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*breathes in* Right. Okay. This ... Is possibly something we should not have done, but howandever. March is apparently meta month this year, and my sister ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
livingtolaugh and I, after a few months of sort-of-kind-of discussing and planning it, finally decided to write out the massive DW meta exploring the development of the Doctor as a person/character across all 11 of his to-date regenerations. It, um, weighs in at 9200 words, covers 40-odd years of television in varying detail, and most probably was a massive mistake. But, you know. Here you go anyway. *grins sheepishly*
livingtolaugh and I, after a few months of sort-of-kind-of discussing and planning it, finally decided to write out the massive DW meta exploring the development of the Doctor as a person/character across all 11 of his to-date regenerations. It, um, weighs in at 9200 words, covers 40-odd years of television in varying detail, and most probably was a massive mistake. But, you know. Here you go anyway. *grins sheepishly*The Doctor
Introduction:
Right. This essay is essentially an attempt on the part of myself and my sister (livingtolaugh) to resolve something coherent from a series of discussions we've been having for the past few months. The subject, of course, being The Doctor. Not a Doctor, not my Doctor or your Doctor, not the favourite regeneration, but The Doctor. The singular. Because, over the course of these (rather excitable) discussions, our basic realisation was that the Doctor is, was, and always has been, one person. A serial person, granted, but the regenerations have never been separate. They have been one being, which is ... sometimes easy to lose sight of, we think. Everyone has a favourite Doctor. Everyone has their Doctor, Three, Four, Five, Seven, Ten, Eleven. Whichever. The show is forty-something years old. There have been 11 regenerations. That's a long fucking life, whichever way you slice it. It's always, we think, been easier to draw the lines between regenerations, and just call My Doctor.
Now, me and my sister, we have our Doctors. Three and Seven, respectively, to be precise. But we've also, through luck or accident or sheer perversity, seen at least a little of all of them, between the two of us (Eight being our major failure -icarus_chained has seen the TV movie, but neither of us have read the EU novels where he got most of his life). And we've also ... have a really, really hard time, drawing our Doctors from that. Because ... Well. Because it's all the Doctor. And more ... There's been a story. Beyond the serial nature of him. Beyond even the catastrophic moments of his life (his exile, his Trial, the Time War) that defined whole series/seasons after them. The Doctor, the whole way through, has been a person, and his development has been visible across regenerations ('development', admittedly, being perhaps not quite the right word). So ... we wanted to do a little something, lay something out, just to explore that. To explore The Doctor, the man, the singular. Heh.
A few warnings beforehand. Neither of us has ever really been involved in the fandom for DW. A few fics here or there between us, the odd discussion. That's about all. So ... if there have been other metas, other essays, following the Doctor, we've obviously not seen them (feel free to rec, by the by). *smiles sheepishly* This is just ... us, personally, exploring this character, this man, and the shapes and stories he makes in our heads. This means that we're writing about each of the regenerations as we see them, not necessarily how everyone does. Heh.
Secondly, though we've seen a little of everything, between the two of us, there are some Doctors we're better on than others (One, Two, and Eight are probably our worst). New Who has been easier to get (and morelivingtolaugh's side), though through natural persistence, we've seen a fair bit of most of the middle Doctors too (Three, Four and Seven, most prominently). The latest seasons, Eleven's later run, is also shaky. One and Two have been hard to access. Eight has been ... very problematic. We've also had little to no contact with the EU (there was forty years of show to get through, there had to be a line somewhere -_-;). Heh. So, you know. If one of our shaky patches is your Doctor, you might want to argue/fill us in. Feel free.
Lastly. Hmm. Bear in mind. Because of, you know, forty plus years of development, and the length of time each Doctor was around, all of them were/are far more nuanced than we have room to explore here. The Doctor was always a complicated character, and every regeneration showed that. What we're attempting to track here is an overall character arc, an impression of what each regeneration has meant to the overall person. This means we are leaving out huge chunks of the characterisation and storylines of each individual Doctor. Heh. We are aware of that, and are not overly concerned by it. Though, we are concerned if, by ignorance of a particular regeneration, we're getting something flat wrong. Feel free to correct us on any such mistakes, yes?
Now. *grins* The fun part. *spreads arms, bows* Introducing ... The Doctor.
The Regenerations:
The First Doctor:
Of the first Doctor, what we've seen is the serial The Web of Fear, and some snippets including parts of Aztecs and Edge of Destruction. And perhaps we're slightly disadvantaged, in that the First Doctor was maybe the third or fourth Doctor we came to, after Ten, Three, and Four for one of us, and probably most of the other Ten for the other. Heh. So. Our impressions of him are heavily influenced by later Doctors.
And in view of later Doctors, the first impression of One is that he is young. For all that he's physically the oldest, and thoroughly acts the part of the bitchy, cranky old man who will do things his way, thank you very much, don't argue with him, young man. But ... given what we find out from Two, about why he left Gallifrey ... The First Doctor is the explorer, the young man on the run, reaching out to touch the universe. He has rules (no changing history), because he thinks he ought to have them, but he also interferes, because he thinks someone should. One is where he took the name 'Doctor'. As in, 'I will fix it'.
He is ... ethically/morally rather dubious, considering that he casually kidnaps people, but then, that makes sense. He's still fresh from becoming a criminal, fresh from running, apparently largely just for the sake of running. And he's also ... very innocent, in a lot of ways. He's capable of falling in love, or something like it (Aztecs). He thinks the rules of time are just so, because he hasn't learned differently yet. He fears his people, but not ... not in a knowing kind of way. All that comes later. One is, still, an innocent. Young, idealistic, wanting to shake free of the idle hedonism of his people and do something. With a somewhat naive idea of politics and morality and justice and duty. He has ... a lot of learning to do, has One.
It's kinda of interesting, then, the reverence with which the later Doctors view him. Three Doctors, Five Doctors. There might be an element of ... envy, I suppose, for what they've lost, in him. For what they were. Wisdom uncluttered by knowledge of cost.
One is also ... where he meets Earth, humanity. Where, over the course of his first companions' stories, we begin to matter to him. Where humans start to have valid opinions on their own merits (icarus_chained loved Barbara, mostly for not being afraid to yell him down and point out his more questionable morals to him). He also has family, though neither of us know enough of Susan's backstory to know how that came about. Heh. But ... he's whole, this Doctor. Cranky and annoyed, but whole. Heh.
The Second Doctor:
Again, we haven't seen much of Two. The Invasion, pieces of Web of Fear and War Games. The last, there, and probably most important, we mostly know through reading of, not watching. And it is ... very important, that episode. We've also seen the Three and Five Doctor serials. We haven't seen Two Doctors.
The second Doctor is ... kind of really important to the later development of the character. We know that, even if neither of us has seen enough of him to properly track it. Because Two ... oh, Two is where we are properly introduced to one of the most important relationships in the Doctor's life: his relationship with his people, with the Time Lords. And that relationship is fraught. That relationship is strained and pained, using and reacting, a building fear and bitterness that will shape his next regenerations, will drive an anger and rebellion that will culminate to horrifying effect in the Time War and the choices he will make there. That, all of that, begins here. With Two.
But before that. In the run up to that. Two is ... wandering, and curious, and petulant, and delighted. The youth of One, paired with the knowledge, the experience, that death is no barrier to him. Two is, in some ways, a lack of consequence, not for those around him, but for the Doctor himself. He can stand, and he can fight, and he can fall, and then he can stand again, and now he knows that, and it doesn't have the pain and despair it will come to have later, that realisation. Two has companions, an incredibly vibrant friendship with them (there's probably a reason Two and Jamie, of all the Classic companions, are so often paired). However ... he's also darker than One. Even before War Games. Two, as a Doctor, is often compared to Seven (from what we've seen), as sort of inverses of each other - the chessmaster playing the fool versus the fool playing the chessmaster. The reality is somewhat more complicated, but ... Two is where a lot of the casual darkness of One, the using of others, becomes clearer and more personal. Possibly, in part, because death doesn't have quite the same meaning to him anymore, now that he's experienced regeneration.
Which is what makes what happens in War Games sort of ... all the more horrible, and really explains so, so much of the next few Doctors. Because Two is where he learns ... that he is not free of his people just because he refused them, that he is not free of consequence just because he's immortal, that what he does has real and personal consequences. Whether you take War Games as a direct segue into Spearhead from Space, or take Two Doctors in between (which adds a whole other dimension), the second Doctor was where the cracks between Doctor and Time Lords really, really started to show. For all the serial itself plays it reasonably lightly, the Time Lords did catch him, they did strip him of power, companions and self. They did capture him, kill him, exile him, and remove all remnants of him (for now) from the lives he had touched (Jamie and Zoe). For the 'crime' of interfering, particularly hypocritical when you consider the amount of times the Doctor over his regenerations has been told to meddle by his people (or, if you consider War Games a deliberate sham trial, not so much hypocritical as incredibly manipulative, and a bit 1984-ish). The Doctor ... In One and Two, the rebellion against the Time Lords has been largely impersonal, a mere rejection of principles. After War Games, it becomes a lot more bitter, and a lot more personal. They hurt him, controlled him, used him. Over the course of Three, Four and Six, it becomes obvious that he never, in all his life, really forgave them for it. And then, the Time War ...
But also, in a lot of ways, what the Doctor learned as Two, what the Time Lords showed him as Two, was also necessary for him. The knowledge of consequence, the knowledge of overseers and beings of sufficient power to call him to task, was/is a potent force in his life (and one only has to look at Ten to see the consequences of taking that away). His second regeneration was a potent turning point for the Doctor, and really the start of his personal story, in a lot of ways. Shifting the focus of the show off the history, and onto the people. Making it personal, not just for the companions, but for him.
The Third Doctor:
Now we come to one of Our Doctors. Three isicarus_chained's Doctor, the first she met after (early) Ten, and the first that made her love the show. Of Three, we've seen in particular Spearhead From Space, Inferno, Three Doctors, the entire one-and-a-bit seasons featuring the Delgado!Master, and the odd serial from the later seasons (missing, admittedly, quite a few of the Sarah-Jane episodes).
Three was ... really, a direct result of Two, and what happened to Two. Three was not a wanted man, he was a prisoner, and an exile. Three had lost not only his own freedom, but his companions, and everything he'd ever done for them (which, considering the strength of the bonds Two had had, was a hard blow - also considering where, exactly, Jamie was dropped back into). He was stuck on Earth, his own mind meddled with to keep him there, gradually let back off again, but initially, mostly, at the Time Lords' behest. Three was, consequently, not a happy camper. He was, in fact, bitter and snappish and brusque, and with all the interpersonal skills of a plank. He was fearful, and much more rigidly devoted to the rules, quite probably in reaction to the fact that breaking them had just recently resulted in all of the above. Three was a man who'd just been knocked, hard, and who was trying, not always successfully, to rebuild a life despite it. The fact that his regeneration itself was forced on him also probably didn't help matters at all. That resentment, that bitterness, the fact that he was forced to earn his freedom from his own people, shaped a lot of his later interactions with them.
