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cringecompanionapologist · 6 months

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Because I'm Bored: Doctors 1-13 Ordered from "Most Human" to "Most Alien"

So, some incarnations of the Doctor seem more "human" than others. Factoring vibes, aesthetic, social skills, emotional connection to companions, and then just shrugging and picking an order that makes sense, here goes:

Short Version, from most human to most alien: 1, 3, 5, 10, 9, 12, 6, 8, 2, 13, 7, 11, 4

(Very) Long Version:

Here There Be Spoilers for multiple Doctor Who Stories, the most recent of them being from Series 12 (and I'm not sure if the bit I'm talking about counts as a spoiler since it's just a thing that happens in the episode). Also this really got away from me and there are quite a few tangents in there. And because it's so long and it's very late I didn't really edit it, so I hope it's at least mostly coherent.

Most "Human"

Okay, this could be defined in a lot of ways, but based on my own definitions:

One:

The Doctor wasn't originally intended to be an alien, just an eccentric human from the future. So One isn't very "wacky". His cloths are a sort of vaguely Victorian/Edwardian normal. Because of Hartnell's age and health, he usually isn't very high energy. He's curious and mysterious, but if you didn't know from future reveals, you might not think he's a literal space alien.

Three:

This one was almost a tie. Three was the first incarnation to be established as an alien from his first story, and because he was written as an alien, he's more alien than an incarnation mainly written as a human. But, he usually comes across more like an eccentric professor with little regard for rules and regulations.

The UNIT Era setting might be a part of this. You take time travel from a Time Lord and what you've got left his a lord. He's an aristocrat who's fallen on hard times and had to get a job and is grumpy about it.

Five:

Five is one of the more cautious Doctors. He's aware of how his curiosity can get the better of him and sometimes tries to reign it in. He can also pass as human very easily. In Black Orchid, he fits perfectly into the setting, a costume party/cricket match in the 1920s. He is very traditionally British, and the British are almost definitely humans.

Five has more alien companions than most incarnations, which means that the ways in which he's alien don't stand out as much. He's been traveling the universe for centuries and he loves Earth, so he's picked up on a lot of human stuff. Adric and Nyssa are much younger and much more sheltered, so they're the alien fish out of water. Turlough has a bit more experience with humanity, but he hated it and is quite proud of being an alien to these people, actually. So, the Doctor blends into Earth surroundings while his companions either have no idea what's going on or are actively protesting it.

But, Fivey's still a space alien. He's still eccentric, and somewhat socially awkward. He misses social cues and tends to deal with emotions by avoiding them. Adric just died? Sadness is happening? Well, he doesn't know how to process and express that emotion while also comforting two people who are also feeling that emotion. So, he basically tells them to stop grieving and get back to the plot. He still feels emotions, of course, but he tries to ditch them whenever possible.

Ten:

He's often thought of as the most human Doctor. He's got quite an emotional range and can connect with humans very well. But, a thing with Ten isn't that he's the most human, but more that he most wants to be human. The Time Lords are dead because he killed them and humans are his adoptive species. But he can never truly be one of them. That's one of the many tragedies of the Tenth Doctor.

Ten is more overtly quirky than the Doctors listed before him. He talks a mile a minute, he's easily distracted, and he can say some very silly things. He's the guy who gave as "wibbly wobbly timey wimey". He's the first Doctor on this little list to regularly seem too weird to pass for human, though he still can when he's really committed to it.

Nine:

I honestly wasn't sure where to put him. He has a less quirky appearance than most Doctors, with his leather jacket not being out of place in a modern setting.

But, he's still very quirky with an added element of being unstable and more emotionally distant than Ten. He's a bit more cynical about the universe, having just come out of a war.

Honestly, 9 and 10 sort of tie. They're both human and alien to around the same degree in different ways.

Twelve:

Twelve changes a lot throughout his run, so it was hard putting him in one spot. He has the darker edges of Nine, but those soften over time and he becomes your silly professor who was in a band in the 70s.

So, in Series 8, he's a grumpy space grandpa. The first to point out that he's an alien. By Series 10, he's hung out on Earth for a while and lightened about. Strangely, he feels more human when he's being silly than when he's being serious.

There's also the added element of Moffatisms, which aren't exclusive to Moffat, but they are elements of the show that became more prominent around 2010. The Moffat Era had the Doctor as more genuinely socially awkward than before and more likely to view that as a problem. It feels like the bit where the Doctor's an alien but he's spent centuries around humans so he knows the basics at least was sorta lost.

