Doctor Who: The Ninth Doctor Era (2005)

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm writing about series 1 of the 2005 Doctor Who revival! In fact, I'm going to go one better than that and write about the Ninth Doctor's entire era. This isn't going to make any difference to the text really, as Christopher Eccleston only had the one season, but it does mean that I'm giving the article a different title! 

I've already covered Doctors 1-8 years ago when I watched a Classic Who marathon on Twitch, so a look at Nine's run is well overdue. In fact, I'm going to start right now by criticising the logo. An oval covered in light bulbs is a bit of a strange choice and the cheap-looking lens flares aren't helping. I prefer the fiery variant that's been in all the end credits and I suppose one of the producers agreed with me as they made it the main logo in season 3 and put it on the DVD boxes.

Okay, there are going to be SPOILERS below, but only up until Parting of the Ways. So if you're watching the series for the first time this should be safe for you.

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The cliché line that people say when they talk about Doctor Who is how the Daleks had them hiding behind the couch as a kid. Though personally I missed out on that, because the series got cancelled and they took it off TV. 

I wasn't completely ignorant of the series, I caught the charity specials, which were a big joke, and the TV Movie, which was also a bit of a joke. I even watched the infamous episode of Room 101 where former BBC Controller Michael Grade defended his choice to cancel the series in 1989, because it "was garbage". It seemed like people were convinced that it couldn't compete with what Star Wars was doing at all, which was a bit depressing really considering the last Star Wars film had come out in 1983.

Though Star Wars kept its place in pop culture warm, and it was the fantastic video games like TIE Fighter and Jedi Knight that really drew me into the franchise. Meanwhile, Doctor Who's novels and audios couldn't stop its reputation with general audiences sliding in the gutter, and I'm not sure the BBC's reputation for science fiction drama was any better.

So new showrunner Russell T Davies had to find a way to take the spirit of the classic show and resurrect it in the style of the slick US genre shows that had been smash hits on BBC 2, like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

This revived Doctor Who would have a modern 40 minute format, much less serialisation, and a much higher budget. It'd also be more down to earth, with relatable character drama and a grounded working class character actor in the role of the Doctor. The guy didn't even wear a ridiculous costume covered in question marks and celery, instead his favourite outfit was a plain black leather coat.

Eccleston's Doctor was always meant to be a departure from the classic Doctors, less of a pompous aristocratic inventor, less eccentric, but more tormented. The writers knew who they were writing for, with some great lines about feeling the turn of the Earth and how he's never waited for a taxi at 2 AM. Though his mad grin is like a facade to hide the fact that he's just a few sentences away from bursting into tears or going on a furious rant.

But did this radical reinvention work to draw in a new generation who had never seen proper Doctor Who before?

For me, nah, not really. It looked a bit too camp and childish from the clips I saw, so I skipped Eccleston the first time around. I skipped the entire RTD era in fact. The series was a massive hit with viewers though, so it was clearly doing something right.

One thing that series 1 nails is the way it uses the 26 seasons of continuity it's following on from. The TV Movie started by tormenting its audience with a lore drop, talking about Skaro and the Daleks and Gallifrey and other things that aren't even relevant to the story, but series 1 makes its backstory a secret. Episode 1 is all about Rose trying to find out who the Doctor is and we don't really get the answer until the end of episode 2. It's not endless mysteries for the sake of mysteries like in Lost, but it does put the work in to make sure you want an answer before it gives it to you.

It also understands that you can't surprise viewers with a returning villain until they've been properly reintroduced. The Daleks revealed in the finale are properly set up six episodes earlier, so new viewers get the full impact along with classic fans. It seems pretty obvious, but I'm still seeing TV series screw this up.

Another thing that series 1 gets right is that when monsters do come back, they resemble the bad guys from the classic show. We don't get reimagined Spider-Daleks, or anything like that. The season tends to keep its cards to its chest about whether it's even following on from the old continuity at all, but every now and then there's a hint that it's all as it should be. 

I've seen people argue that all long running series eventually have to jettison their old continuity and give people a fresh start, but RTD did the opposite here. He didn't just bring back the old baggage, he added even more baggage on top! He used the show's long absence to give us an unseen Time War that led to the Doctor destroying Gallifrey to wipe out the Daleks!