But Three is also ... He's grown up. A lot. He's raw and damaged from Two, and fearfully sticking to the rules, and disgusted at himself for it, but also ... Three is where he starts to learn to be a hero, rather than just a wandering meddler with good intentions. To stand up for or reject the rules not just because they're the rules, but because they mean something. Three is flamboyant and bitter and snappish, but he is also the Doctor with a family, with a support structure, with an enforced consistent interaction with other ('lesser') people. His time in exile, with UNIT in particular, really changes the Doctor, and his views of the people around him. It's his first real experience with working as a part of something, something that in a lot of ways will never again be repeated. He resents it (the speed with which Four drops UNIT like a hot rock suggests quite a bit), but while he's part of it ... we think he liked it. The almost-equal relationship between the Doctor and the Brigadier, started here, is one oficarus_chained's favourite parts of Classic Who, and it's something that would never have been possible in either of his first regenerations, where he still had a very strong tendancy to view humans/companions as, well, silly things to be protected. The more mentoring relationships he builds with the likes of Jo and Sarah Jane set a lot of the standards for his later relationships, too. Three, unlike any other Doctor before or since, was connected to something, in a linear fashion, and it probably enabled some of his later stability, and also cemented his connection to Earth and humanity, for which he would basically later sacrifice his own people. So. You know. An important stage, Three.
Three is also where we are introduced to another of the keystone relationships in the Doctor's life: the friendly, tragic, desperate, vicious connection he has to another renegade Time Lord, and one of his oldest friends. With Three, we meet the Master, and we get a glimpse ... in a lot of ways, at the Doctor's future. He and the Master, though it's not immediately obvious from this era, are intimately connected, and one of the few constants of each other's lives. And ... the Doctor was warned of the Master's coming, by the Time Lords. The backstory between the two before this point, and between the Master and the Time Lords, is ... confused and/or nonexistant (that we've seen - if people have more information, feel free), but it is obviously there, and it is obviously potent. The trajectory the Master takes from this point on, from genteel, still-somewhat-honourable, controlled man into increasing insanity, desperation and bloodshed, is in some ways a truncated version of the one the Doctor appears to take, a forboding echo, really. Three is the regeneration in which the Doctor and the Master both have the best chance at reconcilation, at helping each other, at mutual defiance. And it ... never happens. Sometimes, considering the paths the both of them took later, we wonder what would have happened if that chance had ever materialised (rumours that before Roger Delgado's tragic death, the Master was supposed to die saving the Doctor do not help this speculation).
Three is a key stage in the development of the Doctor's relationships with Earth/humanity, with the Time Lords, and with the Master. It's also ... a key stage in his moral development, the understanding, however much he resents it, that the rules have merit, and sometimes are there for a reason. It was a vicious lesson to learn, forced upon him, but it was also potent (witness Eleven and his fear with rules).
The Fourth Doctor:
For a lot of people, the Doctor. Also one of the hardest to pin, just on sheer length of time and number of stories involved. Not one of our better Doctors, it must be admitted. There was simply ... too much, with Four. What we have seen ... Robot, Pyramids of Mars, Hand of Fear/Deadly Assassin, Image of Fendahl, the Keys of Time series, The Leisure Hive, then the trilogy bridging Four and Five starting in Keepers of Traken. So ... not a bad mixing, really. *sheepish*
Four ... Four was ... complicated. In a lot of ways, Four is the zenith of the Doctor, or at least, the last moment of real innocence. Everything after that is a long, slow fall towards ... the decline of the Time Lord civilisation and the Time War, and New Who, where he is so broken. Four is the height, really, before that. The zenith. Four is ... arrogant, and aloof, and maintains a certain dispassion where he can. He is eccentric, almost belligerantly so. He is sometimes more childish in his behaviours that previous Doctors (definitely more so than Three, but more on that later), partly as smokescreen, partly as an act of defiance. He is also ... Hmm. Four is personally powerful, in conjunction with still being mostly sane, in a way he had never been before, and would never have the chance to be again. Four is whole enough and powerful enough to tangle with the likes of the Guardians, to interact with the Time Lords on a reasonably equal and non-antagonistic footing. He ... connects differently with his people than he did before, or ever will again.
There's still fear, in Four, though. Still reaction to what has gone before. The exploration of his first regenerations, given wing again after the enforced exile of Three. The resentment for the level of connection that was forced on him as Three - while he gained his freedom from Earth well before the regeneration into Four, it's only after that regeneration that he drops UNIT, suddenly and all at once, and practically flings himself back out into the stars - as Three, he still felt a connection and duty, but the opportunity of regeneration, a new face, allows him to reject it, in part. The fear and resentment of his people (interesting, when he's summoned before them in Deadly Assassin, he will NOT let Sarah Jane come, for all she wants to see Gallifrey. He drops her off, sends her home, rather than willingly bringing her before his people. Considering what happened to Jamie and Zoe, that's rather telling - he's willing to tangle with them on his own merits and at his own risk, but not his companions', not again). There is a lot of Four that's still recovering from what he went through in his past two regenerations.
There is also, however, a lot of him that's learned from it. Four is outwardly more childish, his behaviours more eccentric (again, I think, in an effort to distance himself from what he was as Three, from the man he'd become in reaction to forcing), but his motives have much matured. He's more careful and more conscious of consequences than One or Two would have been. He interacts with people, companions, differently. And, of course, there's the fact that one of those companions, for the first time, was another Time Lord. Someone who might have been less in experience, but was his equal in power, and superior in standing. Romana ... taught him a lot, I think. His actions might have been mysterious to her, but his past wasn't, not the way it had been to other companions. She learned from him, but he learned from the act of teaching someone so much closer to being his equal, from caring for someone so much closer to being his equal. Romana was ... a very interesting addition/complication to his interactions with his own people.
And those interactions ... the slant of them changes, with Four. He's afraid of them. He can still be forced by them (including, among other things, into attempting to stop the development of the Daleks - this is where the seeds of the Time War are sown, and it's partially his fault - he could not destroy them, though he did hinder them, and Davros found out about the Time Lords' meddling from him, at the very birth of the Daleks themselves - partially the Doctor's fault, definitely also the Time Lords). He will not risk his companions to them. But he also feels capable of returning to them, directly interfereing in their politics, choosing who lives and who dies among his own people. He begins to be capable, in this incarnation, of fighting them, not just running from them, and fighting for them, and also of judging which, if any, is appropriate. He wants, in this incarnation, to save them from themselves. While he learns from the Guardians at the same time, that White is often only a disguise for Black, that all the power in the world might not justify you. Four is ... where the Doctor is most capable, and least damaging, where he learns most with least pain to himself. At least in some ways.
It's in Four's era, though, that we begin to get presentiments of his future, mostly in the form of the Master. Who has run out of regenerations, is set against their people, and is desperate, destructive, willing to do anything at all. Four stops him. Four protects the Time Lords from him (Deadly Assassin), Four rejects everything the Master tells him, though will still work with him when necessary. But their relationship past this point will never recover. And the Master's insanity (complicated by New Who and Rassilon, and the drumming, but even just the fact of his dying is visibly driving the Master to despair, here) shows the eventual costs of the lives he and the Doctor lead, the sheer build up of trauma and its effects. Four's death is forewarned to him, and he accepts it calmly enough - that's arrogance/confidence, and the lessons he's learned so far. Four's death is at the Master's hand (the only one of the regenerations that directly was, as far as I know), and after the accidental destruction of a decent portion of the universe, despite his best efforts. That's what he's going to learn, in the future. The presentiment, at the death of Four, was more than just his own regeneration, we think. It was his entire future. Four was the zenith, the point of most potential, the Doctor at his most serene and confident (though also manic and childish, because, well, he's him). What comes after, inevitably, is the fall.
The Fifth Doctor:
Again, we are somewhat shaky on Five. We've seen Castrovalva, as part of the trilogy leading from Keeper of Traken and Logopolis. Not Earthshock, but if you've read anything on Five, you'll know what happened there. Parts of Arc of Infinity, parts of the Turlough/Black Guardian arc, The Five Doctors, and then the last three serials leading up to Caves of Androzani.
Five is ... Okay. See. From Four on, the Doctor is getting increasingly complicated, just from sheer weight of history. Okay, from Two on, but still. Five ... Our first impressions of Five were of ... relative fragility, and also relative moral ambiguity. Not out of a desire for evil, but out of an increasing struggle to know what the right thing to do was. Over the course of this regeneration, the Doctor begins to lose companions traumatically in ways he hasn't since Jamie and Zoe (Earthshock, Resurrection of the Daleks). He begins to increasingly run up against the flaws in his own people (Arc of Infinity, where they executed him, rather more permanently than they had Two, and for less reason, and also Five Doctors). His relationship with the Master tanks out (after intermittent attempts of foil each other, Planet of Fire comes along, and the Doctor stands by and watches as the Master burns to death). His own moral compass starts to be severely shaken (Resurrection of the Daleks - where Four was willing to, possibly, destroy the Daleks but couldn't, Five fully intends to assassinate Davros, bottles it for a full few minutes where he can't bring himself to go forward, and then loses his opportunity). He suffers from personal 'cosmic angst', where his very existence, past, present and future, comes under direct threat (Five Doctors, Arc of Infinity). He spends a hell of a lot of time dealing with old enemies (the entirety of season 20), the fallout from his triumphs in previous incarnations. The entirety of this regeneration, in short, is one long trauma conga line, and by the end of it, it really shows.
Five is the regeneration where the Doctor begins to lose faith. In himself, in his people, in his companions, in his successes. He failed Adric, he failed Tegan, Turlough he had to fight tooth and nail for, he died, very traumatically, to keep from losing/failing Peri. His own people executed him to prevent another Renegade using him, not to mention Omega, Borusa, and the fact that Gallifrey has a Death Zone. The Master, for a start is walking around wearing the corpse of one of his companion's father, is very obviously insane (though no longer as desperate as he was when his previous incarnation was dying), keeps coming back to interfere with the Doctor, and eventually ... burns to death while the Doctor watches. His oldest friendship, for all the hits it took with Four, is now rather comprehensively smashed, and the Master, as far as the Doctor knows, will never come back. And Tegan ... Tegan leaves him, out of pain and exhaustion and disgust, and he doesn't ever get over that (particular since it's his failed attempt to assassinate Davros that prompts it). And so, so much of that, of that chain of tragedies, is the result of the Doctor's own past actions (and his people's), and he knows it.
