I have been rewatching the 10th Doctor in an attempt to branch out of my Good Omens hyperfixation, and man. I forgot how important he was to me. If this were Inside Out, I would have 10th Doctor Island in my head. He is simultaneously the person I want to be and the flaws I have inside that I want to hug.
In his first episode, we are introduced to him so perfectly. He is swaggering, and scattered, and ruthless, and joyous. And it zooms off from there. I will take the bits about him that I love one at a time.
The Doctor's Light
The first thing you notice about the Doctor is his joy and curiosity. He is a traveler because he loves experiencing new things and new places and new people. He delights in tiny pleasures, like nibbles and cakes with tiny ball bearings and little shops. He nerds out over meeting Shakespeare and Queen Victoria and Agatha Christie. He thinks the theater is magic and he reads Harry Potter. He even appreciates his enemies. "Oh you are BEAUTIFUL!" He says to the clockwork robots in The Girl in the Fireplace. "No really, you are, you're gorgeous! Look at that! Space age clock work! I love it! I've got chills!"
Even though he always ends up in a scrape, he tells Jackie in The Christmas Invasion that "trouble is just the bits in between." It didn't really hit me until Turn Left, where Donna and the Doctor are just wandering through a market place and trying new foods. That is the purpose of the trip. To enjoy life. That is what he is trying to do. To learn. To experience. And the more impossible and strange a thing is, the more excited he gets: "And that's two impossible things we've seen so far tonight. Don't you love it when that happens?" He revels in unpredictability, in the unknown.
This joy and curiosity is something to cherish. So often we get jaded with our lives. If we approach it like the 10th Doctor, every day, every moment is an adventure. New people to meet, new foods to try, new experiences to have. The unknown is not something to fear, but something to enthusiastically embrace.
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The second thing you notice is how his mind works. It careens and jumps and skips from one thing to the next, making connections, getting distracted, taking in everything. I noticed it even more after I was diagnosed with ADHD. I have always felt that there was something about the 10th Doctor that was like me, that his mind worked like mine. And now I can put it into words.
You notice it most in the way he talks: "All repaired. Lovely! Shush. No one knows we're here. Got to keep quiet. Silent running, like on submarines when you can't even drop a spanner. Don't drop a spanner! I like blue. What do you think?" He laments that other people can't keep up with him: "You look at the world and you connect things, random things, and think, why can't anyone else see it? The rest of the world is so slow."
He gets easily distracted, like when he goes of on a tangent during a murder investigation about meeting Charlemagne in Belgium or making the "Are you my mummy?" joke while the world is ending.
He is impulsive and chases stimulation, another symptom of ADHD. He doesn't land on Sundays because "Sundays are boring." He doesn't want to be a regular human, stuck on earth taking the slow way, with a job and a house. "How rubbish is that?" He needs to jump from one thing to the next thing to the next. He is time blind and has poor money management. Just watch him try to get and pay for a taxi in The Runaway Bride. He presses big threatening buttons. And he eats someone else's jam out of the jar with his fingers, because he wasn't thinking. And Rose has to stop him.
DOCTOR: This investigation of yours, what's it about?
NEXT DOCTOR: It started with a murder.
DOCTOR: Oh, good! I mean.. bad, but whose? (Next Doctor)
DOCTOR: The city outside, that was yours?
CHANTHO: Chan the conglomeration died tho.
DOCTOR: Conglomeration! That's what I said!
JACK: You're supposed to say sorry.
DOCTOR: Oh, yes.... Sorry. (Utopia)
His companions bring him back. They ground him. They remind him of what to focus on. We will talk more about this later.
ADHD is often considered a detriment, but he turns it into a superpower. Sure, there are downsides, but he uses the speed and capriciousness of his mind to make connections that no one else would and to come up with solutions that other people do not see.
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Which leads me to his next quality: chaos and improv. The Doctor is not a planner. I honestly believe that his genius comes from a combination of ADHD, being a traveler, and being 900 years old. He lands in random situations, often not where he intended to be, and he has to pivot. "Nah, nothing here. WELL. Nothing dangerous. WELL. Nothing THAT dangerous..... Know what, I'll just have a quick scan... in case there's anything dangerous."
He get himself to the next step, confidant that once he gets there, he will think of something else. Despite the confidence that he exudes and the faith people place in him, he rarely knows what he is doing. He will enact a plan, and then quietly beg "Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease" to the universe that it actually will work.
I love this. For someone who has grown up thinking that competent people are the ones who know what they are doing and control every element and have a plan from the jump, it is so exciting to see a hero whose superpower is improvisation. He is constantly adapting and pivoting to survive.
