The Two Doctors?
- Thread starter Ar-Pharazon
- Start date
Nice little moment but I don't think it's any more than two former Doctor Who actors who respect each other's work as actors.
Last edited:
Has anyone got video of them skipping gleefully hand in hand?
What a shame Eccleston doesn't want to return. He was so good in that role, and the 50th really lost something without him.
I wonder how the story would have been different.
I wonder how the story would have been different.
Indeed, Eccleston has actually spoken highly of Smith in the past, Eccleston once saw Smith in a play and commented how great he was.
Day of the Doctor? Not much really. As written, the War Doctor is such an obvious Eccleston substitute, and in some cases the writing doesn't even try to differentiate the characters (jokes about John Hurt's ears make no sense at all). Thankfully, John Hurt's performance gives us some differences to work with for the characters.
I don't think the line about the sonic screwdriver would have worked with Eccleston: "What are you going to do - assemble a cabinet at them?" Hurt put the right amount of crochety annoyance into that line.
But I'm more steamed about Paul McGann. Why couldn't they have asked him, rather than retcon this "War Doctor" nonsense?
Moffat claims a war-hardened Doctor would have been inconsistent with McGann's upbeat performance from the TV movie. Personally, I disagree. IMO, seeing McGann's Doctor war-hardened and at the end of his rope would have done a better job showing how war can change people than having the Eighth Doctor literally turn into a different person for the purposes of fighting a war did.
At the very least, having Eccleston appear at the end of the War Doctor's regeneration would have been excellent. Hasn't he said in recent years that, in retrospect, he would have liked to have taken part in the 50th? Somehow, that makes it even worse.
Agreed. None of the Doctors were the same way all the time. People accuse Tom Baker of always being an over-the-top clown, but there were times when his Doctor was quite serious, and issue-focused (ie. the drug-smuggling story in "Nightmare of Eden").
What a pathetic excuse to not use McGann. He proved in the webisode that he can play the gamut of the Doctor's emotions and attitudes, and all in a few minutes.
It's a wonder he decided to use Tom Baker, given his apparent preference to pretend that Classic Who never existed. My cynical self was that it was so the Classic Who fans would be more inclined to watch the show, and praise it.
Yup. Up until then, I actually believed that the Eighth Doctor was the one that fought in the Time War. Nothing against the late John Hurt--he was one of my favorite actors and I thought he was great as the War Doctor--but there's still a part of me that probably always would have liked to see the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors square off against a war-hardened Eighth Doctor that indeed was a far cry from what we saw in the TV movie.
If Eccleston is mainly pissed at the Beeb, it's got a better chance than him being in the show ever again.
The irony is, the War Doctor's character arc could have worked perfectly with McGann in the role, the shunned Doctor who finally earns acceptance. Okay, obviously they couldn't sell McGann as a "forgotten Doctor" since we have seen imagery of him in the current series already, but you could still have Tennant and Smith have a similar attitude towards him they had towards the War Doctor since he was the Doctor from the Time War and the one they blame for destroying Gallifrey until over the course of their shared adventure they discover an alternative and eventually forgive their former self. With McGann you could even work in an added poignancy of having it a reflection of how fandom at first didn't respond well to the TV movie from 96 but eventually learned to accept McGann as the Doctor.
Totally. This is an example of how Moffat gets a little too attached to his ideas for their own good. Moffat fell in love with the idea of introducing a "forgotten Doctor" or "mayfly" who they could bring in for an episode and cast a big celebrity in the role. A combination of Eccleston not being interested in returning and the fact we never saw a McGann to Eccleston regeneration meant he could insert a forgotten Doctor and he ran with it without even considering the fact that the storyline would have worked just fine with McGann.
It's especially frustrating now that even after we go through this whole song and dance of introducing a forgotten Doctor, having him be accepted by his successors by the end and supposedly now considered a true Doctor, he's still treated as an "unofficial" Doctor. The official numbering system still stays the old way, with Eccleston through to Whitaker still considered the Ninth to Thirteenth Doctors, and most of the official tie-in material overlooks the War Doctor anyway. Yes, he got a story arc in Titan's comics, one novel and a Big Finish series which only ended because of John Hurt's death, but that's pretty much it. All the various short story anthologies that supposedly feature "all Doctors" leave him out.
Wasn't it the BBC themselves that mandated that they couldn't use Paul McGann/The Eighth Doctor in the 50th Annivesrsary Special?
Agreed. I think that's a much stronger story arc. Even the Doctor is changed by the horrors of war. As it is, it kind of whitewashes that emotional impact away in a disposable Doctor.
I admit, I get irritated when a licensee makes an "all the Doctors" product... except that it's missing Hurt. Penguin missed out when they redid Eleven Doctors, Eleven Stories for Capaldi and didn't include a Hurt story, and they're doing the same thing with Fourteen Doctors, Fourteen Stories later this year.
I realize that it doesn't make a lot of sense to a licensee to do War Doctor-centric stuff. They want to sell product, and focusing on where the series is now, not a one-off character from five years ago, is where the money will be. Even if there were a functioning publishing line from BBC Books these last five years, I'm not sure that sales would have warranted more than the single War Doctor novel we got. Yet, I'd prefer official War Doctor stories to leaving the War Doctor's era to fanthologies.
I feel the opposite. I don't want more stories with the Warrior. I don't want novels and such to detail that "era", because other than not actually being an era, it also means demystifying the Time War further. Even the audio stories we got from BF and John Hurt is too much, but I suppose acceptable as we get a handle to the character (even if Briggs basically never wrote him as anything but a weary Doctor) and, of course, because you had John fuckin' Hurt playing the part.
Basically, any story featuring him should enforce how vastly different he was as the Warrior, as opposed to the Doctor, and that's a good reason not to have frequent stories published about him.
Basically, any story featuring him should enforce how vastly different he was as the Warrior, as opposed to the Doctor, and that's a good reason not to have frequent stories published about him.
Except that misses the point -- and it's not an unsubtle one -- of "The Day of the Doctor," that the War Doctor was always the Doctor, that he hadn't changed, that even in the circumstances of the Time War he was the man he had always been even if he couldn't see that himself. And that's been clear in every licensed appearance since, from the novelization of the episode to the Big Finish audios to George Mann's novel to the Titan Comics. The War Doctor is the Doctor, full stop, even if he couldn't see that he remained worthy of the name until the very end of his life.
There are Doctors who are more morally compromised than the War Doctor was -- the first Doctor at the start of his adventures with Ian and Barbara, the seventh Doctor at his most "Time's Champion," the David Collings Doctor in Full Fathom Five, even the Infinity Doctor (who lets Omega loose on the universe so he can spend eternity with his dead wife) -- and who never repudiated the name of the Doctor.
Moffat's rigamarole to maintain the marketing numbering as something significant was errant nonsense, imho. It would have been much cleaner to simply say that Capaldi was the fourteenth Doctor (which, narratively, he was) and leave it at that.
It's kind of funny how David Richardson's War Doctor and Eighth Doctor Time War audios (outside of the Matt Fitton's acclaimed War Doctor episode The Neverwhen) are so damn bland and demystifying, but Scott Handcock's peripheral Time War stuff (Derek Jacobi's War Master miniseries and Gallifrey: Time War) is ambitious and exciting. Turns out The Doctor wasn't doing anything remotely interesting during the Time War, but Romana II, Leela, Ace and The Master sure as hell were.
