The Ninth Doctor

[SiHart]

The Ninth Doctor is an interesting incarnation. Hurt and damaged, but with an outwardly cheery demeanour, he's probably one of the most complex incarnations we've met so far.

What are your thoughts on this Doctor? Is he a favourite of yours?

Si xx

[Andrew Curnow]

Got to go to work in a minute, so I'll just say this for now - when Eccleston was cast, I thought he was all wrong. He didn't in any way seem a 'Doctor actor' to me. Shots of him in a leather jacket with short hair only made me more sure of that...

...But as soon as I saw him in the trailer I began to warm to the idea, and when Rose aired, it probably took about 10 minutes for me to not only accept him, but actually love the ninth Doctor as one of the best. By the time he was fending off that Auton hand, I'd already totally accepted him. And by the time we got to that brilliant first TARDIS scene, and then the wonderful sequence on the embankment ("Lots of planets have a North" and "Slapbang in the middle of London, must be completely invisible") I was quite ready to follow him on a trip of a lifetime.

Just, fantastic!

[Perry Vale]

Though he was excellent casting (off the back of The Second Coming), and had no problems at all with the costume (or lack of), but have to admit that he took a few episodes to 'bed in' with me.

There were hints from the start, that excellent scene where he takes Rose's hand (in 'Rose'), the tear in TEotW, but it was in 'Dalek' where he just nails it, and doesn't put a foot wrong after that in my view. Looking back, he's definitely one of my favourite Doctors of all time, and quite possibly the best actor to ever fill the role. I'm still a tiny bit sad to this day that we didn't get to see more of him in Who.

[Ian Lethbridge-Stewart]

I'm still a tiny bit sad to this day that we didn't get to see more of him in Who.

Never say never! people do mellow and/or forgive etc; it may seem unlikely but it's not impossible for him to come back.

[SiHart]

You know what, I'd forgotten how good he was. From Dalek onwards he doesn't put a foot wrong- before that there's a tentativeness and a few moments that don't feel quite right, maybe that the performance is being forced, but after Dalek he's on top form.

I've watched quite alot of series one that last couple of days and thoroughly enjoyed it. he's a very engaging Doctor and has a great rapport with Rose. Much better than the Tennant Doctor has I think.

Yes, he's damaged and hurt, but this Doctor always does the right thing. He flies off the handle, gets angry but always does the right thing in the end- his acceptance of what Rose did in Father's Day is a good example, or his insistance that they take Margaret Slitheen to her death on Raxacolicofallapatorious (it's not every day you type that) is another. He doesn't take the easy way out, though I do like his admittance that he's a coward any day in The Parting of the Ways a great deal.

He did one year, but it was a perfect year for that Doctor. It's one long story for his incarnation from Rose to The Parting of the Ways and I'm glad Christopher Ecclestion was there for that. It wouldn't have been so fantastic without him.

[J.R. Southall]

Couldn't agree more with what everyone else has already said! Eccleston was brilliant. And kind of proved that the Doctor can be anything. I only hope that if there is a "reunion special" for the anniversary (which I think Moffat hints at in the latest DWM), they can persuade him to do it!

[Andrew Curnow]

I always think that Eccleston turned out to be exactly what the series needed in that first year. By his own confession he'd never much watched the show, and wasn't that taken with what he had seen, so I think he probably approached the part like any other - by reading the scripts, by getting a feel for the character, and then putting his own 'take' on it. Whereas if, say, David Tennant had been cast in that first year he would inevitably have some preconceived ideas of how 'the Doctor' would behave - that's not a criticism, but just imagine if you or I had been cast in 2004? We'd never, or at least not easily, come to the idea of a skinhead, leather-jacket wearing Doctor who has a Northern accent and uses words like 'fart'. Eccleston, if you like, freed up the part - like JR says, he proved the Doctor can be anything.

I've also been watching some of season 1 again recently, and there's still something special and fresh and even innocent about it which, inevitably, isn't really there now we're six years down the line.

[J.R. Southall]

Somebody once wrote about Eccleston's Doctor, that he was dressed like a "Geography teacher having a mid-life crisis". But I thought it was more than that: he also played the part like someone who was used to being around younger people albeit at a distance, who's reached the middle part of his life and as the result of an external crisis (the Time War), is realising that far from wanting to distance himself from these younger people (which is where the ninth Doctor comes in at the start of Episode One), he actually needs to be closer to them than he ever was before. You can see a sort of quiet desperation at the end of that first episode, when he invites Rose aboard the TARDIS, and again at several points in Episode Two, when it's dawning on him that this is what he really needs.

A lot of people who weren't pleased with Eccleston's portrayal of the Doctor probably misread this is the actor bringing himself to the part, rather than playing the Doctor (as written; and of course, it always used to be the case post-Hartnell that there was just as much of the actor in the Doctor as there was anything else - a "role", in other words), and perhaps didn't credit him enough for the performance he was giving. For my money, he's easily the best actor who's played the Doctor (Troughton and Baker T. notwithstanding - for those guys, there really was a lot of themselves in the Doctor, no matter how much Troughton might have thought otherwise: back in the late 'sixties, production was so intense it couldn't have been any other way really), and it's this opening out of who the character of the Doctor could be - through RTD's writing and Eccleston's acting equally - that allowed Tennant (and Smith, for that matter) to play the Doctor as a character we probably always knew he could be, but had never actually seen on screen. The way Tennant opens the part out into a delightfully playful combination of the traditional and the new, is testament to the possibilities left behind by his short-lived (but absolutely essential) predecessor. And now Smith is playing the most trad Doctor of the modern series, and is basically playing this "tradness" through a prism of modern drama techniques that makes the character even more playful (in terms of his dynamic) than even Tennant was. Smith is like a version of Troughton that we could only have had once we'd already had Eccleston and Tennant in the meantime. It's quite joyful to see, but I doubt we could have reached the point where it was possible if we hadn't passed through the midlife crisis Doctor of the ninth, and out the other side.