Basically? Everything he pulled back after his loses as Two, everything he built over Three and Four, was ripped away from him in this incarnation. Everything he goes through after the Time War? He went through first here. Five is the start of the fall. Five is where he really starts to learn about consequences, and the limits of power, and the flaws of the Time Lords, and his own, personal failings, and what they cost those around him. Two, it was his people's fault. Five, it's his, and he doesn't ever come back from that. Five is where the Doctor ... starts to break.
The Sixth Doctor:
One of our least well known Doctors. He's ... not popular, is Six. But we ... love him, but ... are greatly pained by him. Heh. As for what we've seen ... Timelash, Mark of the Rani, and Trial of a Timelord. Which, actually, is quite a lot of Six.
Six is ... Pain. Anger. Desperation. Arrogance. Despair. Fractured innocence. He was born directly from Five's death, from that last desperate effort to save someone, to save Peri. He went through a very traumatic regeneration (they actually just seem to get worse from here on - Seven's was no picnic, Eight's resulted in amnesia, Nine's was in the middle of the Time War, Nine ceded to Ten with glee, Ten went with a whimper - seriously, it just gets worse from here). And he comes out ... manic. Loud. Surface cowardly. Arrogant, pompous, demanding, judgemental. He comes out bubbling with anger and desperation, and runs through this regeneration searching for some way to vent it. Six is ... all the pain and rage of Five, worn right out in the open.
Nowhere is that more clear than in his second season, in Trial of a Timelord. That's ... He faces his people, at last, he is put on Trial by them, and he is vicious. Contemptuous. Furious. So childish. Everything they did to Two, to Four, to Five. Everything they set up with the Daleks. He lashes out at them here. That speech, calling them a 'decadent race' ... That's born from such pain. From such anger. He stands in judgement over them, because he will not let them stand over him any longer. And he has lost ... all illusions, with Six. About them, at least. He still clings to some about himself, and the rest of the universe. He has no hope for his people left, though. But ... he still saves them. And this time ... from himself. From a future self.
Trial of a Timelord introduces one of the creepiest characters in Who, especially in light of New Who, and in particular of Ten. In this serial, we meet the Valeyard. We meet the Doctor's future, literally (well, part of it, depending on how much of the Doctor the Valeyard is made of, and how much has been rewritten since). And this future self (somewhere between 12th and last regenerations, according to the Master - who is, admittedly, not the most reliable testimony) is ... cold, calculating, gleeful, destructive. He scares the Master. He rigs the Trial, almost destroys his past self, apparently out of contempt, and directly attacks everything the Time Lords stand for. He is defeated. Between the Doctor, Peri, the Master and the High Council, the Valeyard is stopped, at least for now. But none of that changes the fact that he existed (will exist - Timey Wimey Ball). That is ... the Doctor's potential future. And looking at Ten, at Time Lord Victorious ... That's still in the cards. That's scarily possible. The Valeyard is part of a trine, Master, Dalek, Valeyard, that show the darkest potentials for the Doctor, and he keeps veering into them.
There's also the possibility, sort of horrible, that we meet for the first time here, that the Time Lords were right about the Doctor. That they've always been right. He is dangerous. He is destructive. And, in the end, he really did destroy them. Now, they called a lot of it on themselves. But he was the instrument. And that's ... a hard thought to have.
But ... balanced against it. Six is not without hope, for all the rage and mania of him. He loves Peri (in his own, kinda twisted way). He will sacrifice for her, for those that matter to him, the way the Doctor always has, always will. He stood up against the Valeyard. Stood, even, beside the Master, after all they've gone through recently (not that the Master returned that, but then, you should never, ever present your back and/or opportunity to that man). He was ... even as low, as pained as he was here, in Six, he was still the Doctor. He was still a good man, as best he knew how. That counts for something. It does. It has to.
The Seventh Doctor:
Seven is, again, one of Our Doctors.livingtolaugh came to Who via Ten, but landed on Seven, and both of us love him dearly. Of him, we have seen parts of Time and the Rani, Dragonfire, some of Curse of Fenric, and then the run to the end, Battlefield, Survival, Ghostlight.
Seven is, we think, a direct response to Six and Five, much as Three was a direct response to Two. Seven is the chessmaster (or tries to be), the ruthless, contemptuous, controlled man. A reaction, we think, to the emotional explosion that was Six, the results of it, the lashing out against his people. Seven, after a rather unpleasant regeneration and some amnesia problems, seems to have reacted to who he was as Six by cultivating a rigid sense of control, and also an attempted emotional distance, from anything and everything. He pulled back, forced calm and calculation over the rawness of his previous two regenerations, and set about attempting to manipulate and control everything around him. Probably, we think, in an attempt to never allow what happened to him as Five, and his reactions as Six, to ever happen again. Which ... actually appears to have been successful, at least as long as this regeneration lasted (though spectacularly not, once the Time War hits). Seven is one of the longest visibly running regenerations (because of the timeskip between the end of the series and the Eighth Doctor movie), so he apparently held it, held that control, successfully for a long time (though, judging by the emptiness of the TARDIS at the beginning of the movie, not without personal cost). Though the control is ... tested.
Seven, for all his attempted distance, is also the period where the Doctor reconnects with a lot of people. He makes a partnership with Ace that is almost reminiscent of his earlier partnerships with Jamie, Jo, Sarah Jane, Susan. Something almost paternal, in a lot of ways (though given the ruthlessness of his using of her, perhaps all the creepier for that). He reconnects, in a way none of the previous regenerations had, with UNIT, with the Brigadier, with Earth (Battlefield). The stories in this regeneration become ... a lot more personal, once again, to him and to his companions. He appears to have sworn off the Time Lords altogether (not that we blame him), and after Six and his explosion against them, one suspects they weren't all that eager to bother him, either. He also ... reconnects with the Master, if very briefly, in one very poignant moment of realisation between them (Survival - where both of them are reduced to their most animalistic, barbaric, set against each other, to kill each other, and the Doctor can't. This time, unlike Four, Five, he can't, and begs the Master to remember that also, to not let the thing inside him control his actions - in light of the drumming, that's ... so goddamn painful).
Seven, though, is also a return to the ruthlessness of his early regenerations, that he lost in the traumas of Five and Six. After Six, he has ... become judgemental, in a lot of ways, but colder than Six' anger. More like One, Two, perhaps Four. He has ... come through a fire, and been convinced of his righteousness through it, regaining a lot of the early fire, and losing a lot of the fear he's held since Three for his people. Seven plays chess against monsters, in a way the Doctor hasn't since Four, and with much the same confidence. But ... he hasn't lost the fragility of what happened since. Seven bumbles, makes mistakes, is unsure. Flipside of Two, the fool pretending, in some desperation, to be the chessmaster. The remoteness he cultivates isn't nearly as successful as it was for Four. He needs too much, has lost too much. Ace, the Brigadier, they matter to him, now, for what he has lost since. He clings, a little bit. Which ... makes it somewhat tragic, that by the time of Eight, he appears to have ... lost all that.
Seven is a return of some personal calm, after the wars of his Fifth and Sixth regenerations, a calmer eddy brought about by rigid control, and to a large extent a refusal, once again, to involve himself with his people. They ... really are/were/have been, a far more influential part of the Doctor's life than he ever, ever wanted them to be, or would admit.
The Eighth Doctor:
Canon-wise, Eight is the most problematic for us.icarus_chained has seen the movie, as we said, but neither of us have read the EU novels, so. Which is ... a pity, because somewhere in there was the man who would fight the Time War, the man who would become, in fire and pain, the Ninth Doctor. But anyway. (As an aside, we'd forgotten that Seven, in becoming Eight, was also killed by the Master, if indirectly - interesting echo of Four, considering).
From what we have seen of Eight ... Hmm. Again, he was born from trauma, though from a calmer place - Seven would seem to have indulged in a small retirement, in the lead up to the movie. The Master, once more dying and bodiless and desperate, interferes once again with the Doctor (apparently he learned after Deadly Assassin, not to mention Five Doctors, that hitting up the Time Lords for extra lives is not worth it - though, really, he's always come to the Doctor, in need. Mostly to backstab him in an attempt to get what he needs, but still - plot or no, asking for his remains to be returned to Gallifrey, by the Doctor, says ... something). That it was apparently the Daleks who brought him down is ... interesting, considering the trine of Doctor/Master/Dalek that's been echoing through the past four regenerations. But, anyway. The Master's interference, and then random chance and a shooting in an alleyway, result in the birth of a Doctor that is amnesiac, confused, and convinced he is part human (two things: a) again, the regenerations are increasingly having that kind of consequence - one gets the impression that Time Lord regenerations are not supposed to be enacted under circumstances of serial, repeated trauma, and b) we're not sure if the whole 'half-human' thing was ever canonically explained - given the trauma of the regeneration, we've always assumed that he was just genuinely confused and amnesiac, and having spent so much of his life around humans, came to a spur of the moment conclusion that had no physical basis - the Doctor has always been alien to us, and we prefer him that way).
Eight, at least in the movie, appears to have a lot of Five in him. We're assuming he strengthened a lot over the course of the EU, but he's very fragile in the movie, and also, given the ending and the Master's death, again somewhat ruthless when he needs to be, or is desperate. The movie ... really says a lot more for the Master's story than it does for the Doctor's - his death, again, into the Eye of Harmony, and his being later resurrected (apparently, given the age at which Yana was found, as a child) by the Time Lords for the purposes of their war ... It's more about the Master than the Doctor, really.
The rest of Eight's history is one we (as in, us two personally) don't know. At some point, the Time War started. Given the events of the movie, the sentancing to death by the Daleks of a Time Lord (even a renegade one, and the wrong renegade), hostilities were certainly hotting up. Davros had known since his beginning that the Time Lords were against his creations (Four, Genesis of the Daleks), and the repeated attempts by the Doctor and the Time Lords would have spurred that. So ... somewhere along the line, in this regeneration, the Doctor begins to fight the Time War, the Master is resurrected by the Time Lords, and the whole universe goes to shit. Whether the Doctor regenerates during the fighting, or immediately afterwards, it's probable that at least some of his actions during the War, and possibly the key ones, were as Eight (if there is canon contradiction of this, fill us in, yes?). So. Not so harmless, then?
The Ninth Doctor:
Nine, the shellshocked veteran. Nine, we've seen all of, what little there was (from here on out, up until Eleven's second season, we've seen most of it - New Who is much easier to get a hold of, and we could watch a lot as it came out). And Nine ... isn't really all that complicated, on the face of it.
