Eighth Doctor
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| The Doctor | |
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| The Eighth Doctor | |
| Portrayed by | Paul McGann |
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| Tenure | 1996 |
| First appearance | Doctor Who |
| Last appearance | Doctor Who |
| Number of series | None |
| Appearances | 1 story (1 episode) |
| Companions | on television: Grace in spin-offs: Benny, Stacy, Ssard, Izzy, Kroton, Fey, Destrii, Sam, Fitz, Compassion, Anji, Trix, Charley, C'rizz, Samson and Gemma |
| Related Articles | |
| Preceding | Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) |
| Succeeding | Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) |
| Series | Doctor Who (1996) |
The Eighth Doctor is the name given to the eighth incarnation of the Doctor seen on screen in the long-running BBC television science-fiction series Doctor Who. He was portrayed by Paul McGann.
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[edit] Overview
The Eighth Doctor made his first (and to date, only) television appearance in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie, the first time the Doctor had returned to television screens since the end of the original series in 1989. Intended as a backdoor pilot for a new television series on the FOX Network, the movie was inadequately marketed and advertised (and in some markets even pre-empted by televised sporting events), ultimately leading to poor US ratings. In the UK, however, it was received well, attracting over 9 million viewers and generally positive reviews.
Although the movie failed to spark a new television series, the Eighth Doctor's adventures continued in various licensed spin-off media, notably BBC Books' Eighth Doctor Adventures novels, audio plays from Big Finish Productions, and the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip. As these stories spanned the nine years between 1996 and the debut of the new television series in 2005, some consider the Eighth Doctor one of the longest-serving of the Doctors, as well as the longest serving Doctor in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip. In the wake of the positive reaction to the revived television series in 2005, several Big Finish audio dramas were also adapted for broadcast on BBC7 radio. The trailers for these broadcasts attempt to fit them into the continuity of the television series. Even so, the canonicity of the spin-off media with respect to the television series and to each other is unclear (the BBC Doctor Who Classic Series Beginner's Guidesuggests this may be due to the Time War).
Most recently, it has been suggested that the three continuities (novels, audio, and comics) should be considered separate. After some initial attempts at consistency with the Virgin New Adventues and BBC Books ranges, eventually Gary Russell of Big Finish chose to break the audios off in their own direction. In response, it has become increasingly common to consider the three ranges separately. The final Eighth Doctor Adventures novel, The Gallifrey Chronicles, obliquely references this split in timelines, even suggesting that the split results in the three alternative forms of the Ninth Doctor. Even so, all matters of canonicity remain typically unclear.
[edit] Personality
The Eighth Doctor, a Byronesque figure who is arguably the most human and romantic of all of his incarnations, encouraged those around him to seize life instead of withdrawing from it. He also seemed to enjoy giving people hints of their own futures, apparently to prod them into making the right decisions.
However, as with the Fifth Doctor, the debonair Eighth Doctor's youthful, wide-eyed enthusiasm actually hid a very old soul with perhaps a darker side. In fact, whereas the Eighth Doctor of the audio plays (voiced by McGann) and the comic strip hew closely to the television movie Doctor, the Eighth Doctor of the novels exhibited what was, at times, a much darker personality, perhaps due to the rather traumatic adventures that he underwent.
The Eighth Doctor also attracted controversy in the television movie, breaking the long-standing taboo against romantic involvement with his companions by kissing Grace Holloway. Fans were extremely divided on this, as well as the revelation that the Doctor was apparently half-human. See here for more details.
Curiously, in all his incarnations the Eighth Doctor has proved extremely prone to bouts of amnesia, a tendency apparently inspired by the plot of his sole television appearance.
