Doctor by Doctor 12

Scotch on the Rocks

Peter Capaldi, 2013-17

When I began these Doctor by Doctor articles, it was 2013, running down to the series' fiftieth anniversary. I had originally intended to continue with the twelfth Doctor in 2014, but decided that I wanted to see more of him before I wrote about him in depth. Now, with the thirteenth Doctor's debut series imminent, it's time to do the old boy justice.

Peter Capaldi is the second Scottish fanboy to achieve his life's ambition to play the Doctor. A man who once, in his teens, headed the Doctor Who Fan Club and used to write in to the Radio Times about the series. Capaldi had, almost twenty years before finally becoming the Doctor, been one of the many who auditioned to be the eighth Doctor, and it's entirely possible to imagine him in that role. He's one of the very few actors who could have played the Doctor as a young, dashing romantic and a cantankerous old man, and he brings tremendous charisma to a version of the character that could very easily have been quite unlikeable.

The odd thing about the twelfth Doctor is that he is characterised quite differently throughout each of his three seasons. Of course, there are flashbacks and forwards to other elements of his character throughout, but it's still possible to divide the twelfth Doctor into three distinct periods. In series eight, he is angry, harsh, unapproachable. In series nine, he's the rock and roll Doctor, punky and spiky and unpredictable. In series ten, he's older, a fatherly figure and teacher. Humour and anger and extraordinary grumpiness comes and goes throughout his long, long life, but that's the general pattern.

This could be seen as an inconsistent characterisation, but the fourth Doctor had distinct phases to his character as well. In fact, the gradual shift from the exceptionally prickly Doctor of series eight to the more likeable, more compassionate Doctor of series ten could be seen as the sixth Doctor's journey done right, or even a return to first principles for the Doctor, the same journey he went through in his first few seasons back in the monochrome days.

Let's go back to the twelfth Doctor's beginnings, in the closing moments of “The Time of the Doctor.” To begin with, the twelfth Doctor is over-the-top and silly, much like most of his incarnations in the moments after a regeneration. As usual, his new brain takes a little while to settle down. Acting on some subconscious impulse, he takes the TARDIS to London in the nineteenth century (via an awkward encounter with an oversized tyrannosaur) to where he feels safe, with his trusted allies the Paternoster Gang. While there, he pieces his new personality together while piecing together the mystery of the half-faced man.

An immediate mystery to the Doctor himself is his new choice of face. By now aware that he is selecting his own faces, albeit subconsciously, he is baffled as to why he's picked this scowling, gaunt visage, with its attack eyebrows. We're given two explanations, both valid and true, and both go back to his previous incarnations. During the events of “The Day of the Doctor,” the Doctor faced up to his past as the Warrior, and finally stopped running from his past. He finally stopped pretending to be a fresh-faced young man, and accepted that he was an ancient being with terrible things in his past. Perhaps more importantly, Clara had seen him as this: an old soldier with blood on his hands, and had accepted him as such. Finally, he could let the mask slip. The eleventh Doctor had revelled in his youthful looks and had embraced his flirtatious, and often quite shallow, relationship with Clara.

It may seem odd that the Doctor would regenerate to become physically older. As Clara says, “he doesn't look renewed.” However, it's easy to forget in the hullabaloo of the regeneration that the Doctor spent nine centuries on Trenzalore, growing old and infirm, watching those he protected age and die around him. We only see the tiniest glimpses of the Doctor's life on Trenzalore, and almost all of these moments are in the presence of Clara, for whom he puts on his mask. The Doctor grows ancient in Christmas Town, and has finally accepted his own mortality, only to have a last moment reprieve from the distant Time Lords. After all those centuries, the Doctor was prepared for his final moments, ancient and withered, and Clara was there at the very end. Apart from his brief “reset” before fully regenerating, the Doctor becomes considerably younger in his new incarnation, but still allows himself to appear middle-aged and mature. He can be forgiven for thinking Clara will accept him like this. Of course, she does in time, but to begin with she is completely thrown. It's understandable, of course; every time she saw the Doctor as old and grey, she got her young Doctor back. This time, the old man is there to stay.

“You don't see me, do you?”