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Which leads to... Dashing About! There is an awful lot of running. He is a true swashbucking adventurer, and yet, as Craig Ferguson says, he prizes "intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism." He is a true hero. Many a fan's dreams of being the Doctor's companion begin with picturing him grabbing their hands and joyfully shouting "Run!" His catchphrase, "Allons-y," means "Let's go!" You and me. Together. Let's have an adventure.
He is the world's champion and the thing that monsters have nightmares about. There is an energy to him, an ever-moving force. And yet. There is a shadow side to this. He is running. Running from sadness, from the past, from what he has done. Running because if he stops for too long, it hurts. And if he chases the thrill for too long, he starts to revel in the danger "The worse it gets, the more I love it." This starts to contribute to the Doctor's dark side as we will see later.
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He also has an incredible willingness to be vulnerable. So many of the enemies he faces are creatures that have removed emotions. They often taunt him for his feelings, and yet he embraces the pain. He has every reason not to want to feel anymore, but he holds on to them, knowing that if he is open to pain, he will equally be open to joy.
LUMIC: You are proud of your emotions.
DOCTOR: Oh, yes.
LUMIC: Then tell me, Doctor. Have you known grief, and rage, and pain?
DOCTOR: Yes. Yes I have.
LUMIC: And they hurt?
DOCTOR: Oh, yes.
LUMIC: I could set you free. Would you not want that? A life without pain?
DOCTOR: You might as well kill me. (Age of Steel)
This leads him to get hurt time and again, and you can see the moments where he closes himself off. He shuts down, and this get more pronounced as his end nears. However, he always finds someone worth opening up for either in joy, or in the depths of his despair, like with Wilfred in his very last episode.
Leaving yourself open to such pain is an incredibly brave thing to do. Being able to lean into your emotions, even the bad ones, and know that they are a part of being human, leaves you open to experience such joy.
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He believes in us and wants us to be our best selves: "I'll tell you what I can see. Humans. Brilliant humans. Humans who travel all the way across space, flying in a tiny little rocket right into the orbit of a black hole, just for the sake of discovery. That's amazing! Do you hear me? Amazing, all of you." (The Satan Pit) He makes us better by just believing in us, by seeing what we could not.
And yet somehow, he manages to rise above, to see the best in us, and in the end, to die for us.
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Finally, in his relationship with the Master, his old friend and enemy, his compassion shines the brightest. Even though the Master is a mass murderer, the Doctor's mission is never to kill him, but to save him from himself. The Master refuses to talk to the Doctor alone during the Last of the Time Lords because he knows what the Doctor will say, and he can't bear it:
DOCTOR: And you know what happens now.
MASTER: No! No! No! No!
DOCTOR: You wouldn't listen.
MASTER: No!
DOCTOR: Because you know what I'm going to say.
MASTER: No.
(The Master curls into a ball in the corner. The Doctor puts his arms around him.)
DOCTOR: I forgive you. (The Last of the Time Lords)
The Doctor's Grey
The Doctor places himself as "The Man Who Never Would." The man who never would choose violence. We love him for it. He declares on his first day first day that saying that genocide is the line that will not be crossed, punishing Harriet Jones for her actions. He will always give his enemies a chance. And yet. The lady doth protest to much.
The 10th Doctor reacts so strongly to the idea of genocide not just because he is a compassionate human being, but because he has committed genocide himself. His great trauma is that he killed his own people to end the war. So he decides, never again. Until he does it. He kills the Rachnos. He stands there and watches them all burn and drown. And then his double kills the Daleks, and he banishes his other self to another dimension as punishment. He has a complicated relationship with killing. Killing for him is justified if it is in self defense, or after a chance has been given to withdraw, but never as genocide, never while the enemy is in retreat. But his declaration "I never would" comes after Rose, after Martha, after Donna. They pull him out and help him see. He is a man who is constantly trying to shape himself into the man he wants to be, the man people believe him to be, and sometimes he falters.
The Doctor's Darkness
Each of his lighter qualities have darker aspects: fear, anger, arrogance.
There are few moments in this series where the Doctor is genuinely afraid, and each moment includes an absolute loss of control. For someone who thrives on chaos and adventure, he is terrified of losing himself. In 42, he is possessed and losing hold, "It's burning me up. I can't control it. If you don't get rid of it, I could kill you. I could kill you all. I'm scared! I'm so scared!" It is the first time the Doctor ever admits that, and it is chilling.
In Midnight, he is frozen and unable to stop the terrified humans from throwing him off the bus to his death, forced to verbally encourage them to do it by the alien stirring up discord.
And in End of Time, he is facing his own death, and he says that the person he regenerates into will not be him. He will die.
I relate to that so much. All of my fears are connected to loss of control or loss of self: the abyss, oblivion, powerlessness, being forgotten. I, too, have worked so hard to figure out who I am and live that fully. I have hammered myself into the shape I want, based on the story I wanted to tell. I made myself who I am. It is my strength. On days that I am not myself, due to mental health issues, the fear of loosing myself is almost worse than the actual side effects.
