"You be careful, because your song is ending, soon."
As much as the idea of being the virtual Companion fills me with fangirlish glee (how can it NOT?!), what I would like even more is for The Doctor to have someone to help him through his regeneration. Happy, healthy Doctors have certainly resulted from Companion-less regenerations*, but he really does need someone to help him through, and the relationships are so much stronger and richer with the cross-regeneration Companions. Ben and Polly's farewell was the first to make me cry, and Sarah Jane, Peri, and Rose were all of the Special variety**. Mel, on the other hand, was a cross-regeneration Companion who (through no fault of her own) wasn't actually THERE for the important bit, and the Doctor/Mel relationship doesn't compare to the other cross-regen ones***. I want someone to be there to help him through it. I want someone to be there for Ten when he dies and for Eleven when he is finding out who he is...and I don't want it to be random bystander, I want it to be someone he already knows and trusts, who already knows and trusts him.
And I can't TELL you how much it breaks my heart that Ten has gotten to this point where he has to die to get back to being The Doctor. I know full well that he has reached that point (even without having seen "Waters of Mars"...which I will be doing tomorrow night), and I know how he got there. But this is the Doctor who hugs everyone, who is friendly and enthusiastic and hyper, who I came to love as My Doctor because "What Happens Tomorrow" is his theme song****. He's always been lonely, but he's also always been surrounded by friends, largely because he considers everyone a friend until he is proven wrong. He's exactly the right sort of Doctor to have the strongest, most meaningful Companion relationships. And the thought that all he did for Rose and Mickey and Martha and Jack and Donna and Sarah Jane is going to go unrewarded when he needs them the most*****...that he's sentenced himself to a solitary death for what he perceives as unforgivable transgressions...that he is _this_ weary of life... It's a poignant kind of irony that the most exuberant Doctor ever is also the most suicidal, but I had always hoped that he would have reconciled that at least somewhat by the end.
At the very least, I want him to spend his remaining specials with the new Companion - Peri didn't have much more than that with Five, and she worked brilliantly for Six. I want someone there to acknowledge Ten's death. I want someone there to freak out, and then to fuss over Eleven. And, as fantastic as it would be for it to be Jack there with him, he's not in the right place for that anymore. It needs to be someone who will take that intimate look at a Time Lord at his most vulnerable (and, paradoxically, most powerful) moment and parlay it into the kind of bond The Doctor so craves (and so dreads).
It's the end of an era, yes, but we've already had our big Davies send-off, and this is part of a much longer narrative. I have always been on Davies' side; I've always backed him up when people got stroppy about him bending (or rejecting) Old School rules. But if he makes this Regeneration all about him/his characters/his legacy, I'm going to be the stroppy one. It may just be Ten who is dying, but this is about The Doctor.
* Well, _Three_ was happy and healthy (if tetchy). Eight was happy. Nine was...um...Nine.
** I'm not entirely sure what to do with Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan. They all three got very near to Special status, but, as I've said before, there were just too many of them and Five was exactly the wrong sort of Doctor for any of them to actually become that close.
*** It could be said that there were personality issues at work here, too, but Polly was a bit of a character-less shrieker, too, and Peri has an undeserved reputation for being annoying...and Seven is something of a cross between Two and Six, so I contend that there probably _would_ have been that same level of closeness if Mel had been there for real.
**** Uh...according to me. But don't tell me it's not. (Here's the video and lyrical proof.)
***** Not that I'm saying they owe it to him to be there; not at all. Just that he has been there when those he cares about have needed him; he's earned his karmic helpmate, whomsoever it may be.
Also, Simon Le Bon is apparently going for the Rupert Giles mystique, now.
And you can still win a thingie if you guess what it is.