Of course, we later learn the other reason that the Doctor decided on the face of Peter Capaldi. In “The Girl Who Died,” there's a sudden and jarring flashback to “The Fires of Pompeii,” a then eight-year-old episode in which Capaldi played the Roman citizen Caecilius. The twelfth Doctor barely remembers much of his time as the tenth, if his tenuous recognition of the clockwork robots and the SS Madame de Pompadour is anything to go by. And yet, this one experience with Donna in Pompeii is etched into his memory. The face of Caecilius, the man he saved, is there in the mirror, as a reminder to be compassionate, to think of human lives when history is on the brink. Because the Doctor knows, as well as his companions know, that without that reminder, he can so easily become a monster.

To begin with, the twelfth Doctor is a particularly difficult person to be around. Given how hard Clara has found it to adjust to his new appearance, you'd think he'd go a little easy on her, but no, he's spectacularly hard to love early on. There's an understanding, though, between them, and she copes with his abrasiveness as long as it isn't directed at her too much. Clara acts as a buffer between the Doctor and everyone else in the universe. To the outsider looking in, it would like he just doesn't really care about anyone else, but it's quite the opposite. The Doctor cares intensely about everyone he sees, suffering or in trouble. So, he puts up barriers: his attitude, his anger, his face, those eyebrows. Everything is designed to keep the rest of the universe at bay. However, get past those barriers, become someone the Doctor cares about, and he'll become fiercely, even frighteningly loyal.

“She's my carer! She cares, so I don't have to.”

It's no surprise, really, that the Doctor has started to put these barriers up between himself and the universe. He's just spent centuries in one place, far longer than we've ever seen him stay put before, doing his best to defend a town from a war arguably of his own making. He's seen countless people grow old and die, while he himself has carried on, and even when death seemed certain, he regenerated again. Is it so strange that after all that he has become unapproachable, even a little callous? Equally, he has begun to seriously question himself, asking Clara if he's a good man, concerned that he's grown cruel during the centuries. Of course, we know the Doctor is a good man, albeit one who has the capacity to turn the wrong way at any moment. He needs people with him to keep him thinking clearly; too much time alone and he can become cold, alien, and obsessive. He has a distinctly odd morality: he'll speak passionately about how he hates to hear pigs crying over their fate, but will happily eat offal. He'll lecture of remaining detached, then punch a racist in the face. He'll go to the end of time to save his friend, then shoot an ally in cold blood. He'll express sympathy for Davros, one of his most hated enemies, but use his plans against him and destroy his creations horribly. It's never quite clear what he'll do next.

His aggressive dislike of the military perhaps stems from his time on Trenzalore as well. He still carries immense guilt for his actions in the Time War, even though he no longer has the burden of Gallifrey's destruction on his back, but there's more to it. After the events of “Day of the Doctor,” the Doctor had finally begun to come to terms with his actions in the War, and he was suddenly pitched directly into another. On Trenzalore, he was mayor and general at once, standing over those who went into battle. Danny Pink isn't wrong when he identifies the Doctor as an officer, one who gives orders and lords over the lower ranks. The Doctor's hatred of soldiers is his own self-hatred turned outward, and Danny's observation cuts him to the core.

Perversely, this comes in the episode at which he is most like the eleventh Doctor, with a lot of his previous self showing. The Doctor is daffier when he's pretending to be the Caretaker than at any other time since his regeneration, and is still prone to occasionally forgetting, it seems, that he no longer looks like Matt Smith. Fittingly, he's hilariously convinced that Clara has fallen for a teacher who bears a passing resemblance to his former self. Instead, she falls for a former soldier, someone who the Doctor disapproves of on principle, and unfairly mocks because of it (unfortunately, the fact that Danny is played by black actor Samuel Anderson adds a racial subtext to the Doctor's superior attitude, that was surely unintentional).

Throughout Twelve's life, we do get glimpses of the sillier side of his nature, still there behind the mask, along with his compassion. He'll trade terrible puns with a highwayman; he'll sword fight with a spoon; he'll clamber on top of a tank and introduce the word “dude” into the English language a thousand years too early. He may claim he's against charm and banter, but really he's just against anyone using it better than he does.

SPACE GLASGOW

The Doctor's accent has varied a lot over the years, and he's been Scottish before, but is there a reason he suddenly, and enthusiastically, finds himself with a Glaswegian accent? He didn't pick that part up from Caecilius. The very last person he thought of before regenerating was Amy, so perhaps he's carried over some Scottishness from her. On the other hand, maybe it's just to make himself sound cross and provide some gravitas, like his eyebrows. In reality, of course, it's Capaldi bringing more of himself to the role, just like his guitar. Matt Smith's Doctor played football, Jon Pertwee's loved vehicles, and Capaldi's is an old Scots rocker.

