Comixfan Round Table #4 - DOCTOR WHO

[John H]

DOCTOR WHO has been a brilliant piece of a televised history since the 1960's. And it did it with great success, both in popularity and in the stories it told. Appealing to young and old alike. We'll take a look at old Doctors, and new, villains, mythology and all the elements in between.

Kevin Williams: My favourite Doctor has to be Christopher Ecclestone's 9th Doctor. The way he looked so sad and alone with tremendous guilt and pain behind his eyes was something we'd never really seen before. You really did get the impression that the character was indeed 900 years old and had led a very long and bittersweet life; just brilliant to watch.

Alister Hooke: I loved Eccleston too and the action man vibe that he brought to the role. That was refreshing, but I have to be honest and admit that that approach was a bit off character to me. David Tennant was closer to the essential spirit of the Doctor, IMO: eccentric, brilliant and geeky. But Matt Smith has taken those qualities to an even higher level in one short season. He holds the genius and bonkers thing together in perfect harmony, and the best example of this balancing act can be seen in his pitch-perfect perfomance in "The Lodger" (Season 5, Episode 11). In his own embarrassing words, "He da man!" So Smith gets my vote. My kids all agree as well. But my wife can't let Tennant go. He still has her heart. Swine!

Phil Hunn: My favourite Doctor right now is still David Tennant, but Matt Smith is growing on me, with his eccentric and flawed mannerisms. It's surprising, actually, since his first appearance left me rather irritated - but as the series has progressed he has become more and more likeable, which is an admirable feat on the part of the scriptwriters.

As for Matt Smith's age, that was admittedly a concern for me at first. He didn't particularly strike me as a good choice immediately post-regeneration, either, what with all his crazed flapping about - but he has definitely grown into the role, evoking at least a little of the Doctor's secret world-weariness and loneliness as the last survivor of a dead race, which is what you need, really. He's really won me over.

Ovid: I chalked up all that crazed flapping at the time to the regeneration itself - I'm glad I was right, because that level of mania would never have worked.

Phil: Indeed it wouldn't have, so I'm glad he toned it down so much (as you say, it can be chalked up to post-regeneration blues - which was what we saw with Tennant's Doctor as well, to a degree).

Clay Olsen: My current favorite Doctor has to be Tennant's #10 followed closely by Smith's #11. My wife (a big #4 fan), thankfully, introduced me to the relaunch and i've been hooked since.

Ovid: I was tardy getting in to the new Who and haven't even watched the seasons in order. I started with season 2, then watched 1 then 4 then 3. I've still not seen Tennant's last specials. Although I liked Eccleston and Tennant and was skeptical of such a young Doctor, Smith has quickly become my favourite of the later incarnations. I found that the 'humanity is wonderful and the Doctor is their saviour' themes from Tennant's era got wearing, and Smith's much more alien and fallible Doctor is much more interesting to me. I'm told it's based on Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor and that Smith's favourite Doctor Who story is Tomb of the Cybermen. In view of this, it's interesting to see what Smith has taken from Troughton: the fallibility is already there (Troughton's Doctor is so eager to demonstrate his intellectual superiority that he ends up helping to open the tombs), as is the humour. You can just hear Smith saying something like, "Now there is a distinct element of risk in what I'm asking you all to do, so if anyone wishes to leave they must do so at once. ... Not you, Rory."

Alister: It's Smith's fallibility and good humour that win my heart too.

Ovid: The more I think about it, what I like about this series (which, having seen the finale, is my favourite of the new Who), is the way it combines old and new. You have the humanity that Davison introduced and Tennant emphasised over all else, but you've also got the alienness. It's a great interpretation by Smith, who's just an extraordinary actor and really reaches the heights in the final episode. If he sticks around longer, he might well have a chance of knocking Tom Baker out of the position of definitive Doctor, with all the problems that that might bring to the franchise after he leaves. But that's a bridge I hope we won't have to cross for a couple of years at least.

Kevin: I am apparently in a minority that appears not to like Matt Smith. I'm finding it difficult to pin down exactly what is is that I don't like about his Doctor. Initially I thought it was a knee-jerk reaction to David Tennant's departure in the same way I didn't like it when Tennant took over from Christopher Ecclestone. However in the case of Tennant, I started to like him and his take on the Doctor after 3 or 4 episodes. With Smith however it's been an entire series and I've still not warmed to him. I don't think it's the new character of the Doctor, because I quite enjoy some of the stories and quirkiness of the 11th Doctor; I think it's more to do with the actor. I can't help but find Matt Smith a little wooden and in scenes where he's venting his righteous indignation and meant to be menacing, he comes off like some floppy-haired teenager throwing a strop. It's a shame as on the whole I've enjoyed the stories in the 5th series, but I just can't rally behind Matt Smith's Doctor. I'm prepared to see how he does in the Christmas special and in the next series before I write Doctor Who off, after all Torchwood only became good in series 2.

Ovid: I agree that Smith's not as good at the Great Speeches as Tennant, but I think he can be seriously menacing. Twice in the Silurian story, once when he was interrogating the captive and once when he was telling the woman not to use the guns, he came across to me as seriously scary. It's a quieter menacing, but it's definitely there. He's great at other aspects of his Doctor, too - he manages to be intellectual, comedic and tragic often in quick succession. His Doctor isn't as declamatory as Ten, but I'm happy about this.

Alister: Me too. Tennant undoubtedly had his strengths in playing the part of the Doctor, but his cockiness sometimes rubbed me up the wrong way. For example, I recall a scene in the Tardis where the Doctor and Donna (played by comedian and actress Catherine Tate) tried to outshine each other, which descended into an ugly gurning and shouting match: "Look at me... I'm funnier and smarter than you!" This was Tennant at his grating worst. He started with a refreshing confidence, but over three seasons that confidence became a bit stale and twisted, leaving him by the end looking and sounding like some over-reaching messiah. The worst example of the 10th Doctor's irritating god complex can be found in the otherwise excellent special episode The Waters of Mars, as he ponders on his near divine ability to use time travelling to manipulate other people's destinies, like a god looking down on us poor mortals.

I much prefer the less loftier approach of Matt Smith's Doctor as he blunders into dangerous new situations frequently out of his depth, without ever losing that sense of him being a 900+ year old alien with a monster IQ (which is a mark of Smith's great acting). Indeed, his companion Amy Pond has had to save the day on a couple of occasions, showing that the Doctor does not always have the answers. A much better and balanced approach to storytelling, IMO. Matt Smith may be a lot less declamatory than Tennant, but he can still turn on the passion and intensity when he needs to. Think of his desperate cry to his enemies of "LIIIIISSSSTEN TO MEEEEEEEE!!" as the doors of the Pandorica started to shut him in. Or his wonderfully angry speech to "Bob" the Angel concerning the big mistake that he and his fellow Angels had made. I love both Tennant and Smith in different ways, but I definitely don't find the latter to be wooden.

Kevin: I'm lucky enough to just about remember the end of Tom Baker's run as The Doctor. That mop of curly hair, those wide, manic eyes, the booming Queen's English accent just make him iconic to me as The Doctor.

Alister: Of the old Doctors, Tom Baker also towers above the rest in my eyes. He was really bonkers, but in a good way. He could switch between serious philosopher and grinning idiot savant with great ease and in a way that was natural and unforced. Jon Pertwee's mega-serious boffin take on the Doctor would be a close second. I never saw Sylvester McCoy, so I cannot comment on his performance except to say that I am aware of the bad press he gets from many diehard fans.

Phil: My first Doctor was Sylvester McCoy (I had a huge crush on Sophie Aldred as Ace; must have been the leather jacket ), so I was present at the show's demise - which was because it had to make way for the almost hilariously bad soap opera Eldorado, which died only a few short months later -and I can remember only a few select things about that era (most notably an episode featuring Richard Briers, of all people, as an evil-overlord character, complete with peaked cap and evil glare).

Stuart Vandal: Paradise Towers, and Briers needed a slap for that performance - as did the story's director, as they should have made it clear to Briers that he wasn't performing in pantomime.

Clay: Of the old Doctors, I'm mostly only familiar with #4 and #5 (through my wife's insistance that i watch the old series too) and reading up on the character(s) on various wiki's and fan sites. i've learned to appreciate some of the horribile BBC special effects from the eras of the old series (and similarly produced but excellent shows like Blake's Seven).

Alister: I bought three old Tom Baker Doctor Who DVDs from Amazon last month - Genesis of the Daleks, The Deadly Assassin, and The City of Death. The effects were dismal for the most part, with my oldest daughter complaining that the monster in the last story was rubbish. It looked like someone had thrown up on a man's head and left the gloop to dry. But the acting and script were superb. There is also some enjoyable humour courtesy of script writer Douglas Adams (better known as author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), and we both ended up howling with laughter at the immortal line from a grinning Tom Baker after being thrown roughly to the floor, "What a wonderful butler! So violent!"

Stuart: "You're a beautiful woman. Probably."

Ovid: I'm no 'Whovian', but the one thing I have in common with David Tennant is that the Fifth Doctor, Peter Davison, was 'my' Doctor. In particular one of my earliest TV memories, and perhaps one my most traumatic childhood memories at all, was (twenty-eight year-old spoilers!) the death of Adric. Being an annoyingly precocious little brat myself, I identified with him easily and when he died heroically, yet also completely and utterly pointlessly, I was devastated.

Clay: I'm fairly new to the Doctor myself. I've been aware of him since childhood and saw a few episodes of the old series on PBS growing up... (I have a couple memories that stuck with me though... something about bizarre alien spiders that scared the living daylights out of me and some poor boy companion falling to his death aboard a spaceship that also killed the dinosaurs)... but I was never a regular watcher. Even at 8 years old i was a bit of special effects snob... and the silly cardboard-box robots turned me off a bit (especially versus reruns of the original Star Trek that were being replayed on a different channel at the same time).

Ovid: That poor boy was Adric. He tried to stop the crash, thinking that he was saving Earth, and died knowing that he'd 'failed', but it turned out the crash was necessary for humanity to develop in the first place. Now imagine a child, who had followed Adric over the years and really liked him, try to process the significance of that paradox. That was me.

One thing I'm missing from the new Who is a sense of the assistants companions as individuals separate from the Doctor. Adric's death was my earliest introduction to the idea that good people die for absolutely nothing whatsoever. That's what affected me so much as a kid, and I'm not sure that sort of storytelling is possible when the companions are little more than a Greek chorus for the main character.

When I think back to the original series, I remember the Doctor but I also have clear memories of Tegan and Nyssa, and although I stopped watching regularly during Colin Baker's sixth Doctor run, I saw the occasional Sylvester McCoy episode and absolutely loved Ace. What do you guys think of the way the new Who has handled companions? Who are your favourites? (I'll tip my hand here and say mine's River Song, with Amy Pond, Donna Noble and Wilf not too far behind - it's no coincidence that none of these have gone all gooey-eyed over the Doctor.)

Alister: I think that Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) has been the best of the new companions, followed closely by Rose Tyler (Billie Piper).

Kevin: Karen Gillen is truly amazing as Amy Pond.

Ovid: I have to admit I understood some of the people who got annoyed with Amy during the season. I quite liked her throwing herself at the doctor, since it was refreshing to get a funny, non-judgmental depiction of a woman just wanting a casual shag, and it wasn't that I was bothered by the character's inconsistency since I never considered Amy to be the most stable person, but Karen Gillan did sometimes play her a little over-shrill, with line readings that often got VERY LOUD AT THE END OF THE SENTENCE. But, again, the final two-parter (along with the Vincent episode) made me fall in love with her again. (And all those who've been complaining about her short skirts being too sexy have obviously forgotten Peri.)

Kevin: I'm quite enjoying Amy. I did get miffed after the first 3 or 4 episodes where she seemed like a little miss know-it-all and it was her diffusing dangerous situations or making the important deductive leap instead of the Doctor, but they seemed to clam that down along with her ability to end every sentance by shouting. Given my feelings towards Matt Smith and based on their interactions this series, I'd much rather watch River Song and Amy Pond running around time and space on a Saturday tea-time. (River...Pond...coincidence?)

Alister: I sense that series director Steven Moffat is very clear in his own mind that the Doctor's companion should be portrayed as neither an inferior nor an appendage to the Doctor. The fact that Amy doesn't fawn over the Doctor the way Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) did is a definite plus. I am deeply invested in the character of Amy in a way that I wasn't with the previous three companions (Rose, Martha and Donna). I care about what happens to her, so recent events concerning Amy have hit me like a ton of bricks.

Stuart: I have to admit I became tired of the way Russell T Davies (RTD) and some fans over-idolised Rose. She was a fun companion, but because she was being used (successfully, it has to be said) to bring a new fan demographic into support the show, and she was the point of contact for so many first time fans, they built her up in their minds to be more than she was/should have been. "She is the Doctor's one true love" - uh, no!

Ovid: Heh. There's a very nice graphic of the Doctor's female companions up to Rose that lampoons this perfectly.

Stuart: He's definitely gotten over Rose now that he's regenerated, but even before then he showed signs of connecting more deeply with Madame de Pompadour than he did with Rose. Plus, she was frankly quite a bitch in the way that she treated her boyfriend Mickey. I prefer to think that while Rose thought she was something special and unique to the Doctor (a notion her meeting with Sarah Jane Smith should have disabused her of), for him it was more that she came along at the right time to help Nine get over his survivor's guilt and reconnect with life, and then he regenerated into Ten who effectively "imprinted" on her the way a newborn animal might. He did love her, and she was able to help an old man enjoy life afresh and not dwell too much on past regrets, but he didn't necessarily love her any more than he had several past companions.

Clay: Of the new series i'd have to say, Rose was by far my least favorite companion. I never understood people's love of her. She never struck me as particularly intelligent or interesting in the slightest. Just lucky really.

My favorite has to be Martha Jones, followed closely by Donna and then Rory and Jack.

Martha was both smart and quick witted. And didn't really seem to stumble through anything like Rose did. Donna was much more a friend than either Rose or Martha, and it seemed like she could at least recognize the alieness within him along with the more human side.

I've found i much prefer the episodes that have more than a single companion as well. It gave the story more to play off than just the Doctor and a pretty girl. The companions falling in love with the Doctor also got old really fast. I was relieved that Matt Smith's #11 was disgusted by the idea.

Kevin: The one thing that the new series hasn't really explored is an interaction between the Doctor and a long-term male companion. We've had Jack, Mickey, Adam and Rory, but they've only really travelled with the Doctor for a few epsidoes. It might just be me but I would like to see a male companion who is a more permanent fixture (like those in the series of old) alongside a female companion, and not have the stories devolve into some form of love triangle angst that the ones since the relaunch have been about.

Clay: I liked Mickey. And Wilf would have been a great companion as well. And I half expected (and really wanted) him to take Van Gogh on a few adventures with him as well. But yes the Doctor needs a good male companion. So i hope Rory sticks around for a long time.

Jack was great... but he did kind of grow too big with his backstory and Torchwood. I'd really like to see Jack show back up occasionally though, kind of how River does now.

Ovid: I was disappointed Mickey came to nothing and I wanted Wilf to become a companion, partly because Bernard Cribbins had been one before (he was a big star in the sixties), but also because you'd have a male companion with no love interest to speak of. I love Jack, but he's too big a personality - even the TARDIS isn't big enough for both him and the Doctor!

And as I said above, I'm also a big River Song fan, but I've seen criticism that she's a bit of a Mary Sue and I can see where those critics are coming from. Does anyone else think there's a danger there? And am I the only one who wants to see the Doctor's sort-of daughter again?

Alister: I think River is sassy and sexy, a real femme fatale. As for the Doctor's daughter, yeah I hope she turns up again in future.

And in the very near future (two days) is Part Two of our three part DOCTOR WHO discussion. Join us!

The opinions expressed in The Round Table are solely those of the writers, and are not reflective of Comixfan or its staff in general.

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[Gary Fitzgerald]

I have stumbled over a few episodes of each of the new doctors, and found them enjoyable.

However, when I was a young boy my father had a lot of old videos, and I really enjoy Troughton, Pertwee and Baker, with the Pertwee "stranded on Earth as punishment from the time-lords" era my favourite.

The opriginal UNIT team, the brig, captain yates, benton, liz, jo (swoons) and sarah-jane was an excellent supporting cast, and Roger Delgado as the Master was absolutely fantastic.

Have a look at Day of the Daleks for a DaysofFuturePast nice precursor, The Daemons, The Silurians or The Sea Devils for some classic Dr Who, and The Curse Of Peladon had Patrick Troughtons son in it.

Nice yammering as always chaps...

[gnosis]

The worst example of the 10th Doctor's irritating god complex can be found in the otherwise excellent special episode The Waters of Mars, as he ponders on his near divine ability to use time travelling to manipulate other people's destinies, like a god looking down on us poor mortals.

Wasn't that the point though? As I recall the universe (and Captain Adelaine Brookes) almost immediately showed the Doctor that he cannot in fact play god and manipulate destiny.

I have to say that while I do like Matt Smith as the Doctor, Tennant is still my favorite. Still not a fan of Amy Pond though. There is a fine line between reckless and just bloody stupid and Amy too often comes off as the latter to me.