What I find a little confusing about Ten is that he very much considers himself to be the same person as Five, and even as late as The Next Doctor, he seemed reasonably okay with mortality (Tell me I don't trip over a brick is not bad, considering).
The entire "Ten is afraid of dying" arc was shoehorned in pretty badly, IMO. He spends s3 quasi-suicidal, spends s4 in a downward spiral of instability and trauma-induced dysfunction, doesn't do well alone, vacillates wildly between self-justification and outright self-hatred... and then someone spits a prophecy at him and suddenly fear of death is his Character Issue for his last season? We never even get an incident that could spark this or tie it back to his personality.
I suspect the problem is that RTD was trying to juggle two sets of themes for the specials--he had the character arc he'd set up for the Doctor that desperately needed to be tied off, but he was also trying to pour his own feelings about the end of his tenure as showrunner and of Tennant's run as the Doctor into the show itself. In the end, neither one gets served very well. The 'Ten is afraid of dying' part gets no set-up, the explosive climax of Ten's longstanding issues in Waters of Mars gets no follow-through, the second fall of the Time Lords feels like "well I've been meaning to do this for ages so here it is, have some grandiose language to dress it up" rather than proper closure, Ten's issues with regeneration can't follow much of a progression if they don't have anywhere to start from, and the entire avoidance/acceptance of death thing ends up coming off as a self-indulgent red herring to more longstanding issues that remain unresolved.
I mean... in my head, I can come up with all sorts of reasons why Ten, of all the Doctors, would be the most morbid about regeneration. You could take it back to s2's "everything has its time and everything dies" theme, and the Doctor's attempted avoidance of same. You could make a pretty good case that between experiencing an identity death in Family of Blood, witnessing a similar one in Utopia followed by a regeneration, having the Master refuse to regenerate on him and die for real (well, "for real"), and then having to inflict a sort of identity death on Donna, he's got the material for more issues than National Geographic. You could say that despite all his damage, the cocky self-aggrandizing bastard just enjoys being Ten. Trouble is, I see no evidence that any of this was written into the show itself as an explanation, nor was there any attempt at all to explain Ten's about-face from nearly-suicidal to I-don't-wanna-go.
The entire "Ten is afraid of dying" arc was shoehorned in pretty badly, IMO. He spends s3 quasi-suicidal, spends s4 in a downward spiral of instability and trauma-induced dysfunction, doesn't do well alone, vacillates wildly between self-justification and outright self-hatred... and then someone spits a prophecy at him and suddenly fear of death is his Character Issue for his last season? We never even get an incident that could spark this or tie it back to his personality.
I suspect the problem is that RTD was trying to juggle two sets of themes for the specials--he had the character arc he'd set up for the Doctor that desperately needed to be tied off, but he was also trying to pour his own feelings about the end of his tenure as showrunner and of Tennant's run as the Doctor into the show itself. In the end, neither one gets served very well. The 'Ten is afraid of dying' part gets no set-up, the explosive climax of Ten's longstanding issues in Waters of Mars gets no follow-through, the second fall of the Time Lords feels like "well I've been meaning to do this for ages so here it is, have some grandiose language to dress it up" rather than proper closure, Ten's issues with regeneration can't follow much of a progression if they don't have anywhere to start from, and the entire avoidance/acceptance of death thing ends up coming off as a self-indulgent red herring to more longstanding issues that remain unresolved.
I mean... in my head, I can come up with all sorts of reasons why Ten, of all the Doctors, would be the most morbid about regeneration. You could take it back to s2's "everything has its time and everything dies" theme, and the Doctor's attempted avoidance of same. You could make a pretty good case that between experiencing an identity death in Family of Blood, witnessing a similar one in Utopia followed by a regeneration, having the Master refuse to regenerate on him and die for real (well, "for real"), and then having to inflict a sort of identity death on Donna, he's got the material for more issues than National Geographic. You could say that despite all his damage, the cocky self-aggrandizing bastard just enjoys being Ten. Trouble is, I see no evidence that any of this was written into the show itself as an explanation, nor was there any attempt at all to explain Ten's about-face from nearly-suicidal to I-don't-wanna-go.
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