Oh, I would read the heck out of an essay about RTD era Doctor as a refugee.

It’s not fully put together in my head yet but it starts somewhere during the End of the World.

Doctor Who post-revival loves to lean on this “last of his kind” language, but it often lends itself to different meanings—it can imply extinction, with the doctor as the last of his biological species, or it implies mythos, with the Doctor as the grand survivor of an epic fantasy. But in Davies’ Who, the closest connotation is that of someone fleeing from war. Jabe is not looking at the final surviving member of a species the way we would look at the last white rhinoceros or the last tiger. She is absolutely not looking at a hero. She focuses on his personhood, and with that a recognition of his deep sense of loss: how sorry I am…there’s nothing else left.

And again at the end of the episode, when the Doctor says there was a war and we lost. Those aren’t words that put the Doctor in the slightest role of victor, or soldier, or warrior—all descriptions later attached to the Time War as its role in the series got rewritten and reframed. From the get-go, Davies puts minimal emphasis on what the Doctor did in the time war. he puts all his emphasis on the Doctor as the one who left, with all the complexity that entails: the leaving, the homesickness, the deep grief, the guilt, the fear of cowardice. the hireath. These aren’t the emotions of a cunning warrior; these are the emotions of a refugee.

In Gridlock, Martha sits down and refuses to leave until the Doctor tells her what he is. He doesn’t explain a thing about what he did in the Time War or how he solved it. He focuses solely on loss.

DOCTOR: There was a war. A Time War. The last Great Time War. My people fought a race called the Daleks, for the sake of all creation. And they lost. They lost. Everyone lost. They're all gone now. My family, my friends, even that sky. Oh, you should have seen it, that old planet. The second sun would rise in the south, and the mountains would shine. The leaves on the trees were silver, and when they caught the light every morning, it looked like a forest on fire. When the autumn came, the breeze would blow through the branches like a song.

Notice particularly how as he talks, he drifts totally away from the war Itself. His mind goes to his homeland, the literal land that shaped his childhood. The weight in his own telling of the war is entirely on what it took away.

And then, in Voyage of the Damned, we get—

ASTRID: How come you know it so well?

DOCTOR: I was sort of, a few years ago, I was sort of made, well, sort of homeless, and, er, there was the Earth. 

the simplest, smallest exchange, but it throws off entirely common assumptions about the Doctor and his relationship to Earth. He isn’t here protecting us, or because he likes our small human ways—though those may be factors. He came because he was homeless, and we let him in.

does it get more crystal clear?

i think that refugee metaphor became muddied over the years, partly in good ways (it’s fun that other writers got to play with the idea of the Time War!), but also ways that weaken the deep compassion of that original concept (does it really add anything to have the masterful Doctor also be the top soldier in an unwinnable war?). the Doctor is always a winner, but by giving him a backstory where he was ordinary, at a loss, and on the run, Davies both gave him the balance he deeply needs from the in-show universe and also projected a deep sense of social justice into the show from its roots. He made the most amazing character on the show into the type of person most ignored on this Earth, and presented that story again and again—here is what it’s like to lose a home, here is what it’s like to find one. it’s empathetic storytelling at its finest, and a core of the new show that I wish it would wander back to.