About two weeks ago, Gallifrey One, my convention of choice, announced that their headliner guest for 2020 will be none other than the Ninth Doctor himself, Christopher Eccleston. I hardly know how to begin expressing my utter fangirl delight at this news.

You may recall that Eccleston was might first Doctor. You may also recall that I was bitterly disappointed that he chose not to participate in the 50th anniversary celebrations. Everything I had read for years about him and his time on Doctor Who indicated that he had no interest in engaging formally with the fandom, nor intention to do so.

Then in July 2018, at London Film and Comic Con, he made his first convention appearance.

“Okay,” I told myself, “I guess the press of all his various projects has finally convinced him to attend a few of the big, multi-fandom cons. Too bad I never go to those.” And I shrugged a little sadly. I figured maybe after five or ten years of that, he might consent to come to a Doctor Who convention, and eventually make his way to Gally. I did not see this announcement coming.

Faced now with the prospect of attending “his very first appearance at [a] Doctor Who convention in North America,” I am filled with nostalgia, questions, and anxiety. There are so many things I want to tell him about what his Doctor has meant to me, so many questions about how he envisions his future relationship with the show shaping up, and so many (irrational) fears about him being put off by my/our collective in-your-face enthusiasm. What if everything goes horribly wrong?

Then again, what if it all goes right? Could being surrounded by four thousand people who love this quirky show he helped relaunch open him to new possibilities? What if being in the same spaces as the bigwigs from Big Finish convinced him to record some audio adventures with them?

Because if I’m honest, an Eccleston Big Finish gig would be pretty much the best possible outcome for me. I adore the Ninth Doctor. My only regret about his tenure is that it was so short. (Yes, I’m even including the Slitheen here! In “Aliens of London” and “World War Three,” they are actually proper scary. Sure, there’s a few fart jokes, but these aliens are still dangerous hunters. It’s not until later that they really take a turn for the ridiculous.) I wish desperately that the situation on set had been different so that Eccleston would have stayed longer.

So what if we could have him back? There are so many adventures we didn’t get to see on screen, even based the allusions we did get: visiting the planet Woman Wept, the time the Doctor and Rose were hopping for their lives, even just the moments between his regeneration from the War Doctor and arriving in Rose’s neighborhood. I miss him so desperately I’d even take an audio adventure about him returning Margaret the Slitheen to Raxacoricofallapatorius as an egg!

I have no real sense of Eccleston’s current frame of mind on dipping his toe back into the Whoniverse; I know in the past he’s said he doesn’t like to revisit projects at all. But despite all that, I can’t help but hope that some day he’ll come back. The Ninth Doctor holds such a special place in my heart that I know his return would do a lot to heal the ache that his too-short on-screen era left there.

I can only hope that some day he will feel the same.