Occasionally one shows a brief flash of intelligence, but it's not as if the Doctor chooses them for that.
The lesser races are to be used, but hardly befriended; tolerated, but scarcely indulged.
(And he does not need to be reminded of age and death; not now, not when his regenerations are spinning down towards their end, however many lives he steals or stars he destroys to buy them back again.)
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