For those of us in the UK (and probably on a YouTube near you), yesterday marked the end of the tenth Doctor as played by David Tennant and the end of the reintroduced Doctor Who as helmed by Russell T. Davies.
Tennant as the Doctor seemed to live the role in a way Christopher Ecceleston never quite did. There are reasons built in that sort of make sense of that but Tennant was one of the great Doctor incarnations. I hope that the new boy, Matt Smith, lives up to that - a challenge I'm sure - but one that I wish him every luck with. I want Dr. Who to remain as the one real piece of appointment TV in my life. I will miss Tennant but being old enough to remember the change from Pertwee into Baker I know that the change can be from great to great and hope that's the case this time.
This is also the end of the Russell T. Davies era, the man that drove the BBC into reintroducing the Doctor to the schedules and in some ways made for some really compelling TV over the last five years. Without RTD we wouldn't have Doctor Who in prime-time TV, those of us who are old enough would have our memories, probably reruns on one of the obscure satellite channels and the fanfic (properly published and otherwise if you're a more serious fan than me). However, looking at the episodes from the new era of Who, all the ones that stand out in my memory for the right reasons were penned by other people, usually by the new maestro, Steven Moffatt.
The final episode was, to my mind, a wonderful example of the problem. (No spoilers, honest.) We have a story that has an inevitable and quite magnificent climax on the cards. And the story really did have that. This would have been an OK place to have the Doctor "die" and regenerate. There was, after that big plot climax a much smaller (plot-wise) secondary climax that could have been, absolutely magnificently and slightly surprisingly, the emotional ending, separated a little from the story to let you savour the two parts separately. And then there was the 20 minutes of, in my opinion, maudlin, self-indulgent, ham-fisted garbage stuck on the end. RTD seems to be one doesn't believe the audience can have an emotional release from seeing the story completed, the world saved, the bad guy defeated; no, he has to go and shove it down our throats and make sure that we see it and that he attempts to tug on our heartstrings when he actually tramples roughshod over the story to try and do it.
I, at least, don't watch the show for the emotion that he thinks I should have. I watch it for great stories. Those great stories usually have great emotional arcs too, although not always (Blink for example doesn't really have an emotional arc, while The Girl in the Fireplace certainly does, Genesis of the Daleks (to go back to Tom Baker) certainly had its emotional impact too). But it feels like RTD is trying to force us to feel how he wants us to feel rather than letting us decide for ourselves. To add insult to that injury he wants to break the characters and the stories because his emotional payoff seems to be more important to him than the storytelling, at least in the stories he writes for himself.
So whilst it's a somewhat tearful farewell to David Tennant and a hope that Matt Smith will step up and give us a good incarnation too. It's a sigh of relief that RTD is finally gone and a hope that we get a higher level of storytelling with far less self-indulgence under the new guardian of the stories.
