Leave That Man Alone, or So Help Me
We cannot entertain a possibility where Doctor Who's future is saved by its past—or by one man in particular.
"I don't want to go" might end up being one of the most damning lines of modern Doctor Who.
In context, it's pretty fantastic, to borrow a turn of phrase from another incarnation—the tenth Doctor's teary-eyed final words as he glows with ephemeral light, a reminder that for all his will, regeneration comes for every Time Lord. It's both wonderfully metatextual (Tennant was leaving on a high as basically being the singular face of Doctor Who's stratospheric ascent in pop culture between 2005 and 2010) and deeply incisive of his incarnation's character (an underlying self-important streak that made Ten ignorantly high on his own supply quite a lot—and that way the Time Lord Victorious lies). Honestly, if the eleventh Doctor's regeneration didn't exist, it'd be my favorite regeneration of any Doctor.
But "I don't want to go," whether Tennant or the man who wrote that line ever intended it, has changed a lot in meaning these past couple of years. Tennant's indulgent return as a brand new fourteenth incarnation of the Doctor for Doctor Who's 60th anniversary represented a slippery slope, a herald that Russell T. Davies' second turn as showrunner started with little in the way of new ideas and would go on to generate even less. Now, as that second turn has resulted in the death of Doctor Who (for now, at least), rumors are already swirling that at least some people attempting to make a case for Doctor Who's future have turned to Tennant again, hoping that the most popular face of the show since Tom Baker could make lightning strike a third time.
The Times' claim this week that at least one party attempting to plan for the BBC's release of Doctor Who to competitive tender by getting David Tennant on their side (the company in question, Electric Entertainment, has denied it) is a reflection of a paranoia around the series that has actually existed for quite a while now. When Tennant first announced his intent to leave the series, internal discussions at the BBC believed that Doctor Who couldn't live without him (it did so for another fifteen years). But it is absolutely a paranoia that Doctor Who must break if it's to learn the lessons of why the era heralded by one Tennant return already failed so spectacularly in the first place.