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.
