As It Should Be

Well, [the Doctor] was devastated. I think Rose had helped him reform himself. I think Rose had influenced who he became when he regenerated into me. I think her influence was very formative for the Doctor, having come out of this terrible war and all of these extraordinarily awful things that he'd been to and been borne witness to. And that she helped him recover, helped him become the man that he re-found. To lose her was devastating, and yet, as it went for the Doctor, kind of inevitable. That's part of that tragedy of that character, that every relationship that he forms with anyone other than a Time Lord—and of course, there were none of them left—was, by its very nature, transient, because he's effectively eternal next to a human being, who might get a hundred years if they're lucky. So that's one of the tragedies of that character that makes him sort of timeless. So yeah, to lose Rose—the woman who'd helped him rebuild who he was, and the woman he almost dared to fall in love with, I think—was devastating for him, and took him a long time to get over. And maybe he never did. He was certainly never quite over it while he was me.