[edit] Character history
[edit] Television
After the Seventh Doctor was caught in the crossfire of a gang shoot-out in 1999 San Francisco he was taken to a hospital where surgeons, confused by his double heartbeat, attempted to correct a non-existent fibrillation. Their efforts instead "killed" the Doctor, triggering a regeneration into his eighth incarnation. At the time of his injury, the Doctor had been transporting the remains of his long-time nemesis the Master from the planet Skaro to Gallifrey. The Master, however, was not completely dead, and was able to possess a human form. In an attempt to steal the Doctor's remaining lives, the Master opened the Eye of Harmony within the TARDIS, and nearly destroyed the planet Earth as people celebrated the end of the millennium. However, with the aid of Dr. Grace Holloway, the Doctor was able to stop the Master's plan; the Master was sucked into the Eye, apparently dying once and for all.
The Eighth Doctor made only one on-screen appearance, in the 1996 TV film Doctor Who. He has made many subsequent appearances in spin-off media, but the canonicity of these appearances is unclear. The exact circumstances of the Eighth Doctor's regeneration into the Ninth have not yet been revealed. An off-hand remark by the Ninth Doctor in the 2005 episode Rose (commenting on the size of his own ears) suggests that the regeneration took place shortly before that story. Due to this, many fans believe that it was the Eighth Doctor who participated in the Time War between the Daleks and the Time Lords which all but wiped out both races. Such speculation extends to the Time War being the cause of the Eighth Doctor's regeneration.
Russell T. Davies, current producer of Doctor Who, has stated that he does not intend to bring back past Doctors to the programme, so it is unlikely that the Eighth Doctor will be seen on television again.[1]
[edit] Novels
Almost as soon as he'd left San Francisco, the Doctor had another brief attack of amnesia, caused by a final trap of the Master's. To regain his memories, the Doctor was forced to visit all seven of his past selves and help them out with some crisis or another, at the same time acknowledging the responsibility his role gave him. Having regained his memories, the Doctor met a late twentieth-century Coal Hill School student named Samantha Jones; shortly after their encounter, the Doctor left her alone at a Greenpeace rally.
For a time, the Doctor adventured with an Ice Warrior named Ssard and a human woman named Stacy Townsend, who fell in love with each other; some while after they parted ways with the Doctor, the two invited him to serve as best man at their wedding (Placebo Effect).
[edit] Faction Paradox
Eventually, three years after his departure and one hour after he left, the Doctor returned to the Greenpeace rally. With Sam collected, the pair spent a great period wandering together, facing dozens of adventures. During their travels, Sam and the Doctor became aware of a great War, looming in the future of Gallifrey — a war between the Time Lords and an as-yet-unidentified Enemy, with dramatic and disturbing consequences. While exploring the subject, the Doctor discovered that his Sam was not the original Samantha Jones; rather, her biodata had been manipulated by an outside agency with the intent to mold her into a prosaic distraction for him (Alien Bodies). Ultimately this plan proved a failure, as Sam developed into a much more strongly-willed companion than intended; at one point she spent three years avoiding the Doctor, so as to cope with a crush she had developed on him.
The close dynamic between the pair was shifted with the introduction of Fitz Kreiner, a sixties bar singer incorrectly suspected of matricide. Fitz took on the role of a sort of younger brother to the Doctor, placing the Time Lord on as high a pedestal as Fitz had ever known. Eventually Fitz found himself abducted by Faction Paradox, a "time-travelling voodoo cult", and brainwashed into their legions. When the Doctor realized that a Faction member he had encountered was a biomass copy of Fitz, he used the TARDIS's telepathic circuits to restore Fitz's memories and identity to the clone.
With both Sam and Fitz gone — Sam's creators having been established as the Faction — the Doctor continued his travels with the clone Fitz and Compassion, an ex-Faction agent implanted with an interface that the Doctor found compatible with his TARDIS. Unbeknownst to the Doctor, the Faction — with the aid of the original Fitz — had changed his history, triggering his third regeneration ahead of schedule and infecting him with a time-release virus that, in his eighth incarnation, would transform him into a Faction member (Interference: Book One and Two).
