The Tenth Doctor retrospective thread

I had the feeling that Martha had started moving on emotionally when she decided to leave the TARDIS. She seemed well over him during The Sontaran Stratagem, so if any stories are set after her original season I don't think the unrequited love element would even be on the radar.

No, no, no, she deserves better. At that time the Tenth Doctor is depressed by Donna, it will be the same as when he was depressed by Rose in Series 3. It will be busy in their grief and ignore Martha again. I think Martha will work best with the Eleventh Doctor. (Even in this video it shows that she enjoy being along with Matt and Alex, www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gI9G0dlkpw)

And knowing the talent of the Eleventh Doctor to unite couples, as the Ponds, Craig Owens and Sophie or possibly Vastra and Jenny. Obviously it was him who helped Mickey and Martha to reveal their feelings and be a loving couple.

I think the high points of David Tennant's tenure were incredibly high and hard to top, but the low points were among the worst in all of Doctor Who.

Series 2, as a whole, was a low point - at least to me. The dynamic between the Doctor and Rose that made them enjoyable in the first series did not carry over here and Rose herself became incredibly difficult to like as a character - not taking the situation seriously as she did in Tooth and Claw, being hostile to Sarah Jane in School Reunion, and the whine-fest that was The Christmas Invasion. Then there were episodes such as Love & Monsters and Fear Her that need no explanation - terrible, terrible - and I really find myself disliking New Earth more each time I watch it. Still, the series did have The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit, an absolutely wonderful two-part story, and The Girl In the Fireplace was great too.

Series 3 was a lot better and has some of the greatest episodes of NuWho. While I feel they approached Martha's character entirely wrong, treating her more as Rose's replacement rather than a companion in her own right, I liked the idea of having a more skilled companion onboard (no offense intended to the previous companions, of course). We had some great episodes - Blink, Human Nature, The Family of Blood, and Utopia - but we also had some real clunkers - The Daleks in Manhattan and Evolution of the Daleks, and Last of the Time Lords. Not a bad season, but not the best.

Series 4 would be the best, at least for the Tenth Doctor. Donna really did bring out the best in the Tenth Doctor and each episode really felt more like a genuine adventure with two best pals having a laugh. There's not really a single episode I can point at as being downright bad, besides having a couple of moments in certain episodes that I really disliked. A season that gave us Donna Noble, River Song, and such episodes as Silence in the Library, Forest of the Dead, Midnight, and Turn Left cannot be anything short of fantastic!

The specials... Overall, a mixed bag. I really didn't like The Next Doctor, sadly. Jackson Lake was a little too.... glib? for my liking and the bits with the Cybermen, particularly at the climax, irritated me from a storytelling and world building perspective. Planet of the Dead gets a lot of flack and while I don't consider it amongst my favorites by any means, I still had some fun with it. The Waters of Mars meanwhile was a definite classic. I feel like a story of this kind was what the Tenth Doctor needed earlier in his timeline than later, but that's by no means a fault of the episode itself. It's genuinely scary and finally offers a level of conflict I think was logical for the Doctor to go through following an event such as the Time War.

That leaves The End of Time, and I simply cannot bring myself to like this story. It's over the top in the wrong ways, untrue to the characters of the Doctor and the Master, and the actual story is full of impossibilities - the Doctor surviving a fall from that height? No way. I don't object to the idea that the Doctor can be afraid of regeneration, but I feel as though the manner in which they approached it here was divisive amongst fans and turned a lot of people away from the Matt Smith seasons just because David Tennant "didn't want to go."

The Tenth Doctor's tenure was pretty mixed for me as a whole. I like the actor himself and I never thought he put in a bad performance, but the actual writing could sometimes produce something I was definitely not in favor of. Anyways, those are just a couple of my thoughts.

"Now listen here, you're the most inconsolably irresponsible and incredulous itinerant I've ever had the misfortune to clap me peepers on."
"Really? I would've thought old toothy grin would give him a run for my money."
"Oh, good grief..."

This must happen.

So much wasted potential there, imo. But then, I just cannot stand any inkling of romance between the Doctor and a companion. It really has no place in the show for me and is essentially absurd given the repeatedly stated vast differences between human and TL intelligence, viewpoint, age, etc.

Given all that's been said about said differences, the Doctor falling in love with a companion is comparable to a situation in which I fall in love with a particularly stupid parrot. Given the human appearance of TL's, it's not so odd the other way around, but I just don't feel like watching it. I want them to keep the show focused on his travels and stop trying to cram in every last aspect of human existence. Leave that for other shows.

So do you agree with Missy's assesment that the companions are the Doctor's pets?

The term "pets" makes his friends sound domesticated, which when compared against characters like Vislor Turlough and Elizabeth Klein doesn't really seem to ring true. It's more like the Victorian ideal of enlightened, rational humanity vs. the base nature of animals. From the very beginning, the Doctor thought the human race were less than children in their views towards the greater universe and I don't think that really evaporated, so much as it dulled with time. If you take the literal etymological route that writers like Dave Stone have with the word "incarnation" meaning "embodied in flesh", then it's like saying a character can have a romance with Shub-Niggurath from the Cthulu Mythos. You can try and given the humanoid features of Gallifreyans, it's not hard for human beings to fall for them, but it feels to me as though that's a vast cosmological web that the Earther simply isn't seeing. Not because he or she is stupid, but because they lack the processing power to properly comprehend it. They simply don't have the brain to understand that kind of philosophy beyond their own interpretation

With the Eighth Doctor, I always got the impression that it was the mountain coming to Mohammed. The Doctor had learnt enough about human beings by that stage and had enough of what we identify as humanity in his current incarnation to accommodate a fleeting love affair or two. He was the opposite of his predecessor and embraced the minutiae of life and living rather than watching the big picture from afar. As the Doctor said way back in Rose, he can feel the entire planet moving beneath them. We as a species cannot comprehend, we cannot feel the true scope and scale of the entire world. "There are people dying all over your world, yet you do not care about them," as Krail said in The Tenth Planet. It's too big a concept for us to handle without spiralling into depression or madness, so how could a relationship like that truly last?

I really, really loved nearly all of it at the time it was on, but feel almost no desire to ever rewatch.

I have done, quite recently, as part of a marathon I'm doing, and I just find it all shallow and annoying.

There are beautiful moments in there, but not enough. Too much was spectacle for it's own sake.

Bread and Circuses.