This is a post in the Tor.com Twelve Doctors of Christmas series. Click the link to peruse the entire series.
A theory: performances as the Doctor divide into two categories. There are those that seem like extensions of the actor’s own personality and charisma (Pertwee, both Bakers, McCoy, Smith), and those that seem like more orthodox acting performances (Troughton, Davison, McGann). On first glance, I’d put Christopher Eccleston’s 2005 portrayal of the Ninth Doctor in the latter group. But on reflection, I’m not so sure.
Evidently, the production of Eccleston’s single season in the role wasn’t much fun. Euros Lyn, director of its second and third episodes, has said, “I don’t think it’s a secret that the first series was troubled.”¹ In The Writer’s Tale, showrunner Russell T Davies recalls “our very first block of filming, back in 2004, when after one week of filming we were three weeks behind.”² And Eccleston himself has given no substantive reasons for his departure except an elliptical 2010 interview in which he said, “I didn’t enjoy the environment and the culture that we, the cast and crew, had to work in. I thought if I stay in this job, I’m going to have to blind myself to certain things that I thought were wrong.”
The British playwright Alan Bennett says that one should never “underestimate the courage required of actors. To go out in front of a first-night audience bearing the brunt of a new play is a small act of heroism.”³ What’s true of stage actors is, I’m sure, also true of those on screen. For Eccleston to take on this role, playing against the type of his previous work and picking up a series whose reputation was so low when it was last on screen, must have been a colossal act of nerve. And it’s nerve that I think is the defining characteristic of Eccleston’s portrayal of the Doctor, a refusal to duck out of risks. He’s unafraid to be callous when witnessing Cassandra’s death in “The End of the World,” contemptuous when Rose bends the laws of time in “Father’s Day,” and even a user of torture in “Dalek.” But he can be unashamedly heroic, as when he faces down the Dalek fleet in “Bad Wolf” with a simple “No.”
Structurally, of course, the 2005 season comes after something terrible: in story terms, the universe-convulsing Time War; in production terms, a 16-year hiatus broken only by the Paul McGann TV movie. The Doctor is recovering from something so dreadful that it can’t be spoken about and can’t be gone back to. Under his larky exterior, the Ninth Doctor is a walking wounded—at least until Rose arrives and his persona softens over the season. I can’t think of any other Doctor whose emotional wounds leave him so driven. Both Eccleston and the Ninth Doctor are taking huge risks by doing what they do.
There’s almost a sense that the production team know the 2005 season might be their only throw of the dice. So they try out everything that Who fans have always wanted to see, in the knowledge that it might break the show for good but at least it’ll get made. So there are unashamedly emotional stories like “Father’s Day,” classic monsters-lumbering-down corridors moments in “The Empty Child,” the Doctor meeting Dickens in “The Unquiet Dead,” and, at last, a Dalek invasion of really convincing scope in the finale. For all David Tennant’s skill at portraying the Doctor—and, clearly, his greater comfort with doing so—it’s hard not to feel that this sense of adventure was lost in the subsequent seasons. And, indeed, the highlights of Tennant’s years were stories like “Midnight,” “Blink,” “The Waters of Mars,” or “Human Nature,” that did push the format beyond the expected. But in 2005, everything about the format was up for grabs: how funny, how emotional, how science-fictional it should be. Eccleston wasn’t the only one taking those decisions of course, but he was their public face and the one who had most to lose if it all went wrong. Eccleston and the Ninth Doctor may now be remembered for their refusals, but refusals can sometimes be the bravest thing to do.
¹Doctor Who Magazine 409, May 2009, p.47
²Russell T Davies, The Writer’s Tale (BBC Books, 2008), p. 322
³Alan Bennett, Plays 1 (Faber, 1996), p.16
Graham Sleight is the editor of Foundation, and has a regular column on classic science fiction for Locus. He has two books forthcoming on Doctor Who: The Unsilent Library (edited with Simon Bradshaw and Antony Keen, published by the Science Fiction Foundation in January 2011) and The Doctor’s Monsters (due from I.B. Tauris in autumn 2011).
