Table of Contents

Title Page

CONTENTS

OVERVIEW

1. ‘I’M A DOCTOR, BUT PROBABLY NOT THE ONE YOU WERE EXPECTING.’

2. ‘WHAT IF I GET BORED? I NEED A TELEVISION’

3. ‘THE UNIVERSE STANDS ON THE BRINK’

4. ‘WHAT DO YOU NEED NOW?’

5. ‘I DON’T SUPPOSE THERE’S ANY NEED FOR A DOCTOR ANY MORE’

6. ‘PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF’

7. ‘DOCTOR NO MORE’

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIOGRAPHY

The Black Archive #49

THE NIGHT OF THE DOCTOR

By James Cooray Smith

Published November 2020 by Obverse Books

Cover Design © Cody Schell

Text © James Cooray Smith, 2020

Range Editors: Philip Purser-Hallard, Paul Simpson

James would like to thank:

Jonn Elledge, Ed Jefferson, Chris Kerr of Berwick Street, Steven Moffat, Jonny Morris, Phil Purser-Hallard, Eddie Robson, Matt Symonds and of course Swyrie and Danuka, for giving me space to write this. If you like it, thank them, if you don’t, blame me.

James Cooray Smith has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding, cover or e-book other than which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

For Ralf Collie, who does not call himself the Doctor, but is undeniably a Good Man.

Recently Published

#37: Kerblam! by Naomi Jacobs and Thomas Rodebaugh

#38: The Underwater Menace by James Cooray Smith

#39: The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords by James Mortimer

#40: The Silurians by Robert Smith?

#41: Vengeance on Varos by Jonathan Dennis

#42: The Rings of Akhaten by William Shaw

#43: The Robots of Death by Fiona Moore

#44: The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang by Philip Bates

#45: The Deadly Assassin by Andrew Orton

#46: The Awakening by David Powell

#47: The Stones of Blood by Katrin Thier

#48: Arachnids in the UK by Sam Maleski

CONTENTS

Overview

Synopsis

1. ‘I’m a Doctor, But Probably Not the One You Were Expecting’

2. ‘What If I Get Bored? I Need a Television’

3. ‘The Universe Stands on the Brink’

4. ‘What Do You Need Now?’

5. ‘I Don’t Suppose There’s Any Need for a Doctor Any More’

6. ‘Physician, Heal Thyself’

7. ‘Doctor No More’

Bibliography

Biography

OVERVIEW

Serial Title: The Night of the Doctor

Writer: Steven Moffat

Director: John Hayes

Original UK Webcast Date: 14 November 2013

Running Time: 7m 30s

Regular Cast: Paul McGann (The Doctor)

Recurring Cast: John Hurt (The War Doctor)

Guest Cast: Emma Campbell-Jones (Cass), Clare Higgins (Ohila)

Antagonists: The Sisterhood of Karn

Novelisation: Incorporated into Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor by Steven Moffat, pp5-19.

Responses:

‘[W]hat truly makes “Night” work is Paul McGann who […] turns in a masterful performance as the Doctor, encompassing the character’s many aspects—clever, determined, and tragic—all in less than 10 minutes, and ultimately showcasing what makes the Doctor one of the most iconic characters in fiction.’

[Nicholas Slayton in ‘The Best Television Episodes of 2013’, The Atlantic, 11 December 2013]

‘[T]hings start to fray a bit; a companion narrative gone wrong is sufficient to justify a regeneration; justifying the abandonment of the title “Doctor” is a taller ask, and one that leans almost entirely on the mythic heft of the Time War to get the job done. Which is to say that the Eighth Doctor ends by just sort of getting caught in a jumble of someone else’s continuity. It’s tempting to call it the perfect ending for him.’

[Elizabeth Sandifer, ‘Time Can Be Rewritten: “Night of the Doctor”’.]

SYNOPSIS

Cass, the last crewmember left aboard a stricken spaceship, sends out a distress call which is answered by the eighth Doctor. He offers to rescue her, but Cass recognises him as a Time Lord, whose war with the Daleks is devastating the universe. The Doctor insists that he is a non-combatant, but Cass is repulsed by him, and seals herself behind a bulkhead. The Doctor refuses to leave without her, and the ship crashes on the planet Karn, killing them both.

Ohila, a priestess of the Sisterhood of Karn, knows the Doctor and has his body recovered. The Sisterhood are able to restore him to life for a limited time, during which Ohila begs him to join the Time War to save the universe. She offers him a customised regeneration into the personality of his choice. When he refuses, the Sisterhood show him the body of Cass, the war’s latest victim, who his current persona failed to save.

The Doctor asks to become a warrior, and Ohila hands him a goblet. Toasting his departed companions and Cass, he drinks and regenerates into a new man, the War Doctor.

1. ‘I’M A DOCTOR, BUT PROBABLY NOT THE ONE YOU WERE EXPECTING.’

Just before 11am on Saturday 9 November 2013, the official Doctor Who Twitter feed announced: ‘Before The Day of the Doctor comes a new mini-episode: The Night of the Doctor’[1]. Five days and 18 minutes later another tweet followed: ‘Surprise! The anniversary starts NOW! The Night of the Doctor on iPlayer in less than an hour. Speak to no-one until you’ve seen it! RUN!’[2]

The tweet also included a link to iPlayer, the BBC’s online catch-up service. Anyone who followed it instantly discovered that, despite the implication, ‘The Night of the Doctor’ (2013) was already live, and ‘The Night of the Doctor’ was, for those able to stop what they were doing and with sufficient internet access to watch seven minutes of HD streaming video[3], an instantly available new Doctor Who story. The boilerplate text on the iPlayer teasingly informed viewers that only one of Matt Smith, David Tennant and John Hurt, who would be appearing in that month’s anniversary special, was in the mini-episode, but that you would have to watch it to find out which[4]. Hurt’s brief appearance in the final few moments of ‘The Night of the Doctor’ meant that this subterfuge was not outright deception, and probably helped push the section of the audience intrigued by his largely unexplained one-scene appearance in The Name of the Doctor (2013) a few months before, into viewing the episode as soon as they could. When they did, they were confronted by something few Doctor Who fans were expecting: the return of the eighth Doctor as played by Paul McGann, appearing on screen for the first time in live-action Doctor Who since his initial outing in Doctor Who (1996).

In 2005, when Doctor Who returned for the first time since that single TV movie, Executive Producer and Head Writer Russell T Davies made the dramatically sensible decision to not show McGann’s Doctor regenerating into his own new series lead, Christopher Eccleston. Including Sylvester McCoy at the beginning of Doctor Who (1996) had arguably caused problems for its storytelling, something which contributed to the feeling amongst many fans that, while McGann had been a good choice to play the Doctor, and had shone when on screen, he had not been given enough opportunities to show what his Doctor was like[5]. Davies’ successor, Steven Moffat, admitted a personal fannish desire to see more of McGann’s Doctor, including and especially his final moments, which played its part in his asking the actor to return for a one-off appearance: ‘I was always frustrated that we never got to see more of him. The completist in me […] the “box set man” wants every box ticked and I wanted every regeneration scene!’[6]

He was pushing on an open door. As early as 2003, McGann had indicated a willingness to make a second, and further, appearances as the Doctor on television, as a guest character, or even as the series’ lead[7]. Although the failure of Doctor Who (1996) to spawn a series had initially meant the actor understandably attempting to put distance between himself and its starring role[8], he had begun appearing in audio Doctor Who adventures produced by Big Finish Productions, starting with recordings made in late 1999, and by 2013 had long since fully embraced the role, while referring to himself, as he had done as early as spring 1996, as ‘the George Lazenby of Doctor Who’[9].

Shot in two 11-hour sessions on Tuesday 7 and Wednesday 8 May, a few days after The Day of the Doctor (2013) wrapped shooting, ‘The Night of the Doctor’ was the result of Moffat’s self-described fannish intentions. Initially conceived as two separate short episodes, with a cliffhanger between the two[10], rather than a single instalment, in its final webcast form it runs for 7 minutes and 30 seconds, of which 40 seconds is a trailer for The Day of the Doctor and roughly another 15 seconds credits. Despite a running time of not much over six-and-a-half minutes, and an origin in two arguably conflicting fan impulses, ‘The Night of the Doctor’ is anything but slight. Its brevity is deceptive[11]. Almost every line is worth considering in its own right, both in isolation and with reference to both the rest of the episode and the wider text of Doctor Who. Almost all of them interlock with other aspects of at least some of the above in complex and frequently surprising ways. The story is extraordinarily thick, referentially speaking, and this itself is perhaps a side-effect of having to accomplish so much in so little screen time. (It is, for example, a mere 90 seconds into this story that Cass condemns the Doctor to death.)

In this book we will largely work through the episode in chronological order, dealing with the story as it is experienced by the viewer. Curiously, in doing so we immediately encounter what can reasonably be described as this story’s peculiar relationship with the concept of chronological order itself. The quotation which opens this chapter is the Doctor’s first line in the story, and McGann’s first onscreen words as the Doctor for almost 17 years[12]. Like a great deal of ‘The Night of the Doctor’, and a smaller but still significant part of Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who more generally, they have metafictional implications. In the fiction, the Doctor is addressing Cass and referring to her irritation with a malfunctioning computer that keeps insisting on asking her if she needs medical assistance, but metafictionally, and more importantly, he is addressing the audience, even if he is not looking directly into the camera. The in-fiction sense of the line is almost wholly subordinate to the extratextual one[13]. The audience is probably expecting Matt Smith, or at the very least David Tennant or John Hurt (especially if they have read the boilerplate on the website). But ‘The Night of the Doctor’ is unique amongst onscreen Doctor Who stories in that, although it features the Doctor, the current incarnation does not appear at all.

William Hartnell does not appear in Mission to the Unknown (1965), but neither does the Doctor. The Doctor is also absent from multiple ‘minisodes’, but in no other Doctor Who story made for television does the series’ current lead actor surrender both their billing and their role in its entirety to one of their predecessors[14].

On earlier occasions when previous Doctors had reappeared in TV Doctor Who, it was as guest stars. This was often but not always to commemorate a significant anniversary for the programme, as here: The Three Doctors (1972-73) was transmitted closer to the series’ ninth birthday than its 10th, but marked the start of its 10th series and its 10th year; The Five Doctors (1983) was unashamedly a 20th anniversary special. (The Two Doctors (1985), though described by producer John Nathan-Turner as being made ‘with no particular anniversary in mind’, was transmitted closer to the series’ 21st anniversary than The Three Doctors was its 10th, and I propose we adopt it as the series’ brass anniversary story forthwith.) They appeared alongside the current Doctor, interacting with them as part of the story, as in this story’s more substantial twin The Day of the Doctor, and the actors concerned took lower billing than the series’ incumbent lead. The credits of The Three Doctors, The Two Doctors, ‘Time Crash’ (2007) and The Day of the Doctor present the actors in reverse chronological order of their incarnations. In the case of The Day of the Doctor this leads to the oddity of Christopher Eccleston, who only appears in stock footage, being billed over John Hurt, who has a starring role. The Five Doctors avoids this, crediting after Peter Davison Jon Pertwee, then Patrick Troughton, then Richard Hurndall (who took William Hartnell’s place as the first Doctor). The two Doctors who appear in the special in stock footage only, Tom Baker and Hartnell, are then credited at the bottom, in that order.

In keeping with this idea of a return appearance as a secondary character in the series they had once starred in, these stories effectively saw the past Doctors recast as exactly that – past Doctors, figures from both the Doctor’s and the series’ past making a (very welcome) intrusion on its present, which was that of the current Doctor. (The Two Doctors is a liminal case, in that the action starts with the Troughton Doctor – and for a few moments in monochrome – but only after opening with the Colin Baker title sequence. Besides, the story is set in the year of transmission and no attempt is made to recreate the aesthetics of late 1960s Doctor Who, even when Troughton is the only Doctor onscreen.) This is something else that is not the case with ‘The Night of the Doctor’. Its ‘present’, that of its lead character, is somewhere between Doctor Who (1996) and Rose (2005), but its present as a piece of TV is in the material conditions of 2013 and the series’ golden anniversary celebrations.