Eventually, Compassion's implant triggered her unexpected mutation into a sentient Type 102 TARDIS, specifically the "mother" of the TARDISes that would be used in the pending War. With this knowledge, The Time Lords — led by Romana, now in her third incarnation — attempted to capture Compassion, for use as breeding stock in preparation for the War. In response, and in light of the apparent destruction of his old TARDIS, the Doctor and Fitz retreated into Compassion (The Shadows of Avalon).
The Doctor and Fitz travelled in Compassion for some time, until the machinations of Faction Paradox came to a head back on Gallifrey. As it turned out, in the new timeline triggered by the Doctor's infection, the Doctor was destined to become "Grandfather Paradox", the mythical founder of Faction Paradox. The only factor keeping the original sequence of events in play was the Doctor's TARDIS — which had rebuilt itself after its apparent destruction on Avalon, and had now materialized in a twisted form above Gallifrey, holding within itself the Doctor's original reality.
In a final confrontation with his future self, the Doctor resolved the timeline conflict by channeling the TARDIS's built-up energies through its weapon systems, thereby destroying both the Faction Paradox fleet and Gallifrey itself. In so doing, the TARDIS was able to rewrite the altered timeline with the original one that it "remembered". As a side effect, however, the Doctor’s entire memory was erased — apparently from the trauma of the event (The Ancestor Cell).
[edit] Amnesia on Earth
To give the Doctor time to recover and the TARDIS time to regenerate from the extensive damage it had suffered, Compassion dropped the Doctor off on Earth in the year 1889; she then delivered Fitz to 2001, with the intent that he wait for the Doctor to catch up to him. With that, Compassion departed for parts unknown. Back in 1889, meanwhile, the Doctor awoke in a railway carriage to discover no memory as to his real identity, and no possessions save a small, shapeless box — what was left of the TARDIS — and a note, simply stating "Meet me in St. Louis', February 8th 2001. Fitz".
Despite his amnesia, the Doctor retained a wide general knowledge. However, he also showed an uncharacteristic callous streak — easily allowing others to die, if the situations demanded it. (The Burning). To contrast, he was capable of feeling unusually poignant warmth, even dating a woman in the 1980s, and adopting a young girl named Miranda, a Time Lady from the future (Father Time).
Unsure what "St Louis" was intended by the note, the Doctor created his own in London: the St Louis Bar and Restaurant. As 2001 rolled around, Fitz indeed turned up there to meet him. With the aid of new companion Anji Kapoor, the Doctor and Fitz completed the TARDIS's regeneration, dealt with a race of invading aliens, then set back again to exploring time and space (Escape Velocity).
With his freedom restored, the Doctor chose to counteract his extended exile by seeking as much non-human company as possible. During this period, the Doctor encountered all manner of unusual beings — from a species that a cursory glance resembled the Earth tiger (The Year of Intelligent Tigers), to water spirits, to talking apes from another dimension. Though at times the Doctor seemed somewhat cold — as when he seemed more concerned about damaged plums than a dead man (Eater of Wasps) — he retained his passion for life in all forms. Although his amnesia remained a bother, the Doctor acknowledged that whatever had happened to him had happened for a reason, and he might as well make use of the advantages it offered.
[edit] Sabbath and parallel times
Only a few months after resuming his old lifestyle, the Doctor faced another radical change: the loss of his second heart. As it happened, the heart served as a bond with Gallifrey; with the planet gone, the heart had begun to fester within the Doctor's body, pumping it with poison.
A man named Sabbath, an eighteenth-century secret agent gifted with time travel abilities, excised the blackened organ, both saving the Doctor's life and robbing the Doctor of some of his higher Time Lord abilities (his respiratory bypass system, his ability to metabolise toxins). It transpired that Sabbath was actually after the heart for his own purposes: when implanted into Sabbath's own chest, it imparted upon him those same Time Lord powers. An unexpected side effect of this experiment was that so long as the Doctor's heart remained within Sabbath's chest, the Doctor himself remained practically invulnerable to harm (though any injury sustained by the Doctor would weaken Sabbath).
