Legacy Character Study: The 11th Doctor

Spoilers.

Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers. 

No, really. Like, if I were to measure it, 1.21 Giga-Bruce-Willis-was-dead-the-whole-times and half a Rosebud-was-the-sled. As the series begins to approach the 50th anniversary, Moffat began doing some crazy-mind-blowing stuff that you should really go watch for yourself.

You have been warned.

Character Conception 
Oh, boy, the switching of the Doctors.

For more elaboration on this can of worms, see this post.
After they cast Matt Smith in the role (over Peter Capaldi, who ended up as the 12th Doctor), they wanted to give him a piratey costume that Smith discarded for a Professor Indiana Jones look. With a bow tie. And those are cool.

This outfit would have also been acceptable.

Secret Origin 
After giving one last farewell to each of his companions, 10 made his way back to the TARDIS, where the postponed regeneration had so much force behind it that it wrecked the TARDIS interior. It got better. He met up with a young girl named Amelia, and met up with her again years and years later. After she helped him capture an alien prisoner and defeat the corrupt alien police... he left her again. But he popped back in to take her on an adventure... on the night before her wedding to a local nurse, Rory Williams.

Powers/Abilities 
This Doctor has been shown to take the TARDIS' translation abilities to the extreme, being able to speak any language, including baby.  He was also shown to be able to "waste" regeneration energy to heal others.

After breaking his sonic screwdriver in the regeneration crash, the TARDIS supplied him with a bigger, bulkier sonic screwdriver that essentially became an anything scanner.

Like previous incarnations, 11 had a heightened sense of taste, and could use it to determine location, time period, and whether or not a landscape is natural or not.

Companions

Amy Pond
The girl who waited. The Doctor flew into her life when she was a kid, and she helped him after his regeneration. After he left (intending only to be gone for five minutes) she and her childhood friend Rory played games about "the Raggedy Doctor." Amy (who developed issues with people telling her that the Raggedy Doctor wasn't real) met back up with the Doctor years later, having grown into a feisty (she was Scottish), tough kissogram.

Rory Williams
Rory was the friend zone personified until Amy finally took notice of him. When Amy (who was scheduled to marry Rory) began to develop a crush on the Doctor, 11 took it upon himself to take Rory along with them. Rory was a self-sacrificing, adorkable guy. Who would often die and come back to life during adentures.

He is also the biggest badass in all of time and space. When he entered the TARDIS, he figured out what made it bigger on the inside. And more.

This is what happens when a good man goes to war.

River Song
The mysterious Professor Song, the inmate of Stormcage Prison. She keeps meeting the Doctor out of order. She's flirtatious and adventurous, and just... something else. As for anything else.... Spoilers!

How could I not say it?

Craig Owens
While the TARDIS was stuck in a time loop, the Doctor had to crash at Craig's flat, and taught the lovable, shy oaf how to express his true fellings for his flatmate. The Doctor showed up again later, saving him and his baby, Stormageddon. (Not his real name, but that's what he wanted to be called. The Doctor speaks baby.)

Madame Vastra and Jenny Flint
Madame Vastra was a Silurian woman who lived in Victorian London with her human wife, Jenny. They solved mysteries, including the case of Jack the Ripper, and were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's inspiration for Holmes and Watson. Don't question it, they're awesome.

Strax
Strax is a disgraced Sontaran. His punishment is to be a field nurse for assorted armies throughout the galaxy. Being from an all male clone race, he often confuses women as "boys." Acts as an "assistant" to Vastra and Jenny.

Clara Oswald
...Well, here's a whole 'nother bag of worms. Feisty, smart, and keeps her wits about her. How they met... hoo boy. Let's wait until we get to the mega spoiler section.

Notable Enemies
Weeping Angels
Ancient beings who take you into the past and feed off of your life energy as you live to death. They move at the speed of light, but only when not being observed. If anything looks at them, they instantly take on the forms of stone angels that often cover their eyes. The image of an angel becomes an angel, so pictures, photos, even videos of them become real. Don't blink, but don't look in their eyes. If you do, it's only a matter of time before you become and angel yourself. Don't blink. But don't stare.

Daleks
A few Daleks escaped their final fate, and created "a new Dalek paradigm" from a cache of Dalek DNA. Restructuring Dalek society, they are considerably less overtly "Exterminatey," but more subtle and crafty than ever before.

