The Tenth Doctor’s final words, “I don’t want to go,” couldn’t have been more appropriate for a Time Lord who’s hardly left since his regeneration.
In the modern era of Doctor Who, the Tenth Doctor has outlived his life like no other – from the 50th anniversary special to new audio adventures to, most improbably, returning as the lead Time Lord for several episodes to mark the 60th anniversary.
It helped that actor David Tennant was a Doctor Who fan from childhood. After the show’s triumphant return in the spring of 2005, Tennant and showrunner Russell T. Davies crafted a science-fiction juggernaut that took the show to unprecedented global popularity. Not bad for a show that was already more than 40 years old.
It’s no wonder the Tenth Doctor’s history is one of the most interesting in the Time Lord’s history. As we prepare for his mysterious return in 2023, here’s the story of the Tenth Doctor so far.
Grab your pajamas
We’ve seen Time Lords’ uncanny ability to regenerate and biologically refresh themselves in response to previous incarnations and external factors. When the energy of the time vortex ended the Ninth Doctor’s life as he saved Rose ‘Bad Wolf’ Tyler, his replacement left much of his predecessor’s guilt behind.
The Ninth Doctor was burdened with the recent memory of the Time War and, as we’d later discover, his role in destroying his home planet Gallifrey. The Tenth Doctor was, on the face of it, an energetic, life-loving, and more human incarnation, although it took him a while to get going.
After some cheerful opening lines, the Tenth Doctor crash-landed the TARDIS in London during Christmas 2005 and spent most of a planetary invasion unconscious. When he emerged to battle the plundering Sycorax, he gave us a glimpse of several defining character traits before he’d even raided the TARDIS wardrobe for his trademark pinstriped suit, long coat, and Converse Hi-Tops.
He was brave and reckless, engaging the Sycorax leader in a ship-top sword fight and losing his arm. He was lucky enough to be early in his regeneration cycle and grow a new limb. He was also ruthless, taking out the Sycorax leader with a satsuma after giving him a chance to surrender. He’d quickly found out who he was: “No second chances. I’m that sort of man.” He then ended the career of British Prime Minister Harriet Jones with six words when she defied him, deliberately averting what would have been Britain’s Golden Age. His relationship with established time would always be tricky.
A Rose by no other name
The Tenth Doctor embarked on a year of adventures with Rose and her on-off boyfriend, Mickey Smith, aboard the TARDIS.
There was a trip to the far future of New Earth and his past, where he revealed his sentimental side by reuniting with old companions Sarah Jane Smith and K9 on contemporary Earth.
He exposed his recklessness when he saved Queen Victoria but angered her so much that she created the Torchwood Institute to repel alien interference. In the time-traveling trap, The Girl in the Fireplace, he was willing to sacrifice years for the sake of Madame de Pompadour. He later compounded his bravery by confronting the Beast of the Impossible Planet solo.
In a parallel universe, he reintroduced himself to the Cybermen, where Mickey left the crew thanks to the relationship that would define the Tenth Doctor. After difficulty accepting the Doctor’s new face, Rose fell for his latest incarnation. Their companionship ended in tears when she was stranded in a parallel universe the Doctor couldn’t reach.
Rage of a Time Lord
Immediately thrown together with runaway bride Donna Noble, the Doctor exposed his darker side. When the Empress of the Racnoss refused a peaceful retreat, the Doctor was willing to die to destroy the deadly offspring hatching at the Earth’s core. Donna saved him, although she declined to join his travels and told him to find someone else to keep him in check.
His rage returned after he assumed a human disguise using Time Lord Chameleon Arch technology and brutally punished the predatory Family of Blood. It became clear the Doctor’s desperate escape had been an attempt to save them from his vengeance. By this point, he was traveling with the brilliant Martha Jones, a human doctor he met when the Juddoon transported a hospital to the moon in 2007.
He and Martha were barely present for the arrival of the Weeping Angels, but they were in the right place for a frosty reunion with immortal Captain Jack Harkness as the Face of Boe’s earlier warning came true: “You are not alone.”
