Eleventh Doctor

"Space and time, time and space — locked in an intricate dance across the cosmos — and if you know the tune, anything is possible."

"That's the great thing about the Doctor, he has the energy and mischief of a young child as well as the wisdom, age and intelligence of someone a lot older," she says. With Matt's performance, he's so believable that he isn't human. He has all these things that he does that make you believe he is an alien and you're drawn in by that."

"Q: Matt, what’s been the most fun about playing this role?"

"Q: Matt, your version of the Doctor is very quixotic, which has gone over well. Is that something you brought to the role, or is that something that was on the page?"

"Q: What are the qualities you share with the Doctor, and how are you completely different?"

"So, he’s a swaggering bully—who also withholds vital information from the people about whom he supposedly cares the most. During the first season, when Rory dies and gets swallowed up by the Crack in the Universe, thus ceasing ever to have existed, the Doctor remembers Rory, but Amy, Rory’s fiancé, doesn’t. Does the Doctor say, “Amy, listen to me, I know you don’t remember, but you had this fiancé, and you’d actually decided to go through with the wedding after that time you sexually assaulted me, but he got drawn into the Crack in your wall—and I know that it’s got something to do with me. Look, here’s a piece of the TARDIS I pulled out of the Crack! With your help, we’re going to fix this, I promise. And we definitely will not start off two of the next three episodes by going to museums. Come along, Pond!” No, he doesn’t, and they do start off two of the next three episodes by going to museums."

"The 50th Anniversary Special, “The Day of the Doctor,” offered a welcome respite from this dreary slog; it was easily the best Who episode Moffat had written since “The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang.” Despite the generally positive notices the special got, some critics hated Moffat’s retconning the defining act of the revived series: It turns out that the Doctor didn’t actually kill all of the Time Lords, as it had been written by previous showrunner Russell T. Davies, he just hid them away in a pocket universe. While I find Moffat’s compulsion to insert his own characters into existing Who continuity annoying (c.f. the laughable Forrest Gumping of Clara into footage of Classic Doctors in “The Name of the Doctor”), I actually don’t think his rewriting of this act of genocide totally obviates the Davies era’s emotional content. So it turns out that the Time Lords are lost, instead of annihilated? Hell, the Doctor thought he’d destroyed the Daleks, too, and they just keep coming back. Why shouldn’t the Time Lords get an out? But while, within the context of the episode, this turning-already-established-defeat-into-victory didn’t bother me, it does fit into a pattern of storytelling cowardice on Moffat’s part. There are just never any consequences for any main characters in Moffat’s Doctor Who. Every apparent sacrifice, tragic loss, or moral compromise is invalidated by some kind of reset button, with no physical or psychological cost. The “loss” of the Ponds was so nonsensical that it doesn’t even count. They got to live full lives together in the past, but the Doctor could never go back and see them again? It’s insulting. Why not have the two of them make a meaningful sacrifice and actually, you know, die? Whose feelings is Moffat trying to spare here? As Capt. James T. Kirk witheringly observes of himself—in a neat bit of character development that also doubles as commentary on how static Kirk’s persona was during the original Star Trek series—he’d always been able to find the out, the cheat code, the reset button. He’d never had to face the no-win scenario. He thought he’d gotten away with it again—and then he found out that sometimes victory does have a cost, in this case, the life of his best friend. Now, in story terms, it sucks that the Star Trek franchise promptly undid this by bringing Spock back in the next movie, but it’s because of Kirk’s change and growth that Khan is rightly regarded as the best of the Trek films. The 11th Doctor is TV-show Kirk, not Wrath of Khan Kirk. He neither changed nor grew. Moffat even dubbed him “The Man Who Forgets” in the 50th Anniversary special—and in that episode, his journey is away from a defining, horrific moral choice he made, and towards a cheat code."

"But you know what? Matt Smith, man. In the middle of this train wreck, he does a bit with a severed Cyberman head that actually finds a heartstring. When Handles finally craps out and “dies,” Smith, in his late-middle-age makeup, calls his name a couple of times and stares at the thing. The look on his face evokes memories not just of the similarly robotic K-9, but also of all the other companions long gone. Another one, his face says. I’ve lost another one."