4. Adorable Obliviousness
For me, one of the best bits of David Tennant's 10th Doctor comes in "The Sound of Drums." We're nearing the end of Series 3. Martha and her boys are on the run from just about everyone following a bombing at her apartment. The Master has returned and is Prime Minister. This is not the time to be funny, but funny the Doctor is. He describes the perception filter thus: "Oh! I know what it's like. It's like when you fancy someone and they don't even know you exist. That's what it's like." Martha and Jack share a look and Captain Jack ruefully says, "You too, huh?" The Doctor has a perspective that boggles the mind. He sees and hears what no one else notices. He understands all threads of time, past, present and future. And yet he sometimes can miss things as simple as Martha's crush or Rory no longer being dead. In our first Capaldi encounter in
Doctor Who, Caecilius and Matella are the two daft sods who can't see that the Doctor is something extraordinary. Their children do. The augur does. Heck, the half-stone High Priestess of the Sybilline Sisterhood does. Then take Tristan Campbell from the
Vicar of Dibley. In "The Christmas Lunch Incident," his character shows up, proposes marriage to the twitterpated vicar Geraldine. Then he leaves, executes the proposal that he had just rehearsed with his good friend the vicar and comes back with his new fiancee. I can foresee the Doctor capitalizing on this trait, since he's been so good at it in the past.