Adam James Cuthbert makes the case for the tenth Doctor’s final story.
Although the Tenth Doctor wasn’t my first, through the combination of Russell T Davies’ writing and David Tennant’s generally excellent performance, his characterisation has come to more or less encapsulate my personal preference for the portrayal of the Doctor, especially in light of the influential Time War backstory that continues to be felt today: a man who has seen ‘the horror’.
His jovial, loquacious, and ebullient persona, typically describing peoples and things as “brilliant” or “beautiful”, with an impassioned affinity for humanity that reflected on his own demeanour, counteracted by a fierce intelligence and ruthlessness, underscored by a pronounced sense of loneliness, created a profound, multi-layered and complex characterisation. He was ‘young at heart’ yet we were constantly reminded that the youthful persona was a façade that concealed strong feelings of guilt and rage. This was a haunted man, a disturbed man, provoked by the spectres of enemies past, the spirit of violence that rested within him. He consistently refused to arm himself, a symbolic cue of his own hypocrisies.
The Tenth Doctor, in my experience, conveyed an unprecedented growth and maturity of the show’s protagonist that was concurrently fascinating and heart-breaking to watch. Over time, he’d lost the woman he’d come to love, his best friend, and the only other Time Lord survivor had chosen to defy his desperate pleads, in a dying act of revenge. The character’s subsequent descent into darkness, resolute in his solitude, was mesmerizing almost terrifying, as he fully embraced his status as a Time Lord. He became self-righteous, arrogant; intoxicated by power. The lassitude he felt, at the suffering of innocent lives by the hands of evils, by Time itself, registered a moral lapse, stressing the necessity of a companion to serve as his conscience, to brighten his outlook on life.
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