As An Era Nears Its End...

People are already murmuring about David Tennant being one of the most iconic, Doctorish Doctors ever. I suppose that's fair, the lad's done a great job. But let's bear in mind that he's the first actor since Tom Baker left in 1981 (a lifetime ago! Matt Smith wasn't even BORN then!) to have had a really substantial amount of time to win people over. Davison, Colin Baker, McCoy, McGann and Eccleston, fabulous Doctors all, but if you were an average member of the British viewing public you could easily have blinked and missed any one of them.

I loved what Russell T Davies did with the first season of his show. Not only was it a fabulously original re-envisioning of the Doctor as a post-traumatic war veteran, it attacked the cliches of the old show from all sides, brought Doctor Who into real three dimensional existence at last. Look at all the questions RTD's episodes ask and answer: wouldn't a companion and a Doctor start to develop romantic feelings for one another? Don't companions ever have families and boyfriends and things that they love and miss? How come when the Doctor whisks random youngsters off for adventures in time and space they're so invariably suitable for the job, don't any of them ever fail to come up to snuff? Does the Doctor's meddling ever create disastrous repercussions throughout the timelines? Do monsters have feelings too? (Love and Monsters, later on, feels like another item in this series: what happens to the little people whose lives the Doctor touches, once he's off on his next adventure?)

Obviously, from Series Two onwards, RTD dialed back the number of episodes he was writing each year, assigning himself the duties of introducing each new companion, creating a suitably festive romp for each Christmas special, and writing an even more ultimately apocalyptic and Earth-shattering season finale each year than the last one. So now we're on the verge of getting some kind of overarching perspective on Doctor Ten's reign, what do its questions and themes seem to be?

At this point, with Waters of Mars still fresh in everyone's minds, we're all wondering if Ten is doing some kind of reverse Six: starting off quite sweet, and then ending up a mad, ranting, angsting megalomaniac whose only remaining option is to regenerate. We'll see how that arc ends up in a month.

The other cohesive thread that seems to bind Ten's three-and-a-half seasons together is... his relationship with women. Yes indeed, Ten is the playboy Doctor. Not content to have gotten into sexy relationships with Madame de Pompadour, Joan Redfern, Queen Elizabeth the First and River Song (well, sort of), each of this Doctor's seasons has centered around his relationship with a different woman. Rose is the one he loves and trusts implicitly, who's always been there for him... and he loses her. Martha is the one who wants to be everything Rose was to him, but he's too wounded and wrapped up in himself to be able to see it, so she gives up on him... and he loses her. Donna's the one who he neither wants or is wanted by him, finally he's got a good functional relationship with a female... and he loses her. And now we have the pseudo-season of No Companion, Period: he can flirt with the likes of Lady Christina, but there's no way anyone's getting through the doors of the TARDIS now or ever again.

So basically the Tennant era, 2005-2010 has, boy-girl relationships as its keynote. And - I'm strangely reminded of the plot of recent indie video game hit Braid here - those relationships are deeply dysfunctional. Female companions, can't live with them, can't live and are forced to regenerate without them; I can't help but wonder which members of the scriptwriting team may have been deeply scarred by failed relationships in their past.

Nine was horribly traumatized by war, Ten by being unable to hold down relationships. I dunno, maybe the angst is a fundamental part of the show's new school appeal, but maybe it'd be nice if Matt Smith could be a basically carefree, optimistic, happy-go-lucky young/old Time Lord, at least for a while? It worked for (most of) the first 26 years, after all...