This distinction is more than pedantry; it is an indication of how conceptually disruptive a text ‘The Night of the Doctor’ is. Doctor Who is an ongoing TV series with, in effect, a single narrative that can be experienced in a straight line, and it has a production history that can be catalogued and understood likewise. Up until ‘The Night of the Doctor’, these two stories effectively worked in lockstep. For it, if not necessarily after it, they are not simply incompatible; they are in conflict. ‘The Night of the Doctor’ is not a flashback within another episode, it is an entire piece unto itself, and one which belongs in two places at the same time. This has implications for both the internal ongoing story of Doctor Who and the story of its production. We’ll look at some of the implications for the fictional content of TV Doctor Who in Chapter 4, but the disruptions this story causes in the real-world story of Doctor Who’s production are also interesting. As of ‘The Night of the Doctor’, McGann’s screen era as the Doctor spans 1996 to 2013 – it’s just that he only makes two appearances, one in each year, and that multiple other people are arguably also the current Doctor at some point during half of those years[15]. Which is obviously absurd, but also not obviously untrue. Especially as his two appearances are clearly in a narrative straight line within the fiction, in exactly the way that Patrick Troughton’s three returns to TV Doctor Who aren’t.

Doctor Who in other media had, of course, created new stories which featured previous incarnations of the Doctor ‘in situ’ before 2013. But even there, for almost all of its 20th-century history, this was avoided, not least because the Doctor Who production office would not sanction such things while the TV series was in production. Virgin Books’ Missing Adventures series of novels featuring the first six TV Doctors launched in 1994. Big Finish’s audio adventures, which initially featured the Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy Doctors and quickly expanded their repertoire, debuted in 1999. However, almost the first attempt to produce new Doctor Who featuring an old Doctor as the sole lead was also an anniversary production, but of a qualitatively different kind[16]. The Paradise of Death (1993) was a BBC Radio 5 serial which utilised the regular cast of the 1973-74 series of Doctor Who[17] to tell a new story.

The Paradise of Death is, for its characters, set between The Time Warrior (1973-74) and Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974). Yet, despite its scriptwriter Barry Letts being the producer of both of those serials, this is an in-fiction gap that does not exist. The third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith are explicitly returning from the events of the former when the TARDIS arrives in London in the latter. Curiously, given our attempts to put daylight, conceptually speaking, between the production and in-fiction histories of Doctor Who, Letts had confused a production gap with a story one, The Time Warrior having been made at the end of one production season and Invasion of the Dinosaurs at the start of the next.

Additionally, the story was intended by Letts and producer Phil Clarke to be set roughly in the year of its broadcast, ‘an unspecified end of the 20th century’[18], and several moments within the serial support this[19]. The 1973-74 series of Doctor Who had been implicitly set an indeterminate number of years in the future, and for Letts this was therefore in keeping with his previous work. But later Doctor Who serials made without his involvement had firmly located it in the year of its own production, or at the very least well before 1977[20]. What this perhaps demonstrates is that any intervention in Doctor Who’s past, no matter how carefully or confidently approached, inevitably has implications which are inherently disruptive.

While The Paradise of Death’s disruptions of Doctor Who’s in-story continuity were accidental, this is not the case with ‘The Night of the Doctor’, which is a conscious intervention in the history of Doctor Who[21] and of its central character, made in a period of the former which, to a greater extent than any other, reiterates not only that history can be changed, but that changing history is an inevitable result of time travel. As such, it is a new kind of TV Doctor Who story.

That’s assuming that it can really be called television at all, of course. Whether it can or not is the subject of our next chapter.

[1]

BBC Doctor Who Twitter feed (@bbcdoctorwho), 11:07am, 9 November 2013.

BBC Doctor Who Twitter feed (@bbcdoctorwho), 11:07am, 9 November 2013.

[2] BBC Doctor Who Twitter feed, 11:18am, 14 November 2013.

[3] Something far less likely in 2013 than in 2020.

[4] Initially, at least, the episode’s home page showed a picture of Clare Higgins as Ohila, to further preserve any surprise. It was later replaced with a publicity photograph of Paul McGann’s Doctor propped up against the Sisterhood of Karn’s altar.

[5] The McGann Doctor first appears 22 minutes into the story and recovers his faculties 24 minutes later, leaving only 40 minutes of the roughly 86-minute running time available to his fully-realised characterisation, during which he appears onscreen for considerably less.

[6] ‘Steven Moffat on “The Night of the Doctor”’.

[7] E.g. in Doctor Who @40, a UK Gold documentary broadcast on 22 and 23 November 2003, only a few weeks after Doctor Who’s revival had been announced.

[8] For example, by not including it in his TV credits in theatrical programmes.

[9] E.g. Mottram, James, ‘Paul McGann: The Latest Twist in His Tale’, The Independent, 20 October 2006. Lazenby is the only actor to play James Bond once in the Eon films series based on Ian Fleming’s novels. The reference is not entirely self-deprecating: Lazenby’s single appearance is in a film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), regarded by many as the best of the series, and a sizable constituency of fans consider his their favourite portrayal of its hero.

[10] Pixley, Andrew, ‘The Night of the Doctor’, Doctor Who Magazine (DWM) Special Edition #38: The Year of the Doctor, p7. The excised cliffhanger comes at 2m 28s with Ohila’s line ‘Such a pity he’s dead’. A cliffhanger at this point would have resulted in two episodes of wildly different lengths, which may be why the idea was abandoned.

[11] The Doctor’s line ‘Four minutes? That's ages!’ seems to draw attention both to the originally planned length of each episode and how much is accomplished in them.

[12]

All quotes from ‘The Night of the Doctor’, unless otherwise specified.

All quotes from ‘The Night of the Doctor’, unless otherwise specified.

[13] Doing this is always part of Moffat’s toolkit as a writer of Doctor Who (e.g. The Empty Child (2005) had cut dialogue capping Rose Tyler’s demands the Doctor be ‘more Spock’ by contriving a situation where the Doctor is forced to say ‘I’d rather have Doctor Who than Star Trek’), but one in increasing evidence as his time writing the series wore on. Both the 11th and 12th Doctors have last words that are as much about the departing actor (and in the latter case Moffat himself) as the character on screen.

[14] For a fuller discussion of what constitutes ‘TV Doctor Who’, see Chapter 2.

[15] Even after ‘The Night of the Doctor’, McGann remains the most conspicuous name on a surprisingly long list of people who have played the Doctor, but never been the only actor playing the Doctor in any episode in which they appeared – in order of appearance, Richard Hurndall, Paul McGann, John Hurt, David Bradley (The Doctor Falls and Twice Upon a Time (both 2017)) and Jo Martin (Fugitive of the Judoon and The Timeless Children (both 2020)).

[16]

The only earlier example is the stage play The Ultimate Adventure (1989), starring Jon Pertwee and later Colin Baker. The Doctor Who production office did initially request that the show use the regular cast of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, but the touring dates would have conflicted with the production of the 1989 series. Pertwee’s enthusiasm for The Ultimate Adventure was part of the reason he approached radio producer Dirk Maggs, with whom he had worked on other projects, about the idea of Doctor Who on the radio. Maggs passed the idea onto his colleague Phil Clarke, who oversaw both The Paradise of Death and its sequel The Ghosts of N-Space (1996). Given his public prominence, promoting these projects and repeats of his TV stories in 1992, 1993 and 1994, Pertwee was arguably the closest thing Doctor Who had to an incumbent lead from 1989 to 1996.

The only earlier example is the stage play The Ultimate Adventure (1989), starring Jon Pertwee and later Colin Baker. The Doctor Who production office did initially request that the show use the regular cast of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, but the touring dates would have conflicted with the production of the 1989 series. Pertwee’s enthusiasm for The Ultimate Adventure was part of the reason he approached radio producer Dirk Maggs, with whom he had worked on other projects, about the idea of Doctor Who on the radio. Maggs passed the idea onto his colleague Phil Clarke, who oversaw both The Paradise of Death and its sequel The Ghosts of N-Space (1996). Given his public prominence, promoting these projects and repeats of his TV stories in 1992, 1993 and 1994, Pertwee was arguably the closest thing Doctor Who had to an incumbent lead from 1989 to 1996.

[17] Jon Pertwee (Doctor Who), Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith) and Nicholas Courtney (Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart).

[18] Russell, Gary, ‘Radio Who’, Doctor Who Magazine #204, cover date 2 September 1993.

[19] E.g. the term ‘Virtual Reality’ is commonplace and easily understood, and £20 a head is a viable price for entrance to a UK amusement park, neither of which would be the case in 1974. (The Ghosts of N-Space avoids such anachronism, opting for an unambiguous 1975 setting.)

[20]

See, most notably, Mawdryn Undead (1983).

See, most notably, Mawdryn Undead (1983).

[21] That McGann’s Doctor regenerates into someone other than Christopher Eccleston makes this point inarguable, but there is more detail to be examined.

2. ‘WHAT IF I GET BORED? I NEED A TELEVISION’

Is ‘The Night of the Doctor’ a Doctor Who television story? For a huge portion of the fan audience the instinctive answer to that is an easy yes. Wikipedia, not necessarily the most reliable resource, but a yardstick of collective fan assumptions due to its collaborative nature, certainly thinks so. But, in the abstract, it’s a more difficult question than it might appear. The answer to it may depend on exactly how the question is worded.

The issue though, away from the specifics of phrasing, is the establishment of what (if any) criteria define stories that are part of Doctor Who the TV series – as opposed to being among the large number of Doctor Who stories in other media, which have been produced for almost exactly as long as the TV series, minus a year[1]. Perhaps examples will help. It is abundantly clear, to take this idea to extremes, that ‘Doctor Who Fights Masterplan Q’, a prose story in 15 episodes told on the back of Doctor Who branded Nestlé chocolate bars in 1971, is a Doctor Who story, but not a Doctor Who TV story. It is equally obvious that Terror of the Autons (1971), transmitted on BBC One during weeks in which the chocolates were on sale (and on the DVD of which the ‘Masterplan Q’ wrappers are included as a PDF special feature), is TV Doctor Who. That distinction applies even if you use the relevant disc drive to view the ‘Masterplan Q’ PDFs on a TV screen[2]. But between these two examples there lie numerous examples of Doctor Who stories whose status, or not, as TV is not as clear-cut, and the topic of this book is merely the most high-profile example.

It is tempting to assert that the BBC’s public service ethos is relevant at this point. ‘The Night of the Doctor’ was initially, and still is, given its permanent residence on YouTube and iPlayer, a free-at-the-point-of-use piece of art produced by the BBC[3]. Even if this criterion is used to clear away licensed products which require purchasing, and ‘The Night of the Doctor’s visual nature to exclude the various radio Doctor Who serials from consideration, we are still not much nearer a coherent answer. On 23 February 1985, an episode of the then popular BBC One light entertainment programme Jim’ll Fix It (1975-94) featured an episode of Doctor Who, ‘A Fix With Sontarans’[4]. Starring the incumbent TV Doctor, Colin Baker, and running for slightly longer than ‘The Night of the Doctor’, it is arguably the earliest example of what 21st-century Doctor Who fandom has come to use the blanket term ‘minisodes’ for. Actors who had played the Doctor had of course appeared ‘in character’ on TV – e.g. Tom Baker presenting Disney Time (1961-98) (25 August 1975) and indeed appearing on Jim’ll Fix It (7 June 1975) amongst numerous examples – but ‘A Fix With Sontarans’ presents itself as a story, as an event in the fictional life of the Doctor, in a way that earlier examples arguably do not[5].

Even before revelations about the criminality of the programme’s host meant that ‘A Fix With Sontarans’ was removed from the DVD edition of The Two Doctors (an undisputed Doctor Who TV story, the second episode of which was broadcast on the same night), it is not included in lists of Doctor Who TV serials in licensed publications, and when it is covered within them it is in appendices. It is worth asking why. What is it that excludes it? It can’t be its moments of fourth wall breaking, or its cliffhanger ending, as that would rule out a great deal of undisputed TV Doctor Who[6]. It can’t be that it is presented as being part of, that is to say transmitted within, another TV programme, as that has implications for not only the numerous minisodes transmitted within charity telethons in the 21st century[7], but even the 20th anniversary special The Five Doctors, transmitted as part of Children in Need in 1983. It can’t be that it lacks end credits of its own, as that would likewise exclude multiple 21st-century minisodes transmitted on TV.

‘A Fix With Sontarans’ was written by Doctor Who’s then script editor and de facto head writer Eric Saward, a position equatable in some respects (but not others) to those held in the 21st century by Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall. It could be seen as having the authority of the then production office behind it. But it was made by the Jim’ll Fix It production team, not out of the Doctor Who production office. Is this then the distinction between a story in which Doctor Who’s lead character features and which is on TV, and a Doctor Who TV story? If so, fan historiography might be more keen to include Dimensions in Time (1993), a charity minisode intended to celebrate Doctor Who’s 30th anniversary. While made after Doctor Who had ended, it was produced by BBC Television and by John Nathan-Turner, then Doctor Who’s most recent producer, with his partner and long-term Doctor Who production associate Gary Downie acting as production manager. Nathan-Turner regarded it as his official Doctor Who swansong[8]. But Dimensions in Time is accorded exactly the same status as ‘A Fix With Sontarans’ in David J Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker’s Doctor Who: The Handbook series[9]. Somehow it is Doctor Who on TV, but not TV Doctor Who.

