Ten vs Eleven

Warning: the following post is a long and random joy-ride by the author. It has little to do with the theme of the blog. If you don't like Doctor Who, feel absolutely free to disregard this - the author has foisted her rabid Whovian ravings upon the Normal Ones too many times…

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Ten vs Eleven. Davies vs Moffat. Rose vs River.

The hate. The arguments. *melodramatic music starts playing* Schisms cracking the fandom apart. Oh, the rivers of tears that separate the groups …

But seriously, there's a lot of dispute, in YouTube comment boxes across the internet and beyond, into forums and - well - if there's a video of Eleven and a lot of people talking about it, chances are at least one of them is saying, "OMG liek David Tennant's Dr Who was soooooososo much better then Matt Smiths .10foreva!!!1!!".

And, though it's rarer, vice versa.

Why, exactly? My thoughts.

Short answer: they're different. Almost opposites in the extremes of character a Doctor can display. And I think Doctor Who is a story that has the ability to touch deeply. Thus, people get impassioned over it… if Ten wins them over, they have a very hard time transitioning from white to black (Or, more accurately, light grey to darker grey. They're still both good guys with two hearts who travel time and space in a beautiful blue box. But I digress). I know this firsthand.

Human Nature and the Family of Blood was my first episode, technically speaking. But my first exposure to Doctor Who was, if my memory serves me (which it might not), the "Space" and "Time" Eleventh Doctor comic relief episodes.

()

I loved that quote from the moment I first laid ears on it.

So, who is my Doctor?

I'm going off on tangents far too much. I just have to confess that My Doctor is Ten. Always has been, and he'd better be forever. But I'm on a bit of an Eleven!high right now. Okay, so maybe the "bit of an" has been going on for months and reached a really kind of distressingly-high-to-non-Whovians peak recently.

Oh for goodness sakes. This post will be pages long. I'm making a list to keep it … shortER.

In order of importance, from least to most, I give you some differences between Ten and Eleven, and Moffat and Davies, and why they might cause squabbles.

The Difference Between Them In:

~CGI

Davies: Inconsistent, but usually rather terrible  /  Moffat: Normally as up-to-date as the budget can get it

Okay, so who really cares?

I do. But that's not good. Doctor Who's foundation is on characters, not their special effects. ♬That's just the way it is, some things will never change… ♬

But I admit that Eleven's era makes my eyes feel happy.

Score one for Moffat.

~High Definition

Davies: Non-existent  /  Moffat: The beauty of it, Iago. The beauty of it…

Plus, series two filmed with an odd glowy effect that didn't seem to be an upside. And I know this is another technicality that shouldn't really matter. But somehow it enhances my viewing experience when I can see every wrinkle in the costumes. (Yes, I know my Shakespeare quote is off).

~Good looks: (let's face it, this comes into play with the fangirls)

Ten: not strictly normal, but still, accessibly handsome in general opinion  /  Eleven: For the girls with odd taste

…What do I say? Personally, I think …Matt… if good looks could melt people…

But, apparently, no one else agrees. And it can't be denied that David's really handsome. Right? 

~Story Arcs

Davies: Very, very subtle. A hint or dropped word.  /  Moffat: Are you following this storyline? Huh? Huh? No? Too bad, here's another plot twist.

A matter of preference, but I think it's a fact that Moffat's era turns some people off, because it's too complicated. Personally? I love it! My brain likes being fed. A lot. It makes me feel thspecial ('special' said with a stupid lisp - sorry, it's a vocabulary word in our family) when I can keep up with what's going on. Plus, if you don't like story arcs, series seven is supposed to be a lot less heavy on that. A very large theme that runs through the differences between Moffat and Davies is now coming into play: emotion. I do have to say that series six, as an arc, lacked it. It was discovering a lot of facts, and not an emotional journey. Whereas "Bad Wolf" was saturated in heart. I thought the cracks in the universe was better with that - that Pandorica scene, where it is revealed that the Doctor was really the 'bad guy' all along - well, that is honestly one of the most beautiful plot twists I've ever seen. (backstory time! "The Pandorica Opens" was my first Eleven episode, so I had no idea what was going on. Me and my brother decided to turn off the episode and not watch its continuation in "The Big Bang" because we were so confused. Cue the Pandorica reveal. We looked at each other and it was agreed: we MUST WATCH MORE OF THIS.)

~The Ginger Companion

Davies: Donna Noble  /  Moffat: Amy Pond

Donna. Donna Noble, come to knock Moffat's era to the ground and steal a point. And a whacking big one. Amy strikes me as shallow, annoying, too flirty, and generally not an exceptionally enjoyable companion. Whereas Donna - Donna is, in my opinion - and a lot of other people's - the best NewWho companion yet.

~The Main Romantic Interest

Davies: Rose  /  Moffat: River

Wow, this made it high up on the list of importance, eh? Well, I have one thing to say about River Song. *bangs head* I DO NOT FEEL THE FEELS. The Doctor and Rose - yeah, I used to ship them to death. Someone came along and pointed out that Rose was a really average kind of girl, and suddenly I realized she was right - but Rose and Ten - and even Rose and Eleven, if you like that type of thing (I do so very love it) - most of the time were, and are, more satisfying than Eleven and River. Even though Rose isn't the most well-drawn of characters, she's more loveable than River, to someone tuned like me. Not that Eleven and River don't have their moments - the hints of tragedy in their love story are great, and of course I squee when they kiss. But when River treats the Doctor like dirt, flashing her gun around and blowing off his hats - just no. That is not the River Song I like. The River Song I like is the one who tells the Doctor that he is loved by so many and so much.

