Ninth Doctor (The Curse of Fatal Death)
- You may be looking for other accounts of the Ninth Doctor's identity.
A Time Lord who called himself the Doctor travelled in the TARDIS with his companion Emma. After an encounter with his old enemies, the Daleks and the Master, he regenerated four times in quick succession, ultimately transforming into a female body.
Biography
A day to come
When the Eighth Doctor looked into the Tomorrow Window, he saw several possible ninth incarnations, one of whom was "a listless-looking man [who] sat on a sofa beside a girl in a red dress in an unconvincing medieval dungeon". (PROSE: The Tomorrow Windows)
Adventures with Emma
At some point, the Doctor began travelling with the "glamorous" Emma (PROSE: Who's After Your Cash) in whom, "without even knowing [he] was looking", he found "a woman to love". The two developed a romantic relationship, with the Doctor's next incarnation later indicating that the two had had sex at least once. (TV: The Curse of Fatal Death)
Coming back to Earth for the first time in many years, the Doctor became aware of a charity event centred around a "TV spectacular" which, among other things, contained a depiction of his and Emma's adventures battling the Daleks and the Master. He wrote a rambling letter to The Mirror endorsing the production and insisting that readers give what they could to those in need. In this letter, he described himself as "over 800 years old". (PROSE: Who's After Your Cash)
Death
The Doctor wanted to settle down in domestic bliss with his companion Emma, and he invited the Master to meet him on the planet Tersurus to inform him of his retirement. On Tersurus, both Time Lords had travelled back in time to bribe the castle architect to plant, then negate, various traps, ending in the Master's 936 year imprisonment in the sewers of Tersurus. However, the Master ultimately recruited the Daleks to assist him.
The Doctor, realising that the Daleks planned to exterminate the Master once his usefulness was at an end, warned the Master of the danger through smells in the language of Tersuran. This was detected with the Daleks, and the Doctor was then killed by a Dalek energy beam. Emma was horrified until the Master said that the Doctor was in his ninth incarnation and would soon regenerate; sure enough, the Doctor then regenerated into his next body. (TV: The Curse of Fatal Death)
Behind the scenes
- In the first draft of the script, Moffat described the Doctor as follows: "Now in his ninth incarnation, he is elegant, immaculate and super-suave with an air of artfully bored insouciance. He's been everywhere, done everything and blown up most monsters. When danger strikes he rarely does more than roll his eyes at the lack of imagination among intergalactic psychopaths these days before disrupting their plans, ending their evil dominion and probably blowing up their planet if he thinks it won't get his jacket all creased. However, he has occasional flashes of fluster and panic from which he recovers with a comic swiftness that serves to remind us how much effort he puts into being the cool, smart, impeccably dressed gentleman of the universe we now see emerging from the police box."[1]
- After the credits rolled during the original broadcast of TV: The Curse of Fatal Death, a roughly ten second long appeal by Rowan Atkinson, still in-character as the Ninth Doctor, aired. The short "narrative" showed the Ninth Doctor on Tersurus asking the audience to donate money by using the phone number shown on the screen.
- The Master's statement that the dying Ninth Doctor had "many, many more" bodies would imply an unrecorded circumvention of the twelve regeneration life cycle, such that the Thirteenth Doctor may not necessarily be the final incarnation of the Fatal Death line of Doctors as observers may have expected.
- In PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles, there is a passing reference to the Doctor having "three ninth incarnations", which was intended to refer to:
- The Ninth Doctor played by Christopher Eccleston in the BBC Wales Doctor Who series;
- This Ninth Doctor, played by Rowan Atkinson; and
- The Ninth Doctor played by Richard E Grant in the Scream of the Shalka webcast.
- In the Instagram release of Russell T Davies' short story Doctor Who and the Time War, he liked a comment suggesting that, as the Ninth Doctor in that story was not explicitly identified, it could be any of the Doctor's ninth incarnations, including Rowan Atkinson's.
- In the short story Iris Explains in the 2001 charity anthology Missing Pieces, Lance Parkin had Iris Wildthyme suggest that "that new you", implicitly Rowan Atkinson's Doctor (then the latest incarnation of the Doctor to have debuted on television), was the version of the Doctor whom the Eighth Doctor would regenerate into if Gallifrey was ever restored following the events of The Ancestor Cell. A lasting restoration of Gallifrey would later be presented in The Tomorrow Windows and The Gallifrey Chronicles as one of the possible endpoints of the post-War universe; alternatives included the Doctor becoming the Emperor of the Needle or simply remaining the Last of the Time Lords.
- In Talking 'Bout My Regeneration, when asked if any other Doctors would be joining the lineup seen in The Sirens of Time, Gary Russell said: "It's certainly our intention, uh, to try to get as many Doctors as we can to do plays for us, um, it would be very foolish for us not to try to get Paul McGann, Tom Baker, hey, we may even for for Rowan Atkinson, who knows."
References
- ↑ Doctor Who Magazine #328
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