Tales from the Tardis
Now that we’re getting close to the actual event, it’s been fun watching the BBC reveal what they’re doing as part of the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who. (Other than bringing back David Tennant and Catherine Tate, doing an adaptation of an 80s comic book and bringing back a mid-60s villain, I mean.)
As part of this, they’ve wrangled nearly the entire run of the old show onto the BBC iPlayer for the first time, and as part of that, they’ve made something called “Tales from the Tardis.” On paper, it’s a pretty straightforward “greatest hits” collection—a selection of stories from six of the first eight doctors with new wraparounds starring the classic casts. This is a totally sane thing to do during a big anniversary to onboard new viewers to the back catalog. They’re very charming, and exactly the sort of schmaltz you can get away with during a self-congratulatory party year. The choices of stories are all entirely reasonable for the purpose, and as anAamerican who grew up on PBS airings of the omnibus edits of the show, editing them into a single movie doesn’t bother me.
The Doctor Who difference is that the new wrapper scenes are done with the old cast members in character. It’s not Peter Davison and Janet Fielding talking about how much fun Earthshock was to film, this is an older 5th Doctor and older Tegan talking about old times and mourning the death of Adric in the Memory Tardis, and explicitly acknowledging that this takes place after last year’s Power of the Doctor.
They’re a lot of fun! Everyone slips back into their parts easily, but then again most of them have been reprising these roles in audio for the better part of two decades now, and some, like Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, have basically never stopped playing those parts since they were on the show originally in the late 80s. Everyone seems to be having a good time, and genuinely enjoying getting to do the old parts “for real” instead of one more DVD interview or convention panel.
And that’s the the thing that’s weird about the Tales from the Tardis, though, is they all feel like exactly the wrong level of effort. The one set is clearly small and inexpensive, but it’s a whole lot more expensive and complex than putting the actors in chairs in front of a green screen. They actually designed costumes for everyone. They even designed Colin Baker’s 6th Doctor a new costume. That’s not his street clothes, someone put some actual thought into “what would a non-clown 6Th Doctor outfit look like?”
By comparison, if Star Trek did something similar in a few years for its 60th anniversary, you can easily imagine Paramount+ having a “Tales from the Federation” greatest hits collection with a single episode from each show, and there would be, say, Frakes and Stewart introducing Best of Both Worlds in front of a green-screened Enterprise D bridge. Actually, I take that back, they’d use the Ready Room set, and there would be Wil Wheaton interviewing them about it, and then the next show he’s talking to Nana Visitor and Armin Shimerman about tricking the Romulans into the dominion war. I can’t imagine a world where they’d build a new set, put those actors back in costume and makeup, and then have them reminisce in character about past adventures. I mean, it would be pretty great if they did, and the holodeck even gives them a better built-in excuse than the “memory Tardis”. But Trek certainly wouldn’t use the opportunity to resolve 30-year old character lose ends, or semi-officialize a 41-year old fan ship.
“Canon” isn’t a concept with Who the same way it is with something like Star Trek, but there’s still a continuity, and these land in the same liminal space as the increasingly elaborate Blu-Ray trailers. This isn’t Tom Baker hamming it up in a museum on the VHS for Shada, or even the low-energy 30th anniversary gruel of “Dimensions in Time”; these have a more “intended-to-be-legitimate” quality. You’re left with a strange sense of “wait, is this supposed to fit in somewhere? Did this ‘really’ happen? Are Tegan and Nyssa really a thing now?”
It has the feel that this is teeing something up for later, like maybe part of the plans for “the Whoniverse” include rolling out new stories with old Doctors, with some multiverse-flavored explanations papering over why the actors are all 30 years older.
Its also worth noting who isn’t represented: the 8th and 4th Doctors.
Eight makes sense in the context of the mission here: Paul McGann has only a single mediocre TV movie and a web minisode in live action, and neither of those would be on anyone’s list of greatest hits to introduce a new viewer to pre-2005 Doctor Who.
The absense of Tom Baker’s 4th Doctor is a little harder to swallow. Arguably the most iconic run of the old show is just skipped over for the greatest hits compilation? But—who else would you get for those scenes? The pattern for all of the new material are old friends reuniting after years apart and reminiscing about old adventures, but of Tom’s costars who are still living, I can’t imagine either Luise Jamison or Lalla Ward being willing to act happy to see him, or vise-vera for that matter. They’re all too old and none of them need the money enough to fake their way through something like that. If Lis Sladen were still alive you can bet we’d have gotten a killer scene with the two of them working out that he didn’t drop her off in the right place, and then remembering Mummies or Zygons or some such. You could have Tom ham it up on his own, or maybe sitting next to a powered-down K9 prop, but there’s also the quality that at his age he was only up for a little bit of filming, and this wasn’t what they wanted to spend that time on. (Here’s hoping he makes a final appearance in a couple of weeks, say, in that second of three specials we still don’t know anything about.)
The new credits for “Tales of the Tardis” have a slice of all 8 doctor’s opening credits running side-by-side. Maybe that was easier and less potentially controversial than leaving out two of them, or building a different credit sequence for each based on the titles for that particular doctor. But—seeing the Tom Baker time tunnel, and the 90s TV movie titles sitting there next to the others sure does seem to imply there’s going to be more.
Look, I’ve been hoping they’d bring back back Paul McGann for the occasional one-off side story for years, and if we can finally get that I’ll accept whatever multi-timeline explanation you need to get that out the door.