Review of The Doctors Revisited – Ninth Doctor

No matter who ends up being our favorite, I think if we’re honest with ourselves, each fan instinctually compares every other Doctor to the one they see first. Whether you declare that one “your” Doctor or simply your first, everyone else is, on some level, automatically compared with the one who set your personal standard.

Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2013 BBC

Thus it is for me with Eccleston. Sure, I became a Tennant fan, and consider him “my” Doctor because it was him who cemented my fandom—but Eccelston’s Ninth Doctor defined the Doctor for me, and watching him in the role always feels like coming home.

I was gratified that those interviewed (including Neil Gaiman, Steven Moffat, Marcus Wilson, Nicholas Briggs, Noel Clarke (Mickey Smith), Corey Johnson (Henry van Statten), and John Barrowman (Capt. Jack Harkness)) picked up on some of the same things that drew me to Nine. For one thing, he was always sure of himself—no “absent-minded professor” vibe to this guy. (This could explain why it took me a while to warm to, for example, T. Baker’s Four, who often seemed at a loss.) Further, he doesn’t have to be busy, busy, busy to be in control. As Gaiman put it, “He doesn’t do anything quite a lot and yet he’s still the center of attention.”

There’s a distinctive darkness about him, too. Perhaps one reason I so love Dalek is that moment when he first comes face-to-face with the eponymous creature. We’ve only ever seen this Doctor (and on first viewing for me, that meant the Doctor) be confident; even on Platform One when things went wrong, his “that’s funny” face is not one of “how unexpected; now what?” but of “I’ve just found a new puzzle to solve.” Here, though, suddenly confronted with not only a known-dangerous foe but also a reminder of the atrocity he had been forced (now in vain?) to commit, he stands before us stripped to the bare emotions. His whole arc is about showing us how damaged he is. Moffat expanded on that idea as follows:

“The subsequent Doctors … don’t have to play it up so much, because we know it’s in there. They just give you one wounded look and for a moment you see the Ninth Doctor looking out of their eyes.”

As the episode continues, we move on to the Doctor’s Companions. Although Nine only had one “official” Companion, there were arguably others who shaped him as well. Rose, the Companion many fans love to hate, is actually the perfect one to travel with Nine. (To be fair, those who hate Rose mostly hate her for her subsequent time with Ten.) She gave a new generation of viewers a relatable figure—a classic “everyman”—through whose eyes we could see the Doctor, and learn to love this epically strong, fragile man as she did.

Rose’s mom Jackie gets a look-in during the special, too. Although I don’t consider her anywhere near Companion material until later series (and even then, only barely), I suppose it makes sense to mention her here, in her introduction. After all, the Doctor had “never been slapped by someone’s mother” before!

I don’t believe he’d ever had competition from a boyfriend before, either. Mickey was primarily background noise during Nine’s time with Rose, but it was the beginning of something more. And when Jack made his entrance, there were definitely some competitive sparks flying. As Barrowman pointed out, Jack provided a stark contrast to the Doctor. While our hero abhors guns, using violence to solve a problem is pretty much Jack’s first instinct. It makes for some interesting tension.

Moving finally to the “Famous Foes” portion of the episode, it’s no surprise what’s chosen; there’s really only one worth mentioning: the Daleks. With the setup in Dalek, we see from the Doctor’s reaction how very dangerous the Daleks are. Thus, when they come back in spades at the end of the series, we’re ready to be terrified. The groundwork has been laid, and we see how very dangerous the Doctor himself can be when he confronts them directly. “It makes him more heroic. It raises the stakes for the Doctor,” as Briggs explained.

Given the buildup as the retrospective drew to a close, it seems only natural that the episodes chosen to follow it were Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways, the finale to modern Series One (a new phenomenon itself, as pre-Hiatus stories all effectively just ran one into the next). It broke my heart to see Eccleston go, and while I’ve come to love every Doctor I’ve seen since (that is, all of them), no one will ever affect me quite the same way. Whether you’ve never seen him before, or know all his episodes by heart, it’s worth your time to watch him in action.

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