The ninth Doctor's era (2005)

Christopher Eccleston

• Get the balance right by Thomas Cookson

Get the balance right by Thomas Cookson 14/4/10

Unlike my 2005 Season review, I'm here reviewing the Ninth Doctor era specifically as a continuation of the previous eight eras. It's easy to pretend that New Who picks up from Season 17, and the atrocious years between can be gratefully forgotten. But the JNT era was a heavy inspiration on Eccleston's season. Perhaps it took the JNT era to its logical conclusion and belatedly made it worth something. Much of that season would feel perfectly at home in the JNT era. Father's Day and The Empty Child are inspired heavily by The Curse of Fenric. Dalek is definitely a Colin Baker story. Parting of the Ways is a remake of Resurrection of the Daleks with better acting.

The Ninth Doctor is an amalgamation of the Fifth and Sixth Doctors. Prone to fallibility, bordering on criminal negligence; ruthless; reckless bordering on psychotic actions that often do more harm than good; a tendency for sociopathic etiquette and tasteless remarks; and yet a sensitivity that makes them feel every death and sometimes unwilling to see necessary actions through to the end. The Ninth Doctor was all this and more, well-rounded in a way Colin's, controversial for the sake of it, Doctor never was, and his failures were beautifully tragic by virtue of never seeming as contrived as Davison's. It's about the difference between the spirit and the letter. The Fifth and Sixth Doctor did or permitted terrible things because it was in their rigid character brief, but Eccleston's behaviour was always motivated by genuine passion.

So where had Russell learned where JNT and Eric Saward hadn't?

The Pertwee era could do decent morality play narrative. Both the Doctor and Brigadier get a fair hearing of their viewpoints. The Doctor's views are based on ideals and the Brigadier's on pragmatic survival. The 80's stories, however, were based on a self-destructive ethos, requiring mass deaths from characters being suicidally stupid enough to walk into the line of fire, and a useless Doctor letting it happen.

In The Silurians, maybe the Brigadier was ultimately right that peace was no longer a viable option or too great a risk if the Silurians remained belligerent and used another plague. But maybe the Doctor was right that peace was an option. The story acknowledges that right and wrong isn't a black and white issue. Compare it to Warriors of the Deep where peace clearly isn't an option and the Doctor's ridiculous ideas of how to begin negotiations with Ictar are to kill his whole army, mortally wound him, forcibly revive him, hold him captive, talk at him to make peace - and then be surprised when Ictar goes for his gun instead. What could possibly be learned from that?

Then there's the Controller in Day of the Daleks, who grew up as a servant of the Daleks and never knew any other life. The Doctor forces him to see his true self as a collaborator and a traitor and tells him there's hope for a better tomorrow. Events and interactions in the story then lead the Controller to realise the Doctor is right. The Controller thought the rebels were no-hopers, just like their cause was, until they infiltrate his base but the Doctor persuades them to spare his life (Eric Saward would have killed him off at this point though and left us with no moral lesson and the character journey incomplete). Then the Daleks warn him that his next failure will be his last. He realises that the rebels have more mercy than the Daleks and that he should be on their side, leading to his sacrifice and rejecting his subservient life to face death with bravery and dignity, suiting the Buddhist 'face your fears' theme from Mind of Evil and Planet of the Spiders.

Compare that with Oscar, in The Two Doctors. His character journey is simply to be killed off, and in such a contrived way that bears no relation to any of his choices, his journey or his fatal flaw.

The Pertwee era for all its preachy 'right on' left-winging, had enough roots in traditional narrative to still be about moral choices and decisions that shape the plot. It suited Doctor Who's basic ethos of how any problem has various solutions to be explored and decided upon in terms of which one is morally and pragmatically right, and then showing the consequences. From when the First Doctor decides to bludgeon that wounded caveman because he's holding them up, and Ian stops him, to Genesis of the Daleks, where the Kaled/Thal war is a microcosm for a conflict based universe, and so the Doctor ironically wonders if the Dalek threat is acually the solution to the warring universe by breeding alliances against a common foe. In the Saward era, the morality-play ethos died. It tried to echo the 'dangerous' Hartnell Doctor but they couldn't think of a reason for the Doctor's behaviour beyond madness. It was about shocking the audience and not whether it fit properly into the narrative as a point where consequences could be discussed. It was just gratuitous. When the First Doctor nearly killed a caveman, there was a pragmatic motive behind it. The Sixth Doctor simply would go mad and strangle people, motivated only by the show's desperation for publicity. He also didn't have Ian to hold him back anymore.

A good moral evolves from the narrative with events influencing the moral figure's judgement. In Warriors of the Deep, the Doctor is delusional and completely out of synch, influenced by nothing in the story. The Doctor's blindness to the massacre leaves the story with no conscience. Likewise, the Doctor's scorning of the humans seems typical of a script editor who can't do debates or moral dialogue and so simply resorts to bitching and petty, guilt-tripping exchanges.