Nine is, mostly, raw shock, and the reaction to the Time War. A lot of what he endured as Three, and as Six/Seven, a lot of what he'd tried to rebuild after those traumas, comes back as Nine, but ... Well, the Time War was a huge fucking trauma. It's not every day a war you were instrumental in starting, all the way back when, forces you to genocide not one, but two races, one of them your own. And whatever problems the Doctor has had with his people, whatever they have taken from him over the years, he never, never wanted that. Even if he wanted any genocide, at all, which he had never, over the course of his previous eight regenerations, seemed capable of (Four, possibly, against the Daleks, maybe Seven at a push), he has always fought for his people. Always tried to protect them, if usually against themselves. For all his hatred of what they did, what they'd become, he never wanted them destroyed. Judging from things we learn from Ten, from Eleven, from the Master, the things that happened during the Time War, the things that were done, by everyone, were horrific, and the costs of them incalculable. The Master once destroyed a decent fraction of the universe by accident. The Time War was something far more deliberate.
And Nine ... Nine is living out the shock of that. Nine is doing his damnedest not to think about that. Nine is ... a shocked, calm shell through which bursts of extreme emotion erupt. Everything is edged with him - joy, glee, desperation, anger. He ... has stopped fighting for himself. He's stopped caring for himself. In the aftermath of that War, the Doctor has nothing of what he was, nothing of his people, left to fight for. Instead ... he has Earth. He had humanity. In the wake of the fall of a civilisation, he falls back on what One started, in the accidental kidnap of two humans, what Three cemented, unwillingly, in his exile, what Seven, too, fell back on in the wake of the pain of his fifth and sixth regenerations. The Doctor ... during the Time War, the Doctor sacrificed his own people to save the rest of the universe (a rather unilateral decision, but come back to that), and Earth, humanity, were the symbol of that. The thing he had to protect, to make it worth it. That's ... not conscious, with Nine. He's not thinking about that yet, is staying away from that place in his head, but ... it's there.
And Nine is seeking death. He wants to love, first, he wants to prove he can still feel, he wants to prove there is still some bright somethings in the universe, after the slew of darkness and blood he's just gone through. But he also ... He came from the Time War, through it, and he wants to destroy that, that remnant, the person that did that. So he ... greets his death with glee, and joy, and a fervent wish that he had been fantastic, that everybody lives. Nine was ... the remnants of the War, deliberately short-lived (a Doylist reason, given Eccleston, but Watsonian perspective, it does fit, spectacularly well). Nine was the immediate shock, the immediate pain, the attempt at reconnection, and he segued very, very quickly into Ten.
The Tenth Doctor:
Again, having seen most of Ten (missed a few episodes here or there). Ten is ... complicated. Hoo boy. Ten is complicated. Very Five, bits of Six, those reactions, but also Nine, and dialed up in intensity just by the sheer size and weight of what's happened since. Ten is where it all, everything he's suffered since that first loss in War Games, comes crashing in on him. Ten is where it peaks, where he comes the closest he ever has to becoming all those presentiments, the Master, the Valeyard, the Daleks. The flash in Nine, when that Dalek said to him, "You would make a good Dalek", that ... informs so much of Ten, where those reactions are given free reign.
In terms of trajectory, Ten is in a lot of ways an echo of Six. He's the Doctor going through that process all over again, but deeper, scouringly deep, tearing practically his soul out. Which might be an exaggeration, any other character, any other point in the Doctor's past, but not Ten. Ten is all exaggeration. Pain, love, fury, judgement. The sound and the fury, that's Ten. Where Six lashed out at his people, at what they had done, Ten lashes out at ... the universe, the Daleks, but most of all, most especially, himself. Because it's his fault. Because he's so sorry. Because he knows, now. The innocence Five still had, Six still had, Three still had. That's gone now. He's lost that now. He'd thought, back then, that he could save his people. He destroyed them. He'd thought he could stop the Daleks. He'd started them. He'd thought he could be better than his people, than the Master, than humans. He'd thought he could be better. And all the time, he'd been exactly the dangerous, volatile criminal they'd always thought him to be, and they'd been right to fear him. The Time War cost him everything.
And over the course of this regeneration, much like over the course of his fifth, he keeps losing. Rose. Donna. Martha (like Tegan, so like Tegan, that pain all over again). One genocide, two, but the deaths don't stop. He leads how many races to their deaths (raging against the humans for it, Harriet Jones), or at least feels he has? Like the string of losses that marked his fifth life, it keeps piling up. People running from him. Turning away in exhaustion, or disgust, or pain. People loving him, and being pulled away (he never gets over Rose). People loving him, and the guilt of knowing he can't love them back. Destroying, directly, those he loves (Donna, shit, Donna). Earth, the only thing he has left after the Time War, being threatened every which way.
And the Master. The return of ... someone he'd lost, someone he'd killed, even if it's that someone, and then ... The Master, I think, didn't want to die alone. He went first, so he wouldn't have to die alone, and there is nothing crueler he could have done. Except ... except maybe come back, in the midst of revelations (Rassilon, you utter prick), and die for the Doctor. Yes, as a spectacular 'fuck you' to the Time Lords for what they'd done to him, to both of them, but still. The Doctor, when that happens, is still reeling from Waters of Mars, from what he almost became, from the Valeyard and the Master and the Daleks and the Time War, and the monster he's become, the Oncoming Storm, the bloodstained thing from out of the void, and then ... Then his people come back. The Time Lords come back. Only to betray him. Only to reveal the sheer depths of previous betrayals, the cost to him, to the man who was once his friend. They come back, and he has to destroy them all over again, repeat the decision that led him to Time Lord Victorious in the first place, repeat the Time War ... and in the midst of this, the one thing of his people he thought he might keep, the one thing that always came back, the friend he'd only just remembered, and had a chance to save ... went out in a blaze of savage glory to get vengeance for them both.
Well, shit. If Five's life was a trauma conga line, it was only preparation for Ten. (On a more Doylist level ... New Who is a lot more hysterical than Classic, a lot more ... manic and angsty and ... intense - it makes sense in context, and for the development of the character, but holy shit, people!)
Ten ... Ten was Six all over again, but the pains he's allowing to burst clear are a lot more intense and devasting and all-reaching than those of his younger days. Ten is that same coping mechanism, the fury and righteousness and judgement, the mania, the uncontrolled emotion. And, as with Six, it really doesn't help. As with Six, he is hit, again and again, with the echoes of the Valeyard, the Master, with what he has become. And Ten ... Ten is a lot closer in time to the Valeyard, a lot closer in loss. Watching this live, as it aired ... We will admit to having feared for Eleven, for what he would be, in light of that, in light of Time Lord Victorious. Ten, much like Six, died with a whimper, after all the squalls of rage. He died, and became ...
The Eleventh Doctor:
Eleven. We've seen ... all of his first season, working into his second. Enough to get a grasp of where he is, not enough to see, perhaps, where he is going.
Eleven was ... born in ruins. In a crashing TARDIS, abandoned by his past self to disaster. Admittedly, Ten hadn't known he was coming back, but still. Eleven comes into being ... with some amazement, some joy, and a lot of mania (then again, the Doctor's primary response to danger/pain has always been that). And Eleven, once we settle into him ... actually shows a lot of all his previous lives, the results of them. Our first thought, watching him, was that he was very Classic Who, in a lot of ways. And on a Watsonian level, that's because he's ... the culmination of them, in a way Ten was still too fresh and raw and angry to be.
Not that Eleven isn't angry. In fact, anger is Eleven's defining emotion, really. A hysterical glee, and under it ... anger, rage, exhaustion, despair. Eleven is the regeneration, the life, where the Doctor is beginning to feel his age, his pain, the ruin of his life, the culmination of his fall. He has ... no illusions left, at all. Not about himself, about his people (Rassilon made damn sure of that, even if he himself had been driven by desperation and the madness of being locked for all eternity in an endless, looping war), not about the universe. He's losing faith even in humanity, as Eleven. He wants, he desperately wants for them to prove themselves worthy, worth everything he sacrificed for them, worth what he has become for them (well, for himself, for his people, as a consequence of his history, but he chose Earth, chose us, chose the universe, over his people, his future and himself, twice - he reinacted his genocide, as Ten, for us). Eleven has ... abandoned control, or lost the capability for it. He can't do what he did as Three, as Seven, he can't force the control across himself. There's too much damage, now. He is ... trying to connect, as he did as Three and Seven, but ... His companions, this time, are as fragile as he, and he no longer really has the capacity to allow for that. His desperation ... is showing. Rory picked up on that, more than Amy. He wants them. He wants to hold them. He's afraid, in doing so, he is destroying them.
He's not wrong. Rory knew. Rory said. "You make people want to impress you." You make people kill themselves, for your sake. Even ones ... who know what you are, and what you do to them. (*hugs Rory desperately*)
Eleven is, most basically, tired. Tired and angry, his contempt for his own people swinging slowly, between Ten and here, to humanity. He is in so much pain. He is trying to repeat all those things that once saved him. Earth, family, that saved him as Three. Control, that saved him as Seven. Even, a little, the determined ignoring of pain that helped him as Nine. Judgement, that at least carried him through the losses as Five, as Six. That almost destroyed him as Ten. Eleven is ... scrambling.
And ... trying to save. Something. Someone. Anything. Because that ... has always been the Doctor's first, last and eternal means. I am the Doctor. I fix things. Please, please, let me fix things. Trying to love. Trying to protect. Trying to be ... as good as he still can be. Trying ... not to be the futures he saw. Trying not to be ... the thing they locked in the Pandorica, the thing the universe is so afraid of, now.
Knowing, all the while, that they have reason to be. That they're not wrong. That ... the Time Lords, who he has spent all his life struggling against, saw in him, all those years ago.
Eleven is the culmination of the Doctor, as he has lived so far. Eleven, after the storm of Ten, the fury without end, is where he calms enough for us to see ... what he has become. What he fears, what he feels. What he has left. How much of him is left to try and rebuild. Eleven is ... the survivor, for better or worse, of all that has gone before.
Eleven is the Doctor. And if Eleven could be One again, for even a second, if he could be that naive, innocent, cranky man who went out, in all innocence, into the universe ... he would be very, very happy. For the exact duration of that second. And no more.
Conclusion:
That was ... That was our experience of the Doctor. Really, in some ways, our experience of the show. There were others. Companions, enemies. The Master, most particularly (we really ought to map him out, as we have the Doctor - they are fascinating, laid against each other). So many parts of the show, the tangle that is Who. But this ... We just wanted to explore the Doctor, the man, as we have seen him. The impressions he has made on us.