Eventually, after a woman Sabbath loved sacrificed herself to save the Doctor from a malfunctioning time machine, Sabbath tore out the Doctor's second heart, allowing the Doctor to begin growing a new one — this time, presumably, with a link to Earth rather than Gallifrey.
Shortly after the restoration of his heart, the Doctor found himself locked in a desperate struggle with Sabbath as, along with his mysterious business associates, Sabbath hatched a plan to destroy all alternate realities. Sabbath believed that time travellers like the Doctor, every time they landed somewhere, created an alternate reality where they didn't show up, and that the universe was unable to support so many alternates without suffering damage; therefore, he attempted to trigger an explosion at Event One — the Big Bang — that would erase all alternate universes and leaving only one possible timeline. However, Sabbath's allies had been lying to him; in reality, Time would only split if absolutely necessary, and even then, it was nearly impossible to travel between alternate realities. Effectively, all that would be wiped out was free will itself...
The explosion at Event One was averted, but instead, what occurred was reality starting to 'slide' between histories, each reality fighting to become the dominant one. Along with new companion Trix, the Doctor, Fitz and Anji travelled through the realities, the Doctor being forced to erase at least two of them in order to restore the original reality. During this adventure, the Doctor appeared to become a bit more cold and calculating, sacrificing an innocent man to escape a pocket universe and even leaving alternate versions of Fitz and Anji to die in order to preserve continuity. However, in the end, their sacrifices paid off, the Doctor managing to stabilise reality by resolving a paradox that had been hanging over them since the beginning of the crisis, and then, with Sabbath's help, they confronted his masters; the Council of Eight, mysterious beings who gained power by foreseeing likely future events and then ensuring that they came to pass. The Doctor, as a rogue element existing outside of Time, was the only unpredictable factor in their universe, and was thus the only person who could stop them. Ironically, it was Sabbath himself who gave the Doctor the edge needed to stop the Council; realising that one of the Council members expected Sabbath to shoot him with a weapon designed to send the subject into the Time Vortex, Sabbath instead shot himself, condeming himself to eternal agony just to give the Doctor a chance to outmaneouvre the Council and save creation from them. The move succeeded, and the Council's crystal space station was destroyed.
[edit] The Gallifrey Chronicles
Some while after this, the Doctor was captured by Marnal, one of the few surviving Gallifreyians, and accused of destroying Gallifrey. Although Gallifrey had been all but wiped from history by the Doctor's actions, Marnal was able to jury-rig a Time Space Visualiser in order to witness the Doctor actually push the button as he faced off against the Grandfather, although there were about three minutes where the Doctor's activities in the TARDIS were unaccounted for. Reflecting on his discoveries in the TARDIS, the Doctor, along with the aid of K9 (Who had been transported into a hidden area of the TARDIS and trapped there following Gallifrey's destruction) realised that his memory loss hadn't been caused by the trauma of destroying Gallifrey; in fact, the Doctor had wiped his memories in order to give his mind space to store the contents of the Matrix within his brain, compressed down so he wouldn't be driven mad by the voices of all the dead Time Lords within him, his own memories presumably stored somewhere else in his mind, given his occasional flashes from his past. However, right then, the Doctor had more immediate worries; namely, saving Earth from a species of massive fly-like aliens called the Vore, who would soon have the power to devour the planet. As The Gallifrey Chronicles ended, the Doctor, Fitz, and Trix dived into the Vore mountain, the Doctor equipped with a plan to stop the Vore and save the world...
[edit] Audio dramas
Sometime after the events in San Francisco, the Doctor found himself wandering alone through the Vortex. In the wake of a Vortisaur attack, he was forced to land on Earth, in 1933, aboard the doomed R101 airship. Aboard the vessel, the Doctor met a young adventuress by the name of Charley Pollard. In the course of his adventure, the Doctor saved Charley's life and took her aboard the TARDIS as his latest companion (Storm Warning). Though done in good faith, the Doctor soon understood that Charley's rescue would have much greater impact upon the timestream.
