The Girl Who Grew Up In The TARDIS (Wattys2014)

"You were expecting someone else?"

 Something had gone wrong with the Doctor’s regeneration. The Doctor’s mind was unravelling, maybe he had been too many people in too short a space of time but the Doctor still had many more lives to come so if he couldn’t cope now, then what was regeneration going to be like in the future? But the Doctor had nearly died, that must have been while he was so unstable… Of course the Doctor had never coped very well with regeneration the best of times but this was something else…As I watched the scenes unfold in the control room I could not believe the TARDIS had shown them to me, it left me traumatised though I had to believe that the TARDIS would have stopped the Doctor, that she would not have let him harm Peri. And I thought I had seen everything and felt everything there was to feel about the Doctor. I had been a little afraid of the Doctor before but never angry with him. I knew he couldn’t help what he had done, the Doctor had almost died and he wasn’t a well man but in that moment I hated him. It was very hard to watch the Doctor and the way he behaved, he was loud, bullish, egotistical and in those early days his moods were so wild and erratic, my heart went out to Peri, she stayed with the Doctor even after he had attacked her, though to be fair she was stranded, somewhere in space and time, she couldn’t exactly walk away. In truth the Doctor would have been in a lot of trouble if Peri hadn’t been looking out for him but like so many companions before her, she knew nothing of regeneration so it must have been a terrible shock to her, the unpredictable and horribly moody Doctor standing before her was such a contrast to the gentle, compassionate man she had known.

 I guess I was also in danger of forgetting, the Doctor was an alien and he had never seemed more remote, callous and alien as he did in those early days following his regeneration. But I did not lose heart, this was the Doctor, underneath it all I knew he was still a good man… However his sense of fashion had completely deserted him this time around, the Doctor was never one to blend in and there was now a vanity about him which meant he wanted to be seen and believe me when this incarnation of the Doctor walked into a room, you could not take your eyes off the rainbow multi-coloured, clashing, patterned monstrosity of a suit he wore, it was unforgettable but not in a good way… In fact it still makes my eyes ache whenever I recall that outfit. I mean this version of the Doctor certainly wanted to shake things up, he even tried to fix the chameleon circuit so he could alter the TARDIS’ appearance, what was that all about?!  Looking back I have to joke, though at the time I felt as though my whole world was tumbling down around me because the Doctor wasn’t quite right.