The Doctor is the reason we watch the show. Companions come and go, the Master leans in and out, but the Doctor is always there. From that moment with Two, when it becomes his story more than just a trip through Time and Space ... That's where we've been watching from. That's were it was ... Doctor Who. Heh.
And now, five billion words later, we are finally going to shut up -_-;
ETA: Apparently, people did fill us in on their Doctors in the comments. *beams happily, points down* Keep reading, yes?
Introduction:
Right. This essay is essentially an attempt on the part of myself and my sister (
livingtolaugh) to resolve something coherent from a series of discussions we've been having for the past few months. The subject, of course, being The Doctor. Not a Doctor, not my Doctor or your Doctor, not the favourite regeneration, but The Doctor. The singular. Because, over the course of these (rather excitable) discussions, our basic realisation was that the Doctor is, was, and always has been, one person. A serial person, granted, but the regenerations have never been separate. They have been one being, which is ... sometimes easy to lose sight of, we think. Everyone has a favourite Doctor. Everyone has their Doctor, Three, Four, Five, Seven, Ten, Eleven. Whichever. The show is forty-something years old. There have been 11 regenerations. That's a long fucking life, whichever way you slice it. It's always, we think, been easier to draw the lines between regenerations, and just call My Doctor.Now, me and my sister, we have our Doctors. Three and Seven, respectively, to be precise. But we've also, through luck or accident or sheer perversity, seen at least a little of all of them, between the two of us (Eight being our major failure -
icarus_chained has seen the TV movie, but neither of us have read the EU novels where he got most of his life). And we've also ... have a really, really hard time, drawing our Doctors from that. Because ... Well. Because it's all the Doctor. And more ... There's been a story. Beyond the serial nature of him. Beyond even the catastrophic moments of his life (his exile, his Trial, the Time War) that defined whole series/seasons after them. The Doctor, the whole way through, has been a person, and his development has been visible across regenerations ('development', admittedly, being perhaps not quite the right word). So ... we wanted to do a little something, lay something out, just to explore that. To explore The Doctor, the man, the singular. Heh.A few warnings beforehand. Neither of us has ever really been involved in the fandom for DW. A few fics here or there between us, the odd discussion. That's about all. So ... if there have been other metas, other essays, following the Doctor, we've obviously not seen them (feel free to rec, by the by). *smiles sheepishly* This is just ... us, personally, exploring this character, this man, and the shapes and stories he makes in our heads. This means that we're writing about each of the regenerations as we see them, not necessarily how everyone does. Heh.
Secondly, though we've seen a little of everything, between the two of us, there are some Doctors we're better on than others (One, Two, and Eight are probably our worst). New Who has been easier to get (and more
livingtolaugh's side), though through natural persistence, we've seen a fair bit of most of the middle Doctors too (Three, Four and Seven, most prominently). The latest seasons, Eleven's later run, is also shaky. One and Two have been hard to access. Eight has been ... very problematic. We've also had little to no contact with the EU (there was forty years of show to get through, there had to be a line somewhere -_-;). Heh. So, you know. If one of our shaky patches is your Doctor, you might want to argue/fill us in. Feel free.Lastly. Hmm. Bear in mind. Because of, you know, forty plus years of development, and the length of time each Doctor was around, all of them were/are far more nuanced than we have room to explore here. The Doctor was always a complicated character, and every regeneration showed that. What we're attempting to track here is an overall character arc, an impression of what each regeneration has meant to the overall person. This means we are leaving out huge chunks of the characterisation and storylines of each individual Doctor. Heh. We are aware of that, and are not overly concerned by it. Though, we are concerned if, by ignorance of a particular regeneration, we're getting something flat wrong. Feel free to correct us on any such mistakes, yes?
Now. *grins* The fun part. *spreads arms, bows* Introducing ... The Doctor.
The Regenerations:
The First Doctor:
Of the first Doctor, what we've seen is the serial The Web of Fear, and some snippets including parts of Aztecs and Edge of Destruction. And perhaps we're slightly disadvantaged, in that the First Doctor was maybe the third or fourth Doctor we came to, after Ten, Three, and Four for one of us, and probably most of the other Ten for the other. Heh. So. Our impressions of him are heavily influenced by later Doctors.
And in view of later Doctors, the first impression of One is that he is young. For all that he's physically the oldest, and thoroughly acts the part of the bitchy, cranky old man who will do things his way, thank you very much, don't argue with him, young man. But ... given what we find out from Two, about why he left Gallifrey ... The First Doctor is the explorer, the young man on the run, reaching out to touch the universe. He has rules (no changing history), because he thinks he ought to have them, but he also interferes, because he thinks someone should. One is where he took the name 'Doctor'. As in, 'I will fix it'.
He is ... ethically/morally rather dubious, considering that he casually kidnaps people, but then, that makes sense. He's still fresh from becoming a criminal, fresh from running, apparently largely just for the sake of running. And he's also ... very innocent, in a lot of ways. He's capable of falling in love, or something like it (Aztecs). He thinks the rules of time are just so, because he hasn't learned differently yet. He fears his people, but not ... not in a knowing kind of way. All that comes later. One is, still, an innocent. Young, idealistic, wanting to shake free of the idle hedonism of his people and do something. With a somewhat naive idea of politics and morality and justice and duty. He has ... a lot of learning to do, has One.
It's kinda of interesting, then, the reverence with which the later Doctors view him. Three Doctors, Five Doctors. There might be an element of ... envy, I suppose, for what they've lost, in him. For what they were. Wisdom uncluttered by knowledge of cost.
One is also ... where he meets Earth, humanity. Where, over the course of his first companions' stories, we begin to matter to him. Where humans start to have valid opinions on their own merits (
icarus_chained loved Barbara, mostly for not being afraid to yell him down and point out his more questionable morals to him). He also has family, though neither of us know enough of Susan's backstory to know how that came about. Heh. But ... he's whole, this Doctor. Cranky and annoyed, but whole. Heh.The Second Doctor:
Again, we haven't seen much of Two. The Invasion, pieces of Web of Fear and War Games. The last, there, and probably most important, we mostly know through reading of, not watching. And it is ... very important, that episode. We've also seen the Three and Five Doctor serials. We haven't seen Two Doctors.
The second Doctor is ... kind of really important to the later development of the character. We know that, even if neither of us has seen enough of him to properly track it. Because Two ... oh, Two is where we are properly introduced to one of the most important relationships in the Doctor's life: his relationship with his people, with the Time Lords. And that relationship is fraught. That relationship is strained and pained, using and reacting, a building fear and bitterness that will shape his next regenerations, will drive an anger and rebellion that will culminate to horrifying effect in the Time War and the choices he will make there. That, all of that, begins here. With Two.
But before that. In the run up to that. Two is ... wandering, and curious, and petulant, and delighted. The youth of One, paired with the knowledge, the experience, that death is no barrier to him. Two is, in some ways, a lack of consequence, not for those around him, but for the Doctor himself. He can stand, and he can fight, and he can fall, and then he can stand again, and now he knows that, and it doesn't have the pain and despair it will come to have later, that realisation. Two has companions, an incredibly vibrant friendship with them (there's probably a reason Two and Jamie, of all the Classic companions, are so often paired). However ... he's also darker than One. Even before War Games. Two, as a Doctor, is often compared to Seven (from what we've seen), as sort of inverses of each other - the chessmaster playing the fool versus the fool playing the chessmaster. The reality is somewhat more complicated, but ... Two is where a lot of the casual darkness of One, the using of others, becomes clearer and more personal. Possibly, in part, because death doesn't have quite the same meaning to him anymore, now that he's experienced regeneration.
Which is what makes what happens in War Games sort of ... all the more horrible, and really explains so, so much of the next few Doctors. Because Two is where he learns ... that he is not free of his people just because he refused them, that he is not free of consequence just because he's immortal, that what he does has real and personal consequences. Whether you take War Games as a direct segue into Spearhead from Space, or take Two Doctors in between (which adds a whole other dimension), the second Doctor was where the cracks between Doctor and Time Lords really, really started to show. For all the serial itself plays it reasonably lightly, the Time Lords did catch him, they did strip him of power, companions and self. They did capture him, kill him, exile him, and remove all remnants of him (for now) from the lives he had touched (Jamie and Zoe). For the 'crime' of interfering, particularly hypocritical when you consider the amount of times the Doctor over his regenerations has been told to meddle by his people (or, if you consider War Games a deliberate sham trial, not so much hypocritical as incredibly manipulative, and a bit 1984-ish). The Doctor ... In One and Two, the rebellion against the Time Lords has been largely impersonal, a mere rejection of principles. After War Games, it becomes a lot more bitter, and a lot more personal. They hurt him, controlled him, used him. Over the course of Three, Four and Six, it becomes obvious that he never, in all his life, really forgave them for it. And then, the Time War ...
But also, in a lot of ways, what the Doctor learned as Two, what the Time Lords showed him as Two, was also necessary for him. The knowledge of consequence, the knowledge of overseers and beings of sufficient power to call him to task, was/is a potent force in his life (and one only has to look at Ten to see the consequences of taking that away). His second regeneration was a potent turning point for the Doctor, and really the start of his personal story, in a lot of ways. Shifting the focus of the show off the history, and onto the people. Making it personal, not just for the companions, but for him.
The Third Doctor:
Now we come to one of Our Doctors. Three is
icarus_chained's Doctor, the first she met after (early) Ten, and the first that made her love the show. Of Three, we've seen in particular Spearhead From Space, Inferno, Three Doctors, the entire one-and-a-bit seasons featuring the Delgado!Master, and the odd serial from the later seasons (missing, admittedly, quite a few of the Sarah-Jane episodes).Three was ... really, a direct result of Two, and what happened to Two. Three was not a wanted man, he was a prisoner, and an exile. Three had lost not only his own freedom, but his companions, and everything he'd ever done for them (which, considering the strength of the bonds Two had had, was a hard blow - also considering where, exactly, Jamie was dropped back into). He was stuck on Earth, his own mind meddled with to keep him there, gradually let back off again, but initially, mostly, at the Time Lords' behest. Three was, consequently, not a happy camper. He was, in fact, bitter and snappish and brusque, and with all the interpersonal skills of a plank. He was fearful, and much more rigidly devoted to the rules, quite probably in reaction to the fact that breaking them had just recently resulted in all of the above. Three was a man who'd just been knocked, hard, and who was trying, not always successfully, to rebuild a life despite it. The fact that his regeneration itself was forced on him also probably didn't help matters at all. That resentment, that bitterness, the fact that he was forced to earn his freedom from his own people, shaped a lot of his later interactions with them.