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The next flaw of the Doctor I want to cradle is his anger. The moment that I truly loved the Doctor, not just as a dashing hero, but as a flawed human being like me, was when he let the Rachnos burn and drown. We saw glimpses of this part of his nature before. He kills the Sycorax leader who is trying to stab him in the back in his first episode, and he says "No second chances. I'm that sort of a man."
He has this cold rage that felt so familiar. This was before I even had fully explored my ability for anger and what that was in me, but even then, it echoed in my soul. "That place was flooded and burning and they were dying, and you stood there like… I don’t know, a stranger," Donna says. In Family of Blood, he very slowly and very carefully punishes each of the members of the Family in a very specific way. I have felt that moment where someone crosses a line with me, and I know I can calmly and surgically take them down.
His anger is the flipside of his love. More often than not, it emerges from the fact that he cares so very deeply. Someone he cares about dies or leaves him, and he feels he must rage against the world until it is better, or the hole is filled, or the person who did it is punished. And then his compassion, or his companion, will hold him back from his very worst impulses. Yet it is very telling that Banes, in Family of Blood, realizes that the Doctor was running from the Family not because he was afraid...
He knew his power and rage would consume them, so he ran away to protect them from it until they pushed him too far. He knows his power, and he tries to shield people from it, but he has so much anger inside of him that it bursts forth to consume people sometimes.
There are times when I see the power that lives within me. The things I could do. But I shy away from it, because I know that it is so strong that if I let it get out of control it could burn the world down. My compassion, my companion, and maybe my cowardice keep me in check.
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As we get to the end of the Doctor's life, his arrogance comes to the fore. He was always arrogant, chirping about his brilliance, reassuring those he is rescuing that, because he is here, they will all be saved. He takes leadership positions in groups because he feels he knows best. But it was mostly charming before. He was confidant, and more often than not, he was right.
Then, we get to the Waters of Mars. This is, I think, the most pivotal episode of Doctor Who, and the Doctor comes out of it forever changed. This is the convergence of the best and the worst of him. He finds himself in a disaster that he is not allowed to prevent. The laws of time say it is fixed. Previously, in Fires of Pompeii, in a similar situation, he discovers that his presence there actually causes the volcano to erupt, killing everyone. Pompeii is his fault. And he goes through with it anyway because he must obey the rules of time. However, in Waters of Mars, as he decides to leave them to their fates, and he is listening to everyone he knew on the base dying over the radio as he walks away, he has a revelation. He is the last of the Time Lords. All the people who made the rules about time died. He is the only one left. He is not just a survivor. He is the winner. And there is no one to enforce those rules anymore.
So he goes back and saves them, but something has changed about the Doctor. As he swaggers out of his TARDIS, he is arrogant. Superior. He says "Isn't anyone going to thank me?" This is the direction he rejected in School Reunion when the Krillitanes offered him the base code of the universe that he could use for good. "I could save everyone," he realizes. And then, Sarah Jane pulls him back, knowing it was wrong to have that much power. Yet, in this episode, no companion to temper him, he starts down this path. If he continued unchecked, he could turn into someone like the Master. No rules but his.
It takes Adelaide Brooke to stand in his way, knowing that she is supposed to die in the timeline to spur her granddaughter to make great discoveries. As her suicide shot rings out, the arrogant Doctor is brought back to Earth. He knows he has gone too far.
The Balance
So often, the Doctor is described as lonely. He is the last of his kind. One man with so much power and pain and love. And he pours that love into planet Earth, in the persons of the companions he picks up along the way. He looks into their hearts and sees their true selves, what they could be beyond the shop girl, the student, the temp, and he makes them believe they can be extraordinary. They rise above anything they thought possible and save the world so many times. They become heroes in their own right.
And in turn, they save the Doctor. Donna Noble hit it right on the head when she said that he needs someone to stop him. The companions define him. He knows who he is because of who they are.
Rose was there to love him and hold his hand.
Martha was there to support him and be his strength.
Donna was there to challenge him and show him where he was wrong.
They each gave him a new dimension. They grounded him so that he wouldn't fly off into the ether, either engaging in riskier and riskier behaviors until it got him killed, or like what happens in Waters of Mars, loosing his moral compass.
I have so many people in my life who do that for me. If I didn't have them, I would be chasing every next grand idea and living out of a van, or trying to escape the loneliness in destructive ways.
Our companions ground us, give us dimension, gives us scope.
And yet, in the case of the Doctor, he looses them. He looses them all. They either get trapped in another dimension, or die, or leave him by choice, or are forced to forget everything.