Hiding in human form at the end of the universe, the Master promptly regenerated to match his vibrant rival, then fled through the Doctor’s timestream to become Harold Saxon – the authoritarian Prime Minister of Britain installed before the Racnoss invasion. Captured and taunted by the Master on 21st-century Earth, the Doctor stopped his nemesis’ universal war by channeling the world’s psychic energy. There was a cost to this magic, as Martha’s year in Hell cured her crush, and she walked away from life as collateral damage.
Just a mate
After a trip to a futuristic — but just as unlucky — Titanic, the Tenth Doctor was reunited with Donna Noble as planets around the universe started disappearing. That mystery carried through the Tenth Doctor’s third year, during which he bent the rules of fixed time to rescue a family from Pompeii. In the distorted war of Messaline, the Doctor inadvertently gained a daughter, Jenny (looking a lot like David Tennant’s wife), who is still flying around the universe.
Happier times ensued, like helping a skeptical Agatha Christie solve a murder mystery at a country house, mixed with darker moments, like encountering the deadly Vastu Narada in a planet-sized library. There, the Doctor met River Song, his future wife, for the first time as she died stopping the carnivorous shadow creatures.
After a malevolent alien nearly possessed the Doctor on the Planet Midnight, Donna was dragged into a parallel reality, where the Doctor died defeating the Racnoss, and Britain fell into a dystopia. She barely escaped with a chilling message for the Doctor: “bad wolf.”
Rose and the Doctor united to solve the mystery of the series, where a Dalek invasion of Earth was part of a grander master plan to destroy reality. Their forces had been regrown from the cells of their creator Davros, who was held prisoner by his creations. Their scheme was foiled, thanks to the Doctor’s self-obsession. Hit by a Dalek energy weapon, he wasted a regeneration to restore his incarnation, creating a regenerative meta crisis in the process. The result was the DoctorDonna, whereby his companion gained Time Lord knowledge that helped him stop the pepperpots.
The meta crisis also created a human hybrid version of the Tenth Doctor, grown from the severed hand lost battling the Sycorax. That clone returned with Rose to her parallel dimension, which gets weirder the more you think about it. On our Earth, the consequences were more tragic when the Doctor was forced to erase Donna’s memories of their travels to save her mind and life.
Faced with the inevitable end of his incarnation, the Tenth Doctor became even more indulgent and proved Donna’s earlier warning correct.
Time Lord Victorious
Traveling without companions, the Doctor did his best to ignore the oncoming doom. One highlight was marrying (and annoying) Elizabeth I before joining forces with his Eleventh, War, and other incarnations to stop the destruction of Gallifrey during the Time War.
He battled Cybermen in Victorian London before tackling ancient evil on Mars, where he entered his darkest phase. As the last of his kind, he asserted his supremacy over time, becoming the Time Lord Victorious. That idea was expanded in a multiplatform story named after the pseudonym the BBC launched in 2020 when the Eighth and Ninth Doctors united to stop their successor.
The Tenth Doctor’s life ended when the Time War roared back into his life, surviving a three-way battle with a resurrected Master and Rassilon, Lord High President of Gallifrey. In the end, he was forced into self-sacrifice to save Wilfred Mott, the grandfather of Donna Noble.
There was still time, quite a bit of it, for this indulgent incarnation. He took an extended coda to revisit old companions before destructively regenerating in his TARDIS and taking the decor with him.
That was the last time we saw the Tenth Doctor chronologically until the Thirteenth Doctor’s life ended with the reemergence of a familiar face and suit combination. Mirroring his first line, this older Doctor couldn’t believe his new-old appearance.
Canonically, the Tenth Doctor has returned as the Fourteenth Doctor, and the story of this incarnation is yet to be told. Still, as it stands, the Tenth Doctor remains one of the most recognizable incarnations of the Time Lord and the first Doctor to undergo three regenerations. So far.