But Three is also ... He's grown up. A lot. He's raw and damaged from Two, and fearfully sticking to the rules, and disgusted at himself for it, but also ... Three is where he starts to learn to be a hero, rather than just a wandering meddler with good intentions. To stand up for or reject the rules not just because they're the rules, but because they mean something. Three is flamboyant and bitter and snappish, but he is also the Doctor with a family, with a support structure, with an enforced consistent interaction with other ('lesser') people. His time in exile, with UNIT in particular, really changes the Doctor, and his views of the people around him. It's his first real experience with working as a part of something, something that in a lot of ways will never again be repeated. He resents it (the speed with which Four drops UNIT like a hot rock suggests quite a bit), but while he's part of it ... we think he liked it. The almost-equal relationship between the Doctor and the Brigadier, started here, is one of
icarus_chained's favourite parts of Classic Who, and it's something that would never have been possible in either of his first regenerations, where he still had a very strong tendancy to view humans/companions as, well, silly things to be protected. The more mentoring relationships he builds with the likes of Jo and Sarah Jane set a lot of the standards for his later relationships, too. Three, unlike any other Doctor before or since, was connected to something, in a linear fashion, and it probably enabled some of his later stability, and also cemented his connection to Earth and humanity, for which he would basically later sacrifice his own people. So. You know. An important stage, Three. Three is also where we are introduced to another of the keystone relationships in the Doctor's life: the friendly, tragic, desperate, vicious connection he has to another renegade Time Lord, and one of his oldest friends. With Three, we meet the Master, and we get a glimpse ... in a lot of ways, at the Doctor's future. He and the Master, though it's not immediately obvious from this era, are intimately connected, and one of the few constants of each other's lives. And ... the Doctor was warned of the Master's coming, by the Time Lords. The backstory between the two before this point, and between the Master and the Time Lords, is ... confused and/or nonexistant (that we've seen - if people have more information, feel free), but it is obviously there, and it is obviously potent. The trajectory the Master takes from this point on, from genteel, still-somewhat-honourable, controlled man into increasing insanity, desperation and bloodshed, is in some ways a truncated version of the one the Doctor appears to take, a forboding echo, really. Three is the regeneration in which the Doctor and the Master both have the best chance at reconcilation, at helping each other, at mutual defiance. And it ... never happens. Sometimes, considering the paths the both of them took later, we wonder what would have happened if that chance had ever materialised (rumours that before Roger Delgado's tragic death, the Master was supposed to die saving the Doctor do not help this speculation).
Three is a key stage in the development of the Doctor's relationships with Earth/humanity, with the Time Lords, and with the Master. It's also ... a key stage in his moral development, the understanding, however much he resents it, that the rules have merit, and sometimes are there for a reason. It was a vicious lesson to learn, forced upon him, but it was also potent (witness Eleven and his fear with rules).
The Fourth Doctor:
For a lot of people, the Doctor. Also one of the hardest to pin, just on sheer length of time and number of stories involved. Not one of our better Doctors, it must be admitted. There was simply ... too much, with Four. What we have seen ... Robot, Pyramids of Mars, Hand of Fear/Deadly Assassin, Image of Fendahl, the Keys of Time series, The Leisure Hive, then the trilogy bridging Four and Five starting in Keepers of Traken. So ... not a bad mixing, really. *sheepish*
Four ... Four was ... complicated. In a lot of ways, Four is the zenith of the Doctor, or at least, the last moment of real innocence. Everything after that is a long, slow fall towards ... the decline of the Time Lord civilisation and the Time War, and New Who, where he is so broken. Four is the height, really, before that. The zenith. Four is ... arrogant, and aloof, and maintains a certain dispassion where he can. He is eccentric, almost belligerantly so. He is sometimes more childish in his behaviours that previous Doctors (definitely more so than Three, but more on that later), partly as smokescreen, partly as an act of defiance. He is also ... Hmm. Four is personally powerful, in conjunction with still being mostly sane, in a way he had never been before, and would never have the chance to be again. Four is whole enough and powerful enough to tangle with the likes of the Guardians, to interact with the Time Lords on a reasonably equal and non-antagonistic footing. He ... connects differently with his people than he did before, or ever will again.
There's still fear, in Four, though. Still reaction to what has gone before. The exploration of his first regenerations, given wing again after the enforced exile of Three. The resentment for the level of connection that was forced on him as Three - while he gained his freedom from Earth well before the regeneration into Four, it's only after that regeneration that he drops UNIT, suddenly and all at once, and practically flings himself back out into the stars - as Three, he still felt a connection and duty, but the opportunity of regeneration, a new face, allows him to reject it, in part. The fear and resentment of his people (interesting, when he's summoned before them in Deadly Assassin, he will NOT let Sarah Jane come, for all she wants to see Gallifrey. He drops her off, sends her home, rather than willingly bringing her before his people. Considering what happened to Jamie and Zoe, that's rather telling - he's willing to tangle with them on his own merits and at his own risk, but not his companions', not again). There is a lot of Four that's still recovering from what he went through in his past two regenerations.
There is also, however, a lot of him that's learned from it. Four is outwardly more childish, his behaviours more eccentric (again, I think, in an effort to distance himself from what he was as Three, from the man he'd become in reaction to forcing), but his motives have much matured. He's more careful and more conscious of consequences than One or Two would have been. He interacts with people, companions, differently. And, of course, there's the fact that one of those companions, for the first time, was another Time Lord. Someone who might have been less in experience, but was his equal in power, and superior in standing. Romana ... taught him a lot, I think. His actions might have been mysterious to her, but his past wasn't, not the way it had been to other companions. She learned from him, but he learned from the act of teaching someone so much closer to being his equal, from caring for someone so much closer to being his equal. Romana was ... a very interesting addition/complication to his interactions with his own people.
And those interactions ... the slant of them changes, with Four. He's afraid of them. He can still be forced by them (including, among other things, into attempting to stop the development of the Daleks - this is where the seeds of the Time War are sown, and it's partially his fault - he could not destroy them, though he did hinder them, and Davros found out about the Time Lords' meddling from him, at the very birth of the Daleks themselves - partially the Doctor's fault, definitely also the Time Lords). He will not risk his companions to them. But he also feels capable of returning to them, directly interfereing in their politics, choosing who lives and who dies among his own people. He begins to be capable, in this incarnation, of fighting them, not just running from them, and fighting for them, and also of judging which, if any, is appropriate. He wants, in this incarnation, to save them from themselves. While he learns from the Guardians at the same time, that White is often only a disguise for Black, that all the power in the world might not justify you. Four is ... where the Doctor is most capable, and least damaging, where he learns most with least pain to himself. At least in some ways.
It's in Four's era, though, that we begin to get presentiments of his future, mostly in the form of the Master. Who has run out of regenerations, is set against their people, and is desperate, destructive, willing to do anything at all. Four stops him. Four protects the Time Lords from him (Deadly Assassin), Four rejects everything the Master tells him, though will still work with him when necessary. But their relationship past this point will never recover. And the Master's insanity (complicated by New Who and Rassilon, and the drumming, but even just the fact of his dying is visibly driving the Master to despair, here) shows the eventual costs of the lives he and the Doctor lead, the sheer build up of trauma and its effects. Four's death is forewarned to him, and he accepts it calmly enough - that's arrogance/confidence, and the lessons he's learned so far. Four's death is at the Master's hand (the only one of the regenerations that directly was, as far as I know), and after the accidental destruction of a decent portion of the universe, despite his best efforts. That's what he's going to learn, in the future. The presentiment, at the death of Four, was more than just his own regeneration, we think. It was his entire future. Four was the zenith, the point of most potential, the Doctor at his most serene and confident (though also manic and childish, because, well, he's him). What comes after, inevitably, is the fall.
The Fifth Doctor:
Again, we are somewhat shaky on Five. We've seen Castrovalva, as part of the trilogy leading from Keeper of Traken and Logopolis. Not Earthshock, but if you've read anything on Five, you'll know what happened there. Parts of Arc of Infinity, parts of the Turlough/Black Guardian arc, The Five Doctors, and then the last three serials leading up to Caves of Androzani.
Five is ... Okay. See. From Four on, the Doctor is getting increasingly complicated, just from sheer weight of history. Okay, from Two on, but still. Five ... Our first impressions of Five were of ... relative fragility, and also relative moral ambiguity. Not out of a desire for evil, but out of an increasing struggle to know what the right thing to do was. Over the course of this regeneration, the Doctor begins to lose companions traumatically in ways he hasn't since Jamie and Zoe (Earthshock, Resurrection of the Daleks). He begins to increasingly run up against the flaws in his own people (Arc of Infinity, where they executed him, rather more permanently than they had Two, and for less reason, and also Five Doctors). His relationship with the Master tanks out (after intermittent attempts of foil each other, Planet of Fire comes along, and the Doctor stands by and watches as the Master burns to death). His own moral compass starts to be severely shaken (Resurrection of the Daleks - where Four was willing to, possibly, destroy the Daleks but couldn't, Five fully intends to assassinate Davros, bottles it for a full few minutes where he can't bring himself to go forward, and then loses his opportunity). He suffers from personal 'cosmic angst', where his very existence, past, present and future, comes under direct threat (Five Doctors, Arc of Infinity). He spends a hell of a lot of time dealing with old enemies (the entirety of season 20), the fallout from his triumphs in previous incarnations. The entirety of this regeneration, in short, is one long trauma conga line, and by the end of it, it really shows.
Five is the regeneration where the Doctor begins to lose faith. In himself, in his people, in his companions, in his successes. He failed Adric, he failed Tegan, Turlough he had to fight tooth and nail for, he died, very traumatically, to keep from losing/failing Peri. His own people executed him to prevent another Renegade using him, not to mention Omega, Borusa, and the fact that Gallifrey has a Death Zone. The Master, for a start is walking around wearing the corpse of one of his companion's father, is very obviously insane (though no longer as desperate as he was when his previous incarnation was dying), keeps coming back to interfere with the Doctor, and eventually ... burns to death while the Doctor watches. His oldest friendship, for all the hits it took with Four, is now rather comprehensively smashed, and the Master, as far as the Doctor knows, will never come back. And Tegan ... Tegan leaves him, out of pain and exhaustion and disgust, and he doesn't ever get over that (particular since it's his failed attempt to assassinate Davros that prompts it). And so, so much of that, of that chain of tragedies, is the result of the Doctor's own past actions (and his people's), and he knows it.
Basically? Everything he pulled back after his loses as Two, everything he built over Three and Four, was ripped away from him in this incarnation. Everything he goes through after the Time War? He went through first here. Five is the start of the fall. Five is where he really starts to learn about consequences, and the limits of power, and the flaws of the Time Lords, and his own, personal failings, and what they cost those around him. Two, it was his people's fault. Five, it's his, and he doesn't ever come back from that. Five is where the Doctor ... starts to break.
