Review of The Doctors Revisited – Eighth Doctor
In any rundown of all the Doctors, Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor always seems to get the short end of the stick. The same is true here, as the eighth installment of Revisited is about a two-thirds the length of any of the previous episodes. Further, McGann himself is conspicuous in his absence, the only surviving Doctor actor to date not to appear in his own retrospective.
Granted, since the series seems to be sticking tightly to televised stories—an oversight, in my opinion, since alternative media like audio adventures are where Eight really comes into his own—we can hardly have expected a long homage to a Doctor who only had 70 minutes on screen. Even bringing in Sylvester McCoy to discuss the regeneration barely padded things out.
However, Companion actors Daphne Ashbrook and Yee Jee Tso (who appeared in interview snippets, along with Steven Moffat, Marcus Wilson, and Nicholas Briggs) make a valiant effort to express to the audience why McGann’s Doctor, and The Movie as a whole, should be of interest to those (presumably primarily “new series” fans) who are as yet unfamiliar with them. Their fondness not only for McGann and the rest of the cast but also for the entirety of the story is clearly evident.
Focusing as always on the positive aspects of McGann’s run, rather than its admitted flaws, Revisited emphasizes the ways in which The Movie bridges the gap between pre- and post-Hiatus eras (as I’ve mentioned a couple of times before). For one thing, it involves a “proper handover,” as Moffat puts it, with an actual regeneration scene between the Seventh and Eighth Doctors, and McGann provides us with a persona recognizable as the Doctor because he uses quick wits to further his ends rather than brute force. Further, it introduced the idea that the Doctor might actually have a romantic side, with the at-the-time controversial first on-screen kiss.
