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| Ninth Doctor | |
| Aliases: | The Doctor; Doctor Who; 9th Doctor |
| Continuity: | Doctor Who |
| Type: | Time Lord |
| Gender: | Male |
| Race: | Gallifreyan |
| Location: | Mobile |
| Relatives: | Doctors I-VIII; War Doctor (predecessors) Doctors X-onward (successors) |
| Status: | Regenerated |
| Died: | 2005 |
| First: | "Rose" |
| Actor: | Christopher Eccleston |
The Ninth Doctor, commonly referred to simply as "The Doctor", was the main character from the second iteration of the BBC sci-fi television series Doctor Who. Played by actor Christopher Eccleston, he is the ninth incarnation of the character, succeeding the role that had been previously played by English actor Paul McGann. Eccleston's version of the Doctor was introduced in the pilot episode of the series, "Rose", and was the first Doctor featured in the revamped program. He was the main character in series one and appeared in all thirteen episodes.
Biography[]
In one of his first adventures upon regeneration, the Doctor pursued the actions of an old foe - the Nestene Consciousness, who had taken up residence underneath the London Eye, and had used the Eye to transmit its essence into plastic automatons, or Autons, send them off on random murder sprees throughout Chelsea. He tracked the Auton signature to a department store and saved a young employee named Rose Tyler. He set a bomb on the roof, which not only temporarily disrupted the signal, but also destroyed the building. The Doctor continued to track trace elements of the Autons, which led him back to Rose Tyler, who managed to hold onto a broken Auton arm. The arm attacked the Doctor, and then Rose, but the Doctor disabled it with his sonic screwdriver. Ultimately, the Doctor and Rose ferreted out the location of the Nestene, and were able to destroy it with an anti-plastic formula. Afterward, the Doctor extended an offer to Rose to join him in his various adventures through time and space; an offer that Rose gleefully accepted. [1]
The Doctor showed Rose the far future ("The End of the World") and Victorian Britain ("The Unquiet Dead") before returning to Rose's own era, where they fought off an attempt to destroy the Earth by the alien Slitheen family ("Aliens of London"). When they journeyed to Utah in 2012 ("Dalek"), 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. A young man named Adam Mitchell travelled with them from Utah.
The Doctor, Rose, and Adam travelled to the future to Satellite 5, where they discovered a plot by the Jagrafess to manipulate Earth through its mass media ("The Long Game"). When Adam tried to smuggle future knowledge back to his own time, he became the first companion to be deliberately expelled 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 ("Father's Day").
Following a mysterious spaceship to wartime London in 1941, the Doctor and Rose met Captain Jack Harkness, a confidence trickster and former Time Agent from the 51st century ("The Empty Child"). 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 prior to joining the TARDIS crew.
Going back to Cardiff to refuel the TARDIS from the rift, the Doctor, Rose and Jack found that one of the Slitheen had survived, posing as Margaret Blaine, the city's mayor ("Boom Town"). 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 sinking of the RMS Titanic, the eruption of Krakatoa in the 19th Century, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. These are revealed in "Rose", but their placement in the Ninth Doctor's chronology remains unknown. However, it's implied the first two of these events happened immediately after regenerating, as he's seen wearing clothes from his previous incarnation. He also shared an adventure with Jack and Rose in feudal Japan immediately prior to the events of the episode "Bad Wolf".
When the Doctor and his companions became caught in a series of deadly versions of 20th Century game shows ("Bad Wolf"), they found themselves at the mercy of the Bad Wolf Corporation, based on Satellite Five, but a full 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. In doing so, he would have been forced to destroy a great part of the human race, which he ultimately finds himself incapable of doing. Meanwhile, after seeing more "Bad Wolf" graffiti, Rose 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 kisses her, absorbing the fatal energy himself. However, the damage to his cells caused him to begin the regeneration process. Finally at peace with himself, his last words are, "Rose, before I go I just wanna tell you – you were fantastic...absolutely fantastic... and d'you know what? So was I!" Immediately thereafter he regenerates into the Tenth Doctor.
Notes & Trivia[]
- The ninth incarnation of the Doctor was created by executive producer and writer Russell T. Davies and director Keith Boak based on concepts originally developed by Sydney Newman, Waris Hussein and Anthony Coburn.
- Although he is regarded as the Ninth Doctor, he is actually the tenth regeneration. An interregnum version of the Doctor colloquially known as the War Doctor existed prior to the current version. This would not be revealed until the 2013 episode, "The Name of the Doctor". By this point, the Doctor will actually be on his twelfth iteration.
- In terms of recurring roles, actor Christopher Eccleston had the shortest tenure of any incarnation of the Doctor to date, appearing in only thirteen episodes of the series, not counting recaps, references and archival footage from later episodes. Other actors with even less screen time include Paul McGann, who played the Eighth Doctor in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie, John Hurt who played the War Doctor for two episodes in 2013, series veteran Tom Baker in a single appearance as the "Curator Doctor", and Peter Cushing who played Doctor Who in a non-canonical role in the 1966 film Dr. Who and the Daleks.
- It is known that the Ninth Doctor traveled back to 1912 to convince a family to not go on the ill-fated voyage of the RMS Titanic, and that he was also present in Dealey Plaza on November 22nd, 1963 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It is unknown however, at which point in his own timeline the Doctor made these journeys. While the source material suggests that the Doctor visited these eras, prior to his first encounter with Rose Tyler, it is important to note that his meeting Rose was very early on in his regenerative cycle, as he had yet to acknowledge the size of his ears.
- The Autons are the first on-screen adversary that the Ninth Doctor faced. Coincidentally, the Autons were also the first villains of the Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee when they were first introduced in the "Spearhead from Space" storyline from 1971.
Appearances[]
See also[]
Media
The World of Doctor Who
Doctor Who miscellaneous
External Links[]
- The Ninth Doctor at IMDB
- The Ninth Doctor at Wikipedia
- The Ninth Doctor at the Doctor Who Wiki
- The Ninth Doctor at the Universal Experiment Wiki