The Sixth Doctor:
One of our least well known Doctors. He's ... not popular, is Six. But we ... love him, but ... are greatly pained by him. Heh. As for what we've seen ... Timelash, Mark of the Rani, and Trial of a Timelord. Which, actually, is quite a lot of Six.
Six is ... Pain. Anger. Desperation. Arrogance. Despair. Fractured innocence. He was born directly from Five's death, from that last desperate effort to save someone, to save Peri. He went through a very traumatic regeneration (they actually just seem to get worse from here on - Seven's was no picnic, Eight's resulted in amnesia, Nine's was in the middle of the Time War, Nine ceded to Ten with glee, Ten went with a whimper - seriously, it just gets worse from here). And he comes out ... manic. Loud. Surface cowardly. Arrogant, pompous, demanding, judgemental. He comes out bubbling with anger and desperation, and runs through this regeneration searching for some way to vent it. Six is ... all the pain and rage of Five, worn right out in the open.
Nowhere is that more clear than in his second season, in Trial of a Timelord. That's ... He faces his people, at last, he is put on Trial by them, and he is vicious. Contemptuous. Furious. So childish. Everything they did to Two, to Four, to Five. Everything they set up with the Daleks. He lashes out at them here. That speech, calling them a 'decadent race' ... That's born from such pain. From such anger. He stands in judgement over them, because he will not let them stand over him any longer. And he has lost ... all illusions, with Six. About them, at least. He still clings to some about himself, and the rest of the universe. He has no hope for his people left, though. But ... he still saves them. And this time ... from himself. From a future self.
Trial of a Timelord introduces one of the creepiest characters in Who, especially in light of New Who, and in particular of Ten. In this serial, we meet the Valeyard. We meet the Doctor's future, literally (well, part of it, depending on how much of the Doctor the Valeyard is made of, and how much has been rewritten since). And this future self (somewhere between 12th and last regenerations, according to the Master - who is, admittedly, not the most reliable testimony) is ... cold, calculating, gleeful, destructive. He scares the Master. He rigs the Trial, almost destroys his past self, apparently out of contempt, and directly attacks everything the Time Lords stand for. He is defeated. Between the Doctor, Peri, the Master and the High Council, the Valeyard is stopped, at least for now. But none of that changes the fact that he existed (will exist - Timey Wimey Ball). That is ... the Doctor's potential future. And looking at Ten, at Time Lord Victorious ... That's still in the cards. That's scarily possible. The Valeyard is part of a trine, Master, Dalek, Valeyard, that show the darkest potentials for the Doctor, and he keeps veering into them.
There's also the possibility, sort of horrible, that we meet for the first time here, that the Time Lords were right about the Doctor. That they've always been right. He is dangerous. He is destructive. And, in the end, he really did destroy them. Now, they called a lot of it on themselves. But he was the instrument. And that's ... a hard thought to have.
But ... balanced against it. Six is not without hope, for all the rage and mania of him. He loves Peri (in his own, kinda twisted way). He will sacrifice for her, for those that matter to him, the way the Doctor always has, always will. He stood up against the Valeyard. Stood, even, beside the Master, after all they've gone through recently (not that the Master returned that, but then, you should never, ever present your back and/or opportunity to that man). He was ... even as low, as pained as he was here, in Six, he was still the Doctor. He was still a good man, as best he knew how. That counts for something. It does. It has to.
The Seventh Doctor:
Seven is, again, one of Our Doctors.
livingtolaugh came to Who via Ten, but landed on Seven, and both of us love him dearly. Of him, we have seen parts of Time and the Rani, Dragonfire, some of Curse of Fenric, and then the run to the end, Battlefield, Survival, Ghostlight.Seven is, we think, a direct response to Six and Five, much as Three was a direct response to Two. Seven is the chessmaster (or tries to be), the ruthless, contemptuous, controlled man. A reaction, we think, to the emotional explosion that was Six, the results of it, the lashing out against his people. Seven, after a rather unpleasant regeneration and some amnesia problems, seems to have reacted to who he was as Six by cultivating a rigid sense of control, and also an attempted emotional distance, from anything and everything. He pulled back, forced calm and calculation over the rawness of his previous two regenerations, and set about attempting to manipulate and control everything around him. Probably, we think, in an attempt to never allow what happened to him as Five, and his reactions as Six, to ever happen again. Which ... actually appears to have been successful, at least as long as this regeneration lasted (though spectacularly not, once the Time War hits). Seven is one of the longest visibly running regenerations (because of the timeskip between the end of the series and the Eighth Doctor movie), so he apparently held it, held that control, successfully for a long time (though, judging by the emptiness of the TARDIS at the beginning of the movie, not without personal cost). Though the control is ... tested.
Seven, for all his attempted distance, is also the period where the Doctor reconnects with a lot of people. He makes a partnership with Ace that is almost reminiscent of his earlier partnerships with Jamie, Jo, Sarah Jane, Susan. Something almost paternal, in a lot of ways (though given the ruthlessness of his using of her, perhaps all the creepier for that). He reconnects, in a way none of the previous regenerations had, with UNIT, with the Brigadier, with Earth (Battlefield). The stories in this regeneration become ... a lot more personal, once again, to him and to his companions. He appears to have sworn off the Time Lords altogether (not that we blame him), and after Six and his explosion against them, one suspects they weren't all that eager to bother him, either. He also ... reconnects with the Master, if very briefly, in one very poignant moment of realisation between them (Survival - where both of them are reduced to their most animalistic, barbaric, set against each other, to kill each other, and the Doctor can't. This time, unlike Four, Five, he can't, and begs the Master to remember that also, to not let the thing inside him control his actions - in light of the drumming, that's ... so goddamn painful).
Seven, though, is also a return to the ruthlessness of his early regenerations, that he lost in the traumas of Five and Six. After Six, he has ... become judgemental, in a lot of ways, but colder than Six' anger. More like One, Two, perhaps Four. He has ... come through a fire, and been convinced of his righteousness through it, regaining a lot of the early fire, and losing a lot of the fear he's held since Three for his people. Seven plays chess against monsters, in a way the Doctor hasn't since Four, and with much the same confidence. But ... he hasn't lost the fragility of what happened since. Seven bumbles, makes mistakes, is unsure. Flipside of Two, the fool pretending, in some desperation, to be the chessmaster. The remoteness he cultivates isn't nearly as successful as it was for Four. He needs too much, has lost too much. Ace, the Brigadier, they matter to him, now, for what he has lost since. He clings, a little bit. Which ... makes it somewhat tragic, that by the time of Eight, he appears to have ... lost all that.
Seven is a return of some personal calm, after the wars of his Fifth and Sixth regenerations, a calmer eddy brought about by rigid control, and to a large extent a refusal, once again, to involve himself with his people. They ... really are/were/have been, a far more influential part of the Doctor's life than he ever, ever wanted them to be, or would admit.
The Eighth Doctor:
Canon-wise, Eight is the most problematic for us.
icarus_chained has seen the movie, as we said, but neither of us have read the EU novels, so. Which is ... a pity, because somewhere in there was the man who would fight the Time War, the man who would become, in fire and pain, the Ninth Doctor. But anyway. (As an aside, we'd forgotten that Seven, in becoming Eight, was also killed by the Master, if indirectly - interesting echo of Four, considering).From what we have seen of Eight ... Hmm. Again, he was born from trauma, though from a calmer place - Seven would seem to have indulged in a small retirement, in the lead up to the movie. The Master, once more dying and bodiless and desperate, interferes once again with the Doctor (apparently he learned after Deadly Assassin, not to mention Five Doctors, that hitting up the Time Lords for extra lives is not worth it - though, really, he's always come to the Doctor, in need. Mostly to backstab him in an attempt to get what he needs, but still - plot or no, asking for his remains to be returned to Gallifrey, by the Doctor, says ... something). That it was apparently the Daleks who brought him down is ... interesting, considering the trine of Doctor/Master/Dalek that's been echoing through the past four regenerations. But, anyway. The Master's interference, and then random chance and a shooting in an alleyway, result in the birth of a Doctor that is amnesiac, confused, and convinced he is part human (two things: a) again, the regenerations are increasingly having that kind of consequence - one gets the impression that Time Lord regenerations are not supposed to be enacted under circumstances of serial, repeated trauma, and b) we're not sure if the whole 'half-human' thing was ever canonically explained - given the trauma of the regeneration, we've always assumed that he was just genuinely confused and amnesiac, and having spent so much of his life around humans, came to a spur of the moment conclusion that had no physical basis - the Doctor has always been alien to us, and we prefer him that way).
Eight, at least in the movie, appears to have a lot of Five in him. We're assuming he strengthened a lot over the course of the EU, but he's very fragile in the movie, and also, given the ending and the Master's death, again somewhat ruthless when he needs to be, or is desperate. The movie ... really says a lot more for the Master's story than it does for the Doctor's - his death, again, into the Eye of Harmony, and his being later resurrected (apparently, given the age at which Yana was found, as a child) by the Time Lords for the purposes of their war ... It's more about the Master than the Doctor, really.
The rest of Eight's history is one we (as in, us two personally) don't know. At some point, the Time War started. Given the events of the movie, the sentancing to death by the Daleks of a Time Lord (even a renegade one, and the wrong renegade), hostilities were certainly hotting up. Davros had known since his beginning that the Time Lords were against his creations (Four, Genesis of the Daleks), and the repeated attempts by the Doctor and the Time Lords would have spurred that. So ... somewhere along the line, in this regeneration, the Doctor begins to fight the Time War, the Master is resurrected by the Time Lords, and the whole universe goes to shit. Whether the Doctor regenerates during the fighting, or immediately afterwards, it's probable that at least some of his actions during the War, and possibly the key ones, were as Eight (if there is canon contradiction of this, fill us in, yes?). So. Not so harmless, then?
The Ninth Doctor:
Nine, the shellshocked veteran. Nine, we've seen all of, what little there was (from here on out, up until Eleven's second season, we've seen most of it - New Who is much easier to get a hold of, and we could watch a lot as it came out). And Nine ... isn't really all that complicated, on the face of it.