Even though I called this a Moffatism, this trend only became more noticeable after Moffat left. We'll get there when we get there.

Six:

The only reason Six isn't higher on the alien scale is his darker, more violent edge. It doesn't feel very alien. But, Six is probably the most alien-looking Doctor.

Six is great at pissing people off, sometimes on purpose and sometimes not. But, even in the TV episodes that usually had weak scripts, you could still see how much he cared.

When I think of the Doctor being socially awkward, I often think of The Mysterious Planet, of all stories. Basically, Peri has a bit of an existential crisis over realizing that she's on a far future Earth and that Earth won't last forever. Six has a little speech about how everything ends at some point. It's not very comforting, but you can tell from his tone that he intended it to be. As a centuries-old time traveller, the fact that everything ends isn't quite that big a deal. You can just go back in time to before the world ended. But Peri, though she's been traveling with the Doctor for a while, is still a regular human from 1984, of a single time and place where time travel doesn't exist. So when something ends, that's it. The Doctor understands that Peri is upset and he wants to comfort her, but he doesn't understand her feelings enough to succeed at it. It's a great little moment from one of the more "meh" stories of the era.

So, there's the Doctor being an alien depicted in a slightly more subtle way, underneath the loud technicolor dream coat.

Eight:

A while ago, I made a post that sorted the Doctors into three loose categories. One of them was called something like Wacky, Zany, Silly, Fun-Time War Criminal. All the Doctors I'll talk about as the most alien are in that category. Eight is the most alien incarnation to not be in that category. Eight is a romantic, heroic type, who also happens to basically be a puppy with the zoomies for whatever parts of the TV Movie he doesn't have amnesia in.

I haven't seen a lot of Eight, so I don't have much else to say. He gets more seriously later on, because of the Time War and several companions dying. There's also a difference between the Eight Doctor Adventure novels and the Big Finish audios. Big Finish is where a lot of the "Eight gets more serious" arc happens. Both series have the overall plot of "the puppy is kicked repeatedly by absolutely everything". The EDA Doctor is traumatized by it and that's another thing that triggers an amnesia arc, but he remains upbeat when he isn't suffering The Horrors. BF Eight grows more cynical over time.

Two:

The Most Human of the Most Alien. He's very silly and very energetic. He plays the recorder and behaves in a way that often feels half-child/half-grandma. He's the template that all the other Wack, Zany, Fun-Time alien Doctors are built from.

So why's he the most human of that category?

Two actually has a unique skill. Though many incarnations of the Doctor can be manipulative, or use their understanding of people to accomplish their goals, Two is the most socially intelligent Doctor. He acts silly because he likes being silly, for the most part. People underestimate him, which can be useful. But, his more serious moments show a side to him that, though he doesn't act like a normal human, he understands humans, as individuals and as a species, very well.

Compare that scene from The Mysterious Planet I mentioned earlier to The Tomb of the Cybermen. Victoria is a knew companion who only became a companion because she'd otherwise have been stranded on Skaro. She's also just become an orphan. The Daleks killed her father. So, though she's trying her best, she's obviously not doing very well. The story stops for a moment and the Doctor talks to Victoria and what he says actually comforts her. While Six couldn't understand Peri's existential crisis, Two can understand grief, losing family, and being forced to leave home. So, he's able to emotionally connect with Victoria in a way Six couldn't with Peri, even though he wanted to.

Two's emotional intelligence gives him a strong human side, or at least a side that can relate to humanity.

Thirteen:

She's quirky. Very, very quirky. She has no attention span and often just does things. Chibnall takes the Moffat Era social awkwardness even further. Thirteen is self-aware and obviously insecure about not relating to her companions socially. She's also one of the more secretive incarnations, so she sometimes just refuses to connect with her companions, but even when she wants to connect with them, it often feels like there's a barrier between them.

Some of this is, at least as I perceive it, the result of consistent writing problems. Basically every writer of this era had difficulty distributing lines between the three companions and making sure everyone had something to do. Unless the plot had stopped for the characters to talk about their feelings, the companions tended to all fall into the stock "what's happening, Doctor?" role. I get the feeling that people who like these characters, and there are people who love these characters, love them for the fleeting moments when they get to be characters, when there's nothing else going on. Yaz stands out when she's talking to the Doctor on the beach, trying to sort out romantic feelings, but not when she's one of three companions in the middle of some Alien Bullshit.

