The scene where she's trying to turn around a medical spaceship because she wants to get back to her TARDIS is probably one of the most baffling character choices I've seen in a long time. I literally screwed my eyebrows up in confusion.
Like, sure, she wants to make sure it's safe, and she's a bit dazed and confused, but she's just nearly got her friends killed and she's on board a ship with who knows how many other injured people and she's acting like they left one of her companions behind. The Doctor constantly gets separated from the TARDIS; that's the set up to most stories.
It's stuff like that that makes it feel like Chibnall hasn't been watching the show for the past 13 years and so just binge-watched a few episodes, noted down that the Doctor is 'kooky', says 'weird stuff' and likes her TARDIS and ran with that.
It's bizarre to me, yeah. Like, there's no sense of panic in the character in Cold War or The Impossible Planet or any of the numerous other episodes where the Doctor thinks the TARDIS is lost.
The thing I'm getting off Jodie's Doctor so far is that she's like Smith in his later years. In series 5, Smith has a more layered portrayal of the Doctor. The kookiness is there, but there's also surprising darkness, self-doubt, anger, etc, plus him as a seventh Doctor-esque manipulator, even of his friends. A lot of this evaporates in Series 6 and 7. In a weird way, Smith's Doctor suffers what I call the 'post-regeneration retcon'
early.
What I mean by this is
always in the show's history once an actor playing the Doctor has moved on, their portrayal of the Doctor ends up being diluted down to its most memorable aspects if they return. You don't have time to re-establish them, so you just go for the beats most remembered by the audience and even play them up to the point where they're not actually accurate.
So when Troughton came back for later episodes, his Doctor was always played as 'the clown one', with the recorder and being bumbling. There was a lot more to Troughton's interpretation in his actual era - in fact, it's one of the most nuanced in the classic era - but when he returned, he was boiled down to The Clown. That's who his Doctor 'is'.
This is true in modern Doctor Who, too - in Day of the Doctor you get Tennant's version of the character boiled down to the romantic and the off-beat hero - so you get the grandstanding speech to the rabbit, the Elizabeth stuff, even flirting with Clara. We all know Tennant's Doctor was a lot more than that, but this is shorthand for his Doctor. The shorthand always means a returning Doctor does out-of-character stuff as part of the shortcut, too. The moment that stands out to me in Day of the Doctor is him doing this flirty, grinning as he turns a handshake with Clara's into kissing her hand when he says goodbye - that's not the sort of thing he ever actually did in his era (in fact, he always mostly bemused at each romantic advance upon him). He was never that smooth. But this is the post-regeneration retcon, the shorthand: he's the romantic Doctor. They even go in for the reaction shot of Smith watching him, looking bemused, like, "I can't believe I was like this." You can guarantee that when Smith returns he'll be the 'Goofy one' and Capaldi will be the 'no-nonsense shouty one' too, even though Capaldi's version is also quite tender.
Anyway. A curious thing about Moffat's era, and Smith's part of it in particular, is that Smith hits that phase straight away. Series 5 is more scattershot with characterization and so Smith can do more, but by Series 6 it feels like Moffat had watched back Series 5 a few times, decided what worked for Smith best and doubles down on those elements and does away with everything else. The same is actually true of Capaldi, but it's less so, I think in part because Capaldi was approaching it from a very different angle to Smith (as a fan) and was constantly cramming references to other past Doctors into his interpretation, which adds a lot of texture. It's weird, but I think they're both more shallow versions of the character when you take in the entirety of their work than Tennant despite amazing acting work from the leads... and it means that Smith and Capaldi's Doctors in particular have a
lot to gain when they hit Big Finish.
I'll get to my point eventually. Bloody hell. Point is, I feel like Jodie's Doctor so far is almost like the Smith of Series 6 and 7, like she's missing a layer or two, like she's
too stripped back. And that isn't her fault, she's brilliant - as with Smith's later series', it's in the writing.