Nine is, mostly, raw shock, and the reaction to the Time War. A lot of what he endured as Three, and as Six/Seven, a lot of what he'd tried to rebuild after those traumas, comes back as Nine, but ... Well, the Time War was a huge fucking trauma. It's not every day a war you were instrumental in starting, all the way back when, forces you to genocide not one, but two races, one of them your own. And whatever problems the Doctor has had with his people, whatever they have taken from him over the years, he never, never wanted that. Even if he wanted any genocide, at all, which he had never, over the course of his previous eight regenerations, seemed capable of (Four, possibly, against the Daleks, maybe Seven at a push), he has always fought for his people. Always tried to protect them, if usually against themselves. For all his hatred of what they did, what they'd become, he never wanted them destroyed. Judging from things we learn from Ten, from Eleven, from the Master, the things that happened during the Time War, the things that were done, by everyone, were horrific, and the costs of them incalculable. The Master once destroyed a decent fraction of the universe by accident. The Time War was something far more deliberate.
And Nine ... Nine is living out the shock of that. Nine is doing his damnedest not to think about that. Nine is ... a shocked, calm shell through which bursts of extreme emotion erupt. Everything is edged with him - joy, glee, desperation, anger. He ... has stopped fighting for himself. He's stopped caring for himself. In the aftermath of that War, the Doctor has nothing of what he was, nothing of his people, left to fight for. Instead ... he has Earth. He had humanity. In the wake of the fall of a civilisation, he falls back on what One started, in the accidental kidnap of two humans, what Three cemented, unwillingly, in his exile, what Seven, too, fell back on in the wake of the pain of his fifth and sixth regenerations. The Doctor ... during the Time War, the Doctor sacrificed his own people to save the rest of the universe (a rather unilateral decision, but come back to that), and Earth, humanity, were the symbol of that. The thing he had to protect, to make it worth it. That's ... not conscious, with Nine. He's not thinking about that yet, is staying away from that place in his head, but ... it's there.
And Nine is seeking death. He wants to love, first, he wants to prove he can still feel, he wants to prove there is still some bright somethings in the universe, after the slew of darkness and blood he's just gone through. But he also ... He came from the Time War, through it, and he wants to destroy that, that remnant, the person that did that. So he ... greets his death with glee, and joy, and a fervent wish that he had been fantastic, that everybody lives. Nine was ... the remnants of the War, deliberately short-lived (a Doylist reason, given Eccleston, but Watsonian perspective, it does fit, spectacularly well). Nine was the immediate shock, the immediate pain, the attempt at reconnection, and he segued very, very quickly into Ten.
The Tenth Doctor:
Again, having seen most of Ten (missed a few episodes here or there). Ten is ... complicated. Hoo boy. Ten is complicated. Very Five, bits of Six, those reactions, but also Nine, and dialed up in intensity just by the sheer size and weight of what's happened since. Ten is where it all, everything he's suffered since that first loss in War Games, comes crashing in on him. Ten is where it peaks, where he comes the closest he ever has to becoming all those presentiments, the Master, the Valeyard, the Daleks. The flash in Nine, when that Dalek said to him, "You would make a good Dalek", that ... informs so much of Ten, where those reactions are given free reign.
In terms of trajectory, Ten is in a lot of ways an echo of Six. He's the Doctor going through that process all over again, but deeper, scouringly deep, tearing practically his soul out. Which might be an exaggeration, any other character, any other point in the Doctor's past, but not Ten. Ten is all exaggeration. Pain, love, fury, judgement. The sound and the fury, that's Ten. Where Six lashed out at his people, at what they had done, Ten lashes out at ... the universe, the Daleks, but most of all, most especially, himself. Because it's his fault. Because he's so sorry. Because he knows, now. The innocence Five still had, Six still had, Three still had. That's gone now. He's lost that now. He'd thought, back then, that he could save his people. He destroyed them. He'd thought he could stop the Daleks. He'd started them. He'd thought he could be better than his people, than the Master, than humans. He'd thought he could be better. And all the time, he'd been exactly the dangerous, volatile criminal they'd always thought him to be, and they'd been right to fear him. The Time War cost him everything.
And over the course of this regeneration, much like over the course of his fifth, he keeps losing. Rose. Donna. Martha (like Tegan, so like Tegan, that pain all over again). One genocide, two, but the deaths don't stop. He leads how many races to their deaths (raging against the humans for it, Harriet Jones), or at least feels he has? Like the string of losses that marked his fifth life, it keeps piling up. People running from him. Turning away in exhaustion, or disgust, or pain. People loving him, and being pulled away (he never gets over Rose). People loving him, and the guilt of knowing he can't love them back. Destroying, directly, those he loves (Donna, shit, Donna). Earth, the only thing he has left after the Time War, being threatened every which way.
And the Master. The return of ... someone he'd lost, someone he'd killed, even if it's that someone, and then ... The Master, I think, didn't want to die alone. He went first, so he wouldn't have to die alone, and there is nothing crueler he could have done. Except ... except maybe come back, in the midst of revelations (Rassilon, you utter prick), and die for the Doctor. Yes, as a spectacular 'fuck you' to the Time Lords for what they'd done to him, to both of them, but still. The Doctor, when that happens, is still reeling from Waters of Mars, from what he almost became, from the Valeyard and the Master and the Daleks and the Time War, and the monster he's become, the Oncoming Storm, the bloodstained thing from out of the void, and then ... Then his people come back. The Time Lords come back. Only to betray him. Only to reveal the sheer depths of previous betrayals, the cost to him, to the man who was once his friend. They come back, and he has to destroy them all over again, repeat the decision that led him to Time Lord Victorious in the first place, repeat the Time War ... and in the midst of this, the one thing of his people he thought he might keep, the one thing that always came back, the friend he'd only just remembered, and had a chance to save ... went out in a blaze of savage glory to get vengeance for them both.
Well, shit. If Five's life was a trauma conga line, it was only preparation for Ten. (On a more Doylist level ... New Who is a lot more hysterical than Classic, a lot more ... manic and angsty and ... intense - it makes sense in context, and for the development of the character, but holy shit, people!)
Ten ... Ten was Six all over again, but the pains he's allowing to burst clear are a lot more intense and devasting and all-reaching than those of his younger days. Ten is that same coping mechanism, the fury and righteousness and judgement, the mania, the uncontrolled emotion. And, as with Six, it really doesn't help. As with Six, he is hit, again and again, with the echoes of the Valeyard, the Master, with what he has become. And Ten ... Ten is a lot closer in time to the Valeyard, a lot closer in loss. Watching this live, as it aired ... We will admit to having feared for Eleven, for what he would be, in light of that, in light of Time Lord Victorious. Ten, much like Six, died with a whimper, after all the squalls of rage. He died, and became ...
The Eleventh Doctor:
Eleven. We've seen ... all of his first season, working into his second. Enough to get a grasp of where he is, not enough to see, perhaps, where he is going.
Eleven was ... born in ruins. In a crashing TARDIS, abandoned by his past self to disaster. Admittedly, Ten hadn't known he was coming back, but still. Eleven comes into being ... with some amazement, some joy, and a lot of mania (then again, the Doctor's primary response to danger/pain has always been that). And Eleven, once we settle into him ... actually shows a lot of all his previous lives, the results of them. Our first thought, watching him, was that he was very Classic Who, in a lot of ways. And on a Watsonian level, that's because he's ... the culmination of them, in a way Ten was still too fresh and raw and angry to be.
Not that Eleven isn't angry. In fact, anger is Eleven's defining emotion, really. A hysterical glee, and under it ... anger, rage, exhaustion, despair. Eleven is the regeneration, the life, where the Doctor is beginning to feel his age, his pain, the ruin of his life, the culmination of his fall. He has ... no illusions left, at all. Not about himself, about his people (Rassilon made damn sure of that, even if he himself had been driven by desperation and the madness of being locked for all eternity in an endless, looping war), not about the universe. He's losing faith even in humanity, as Eleven. He wants, he desperately wants for them to prove themselves worthy, worth everything he sacrificed for them, worth what he has become for them (well, for himself, for his people, as a consequence of his history, but he chose Earth, chose us, chose the universe, over his people, his future and himself, twice - he reinacted his genocide, as Ten, for us). Eleven has ... abandoned control, or lost the capability for it. He can't do what he did as Three, as Seven, he can't force the control across himself. There's too much damage, now. He is ... trying to connect, as he did as Three and Seven, but ... His companions, this time, are as fragile as he, and he no longer really has the capacity to allow for that. His desperation ... is showing. Rory picked up on that, more than Amy. He wants them. He wants to hold them. He's afraid, in doing so, he is destroying them.
He's not wrong. Rory knew. Rory said. "You make people want to impress you." You make people kill themselves, for your sake. Even ones ... who know what you are, and what you do to them. (*hugs Rory desperately*)
Eleven is, most basically, tired. Tired and angry, his contempt for his own people swinging slowly, between Ten and here, to humanity. He is in so much pain. He is trying to repeat all those things that once saved him. Earth, family, that saved him as Three. Control, that saved him as Seven. Even, a little, the determined ignoring of pain that helped him as Nine. Judgement, that at least carried him through the losses as Five, as Six. That almost destroyed him as Ten. Eleven is ... scrambling.
And ... trying to save. Something. Someone. Anything. Because that ... has always been the Doctor's first, last and eternal means. I am the Doctor. I fix things. Please, please, let me fix things. Trying to love. Trying to protect. Trying to be ... as good as he still can be. Trying ... not to be the futures he saw. Trying not to be ... the thing they locked in the Pandorica, the thing the universe is so afraid of, now.
Knowing, all the while, that they have reason to be. That they're not wrong. That ... the Time Lords, who he has spent all his life struggling against, saw in him, all those years ago.
Eleven is the culmination of the Doctor, as he has lived so far. Eleven, after the storm of Ten, the fury without end, is where he calms enough for us to see ... what he has become. What he fears, what he feels. What he has left. How much of him is left to try and rebuild. Eleven is ... the survivor, for better or worse, of all that has gone before.
Eleven is the Doctor. And if Eleven could be One again, for even a second, if he could be that naive, innocent, cranky man who went out, in all innocence, into the universe ... he would be very, very happy. For the exact duration of that second. And no more.
Conclusion:
That was ... That was our experience of the Doctor. Really, in some ways, our experience of the show. There were others. Companions, enemies. The Master, most particularly (we really ought to map him out, as we have the Doctor - they are fascinating, laid against each other). So many parts of the show, the tangle that is Who. But this ... We just wanted to explore the Doctor, the man, as we have seen him. The impressions he has made on us.
The Doctor is the reason we watch the show. Companions come and go, the Master leans in and out, but the Doctor is always there. From that moment with Two, when it becomes his story more than just a trip through Time and Space ... That's where we've been watching from. That's were it was ... Doctor Who. Heh.
And now, five billion words later, we are finally going to shut up -_-;
ETA: Apparently, people did fill us in on their Doctors in the comments. *beams happily, points down* Keep reading, yes?
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