preserved_ginger

Several things about the Tenth Doctor, Ten II and the latter’s way of relating to Rose post-Journey’s End have been bugging me just lately. I’ll talk about the main one here.

Before I stopped reading Ten II fanfic, I saw quite a lot of it that assumed that not only does Ten II have all the Doctor’s memories from his time with Rose but that he, too, knows what it is like to stand slumped against that cold white wall in Canary Wharf unwilling to leave it because the woman you adore stands on the other side of it in a parallel universe, to stand arms outstretched begging the Daleks to kill you and put you out of the misery that life without your love appears to have become, to become human but for the strength of your feelings for your lost love to be strong enough that her face still haunts you even when you’ve forgotten almost everything else that makes you you.

But since Ten II was created out of a hand that the Doctor lost within the “first fifteen hours of my regeneration cycle” (The Christmas Invasion), how can Ten II have any knowledge of that? How can Ten II have any knowledge of the changed nature of the relationship between the Tenth Doctor and Rose, the relationship that is put beyond reasonable doubt (I would say ‘canonised’, but that word sits ill with me in relation to the Doctor when I’m trying to dissociate from the “Lonely God” motif) by canon in Turn Left, The Stolen Earth and Journey’s End?

I for one think the kiss between Ten II and Rose is confirmation of a romantic relationship – how far explored before Doomsday I am unsure; I’m not a hundred per cent convinced it ever made it to the level of a full physical relationship, for example – between the Doctor and Rose. Almost a ‘control experiment’ on Rose’s part, if you like (but for that to work, you’d have to gloss over the fact that even RTD acknowledges that for Rose to choose Ten II over “her Doctor” is completely out-of-character).

Why do I think that? Because the haunted, hunted, longing expression on the Doctor’s face pretty much gives it away; DT has an incredibly expressive face and so his Doctor isn’t capable of hiding anything that way (another reason why I’ve never bought “I’m always all right” in The Girl in the Fireplace for anything but the (obvious) lie it is).

The only thing that makes me think that Ten II would ever feel anything for Rose is the fact that, going on how drastically his personality has been known to change in previous regeneration cycles (including how he reacts to people he is close to, such as his companions) the Doctor pretty much must have regenerated with Rose and his feeling for her at the forefront of his mind, held securely there to make sure that the regeneration didn’t taint it. Which worked, because the Tenth Doctor is quite obviously in love with Rose almost from the first nanosecond of his existence (well, certainly from when he’s past the regenerative coma at any rate – see how he interacts with Rose in the ‘snow’ at the end of The Christmas Invasion if you want an example of what I mean) and he wasn’t shy about showing it, either. If that’s the same for Ten II, that he’s in love with Rose from his very beginning, then although I still abhor the ending of Journey’s End for how it fillets the Tenth Doctor I can take it if it means that Ten II (who comes from the Doctor I love so much) and Rose may have the potential to be happy. Or if not happy, perhaps content?

But the Tenth Doctor pretty much puts the kibosh on it being the same when he says that Ten II is how he was when he and Rose “first met”. This to my mind suggests that he is alluding to the idea that Ten II is the Ninth Doctor in the physical form of the Tenth, unless the Tenth Doctor is literally saying that Ten II is how he (the Tenth Doctor) was when he first met Rose. The Tenth Doctor said something in the Children in Need special (2005) about how he’d changed every single cell of himself but that he was still the same person as the Ninth Doctor.

And given that he’s saying (well, the script is making him say; making him out-of-character at the same time seems to almost be a given at that stage in the proceedings of Journey’s End) that he and Ten II are exactly the same man, which is an absolute impossibility because as I said earlier the Tenth Doctor has memories of time spent without Rose which Ten II simply cannot have, I wonder if the Doctor is not also being intentionally paradoxical.