Why is that? What we can say is that there are criteria which clearly do not impact on the ‘televisionness’ of a Doctor Who episode. It is not about the scale of cultural impact. Battlefield (1989) is TV Doctor Who despite having been watched by 10 million fewer people on original transmission than Dimensions in Time, which isn’t. In a similar, but in-fiction, way, The Underwater Menace (1967) is no less a Doctor Who TV serial because it is one of the vanishingly small number with no significant sequels or prequels in any medium. Perceived quality, as wildly contestable as it is, likewise cannot reasonably be a criterion.

By the time ‘The Night of the Doctor’ was made, Doctor Who’s audience had got used to there being a large number of ancillary Doctor Who minisodes, made by the TV production team, which supplemented the regular season runs and Christmas specials. The first of these, transmitted on Children in Need night in 2005[10], seemed philosophically a simple matter. While only running for about seven minutes, it seemed to be clearly an episode of Doctor Who, broadcast on TV, which fitted into the ongoing story of the TV series at the exact point where it was transmitted. Its places in the fictional and production narratives of Doctor Who were in lockstep[11]. It was later included on DVD releases of the 2006 series which it preceded. Neither its fiction or its facts seemed to produce any ontological problems. The same was largely true of the 2007 Children in Need minisode ‘Time Crash’, transmitted two years minus a day later – although online discussion of the latter immediately before and after its transmission did unfortunately invoke the C word, ‘canon’.

The concept of canonicity, as used by Doctor Who fans at least, is laterally relevant to ‘The Night of the Doctor’s issues of form. Broadly, it is the contested question over the reality or otherwise of fiction: the argument that one fictional story can be more or less real than another fictional story for in-story continuity purposes. It is innately absurd, and derived, albeit at some distance, from Biblical studies[12] and (at least in Doctor Who’s case) via the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes fandom[13]. ‘Canon’ is a noun, not an adjective, and derives ultimately from the ancient Greek ‘Καννα’, a reed used for measuring. To declare something to be part of a canon, whether in the Biblical or Leavisian[14] or Holmesian senses, is to count it. Due to its etymological origins a canon can really only be defined from a position of authority[15] – something which the authorities behind Doctor Who, e.g. the BBC as an institution or the various people it has placed in charge of Doctor Who, have consistently failed to show any sort of interest in doing, even when prompted.

Yet part of Steven Moffat’s enthusiasm for producing ‘The Night of the Doctor’ was the idea of showing McGann’s Doctor regenerating into his successor. This is an engagement with continuity, if not canon in the fan sense, and the impulse to show a ‘missing’ event in new fiction is nothing new. There are arguably two other occasions in TV Doctor Who where the ‘handover’between actor is not shown. . Jon Pertwee had not formally been cast when Patrick Troughton shot the final moments of The War Games (1969) episode 10[16], and so the Doctor is simply seen spinning into space, protesting that his appearance will be changed against his will. Equally, Colin Baker’s refusal of an offer to appear either in the whole of Time and the Rani (1987) or its opening scene, after BBC management declined to renew his contract for the entire 1987 series, meant that, while arguably Baker’s Doctor is seen to change into Sylvester McCoy’s, the matter is at least ambiguous.

Both of these other ‘missing’ regeneration scenes have prompted stories covering them in Doctor Who tie-in fiction. The Night Walkers[17] was a 1969 comic strip which showed the second Doctor regenerating on-panel. The 2005 BBC Books novel Spiral Scratch was published as a final sixth Doctor story, and contains an account of the moments leading up to the Colin Baker Doctor’s regeneration. Curiously, despite an arguable in-fiction importance equal to ‘The Night of the Doctor’s, both these stories are relatively obscure. The Night Walkers has never been reprinted in its entirety[18], and Spiral Scratch is not only out of print but has a rival account: The Last Adventure, Big Finish Productions’ distinct ‘Final Sixth Doctor Story’ for audio in 2015, the events of which are incompatible with those of Spiral Scratch. (It is interesting to speculate what would happen if a way could be found to give Baker’s Doctor onscreen final moments in a similar manner to McGann’s[19].)

Doctor Who minisodes made by the production team of the ongoing BBC TV series Doctor Who after 2007 number in the dozens, and their delivery methods have varied from TV broadcast to internet release on both BBC sites[20] and non-BBC sites[21] and DVD and Blu-ray releases. 13 ‘TARDISodes’, 60-second episodes of Doctor Who[22], were briefly available on the BBC website, and over mobile phones, to accompany the 2006 series alone.

‘The Night of the Doctor’ premiered on various, mostly BBC-administered, websites. It did not initially receive a TV transmission. For some, that might be enough to exclude it from being a part of the TV series. It can be excluded in the way that mini-episodes produced and made exclusively for release on domestic video formats can. Like them it resembles TV in almost all respects, but is not it. The counterargument is that, two days after its iplayer release, it was made available on the BBC ‘Red Button’. This service, accessed by literally pressing a red button on TV remote controls, was partially intended as replacement for Ceefax, the corporation’s onscreen teletext service[23], but its programming alternatives[24] are also available through TV channel frequencies. However, this very slightly later release onto something which is surely a TV channel also applies to other Doctor Who minisodes which are not afforded special status.

‘He Said, She Said’ is a 3 minute 30 second video minisode produced a few weeks before ‘The Night of the Doctor’. In it, Clara, and then the Doctor, address the audience directly, about events on Trenzalore in The Name of the Doctor. Implicitly, these events have already happened to the characters, but are – or rather were at the point of release – in the future for the audience.

It is more of a trailer than a story, but it could theoretically take place, fictionally speaking, between The Name of the Doctor and The Day of the Doctor[25]. Made by BBC TV, premiered on the internet, later shown on a TV channel, it fulfils all these criteria to the exact same extent as ‘The Night of the Doctor’, except that it is almost entirely forgotten. But surely, if ‘The Night of the Doctor’ is a Doctor Who TV story then so is ‘He Said, She Said’? So why does that not seem right? Why is one included when the ‘complete’ post-2005 Doctor Who is periodically placed on BBC iPlayer, and not the other? There is no clear answer.

Arguments about the nature of the original material produced by streaming services in the second and third decades of the 21st century have largely centred on whether single dramas produced for streaming services can be properly called ‘films’ – or, moving the goalposts slightly, ‘cinema’. This has usually become an issue with regards to whether they should be eligible for film awards if they premiere on services which are received on devices such as, but not limited to, domestic TV screens, rather than in the commercial film theatre sector or at a film festival.

There has been less discussion of what constitutes TV in this environment. No one has ever really disputed that the American remake of House of Cards (2013-18) is the first original streaming series. It debuted only a few months before ‘The Night of the Doctor’, and seven years after the TARDISodes were written and made especially for online viewing.

2006’s TARDISodes were initially seen as a failure[26], although the total number of downloads received (2.6 million) was greater than, for example, the total UK number of viewers for most episodes of Game of Thrones (2011-19). Their main crime in retrospect is one of Doctor Who being ahead of the game with regards to TV’s changing nature, of being streaming before streaming. Not only were they released years before Netflix's first original programming, they went up just under a year before Netflix announced it would move from distribution of discs via postal services to an online streaming model.

Just as the events shown in ‘The Night of the Doctor’ are conceptually disruptive within the internal history of Doctor Who, its form matches its content, inevitably posing the question as to what that form actually is. ‘The Night of the Doctor’s primary characteristic, as I hope will become increasingly obvious as this book progresses, is a state of liminality which infects almost all aspects of both fiction and production. At the climax of ‘The Night of the Doctor’, its title character stands at a threshold, on the verge of being redefined in ways that are not entirely clear – and so does the medium for which that character was originally created.

[1] The Doctor Who comic strip began in TV Comic #674, dated 9 November 1964.

[2] Which, for the sake of this argument, I have.

[3] Curiously, Paul McGann’s other screen appearance as the Doctor, Doctor Who (1996) has no problems being accepted as TV Doctor Who, despite, in essence, not being made by the BBC and, on its first broadcast, even featuring a credit which says ‘Based on the original series broadcast on the BBC’, placing distance between them.

[4] This is sometimes parsed as ‘In a Fix with Sontarans’ which is arguably more grammatical, but onscreen the ‘In’ clearly refers to actors Colin Baker and Gareth Jenkins, who are credited ‘above the title’ in the same way that Roger Moore is on the James Bond film released two months later, which is not called In a View to a Kill.

[5] Disney Time might be stretching a point; while the Doctor talks to camera and is clearly aware he is presenting a TV programme which otherwise largely consists of clips of Disney films, at the end he receives a note ‘from the Brigadier' demanding his presence in Scotland, leading directly into the events of Terror of the Zygons (1975), which commenced broadcast five days later, albeit implicitly contradicting the end of Revenge of the Cybermen (1975) in the process.

[6] E.g. The Face of Evil (1977) episode 1, The Trial of a Time Lord (1986) episode 14.

[7] E.g. ‘Time Crash’, ‘Space’ / ‘Time’ (2011).

[8] Nathan-Turner, John, The John Nathan-Turner Memoirs volume 2.

[9] Howe, David J, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker, Doctor Who: The Handbook – The Sixth Doctor, p132; Howe, Stammers and Walker, Doctor Who: The Handbook – The Seventh Doctor, p120.

[10] It has no onscreen title, meaning the proper way to refer to it is disputed, and it is various referred to as ‘Doctor Who: Children in Need’, ‘Born Again’, ‘The New Doctor’ and ‘Pudsey Cutaway’, the last being an in-joke by writer-producer Russell T Davies, referring to an almost inexplicably baroque 1990s fan dispute about the correct title for the 1965 single-episode story with the onscreen title Mission to the Unknown. Regrettably, there is a case for claiming the minisode is called ‘Doctor Who’ (2005). Let’s not go there.

[11] It was made on 3 November 2005, after location filming for Rise of the Cybermen (2006) had begun, but was directed by Euros Lynn, who had directed the two previous episodes in production order, School Reunion and The Girl in the Fireplace (both 2006). Such minor discrepancies between production and transmission order had been common in Doctor Who beginning with Carnival of Monsters (1973), which was shot at the end of the ninth production block and before The Three Doctors, the story that would precede it on transmission, in part due to guest star Patrick Troughton’s availability.

[12] Where, simplifying to the point of caricature, the ‘canonical’ Bible is the writings included under rules designed between the First Council of Nicea (325 CE) and the First Council of Constantinople (381 CE) and later collected in a single volume and a single language (Latin) by Jerome of Stridon and latterly called the Vulgate. For more on the Council of Nicaea and its implications for the Doctor Who canon, see Stewart, Alasdair, The Black Archive #50: The Day of the Doctor.

[13] Where 56 short stories and four novellas written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are the canonical Holmes – a decision which excludes, for instance, stage plays written by Conan Doyle himself which feature the character.

[14] FR Leavis (1895-1978) whose The Great Tradition (1948) is taken by some to have codified or at least developed ground rules for the ostensible canon of English Literature. Leavis taught Doctor Who writer Terrance Dicks as an undergraduate at Downing College, Cambridge. Dicks considered Leavis to be more interested in academic feuds than literature, ideas or undergraduates, and particularly resented his teacher’s disdain for Charles Dickens (Smart, Billy, ‘Terrance Dicks (1935-2019): The BBC1 Classic Serial in the 1980s’).

[15] E.g. Church councils, or the person or estate of Arthur Conan Doyle.

[16] The Doctor’s rage against the dying of the light on the Time Lords’ screen was shot as part of the serial’s pre-filming at BBC Elstree on 3 April 1969. Pertwee’s casting as the Doctor was formalised in a contract dated 21 May 1969, although he had initially been approached a few weeks prior. It was not announced until 17 June (Pixley, Andrew, ‘Archive: The War Games’, DWM #232, cover date 22 November 1995).

[17] Written by Roger Noel Cook and drawn by John Canning, published in TV Comic #934-36 (8 to 22 November 1969). The title is not original and was applied ex post facto by fan scholarship.

[18] Thumbnails of a few pages were included for illustrative purposes in Peter Haining’s The Doctor Who File and similarly, on occasions in Doctor Who Magazine, e.g. Lyons, Steve, ‘Apocrypha: The Night Walkers’, DWM #553, cover date June 2020.

