Excuse me while I leap with gusto onto the national bandwagon: I like David Tennant. I like his cheeky grin, I like his nervous energy, I like his wide eyes, I like his beautiful flicky hair.
Or, at least, I did. In 2005, when he thrust himself onto our televisions as the tenth Doctor, all those statements were true. Tennant was a welcome change from the brusque northern gangling of Christopher Eccleston’s already-forgotten ninth Doc, and he approached the part with such enthusiasm that he -- and the show he starred in -- immediately became a national treasure. Five years on, and I’m not so sure. The cheeky grin became an irritating grimace, his nervous energy came to define the man as an uncontrollable caricature of himself and his wide eyes became vacant and tired. As four series passed, it became obvious that Tennant, and Russel T Davies, who masterminded the show’s return, were running out of ideas.
The departure of Tennant and Davies will bring a much-needed freshness to the ‘Doctor Who’ team. With Davies handing over the task of Head Writer and Executive Producer to Steven Moffatt, and Tennant relinquishing his position to the young and sprightly Matt Smith (who, at 27, is the youngest ever Doctor), we should begin to see a renewed energy and enthusiasm. Exciting times indeed, for if the BBC’s series preview is to be believed, the eleventh Doctor will bring with him more of everything that’s been good about the last five series: More Daleks, more vampires, more weeping angels, more attractive-if-pathetic assistants and more inevitable sexual tension.
It is a shame, then, that the New Year’s Day finale saw Tennant’s time as the Doctor grind to a nauseatingly sentimental halt, rather than end with the adrenaline-fuelled bang that many (including me) were hoping for. The epic battle of two great Time Lords that had been set up by the penultimate episode simply failed to happen, and the ‘will-they-won’t-they’ return of Timothy Dalton’s Time Lord race was the very definition of anticlimax. This was an episode loaded with dramatic potential that absolutely failed to deliver: take two evil time-travelling geniuses who can kill by shooting blue light out of their hands, one internally conflicted man struggling to come to terms with his own impending demise but with the power to save mankind, and Bernard Cribbins trapped in a glass box full of space-age nuclear waste, and you’ve not to be a real idiot not to create TV gold. Especially when three of the four main characters are played by some of the most respected British actors on television.
TV gold, is, sadly, not what I witnessed, and instead Davies and Tennant treated us to a series of nostalgic, meandering visits to past assistants in a self-indulgent, smugly introspective and utterly unnecessary quarter of an hour, by which point the thing I wanted most in the world was to see David Tennant’s face explode and someone else take over.
In that respect, at least, the episode was a success.
