The problem is that he's still fundementally the same guy with the same set of memories, something which comes up when he confronts the same basic rogues gallery continously. There is a point upon which you'd have to expect a bit more to carry over than what we've been seeing.Zombie Sodomy said:I actually like having a lot of character development and then having it shattered. It's brutal to watch, but how is that bad? As I mentioned earlier, it reinforces the fact that the doctor dies. It makes the transitions so much more tragic and, while not everyone likes that, I love it. I should be bothered when the doctor changes. It should piss me off that the character I've grown to love is killed off repeatedly. It makes the Doctor such a tragic character, that I end up sympathising with him all the more and dreading the day when he has to die. I love the Doctor because he's so sad, but he keeps putting other people before him at great cost to himself.Therumancer said:That said I think one of the problems has been that in the modern Doctor Who we've seen some attempts to be consistant and do some real, lasing, world and character building, only to see it shattered. It can be argued (as your other responder pointed out) that this was never the idea behind Doctor Who, *BUT* I tend to agree that once they started doing it they should have continued to acknowlege it, I think the problem is they are trying to have it both ways, and it really doesn't work, the jarring impact of the way they did this really hitting the entire current fandom, "old school" fans who were here before the modern version are less bothered of course since, as was pointed out, it's happened before.
Originally Doctor Who came up with the entire reincarnation gimmick due to it's low budget and the need to change actors, on what seemed to very much be a day-to-day series as far as survival goes, and where they literally used things like inflatable pool chairs as alien execution devices. Right now Doctor Who doesn't have that same kind of excuse, and I think it shows in the reactions to entire arcs of development being dismissed. I don't think it was ever really a part of the central characterization, so much as it was an excuse people simply accepted due to the realities of the show's production, and how at the time there wasn't a whole heck of a lot of other science fiction television programming.
Of course what I think is more or less irrelevent, but I think the path that was chosen means that the current incarnation of the series is always going to be in the shadow of David Tennant, and the strong writing that went
along with him.