“Well, here we go again…”
With the announcement that Matt Smith will be bowing out of Doctor Who this Christmas, it’s time for us to play the regeneration game once more, with all that traditionally accompanies it: Will The Doctor Be A Woman headlines, slightly awkward discussions on the Today show, and all of fandom searching for an actor who can embody the hopes and fears of a nation via the medium of a kids TV show. (Note: I will accept Tilda Swinton, Idris Elba, or Jason Statham).
But it’s also a time to look back at the outgoing Doctor. Matt Smith plummeted into the national consciousness in a flaming TARDIS back in 2010, a whirlwind of limbs and hair and a catchphrase that didn’t quite catch (Geronimo, we barely knew you). The youngest actor to take on the role, he faced a huge challenge in taking over from David Tennant, who’d come to define the Doctor for a whole generation of fans.
Smith’s Doctor was a fizzing bundle of energy, enthusiasm and contradictions – by turns stern and childlike, he was both a dotty professor, and the first Doctor to care about whether he was cool. Smith gave the role a manic physicality. Legs from a 1930s silent comedy, arms waving at things in seven different dimensions at once, bow-tie rampant, he whirligigged around the screen like a hipster spider playing Twister against itself.
Smith’s performance – like Steven Moffat’s scripts – would frequently try to go a dozen different ways at the same time, before finally pointing himself in the direction of the story and marching resolutely towards it. He had the air of someone confronting head-on the mysteries of the cosmos, and determinedly trying to chip away at them with his chin.
But then there were the eyes. Those old man’s eyes. When Smith was at his best (and he was frequently wonderful) it was all in the eyes; exhausted eyes, furtive and alien and so very, very old. More even than Eccleston and Tennant – who weren’t exactly bad at it themselves – Smith excelled at the sudden switch of tone, the moment where he’d pivot on a single phrase and the antic clown would fall away, replaced with someone aged and scarred and deeply unknowable. Obligatory Tom Baker aside, no other Doctor has seemed so truly ancient and otherworldly, and fans knew that those were the moments worth cherishing. It was mood dubstep; everyone was waiting for the drop.
It’s almost impossible to disentangle the qualities of Smith’s tenure as the Doctor from Moffat’s reign as showrunner; they fit each other so well, both in their qualities and their flaws. For some time, it really looked like the eleventh Doctor could become the definitive Who; the standard to judge all the others by. But Smith’s legacy suffers from the fact that something went awry in the writing of the last series; that for all the enjoyable twists and flips as they were in flight, very few episodes nailed the landing.
Because when the script was missing something and the momentum was gone, Smith had a tendency to . . . well, turn it up to Eleven. He’d overcompensate for the exposition dumps and the gaps in narrative sense, twirling and gurning and SHOUTING A LOT and tripping over his own elbows. He would do Hair Acting.
(It also didn’t help that he was forced to spend the past half-season playing Unsettlingly Creepy Doctor, time-stalking a young woman for reasons the plot never quite seemed to justify.)
To an extent, the show’s suffered under the weight of its own ambition (a pretty laudable reason). Ultimately, the Moffat/Smith years have fundamentally been about story. Not just the giddy, headlong rush of Moffat’s narrative, but the idea of story as a living, breathing thing – a force of nature in its own right. In Moffworld, the Doctor’s superpower isn’t his mind or his two hearts or his sonic screwdriver; it’s that he’s a legend. He’s a fable passed down the generations, “a goblin, or a trickster”, the thing monsters have nightmares about, the reason our language has the word “doctor”.
This was no subtext; it was all upfront in the plot, as befits a post-Buffy, monsters-are-metaphors TV show. Smith’s first series ended with him escaping oblivion by becoming a bedtime tale he told to the young Amy, her childhood memories a life-support machine; his last with Clara literally jumping into his lifestory to save him, the ultimate sacrifice of giving herself up entirely to his history. It was all about story.
And if there’s been a problem with this last series, beyond the structural flaws and the tonal mis-steps, it’s the lurking feeling that none of these stories really demanded to be told. They didn’t live out in the world, in herds of wild narrative roaming the twilight, just waiting to be discovered and written down. They felt like constructs, awkwardly fitting themselves around external necessities – marketing material in search of a plot, or an extended trailer for the upcoming 50th anniversary episode. They forgot to bring the mythic.
If his tenure as the Doctor right now has a nagging sense of promise not quite fulfilled, Smith still has – naturally – time. There are two showpiece episodes to go. If the rumours that the 12th Doctor was actually cast months ago are true, then there’s reason to trust that the moment has been prepared for. Moffat has set an awful lot of plates spinning over the past few years; with a bit of luck, he’ll use them to serve up a feast, rather than it all resulting in an unfortunate mess of tears and crockery fragments.
Because all told – when given the chance to shine – Smith was and is a magnificent Doctor, this mad man in a blue box, this great floppy nonsense with the extrovert hair and those weary, haunted eyes. Let’s hope his story gets the ending it deserves.
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