Alternate Doctor Who Castings!

[Thebarton_Gamer]

The Peter Cushing movies are hella fun. And as campy as all get-out.

[Thebarton_Gamer]

Parminder Nagra

[Mindysan33]

Oh yes. I don’t think they’ll give up the show since it’s been such a big hit in the reboot. A time lord being able to go past 13 regenerations was made canon back in the original series anyway, with the Master (who with this past season is way past 13).

[Mindysan33]

Didn’t you just do that?

[ghostly1]

@marilove

Haha, your’e such a jerk, daneel. But I’m still going to watch them. They look campy. Are they campy? Because if so, it doesn’t matter if they are canon. If they are fun and campy, they will probably make me want to watch more Dr. Who!

Maybe I’ll just start from the very beginning. I’m doing the whole completest thing with the MCU movies & tv shows at the moment. Maybe I can attempt the same thing for Doctor Who.

Of course, a lot of the very early episodes of Doctor Who were wiped to make room for other shows because tape was expensive in those days (thanks BBC!), so you’re unlikely to be a complete completist, but it is worth at least checking out some of the highlights of each Doctor, see how everyone changes and makes the role their own.

With the Cushing, I’ll just warn that it’s not only not canon, in terms of backstory it’s absolutely incompatible (The Doctor is just a human who invented a time machine, for example), and at the same time some of the plots are based on actual episodes of the real one, so it might be spoilery if you care about that for a 50 year old TV show.

@jsroberts

While this may be something of a spoiler, is there actually going to be another doctor? I love the show, but they’ve been building up to this being the end for quite a while.

Actually, they sort of dealt with that already… Matt Smith was the eleventh Doctor we’d seen (of thirteen possible), but then they inserted a hidden regeneration we just never saw (until the 50th anniversary), AND made a (kind of silly, IMHO) official judgement that something in a previous episode counted as a regeneration even though the actor didn’t change. So in his exit, he was played as the LAST life… and then got a whole new batch, Capaldi being the first of them.

But yeah, Doctor Who is just too popular for them to stick to twelve regenerations and actually quit after that.

[jsroberts]

@ghostly1

So in his exit, he was played as the LAST life… and then got a whole new batch, Capaldi being the first of them.

I had thought he’d just been given one extra life by the other time lords, although you and @Mindysan33 seem to have a better idea of the canon.

[ghostly1]

Yeah, it wasn’t entirely explicit and so on that point it’s easy to disagree (technically, I mean, they could play it so the Doctor THOUGHT he was getting a whole new regeneration cycle, but learns later it was just one more life so he has to go to desperate lengths AGAIN… but that seems like an unnecessary trip to the well).

Incidentally, I’m about 63.6% sure that a big part of the reason Moffat created the Hurt Doctor and doubled-up on Ten was that he wasn’t sure that he, as showrunner, could outlast another full Doctor, much less two, and he really, really, really wanted to be the one who wrote them all out of the “only 12 regenerations” barrier.