Ah, the metacrisis Doctor. A tease of the audience, a narrative cheat (in multiple ways,) and in my view, a bit of a waste of a regeneration. However, since he does canonically count as a regeneration, here we are (spoilers for “Journey’s End.)
Indicative, I suppose, of the “I don’t want to go” attitude that will permeate the Tenth Doctor’s final stories (for the worse, in my opinion,) Ten point Five is created shortly after Ten literally cheats his way around the circle of life – ironic for a Doctor who quoted that very song in his first episode. Cut down by a Dalek moments before finally reuniting with Rose, Ten starts to regenerate. However, with a bit of extra Doctorness conveniently nearby (his hand in a jar – only on Doctor Who could this be a casual thing,) he manages to use the regeneration energy to heal himself and then shunts the excess off into the hand, thus remaining Ten for a bit longer. Little does he know, though, the regeneration energy keeps marinating in the hand, and when Donna touches the jar later on, the hand grows into a new, identical Doctor whose personality is a combination of Ten’s and Donna’s.
So, we blow an entire regeneration (and with it, an average of three years’ worth of stories) on a Doctor who’s around for less than a single episode, looks like/is played by the same actor as the current Doctor, and shares the personality of both the current Doctor and his current companion. Oh, and Ten later implies (through some weird/judgy logic) that Ten point Five is actually just like Nine when Rose met him. At least Eight and Eight point Five, the other incredibly short-lived Doctors, get their own characterizations. I blame RTD for coming up with a plot-point Doctor who never really gets to be himself, and for throwing in the “Time Lord with a human lifespan” thing just to give Rose her very own Doctor to take home, and I later blame Moffat for counting both Eight point Five and Ten point Five as official regenerations in the eleventh hour (see what I did there?), meaning we only get to see the Doctor actually acting like he’s on his last regeneration for less than a single episode. Think of the story potential involved in the Doctor knowing there’s no coming back this time! How would it affect their choices and actions, what would their outlook be on how they want to spend their last life? Instead, nada. (Let’s not talk about “The Timeless Children” right now)
That’s a lot about how Ten point Five’s existence fits within the series as a whole, but what about Ten point Five himself? Despite the pointlessness I already noted, I do kind of enjoy him in his manic post-regeneration scenes with Donna. He’s very childlike and scatterbrained, with a mind like a speeding bullet train that left his mouth a full three stops behind racing to catch up. It’s fun to watch him discover a) how he’s biologically different, what with the Time Lord/human combo and b) just how much of Donna got mixed into his personality. His presence is bonkers and weird, but for those scenes of them together in the TARDIS, it’s amusing.
Then the big climax happens and I get annoyed all over again. First off, the whole “fulfilling the prophecy” thing is dumb, but whatever, What really irritates me is Ten treating him like a monster for destroying the Daleks, as if the stuff with the Gelth, the Racnoss, hell, the Time War never happened (and no, we’re not gonna talk about “The Day of the Doctor” either.) The Doctor has killed, sometimes on a tremendous scale, multiple times, so I don’t see what marks Ten point Five as so particularly terrible – is it because he didn’t agonize over the decision or seem regretful afterward? If that’s the case, then Ten really has no business comparing him to Nine, who’s so often a raw nerve of regret. Also, what was Ten’s plan for the Daleks? To let them go on their merry way, slaughtering across the cosmos? The whole thing feels sloppy and ill-conceived. Most of it may come from external storytelling things that Ten point Five has no control over, but they still all come together to reflect badly on him.
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