Cybermen
The Cybermen returned, but not the Pete's World Cybermen from previous modern stories. It was revealed that at some time in the past, the Mondas Cybermen assumed similar forms. They would later upgrade once again, this time resembling their classic forms as well as gaining new abilities and programming.

The Pandorica Alliance
An alliance of all the Doctor's foes. Daleks, Cybermen, Hoix, Sontarans, and many, many, many more, including an onscreen mention of Drahvins, who only appeared in one serial of the 1st Doctor's run.

Continuity! Boom.

The Silence
A religious sect, hellbent on killing the Doctor before he gets asked "the First Question." The main members, looking like tall versions of the traditional little grey aliens, are instantly forgotten by anyone as soon as they look away. You may have seen them seven times while reading this.

The Great Intelligence 
Psychic crystals fell to Earth from space, absorbing the mind of a young boy into adulthood. The Doctor dispersed the Intelligence after tricking it with a map of the London Underground, with events coming full circle. But the Intelligence is very intelligent. It's in the name. The GI returned, but let's save that for the spoiler section.

Notable Traits 
10 was perfectly willing to sacrifice this version of himself to close the book on the Time War once and for all. But he survived. And with his survival, he lost the will to die. He was finally able to move on. His last words? "I don't want to go." Because he stopped seeking death. He wanted to seek life.  That's the true sorrow of 10's departure. As soon as he was willing to live, he had to die. That's why he revisited all his companions. He never really appreciated any of them while he was focused on himself.

10's final act was to end the last act of the Time War, giving him catharsis. And with that, he was finally able to put the past behind him. 

11 was a clean slate. A younger man, more innocent and childish, and free to enjoy the wonders of the universe. He had a notable philosophy of "if you know you're going to be sad tomorrow, be happy today" which could be seen in many episodes in how he handled losing companions.

The Doctor loved to pick up and wear bits of clothing (notably bow ties and fezzes) and declare them to be cool. A popular theory is that 11's not wearing them because they're cool, but they're cool because the Doctor's wearing them.

11 was much more loose and uncoordinated than previous incarnations, but this is either a ruse or something he uses to his advantage to confuse enemies. He once held a group of Daleks at bay by convincing them that a jammy dodger was a weapon. Speaking of food, 11 had odd taste buds, favoring fish fingers and custard as a meal, which he claims led him to go back and invent the Yorkshire Pudding.

11 had a tendency to "goof off" with history, inventing the Yorkshire Pudding (allegedly), the quadricycle (to be fair, he thought he was just repairing it), and spent a very interesting night with Marilyn Monroe.

A popular theory behind 11's ADHD-riddled behavior is that he's experiencing Time Lord senility. I'd believe it.

Catchphrases
"_______ is/are cool."
"Geronimo!"

Notable Character History 

THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING: HUGE SPOILERS AHEAD

After regenerating, defeating a crack in time, an alien prisoner, and the corrupt guards, Amy and the Doctor (to no one's surprise) went off to gallivant in time and space... the night before her wedding to Rory Williams. Again, here are the notable occurances.

• They went back to WW2 and fended off the new Dalek paradigm, though they were far from defeated. The Doctor discovers that many events, like the Dalek invasion of Earth and the Victorian invasion of the Cybermen seem to have been wiped from history.  
• They find a crashed spaceship in the future and fend off the starving Weeping Angels with River Song. Amy gets an angel in her eye, but all the Angels fall through another crack in time, wiping them from history, making the Angel in Amy's eye never exist. Being a traumatic event in Amy's life, she develops an attraction to the Doctor, who remedies this by bringing Rory along for their next adventures.  
• The TARDIS team finds themselves switching between marriage in the future, and the present in the TARDIS, with a menace in both timelines. An evil mastermind called the Dream Lord made them guess which one was real, but it turned out that both were fake. Rory deaths: 2 (Though they were both dreams.)  
• The Silurians were attempting to destroy humanity after a sciencey drill "attacked" their hibernation pods. During the inevitable escape scene, Rory ended up shot and was sucked up by a crack in time, erasing him from history. Rory deaths: 3 
  But before that happened, the Doctor reached into the crack and pulled out a fragment of the TARDIS from the future. Uh oh.  
• Amy gets trapped in the TARDIS while the Doctor stays with Craig. At his flat, a reverse-engineered TARDIS is disguised as the upstairs apartment. After everything gets sorted out, Amy discovers Rory's wedding ring in the TARDIS, assuming it's the Doctor's.  
• Vincent Van Gogh (who the Doctor and Amy actually met) paints the TARDIS exploding. In 102 AD, River Song shows it to Amy and the Doctor. It also contains coordinates for Stonehenge. When they get there, it turns out that underneath Stonehenge is the legendary Pandorica, a prison for the most dangerous thing in the universe. It begins to open up, and EVERY SINGLE ENEMY THE DOCTOR HAS EVER FACED shows up and traps him inside. The most dangerous thing in the universe: the Doctor. 
  
