No, it’s okay. I DIDN’T NEED MY HEART ANYWAY.
When it comes to the Doctor, this stuff has absolutely no effect on me.
You see, in my mind, he’s immortal. He was at the beginning of Time, and he’ll be at the end of Time, and he’ll turn up at every point that matters in between. And maybe he won’t do it precisely chronologically, but that doesn’t matter. He’s woven into the fabric of the universe. Maybe one day he’ll end (though I don’t buy it), but that doesn’t matter because for all the moments from now till then, he could turn up anywhere and anywhen. His life is an eternity.
The primary thing that bugs me about New Who is how much Davies and Moffat have humanized him. As in ‘made him just like a human.’ I know people hear it from Old Who fans a lot, but I miss Classic Who for this. It was unique for how, in all those years of stories, you almost never really got to see into the Doctor. Sometimes he would tell his Companion a story about himself, and you would learn a little about him (and that was why Companions were important, because it was the Companion you could understand). He was always a bit of a mystery, always a little unknowable. He was always alien.
So it bothers me, the way Davies and Moffat let us into his head, and then—here’s the problem—dream of nothing extraordinary in there. They give us the same thing you find in every other story, only writ on a larger scale: girlfriends, a great loss in his past, several buckets of angst underlying that lying carefree smile. What a failure of imagination! Why should a being who can taste the flavor of starlight and see the warp and weft of time, who periodically becomes a different person who experiences the universe in a whole different way, and who has known uncountable millions of people of every shape and age and gender till they’ve all long since blended into a sea of all-the-same-yet-all-brilliantly-unique have the same story to tell as every other character ever?
But here’s what makes the Doctor different, and the reason I don’t particularly care: he’s not theirs. Their personal interpretations of the Doctor are in fact not inherently more valid than mine, and they won’t last. Jack Harkness and Rose Tyler and River Song may belong to them, but the Doctor was here before them, and he’ll be here after, and their personal interpretations will melt into the great collective myth of him (or probably, at some point, her; I believe that Britain will be the first nation to invent a widely adopted inter-gender pronoun because at some point they’ll need it so they can talk about Doctor Who without confusing themselves). So you’re upset because Moffat’s Doctor brainwashed the human race into exterminating another species? Well, another time, he kicked the human race’s collective butt and forced them to let him broker a peace treaty with the Silurians. Does that seem to lack continuity? Excellent! Because the Doctor has been at least 11 different people who can barely agree on anything, and he’s lived for God knows how long, and sometimes he does things that don’t make sense to him either.