David Bradley IS the Doctor (on an ongoing basis)

Recasting is a touchy subject in the Doctor Who fandom and that's a complex subject. Its very emotional and not entirely logical but I understand it. I can argue all day that there's no rational difference between Jemma Powell taking on the role of Barbara Wright that Jacqueline Hill originated and (to take a topical example) Kenneth Branagh being Poirot in the new Murder on the Orient Express. Branagh is Poirot now and that doesn't insult David Suchet's or Peter Ustinov's work in the role. Different actors play the same role all the time, its how acting works.

And yet I see the argument. Its purely emotional and there's nothing wrong with that. Jacqueline Hill is the Barbara Wright, Lis Sladen is Sarah Jane Smith. These were definitive performances that mean something to the fandom.

Personally I don't mind recasts but they will always be second best. I hate that I feel that because I feel like I'm insulting the new actors. Take Tim Treloar, for example, who has played the Third Doctor for Big Finish for a couple of years now. He puts in a fine performance and I include the fact that he explicitly plays a version of the Third Doctor and not a Jon Pertwee impression. From what little I've seen of David Bradley (in The Doctor Falls and clips of An Adventure in Time and Space) he seems to take a similar approach to the role (even when explicitly playing Wiliam Hartnell in the documentary).

I won't lie: I love what I've seen of Bradley and I think Big Finish are going to do well with this project but I say that with one caveat...

I think it would be better in the long run if they treated The First Doctor Adventures as effectively a reboot of Season One. This is an entire TARDIS team played by new actors, with a new Master as well, and I'd rather see the roles pushed in new directions for new actors than slavishly trying to imitate the past.

This is Big Finish so it could go either way but for the moment I think I'll tend towards the positive. 

Across The Darkened City and competing canons

(MAJOR SPOILERS for Across The Darkened City by David Bartlett, the second story in Doctor Who: The Companion Chronicles: The First Doctor volume 2 and I do mean MAJOR, this is basically all about the big reveal of the story).

Doctor Who canon is really weird. On the one hand you have a series that has a profound love affair with its own past which produces sequels all the time. I'm posting this between the transmission of two episodes featuring a version of the Cybermen not used on television since 1966 for really no better reason than as a thank you to a lead actor who loves the design. On the other hand, there are few people who can claim Doctor Who canon has any consistency.

According to televised Doctor Who, not bringing in any later expanded universe material, the Doctor both built from scratch and stole the TARDIS; the Brigadier retired from UNIT half a decade before meeting Sarah Jane Smith at UNIT; the same author wrote the story that established the Doctor has only thirteen lives, co-wrote one that established that Tom Baker was the Twelfth Doctor and then wrote Davison's (therefore Thirteenth) Doctor's regeneration.

When you start subbing in EU material it only gets stranger: Peri has three or four different fates (two of them even produced by the same author for the same company); Ace has at least five; Sarah Jane dies in 1997, a decade before her own TV show begins where she is neither a corpse nor a zombie; Gallifrey is destroyed twice; the Eighth Doctor leads several contradictory lives.

So sometimes you just have to shrug and pick the explanation you prefer. You don't have to choose. I've nothing against The Sarah Jane Adventures but I also loved Bullet Time, the novel that kills off Sarah Jane. Sometimes, though, you end up with a clash where you pick a side almost on reflex.

Across The Darkened City is a two-hander in which Steven and a semi-functional Dalek are the only survivors of a spaceship crash. There's an abandoned Dalek transmat on the other side of a ruined, monster-infested city and if Steven drags the Dalek there on a cart the Dalek will chip off back to Skaro and give Stephen the co-ordinates for the planet he was abducted from (and where the TARDIS currently is). Its a pretty standard such shipwreck story where the Dalek elicits some sympathy and the two start working together in a way that suggests both are suffering some element of Stockholm Syndrome. Its a decent story and Nick Briggs does his usual excellent job with the Dalek vocals.

An element that comes up every now and again is that the Dalek is a special, superior form of Dalek that “needs” to survive and return to Skaro. Across the story its suggested that this Dalek has empathy and is preserving Steven's life for more reasons than sheer pragmatism.

The bit I like about the twist I'm about to describe is that the way this Dalek acts, with a degree of emotional intelligence enough to manipulate Steven into not just helping it but sympathising with it, is an interesting way to link the Hartnell era Daleks with the Troughton era version. This Dalek has been engineered to display the emotional intelligence the Daleks display in David Whitaker's two Dalek stories which makes it superior to the Daleks as imagined by Terry Nation (it helps that I am absolutely on the side of Whitaker in this particular debate).

Then it turns out this isn't just some random genetically re-engineered Dalek because in the final scene it gets put in a new casing, gets a deeper voice and turns out to be the Emperor.

Now, as unfashionable as it is to disbelieve that John Peel (not the sainted DJ) contributed anything of worth to the Dalek mythos, one idea I always loved (from his Evil of the Daleks novelisation) was that the Emperor was the very first Dalek, the one who shot Davros in Genesis. It made a beautiful sense to me that in a society of total conformity with no names and barely any form of rank (nothing seems to exist between mission commanders and drones) the only true distinction that could nominate an ultimate authority figure was killing the creator of your entire species.

He's the Emperor because he killed “god” and in my own personal headcanon I'm sticking with that. It just seems a bit more fitting than having the Emperor being another random Dalek experiment.

That's just my humble, of course. Its Doctor Who canon, do as thou wilt is the whole of the law.

The 1st Doctor, Ben and Polly: a rare treat

Yesterday, this appeared in my Big Finish account and it occurred to me that this is the first time in a long time I've bought something from them because it was special.

You see, this box set contains two stories featuring one of the rarest casts in Doctor Who: the First Doctor, Ben and Polly. This crew only appeared in three stories on TV, all of which dovetail into each other rather directly. As a consquence, amongst all the hundreds and hundreds of books, comics, audios and short stories retroactively slotted into Doctor Who continuity this is a very rare set of characters.

By my count there's a novel (Ten Little Aliens by Stephen Cole), a recent Short Trips audio, this box set and that's about it. This particular TARDIS crew might be more than half a century old but its nice that there's finally some new material for them.

Hell, its nice that Ben and Polly are getting new stories at all, as screwed over as they got by circumstance on TV. Of their entire run of stories only one (their first) exists in its entirety. Others have been reconstructed for DVD release but as good as some of the animations are they still represent something of a barrier to more casual fans getting to know them. Plus, the fact that Jamie turned up and became the iconic Second Doctor companion whilst making Ben sort of redundant as the action man companion hardly helps them, either.

Also, their departure is absolutely crap, one of the worst handled in the entire classic series.

And The War Machines, that one surviving story with Ben, Polly and the First Doctor? It paints such a vivid picture of their dynamic that I've always wanted to see more of it. Unfortunately, The Smugglers never left much impression on me (most of the missing stories I've only experienced in audio left me like that, I should really track down the Loose Cannon reconstruction) and The Tenth Planet sadly has to have Ben fill in for the Doctor to the detriment of the Ben's character, in my view.

So you can understand why I've always craved more of this tantalisingly brief and under-documented cast.

I really should dig up my copy of Ten Little Aliens, I never did get around to reading it.