Ninth Doctor

The Doctor

The Ninth Doctor
Doctor Who character
File:Doctor006.jpg Christopher Eccleston is the Doctor
First regular appearance	Rose
Last regular appearance	The Parting of the Ways
Portrayed by	Christopher Eccleston
Preceded by	Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann)
Succeeded by	Tenth Doctor (David Tennant)
Information
Tenure	March 2005 – June 2005
No of series	1
Appearances	10 stories (13 episodes)
Companions	Rose, Adam, Jack
Chronology	Series 1 (2005)

The Ninth Doctor refers to the ninth official incarnation of the fictional character known as the Doctor, in the long-running BBC television science-fiction series Doctor Who.

"Unofficial" Ninth Doctors include the Ninth Doctor played by Rowan Atkinson in the charity skit Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death and the Ninth Doctor voiced by Richard E. Grant in the animated webcast Scream of the Shalka who is known as the Shalka Doctor to avoid confusion. This article is about the official Ninth Doctor, played by the actor Christopher Eccleston, whose tenure as the Doctor only lasted through Series 1 (2005).

Overview

The original Doctor Who television series ceased production in 1989 with the Seventh Doctor. Paul McGann, as the Eighth Doctor, appeared in the role just once on screen in the Doctor Who television movie in 1996. The appearance of the Ninth Doctor marked the regular return of the character to television screens after nearly sixteen years, and as a result for many young fans and new viewers he was the first Doctor they had ever seen. He was introduced without any information on his recent past; though it is implied in Rose that he had recently regenerated, the exact circumstances of that change, or what caused it, are unknown.

Biography

Template:Spoiler The Ninth Doctor is (to the best of his knowledge) the only survivor of the Time War. It is unspecified whether it was he or the Eighth Doctor who fought in the war.

After his regeneration, he helped save London from an invasion by the Autons, living plastic automatons animated by the Nestene Consciousness. He did this with the help of Rose Tyler, a teenager whom he subsequently invited to be a companion in his travels. The Doctor showed Rose the far future and Victorian Britain before returning to Rose's own era where they fought off an attempt to destroy the Earth by the alien Slitheen family. After this, they journeyed to 2012 where the Doctor found that a single Dalek was being kept in a secret museum filled with alien artefacts. There, the first details of the Time War fought by the Time Lords and Daleks were revealed and how it concluded with the mutual annihilation of both races, leaving the Doctor the last of the Time Lords. The Doctor and Rose were also joined by a young man named Adam Mitchell.

The Doctor, Rose and Adam travelled to the future to Satellite Five, where they discovered a plot by the Jagrafess to manipulate Earth through its mass media. When Adam tried to smuggle future knowledge back to his own time, he became the first companion to be deliberately exiled from the TARDIS. After this, Rose persuaded the Doctor to return to the day her father, Pete Tyler, died, creating a temporal paradox by saving him which nearly led to disaster until Pete sacrificed himself to set time right once more.

Following a mysterious spaceship to 1941, the Doctor and Rose met Captain Jack Harkness, a confidence trickster and former Time Agent from the 51st century. Jack's latest con nearly caused a deadly nanotechnological plague to sweep through the human race, but he helped the Doctor and Rose end it before joining the TARDIS crew.

Cardiff Whilst shopping for spare Tardis parts in downtown Go-Lo, the ninth Doctor was aproached by a troupe of traveling alcoholic circus acrobats. The Acrobats and the Doctor were old army buddies and had many a zany adventure story to share. After quite a few pints of larger down at the local, the Doctor drunkenly stumbled down the street on his way back to the Tardis. He was later found flashing a taxi and then was taken into Police custody and arrested whilst trying to burn down a harmonica factory.

Going back to Cardiff to refuel the TARDIS from a space-time rift, the Doctor, Rose and Jack found that one of the Slitheen had survived, posing as Margaret Blaine. Blaine was exposed to the heart of the TARDIS and was regressed into an egg. It was during this episode that the Doctor first noticed that he and Rose had kept coming across the words "Bad Wolf".