But didn't Rose tell the Doctor that by simply being there with him?

~The Doctor's Mercy and Darkness:

Ten: Had cruel moments, but for the most part, expressed a lot of mercy  /  Eleven: Quite ruthless - unobtrusively so, sometimes, however

Yeah. Ten pushed Mother of Mine into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy. But Eleven turned the human race into killers in "The Impossible Astronaut" - he waltzed up, told the Silence he'd give them a chance to surrender, then did the Doctor-equivalent of "lol jk" and set them up for a genocidal fall. Take that how you will. The Team Ten part of the fandom takes it badly. I don't mind it. Ten said "No second chances, I'm that sort of a man" - and maybe his next regeneration was seeping through, because though he himself did have moments like in "The Runaway Bride" and "The Waters of Mars", Eleven has, I think, a much more cold and level way of killing. He's virtually aways ready to kick your butt into everlasting oblivion. He'll lie, with this nice, ernest, straight face - tell you, "Sure, I can save your life, hop on board" - and then he'll slam the TARDIS door in your face (don't believe me when I put it that way? "The Girl Who Waited".) Granted, he has his reasons and they do make sense. But still. Eleven's darker.
Anyway, this is opinion and personal perception, I may not be right.

~Emotions

Ten: expressed liberally, most of the time  /  Eleven: extremely bottled up

Ten swung between lighthearted and contagiously happy, to sad and angsty. And Eleven? Wait, what emotions? Huh? Oh, the one part when he teared up in "Closing Time" or "Flesh and Stone"? That one scene where he yelled at a Dalek? He was blinking back something in his eye at "The Doctor's Wife".

And I think that might be all.

Please don't get me wrong. Eleven can be fantastically happy, and I love that about him. But I'm talking about the emotions that resonate. And bowtie emotions, while amazing, don't make us sob all over the couch, wiping our streaming eyes on our TARDIS-pattern pyjamas and trying not to get the electrical workings of our tightly-clutched sonic screwdrivers too wet - whether from joy, or sadness.

The thing is about emotions - and I'll come back to this - is that Team Ten is measuring the Moffat era by the RTD era. And that's not the right measuring stick. There's a short Ernest Hemingway story that illustrates this so sweetly (#shameless favourite author plug): when you measure temperature by Celsius, it can look dangerously low. And then you switch to Fahrenheit, which was how it was always meant to be, and it's just fine.

And I'm not entirely sure I actually agree with myself, but what I think is that Eleven isn't meant to be emotional. He's so, so old. He can't just cry. And it's his lack of emotion that can stab us. The Lion the Witch and the - sorry, the Doctor the Widow and the Wardrobe! That ending! The Doctor is drained of feelings - the years have bled his hearts dry and white. I do know how that feels - though of course, not on the scale that 1000 years of life brings - and that episode actually was really touching to me, because I was going through a period of hardly being able to feel a single thing deep in my soul at the time. And when he wiped away that tear, it was a gorgeous ending that felt tuned to me. But, personal angst stories over. God brought me out of that, and it's not something to scream over at all. Everyone has lows.

Just … imagine having one that dragged your soul down for centuries.

The Eleventh Doctor lives under that.

GUYS. GUYS I LOVE THE DOCTOR'S CHARACTER.

Conclusion:

Sometimes I think I'm just too accepting of everything, of every difference.

But truth is that I love both the Moffat era and the Davies era. And I like the Moffat era, as a whole, more. And I love to love my Who. Am I a mindless consumer that is gobbling up everything I am fed? Or am I radically enjoying myself where the internet is too cynical to feel the feels?

Sometimes I think there is something that the RTD era had that Moffat's missing. And I think it's emotions. But sometimes I think they are there in Moffat's era, and people are just not looking at it the right way. They're using the wrong measuring system. Or they're not looking hard enough, and they miss the way the Doctor's voice shakes and goes up that one note higher when he tells Craig to take Alfie and go.

But sometimes I think the high definition and the beautiful, clean-looking, sharp, constantly mind-engaging atmospheres of Moffat's episodes have lured me in and make me see beauty where it's not.

But sometimes I think reading way deep into the subtext is awesome.

But sometimes I think maybe I'm reading too far.

But sometimes I don't know what to think.

That's where I need you.

But I get the feeling the internet doesn't like it when people yell over and over that they want their readers to comment. Hey, it's only a natural human instinct, to want to share things together.
Hehe, I'm just kidding. Comment if you feel like it, because I WOULD LOVE to hear your thoughts, for however long you want to go on. I could sit here and listen for hours - or, if you want to just dash off without leaving a comment - or with just a one-lined speculation - that's good too.

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That post was such a guilty pleasure. a) I stayed up way too late to write it, b) I feel bad, because even though I think that at least 50% of my small group of followers are Whovians, that post has nothing to do with … anything, and c) I allowed myself to go off on personal opinion tangents. FOR A LONG TIME. Seriously, this was a monster post.
 So please, if you feel like it, let me know if you didn't enjoy it, because I don't have to this kind of thing again. Until the autumn. When I will, God willing, give you a savage dissection of every episode that airs in series seven. But anyway - if you'd rather not read things like this, honestly just let me know.