Doctors Assemble! (webcast)
Doctors Assemble! was a webcast that made specifically for the Doctor Who: Lockdown! event, coinciding with a tweetalong for An Adventure in Space and Time. It was a multi-Doctor story featuring all thirteen of the Doctor's main televised incarnations, as well as the War Doctor.
Though the webcast had a visual element, it consisted only of CGI exterior and interior shots of the Doctor's TARDIS, with pictures appearing on the TARDIS scanner. All of the Doctors appeared via voiceover, though their likenesses were featured in humorous profile pictures in the emergency "group chat" on the scanner. Of the various Doctors, only the First Doctor, Fourth Doctor and Eleventh Doctor were played by actors who had portrayed them before, namely David Bradley, Jon Culshaw and Jacob Dudman respectively, while the other Doctors were voiced by impressionists, some of whom had never contributed to licensed Doctor Who media in the past.
Synopsis
Trapped in his TARDIS by a a mysterious entity intent on conquering Earth, the Fourth Doctor contacts his past and future selves via his TARDIS's telepathic circuits. Can the fourteen bickering Doctors come together across Time and Space to work out a solution before the Fourth Doctor is crushed by the collapsing internal dimensions of his Ship?
Plot
to be added
Cast
- The First Doctor - David Bradley
- The Second Doctor - Chris Walker-Thomson
- The Third Doctor - Jon Culshaw
- The Fourth Doctor - Jon Culshaw
- The Fifth Doctor - Jon Culshaw
- The Sixth Doctor - Angus Villiers-Stuart
- The Seventh Doctor - Wink Taylor
- The Eighth Doctor - Angus Villiers-Stuart
- The War Doctor - Jonathon Carley
- The Ninth Doctor - Pete Walsh
- The Tenth Doctor - Elliott Crossley
- The Eleventh Doctor - Jacob Dudman
- The Twelfth Doctor - Jonathon Carley
- The Thirteenth Doctor - Debra Stephenson
Crew
- Written by by James Goss
- VFX & Video Editing - Rob Baines
- Artwork - Will Brooks
- Profile Pictures - Andrew-Mark Thompson
- Audio Editing - Scott Handcock
- Sound Design - Benji Clifford
- Music - Howard Carter
References
- The Third Doctor taunts the Second Doctor by asking him if he doesn't have "a kazoo he could play with". When the Fourth Doctor points out that he has a yo-yo, the Third Doctor then insults him by claiming that "it looks like somebody knitted the Rings of Saturn and draped them around [his] shoulders".
- The Fourth Doctor describes himself as being "trapped on his own, [with] no Romana, [and] no K9". He has been warned by Sarah Jane Smith about the approaching alien threat to Earth.
- The Ninth Doctor compares his other incarnations teaming up to Chuckle Vision.
- The Ninth Doctor has a poster with the tagline "Mechanus is so bracing!" and depicting Mechonoids on it, and another poster for a Titanic film.
- The Eleventh Doctor is "glad River isn't here" due to what she would think of the Doctors bickering.
- Humanity is currently dealing with "a great crisis".
- Cat pictures submitted by the Sixth Doctor prove essential, as their backgrounds contain encoded location vectors.
- The First Doctor borrows Barbara Wright's cardigan in an attempt to muffle the noises coming from the food machine, unaware of their significance.
- The Fourth Doctor fears he will be crushed into a singularity.
- The Third Doctors attempts to have all the Doctors rendezvous in Geneva at Unit HQ.
- As the walls close in around him, the Fourth Doctor says he's "starting to feel sorry for marmalade".
- The War Doctor's profile picture features him, as a young man, in front of largely empty shelves of toilet paper, tagged "NO MORE".
- The Sixth Doctor goes back in time to install a yellow button on the First Doctor's TARDIS control console, which, when pressed, flushes the pandimensional entity from the TARDIS's telepathic buffers.
- The Thirteenth Doctor calls the group of her past selves "fam", much to the Sixth Doctor's fury and the Tenth Doctor's approval.
Notes
- The "great crisis" which leaves humans vulnerable to an outside attack was an allegory to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The War Doctor's profile image depicts him standing next to an almost empty shelf of toilet paper, a nod to the shortage of essentials caused by the pandemic.
