Do you remember that moment in 'Partners in Crime' where Donna tells the Doctor he looked older? Brilliantly written, because not only does it explain obvious things (DT does look older in s3 and 4, but can I just say - HOT AF?😁), but also.... grief tends to age people? And he's grieving Rose.
It's honestly beyond me how writers just sit there all night long and think all of this stuff through: those little bits and bobs that just come together so beautifully
Sorry I'm only just getting round to this! It's been a busy week 😂
Thank you for sending me this ask!! Okay so, right. Ten is FLAWED, do not get me wrong, and he's not written consistently (thanks Moffat) but his character arc is so good. And it's because, by the end, he's just so tired.
Everyone thinks of Ten as either this adorable little loved up puppy, or this stern 'does it need saying' git, but actually, watching his story is so draining and that's what makes it so good?
We watched him just... fall. The Doctor everybody looks back on fondly, thinks of as this adorable eccentric tight suit (space noodle by @alwaysdramatizing sums him up perfectly!), but he was only that way at the beginning.
He's so full of joy and love at the start. He's fresh out of regeneration, a man who went from grief and loss to complete unadulterated love, he regenerates into somebody with hope for the first time. And bit by bit it gets taken away from him.
Losing Rose was only just the start. It set him back, all the way back to how Rose first found him, only worse. She was his last hope, his saviour, and she left him.
But Rose taught him to trust, she taught him to give people a chance. He was reluctant with Martha, and you can see he really didn't want to, but he did. He told her about Gallifrey!! Only a few hours after meeting Martha, he's sitting down with her and opening up to her. You can see how tired he is, but he tries.
I think we're quick to say Ten's grieving Rose in series three, which is true, but I think he's mostly grieving who he was and the hope he had. It's hard to pick yourself back up again — that one loss we all experience where life becomes separated into a 'before' and an 'after'. He's a completely different man in series three because he's the version of himself that's 'after' he loses Rose.
But it's more than that. He's exhausted, emotionally drained, and it's there all throughout series three how reckless he is with his own life because he really doesn't care about himself anymore.
You only really notice it when you're a bit older, I think, because I certainly don't remember thinking Ten was suicidal when I watched this at 13 years old. But series three is dark for Ten. Martha saves him, multiple times, and I think he knows it by how much he tries. It's like he's got somebody to look after again, somebody who he knows loves him and he owes it to her to love again.
And then he loses Martha. Whether or not you think he pushed her away/it was his fault, you can see that he's still devastated.
The only other person, in the whole universe, he's ever told about his home planet. Actually no, Rose isn't in that universe anymore — Martha's the only person in his world who knows what happened to him. I do think Ten loved Martha — obviously not in the way she wanted him to — but he showed it in all the times he kept getting back up for her. By the end, he was just starting to care again, and she left him at the point where he was just about able to stand on his own two feet.
By the time he meets Donna again, he's just shattered. And I love that it's mentioned, that Donna catches it. I don't think it was a way to explain the fact that David Tennant had aged as much as it was just Ten's character. RTD wrote him to be the tired hero, and by the time he dies in End of Time he's so exhausted that he just... lets go. Even his goodbye, the fact that he clung to that regeneration in the end to say goodbye to everyone who saved him, the fact that he's staggering by the time he makes it back to Rose is exactly Ten's ark. It's so striking that he is at his worst when he's with Rose in his last few minutes because she was the one who brought life to him. It's the perfect way to show the audience what life did to him, by having him so completely broken when he's with Rose in the end.
I could go onto a rant about how RTD wrote his Doctors with full character arcs when Moffat and Chibnall didn't quite have the same ideas, but I won't! I'm just glad you've given me the space to talk about Ten's!
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