At some point, the Ninth Doctor had at least three unchronicled adventures involving the sinking of the RMS Titanic, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the eruption of Krakatoa in the 19th Century. These are revealed in Rose, but their placement in the Ninth Doctor's chronology remains unknown. Many fans assume that they must occur after Rose — but necessarily before his regeneration at the end of the series — since the Doctor's comments about his appearance in that first episode suggest he has only recently regenerated (or at least not had an opportunity to look in a mirror since). However, the first of these adventures may actually have taken place immediately after his regeneration, since he is shown in a photo (taken in Southampton in 1912) to be wearing period clothes (Eccleston was dressed and shot specially) which resemble those worn by the Eighth Doctor. The Ninth Doctor refuses to make any concessions to contemporary fashion elsewhere in his travels (though he later insists that Rose dress appropriately for the Victorian era), being very precious about his look, which is deliberately most unlike that worn by any previous incarnations. Also, it is strongly implied that he saved the family pictured with him, by dissuading them from boarding the doomed ship — and, one episode later, he reveals that he himself was on board and ended up clinging to an iceberg.

When the Doctor and his companions became caught in a series of deadly versions of 20th century gameshows, they found themselves at the mercy of the Badwolf Corporation, based on Satellite Five, but a century after their last visit. However, the true enemy was soon revealed to be the Daleks. The Dalek Emperor had survived the Time War and had rebuilt the Dalek race. The Doctor sent Rose back to her own time in the TARDIS, before attempting to destroy the Dalek army. However, when she saw more "Bad Wolf" graffiti, she realised it was somehow a message linking her to the events in the future. Managing to open up the heart of the TARDIS, she absorbed the energies of the time vortex, and used it to destroy the Daleks. In order to save Rose from being consumed from within by those energies, the Doctor absorbed the fatal energy himself. However, the damage to his cells caused him to regenerate into the Tenth Doctor.

Companions

File:Rosetyler2.jpg

Rose Tyler

The Ninth Doctor had three on-screen companions during his tenure, the main one being Rose Tyler, who appears in all 13 episodes of Series 1. Adam Mitchell joined the Doctor on his travels at the conclusion of Dalek and was rejected by the Doctor after his actions in The Long Game. Jack Harkness first appeared in The Empty Child and joined the TARDIS crew in The Doctor Dances and made his last appearance so far in The Parting of the Ways. He is due to return in Series 3 and currently features in the spin-off series Torchwood.

The Ninth Doctor's relationship with Rose verged on the romantic, with both of them clearly showing that they cared about each other deeply, although both always denied that they were a couple. The lone Dalek in Dalek, having absorbed Rose's DNA, taunted the Doctor by referring to her as "the woman you [the Doctor] love," but the Doctor did not respond. The Ninth Doctor did kiss Rose with some passion in The Parting of the Ways, although it could be argued that this only was in order to draw out the lethal energy of the time vortex from her body. (See "The Doctor and romance".)

Personality

The Ninth Doctor was perhaps the most gritty, working class and informal of the Doctor's incarnations, masking a lonely, melancholic personality with an almost manic exterior. Similar to the Fourth Doctor, he would often make jokes in the face of danger, but then become grim and serious when on his own. He also tends to be fatalistic at times, to the point of near-panic when he and Rose are cornered in The Unquiet Dead and he realizes he's going to die (this despite the knowledge that he would probably just regenerate). Despite being impatient with humans, who he often referred to as "stupid apes", the Ninth Doctor was far more tactile with, and reliant upon, his human companions than previous incarnations.

The Ninth Doctor was quite colloquial in his language and spoke with a distinctly Northern accent. Although the Seventh and Eighth Doctors spoke with non-Received Pronunciation accents, the Ninth's era was the first time this was commented on in the series. When Rose questioned him on why, if he was alien, he sounded like he was from the North, the Doctor retorted, "Lots of planets have a North!"

Much of the Ninth Doctor's melancholy, lack of patience, and hard-bitten edge could be attributed to feelings of guilt at being the sole survivor of the Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks. This darker side came to the fore when he encountered the lone Dalek in Dalek, exhibiting an angry, merciless and vengeful streak which surprised even Rose and led to the Dalek commenting that the Doctor would make a good Dalek. However, the Doctor seemed to find peace towards the end of his incarnation.

