LogFAQs > #968596949

6. 10th Doctor (David Tennant)

Best Episode: The Waters of Mars (Thanksgiving Special 2009)
Worst Episode: Fear Her (Season 2, Episode 11)

This top six is EXTREMELY strong, and I think all six of these Doctors did an amazing job of bringing the character to life in their own special ways. With David Tennant, he is an AMAZING actor, and at a point when the show really needed to stick the landing after its reboot, he came in and he stuck the HELL outta that landing. Hell, the 10th Doctor is the only Doctor I've COSplayed, and in my overall ranking of every Doctor Who story, FIVE of his episodes make my top ten (admittedly, I have a reboot bias, since the classic serial format sometimes falls flat for me...but I tried to be fair to those stories as well). He's quick-witted, clever, energetic, funny, and he carries himself with a level of maturity that I couldn't quite find when it came to his successor in Matt Smith.

So why does Tennant only rank sixth for me? Well, while all of these six Doctor offer copious amounts of QUALITY, this ranking comes down to quantity. Unfortunately for Tennant, while series four and the subsequent holiday specials are all largely amazing, he spends his first two series in this purgatory of romantic subplots with his companions that leads to some less-than-ideal writing and overall storylines. They're not AWFUL (well, aside from Fear Her, which is the worst story from An Unearthly Child all the way through Hell Bent...I have not folded series 10-13 into my overall ranking yet), but they are certainly subpar. And it's a problem, because David Tennant is a strong actor, but when you saddle him with this sort of will they/won't they tension, it leads to stories that don't play to his strengths, and makes the Doctor feel much less larger-than-life than he should.

All that being said, he's still a top six Doctor for me, and it's amazing how much that fourth series drags him back into the upper echelon. It turns out that when you remove the romantic angle and just give the Doctor a charming companion that serves as his emotional core (while allowing him to really embrace how supreme he is as a Time Lord), good things happen. But more than that, I feel like Eccleston set the stage for the PTSD Doctor, but Tennant is the one who really had to bear the burden of that trait, and you can see it on his face, every time he's forced to confront mortality and just how powerless he truly is in the face of death. I feel like his final farewell in The End of Time wouldn't resonate nearly as well if Tennant hadn't built up the character to be both devastated by his own mortality, and devastating to the audience who'd grown to know and love him over the lengthy period of his tenure.

Hint for #5: Played by a Baker.