Ninth Doctor

The Doctor
The Ninth Doctor
Doctor Who character
	File:Ecclestonwho2.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	2005
No of series	1
Appearances	10 stories (13 episodes)
Companions	Rose, Adam, Captain 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 Shortly after his regeneration, the Ninth Doctor helped save London from an invasion by the Nestine Intelligence, 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 ventured 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, and joined the TARDIS crew.

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 assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the sinking of the RMS Titanic, 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 they occur after Rose, since the Doctor's comments about his appearance in that episode suggest he had only recently regenerated (or at least had not had an opportunity to look in a mirror since his regeneration).

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

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. Captain 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 the spin-off series Torchwood.

The Ninth Doctor's relationship with Rose has 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. Fans have read possible romantic relationships between the Doctor and his companions before (most notably with the Time Lady Romana), but the original series strongly avoided any romantic implications. This taboo was first broken by the Eighth Doctor and Grace Holloway in the television movie. While that did not go beyond a few kisses and Grace admitting her attraction to the Doctor, it sparked some controversy in the fan community.

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. Whether this relationship develops with the Tenth Doctor is yet to be seen, although a clip from Series 2 shows Rose kissing the Tenth Doctor.

Personality

The Ninth Doctor masked a melancholic and lonely personality with an almost manic exterior. He shared the predilection of his earlier incarnations for making jokes in the face of danger, but would become grim and serious when on his own. He also echoed the characteristics of his previous personas: the frivolity of the Eighth Doctor; the quirkiness and refusal to be mistaken for a human of the Fourth; the vulnerability of the Fifth; and the wisdom, and occasionally the irascibility, of the First. He shared his keen sense of humour with his Second incarnation, his contemplative nature with his Seventh incarnation, his ingenuity with the Third Doctor, and his argumentative depth of feeling and occasionally boastfulness with the Sixth Doctor. Like earlier Doctors, he disliked firearms, but was not averse to using violence where he deemed necessary, including attempting to electrocute a disabled Dalek, in the eponymous Dalek and knocking out a guard in Bad Wolf.

Unlike the Fourth Doctor, who considered humans his favourite species, the Ninth was known to refer to humans as "stupid apes" and showed less patience with them than in the past, at times seeming unimpressed by their mental and observational qualities, yet at the same time wanting to protect them and other species. Much of this melancholy, lack of patience, and occasionally hard-bitten edge (seen mostly in The End of the World and Dalek) could be attributed to feelings of guilt at being the sole survivor of the Time War. He also seemed to depend on his companions more, working with them as a team. He was also more tactile with them, often holding hands with Rose and hugging Jack.

The Ninth Doctor tended to be far more colloquial in his language than previous Doctors, in particular in his use of slang as well as light curse words such as "hell" which were never uttered on screen by previous Doctors, although the Third Doctor did occasionally use the phrase "damn fool". He also spoke with a distinctly Northern accent. Although the Seventh and Eighth Doctors spoke with non-Received Pronunciation accents, the Ninth 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!".

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 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.

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.

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.

Spin-off appearances

Novels

Ninth Doctor Adventures

External links