Eccleston’s doctor is my favorite of the new doctors. I didn’t like Tennant’s doctor nearly as much, and you have helped me understand why. In the long ensemble that Dr. Who has become, this doctor adds something essential to the play of characters, I think.
For all that I love Tennant, Eccleston was my first Doctor and has a place no one can take. I’ve been rewatching his season now and am struck over and over by how much pain he seemed to be in, how bitter he could be. I love him for his smile, or “fantastic!” but he’s a Doctor I’d think twice about traveling with.
I was also surprised by how much (comparatively) he softens in just that season and as he turns into Tennant (and even then, we have Donna’s S4E1 comment about how he’d changed for the better since the Runaway Bride). It wasn’t something I was focusing on at the time, so it took the rewatches for me to notice.
Eccleston is the only Doctor who feels the gravity of what he’s done. We see Matt Smith reaching for it in the episode Amy’s Choice, but never really grasping the level of despair and anguish over the choices that had to be made. The Dream Lord embodies the Doctor’s personal loathing as an ‘other’, while for Eccleston this was simply part of who he was. In the wonderful conclusion to The Empty Child, when the Doctor dances it’s almost as if he just remembered, that despite everything, he does dance. That touching moment couldn’t happen without the depth Eccleston brough to the role.
And it’s nerve that I think is the defining characteristic of Eccleston’s portrayal of the Doctor, a refusal to duck out of risks.
Oh, dead ON, Graham.
As Eccleston plays it, the role is a portrait of emotionally sophisticated resilience that converts injury, bizarrely, into equal parts grim resolve and sharp-edged joy. Fused, perhaps, by that nerve. (The larky demeanor seems every bit as real to me as the other.)
Analyses that rest on actor-character parallels nearly always make me flinch, but I think this one is brilliant.
Count me in as one of those who feel like Eccleston’s Dr is among the best. Tennant’s version was fine, and I’ve really grown to appreciate Smith’s Dr, but Eccleston is the best in my opinion.
For me it’s the lack of gravitas in David Tennant and Matt Smith. The Doctor has lived through 900 years of space and time (presumably there’s something in the Tardis that tracks how much real time he’s gone through). His civilization was destroyed. He’s destroyed civilizations. He’s seen friends, family, loved ones die. He also knows the joy that comes with living and loving.
Eccleston manages to show us these contradictions. To me it feels like Tennant and Smith kind of shove the badness underneath and focus on the zany side of the Dr.
Eccleston has serious dark chops. He plays “The Rider” in the movie adaptation of Susan Cooper’s “The Dark is Rising” and is convincing in that role. In a way I think that was preparation for the Doctor since The Rider had also lived through centuries of time and space but managed to get no joy out of it.
@NaomiDePlume & smileyman Yes! Tennant first grated on me for being too chipper. Fortunately, he had his serious moments and some pathos/loneliness too, as the series went on. Maybe it’s a good thing that the Doctor can grow happy, but I don’t see how he wouldn’t be carrying everything he went through.
Finally, thank you, a review that actually understands what Chris Eccleston did, and why he was an amazing Doctor. I think all of them have done a great job in each of their different ways and different scripts given to them, but Nine is the one that still affects me every time I watch, as if it was the first time. It is refreshing to read this after all the dross written about why he left etc. Lets remember what he DID do.
Nine was my first Doctor. I think Eleven is MY Doctor but Nine was my first and he was fantastic. I remember the moment that hooked me was in “The End of the World”, when he and Jabe are out and about and she speaks to him about being the last one and there’s that shot of Eccleston’s face and he’s crying and that was it. I wanted more, wanted to know more, had to have more.
I loved the Ninth Doctor. Christopher Eccleston made him so real, so human, while not being human at all. His Doctor cared. Really cared about what he’d done, what he was doing, what he would have to do. It didn’t just get brushed off with an “Oh well, on the the next thing.” attitude. Matt Smith is brilliant, but his is a different Doctor. Two regenerations have completely wiped away all vestiges of the man who was Nine. MY Doctor.