[19]

Journey’s End (2008) and The End of Time (2009-10) strongly imply, and The Time of the Doctor (2013) shows, that (counterintuitively) regeneration heals a Time Lord’s body, reverting it to an earlier state of that incarnation, and then replaces it. Does this provide a way for Colin Baker play the Doctor on TV in a The Night of the Doctor style regeneration episode at his current age. without disrupting what is seen on television Time and the Rani?

Journey’s End (2008) and The End of Time (2009-10) strongly imply, and The Time of the Doctor (2013) shows, that (counterintuitively) regeneration heals a Time Lord’s body, reverting it to an earlier state of that incarnation, and then replaces it. Does this provide a way for Colin Baker play the Doctor on TV in a The Night of the Doctor style regeneration episode at his current age. without disrupting what is seen on television Time and the Rani?

[20] E.g. ‘Clarence and the Whispermen’ (2013).

[21] The ‘Prequel’ to Asylum of the Daleks (2012) made its bow, in the United States, on iTunes.

[22] Written by Gareth Roberts, in the process of joining Doctor Who’s regular writers, and directed by Ashley Way, responsible for multiple episodes of Doctor Who, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.

[23] Which closed in 2012, having existed continuously since 1974.

[24] Which at the time included, for example, the possibility of watching football matches transmitted on one of the ‘main’ BBC channels without commentary. Events not afforded full coverage on BBCs One to Four were offered on the Red Button during the London Olympics and the 2012 World Cup.

[25] Their doing so would neither help nor hinder the connection between The Name of the Doctor’s cliffhanger and the opening of The Day of the Doctor, which remains perhaps bewildering.

[26] Bulkley, Kate, ‘“TARDISode” Audience Fails to Materialise’, The Guardian, 16 October 2006.

3. ‘THE UNIVERSE STANDS ON THE BRINK’

When the audience first sees the reflected face of John Hurt’s Doctor in the final moments of this story, it is not that of the 73-year-old actor who appears in the trailer appended to most of its versions. Instead, it is a 39-year-old Hurt, in an image from the 1979 BBC TV production of Crime and Punishment, where he played Raskolnikov[1]. This fits neatly with dialogue early in The Day of the Doctor, where Hurt’s character says he has ‘been fighting this war for a long time’, and long-term fan assumptions that Time Lords naturally age more slowly than adult humans do. It also works well with the implication in the War Doctor’s final scene in The Day of the Doctor that he is regenerating because of old age[2]. The War Doctor, then, has lived perhaps for centuries since regenerating into this body on Karn, and has spent every year of them fighting[3].

This assumption, however, fits rather less well with other aspects of ‘The Night of the Doctor’, and the possible discontinuities that result are worth consideration for what they imply about the story and its relationship with The Day of the Doctor, particularly with regards to how much time passes between them. In ‘The Night of the Doctor’, Ohila describes the perilous situation in which the universe finds itself at this point in the Last Great Time War in very stark terms, saying that ‘The war between the Daleks and the Time Lords threatens all reality. You are the only hope left,’ and later insisting that, ‘The universe stands on the brink. Will you let it fall?’

This does not sound like a situation in which the War Doctor has centuries in which to fight. Neither do Ohila’s pleas sound like those of someone looking to recruit simply one more soldier to a conflict which she clearly believes must be ended as soon as possible. What it does sound like is the exact situation that the War Doctor describes to the Moment early in The Day of the Doctor: ‘Every moment in time and space is burning. It must end. And I intend to end it the only way I can.’ Could it be that the reason the crisis in ‘The Night of the Doctor’ is indistinguishable from that in The Day of the Doctor is that they were originally conceived, if not written, as the same crisis, set not centuries apart, but within a few hours of one another – The Day of the Doctor literally following the night before? That, in this original conception, what Ohila would do is push the Doctor into accepting the task of using the Moment, not his role as Warrior?

It is now acknowledged that Steven Moffat’s original conception of The Day of the Doctor had Christopher Eccleston’s ninth Doctor in the role eventually occupied by John Hurt’s War Doctor. There was not originally a War Doctor. A partial draft of that story including the ninth Doctor exists[4], and a few pages of it, covering early scenes between the Doctor and the Moment in the barn, have been published[5]. They are largely almost identical to the equivalent scenes in the finished programme, but the differences do seem instructive. It is clear that this Doctor is newly regenerated, commenting of his own face, ‘Thanks, it’s new.’[6] Logically, then this version of The Day of the Doctor would follow on from a version of ‘The Night of the Doctor’[7] or whatever similar minisode ended up being made, which ended with Paul McGann’s Doctor regenerating into Christopher Eccleston’s. The Eccleston Doctor of the early Day of the Doctor draft explicitly denies that he is a soldier[8], and shortly afterwards the Moment notes that only now is he ready to kill[9].

This would seem to rule out the idea of Eccleston Doctor having earlier fought in the War, an idea which Moffat has often indicated he personally disliked[10], in part because he felt Rose clearly presented a new and recently regenerated Doctor. But Moffat is also on record as disliking the idea of the bubbly eighth Doctor as seen in Doctor Who (1996) being reduced to fighting in a war, and this conviction played a part in not reconfiguring Eccleston’s role for McGann’s Doctor when the actor finally committed to not appearing in the then-unnamed special. Moffat has recounted the realisation that there was no hope of Eccleston reprising his role as ‘A moment of terror […] just terror.’[11] This, though, would imply that any version of ‘The Night of the Doctor’ which preceded an Eccleston version of The Day of the Doctor would also present McGann’s Doctor as still committed to helping where he can but morally opposed to fighting, while the Eccleston Doctor of its counterpart version of Day, with his explicitly new face, has not had time to fight in the War either. There would seem to be no space for the Doctor to have ever fought in the War at all, which prompts the question: is it possible that Moffat at one point was looking to retcon away this idea altogether?

Circumstantial evidence and close reading would support such a conclusion, starting with Ohila’s aforementioned dire pronouncements about the universe being ‘very nearly over’. These arguably fit better with a version of The Day of the Doctor where the newly-regenerated Eccleston Doctor leaves Karn, which we know from The Brain of Morbius (1976) to be located in the same solar system as Gallifrey (the Doctor states it is ‘a couple of billion miles’ from where he was born[12]), and immediately proceeds to the Vault to find and use the Moment, having been persuaded to this course by the Sisterhood of Karn. Making ‘the fall of Arcadia’ mentioned by the 10th Doctor in Doomsday (2006) part of the same final event as the activation of the Moment which happens offscreen during The End of Time (2009-10), and (eventually, sort of) onscreen in The Day of the Doctor, plays into this. Doomsday is the only occasion in the 21st-century series, prior to The Day of the Doctor at least[13], where the Doctor explicitly confirms that he fought ‘on the front line’, something which is seen in The Day of the Doctor. The comment is also a response to the Cult of Skaro’s demand to know how he survived the War, as a reply to which it makes slightly more sense filtered through the events of The Day of the Doctor, not less. In late 2012, Moffat asked Script Editor Richard Cookson to prepare a list of every reference to the Time War made in the series previously[14], which is something that would prove especially useful if he was planning on incorporating them all, in order to tidy away the idea that the Doctor had ever been a soldier at all.

This does not seem too large a leap, given that the finished version of The Day of the Doctor at the very least retcons the end of the War as audiences had previously understood it, and arguably changes the events within the fiction itself. Because, while it has always been the case officially that the conclusion of The Day of the Doctor does not change history – instead merely revealing what really happened all along, unbeknownst to a Doctor whose memory had been affected (‘The time streams are out of sync. You can’t retain it’[15]) – this doesn’t quite fit with what we’re told onscreen. Not only does the ninth Doctor recall seeing Time Lords and Daleks burn at the end in Dalek (2005), but the 10th and 11th Doctors also recall this during The Day of the Doctor itself, which is a strange thing to reprise in a script which ostensibly says that this never in fact happened[16]. Earlier in the story, as the Tennant, Smith and Hurt Doctors gather in the barn on Gallifrey to activate the Moment, and the 11th Doctor decides not to press the button, dialogue again suggests that history is being changed. ‘You’re not actually suggesting that we change our own personal history?’ the 10th Doctor asks, leaving his future self to reply, ‘We change history all the time. I’m suggesting something far worse. […] I’ve changed my mind.’[17] It is not a denial. More, the first shot after the ‘round up’ of all the Doctors saving Gallifrey at the end of the story is of a lump of sugar dropping into the War Doctor’s cup of tea, sending ripples. Which is surely a visual suggestion of the consequences of changing history[18].

This also allows for a more interesting interpretation of the War Doctor’s regeneration. In the previous history, activating the Moment also killed him, but he was whisked away to the TARDIS to regenerate[19]. As that has not now happened, the Moment gives him a little push and his body regenerates[20], so that the new history resembles the old as much as possible. While still working on Doctor Who, Moffat was usually careful to couch discussions of the end of The Day of the Doctor in terms of it revealing what had always happened, not in changing history, but in more recent years he has become a little less circumspect, at one point laughingly noting, ‘A lot of people object to it changing time; If you object to changing time, pick another show.’[21]

Because, in truth, the War Doctor’s very existence ‘changes time’. The character, that ‘missing’ incarnation of the Doctor played by a guest actor, was simply not conceived of before early 2013 when production circumstances prompted Moffat to suggest it, only to discover that BBC colleagues, such as executive Faith Penhale, loved the idea and no longer wanted to discuss any alternatives[22]. She was right. Only these exact circumstances give the audience – an audience of 12.4 million people, making The Day of the Doctor the most watched TV drama of 2013 in the UK – John Hurt’s magnificent performance as the War Doctor. Character and continuity implications are for others to sort out later.

Certainly, once shown, the now inarguable fact of the War Doctor’s existence has an impact on how Moffat writes the Doctor. After The Day of the Doctor, the references to the Doctor’s acts in the Time War actually increase, e.g. in Hell Bent (2015), where explicitly some of the soldiers on Gallifrey have served under the Doctor, or Twice Upon A Time, where he is called ‘the Butcher of Skull Moon’. (Both later stories state the Doctor was known as the Doctor of War during the conflict, rather than the War Doctor.) It seems that having initially thought about erasing, in practical terms, the Doctor’s direct involvement in the Time War, production circumstances dictated that the consequences of having done so became more incorporated into the series and the characterisation of the Doctor than ever before.

Implicitly then, the ‘Night’ before The Day of the Doctor comes to mean not just the death of the eighth Doctor on Karn, but the whole period where the Doctor disavows his name and fights in the War. A night that lasts for centuries[23], but which, like Gallifrey, was never meant to fall at all.

[1] It’s a thematically appropriate choice as well as a good practical one, given the novel’s engagement with the idea of overwhelming guilt.

[2] The War Doctor says, ‘I suppose it makes sense… wearing a bit thin,’ referencing the first Doctor’s comment in The Tenth Planet (1966) episode 4 that ‘This old body of mine’s wearing a bit thin,’ shortly before he did just that.

[3] In the 28 February 2013 draft of the script, the first to feature the Other Doctor, not the ninth, he has explicitly been fighting for 200 years (Pixley, Andrew, ‘The Day of the Doctor’, DWM Special Edition #38: The Year of the Doctor, p14).

[4] Dated Monday 14 January (Pixley, ‘The Day of the Doctor’, p13).

[5] Moffat, Steven, ‘Doctor Who: The Special’ in anon, ed, A Second Target for Tommy.

[6] Moffat, ‘The Special’, p140.

[7] We know that Moffat was motivated to make ‘The Night of the Doctor’, in part, by a desire to see McGann regenerate into his successor, arguably more of a temptation if that successor were to be, as everyone assumed, Christopher Eccleston not John Hurt.

[8] Moffat, Steven, ‘The Special’, p142.

[9] Moffat, Steven, ‘The Special’, p148.

[10] E.g. Pixley, ‘The Day of the Doctor’, p18.

[11] ‘Steven Moffat On Matt Smith’s Era, Writing The 50th Anniversary And More’. Doctor Who: The Fan Show, 17 January 2018.

[12]

The Brain of Morbius episode 1.

The Brain of Morbius episode 1.

[13] Others, such as the Doctor reminding Davros in Journey’s End that he tried to save him from the Nightmare Child, do not require the Doctor to be fighting, and may be the origins of the lines about the Doctor helping where he can in ‘The Night of the Doctor’.

[14] Pixley, ‘The Day of the Doctor’, p13.

[15]

The Day of the Doctor.

