Personality
The Fifth Doctor was far more vulnerable, sensitive, and reserved than his previous incarnations and often reacted to situations rather than initiating them. Frequently, he made decisions by flipping a coin. Unlike his more authoritative predecessors, he treated his young companions as parts of a team, and often willingly participated in situations under the leadership of someone else who had the strong command presence that he apparently lacked. However, the Fifth Doctor's boyish appearance, nervous energy, and charm all hid the fact that he was a Time Lord of great age, compassion, and experience. He could decipher the ingredients of a drink by smell alone and rosemary made him sneeze.
This Doctor greatly abhorred violence and often hesitated about taking matters into his own hands. For the first time, indecision weighed seriously on the character, and it had its consequences - yet this Doctor was also one of the most courageous of his incarnations. He was willing to take chances with companions like Turlough and Kamelion, who were originally threats, even as he pretended to be unaware of it at first in order to grant his companion the opportunity to do the right thing. He was also willing to make enormous personal sacrifices (Mawdryn Undead) simply to keep his word and liberate others from suffering. It was perhaps the awful realisation that his very existence begat violence and the weight of companion Adric's death on his conscience, and perhaps Tegan's near emotional breakdown as well, that led him to sacrifice his own existence to save his last companion, Peri. In an episode of Doctor Who Confidential, Steven Moffat said that "this Doctor takes the emphasis off the eccentricities and turns it into a pained heroism of a man who is so much better than the universe he is trying to save but cannot bear to let it stand."
The Fifth Doctor was the last to use the sonic screwdriver in the original series, having been destroyed during The Visitation. The Seventh Doctor and subsequent Doctors were later seen using versions of the tool in the television movie and the revived series. In "Time Crash", the Fifth Doctor declined to borrow the Tenth Doctor's sonic screwdriver.
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Famous quotes containing the word personality:
“The child begins life as a pleasure-seeking animal; his infantile personality is organized around his own appetites and his own body. In the course of his rearing the goal of exclusive pleasure seeking must be modified drastically, the fundamental urges must be subject to the dictates of conscience and society, urges must be capable of postponement and in some instances of renunciation completely.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do not intrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear.”
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“The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behoves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c’est l’homme, what is likely to happen if l’homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?”
—Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)