But, you often don't get the "what's happening, Doctor?" Many scenes of exposition involve the Thirteenth Doctor thinking aloud, asking herself questions and answering her own questions, while three other people just stand there and wait to be addressed. Of course the Doctor is going to seem distant from her companions when she's talking to herself most of the time they're around.

Thirteen's social awkwardness actually led to a somewhat infamous moment in Can You Here Me, where Graham talks about having cancer and his fear that it might come back someday...and the Doctor straight up admits to being too socially awkward to know what to say in this situation and there's a complete tonal whiplash from Graham's serious talk about cancer to a "Doctor is socially awkward" joke, as if the seen was getting to heavy and the writer was desperate to change the subject.

A lot of people complained about this and the defense basically amounted to "It's not that the Doctor doesn't care about Graham. She just doesn't always know what to say.". My problem with it isn't that she didn't know what to say, but that she didn't try. Again with The Mysterious Planet. Six was also socially awkward and didn't know what to say to comfort his companion, but he tried. It didn't work, but he tried. And there wasn't a tonal whiplash, since Six not understanding why Peri's upset wasn't being playing as a joke. Thirteen can be socially awkward. She can admit to being socially awkward. But, what you had in that scene with Graham was a poorly timed joke that, because the show tried to lighten the mood, made it feel like Thirteen wasn't taking things seriously. That clearly wasn't the intent, but that's what felt so wrong to so many people.

So, she's about as far from Two as you can get in terms of social skills.

But, the fact that she is so self-aware, insecure in a way that previous incarnations weren't, feels like a very human trait. So despite everything I've had to say, she's still just shy of the top three.

Eleven

Quirky Moffatisms at full force. He is silly, acts like a child, comes with several wacky catchphrases, and sales of bowties in the real world increased about he said they were cool. That was supposed to be weird but the world changed for him.

Eleven is better at connecting to his companions than Thirteen, so I wasn't quite sure which to put first, but Eleven has more in common with the two I haven't gotten to yet. Thirteen didn't really have the confidence to pull of the "angry god" thing that some incarnations, especially in the the new series, sometimes do. She had her lapses in sanity and could be downright cruel during those lapses but it felt more like "the Doctor is having a bad day" than "Do Not Piss Off This Eldritch Horror". When Eleven snapped, it felt like the Wrath of God. No human could really do that.

There's a reason I call this one category of Doctor the Wacky, Zany, Fun-Time War Criminal. They're the silliest Doctors, but also the ones that are the scariest when angry.

Eleven is heavily inspired by Two, but I also tend to see him as combining traits of Seven and Ten. He's high energy and high intensity like Ten.

As for Seven, who was also based on Two, well, there are Eleventh Doctor moments that are basically their own versions of Second and Seventh Doctor moments. Victory of the Daleks has the "Daleks pretend to serve humanity to win their trust so they can take over" lifted from The Power of the Daleks, but while Two was scared of the Daleks, Eleven was enraged. In Two's case, it was because this was his first story. One rarely expressed fear quite this openly, which made it clear that 1. Two is different from One and 2. Daleks are serious business. For Eleven, it was something of a rehash of Nine torturing a Dalek in Dalek. Victory of the Daleks is made up of little moments stolen from better stories.

However, a deliberately similar moment isn't necessarily stolen. Sometimes, it creates another opportunity to compare and contrast. So, let's talk about Seven.

Seven

He's got all the clownish behavior of Two and Eleven, but he comes across as more alien from his tendency to act like a supervillain from time to time. It's all part of the plan and sometimes he screws his friends over along the way. Of course he still cares. Ace is still his Space Daughter. But, sometimes sacrifices have to be made to save the universe...

So, we did a Two vs. Six. vs. Thirteen on the subject of Comforting Companions. Now it's Two vs. Seven. Eleven in Betraying Companions.

Okay, not really. But the companions are made to feel betrayed, whatever the intentions behind it were.

The obvious two to compare are The Curse of Fenric and The God Complex. This is one of the more obvious "new who just does a classic scene" moments. Both stories have a reoccurring theme of faith, which has an effect on the Monster of the Week. The Curse of Fenric has one of the many varieties of Doctor Who Vampire that are repelled by faith. It turns out that the sign of the cross only worked on vampires because it was used by devout Christians. Any sort of faith works. A Soviet soldier repels vampires with a hammer and sickle badge because of his faith in Communism. The Doctor starts listing the names of past companions to repel them because he has faith in his friends.