The Day of the Doctor.

[16]

‘I saw it happen! I made it happen!’ (Dalek); ‘Because the alternative is burning.’ ‘And I’ve seen that.’ ‘And I never want to see it again.’ (The Day of the Doctor).

‘I saw it happen! I made it happen!’ (Dalek); ‘Because the alternative is burning.’ ‘And I’ve seen that.’ ‘And I never want to see it again.’ (The Day of the Doctor).

[17]

The Day of the Doctor.

The Day of the Doctor.

[18] As well as a nod to a conversation in Remembrance of the Daleks (1988) about doing exactly that.

[19] The Moment promises him that his ‘punishment […] if you kill them all…’ [is] ‘You live.’ (The Day of the Doctor).

[20] We know from The Parting of the Ways (2005) that the Bad Wolf, which at this point the Moment has become synonymous with, is capable of initiating a regeneration.

[21] ‘Steven Moffat On Matt Smith’s Era, Writing The 50th Anniversary And More’.

[22] Which, as Moffat as noted, logically only really constitute ‘using one of the other Doctors’ and explaining it within the show.

[23] This concept finds, in typical Moffat reprise and invert style, a comic reappearance in The Husbands of River Song (2015), which he at the time expected to be his final Doctor Who story, where it’s discovered that planetary rotations mean that the 12th Doctor’s final night with River lasts for 24 years.

4. ‘WHAT DO YOU NEED NOW?’

That ‘The Night of the Doctor’s final moments see McGann’s Doctor regenerate into John Hurt serves an obviously useful purpose for Doctor Who on television, and one distinct from that which it would have served had it shown McGann regenerating into Christopher Eccleston. The latter would have been, as Moffat commented, an example of fannish box-ticking, whereas the former instantly cleaves away any ambiguity about the nature of Hurt’s character. Such ambiguity did, it is hard now to remember, exist in the gap between the transmissions of The Name of the Doctor and ‘The Night of the Doctor’, with fan speculation inevitably dwelling on ideas such as that Hurt would play whoever the Doctor was before he was William Hartnell[1], or some kind of future Doctor, or was a recast Valeyard[2]. The proliferation of ideas was in part a response to attempts to parse the seemingly contradictory bits of information gleaned from The Name of the Doctor’s final scene, in which Matt Smith’s Doctor denies that John Hurt’s character is the Doctor at all, while the onscreen credits moments later read ‘Introducing John Hurt as the Doctor’.

The initial secrecy surrounding Hurt’s role in Doctor Who[3] added to that ambiguity, but ‘The Night of the Doctor’ sweeps it away, and indisputably seals this incarnation’s retroactive position in the programme’s history, linking Hurt’s Doctor to the ambiguously unbroken line created by Sylvester McCoy’s appearing in Doctor Who (1996). As such, it is both a joining and a sundering, and if that is a contradiction, it is because the War Doctor is in so many senses an innately contradictory thing, one which not so much disrupts as detonates previously entirely reasonable fan assumptions about what happened between Doctor Who (1996) and Rose.

That the War Doctor is a ‘missing’ and unacknowledged incarnation that the Doctor has increasingly lied to even himself about is a necessary dramatic conceit to cover the occasions since 2005 that the specific number of incarnations he has had has been invoked. Curiously, these are fewer in number than might be guessed. Every (then known) Doctor’s face being included on the an infostamp stolen from the Daleks in The Next Doctor (2008)[4] and in a parade at the climax of The Eleventh Hour (2010), and the Matt Smith Doctor yelling ‘Eleven!’ while pointing at his own face[5] in The Lodger (2010) are the earliest. (Curiously, had a ‘missing’ Doctor been introduced during Russell T Davies’ time on Doctor Who, there would have been far fewer references to contradict.) But they increase in number across the 2011 series as the series’ makes reference to ‘the fall of the eleventh’[6], i.e. the then incumbent Doctor’s death. What is fun is the War Doctor’s very nature as a hidden part of the Doctor’s past, and this is also inevitably reflected in elements of this story’s production – shot by the production’s usual second unit director, with Paul McGann unnamed on the call sheets and his character referred to as ‘Omega’[7].

A difficulty over what to call the character exists both within and outwith the fiction; Moffat has repeatedly said that he felt fannish anxiety at the idea that he had ‘messed the numbering up’ and was conscious that in practical terms the 21st-century Doctors could not and would not be renumbered[8]. ‘The War Doctor’ is a term used only in the end credits of ‘The Night of the Doctor’[9] and on some merchandise and publicity material, but it was seemingly not arrived at quickly or easily. In the script for The Day of the Doctor Hurt’s character is ‘The Other Doctor’[10] – a term that perhaps has its origins in a joke in Black Orchid (1982)[11] – and ‘Doctor’ in dialogue. Earlier drafts call the character eventually played by Hurt ‘the Renegade’ in both dialogue and stage directions[12]. There is an implication in ‘The Night of the Doctor’ that he will go on to be called ‘the Warrior’. The Doctor’s ultimate answer to the question posed by this chapter is:

DOCTOR

Warrior.

OHILA

Warrior?

DOCTOR

I don't suppose there’s any need for a doctor any more. Make me a warrior now.

The repetition does suggest this might be intended as the name the character uses between ‘The Night of the Doctor’ and The Day of the Doctor. Even in The Day of the Doctor itself, Clara refers to the War Doctor as ‘the warrior’, in one instance that feels a little like a textual ghost. While both ‘Renegade’ and ‘Warrior’ are acknowledged in some spinoff fiction[13], Warrior has some logical precedent within the Moffat era. A Good Man Goes To War (2011) twice suggests that the Doctor’s mere presence in spacetime has had an impact on language. When Amy tells soldier and Doctor fan Lorna Bucket that the Doctor is not a warrior, she replies, ‘Then why is he called the Doctor?’ and later River Song confirms that, ‘To the people of the Gamma Forests, the word Doctor means mighty warrior,’ because of their encounters with the Doctor[14]. However, if this ever was the intention, it was pulled back from, and is never confirmed.

Strictly speaking, going only by the TV series, we do not know how the Doctor referred to himself during the Time War (Hell Bent sees only the revelation that others referred to him as the ‘Doctor of War’.) The eventual choice of ‘War Doctor’ has resonance with the villains of The War Games, the War Lord and the War Chief, but also with the War King, a character occasionally seen in flashforward in the range of BBC novels featuring McGann’s Doctor[15], who has a connection to that series’ own, distinct future time war story, and who is at various times implied to be a future incarnation of either the Master or the Doctor.

It is not the BBC Books range that receives a direct reference in this story, however. Before he drinks the draft Ohila has prepared for him, the Doctor raises his glass to salute ‘companions I have known’, and lists ‘Charley, C'rizz, Lucie, Tamsin, Molly’. All are companions to McGann’s Doctor in Big Finish audio adventures. While this delighted some fans, others mourned the absence of characters from other media in which McGann’s Doctor had appeared – not just the novels, but also the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip. (Perhaps in deference to their shared medium of prose, the Day of the Doctor novelisation, which also incorporates ‘The Night of the Doctor’, adds Fitz, the most frequently appearing companion from the eighth Doctor novels, to the list[16].) An explanation, should readers feel one is required, might be that most of the named companions died during the course of their relationship with the Doctor. He is, as with Cass, apologising in the moment of his death for not being able to save them from their own.

The contradictory nature of 90s Doctor Who spinoff media does seem like part of the point of the multiple cups, each containing a different future self, which the Doctor is offered. Also relevant is that as of this story, while there are three separate actors who have been independently announced as playing the ninth Doctor (Rowan Atkinson[17], Richard E Grant[18] and Christopher Eccleston), none of them actually played the Doctor’s ninth incarnation. Nevertheless, the ‘wise’ and ‘angry’ Doctors could be taken to refer to the Atkinson and Grant Doctors respectively. Certainly ‘Fat or thin, young or old’ seems a specific reference to the end of The War Games, which is where the idea that there are circumstances where a Time Lord can choose their next appearance[19] originates, and in which the second Doctor rejects ‘fat’, ‘thin’, ‘young’ and ‘old’ options in quick succession.

For a member of the Sisterhood of Karn to ask if the Doctor wishes to regenerate into a ‘man or woman’ is not simply a further onscreen pushing of Moffat’s own belief that Time Lords are capable of sequential dichogamy[20], but also interesting given her own position. The Karn of The Brain of Morbius was conceived as an ancient, sterile matriarchy governed by magic, one equal and opposite to the ancient, sterile, scientific patriarchy that was the Gallifrey of that era. While Gallifrey has diverged from that interpretation in the intervening decades, Moffat reprises the comparison by implication here: the Doctor’s description of the sisterhood as ‘Keepers of the flame of utter boredom’ matches his explanation for why he ran away from Gallifrey in The War Games[21], and Moffat’s personal conviction that if the 12th Doctor were ever to find Gallifrey he would quickly become bored and leave it again[22].

The eighth Doctor’s final words are the topic of a later chapter, but it would be neglectful not to mention the metafictional pun that ties all this together. The soon to be Doctor No More ask Ohila one last question, ‘Will it hurt?’ ‘Yes,’ she assures him, and somehow resists the temptation to add ‘It won’t eccleston until next time now’.

[1] A fictional possibility played with in Fugitive of the Judoon and The Timeless Children.

[2]

The ambiguous, but definitely evil, future Doctor originally played by Michael Jayston in The Trial of a Time Lord.

The ambiguous, but definitely evil, future Doctor originally played by Michael Jayston in The Trial of a Time Lord.

[3] He was announced as a guest star for the as-yet-unnamed anniversary special in Doctor Who Magazine prior to the broadcast of The Name of the Doctor, with his role unspecified (‘Gallifrey Guardian’, DWM #459, cover date May 2013).

[4] Perhaps the Daleks don’t know what the War Doctor looks like because no Dalek ever saw him and lived?

[5] And later wearing a No 11 shirt when playing football.

[6]

The Wedding of River Song (2011).

The Wedding of River Song (2011).

[7] Pixley, ‘The Night of the Doctor’, p8. This code was also used for Hurt’s character on call sheets for The Day of the Doctor, so that if this information leaked it would seem meaningful to fans, who would then not investigate further.

[8]

E.g. ‘Steven Moffat On Matt Smith’s Era, Writing The 50th Anniversary And More’.

E.g. ‘Steven Moffat On Matt Smith’s Era, Writing The 50th Anniversary And More’.

[9] In The Day of the Doctor, Hurt is included with the actors playing ‘The Doctor’.

[10] This survived long enough in the outside world to be used on the packaging of the initial John Hurt Doctor action figure and the toy version of his sonic screwdriver prop.

[11]

Where the ‘other Doctor’ mentioned by Lord Cranleigh is physician and cricketer WG Grace (Black Orchid episode 1).

Where the ‘other Doctor’ mentioned by Lord Cranleigh is physician and cricketer WG Grace (Black Orchid episode 1).

[12] 28 February 2013 draft.

[13] ‘The Stranger’ in the Doctor Who: Heroes and Monsters Collection, p11.

[14] This is a bleak twist on Moffat’s idea that humans got the word ‘Doctor’ to mean ‘Healer’ from the character’s interventions in their history.

[15] And explored more fully in the Faction Paradox ranges of books, audios and comics spun out of it by writer Lawrence Miles. Philip Madoc, who both played the War Lord and appeared in The Brain of Morbius, plays the War King in the audio range.

[16] Moffat, The Day of the Doctor, p18.

[17] Radio Times, 12 March 1999. The Atkinson incarnation is also called ‘his ninth’ onscreen in The Curse of Fatal Death (1999).

[18] See, for instance, Cook, Benjamin, ‘No One Can Hear You Scream’, DWM #336, cover date November 2003. This temporary official status is also demonstrated by Scream of the Shalka (2003)’s inclusion in the 40th anniversary book, Doctor Who: The Legend.

[19] The word ‘incarnation’ was not yet part of Doctor Who argot.

[20] Which begins in literally his first (uncredited) scene as showrunner, the final one of The End of Time episode 2.

[21] ‘I was bored’ (The War Games episode 10). Both The War Games and The Brain of Morbius were cowritten by Terrance Dicks.

[22]

E.g. ‘Steven Moffat On Matt Smith’s Era, Writing The 50th Anniversary And More’.

E.g. ‘Steven Moffat On Matt Smith’s Era, Writing The 50th Anniversary And More’.

