Yeah, by ACC I was all "Eleven is the best part of Moffat Who! He is my second favourite! Eleven is wonderful!" and by the end of s6a I was like "yeah okay whatever". WHAT HAPPENED? I guess Space & Time happened and somehow that just started a domino effect of me being unimpressed, idk. That combined with rewatching and rediscovering my affection for Nine has left Eleven sliding quite far down the list.

I mean,I don't hate Eleven. But I'm back to the sort of ambivalence I had towards him in the beginning of s5, before I warmed to him/when I was still missing Ten.

Edited at 2011-06-22 08:07 pm (UTC)

Yeah, I know what you mean. Right now Rory is my favorite part of Moffat's Who,'along with Canton. (And I'd watch a show about those two being awesome and having all sorts of crazy world-saving shenanigans, tbh.)

But the more I watched S6A, the I was like, 'Ugh Eleven you are the worst.' Which makes me sad because I loved him in S5.

Yeah, Rory was my favourite for most of s5, then somewhere around ACC I thought "no, actually, Eleven is the best part" ...but not anymore. On the bright side I haven't been annoyed by Amy once in s6.

But yeah IDEK what happened to Eleven, poor dude suddenly became such a douche. I think why his doucheness bothers me more than, for example, Ten's, is because it's so unacknowledged in the text. I feel like Eleven's been douching it up all over the place in s6 and no one, not even River or Rory, bats an eye. River gives him a slap on the wrist in 6x07 but it's meaningless because we know she is proud and boastful of that same exact thing by the time she dies in s4.

I've only seen s6a through once, but Eleven has felt weird all season to me. It's like Matt Smith lost the character between s5 and s6a. The only thing I wonder is if it might be intentional and some sort of foreshadowing for some Moffat-y reveal in s6b, like, "IT TURNS OUT HE WAS FLESH ALL ALOOOOONG" or something. That would at least make sense.

I felt like by the end of s5 I might end up really like s6a, but then I actually watched it and was just sort of like, "...Oh." Also, does every woman ever have to get married and/or have babies? gdi Moffat some people DO have priorities that have nothing to do with family or baby-making.

Yes, it's very odd. And Matt Smith keeps saying in interviews how the character just gets so much better because now he feels like Moffat is writing specifically for him.

I sort of have my own hypothesis that may have no basis in fact about it, which is basically that when people were writing for s5, with the exception of but even to some degree including Moffat, they didn't really "know" Eleven yet so I think on some even subconscious level many of them would be writing either a generic Doctor voice or a more Ten-ish voice than maybe they realized -- Neil Gaiman admits that, when his script was bumped from s5 to s6 and had a chance to watch Matt for a season, he had to go back and change some of Eleven's dialogue to make it "less Tennant-ish and more Matt Smith-ish" or whatever. Which you'd think would be great, right? But it does make me wonder if maybe the writers for s6, because they got to base their Doctor off s5 and not a vaguely generic/Ten-like Doctor, ended up just kind of... amplifying the quirks and everything Eleven had in s5, making him like 500% more tawdry quirks with less depth or whatever thread of familiarity had me liking him in s5. It's like they watched s5 and came away with a checklist of characteristics for Eleven but they were all things like "likes hats" and "uses the word 'cool'", rather than any actually interesting things.

That's all based on nothing more reliable than my own reasoning and speculation, but yeah.

Yeah, I don't understand how Matt could say that. That might just be one of those BS actory things actor people say when they're trying to be nice. Like how no one ever really said the dialogue in the Star Wars prequels was shit, but they were all thinking it.

I basically totally agree with everything you ever say, lirl. I think it may be that what we liked about Eleven in s5 was that there were still some very, teeny tiny traces of Ten in there, which gave us something to hold onto. But yeah, the checklist the writers made appears to have been terrible and based entirely on physical attributes and quirks rather than even something as basic (and fascinating) as "Eleven is borderline autistic," or even going further to say, "Eleven is borderline autistic by choice as a reaction to and defense mechanism to all the god-awful things that happened to him when he was Ten." See, look, I just pulled that stuff out of my ass and it's already way more interesting than anything in s6a, in my opinion. I think people either aren't trying very hard to make Eleven his own character, or Moffat is has some sort of machine that takes a script and sucks all the soul out of it and then delivers it to the actors, who do the best they can.

In short, Moffat's Who sucks EVEN WORSE than I thought it would. I actually thought he might win me over but uh, no. He's failing hard.