Sunday 15 April 2012

Multi-Doctor Stories


Apparently, the vast majority of fans want to see a multi-Doctor story for the 50th Anniversary. Personally, I do not. I would prefer something really special - something new and unique.
To date we have had The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors, The Two Doctors and the Children In Need short Time Crash. And the truly abysmal Dimensions In Time of course. But that's not canon - phew!
The latter does however demonstrate how terrible it can be just to chuck everyone into an episode without bothering to have a decent storyline.
With three of the original Doctors now dead, how would you go about achieving an Eleven Doctors? Recast? Use clips? CGI? How much screen time (and plot share) would each get? The scrapped Dark Dimensions partly foundered due to the allocation of screen time amongst the surviving Doctors. What would it be like to watch much older versions of favourite Doctors on screen for a mere handful of minutes each? Time has not been kind to all, I am afraid to say.
What if you simply left out the first three Doctors? It would hardly be a celebration of the whole 50 years of the programme to have only some Doctors and not others. A return of David Tennant on his own would be to only acknowledge the last 6 years, not 50. And a return for Paul McGann would only take the story back to 1996 (though I would like to see him get a return appearance at some point).
I found The Two Doctors really rather dull and over long. I am not alone in this, and I have great company. Both Eric Saward and Robert Holmes are on record as saying they didn't much care for it. It was a shopping list of elements from John Nathan-Turner, which poor Bob had to shoehorn into a script, then drag out to the equivalent of an old 6 parter. A wasted return for Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines.
So, sorry - but no vote for a multi-Doctor story from me. They may be big, but they're not always clever.

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