This could've been the choice that turned the classic fanbase against the show, and maybe it did for a lot of people. Wiping out the Time Lords is kind of a big deal. But this isn't one of those retcons that leaves you wondering what the point even was afterwards (I'm looking at you Chris Chibnall) as the Time War is absolutely crucial to the Doctor's arc this series.

In fact with Eccleston leaving at the end, the season has become a story about how Rose helped the Ninth Doctor deal with his guilt and trauma. As the series goes on he stops being so isolated, his smiles become more genuine, and at the end he gets some kind of closure by being put in the same horrible situation and making the opposite choice.

It's a shame we lost the Ninth Doctor two or three years too early as he really was fantastic, though I suppose it worked out pretty well for the series. His story feels complete and I wouldn't want to replace one moment we got with David Tennant with any other actor.

In fact Tennant made such a huge impact on the show that people used to suggest starting with him and skipping Eccleston entirely. Though I think these days series 1 is considered to be the best jumping-on point for people curious about the modern show. Even with Ncuti Gatwa getting a new season 1 with flashier visuals, this is still a great starting point.

But the Doctor is arguably not the main character of this era, as Rose Tyler is the first character we meet and the one who ultimately saves the world from the Daleks. 

The Doctor is the mystery but Rose is the one trying to solve the mystery and showing the action from her point of view helps keep things relatable for a new audience. If the viewer feels overwhelmed by the weird aliens in End of the World, that's fine, as Rose is feeling the same way. If a viewer has no idea what a Dalek is, Rose is equally clueless. And despite going off on an adventure across time and space, she still has to come home to her mother and her boyfriend sometimes.

Rose isn't like any companion that's come before in the series, though it's not because she's more proactive than Leela, or more complicated than Ace, or more ordinary than Sarah Jane, it's because she's still tied to the real world. Jackie and Mickey are the season's Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and Sergeant Benton, but their normality gives a different vibe to the series, making it approachable for audiences who were more used to Hollyoaks or What Not to Wear. 

The classic series rarely did anything ordinary, though the mundane setting of Rose did remind me of Survival, its very last episode. It's almost like the new series was carrying on from where the previous one left off back in 1989 (if you ignore the 1996 TV Movie with the Eighth Doctor).

The season never tells us what happened to previous companion Ace, or how the Eighth Doctor regenerated into Nine, but I think that's for the best as it keeps the backstory simple. Not that the classic series was really all that complicated as it kept most of its serialisation contained within its individual serials.

Series 1 has a very different structure and a faster pace, with most stories getting told in one 40 minute episode instead of multiple 20 minute chapters. But it was all planned out before they started the first script and there's sneaky serialisation in how it sets things up to be paid off later. For example, the Cardiff rift in ep 3 turns out to be important in ep 11, the space station from ep 7 is the setting for the finale, and so on.

But the season's biggest thread, aside from the character stuff, is 'Bad Wolf' and it's downright impressive how well it works.

I mean it doesn't work at all, it's complete nonsense. 

"The same words written down now and two hundred thousand years in the future. It's a link between me and the Doctor. Bad Wolf here, Bad Wolf there. [...] It's telling me I can get back." 

Uh, what? There's no logic in there at all. Though at least the Bad Wolf mentions avoid becoming repetitive as they're often hidden somewhere for viewers to have fun finding. It's not like a certain other series I watched recently where a mysterious woman popped up in every bloody episode just to remind us that she's mysterious; it doesn't waste anyone's time.

Then Rose gets the power to defeat all the Daleks by just staring into the TARDIS for a bit, and she disintegrates their fleets with a wave of her hand. On paper this is not a satisfying way to end a story! But the season does such a good job of selling you on Rose's arc emotionally that if you manage to turn your brain off you can go along for the ride. I rarely see anyone disappointed when Rose comes out of the TARDIS as a superhero and begins to tear Daleks apart at the atomic level.

And I suppose if that's the biggest attack against logic and reason this season, that's not so bad. Though it's not the only problem I had.

THE BAD

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I chose this picture because I was going to talk about the dated VFX and how recording with SD digital cameras didn't do the visuals any favours, but now it's reminded me of how childish the series could get this year. Mickey got eaten by a burping wheelie bin and farting Slitheen monsters chased Rose around Downing Street. Worse, it had the cringy comedy music to match.  