5. ‘I DON’T SUPPOSE THERE’S ANY NEED FOR A DOCTOR ANY MORE’

It has always been easy to cast the Last Great Time War, which forms the backstory to the 2005 series of Doctor Who, in metafictional terms. It forms, in a sense, an excuse, a reason, why Doctor Who has been away for so long[1]. This interpretation of the War occasionally manifests itself onscreen in 21st-century TV Doctor Who, perhaps most noticeably in the conversations between the 10th Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith in School Reunion (2006). Moreover, the ‘time lock’ that makes the War inaccessible even to those with a TARDIS serves an in-story function equatable to the line drawn between 20th-century and 21st-century Doctor Who in the earliest days of the series’ revival[2]. The Time War also resembles, at least as described in dialogue in 21st-century Doctor Who, the kind of TV science fiction popular in the 1990s, which tended towards depictions of intergalactic or interplanetary wars, with shifting alliances and factional politics amongst multiple alien races[3]. Curiously, while Doctor Who fans cheerfully refer to the 20th and 21st-century series as Old and New Who, and others draw an Old/New Testament distinction, referring to the series as pre- and post-War never seems to have occurred to anyone.

The easy metafictionality of Steven Moffat’s work has come up before in relation to ‘The Night of the Doctor’, but Moffat of course did not conceive of the Last Great Time War, that being the invention of Russell T Davies. Neither did he write School Reunion[4]. Nevertheless, he was open about seeing his own creation, the War Doctor, in such terms: ‘What if […] there was another Doctor? In that time that [the BBC] took the show off the air, there had been another Doctor [and] we never got to see him? What was he doing when we weren’t looking at him?’ This logic even extended to a conviction that the actor who played the War Doctor would have to have been working during the series’ hiatus, in order to be someone who ‘could have been the Doctor in the 16-year gap’[5].

This comment casually assumes that a fictional character has an existence despite having no audience, in a sort of inverted Heisenberg principle, but also serves as an example of how the fictive ‘present’ of ‘The Night of the Doctor’ (and of the War Doctor’s scenes in The Day of the Doctor) is not just between Doctor Who (1996) and Rose, but also in some abstract sense during the years that passed between their transmissions on BBC One. The Time War, then, comes explicitly to stand for the decade-and-a-half where, except for one night, Doctor Who was not on British TV. A period when, frankly, the series was widely despised, and when one famous review described it as the ‘TV equivalent of anal warts’, a view that was extreme but not atypical and which, along with an equally vitriolic description of its fans as ‘anorak-clad wankers’, was described in a licensed Doctor Who publication as ‘entirely fair’[6].

‘The Night of the Doctor’ begins like many a 21st-century Doctor Who season opener. A dashing, if damaged, Doctor emerges into a fraught situation, to encounter a female lead the audience have already spent a little time with. (Cass is described, tellingly, in the shooting script as ‘in her twenties, pretty, currently terrified.’[7]) There is then a spark between the characters, one in this instance caused by Cass’ heroism in transporting everyone else off the crashing spaceship on which the TARDIS has materialised. Asked why this was her responsibility she replies that ‘Everyone else was screaming’, a line that serves as a riposte to clichés about the role of the ‘Doctor Who girl’. A delighted Doctor, now showing off, says ‘Welcome aboard,’ assuming that when he invites this young woman to join him on his adventures she will accept. She is so perfectly suited to be his companion that it’s after this moment, not before, that she confides in him that she wants to see the universe.

There are differences, of course; the outer space setting for one – Doctor Who’s regular second leads this century being exclusively drawn, for audience identification purposes, from 21st-century Earth. But the important difference is, this time it doesn’t work. Cass’ rejection of the Doctor’s overture is not gentle or qualified, as Donna Noble’s in The Runaway Bride (2006) initially is. It’s a consequence of the time in which she is living, or rather the Time War in which she is fated to die. She has a full-blown hatred for the Time Lords[8]. Moved to defend himself, if not quite his people, the Doctor has the ultimate insult thrown in his face: that not only is he no better than a Dalek, but that it is impossible to tell the difference between him and one.

It is often said that a Doctor Who companion is an audience surrogate. Cass, who the Doctor will later specifically deny has ever been his companion, in accordance with her own wishes, is an audience surrogate for Doctor Who when it didn’t have one. She is ‘The Night of the Doctor’ referencing how Doctor Who could not find an audience in the 1990s, by showing the Doctor unable even to find a companion to join him on his adventures. Nothing the character or the series is or does has really changed. Nothing the Doctor does is different, it’s simply that his schtick fails to find an appreciative audience. The expression on the McGann Doctor’s face as Cass rejects him, and therefore the series and all its promise, is described in the novelisation of The Day of the Doctor as ‘The memory of better days and lost magic’, which serves to underline the point[9].When Ohila has her sisters bring in the now dying Cass she says ‘Doctor, attend your patient.’ invoking another context for his title. He cannot save her. Somehow, in the Last Great Time War that is also the 1990s, being the Doctor does not work.

Moffat had himself, of course, written Doctor Who for TV in the 90s, and the nature of that production is itself instructive. The Curse of Fatal Death was produced as part of Comic Relief in 1999. While later released as part of the official Doctor Who VHS range, and preceded by an announcement in Radio Times that its Doctor, as played by Rowan Atkinson, was his ‘ninth incarnation’[10], The Curse of Fatal Death is undeniably parody, and arguably not quite self-parody. Affectionate and very well-made, it’s something which exerts with all its might the cultural importance of Doctor Who, but goes along with conceding that Doctor Who can by 1999 only be done as comedy. Something to be laughed with, but also, up to a point, at – even if Moffat’s own fannishness means that there are no jokes about wobbly sets or Daleks not being able to go upstairs. Perhaps the most interesting thing about The Curse of Fatal Death creatively, at least in retrospect, is how much of it is reprised in Moffat’s formal period in charge of the series. A reformed Master. A Doctor who marries one of his companions. The Doctor exceeding a Time Lord’s allotted span of 12 regenerations. The 13th Doctor being a woman. It is the first occasion when Terrance Dicks’ dictum about the Doctor being ‘never cruel or cowardly’ is paraphrased in fiction on TV[11], while some lines written for it are themselves reprised in later episodes[12]. It is tempting at times to regard The Curse of Fatal Death as being like the ‘dumb show’ included before some Early Modern drama, which in a sense parodies in advance[13]. While this cannot be deliberate, it is entirely in keeping with Moffat’s work generally.

Even in Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary year, it might seem indulgent to have a story where one of the major themes is so overwhelmingly metafictional[14]. What saves the episode from smugness in this regard is that it is not his own Doctor Who that Moffat is defending, but the idea of Doctor Who. It also, by giving Paul McGann an enormous amount to play in six minutes in which he is almost never offscreen, expresses absolute confidence in the actor and his Doctor. On his entrance, McGann’s character is described by Moffat thus: ‘the Eighth Doctor. He looks much as we last saw him. Older of course, the frock coat[15] a bit more worn. But this is the man who saved the world at the turn of millennium!’[16] On multiple occasions Moffat had expressed doubt that McGann’s Doctor could have been the one to commit the act of genocide Eccleston’s remembers in The End of the World (2005) and Dalek, seeing him as ‘the forerunner of the romantic dashing Doctor’ played by both David Tennant and Matt Smith[17]. The characterisation of McGann’s Doctor as one who is willing to ‘help where I can’ but ‘will not fight’ in the Time War is in keeping with this, but only serves as an in-fiction version of the real-world truth, that the failure of the 1996 TV movie to lead to a series was nothing to do with the abilities of its lead actor, as his magnificent performance in this episode demonstrates.

Cass, like the TV audiences of the late 1980s and 90s, is happy to let Doctor Who die. Unlike them, she is at least happy to watch it happen.

[1]

While Black Archive house style distinguishes between ‘the Doctor’ and Doctor Who (and indeed Doctor Who), readers are welcome to imagine that references to Doctor Who the series also encompass the character sometimes called by that name.

While Black Archive house style distinguishes between ‘the Doctor’ and Doctor Who (and indeed Doctor Who), readers are welcome to imagine that references to Doctor Who the series also encompass the character sometimes called by that name.

[2] It has since been pretty definitively rubbed out.

[3]

See, for instance, Babylon 5 (1993-98), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-99).

See, for instance, Babylon 5 (1993-98), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-99).

[4] Its script is the first of seven for Doctor Who by Toby Whithouse, best known as the creator of Being Human (2008-13) and whose other credits include Noughts + Crosses (2020).

[5] ‘Steven Moffat On Matt Smith’s Era, Writing The 50th Anniversary And More’.

[6] Loaded, issue unknown, quoted and endorsed in Howarth, Chris, and Steve Lyons, Doctor Who: The Completely Useless Encyclopedia (1997), p100.

[7]

Pixley, Andrew, ‘The Night of the Doctor’, p8.

Pixley, Andrew, ‘The Night of the Doctor’, p8.

[8] In the novelisation of The Day of the Doctor, her ship has been irretrievably damaged by the Time Lords after having just survived an encounter with Dalek ships (Moffat, Steven, Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, p7).

[9]

Moffat, The Day of the Doctor, p10.

Moffat, The Day of the Doctor, p10.

[10] Radio Times #3916, 6-11 March 1999.

[11] Moffat will repeat this in The Day of the Doctor.

[12] E.g. ‘Look after the universe for me, I’ve put a lot of work into it,’ used in a deleted scene from The Magician’s Apprentice (2015) released as an internet minisode.

[13] The most famous example is ‘The Mousetrap’, before ‘The Murder of Gonzago’, the play-within-a-play in Hamlet (1599). Real examples include those in Gorboduc (1561) and The Spanish Tragedy (c1587).

[14] The 2009 Star Trek film has many good qualities, but falls slap bang into this problem, in that the only thing it is about is how important Star Trek is. Which is a particular problem for a film version of a series explicitly conceived as dealing with an ‘issue of the week’.

[15] While McGann’s costume from Doctor Who (1996) is often referred to as featuring a frock coat, it does not. A frock coat is a type of light jacket, which tapers dramatically at the waist, then fans out at an even greater angle. The Patrick Troughton Doctor’s tailcoat has been routinely referred to as a ‘frock coat’ since the publication of Terrance Dicks’ Doctor Who And The Abominable Snowmen (1974), including onscreen in The Five Doctors. In fact, the first Doctor to wear a frock coat onscreen is Matt Smith in The Bells of Saint John (2013), whose costume designer, Howard Burden, also worked on ‘The Night of the Doctor’. It is possible that he simply took Moffat’s use of fan argot literally, twice resulting in magnificent costumes.

[16]

Pixley, Andrew, ‘The Night of the Doctor’, p8.

Pixley, Andrew, ‘The Night of the Doctor’, p8.

[17] Steven Moffat, interviewed on stage at the British Film Institute following a screening of The Day of the Doctor held as part of the Sir John Hurt tribute season, 28 January 2018.

6. ‘PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF’

That Colin Baker’s Doctor was condemned, by the circumstances of the actor’s departure from the role, to the final onscreen utterance ‘Carrot juice, carrot juice, carrot juice!’[1] is a decades-long source of fan regret and/or amusement, yet Paul McGann’s Doctor’s last words onscreen (‘Oh no, not again!’ as the TARDIS record player skips[2]) were, for nearly two decades, so uninspiring as to not even prompt amusement. Both were, however, seen as lacking in comparison to the assumed final words of the first, third, fourth and fifth Doctors in particular[3], all of which attempted to make some sort of statement, whether about their interpretation of the role, their imminent successor or simply the story. This was a tradition that was embraced and extended by Russell T Davies for the revived 21st-century Doctor Who, where he supplied his Doctors with final words that made statements about both the Doctor and the actors who were playing him. The ninth Doctor’s final words serve as a salute to Billie Piper and Christopher Eccleston’s contributions to reviving Doctor Who, as well indicating that the Doctor has moved beyond the self-recrimination that characterised this incarnation[4]. The 10th’s indicate the mixed feelings both Tennant and Davies himself had moving on from the extraordinary success that Doctor Who had become, as well as the Doctor’s explicit fear of his own mortality[5].

In the same year that ‘The Night of the Doctor’ was made, BBC Worldwide issued a set of 11 mugs, one to commemorate each Doctor, with a design on the front and their first and last words on the back. Thanks to ‘The Night of the Doctor’ the McGann mug was out of date while still in shops, although this is something it is hard to see any fan being anything other than delighted by. McGann’s Doctor’s final words in ‘The Night of the Doctor’ are the Biblical quotation which opens this chapter, from the Gospel of St Luke[6]. By placing this quotation in the Doctor’s mouth, particularly as the final words of one of his ‘lives’, Moffat is picking up on several things, some that might seem instinctively alien to Doctor Who, and they are worth unpacking.

