LogFAQs > #968579843

11. 11th Doctor (Matt Smith)

Best Episode: The Girl Who Waited (Season 6, Episode 10)
Worst Episode: Night Terrors (Season 6, Episode 9)

Matt Smith's Doctor almost has the exact opposite problem that Peter Davison's did. Davison played the Doctor very normal and average and human, whereas Smith took the Doctor's personality to its extremes, going the route of turning the Doctor into a manic pixie dream boy with slight sexual tension towards all of his female companions. However, while I don't think Davison's interpretation of the Doctor would ever translate to a different era, I feel like Matt Smith would have been better-suited for the classic era. Classic was a lot more episodic, and it would've played to Smith's strengths in playing the Doctor as this childlike, wacky, alien presence.

Unfortunately, Matt Smith came during an era where the show was dealing with the Doctor as this traumatized demi-God who survived the Time War after (allegedly) killing his entire race. And he's hundreds of years old. Neither of these really worked well with just how impish Smith acts through most of the series. He's almost TOO quirky, and TOO wacky. For a guy who spends as much time on Earth as he does, there are just these bizarre scenes where, to demonstrate how strange he is, he acts as though he's never visited Earth or done normal things in his life. On NUMEROUS occasions, the plot of a given episode requires the Doctor to take on the role of a normal person...and he's incapable of doing so.

This all becomes really problematic, because the Moffat Era of the show, well before Chibnall took it to an unpleasant extreme, really tried pushing these heavy-handed, season-long narratives. This wasn't the subtlety of Davies' era, after all. But when you have these long plotlines about the Doctor's alleged death, or about the loss off the Ponds' child, or the countless times the writers try to flip a switch from goofy, wacky Matt Smith to "I'm a super serious badass" Matt Smith...it just doesn't work. It feels like Matt Smith was almost too young to do the role how the writers wanted. After watching him in House of the Dragon, I think he absolutely could nail the role now, with a little more maturity and nuance to his acting.

Hint for #10: A prime-numbered Doctor.