And the Doctor admits that, early on in Fear Her, "Fear, loneliness. They're the big ones, Rose. Some of the most terrible acts ever committed have been inspired by them.... There's a lot of things you need to get across this universe. Warp drive, wormhole refractors. You know the thing you need most of all? You need a hand to hold." And yet the very nature of the Doctor and his long life is that he will constantly lose people. He lost his family. ("when they died, that part of me died with them."). He lost his race. He looses his friends. He continues to be resilient and open himself up to new people, but towards the end of 10's life, it begins to take a toll.
I have lost people. One of my earliest memories is of a loss of a companion who I loved above anything. And each time someone leaves, it hurts. And you try to make it fine. They are better, and happy, and doing what they need to do for their lives. And yet the hole is still there.
Worse than simply losing his companions, Davros takes the idea of the Doctor urging his companions to great things and twists it to make it the Doctor's fault. He makes the Doctor remember how many people he has inspired to do something grand who consequently died: "How many more? Just think. How many have died in your name? The Doctor. The man who keeps running, never looking back because he dare not, out of shame."
The Doctor takes this to heart, and starts to believe it as well: "It's not like I'm an innocent. I've taken lives. I got worse. I got clever. Manipulated people into taking their own." This is why he starts to travel alone. His fear of losing people makes him isolate himself. He has no one to temper him. This is what leads him to his arrogance on the Waters of Mars. This is what ultimately leads him to his end.
The Death of the 10th Doctor
When the End of Time begins, the Doctor has made the biggest mistake of his life in Waters of Mars, teetering on the edge of the monster he could be, and then is abruptly pulled back into himself with the suicide of Adelaide Brooke. Then the Ood appear, reminding him of their message that his song was ending soon.
He realizes he overstepped. But then he steps into his TARDIS and says "No." He does not intend to "go gentle into that goodnight." The next time we see him, he arrives at the planet of the Ood in a cowboy hat and flower chain, flippant as ever. He is pushing back against his death, careening around the universe trying to enjoy life. But the Ood call him back to reality. To Earth. Then, through the conflict with the Master and the Time Lords, we get the Doctor wrestling with who he is and with his own death.
In one of the most heartbreaking scenes of the entire series, the Doctor admits what we have always known: that he is profoundly lonely and flawed, and he needs someone to help keep him whole.
Honestly, there is nothing I love more in a story than a person who realizes their mistakes and is sorry and tries to be better. This is why I love Edmund and Eustace from Narnia, why I love Spike from Buffy. There is something profoundly beautiful and healing and human about it. It makes us feel like, even though we are flawed and have made some incredible mistakes in our lives, we will be ok if we acknowledge it and try again. We need to see it in our heroes so we can live it ourselves.
In the end, the Doctor chooses who he wants to be. He saves Earth from his own people. He rejects the arrogance and anger and fear of the Time Lords, and he chooses us. He chooses his humanity.
And then it happens. He has to make one more choice.
After we think it is all over, Wilfred, the man who showed him such compassion in his worst moments, gets stuck in a machine that will vent radiation, killing its occupant. The only way the Doctor can save him is to take his place. The Doctor must choose between himself, a Time Lord that could save millions, and a simple, loving, old man. And this is where we see our Doctor in microcosm.
Wilfred says to leave him. That he is an old man who has had his time. The Doctor replies:
He then walks up to Wilfred, smiles sadly, and says "Wilfred, it would be my honor." And he takes the radiation meant for Wilf, and begins the process of dying. He gives up his grand and exciting and important life for the sake of one kind old man. That is the 10th Doctor.
And then, as the radiation begins to slowly kill him, he has one last trip. A trip that sums up everything about the Doctor. It is not about being the lonely god. It is about the people that he loves, and who loved him.
This is the Doctor. A brilliant, scattered, loving, compassionate, flawed man who tried his best, made mistakes, and tried to do better. He tried to shape himself into the man he wanted to be. And he gave himself wholeheartedly to love.
Lessons from the 10th Doctor
Make every day an adventure. Be curious and open to new people and experiences. Let your brain go as fast as it needs to, think your way out of problems, and be able to pivot and improvise. Embrace the unknown. Learn everything you can and make connections. Give everyone the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. Be compassionate and really listen to people and their stories. Protect the vulnerable and show mercy. Forgive. There is a thin line between who you are and who they are. All it takes is a choice based on fear, rage, or arrogance. And when you make mistakes, forgive yourself, apologize, make amends, and try to be better. And be open to love. Love wholeheartedly and unreservedly. It will hurt you yes, but it will also save you.
Episodes That Define the 10th Doctor
- The Christmas Invasion
- Tooth and Claw
- The Satan Pit
- Doomsday
- Runaway Bride
- Human Nature/ Family of Blood
- Fires of Pompeii
- The Doctor's Daughter
- Silence in the Library/ Forest of the Dead
- Midnight
- Journey's End
- Waters of Mars
- End of Time
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