In one of his earliest interviews after being cast as the Doctor, Paul McGann was asked to recall any elements of the series that had stuck with him since watching it in childhood. Like his eventual successor Christopher Eccleston, McGann had not seen much of Doctor Who as a child, describing himself as being more the kind of boy who played football in the street than the kind who developed a fascination with TV series. One image, though, did resonate with the actor after nearly 30 years, a Yeti’s chest opening in either The Abominable Snowmen (1967) or The Web of Fear (1968) to reveal its glowing control sphere. His response is worth quoting in full:

‘The monster that did it for me was the Yeti. I was only thinking yesterday that because we were good little Catholic boys[7], we used to go to church three or four times a week, and in Catholic churches you have these Sacred Heart statues, the figure of Jesus, you know, holding back his gown or whatever and there’s the beating heart, with a crown of thorns flashing around it, almost like a cartoon heart. Rich stuff. What would happen with the Yeti? His chest would come apart and he’d be sitting there with the golden ball. And we’d be sitting there watching it, going “Jesus!”.’[8]

The Sacred Heart is a common Catholic devotional practice, in which Jesus’ heart is visible outside his body in religious art, as a symbol of God’s undying love. There is something interesting in McGann finding the accidental, and in truth not particularly pronounced, resemblance between this recurring image from his daily life and a fleeting moment in Doctor Who the most memorable aspect of the series of which he was about to become the lead, not least because TV Doctor Who up to that point had, with very few marked exceptions, been consistently remarkably secular. As early as 1963, the religious assumptions of the second serial for the programme by Doctor Who’s initial writer, Anthony Coburn, played a part in the story’s abandonment[9].

Early Doctor Who’s secular assumptions are such that its first script editor, David Whitaker, also the man who wrote off Coburn’s story, managed to write The Crusade (1965) about the Third Crusade (1189-92), featuring both Richard the Lionheart and Saladin the Great as speaking characters, without ever quite managing to discuss, or even admit, the religious motivations behind said war. (It is hardly an exaggeration to say that The King’s Demons (1983), which features Richard’s brother King John being impersonated by a shape-changing robot, manages to be more explicit simply by using the phrase ‘to free the tomb of Christ our lord’[10].)

A little over a year after The Crusade, but crucially also after Doctor Who’s first comprehensive replacement of its permanent production staff, an attempt was made to produce a serial about one of the flashpoints of the late 16th-century ‘French Wars of Religion’, but, while much admired in retrospect, The Massacre (1966) had no imitators within TV Doctor Who[11], and seems to have done considerable damage to the series’ viewing figures in the short term[12]. After it, although this is assuredly entirely coincidental, Doctor Who’s engagements with the substance of the state religion of the country in which it was made more or less entirely ceased. Kinda (1982) offers some Biblical glosses, chiefly in terms of imagery, to a story conceived in Buddhist terms by its author, and there are occasional allusions, such as the renegade Time Lord Azmael in The Twin Dilemma (1984) seeming to reference the fallen angel Asmodel[13], or Ghost Light (1989) using a clergyman character to help further its theme of emerging Darwinism.

The significant exception is, of course, the last TV Doctor Who story of the 20th century, and Paul McGann’s first appearance as the Doctor, Doctor Who (1996). It might be seen to be remarkable that Doctor Who, a series which could be seen as routinely killing off and resurrecting its lead, had so studiously avoided Christian imagery when doing so, and on half a dozen occasions. It is tempting to suspect the influence of the practising Buddhist Barry Letts (Doctor Who’s Producer from 1969 to 1975 and Executive Producer from 1980 to 1981) in shaping how the Doctor deals with such transitions[14], but there may be other factors. In 1985, Robin of Sherwood (1984-86) one of ITV’s many short-lived attempts to make Doctor Who-type programming for a Doctor Who-type slot, drew considerable ire from religious censorship campaigner Mary Whitehouse for ‘resurrecting its hero’[15] in an episode shown in Holy Week, so perhaps the series was wise not to engage before it did. Perhaps, by 1996, circumstances, including the production of the TV movie for the more overtly religious American market and an early intention to screen it in the UK over Easter weekend, meant that it was an idea whose time had come. Or at least one that could no longer be avoided.

The Doctor’s regeneration and its aftermath in Doctor Who (1996) are cast in explicitly Christian terms[16], or at least imagery. The Doctor emerges from his tomb, in fact the morgue at the hospital, wrapped in a shroud. McGann’s overall appearance, particularly his blue eyes and long hair, recall Robert Powell in Jesus of Nazareth (1977), at the time perhaps the most celebrated TV incarnation of Jesus, and that production’s deep debts to a western visual depiction of Jesus. What is key, though, is that the Doctor of Doctor Who (1996) is resurrected after death[17], not regenerated prior to it. Grace[18] confronts the Doctor, saying ‘You’re trying to tell me you’ve come back from the dead?’ and he replies, definitively, ‘Yes.’ He has already said that ‘I was dead too long this time,’ and will later refer to regeneration as occurring ‘when I die’. Of the regeneration stories made before it, the Doctor is explicitly not dead yet in The War Games, Planet of the Spiders (1974), Logopolis (1981) or The Caves of Androzani (1984), and implicitly not in The Tenth Planet (1966) and Time and the Rani. Doctor Who (1996) recasts the idea from regeneration to resurrection in order to Christify both it and the character undergoing it. In this context, it is perhaps telling that in The Parting of the Ways (2005) the ninth Doctor explicitly calls regeneration a ‘way of cheating death’, rather than returning from it, and tries to cast it more in terms of the ‘change of appearance’ of The War Games[19].

Doctor Who (1996)’s religious imagery does not stop there[20]. Later, the Doctor is bound by the Master, himself cast in Biblical terms with his earliest appearance in the TV movie as a kind of snake[21], and is forced to wear a coronet which resembles the crown of thorns placed on Jesus’ head prior the crucifixion[22]. Notably, in that Doctor Who Magazine interview, conducted on set in Vancouver, McGann commented that the responsibility of playing the Doctor was akin to playing John Lennon or Jesus, in that everyone seemingly had a view on what he was really like or should be like, indicating that the actor’s childhood association of Doctor Who with his faith in which he had been raised was still at the forefront of his mind as he worked on it[23].

‘The Night of the Doctor’ picks up on both the religious imagery of Doctor Who (1996) and perhaps the implications of McGann’s own comments, and expands them further[24]. Moffat’s choice for the eighth Doctor’s last words, ‘Physician, heal thyself,’ are not merely a direct quote from the Bible, they are the words of Jesus himself[25]. As with Doctor Who (1996), the identification of the Doctor with Jesus is both direct and unavoidable, and to an even greater extent than in the earlier story, ideas and images pile up around this. The Sisterhood of Karn have a central altar table, something not true in their previous appearance in The Brain of Morbius. The cups the Doctor is offered, holding the liquid that will trigger his regeneration, are shaped like chalices, as used in Christian celebration and particularly communion. One could even see the Doctor’s death being watched by Ohila and a number of sisters as referencing the ambiguously biblically testified number of women who came to comfort Jesus as he was dying on the cross. This is an interpretation that particularly works given Claire Higgins’ own conviction that Ohila is the Doctor’s mother[26], since one of the women present at the crucifixion is usually said to be Jesus’ mother Mary[27].

As the Doctor arrives on Karn in the ruins of Cass’ spaceship, Ohila informs the audience that the Doctor is dead. She then repeats this information to him. As in Doctor Who (1996), but not elsewhere in Doctor Who, the Doctor is killed, then resurrected through the process of acquiring a new body. The parallel is too complete and too much of an exception not to be important. This is why it is key to this story that the Doctor’s self-sacrifice on the ship is so absolutely willing. It is entirely within the Doctor’s own power to escape and leave Cass to die. He is on the same side of the locked door as the TARDIS. He does not die because he cannot escape, he dies because he tells Cass that he will not leave her to die, even though she has no interest in being saved. He proves that he is willing to die for one person, an entirely selfless act that is of a different order of self-sacrifice even from that when the fifth Doctor dies for Peri in The Caves of Androzani, because here it does not even work.

At this point the story wraps around Doctor Who (1996)’s Christified Doctor its own metafictional engagement with the idea that the ‘present’ of ‘The Night of the Doctor’ is the time when being the Doctor does not work. Following his conversation with Ohila, McGann’s character banishes the Doctor. Because in the Last Great Time War which is also the 1990s, the only option available to the Doctor is, like the series of which he is the lead, to not exist.

[1]

The Trial of a Time Lord episode 14.

The Trial of a Time Lord episode 14.

[2]

Doctor Who (1996).

Doctor Who (1996).

[3]

Respectively: ‘It’s far from being all over!’ (The Tenth Planet episode 4, although he does in fact say ‘Keep warm’ after this point, and as of Twice Upon A Time a great deal more); ‘A tear, Sarah Jane? Where’s there’s life, there’s…’ (Planet of the Spiders (1974) episode 6); ‘It’s the end, but the moment has been prepared for’ (Logopolis (1981) episode 4); and ‘Adric’, the name of a companion he failed to save (The Caves of Androzani (1984) episode 4).

Respectively: ‘It’s far from being all over!’ (The Tenth Planet episode 4, although he does in fact say ‘Keep warm’ after this point, and as of Twice Upon A Time a great deal more); ‘A tear, Sarah Jane? Where’s there’s life, there’s…’ (Planet of the Spiders (1974) episode 6); ‘It’s the end, but the moment has been prepared for’ (Logopolis (1981) episode 4); and ‘Adric’, the name of a companion he failed to save (The Caves of Androzani (1984) episode 4).

[4] ‘Rose, before I go, I just want to tell you, you were fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And do you know what? So was I.’ (The Parting of the Ways).

[5] ‘I don’t want to go.’ (The End of Time episode 2).

[6] Luke 4:23.

[7] Curiously, a disproportionate number of the actors to play the Doctor on TV come from Catholic backgrounds, with Tom Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann and Peter Capaldi being raised in the faith. Baker and McCoy took religion seriously enough when young that both trained for the priesthood before becoming actors.

[8] Gillatt, Gary, ‘The Doctor: Paul McGann’, DWM #237, cover date 8 May 1996.

[9] ‘The Master of Luxor’, aka ‘The Robots’. Commissioned 16 June 1963, recommissioned 6 July 1963, it was bumped from second place by The Daleks (1963-64) on 23 September 1964 and formally abandoned in early 1964 (Doctor Who: The Complete History Volume 4 10,000 BC and The Mutants). The scripts were published in 1992 and an audio adaptation made in 2011. It is very telling that the audio felt the need to amend many of these assumptions, in order to make the adaptation ‘fit’ with televised Doctor Who of the era.

[10]

The King’s Demons episode 1.

The King’s Demons episode 1.

[11] Except, perhaps, and at considerable distance, Demons of the Punjab (2018).

[12] For a (much) fuller account of this story see Cooray Smith, James, The Black Archive #2: The Massacre (2016).

[13] The link is made stronger in Eric Saward’s novelisation, where Azmael is portrayed as having engaged in armed insurrection against Gallifreyan authority in his younger days.

[14] He co-wrote, directed and produced Planet of the Spiders, where regeneration as it tends to be understood is in practice invented, and then retroactively applied to the ‘renewal’ of The Tenth Planet and the ‘change of appearance’ of The War Games; and Executive Produced Logopolis, which firmly cemented his ideas as the norm.

[15] Quoted in Cornell, Paul, Keith Topping and Martin Day, The Guinness Book of Classic British TV, second edition, p354.

[16] This is leavened with other directorial touches that mix the metaphor, such as the intercutting of moments from James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931).

[17] Although it is a curious inversion that McGann’s Doctor is resurrected before he is rendered immobile with his arms held straight and away from him while wearing a crown of thorns.

[18] The character’s name has Christian connotations, but not ones that map significantly onto anything which happens in Doctor Who (1996).

[19] This century, the Doctor is also assuredly not dead before regenerating in The End of Time, The Day of the Doctor, The Time of the Doctor, or Twice Upon A Time.

[20]

For more on this, see Driscoll, Paul, The Black Archive #25: Doctor Who (1996), pp99-103.

For more on this, see Driscoll, Paul, The Black Archive #25: Doctor Who (1996), pp99-103.

[21] Referencing the serpent of Genesis, linked culturally, but not Biblically, with the Christian Devil.

[22] ‘And when they had pla[i]ted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee and mocked him, saying Hail, King of the Jews!’ (Matthew 27:29). It is also mentioned in Mark 15:17 and John 19:2-5.

