You Were Fantastic...And So Was I

The character of the Doctor in the British sci-fi program (or maybe "programme") Doctor Who has been played by many different actors over the show's decades-long run. Rather than pull a Bewitched Darren switcheroo, the different actors are written into the story as "regenerations."

A new actor arrives, develops a new persona, new wardrobe, new way of doing things, but is still the Doctor. In the original version of the show there were supposed to be only a dozen regenerations available per Time Lord (the Doctor's species). This works great when you have an actor stick with the role for, say, seven years like Tom Baker and his extraordinary scarf. It'll take a long time to run out a dozen cast changes with that kind of tenure. But then things happen like ratings dives, cancellations, very brief tenures and aborted reboots, so you wind up burning through the first part of your second half-dozen pretty quickly. So the showrunners found some wibbly-wobbly way to remove the regeneration limit -- there's no telling how many Doctors there have been or will be. Although if the ratings from the most recent series -- the word British TV uses where we would use "season" -- don't turn around, we may not see very many more of them.

In any event, when the show rebooted in 2005 it featured the Ninth Doctor, played by Christopher Eccleston. His tenure was just one season, the briefest of all of the Doctors of the "Nu Who" era except for the late John Hurt's one-episode War Doctor. His regeneration happened 15 years ago today, with Eccleston leaving following disputes with the BBC and showrunners. The actor brought a haunted quality to the character, reflecting his experiences of seeing his home planet of Gallifrey destroyed along with their greatest enemies, the Daleks, in a "Time War." He's also responsible for some of the revival's best moments, especially his joyful shouted declaration in "The Doctor Dances:" "Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once, everybody lives!"