‘Doctor Who’ Season 8 Trailer Throws Peter Capaldi Into the Darkness

Beloved BBC series Doctor Who returns for season 8 on August 23, backed by an exciting new trailer that debuted during Sunday's World Cup final. It finds Peter Capaldi portraying the 12th Doctor along with his sidekick Clara Oswald, played by Jenna Coleman, as aliens and dinosaurs stand in their way... we guess? This writer has never seen the show, and if you've never seen Doctor Who, the whole culture and legacy surrounding it can be intimidating.

"I don’t think I know who the Doctor is any more,” Oswald says in the trailer about the 2,000-year-old protagonist, and neither does your humble ANTENNA correspondent, because this shit is complicated. Hasn't Doctor Who been on since like the '50s? So how is it just season 8? And there's so much backstory so how does one ever dive into this, there aren't enough hours in the day and plus there's still House of Cards to catch up on, and this whole plan to re-watch The X-Files as an adult because it'll probably even more compelling now, but there's a major backlog because the DVR screwed up and now all of Parks and Rec got deleted so that's priority one, plus we never finished Twin Peaks after they revealed Bob's identity, so when are we gonna do that, fuck it, it's time to just play Candy Crush and give up.