People say that Doctor Who is supposed to be a children's show, but it's actually a family series, designed for adults to watch and enjoy while the kids are hiding behind their couch. You can tell by its time slot. Either way, I've visited the show's future and its past, and I've seen what it's like when it finds its feet, so I know that this season struggled for a while to find the right tone.

Then again RTD actually got a second chance to do it all over again 20 years later with his Ncuti Gatwa run and that's just as childish and tonally inconsistent, so maybe this isn't an example of a show figuring itself out. Maybe it's just weird.

Another problem the season has is that it's very earthbound. Every single episode this year takes place either on Earth or in orbit. There are seven episodes set in London! 

By comparison, the original first season from 1963 started with one 20 minute episode of the heroes in present day London. Then they went back to 100,000 BC, dropped in on the Daleks, travelled across China, teleported around the planet Marinus, visited the Aztecs, landed on the Sense-Sphere and survived the French Revolution!

It was a smart choice to make it more accessible and grounded in its first year to help audiences settle into the sci-fi weirdness, but RTD really took it to extremes.

Though on the other hand, the series is utterly unconcerned that a farting green alien squeezed into a suit of human skin with a zipper on her head might be a bit implausible.

And it's certainly not worried that her plan to destroy the Earth and fly away on a tiny space surfboard she'd hidden inside a model of her new power plant could leave everyone older than eight scratching their heads. The series can sometimes manage to be simultaneously too mundane and too absurd. 

But sometimes it manages to be good.


THE GOOD

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I like this shot, for instance. In fact I like lots of shots, and if you can get past the low resolution there's a lot to appreciate about the visuals. It doesn't try to appear timeless, it wants to look like 2005, so now the present day has become its most authentic historical setting.

It also sounds very 2005, as they didn't have the budget to give Murray Gold an orchestra. His Doctor Who soundtracks contain some of the best music I've heard on television... just maybe not yet. It's pretty good at times though, and a massive step up from the original series in my opinion. It's still one man producing it all in his own studio, but technology has come a long way and Gold is perhaps the most talented composer the series has ever had.

Also I've already mentioned how the series respects its canon without dropping new fans in at the deep end. You might not expect that to matter much to me, seeing as I started watching in 2010 without any attachment to what came before, but I find the series' history to be part of the appeal. I love that it has a past I can explore (in fact I did explore it all afterwards), and this season shows how it doesn't have to be a weight on the show's back or a source of endless fan service.

It also shows how rewarding getting into a series with a bunch of lore can be, as Rose starts to pick up on things at the same time that the audience does. By the end of the series she knows about psychic paper, teleporters and the Face of Boe, and her happiest moment is when she manages to say Raxacoricofallapatorius (which I very nearly spelt right on my first try). She's an ideal audience surrogate as she comes in blind and turns into a Doctor Who fan along with the viewers.

Also she falls in love with the Doctor himself, which is a bit weird. That never used to happen in the classic series. 

Classic Who was more of an adventure serial, but it wasn't completely divorced from the concept of manipulating the viewer's emotions and getting them to form an attachment to characters. Half the companions decided to quit because they'd fallen for someone they'd just met, though the series did take the time to make sure viewers gave a damn when people like Jo, Sarah Jane and even Adric left the TARDIS. Nyssa saying goodbye to Tegan is properly sad.

But RTD's new 'emotions first, sense and logic second' approach reinvented the show. Now if a season finale isn't bringing you to tears something's probably gone wrong. They maybe pushed it a little far here with the overly melodramatic music as the Doctor and Rose kiss, but this season set the template for what Doctor Who was.

This incarnation of the series wants you to feel things and as long as you're not feeling that it's ruining the classic show or feeling like it's wasting your time then I'm considering that a good thing.


CONCLUSION

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Was the first series of the Doctor Who revival a success? Well it got huge ratings, resurrected the series for at least two decades, reinvented it for a new generation of fans without alienating the viewers it inherited from the classic show, and it was pretty watchable too. And it did all that on British television, which was great at costume dramas and psychological crime thrillers, but less good at CGI space scenes and aliens in rubber suits.

A lot of the success is due to Russell T Davies, who planned the season out and wrote a lot of the episodes. Though arguably not the best episodes, as Robert Shearman wrote Dalek, Paul Cornell wrote Father's Day, and Steven Moffat wrote The Empty Child (there was also The Unquiet Dead by Mark Gatiss, but they can't all bring home the gold).

