Zalben
Writer/Editor at MTV News. You can follow him on Twitter, but not in real life because that would be weird.
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