  Rory returns as a plastic Roman created by the Nestene (long story, Amy's memories), Amy gets shot, and the stars begin to go out as the TARDIS, with River inside, explodes in a perpetual loop, which ends up causing the cracks in time. 
  
  Thanks to a lot of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey and predestination paradoxes which would be too complex to go over here, the Doctor is freed, Amy gets put in the Pandorica to stabilize her, and her younger self touches the Pandorica in a museum almost 2,000 years later, which uses her DNA to heal her. 
  
  The problem is that history is messed up. The museum contains stone Daleks, penguins in the jungle, and more. As it turns out, plastic Rory guarded the Pandorica for all those years, becoming a legend known as "the Last Centurion." 
  
  As the universe continues to collapse from all the cracks in time, the Doctor flies the Pandorica into the permanently exploding TARDIS (which has replaced the sun) to save River and stop the cracks by resetting the universe with the Big Bang Two. But in doing so, his life begins to rewind as he gets erased from history. Amy marries Rory, but cries during the reception and doesn't know why. Thanks to a wedding gift from River Song, she begins to remember the Raggedy Doctor, which is enough to bring him back. Wearing his spiffy wedding tux, no less.

• This episode was called "The Big Bang," but according to Steven Moffat, it has less to do with the Pandorica and more to do with Amy and Rory's wedding. This will be a plot point. 

Yes, he wore that on the honeymoon.

• On Amy and Rory's honeymoon, the Doctor has to convince a miser of the spirit of Christmas using the past, present, and future to save Amy and Rory from crashing into the planet.  
• Amy and Rory, having left the TARDIS by this point, get an invitation from the Doctor. They go to Utah, and they, River, and 11 have a picnic. And the Doctor ends up killed by an astronaut rising from a lake. DEAD-dead. 
  
  In a nearby diner, after giving him a viking funeral, the run into a younger Doctor, who received a similar invitation. They head to the Oval Office, 1969, and meet up with the Silence, the force who caused the TARDIS to explode. 
  
  They find a little girl in a weaponized spacesuit, and end up defeating the Silence by using their own abilities of post-hypnotic suggestion against them. The little girl, who got shot and disappeared regenerates in an alleyway into a new body. 
  
  (During this adventure, Rory gets "shot" to fool the bad guys. Rory deaths: 4)  
• They meet up with a "siren" on a pirate ship. Rory deaths: 5 (He gets resuscitated by alien science.)   
• When a disembodied mind takes over the TARDIS, Amy has a vision of an aged Rory cursing her and dying. Rory deaths: 6  
• During all this time, Amy had been having visions of a woman opening a panel in random walls. The TARDIS team saves artificially grown worker clones called "gangers," and the Doctor reveals that the reason they're there is to research the "Flesh" the gangers are made from. Amy turns out to be a ganger and is disintegrated. Real Amy is somewhere else, quite pregnant, and is told to push.  
• Rory and the Doctor assemble a new team of pirates, Strax, Jenny, Vastra, and more to defeat the Silence and save Amy and her child. Sadly, they save Amy, but the Silence get away with the baby. As it turns out, the baby, Melody Pond (having been conceived in the TARDIS) will essentially be a Time Lady. And due to her eventual foster parents having a different language system and naming convention, "Melody Pond" gets raised as "River Song." Yep. 

Of course River Song turned out cool. This is her dad.

• As it also turns out, Melody is named after Amy's childhood friend, who is revealed to be a time-displaced River Song. Melody hijacks the TARDIS, goes to kill Hitler, dies, regenerates, and becomes the River we all know and love, with a few caveats. This is the first time, to her, that she had met the Dcotor, and the Silence has brainwashed her to kill him.  They help River with her homicidal urges, and learn from a shapeshifting robot full of shrunken people that the Silence want to prevent the "First Question" from being asked.  
• Amy gets separated from the team on a world plagued by an illness, and spends decades fighting the robot nurses and their lethal "cures." The Doctor brings back young and old Amys through a paradox, but is forced to leave the elder one behind.  
• The Doctor gives the Ponds a break, taking them back to Earth.  
• While the Doctor helps Craig defeat the Cybermen, River gets abducted and placed into a spacesuit under Lake Silencio.  
• The Doctor goes to face his death, but River drained the spacesuit's weapons, creating an alternate reality where all of history's happening at once. For example, Winston Churchill is the Holy Roman Emperor, and Charles Dickens is being interviewed by Meredith Viera. River, who has fallen in love with the Doctor, marries him and he whispers into her ear his name, allegedly. 
  