After his first year, the Doctor lets his hair down, or at least grows it out. His changing outfits signal his attitudes as well. At first, he dresses in a way that both hints at his rock tendencies and harks back to his earliest incarnations. He may have hit magician by mistake, but the stark white shirt, black cardigan and dark Crombie call on both the Mod movement and maybe Tin Machine-era Bowie, while also having a hint of third Doctor about them. Even early on, though, he swaps the smarter elements out for T-shirts and jumpers, developing a sort of off-duty look for when he's not looking for trouble. When he begins to chill out, he's goes for an ageing rocker look – not many Doctors could pull off a hoodie – and trades in his sonic screwdriver for sonic shades and a guitar. He still keeps the formal wear in the closet, though, for when he wants to make an impression: he has a topper and tails and a sombre Victorian suit on standby, plus a velvet jacket that simply scream third Doctor.

Even as he starts to chill out, though, he remains pretty spiky and unapproachable. Only Clara really gets through to him. Indeed, the Doctor's relationship with Clara is the defining one of this incarnation. Whether you like her or not, Clara has been set up to be the single most important companion of the Doctor's long life. By the time he regenerates, the Doctor already owes Clara his life many times over, after she threw herself into his timestream, becoming an indelible part of all his lives. It's after his regeneration that they truly become a vital part of each other's lives. Once Clara accepts him as the same man she had been travelling with before, their relationship is deeper than ever. The Doctor may state that he's not trying to be her boyfriend anymore, but he's clearly in love with her. While there's a more fatherly bent to the Doctor's relationship with Clara now, that doesn't preclude romantic love. He is father, best friend, chaste love; it's very much like the third Doctor's relationship with Jo, but with a powerful undercurrent of obsession. Not that he can be blamed for that, given that Clara inserts herself into his childhood at an impressionable moment. Clara imprints herself on the Doctor, influencing him as much as he influences her.

Clara begins to take after the Doctor as they spend more time together. He's not exactly easy on her; he expects devotion from her and completely disregards her personal life. As much as she loves him, she needs a real relationship with a human being, and her love for Danny Pink is as true as her love for the Doctor. Nonetheless, the Doctor impacts her more, and she learns from him, growing more and more like him as times goes on, something he is increasingly horrified to see. Danny's death should be the cutting off point for them, when Clara's grief leads her to betray the Doctor and force him to go against his principles and change history. The Doctor loves her too much, of course, and not only forgives her, but attempts to do the impossible and reach beyond death to find Danny. Not for the last time, he breaks his own rules in a misguided attempt to help Clara. After this, their bond is stronger than ever, and Clara grows even more like the Doctor, which inevitably leads to her death (even though it doesn't stick).

“I'm two thousand years old. I'm old enough to be your messiah.”

As always with the Doctor, his arrogance is his major weakness, one that almost costs him his friendship with Clara. “Kill the Moon” shows this at its worst, when he steps back in judgment and leaves her, standing in for all humanity, to decide what should be done about the moon alien. He seems to think he's being respectful of her choices, but he's actually being patronising. Throughout this life, the Doctor consistently misinterprets human responses. Often it's harmless and funny, as in his apparently unintentional insults to Clara's appearance, but other times it's incredibly damaging. He seems blissfully unaware of the impact he has on people's lives. He devastates young Courtney by dismissing her, and that's someone he really likes! (As an aside, the Doctor still gets on very well with children, albeit with a very different approach to his predecessor. He treats children like people and people like children, for a start, and actual children are bluntly honest, just like him.)

His arrogant attitude is exemplified by his tendency to swoop in, make and impact, and then leave without taking responsibility. This is no different to any of his incarnations, but the cumulative effect is by now becoming impossible to ignore. “Ripples become tidal waves,” he says, but still sticks his head in the sand. His sparing of Missy has consequences for all her future victims. He never bothers to follow up on the events above Triton. He dumps two alien refugees at Coal Hill School and then leaves them and a bunch of students to defend it against interdimensional incursion after the one and only time he drops in to check on them. He at least tries to keep an eye on Grant after his good-natured interference leaves the boy with superpowers, but he doesn't do a particularly attentive job of it. The one exception during this period is his stepping in to deal with the Zygon uprising, and even that comes after events have reached a crisis point.