[23] Gillatt, ‘The Doctor: Paul McGann’.

[24] As a DWM reader, Moffat will surely have been aware of them.

[25] Moffat’s own casually professed atheism is not strictly relevant, but is noted here as the fact it is.

[26] Wright, Mark, ‘Under the Spell’, DWM #499, cover date June 2016, pp25-26.

[27] John 19:25.

7. ‘DOCTOR NO MORE’

At the climax of The Beast Below (2010), Matt Smith’s Doctor finds himself faced with a dilemma; one where he has to choose whether or not to press a button. If he does the innocent will suffer, ostensibly for a greater good, but at his hands. Faced with what seems like the inevitability of pushing the button, he tells his new companion Amy Pond that ‘then I’ll have to find a new name ’cause I won’t be the Doctor any more’. Here, in the second transmitted episode of the Steven Moffat and Matt Smith eras of Doctor Who, we find a moment that both prefigures (from the audience’s point of view) and, as we eventually discover, recalls (from its lead character’s point of view) key scenes from The Day of the Doctor, the penultimate episode of Smith’s time on the show, if not Moffat’s.

While it would doubtless be untrue to claim that much, if any, of even the broad strokes of The Day of the Doctor were already conceived when The Beast Below was written and made, the undeniable parallels between the two, and further ones between The Beast Below and the end of ‘The Night of the Doctor’, are worth unpacking for what they demonstrate about the shifting conceptual basis, conscious or otherwise, of Doctor Who as it existed from 2010 to 2017. Of chief importance is that it is absolutely central to Doctor Who under Steven Moffat that the Doctor is not a character, or even a person. The Doctor is an idea. This finds its most coherent verbal expression in The Witch’s Familiar (2015), and the way it does so is worth quoting in full before we look at other, earlier instances of it in Moffat’s work:

‘There’s no such thing as the Doctor. I’m just a bloke in a box, telling stories […] sometimes on a good day, if I try very hard, I’m not some old Time Lord who ran away. I’m the Doctor.’

A Good Man Goes To War revolves around the 11th Doctor’s attempt to rescue Amy Pond from the Silence. The Silence, for their own part, profess to have no fear of the Doctor, their leader Madame Kovarian saying, ‘The anger of a good man is not a problem. Good men have too many rules.’ The Doctor tells her that truly good men do not need rules, and now is not the time to find out why he has so many. ‘The Night of the Doctor’ draws an exact equivalence between the phrase the ‘good man’ and the title ‘the Doctor’, and has the eighth Doctor confirm it in dialogue. It goes on to build on both this and The Sound of Drums (2007)’s confirmation of the long-term fan assumption that the Doctor and the Master chose their own titles. (There, the 10th Doctor tells the Master his is a ‘Psychiatrist’s field day’, and the Master responds that the Doctor’s means ‘the man who makes people better. How sanctimonious is that?’) The irony is that, following A Good Man Goes To War, the audience already knows that, thanks to the Doctor’s eventual notoriety across time and space, many cultures now equate this title itself with someone who fights.

In The Day of the Doctor, the War Doctor says that he (implicitly his current incarnation) has ‘lost the right to be the Doctor’. But ‘The Night of the Doctor’ sees McGann’s character disavowing his title before his regeneration, something his next incarnation quickly affirms with the words at the head of this chapter. The implications of Day and ‘Night’ are different. The scene in The Day of the Doctor suggests that actions in the War, through a process of attrition, caused the character to believe he was no longer worthy of the name he had chosen for himself. The end of ‘The Night of the Doctor’ sees the title being put away preemptively[1], perhaps in order to facilitate whatever its former holder feels needs to be done, perhaps in order to protect the title from his actions[2].

The existence of the Doctor’s original name, unknown except to River Song, is a recurring presence in Moffat’s Doctor Who. First occurring as early as The Girl in the Fireplace (2006), it is obviously a major issue in The Name of the Doctor, the story transmitted immediately before this one. The end of The Day of the Doctor restates Terrance Dicks’ ‘never cruel, never cowardly, never give up, never give in’ dictum and then links that with the title choosing referred to in The Sound of Drums. This might be taken to suggest that the qualities the character was disavowing were ones he associated with his original name. Yet this original name is not employed by the former Doctor during his life fighting the Time War. While in practical terms this is because the TV series is not going to reveal it[3], from a character perspective we might conclude that the Doctor wishes to protect his hidden name from what he will go on to do, as well as his chosen title.

The War Doctor’s first words also have resonance up and down the series’ history. The insane Dalek Caan was the first, at least on screen, to declare ‘No More’. His attempts to entrap and destroy the Daleks forever were, as he said, inspired by a revelation; ‘I saw the Daleks. What we have done, throughout time and space, I saw the truth of us, Creator, and I decreed, “No more!”’[4] Having the War Doctor reprise these words draws a direct parallel between him and the last of the Cult of Skaro. Yet his doing so is not the former Doctor accepting the truth of what the desperate Cass said on a crashing spaceship, when she refused to see any difference between Time Lord and Dalek, including him. Because, for this iteration of the Doctor, the whole Dalek Caan business hasn’t happened yet. The obvious conclusion is that Caan gets the phrase ‘No More’ during his own impossible post-War time travelling excursions into the time-locked Time War, and that he gets it from the War Doctor, not the other way around, even though the audience encounters Caan’s iteration of it first.

‘The Night of the Doctor’ falls, despite not featuring him, at more or less the endpoint of Matt Smith’s time on Doctor Who, but it is merely the middle of the Moffat era. As such it acts as a pivot, clarifying themes and setting up new variations on them to be explored in the years to come. The 11th Doctor of A Good Man Goes To War has, by his own words, accepted that he is not a Good Man; he knows that because of how he acted in the Last Great Time War. He has, as he says in The Day of the Doctor, ‘moved on’, in a way his previous incarnation had not. The Moment calls them ‘The man who regrets and the man who forgets.’ [5] The 11th Doctor is not, at least at this point, really aware of the pain of having been the War Doctor in the way the 10th Doctor was. That is what makes his acceptance of what he thinks of as his own nature possible. But he is still trying to be the Doctor, a term at least one of his past selves directly equated with ‘good man’. When in The Day of the Doctor the 11th Doctor reconciles himself to the idea that the War Doctor is the Doctor, this also involves accepting that the War Doctor’s actions are his own. Which is not quite the same thing. And even if, as of the end of The Day of the Doctor, neither of them were responsible for the destruction of Gallifrey, this acceptance means the War Doctor’s actions earlier in the War are also his own. During the reveal at the end of The Name of the Doctor, the 11th Doctor tells Clara: ‘I said he was me. I never said he was the Doctor.’ The statement carries with it an implication. The Doctor didn’t press the button and end the War, and if the Doctor didn’t do it, then the Time Lord who is not the Doctor, but who tries to be, must have done it instead. Curiously, forgiving the War Doctor means shouldering a greater burden in his current incarnation – or perhaps his next. Because the ramifications of this difficult acceptance seem to serve as the underpinning of much of the writing of the 12th Doctor, especially early on, where a question which contains a familiar term, ‘Am I a good man?’, features heavily[6].

In his novelisation of The Day of the Doctor, there is an additional scene where Ohila tells an unspecified later Doctor that the drink she administered on Karn was simply ‘lemonade and dry ice’[7]. It was a device to give the Doctor an excuse to fight in the War, something she knew was necessary[8]. Nothing he did in the War was a consequence of her actions. This revisionist gloss reiterates and affirms the point made in The Day of the Doctor that whatever he did, he did it all himself. The 12th Doctor – having integrated himself, the War Doctor and his actions into his new persona, if not quite into the ideal self he calls the Doctor – is in a different position. He has not simply seen the Time War afresh, he has fought the war for Christmas. It would be easy to see the thousand-year battle to protect Trenzalore in The Time of the Doctor (2013) as a quick-fix replacement traumatic event for the Doctor, now that he is no longer haunted by destroying Gallifrey[9]. But it is more complex than that; we can also see the 12th Doctor’s resentment of soldiers and frequent mulling over of his own morality as a consequence of him having again found himself fighting a war and leading an army, once again against the Daleks. Tasha Lem makes the comparison explicit, saying that ‘The Time War will begin anew’ if the Time Lords re-emerge into the universe above Trenzalore, where the Daleks are waiting for them and a conflict inimical to all life in the universe will begin again[10].

The equation of the Doctor and the Daleks represented by the reuse of the words ‘No more’ is reprised in the aftermath of The Day of the Doctor, and with another unusual Dalek. The ‘good Dalek’ Rusty encountered in Into the Dalek (2014), and again in Twice Upon A Time, refuses that description, telling the Doctor ‘I am not a good Dalek. You are a good Dalek.’ This at first seems like a repeat of a moment in Dalek, but while indebted to it is fundamentally different. The ‘Metaltron’ in Dalek tells the Doctor ‘You would make a good Dalek’ – i.e. it believes the Doctor would be good (successful) at being a Dalek. This is not a moral judgement on its part, because it has no moral judgement. It is a qualitative judgment. Whereas Rusty, who has acquired a conscience, believes that the Doctor’s methods and actions are like those of the Daleks, but are placed in the service of a different morality. These are different allegations, not that the Doctor accepts either of them. But the latter is clearly more troubling than the former, and its effects much longer-lasting.

‘Go back to your battlefield, you haven’t finished yet,’ Cass angrily tells the eighth Doctor shortly before both die. It is on another battlefield, in another war to end wars, that the 12th Doctor’s actions give his first incarnation[11] an insight into ‘what it means to be a Doctor of War,’ and that the ultimate reconciliation of these ideas is found, in the Moffat era’s final scenes. But that moment of peace is far in the future, as the War Doctor begins his long Night’s journey into Day.

[1] Neatly, Cass’ first line has her telling the computer and the unseen Doctor to ‘Stop talking about doctors!’, and by his last line he has.

[2] In the same way the Moment implies embarrassment on the War Doctor’s part as the reason why he does not activate the weapon near the TARDIS: ‘Don’t you want her to see?’

[3] As Moffat has repeatedly noted, doing so is a terrible idea.

[4] Journey’s End.

[5]

The Day of the Doctor.

The Day of the Doctor.

[6] This question, although not all the underlying issues that feed it, is resolved at the climax to Death In Heaven (2014).

[7]

Moffat, The Day of the Doctor, p21.

Moffat, The Day of the Doctor, p21.

[8] This detail, if accepted, does mean that the Doctor does not die and then return to life as discussed in the previous chapter; nevertheless, he is presented as having done so to both the TV audience and himself, leaving the symbolism arguably unaffected.

[9] At the beginning of The Time of the Doctor, he announces ‘I'm the Doctor. I'm a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. I stole a time machine and ran away and I've been flouting the principal law of my own people ever since,’ and he does so when trapped in a truth field. According to the rules this story establishes, this must be truth. Which suggests both that at this point he is happier with his internal conflicts, and that it is the battles of Trenzalore that make him no longer so.

[10] One might ask how a Time War, one fought throughout history, could ever truly come to an end. It is not impossible that a later Doctor might discover that much which has happened to them since they thought it had ended is merely part of it, e.g. the Master’s re-destruction of Gallifrey (Spyfall, Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (all 2020)).

[11] Or at least what both he and the audience then believe to be his first incarnation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

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Film

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‘Steven Moffat on “The Night of the Doctor”’. BBC Doctor Who. https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/doctorwho/entries/41fd63f1-63ae-30b1-a302-bd6e59ddecbf. Accessed 8 October 2020.

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BIOGRAPHY

James Cooray Smith is a freelance writer and critic whose credits include The New Statesman, Prospect, Private Eye, Hero Collector and That Mitchell and Webb Sound. He researched and wrote the production information subtitles for several official BBC Doctor Who DVD and Blu-ray releases, and is the author of well-received Black Archives on The Massacre, ‘The Ultimate Foe’ and The Underwater Menace and a Silver Archive on Sapphire & Steel. He lives in North London with a Lady Barrister and their son.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Title Page

CONTENTS

OVERVIEW

1. ‘I’M A DOCTOR, BUT PROBABLY NOT THE ONE YOU WERE EXPECTING.’

2. ‘WHAT IF I GET BORED? I NEED A TELEVISION’

3. ‘THE UNIVERSE STANDS ON THE BRINK’

4. ‘WHAT DO YOU NEED NOW?’

5. ‘I DON’T SUPPOSE THERE’S ANY NEED FOR A DOCTOR ANY MORE’

6. ‘PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF’

7. ‘DOCTOR NO MORE’

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIOGRAPHY