The Night of the Doctor

Chapter the 303rd, covers some Doctor Who, but probably not the Doctor Who you were expecting.

Plot:
During the Time War, the Paul McGann version of the Doctor materialises on a stricken space-gunship. When its sole occupant Cass finds out that he is a Time Lord, a people she holds in contempt because of their contribution to the carnage, she refuses to escape with him in the TARDIS. He is still trying to persuade her when the ship crashes onto the planet Karn. Both Cass and the Doctor are killed, but the Sisterhood of Karn restore the Doctor to life for a short period. They believe he is the one hope of ending the war, and offer him a controlled regeneration using mixtures of their elixir. The Doctor has so far refused to fight in the war, and is in no mood to change now, but they persuade him. He chooses to become a warrior, sends the Sisterhood away, salutes his companions of old, and drinks the mixture. He regenerates into a young John Hurt, and dons Cass's bandolier - ready for battle at last.

Context:

Is this cheating? My calculations tell me that at my current rate of blogging I have enough TV stories left to see out 2024 and no further, but there's a whole new Ncuti Gatwa season in post-production that is unlikely to be shown before spring 2025. I don't want to end up having to blog that in broadcast order; I'm also sentimentally inclined to attempt reaching the blog's 10th anniversary in May 2025. For that reason - and also because I think it might be interesting - I am going to throw in (randomly, natch) a few more of the odds and sods of dubious canonical status. I've already covered Scream of the Shalka and even An Adventure in Space and Time; if they're fair game, then the only reason not to cover The Night of the Doctor would be its short duration (see the Deeper Thoughts section below for more on that). Even though it's only a few minutes long, The Night of the Doctor depicts significant events in the mythology of the show, and that swayed me. I watched it on my own a couple of times from the iplayer taking notes, in mid-June 2024.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the significant milestone of the completion of a Doctor's televisual era; the eighth Doctor becoming the first one completed for the blog. I kind-of sort-of already completed Paul McGann with a single post in the very first year of blogging, depending on your views of what counts or doesn't. With this 2013 special short and McGann's recent cameo in The Power of the Doctor additionally written up, though, there can be no doubt - at the time of writing, that's every visual appearance by his Doctor covered.

First Time Round:

It's hard to be 100% sure after more than a decade, but I'm pretty sure that The Night of the Doctor was the first newly made Doctor Who I ever watched on a smartphone screen. I was at the office in South Quay, London for my day job on Thursday 14th November 2013, and saw online messages that something had become available to stream as a taster for the big 50th anniversary special due in nine more days' time. I didn't want to wait to watch it, but also didn't want to watch it on a big monitor in the middle of a working day in the office. So, I used my phone (actually one provided by work as I recall, which had relatively recently become an iOS device, swapped in after years of them providing a Blackberry that I doubt would have been useable for watching video easily). When I came home after work, I undoubtedly would have watched it again on a bigger screen (I seem to remember it was available on TV using the red button service) with anyone from the family dragged in if they were interested (I don't recall who was and who wasn't). That weekend I left for a working trip to Paris for the next week, coming home on the following Friday. The next day after that, of course, was The Day of the Doctor.

Reaction:

Paul McGann, with typical humour and self-deprecation, has described himself as the George Lazenby of Doctor Who, having only - before The Night of Doctor at least - played the role once on TV. Like James Bond, the Doctor is a role an actor is forever associated with after playing it, even if it was only the once. The comparison to Bond's 'one hit wonder' actor doesn't hold up, though. For a start, the period McGann wasn't playing the role was only a relative blip. After the TV movie was broadcast in May 1996, McGann started recording audio stories for Big Finish, the first being released early in 2001 after he'd had less than five years away from the part; he's continued making them ever since. In parallel with this, he was the face of the Doctor in other media (the ongoing comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine, the original novels published by BBC Books) from immediately after the TV movie's broadcast right up to the point that Christopher Eccleston appeared on TV in 2005. Were many members of the James Bond fandom during the Roger Moore years clamouring for Lazenby to come back or to have his own rival series of movies? Maybe some of them were, but how long did they keep it up? Despite his ubiquity in tie-in media, McGann has still been felt not to have been given a fair crack of the whip, and some fans are still - almost thirty years on - asking for his return. When Russell T Davies first hinted that he had ambitions for a Marvel-style stable of spin-off shows, a pitch that came from many corners of fandom was a McGann-starring Tales of the Time War, or similar. Watching The Night of the Doctor, one can instantly see why.

McGann has aged well, growing into the part, and looks perfect; there's a magnificent new costume that is much better than the slightly fake outfit worn in 1996 (in the story of the TV movie, it was explicitly stated to be a fancy dress costume, not something a hardy adventurer would keep for long). Even considering the American TV money that the first outing had, production values have improved between 1996 and 2013, so this brief return is pretty glossy. Mainly, though, it's all about the performance. McGann's a great actor, with a great controlled take on the role, honed over the years to remove any small amounts of hesitancy that can be seen in the TV movie. To a certain extent, he has to be great, as he only has a very limited amount of onscreen action to make a mark. Not including the 30-second pre-credits sequence where he makes a dramatic entrance right at the end with a killer line, there's a scene on the spaceship with Cass that lasts a minute and a half, and - after the Sisterhood have witnessed the ship crash - a four minute scene of the Doctor in conversation with Ohila, leading to his regeneration. It's two scenes and just over five minutes, and McGann burns through the screen throughout. To give him his due, writer Steven Moffat stuffs those minutes with so much good material. The spaceship scene with Cass is something that was unique at the time: the Doctor, all his initial chumminess and quips dying away, has desperately to try to save someone who rejects him, and refuses to be saved. It's interesting that there is now a very similar scene where Ncuti Gatwa faces the same challenge (I won't specify exactly where and why to avoid spoilers in this streaming age). In both instances, it is a gift to the performer.

The scene with the sisterhood allows McGann to run the gamut: humorous cynicism at first, as he refuses to accept Ohila's attempt to pressure him into a decision, dawning resolution that he must suppress the more peaceful parts of his nature, a commanding anger as he sends everyone out of the room. If there's one mild criticism I have, it's that he's persuaded a bit too easily, but they only had a handful of minutes, so what could they do? At this point, as someone who wasn't familiar with the details of his Big Finish adventures, his litany of companion names took me out of the action momentarily (and presumably the list has subsequently dated as he's continued doing audios for over a decade and counting after Night of the Doctor); it's a nice tribute, though, to the makers and the audience of the dramas that kept the character performance alive. With a great final line - "Physician heal thyself" - he regenerates and is woven in to the wider fabric of the series. The character has an onscreen start and end now; even if there's never anything televisual ever made or shown of his adventures in between, and even for someone who has no knowledge of the extended media tie-ins that take place there, we can always imagine our own stories - with an indelible image of the hero of those stories - to plug the gap.

Connectivity:

In both Space Babies and The Night of the Doctor, the Doctor arrives on a craft in space that's undergoing mechanical trouble that if left unchecked will eventually mean everyone aboard is killed. At least according to Cass's reaction on discovering he's a Time Lord, both crafts have monsters on board too.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Duration Game. Many moons ago, I expounded in the Deeper Thoughts section of a blog post about the longest Doctor Who stories ever. As I wrote then, long stories are rarer than one might think. Until the 1980s, four or six part stories were standard; in the final years of the classic series, it was four and three parts. In the new series years, and in one experimental season of Colin Baker's tenure, individual episodes were double the length of the classic era, but the stories tended not to be more than two - and very rarely - three parts; as such, they did not breach the established ceiling. In the first seven years of Doctor Who, there were a handful of exceptions that were longer than the established standard durations of the time, and - if you count them as single stories rather than linked separate stories under a banner title - The Trial of a Time Lord and Flux did this more recently too (I count one as a single story, but not the other - I won't get into why just now). But what about stories that were shorter than the norm? In the classic era, two times 25-minute long episode stories came along occasionally, but as they were the equivalent length of a new series one-parter, and because one-parters have formed the vast majority of stories in the last 14 years of the show, one can't exactly call that duration a rarity. Sometimes individual episodes of stories ran short, but collectively the story was still about average. For Doctor Who as broadcast on TV, there was really only one shorter than usual story in 60+ years. This was Mission to the Unknown, a 25-minute single episode teaser for the longer Dalek Master Plan story to come. Some might lump this in with that later story, but it's made difficult by the slightly bizarre decision to broadcast another story in between. I decided to cover the story for the blog on its own (see here).

For a story shorter than 25 minutes, one has to go beyond broadcast TV Who, which unavoidably entails considerations of canon. As I widen the definition of acceptable stories for the blog (see Context section above for more details), I have to ask myself certain questions of anything I want to include. The first would be: does it star the Doctor? You'd think this would be a no-brainer, but I've already broken that rule blogging the K9 and Company pilot (I had a moment of weakness!). Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? I can't blog every Big Finish audio ever made, so I have to next ask: does it have visuals? (An aside: I might make an exception for radio adventure Slipback; I won't for The Paradise of Death as I already covered its novelisation in a Deeper Thoughts section a while back; as for The Ghosts of N-Space - no, just no.) Was it released as an official Doctor Who or official spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Have I not already covered it in passing with another connected story (as I did with the Children in Need shorts Born Again and Time Crash in The Christmas Invasion and Voyage of the Damned posts respectively)? With all those rules considered, there are certainly other future contenders to add to the list, but none under 25 minutes, except for maybe each of the 2006 Tardisodes or other similar short prequel scenes or special trailers made over the years. I can't see myself being able to spin an entire blog post out of any of them though, they don't have sufficient content and aren't self-contained. As such, I suspect that The Night of the Doctor - which I think meets all the criteria above, just about - is going to be the shortest story ever covered for the blog.

In Summary:

For one night only - again! - Paul McGann shines.