There's no better example of his impact and lack of responsibility than Ashildr/Me. After reaffirming his compassion, he decides to slap history in the face and save the young girl's life, fully aware that the alien technology might grant her immortality. This with thousands of years of experience behind him, knowing exactly how much heartache and pain she's going to endure as everyone else dies around her. By rights he should stay with her, but instead he leaves her to the ravages of history. He keeps and eye on her from afar, and she on him, but the only times that he actually interacts with her after completely changing her life are accidental, and he has the gall to be surprised that her personality has hardened. He may be right when he says that they both need someone mortal to keep them connected to the world, but Me is also right when she says the world needs protecting from the Doctor. It's not that he's unaware of his impact, it's that he refuses to face up to it. And, like all his worst interventions, it comes back to bite him.

If you were to look for a particular character trait that defines Twelve throughout his lifetime, you might hone in on that temper, that spikiness, those hard edges, that need to keep people at arm's length. For me, though, there's one thing that's there right through his life: there's a terrible sadness to this Doctor.

The twelfth Doctor carries over his previous incarnation's self-hatred, but with centuries more guilt, along with the exhaustion of someone who has tired of seeing terrible things again and again throughout his life. He is visibly weighed down by everything he's seen and done over the centuries. Beyond this, there's a fatalism to him that we've only ever seen before at his darkest moments. He faces death in the face several times, and he seems consigned to it more than once. While he's always had a bit of a martyr complex, the Doctor now honestly doesn't seem to be that concerned that he might be killed. He describes his current regeneration as a “clerical error” and seems more interested by the possibility of becoming a ghost than worried about imminent death, in “Before the Flood.” By the time he faces the Monks, he seems almost looking for a reason to sacrifice himself.

While it's possible to read too much into a fictional character, there's only one way I can read this characterisation. The twelfth Doctor suffers from depression, and it's something that he carries with him throughout his life. It's all too easy to see yourself in your heroes, but that's why I can recognise these signs. The self-hatred, the fatalism, the emotional tiredness, are all part of the condition he's living with. The anger, aggression and emotional barriers are all ways of dealing with this underlying sadness and expressing it. Indeed, that anger that comes from his pain spurs him on, energises him; it's a way of turning feelings that could stop him in his tracks into something to keep him going. No wonder he doesn't want to face up to the impact of his actions; to do so would rob him of his only coping mechanism.

“The Doctor is no longer here – you are stuck with me!”

More than ever there's the sense that “the Doctor” is a title that he's living up to, and when he fails to uphold his own ideals he's no longer the Doctor. Nonetheless, it's this set of ideals – never be cruel, never be cowardly, keep fighting for what's right, and always be kind – that keeps him going. It's certainly not something he always manages, and he slips from kind to cruel on more than one occasion. Behind the abrasive exterior is a kind, silly old man, but behind that is a vengeful, ancient being. The Doctor is his best self, and no one can be their best self at all times. When he's on the verge of losing Clara – the one person he's been holding onto to keep him going – he loses his way completely. I'm still not sure what all that stuff with the Hybrid was really about, and I'm not convinced Steven Moffat is either, but nonetheless, it let the Doctor show what he is capable of being. Trapping himself in an aeons-long loop, reliving the same hellish existence over and over, dying and reconstituting just so that he'd retain some leverage to use to bring Clara back, shows the sheer extent of the twelfth Doctor's arrogance and his desire to be punished. Not to mention, spectacular bloody-mindedness.

Finally, he crusades against Gallifrey, overthrowing Rassilon (and becoming president of two planets at once, in the process) and potentially endangering the whole of space and time before Clara and Me manage to talk some sense into him. He then comes up with a desperate, self-destructive plan to erase Clara's memories of him, forcing himself to let go of her by removing her agency. It's quite monstrous, and he hasn't the justification of saving her life as he had when he did the same to Donna. Fortunately, Clara talks him round, partially at least, and he ends up pulling the short straw and erasing his memory of her instead. If anything, this outcome suits him better; no need to deal with the pain of losing someone if you can just forget them altogether. It does, however, leave the Doctor lost and in need of direction. Thank god for River.