  Time resets from their physical contact, and the Doctor dies. Except he doesn't. Remember that shapeshifting robot? The Doctor called in a favor. He didn't tell her his name, he told her to look into his eye. She saw the real Doctor in the cockpit of the robot. 
  
  While the Doctor goes into hiding, he ends up learning the First Question, hidden in plain sight. "Doctor who?"  
• The now-divorced Amy and Rory are kidnapped by the Daleks to assist the Doctor in removing a crashed ship from the Dalek asylum, where the insane Daleks go. The Doctor gets them to realize that they left each other because each thought the other would be happier that way, and the Doctor went off to save crash survivor Oswin Oswald... who had sadly been turned into a Dalek. An insane Dalek, who thought she was still human. But her last act was to wipe the Doctor from the Daleks' files. 
  "DOC-TOR WHOOOOOOO!?" 

• The Doctor saves the Earth from an ancient Gallifreyan legend, the Shakri, the pest-controllers of the universe. He teams up with the revised UNIT, headed by Kate Stewart, the daughter of the Brigadier.  
• Sadly, Amy and Rory ended up abducted by the Weeping Angels. They lived a good, happy, long life in the past and Amy became a children's author. Due to the paradoxes with the Angels' time travel abilities, the Doctor could never go back and get them. Rory deaths: 9  
• The Doctor became a recluse after that, hiding out in Victorian London, watched over by Strax, Jenny, and Vastra. With the help of a local nanny, he saved the world from the Great Intelligence's plan to replace all humans with living ice-people. Sadly, she lost her life in the process. At the funeral, the Doctor discovered her real name: Clara Oswin Oswald. Vowing to figure out the reason behind this Impossible Girl, the Doctor heads back into time.  
• He ran into Clara Oswald again, who had her mind enhanced by the Great Intelligence's mind-sucking scheme in the present. He saved her, but she gained the immense computer skills of her dopplegangers, even taking the username "Oswin." Then, they went off in the TARDIS.  
• He spied on her past, but found out nothing odd about her. She was a perfectly ordinary girl.  
• The TARDIS, through a series of mishaps, was exploding again. The Doctor revealed to Clara her impossible status, before time reset, undoing the events of the episode.  
• He stopped a Silurian venom from raining over the world in Victorian London; Strax, Jenny, and Vastra were very confused as to how Clara was still alive.  
• Vastra learns from Jack the Ripper that the Doctor's secret will be taken to his grave, and "it is discovered." The GI kidnaps the Doctors allies, and he is forced to go with Clara to his grave. The GI forces him to unlock it by asking the First Question, as the Doctor's true name is the password. An unheard echo of River answers, and we see the remains of the Doctor: a living timeline. The GI heads into it, killing the Doctor at every point in history at the same time. Clara rushes in to stop him, becoming the echoes of herself that the Doctor kept running into, preventing the stars from going out again and the universe from ending several times over. 
  The Doctor rushes in to save her, and they end up in a place entirely populated by previous incarnations of the Doctor, including one that we've never seen before.  The Time War Doctor.  To be continued on the 50th Anniversary.  

Alternate Versions 
"Ganger" Doctor
After assuming the Doctor's physical form, it took a while for the mental faculties to catch up. He creepily tried to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, asked if anyone would like a Jelly Baby, and introduced himself with the 10th Doctor's voice.

Though the other Gangers were bent on self-preservation, this Doctor seemed to be exactly like the regular one, just made out of goo. Sacrificed his life to save the TARDIS team.

Dream Lord

Well, hi, Arnim Zola! Shouldn't you be working with Agent Smith?

The Dream Lord was a mental manifestation of the Doctor's self-hatred brought forth from psychic pollen. It's easy to see how easily the Valeyard became what he was, with this as his predecessor.

Don't worry, this page will be completed when 11 finishes his run. For now, kick back, have a Jelly Baby, make yourself some fish custard, and enjoy the "Day of the Doctor."  Happy 50th Anniversary to one and all!