Blasphemy!  Heresy!  Buuuuuurn heeeeeer!

OK, that’s probably overstating the reaction a bit, but I may well be ostracized at my own get-together after this one.  The Ladies of WhoFest are firm Tennantites, so admitting my Smithian leanings is sure to engender some antagonism, or at the very least disdain. I can’t deny it any more, though.  I think Eleven has surpassed Ten for me in terms of watchability.

Don’t get me wrong – Ten is my Doctor.  I fell in love with him (yeah, I mean it that way – how Mary Sue of me; and yes, I wept like a pregnant lady during The End of Time…), and through him learned to love all the Doctors, each in their own way.  But there’s something a bit off-putting about The Lonely God after a while.  While I loved the Saddest Doctor when he was in a manic phase – oh, that smile… – I got tired of him getting screwed (metaphorically, and – depending on how you interpret a few things – literally) all the time.  The guy couldn’t catch a break.  Given how RTD chose to write his story arc, I have to say it was probably time for Ten to regenerate; I mean, how much lower could he go?

Perhaps it will come as no surprise, then, when I say that what I’ve come to love most about Eleven is the return of his joie de vivre.  Sure, the pain is still lurking there in his eyes when someone forcibly reminds him of it, but for the most part, he can put it out of his mind the way anyone who’s lost a loved one learns to do (or, as Two put it in Tomb of the Cybermen, “I have to really want to – to bring them back in front of my eyes. The rest of the time they… they sleep in my mind, and I forget.”).  But overall, Eleven gives off a kid-in-a-candy-store vibe, like he hardly knows where to begin because it’s all so fabulous – sort of like Ten’s breathy “that’s beautiful!” upon first seeing the werewolf in Tooth and Claw, except all the time. New regeneration, new companion(s), new outlook; in a sense everything that Ten was really did die.  And while part of me misses him, another larger part just doesn’t have the time, because watching Eleven is too damn much fun.