Jumping over to The God Complex, we have a sort of Minotaur thing that eats faith. There's this weird prison hotel thing where people are shown their worst fears. Everyone has a room with a fear in it. Except for Rory. He's experienced all the Horrors and came back from the dead so many times that he doesn't care anymore. People who have some sort of faith tend to think of that faith when scared for their lives. So, the fear leads to faith, the Minotaur converts that faith into worship of the Minotaur and then it kills people.

The Doctor, Amy, and Rory end up in the prison hotel with a group of other random people. There's a gambler who believes in luck, a conspiracy theorist, a Tivolian, who are a culture of strategic cowardice, and his faith in his oppressors oppressing him, and a sane woman who is a devout Muslim. They all get picked off one by one.

Then we have the companions. Eleven has two with him, but Rory just kind of hangs back for this one. You have Ace and Amy. A names are apparently unlucky.

As companions who jumped at the chance to be companions, Ace and Amy have faith in the Doctor. In The Curse of Fenric, you'd think this would be a good thing, since it keeps the vampires away, but because of Reasons it becomes necessary to turn the faith off to save the universe. In Amy's case, her faith is putting her at risk of getting eaten by a minotaur.

So, the Doctor has to break his companion's faith in him.

But I also mentioned Two, so let's derail things even further to talk about The Evil of the Daleks. It's not as direct of a comparison, but I want to bring it up because the Doctor betrays a companion's trust and challenges his faith in him. In this case, it's Jamie. The Doctor tricks him into taking part in a Dalek experiment to discover the Human Factor, all the things that make humans special, so they can understand the people who keep beating them.

The Evil of the Daleks softens the blow. We see the build-up to the Dalek experiment from the Doctor's perspective. The Daleks demand that Jamie be used in the experiment. The Doctor asks why it has to be him and not some other human. The Daleks say that traveling in time makes Jamie unique. The Doctor asks why they can't just to the experiment on him, and since a later plot point in this serial is dependent on the Doctor NOT being human, I'm going to just say he was lying here. The Doctor's traveled in time too much, apparently.

So, the Doctor did everything he could to keep Jamie out of it, including lying to put his own life on the line. This was an absolute last resort and the Doctor tries to make the most of.

But, Jamie wasn't present for any of this, so all he knows is that the Doctor put his life on the line working with the bad guys.

So, it's not quite the same as the later Faith Breaking stories. The Evil of the Daleks feels more like a misunderstanding.

So we go back to Seven and Eleven. Seven breaks Ace's faith by claiming not to care about her, that he was just using her this whole time, and that he doesn't care if she dies. It's absolutely brutal. With Eleven, it's more about recklessness and incompetence. He failed to protect Amy. He let her down. He put her in danger knowingly, because he likes having companions and he cares more about having their company than about their safety. He keeps talking people into running off with him to see the universe, only for terrible things to happen because it wasn't safe. The Doctor knows it isn't safe, but he just can't stop endangering people's lives. It's more complicated, a deconstruction of the Doctor/Companion dynamic, but it seems like a last minute confession, like the Doctor is breaking down in the face of losing another companion. In the end, he did deliberately say what he needed to to break Amy's faith, but it doesn't seem quite so cold.

Eleven doesn't usually have master plans. He's just willing to get very dark in certain situations. Seven plans ahead, so you can't know just how long he was planning to emotionally destroy the teenager he sort of adopted. That also adds to the brutality. Ace's faith in the Doctor is more like a child's faith in a parent. Eleven was Amy's imaginary friend who turned out to be real, so it's a more abstract faith.

Okay, I've gone on an on and on about so many things. Let's wrap this up.

Four

Four is big and loud. His hair, his eyes, his teeth, his impressively long scarf...You can't not pay attention to him. He looks a bit silly, but he can also be a little intimidating. You have all the quirkiness of the Doctors we already mentioned, but with an added sense of authority. Everywhere he shows up, he just sort of takes over. Two and Seven will just blend into places at times, put Four doesn't need to. He walks in, offers people jelly babies, and starts asking about what's going on. People tell him. It's refuge in audacity. People are too confused to even ask questions and they just start following along.

If you take the idea of a renegade Time Lord: There's a powerful species of aliens and this one went rogue to travel the universe and help people, Four perfectly fits. He's authoritative, like you'd expect a powerful person to be, weird and distant from humans, as you'd expect an alien to be, and chaotic, like you'd expect someone acting in defiance of the ultimate Lawful Neutral Bordering on Evil.

Four is alien in a very specific way that might be the entire show, so yeah, he's the Most Alien Doctor.

This thing's really fucking long I'm sorry...