I understand that I risk calling down the wrath of Doctor Who fans around the globe.  But you need to understand that I am one of them.  In fact, my Who fandom was born before many of you.

So with that disclaimer out of the way, allow me to say that when I found out about the Capaldi selection, my reaction was essentially, "Ho-hum.  Another one."

To see where I am coming from, let's consider the first seven Doctors.  I'm leaving McGann out of the mix because I have a difficult time considering him to be canonical, in much the same manner as the Peter Cushing movies.

1. A half-senile old man
2. A flute-playing buffoon
3. An elegant dandy
4. A frizzy-headed eccentric
5. A suave professor
6. A Technicolor brat
7. An aspiring ghost

Back in the day, a regeneration was like Christmas.  You had absolutely no idea what was going to come out of the package once the wrappings came off.  You still haven't known exactly, but there were no shocking surprises since 2005, no trauma.    The Baker-Davison regeneration was hard on the Doctor; he almost died.  All that stuff about the Zero Room and all.  Well, it was almost as hard on the fans.  Pertwee-Baker might even have been worse.

I saw a tweet the other day that switching from Matt Smith would be hard.  Oh.  Wow.  I've liked all the "new" Whos — immensely — but there has hardly been any trauma for us in the regenerations.  I sort of keep the new three in mind like this:

1. A cool guy in a black leather jacket
2. A cool guy in a brown pinstripe jacket
3. A cool guy in a brown other-stripe jacket and a bowtie

Matt Smith brought a dose of that classic weirdness that characterizes the Doctor Who of yore, and that is quite refreshing for us old-timers.  But in the big scheme of things, when contrasted with the first seven, there hasn't been a whole lot of difference between them and they all are rather ... normal.  I can keep Eccleston straight in my mind, but Tennant and Smith sort of blur into one, and I often have to rely on the sidekick to figure out which Doctor it was.  Nobody, not even with a whole fifth of Russian vodka and a handful of sleeping pills, could ever forget the difference between Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy.  Not in a 100 billion years.

In the interest of academic honesty, I have to admit that we haven't seen Capaldi's Doctor yet.  It might be that he surprises us and turns out to be a scarecrow, or a vampire, or a dusty academician, a regeneration to burn out a few mind fuses like the old ones did.  But as I didn't know who Peter Capaldi is and therefore had to look him up, he impressed me as another Eccleston-Tennant-Smith sort of guy.  Maybe a bit older, but essentially the same.

There are three things that I miss from the old Doctor Who.  One of them is actually the campy special effects.  It was a tradition, but obviously not an inviolable one.  Another is the longer story lines, some having reached six half-hour episodes. The last, of course, is the gauntlet of dramatic regenerations that always cranked out someone drastically different from his predecessor.

We haven't seen that, really, since Sylvester McCoy (leaving out McGann again, and McCoy-McGann was rather tame anyway).  I am hoping against hope that Capaldi can bring back at least that fond memory.

There has been speculation about a woman Doctor.  Now that would be doing it old-school!