New Who, however, can re-approach the show with the benefits of hindsight into where it went wrong. So the 2005 season was all about morality and narrative. Since the episodes were 45 minutes long and had to be full of action, this called for a belligerent and rash Doctor in Christopher Eccleston. Someone who'd ignite the action, who'd actually look for trouble and force the enemy's hand and who'd often make things worse. This is how to do morality and consequences. The Time War taught this Doctor to shoot first and that violence is the only answer. But the events in the stories continually prove him wrong. Bringing the antiplastic into the Nestenes' lair makes the accelerate their invasion plans and destroy his chance at negotiating peace. Likewise in exposing Cassandra's plan to engineer a hostage situation, he actually forces her to go to plan B which results in more deaths.

Gradually, the Doctor learns that there are long-term consequences to what he does. He learns there is hope of being able to save the most lives, and that to kill that helpless Dalek would have come at an enormous cost to his soul. So they really took the fallible and belligerent Doctor of the Saward era, and showed what could have been done if they'd given him a genuine soul and evolved him and had him learn from the stories. A genuine soul, one that makes the fallibilities of the Doctor beautifully human and relatable, rather than contrived self-destruction. Now Doctor Who can actually do its characters justice and have them be rich in passion. Dalek really works as a tragic, sound-and-fury massacre with a sympathetic villain in a way Warriors of the Deep never did. It doesn't bully the audience into its sympathies and it doesn't contrive to deliberately make the Doctor negligent. It also presents a compelling and beautiful psychotic Doctor who brims and burns with contradictory and human emotions taken to extremes. Because, essentially, the ruthless Sixth Doctor could have worked. Whatever the self-serving nature of the First Doctor, the Doctor had grown into a figure who upheld the sanctity of life, which was to be expected for a man who had lived for centuries and seen a lot of death. But what if something pushed him over the edge and he went off the deep end in a big way? That was the idea behind the Sixth and Ninth Doctor. With the Ninth Doctor, the Time War wouldn't have happened if he'd pressed the wires in Genesis of the Daleks. His morality had cost him his world.

Where Fifth and Sixth Doctors failed is that they were envisioned as old and set in their ways. There was no hope of developing them, or change for them. Ironically, they were aware from their long life experiences about shades of grey, but still they were morally arrogant and blinkered, and never learned from their mistakes, no matter how many died. By contrast, the Ninth Doctor is almost reborn with renewed flexiblility like the series itself. Sometimes, when someone gets old and rigid in their beliefs, it takes a major trauma to change them, to disintegrate their sense of self and send them regressing back to adolescent insecurity, neediness and a sense of not really knowing all the answers and having to learn it all again.

With Eccleston, you could see in his eyes that he'd lived for centuries, he'd been out there, seen all those wonders and horrors and was haunted by it all. This is the humanness that Russell and Shearman really valued about the JNT Doctors and they made it palatable to the audience in the hope that they would see beauty in it too, if it was drawn to its full potential out of its inherent ugliness.

Mainly, though, the Ninth Doctor had a sympathetic side that Colin's Doctor never did. Rose was there to hold him back, whilst Peri was always the victim. But, most crucially, the series still upheld the Doctor's moral value of life even whilst the Doctor himself had forgotten it. The series valued the life and feelings of individuals. It drew out their vibrant, angry emotions in sharp, vivid detail, the way human psychology works (see the astounding scene where Gwyneth reads Rose's mind). It really showed that each life is a universe.

The poor stories of the Eccleston era reflected that vitality by its absence. World War Three doesn't demonstrate the Doctor as a belligerent igniter of events, exposing that there's not much plot there, and it's too 'knowing' to be subverted by the Doctor's presence. The Long Game feels inconsequential by a deliberately obfuscated climax. Boom Town rather patronisingly tells us what previous stories actually demonstrated about the Doctor.

But it was a wonderful must-see series, it mattered to me in a way New Who doesn't anymore. Once Doctor Who started chasing ratings, it became a failure. When it had nothing to lose - circa 1988 and the wilderness years - it really shone. Its revival was a success born of failure, pain, art, missed oppurtunities and a wish for final words. But now it's a success with a guaranteed mainstream audience, it no longer has that vitality or desire to challenge.

The show has become safe and lost in showbiz, and the humanism replaced by insincere schmaltz. The Tenth Doctor is a reliable figure who always does the right thing, like pressing a character reset switch. The only time Tennant was fallible was in an adaptation of something from the wilderness years.

The inconsequential Last of the Time Lords epitomises the problem. Like the JNT era, it taught the Doctor nothing, because the Doctor has become twee and uncorruptable now, and the Master's actions had to be reversed in an almighty copout.

The smug cliqueyness of the Tennant and Rose team was especially offensive to toxic levels. Mainly because their 'aren't we so great?' attitude seemed so unearned after their beautiful fallibility in Series One. The impact of lines like Rose's "But I voted for her!", the Dalek's "They are dead because of us!" and the Doctor's "But I made this world!" will probably never be matched again.