GALLIFREY

The Doctor's attitude to Gallifrey in this incarnation seems contradictory, but actually is firmly in keeping with his feelings throughout his lives. The Doctor's appreciation for his home planet is inversely proportional to how much contact he has with it. When he thought it was destroyed he pined for it, but even then, he admitted that his rose-tinted view was how he chose to remember it. After saving Gallifrey the Doctor takes on finding it as a sort of background mission. In the early days of this incarnation he can be seen working on a complex series of calculations, which may be to do with his relocating of the planet (as seen in “The Day of the Doctor”) or to do with tracking it down. After Missy returns, he knows it must be out there, but her lying to him about its location seems to end his hope in finding it. Then, of course, the Time Lords return, imprisoning him until he finally escapes into Gallifrey's post-War present. Once he's there, he spends no time at all pitting himself against the Time Lords and siding visibly with the common folk. Then, having taken up the highest position of his aristocratic society, he tells them to go hang and runs away again.

When the Doctor arrives on Mendorax Dellora, after an unknown time travelling alone, he's in a terrible mood, and it looks like his somewhat more relaxed attitude is long gone. All it takes is to bump into River again, and there's a huge grin back on his face. The only person he's more in love with than Clara is River. He might describe Missy as “the only person even remotely like (him),” but that's not true. River is more like him than he'd ever like to admit, even when she's acting in ways that he would never approve of. Their strange, time-crossed, tangled, polygamous marriage finally settles into something almost resembling a normal relationship. We may never know quite what they get up to during their twenty-four years on Darillium, and it's hard to believe they never take any trips in the TARDIS, but it's clear that this is the first time for either of them that they've allowed themselves to live an almost normal life. When we catch up with him again, he's transferred his sadness to mourning for his wife, and he's lonelier than we've seen him in a long time. He's got Nardole to look after him, thank goodness, but this is a rather formal relationship that sees the Doctor, once again, keeping emotions at arm's length.

In the tenth season, we re-meet the Doctor in a new phase of his life. He's spent at least fifty years, perhaps more, lecturing at St. Luke's University, while keeping Missy captive in the vault beneath the building. While it's hardly feasible that he never nipped off for an adventure or a side-trip during that time, his commitment to guarding the vault, and Nardole's guarding of him, makes it clear that the Doctor has become more rooted than we usually see him. Yet, this is a Doctor changed, it would seem, by time and guilt and married life. While his lectures might stray from subject to subject, he doesn't seem as flighty as he once was. Nonetheless, his sudden adoption of Bill as his personal project triggers a return to the adventurous lifestyle. We'll probably never know if he took on any other students for private tutoring, but regardless, Bill brings out the best in him: a purely platonic, fatherly friendship. It's the most old school Doctor-companion relationship we've seen since the series returned in 2005.

THE BLIND LEADING

A significant side plot during the tenth season finds the Doctor blinded by exposure to the vacuum of space, a consequence of his rescuing Bill from a deadly situation into which he has led her (and not for the last time). Whether or not the Doctor honestly thought his blindness could be cured or not is uncertain, but once it becomes clear that it cannot, he refuses to let Bill know that he is still disabled. Part of the reasoning behind this is his usual arrogance, part of it is an unwillingness to show weakness to his many enemies, but much of it is kindness: he doesn't want to saddle Bill with the guilt of being (partly) responsible for his injury. As it is, the Doctor copes extremely well with blindness, with the help of technology as well as his innate capability. Arguably, it's a shame that it didn't last longer; a series in which the Doctor is blind, remaining the hero while coping with a debilitating disability could have been amazing. It's illustrative, though, that he refuses to take the easy way out and regenerate so that he gets his sight back, even when the alternative is death. It's an attitude that will come back at the end of this incarnation.

It's his relationship with Missy that reveals the most about the Doctor. The ins-and-outs of Missy's character are a subject for another essay, but one thing that's notable is how much more comfortable she is with herself than she ever was as the Master. The Doctor, too, has begun to realise that they're not so different, and takes the opportunity to try to bring his old friend back from the brink. Part of this is his keeping of a promise from when he was the tenth Doctor: to “keep” the Master and take responsibility for him. It's unlikely that could ever have worked with the Harold Saxon incarnation, but Missy is both fonder of the Doctor and mellower in attitude. Still, it takes decades of captivity before the Doctor even considers letting her out to play.

