In his second incarnation, the Doctor appears distinctly ruffled and comical owing to his shapeless clothing: he wears a baggy black frock-coat, small straggly navy bow-tie with white polka-dots, pale blue short-sleeved shirt, black and pale pink broad-checked trousers, and scuffed ankle- boots. Mischievous blue eyes twinkle out of his cheerful, wrinkled face, which is framed by a mop of tousled black hair.

The second Doctor is an accident waiting to happen: he blunders his way through space and time relying on luck and quick thinking to extricate himself and his companions from trouble. He often seems to be nothing more than a bumbling idiot, an illusion that is usefully disarming and conceals the Doctor's true intelligence from potential enemies. The Doctor will clown his way through adversity to put his enemies off guard until he finds their vulnerable points.

Yet the Doctor's clowning and seeming ineffectiveness is not always an act: he is easily flustered, especially by his less experienced companions, who can panic him into hasty, ill-considered action. It is then that he begins to doubt his abilities or the safety or effectiveness of equipment. A victim of fast changing moods, the Doctor can look cheerful, sad, sulky and then bemused in a matter of minutes. Even when things are against him, however, the Doctor continually thinks of escape plans or ways of outbluffing or outmanoeuvring his opponents.

The crusty nature of his first incarnation has gone: the Doctor welcomes the presence of companions aboard the TARDIS and meets the unknown with a cheerful, disarming grin. He regards his companions as charges that need protecting and shows great concern should one of them go missing or be threatened. His moral sense of good and evil is more balanced, and he will do his utmost to thwart or destroy what he believes is wrong.

By nature the Doctor loves a puzzle: he is intrigued by things that are out of place. His scientific methods are haphazard, but somehow they get results. While the Doctor thinks he will often toot tunes on his recorder to relax or even dance a jig. He can become obsessed with small objects that to him are quite important yet seem irrelevant to anyone else.