- The advert promoting Mechanus behind the Ninth Doctor is a poster entitled "Mechanus Holidays" by Andrew-Mark Thompson.[1]
- The picture of the Sixth Doctor and Peri dancing is from Behind the Scenes of The Mysterious Planet.
- Doctors Assemble! marks the third occurrence of the complete moniker of "(Number) Doctor" being used, as the sixth incarnation refers to himself as the Sixth Doctor in his message. The previous occurrences were in TV: The Name of the Doctor and COMIC: The Many Lives of Doctor Who.
- Elliott Crossley, who voiced the Tenth Doctor, improvised the Tenth Doctor's reaction to the Thirteenth Doctor calling the others "fam".[source needed]
Easter eggs
- The Third Doctor describes the Fourth Doctor's telepathic message as his having "reached out through the void beyond the mind", referencing the lyrics of "I Am the Doctor", from the album of the same name, a song which was performed by Jon Pertwee in-character as the Doctor.
- The Second Doctor says that "some corners of the universe have bred the most terrible things" when he sees his first incarnation, referencing his famous speech from TV: The Moonbase.
- The Thirteenth Doctor's profile picture is her hiding in a wardrobe from a Sontaran, referencing the events of NOTVALID: Message from the Doctor.
- The Fourth Doctor states that he used his TARDIS tuner to open the telepathic transtemporal communications channel, referencing the comic story Dr Who and the Turgids, which was released in early issues of Doctor Who Weekly.
- When the Fourth Doctor calls the current crisis the "greatest peril in [Earth's] history", the Fifth Doctor rhetorically asks if it is Tuesday, with the Ninth Doctor and Thirteenth Doctor asking if it could be Saturday or Sunday, referencing the days in the week their episodes aired.
- The Seventh Doctor gets his other incarnations to stop arguing using the same method he did in TV: Battlefield to stop a battle.
- The Third Doctor promises to give the War Doctor "a hundred cats" in the same vain as how he tried to persuade his second incarnation to sacrifice his recorder in TV: The Three Doctors, with the Second Doctor also hinting to those events.
Continuity
- A picture of Grace Holloway appears on the Eighth Doctor's profile picture. (TV: Doctor Who) The Fourth Doctor's profile picture, meanwhile, features Mona Lisa in the front, (TV: City of Death) and the Seventh Doctor's depicts him on Iceworld. (TV: Dragonfire) The Tenth Doctor's features him with the Wire. (TV: The Idiot's Lantern) The Eleventh Doctor's profile picture is a screenshot from the Laurel and Hardy movie in which he previously inserted himself to contact Amy and Rory. (TV: The Impossible Astronaut)
- The First Doctor sees the call appear from within the TARDIS' food machine, which he located with the fault locator. (TV: The Daleks) The Third Doctor picks up the call on John Benton's Bunsen burner in his UNIT laboratory. (TV: Terror of the Autons)
- The Third Doctor says the Fourth Doctor is "all teeth and curls". (TV: The Five Doctors)
- The Second Doctor suggests the Fourth Doctor check the fluid links. (TV: The Daleks)
- The Eighth Doctor wonders if the cause of the dimensional anomalies in the Fourth Doctor's TARDIS might not be the Eye of Harmony. (TV: The Deadly Assassin, Doctor Who)
- The Eleventh Doctor mentions meeting Jane Austen with Clara Oswald. (TV: The Magician's Apprentice; AUDIO: False Coronets)
- The Third Doctor repeats his anecdote about the "daisiest daisy" in an attempt to cheer up his other incarnations. (TV: The Time Monster)
- To solve the TARDIS's malfunction, the Third Doctor proposes that the Doctors synchronise their time streams. (COMIC: The Test of Time)
- When seeing previous control rooms, the Eleventh Doctor comments on the "round things". (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
- The Fourth Doctor states his TARDIS is growing "smaller on the inside". The Machine was also dimensionally immanent. (PROSE: Cold Fusion)
- When he joins the efforts, the War Doctor is met with embarrassment and dread by his future incarnations. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
- The Doctors occasionally finish each other's sentences. (TV: The Almost People, The Day of the Doctor)
- The Tenth Doctor expresses his liking of the word "Fam" when the Thirteenth Doctor uses it. He previously expressed his liking for the word "Spoilers" upon hearing the same incarnation say it. (COMIC: A Little Help from My Friends)