The Eleventh Doctor By @CheekyChemist

Oh my god, I’m a girl!

Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor – an interesting thing to write about. Especially, since he was the one to regenerate out of ‘my’ Doctor.  So who was that guy rambling through a little girls’ kitchen eating fish fingers and custard? To be honest, this first episode of the eleventh Doctor still is my least favorite one and I didn’t want to watch any others of that series for quite a long time.

Hello. I'm the Doctor. Basically...run.

 So what is typical for this new Doctor? Besides his new favourite dish and his newly found love for bowties (oh, and did I mention fezzes?), he also seems to have a new attitude towards his adventures: Has the tenth Doctor mostly dived into the depths of his guilt and the loss of his companions, the eleventh Doctor seems to go on unscathed by his past. Furthermore he begins to purposely use his companions and friends; a fact that is brought to a climax in A Good Man Goes to War. As River Song confronts him in that episode, the probably most recognizable argument is that the word “doctor” does mean “mighty warrior” for the people of the Gamma Forests.

Hello, sweetie!

The mysterious time-traveling archaeologist River Song herself brings an additional new aspect to the Doctor’s life: love. Although we don’t get to see a standard romance, we get a very doctor-ish one as the Doctor is fascinated of this woman (even at first sight in the Library, when he is still his tenth self) who seems to know parts of his future and time travels with as much ease as he does. At the end of series six, the Doctor finally marries River Song.

But then there's other people, and you meet them and you think: "Not bad, they're okay"

With Rory and Amy, Eleven is the first Doctor in the new series to travel with a couple. His fondness of little Amelia turns into admiration for grown-up Amy as he finds out that she was waiting for him many  years. Still, things get timey-wimey as Amy falls pregnant and is abducted, especially with the revelation of her daughter’s real identity… Rory basically dies a lot and turns finally into the Last Centurion who is searching for his wife and child. Another companion, though a lot older than all previous ones, makes an appearance in The Doctor’s Wife: Idris, the personification of the TARDIS. In this really Tom Burton-ish episode it becomes clear how deep the bond between the Doctor and his TARDIS (or the TARDIS and her Doctor, as Idris would put it) goes – he also starts calling her “sexy thing” instead of “old girl”…

And then they are destroyed, and they feel death and all they can say is "why?"

But with the change of the head writers, the main topics of Doctor Who also seemed to have changed. Moffat focused on topics concerning the darkest parts of human nature:

The two parter Rebel Flesh / The Almost People asks in a typical Doctor Who way, what exactly identifies us as who we are? What makes us human and individual? Early in the fifth series, in The Beast Below, we see one of the worst parts of human nature: what we don’t understand has to be either destroyed or used for our own purposes, no matter the costs. In The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood we are presented with the possibility that a more evolved species has been inhabiting earth millions of years ago and is still around – and how people react. The eleventh Doctor keeps getting himself in situations, in which we all may have borrowed Gwen’s words in Torchwood: Children of Earth: “Sometimes the Doctor must look at this planet and turn away in shame.”

The beautiful thing about Eleven, and the point where I started to cherish him as the Doctor, is that he doesn’t turn away in shame. In all those episodes he tries to help and save everyone. Because this is what the Doctor does and always will do! And although he stepped “back into the shadows” in his own version of the Reichenbach Fall, he is leaving us waiting for more adventures yet to come!