IS HE REALLY FOUR BILLION YEARS OLD NOW?

The Doctor's age is now harder than ever to pin down. After his regeneration he describes himself as over two thousand, matching up with his previously given age: he arrives on Trenzalore aged about 1200, lives there for nine hundred years, and so is now 2100, albeit accepting the discontinuity in ages between the original and revived series. Quite how long his travels last before his imprisonment in the confession dial is unknown – he clearly takes some long solo trips – but he probably isn't vastly older. Then he spends four and a half billion years being repeatedly killed and reiterated. So, then, is he four billion odd years old? Arguably, but that original Doctor was killed and has now been replaced over and over. It could be said that the Doctor is brand new once he arrives on Gallifrey. He spends twenty-four years on Darillium and maybe seventy in Bristol, so he's arguably only about a hundred years old by the time he regenerates again. Or 2200, or 4,500,000,000. A related note: how many regenerations does he now have? Not even the Doctor or Rassilon seem to know. The Harmony Shoal even claim that he has infinite faces – how many future regenerations have they faced?

"Everything ends, and it's always sad. But everything begins again too, and that's always happy."

Again, though, his arrogance gets the better of him, but also his hope. He desperately wants Missy to be redeemable. Perhaps her changing will prove to him that the universe isn't a hopeless place; perhaps it will just prove to himself that no matter how dark his actions, he isn't lost. Bill and Nardole see Missy for how dangerous she is, but the Doctor insists on taking the three of them into an unknown but clearly dangerous situation as an experiential exercise. He couldn't have known that the Cybermen would be involved on the colony ship, nor that the Saxon Master would be there, but did he honestly expect things to go well? Within minutes, he's gotten Bill fatally wounded, and is unable to save her from a truly horrific fate. While taking on responsibility for Missy, he completely fails to take responsibility for Bill.

Events on the colony ship rapidly get out of hand, and once again, the Doctor is trapped in a war zone. However, this time sees him take a very different track to his time in the Time War or on Trenzalore. This is the Doctor who gave the powerful, impassioned anti-war speech to the Zygon insurgents, who has spent far, far too long fighting. This time, the Doctor doesn't wage war: he fights it. By placing Nardole in charge of tactics and operations, the Doctor absolves himself of some of the horrors of responsibility, but takes on the mantle of getting down and fighting a hopeless fight while the people of the ship escape. He knows full well that he isn't going to survive, but that's not important. What matters is that he makes a stand and does what's right. No longer will he send people in to fight for him.

"Who I am is where I stand. Where I stand is where I fall. Stand with me. These people are terrified. Maybe we can help a little. Why not, just at the end, just be kind?"

How much, though, is this the ingrained death wish of this incarnation? He could have regenerated after that first electrical attack from a Cyberman, but he holds back. Fighting off his regeneration even as he is brutally attacked in the final battle. He's actually killed, only saved by the unearthly powers of Bill and Heather, and still he refuses to regenerate.

To some, this might seem a rehash of the tenth Doctor's famous “I don't want to go,” moment, but it's really quite different. This isn't a Doctor fearing replacement due to self-assuredness or vanity. This is a Doctor who's lived for so long, and been so many people, that he simply cannot face yet another new face and mind and a whole new lifetime ahead of him. This isn't something that comes out of the blue, but a facet of his character that was there from his first episode, when he talked down the half-faced man and realised that there was nothing left of his original self, like Trigger's broom. After all, he has had his allotted thirteen incarnations, and been through the expected end of his life and back out the other end. He has come to terms with death, and yet, here he is, still going. No wonder he's depressed. After everything, he is still faced with centuries of soldiering on, trying his best to be the Doctor, never getting to rest. He must be desperate to die.

And still... after a decisive meeting with his first self, he decides, at the last moment, to regenerate again. Because that's what the Doctor does. He keeps going, because it's the right thing to do. It may not be easy, it may not be pleasant, but he fights on, finding the good in the universe where he can and doing his best to do what's right. Right at the beginning of this life, the Doctor asked Clara, “as I a good man?” He came to the conclusion that it didn't matter, but he's only half right. What's important is that he tries to be a good man; he doesn't always manage it, but he tries, in spite of his heartache, in spite of his weariness. He keeps going, even when it would be easier just to lay down and give up. And that, for me, is what Doctor Who is all about.

That, and looking like a tit and just not caring.