Journey's End - Musings on the Doctor and Rose
I've been thinking about the best way to differentiate the two Tens. I want a scheme that doesn't privilege one over the other (no real!Ten or clone!Ten) and doesn't depend on what they're wearing. So from now on I'm going to use Ten and new!Ten. They are both the Doctor, just one of them is new.
In reading various reaction posts, I've come across the idea that new!Ten and Rose are going to settle down, go to work, and basically live their lives like normal humans. I truly do not see that happening. New!Ten has all the knowledge and intelligence that Ten has. He's not going to sit about. I give him a very short time before he's made himself a new sonic screwdriver, a means of transportation, and a time travel device. Once he and Rose have worked out their relationship issues, they (and any children) are going to spend their lives exploring the altverse. This is assuming he doesn't have a bit of TARDIS in his pocket. Then all he'll have to do is make a new screwdriver and speed up TARDIS growth before they go off on adventures. Either way, they're not staying in one place for very long. Which is probably good, since no version of the Doctor is safe to have around in one place for very long. A couple of weeks stuck in 1969 and he's exploding chickens. There's no end to trouble he'd get into over years.
I've also seen a fair number of people who consider new!Ten to be a broken, genocidal version of Ten. Are we forgetting that Ten, himself, is broken and genocidal? Shall we add up all of the Doctor's genocides, starting with his own people? Ten uses the genocide of the Daleks as an excuse for not wanting to be with new!Ten, but, really, Ten knows that new!Ten is a mirror of him. And the one thing the Doctor never wants to do is look in the mirror and confront what he has done. As far as I'm concerned the whole 'make him better' reason that Ten gives for leaving Rose and new!Ten together in the altverse is a way to side step the issue. What he really wants is for his mirror to be as far from himself as possible. And this has the added benefit of leaving Rose both with her family and with a version of himself that can love her.