I have to admit, I found it a lot easier to get into classic Star Trek than I did getting into classic Doctor Who (especially as I was watching three serials a night as part of a marathon), so I can't really compare this to the original like a proper fan could. But to me, this was the best season of Doctor Who so far, and how many TV series can say that about their 27th season?

I usually write a bit about a Doctor's companions at the end of their run, but Rose stayed on for another season so it's too early to talk about her. Fortunately there was also Adam!

Adam Mitchell: Adric had a habit of siding with the bad guy and Turlough was an assassin tasked with killing the Doctor, but no companion has been as much of a liability as Adam. Granted that's partially because he was kicked out before he had a chance to grow as a person, but that's what you get when you sneakily try to get rich off future technology and end up accidentally giving the bad guys knowledge of the TARDIS along with the key! He was introduced to show that not every companion is a Rose and he did that job spectacularly.

Jack Harkness: Jack's time as a companion was short, but he wasted no time setting himself apart from the crowd. He's the first companion since the '70s to be from the distant future, and he's the first non-straight companion ever. Plus he did get a chance to grow as a person, going from a con man to a hero who dies to save the day.

The guy was introduced as a rival to the Doctor and is so knowledgeable, skilled and charming that he could've been obnoxious, but John Barrowman managed to make him endearing.

Lynda Moss: I'm throwing Lynda in here too because I feel so bad for her. She was 100% a companion except for the 'travelling in the TARDIS part' and she did get to hang around with the Doctor for two episodes while Rose was mostly elsewhere. Her biggest flaw as a companion was that she never wandered off, never put the Doctor in his place, and never did the thing that saved the day. She never did anything actually, but she totally would've done eventually if she'd survived. She was sweet and brave and helpful, and she died opposing an unstoppable evil.

Ranking

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The Ninth Doctor's run was tragically short, only 13 episodes and he didn't even get a Christmas Special, so I'm going to go wild and rank all of his stories.

10.	Boom Town - There's good in this story, but it's got an alien who tries to blow up the Earth so she can escape on a space surfboard and accidentally turns herself into an egg instead while everyone else just watches. Also it's got a bunch of Mickey drama I wasn't into. (5)
9.	The Long Game - An episode with a lot to say, but it's all telling and no showing. (5)
8.	The Unquiet Dead - All the actors are great, but the story started to lose me in the second half. (5)
7.	Aliens of London / World War Three - You could describe a lot of good episodes as 'goofy aliens and great character drama', that's kind of Doctor Who's thing. But here they took the goofy aliens too far. (6)
6.	Rose - A perfectly adequate introduction spoiled a bit by Plastic Mickey. I get how him acting like an idiot wasn't a red flag, but how did Rose not notice his hair? (6)
5.	Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways - It's the epic conclusion this season deserved, pulling threads from multiple stories together in a way that makes it feel like all one big story. It's also surprisingly bleak, even outside of the reality TV shows. (7)
4.	Father's Day - Speaking of bleak, this adds depth to Rose's character and really puts her through the ringer in the process. (8)
3.	Dalek - Successfully rehabilitated the Daleks while also pushing the Doctor's arc forward and letting Rose's empathy save the day. (8)
2.	The End of the World - A rare example of the series really getting into science fiction, with a space station full of weird aliens. But what I really liked about it were the scenes of Rose struggling to process her new reality. (8)
1.	The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances - Beautiful comedy horror pseudo-historical with a satisfying sci-fi explanation and a suitably emotional resolution. (9)

Half the season's really good and the rest of it is never outright bad. That's something I wish I could say about later seasons, as Moffat's era hit some real lows and Chibnall struggled to get anywhere near the highs. In my opinion anyway.


Next time on Doctor Who:

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I can't make any predictions for series 2 as I've already seen it and know what's coming. In fact I've already written a review for The Christmas Invasion.

It's likely that I'll get around to reviewing the rest of the second series, but right now I like the idea of writing about the episodes on their 20th anniversary next year. I need a break from Doctor Who, I've been writing about it since April!

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NEXT TIME

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm going to write some thoughts about the Fifteenth Doctor's run as well. And then the Doctor Who will finally be over.

If you're not completely burned out on talking about Doctor Who, you can share your own thoughts on the Ninth Doctor's era in the box below!