The Ninth Doctor's catchphrase, used in a variety of manners, and sometimes sarcastically, was "Fantastic!" (In 2007, Eccleston joined the cast of the American series, Heroes; in the episode "The Fix", Eccleston's character utters "Fantastic!" in the same sarcastic fashion as the Ninth Doctor.)

Gadgets

The Ninth Doctor's era saw the introduction of a redesigned sonic screwdriver which was more versatile than its earlier versions, with functions ranging from its usual door opening abilities to conducting medical scans, repairing barbed wire and acting as a remote control for the TARDIS. The TARDIS console room also underwent a radical redesign, with an amber and green motif and a more organic look to its components.

The Ninth Doctor was also in the habit of using "slightly" psychic paper — what appeared to be a blank piece of card had the ability to show the viewer anything that the user wanted them to see. The Doctor used this to fake various means of identification. Jack Harkness also used psychic paper in his capacity as a con man.

The Ninth Doctor modified Rose's mobile phone — which she dubbed the "superphone" — to give it the ability not just to receive and transmit where ordinary signals would not get through, but powerful enough to be able to make telephone calls to any point in time (even calibrating to the time period of the user).

Story style

Under producer Russell T. Davies, the new series was aimed towards a more contemporary audience, and its stories had a more frenetic pace than the classic series. Rather than four- to six-part serials of 25-minute episodes (the most common format of the original series), most of the Ninth Doctor's stories consisted of individual 45-minute episodes, with only three stories out of ten being two-parters. The thirteen episodes were, however, loosely connected in a series-long story arc which brought their disparate threads together in the series finale. Also, like the classic series, stories often flowed directly into one another or were linked together in some way. Notably, in common only with seasons 7 and 26 of the Classic Series, every story of the season took place on or near Earth. This fact is directly addressed in the original novel, The Monsters Inside in which Rose and the Doctor joke about the fact that all their adventures to date have taken place on Earth or on neighboring space stations.

The stories of Series 1 varied quite significantly in tone, with the production team showcasing the various genres inhabited by Doctor Who over the years. Examples include the "pseudo-historical" story The Unquiet Dead; the far-future whodunit of The End of the World; Earthbound alien invasion stories in Rose and Aliens of London/World War Three and the "base under siege" in Dalek. Even the spin-off media were represented, with Dalek taking elements from writer Rob Shearman's own audio play Jubilee and the emotional content of Paul Cornell's Father's Day drawing on the tone of Cornell's novels in the Virgin New Adventures line. Davies had asked both Shearman and Cornell to write their scripts with those respective styles in mind. The episode Boom Town included a reference to the novel The Monsters Inside, becoming the first episode to acknowledge (albeit in a subtle way) spin-off fiction.

Spin-off appearances

Novels

The Ninth Doctor appears briefly in The Tomorrow Windows by Jonathan Morris (which was published before he actually appeared on television). He is mentioned, but not seen, in The Gallifrey Chronicles by Lance Parkin. In that novel, a Time Lord named Marnal points out that the Doctor appears to have three different ninth incarnations: the canonical Ninth Doctor (played by Eccleston), plus the versions from The Curse of Fatal Death (Atkinson) and Scream of the Shalka (Grant).

New Series Adventures

• The Monsters Inside by Stephen Cole
• The Clockwise Man by Justin Richards
• Winner Takes All by Jacqueline Rayner
• The Deviant Strain by Justin Richards
• The Stealer of Dreams by Steve Lyons
• Only Human by Gareth Roberts

Doctor Who Magazine

• The Love Invasion
• Art Attack!
• The Cruel Sea
• A Groatsworth of Wit

Doctor Who Annual 2005

• Mr. Nobody

See also

• History of Doctor Who - The 2000s
• New Series Adventures
• Shalka Doctor - an alternate version of the Ninth Doctor (predating the 2005 series), introduced in the BBC webcast, Scream of the Shalka.

External links

• The Ninth Doctor on the BBC's Doctor Who website
• 2005 series trailer
• Ninth Doctor's Theme Music
• Alan Kistler's Profile on The Ninth Doctor