I was really happy to see this. Absolutely FANTASTIC :D Eccleston is my favorite Doctor, and I’m now following his career and consider myself a fan. He had such range in his emotions.
The scene where he thinks Rose has been turned to dust, and he just looks at where she was just standing – gets me every time! But he has that adorable silly side as well, as evidenced in “The End of the World” when he bops about to Tainted Love. Perfect!
Tennant/Smith are good, don’t get me wrong. Both great actors. But I always felt 10 was too self-important and hyper, and 11 is a bit all over the place.
I grew up watching Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker and Peter Davidson, but the Eccleston Doctor was a Doctor I empathised with. He was a Doctor who’d suffered. A Doctor who was still suffering. My phrase to describe him is that he was the Doctor with PTSD – and it could really be seen in “Dalek”, when he comes face to face with a last remnant of his greatest foe, and just about falls apart in the face of it. “Dalek” was really the episode which defined a lot of what Eccleston’s Doctor was dealing with, for me. He was the last one left, and he had a tremendous amount of survivor’s guilt as a result. He was really alone, he could genuinely never go home. Before, he’d run away, been exiled, been deported, been accused and tried and sentenced to death by the Time Lords, but he always had that comfort of knowing Gallifrey was there, and the hope that one day he’d be able to go home. But the Ninth Doctor was a Doctor without that comfort, without that hope. He was alone in the universe, and he was hurting, badly. Which is why that wonderful line at the end of “The Doctor Dances” (“Just this once, Rose, everybody lives!”) is such a bittersweet moment – because it’s the first bit of hope he’s had in such a long time.
For me Doctor Who both started and ended in 2005. Eccleston’s intergalactic-Man-With-No-Name portrayal of the Doctor is unbelievable – one of his best acting performances, imo. Pity that Mr. Sleight has to bring up the ‘comfort’ issue in this otherwise great article – with Nine, I can’t see the actor on screen, I can only see a very consistent character.
>smileyman> Eccleston played the Rider well after the Doctor. Of pre-DW in this context could be mentioned ‘Revengers Tragedy’, ’28 Days Later’ and ‘The Second Coming’.
My first Doctor was Tom Baker, but ever since the first time I saw the new series, Christopher Eccleston has been, and will always be ‘my Doctor’. One thing that stood out for me was that he was damaged, as of course a post-Time War Doctor must be. But his Doctor seem to recognize that he was a very dangerous being. It is not a safe and cuddly thing to be The Doctor’s companion. In that first episode, where he begins by warning Rose away, but ends up inviting her in – I thought that for the first time, I was seeing a Doctor who knew that travelling with him was very, very dangerous for any mere human, but still let himself be secuced by Rose. I certainly don’t mean anything unsuitable for prime time TV in the USA, but Rose was exactly the sort of human who any Doctor could not have resisted. She knew it was dangerous to go, but also knew that it would be dangerous to stay. If she stayed with her mother and her boyfriend, they were going to change her. And she risked everything for an adventure. Of course The Doctor couldn’t resist her. In the end, of course, she was far more dangerous for him than he was for her.
I’ve been watching Dr Who since around 1980 and had managed to see most of the surviving old-series episodes prior to 2005 but Christopher Eccleston is my Doctor (though Sylvester McCoy will always come in a close second). I was very sad to see him go after only one season – to me, the Beeb should have offered him almost anything to continue in the role. Tennant was good but didn’t hold a candle to Eccleston for me.
I agree with all of the previous comments. Christopher Eccleston will always be my doctor. I cry in so many episodes because of the pain that comes through even in lighter moments. “The empty child” and “The doctor dances” are two of my favorite episodes because of the incredible joy that the ending gives me. The doctor’s cry “of just this once, everybody lives” is a testament to the many times that not everybody lived.(that he could not save everyone). I read the comment that the doctor suffered from PTSD with an absolutely visceral agreement. His travels have damaged something in his spirit but Rose and the adventures and the love some characters have felt for him have given him a degree of peace.