For two "seasons" of audio adventures, Charley's continued existence — whereas she was "meant" to be dead — formed a rough plot arc, only eventually solved when the Doctor chose to sacrifice himself for the sake of Charley and the universe as a whole by removing himself from space and time, plunging into a universe of "anti-time", of which he had no knowledge or frame of reference (Zagreus). Charley followed in turn, in a sense nullifying the Doctor's sacrifice by again placing herself in danger; for a time, this fact caused great friction between the characters and personal angst for the Doctor.
For another two seasons, the Doctor, Charley, and a new companion by the name of C'rizz, explored the anti-time universe, gradually unravelling a deep plot designed around the Doctor by Rassilon, founder of Time Lord society. Eventually, with the aid of his companions, the Doctor escaped the trap built for him, overcame his emotional burden, and returned to his normal universe with Charley and C'Rizz in tow (The Next Life).
Since that point, which coincided with the end of the official Big Finish "seasons" in light of the return of Doctor Who to television, the trio has wandered freely. The only continuing plot element has involved C'rizz and his unusual, potentially destructive psychologial development.
It has also been revealed (in Terror Firma) that prior to meeting Charley, the Doctor travelled with at least two other companions — a brother-and-sister pair (Samson and Gemma Griffin) — of whom the Doctor's memories had been erased by Davros, as part of an elaborate revenge plot.
In September 2006, Doctor Who Magazine announced a new audio miniseries featuring the Eighth Doctor and new companion Lucie Miller (played by Sheridan Smith), set later in the character's chronology, after he has parted ways with Charley and C'rizz. Produced by Big Finish Productions, the miniseries will be broadcast on BBC Radio 7 beginning on New Year's Eve 2006. The miniseries will consist of eight episodes, constituting six stories (the first and last stories having two parts).[2]
[edit] Other appearances
[edit] Novels
[edit] Past Doctor Adventures
[edit] Telos Doctor Who novellas
- Rip Tide by Louise Forward
- Fallen Gods by Jon Blum and Kate Orman
- The Eye of the Tyger by Paul McAuley
[edit] Comics
[edit] Radio Times
- Dreadnaught
- Descendance
- Ascendance
- Perceptions
- Coda
[edit] Doctor Who Magazine
- End Game
- The Keep
- A Matter of Life and Death
- Fire and Brimstone
- By Hook or By Crook
- Tooth and Claw
- The Final Chapter
- Wormwood
- Happy Deathday
- The Fallen
- Unnatural Born Killers
- The Road to Hell
- TV Action!
- The Company of Thieves
- The Glorious Dead
- The Autonomy Bug
- Ophidius
- Beautiful Freaks
- The Way of All Flesh
- Children of the Revolution
- Me and My Shadows
- Uroburus
- Oblivion
- Where Nobody Knows Your Name
- Doctor Who and the Nightmare Game
- The Power of Thoueris
- The Curious Tale of Spring-Heeled Jack
- The Land of Happy Endings
- Bad Blood
- Sins of the Father
- The Flood
[edit] Audio dramas
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ Robertson, Cameron. "Writer Russell won't be asking old docs back", Daily Mirror, 2006-04-10. Retrieved on 2006-04-11.
- ^ Doctor Eight for BBC7. BBC Doctor Who website. bbc.co.uk (2006-09-14). Retrieved on 2006-09-14.
[edit] External links
| The Doctors |
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| First Doctor | Second Doctor | Third Doctor | Fourth Doctor | Fifth Doctor |
| Sixth Doctor | Seventh Doctor | Eighth Doctor | Ninth Doctor | Tenth Doctor |
| Other Doctors |
| Cushing Doctor | Shalka Doctor |
