Everybody Lives! Death and Doctor Who Spin-Off Media

It was announced recently that Michael Troughton would be stepping into his late father’s shoes to play the Second Doctor for Big Finish. His first appearance will be in The Annihilators, alongside the Third Doctor, the Brigadier and Liz Shaw. All characters immortalised by actors who are no longer with us, resurrected by Tim Treloar, Jon Culshaw and Daisy Ashford respectively. The only classic character to be played by the original actor is Jamie McCrimmon.

Everything has its time and everything dies.

The Ninth Doctor, The End of the World

The bickering relationship between the Second and Third Doctors was rooted in Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee as actors, without them it surely becomes a hollow retread. So what’s the appeal of this trend for re-animating past Doctors, where did it start and where is it heading?

Let’s begin with where it started, with 2003’s incredibly experimental and out-there 40th anniversary story Zagreus. As a special bonus, “new” Third Doctor material allowed Jon Pertwee to join Paul McGann, Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker and Peter Davison for the party. The material was taken from the legendary fan film Devious and due to the differences in recording equipment, it ended up being quite hard to hear! It was a sweet, well-meaning nod to the past that added to the anniversary feel, and at least it was actual Jon Pertwee. Though he was likely demanding a cheque from beyond the grave!

You begin your life, and it begins a journey towards you.

The Twelfth Doctor, Heaven Sent

It wasn’t until 2007 that it became clear Big Finish were no longer happy to just settle for releasing adventures for the living Doctors. Launching The Companion Chronicles was a way to tell new stories for the first four Doctors (Tom still hadn’t signed on yet) whilst also keeping their respective companion actors in employment. The format was essentially that of an audiobook rather than a full-cast play, therefore getting around the problem of William Hartnell not answering your phone calls. A lot of these are very good, and both William Russell and Frazer Hines received praise for their approximations of their respective Doctors.

So much so that in 2013, the actors played the First and Second Doctors in Big Finish’s 50th anniversary story The Light at the End. That story saw the debut of Tim Treloar who would, two years later, play the Third Doctor in an ongoing series. Much like The Companion Chronicles, the first few sets of The Third Doctor Adventures were structured as audiobooks, perhaps due to a squeamishness over fully recasting Jon Pertwee. They eventually abandoned the audiobook format, shifted to full-cast audios and the rest, as they say, is history.

From there we’ve seen the returns of Liz Shaw, Sarah Jane Smith, the Brigadier, the War Doctor and Harry Sullivan all played by other actors. So what exactly is the appeal of all of this? Isn’t our love of these characters intrinsically linked with the original performers? Are we really so desperate for new adventures for these old favourites?

The main selling point of the upcoming Old Friends boxed set is, of course, the Ninth Doctor meeting the Brigadier. And yet, the reality is that it’s Christopher Eccleston meeting Jon Culshaw, who isn’t even in the same studio. Culshaw’s Brigadier is good but it’s not Nick Courtney. And I’d argue that that’s really what fans want, to see Christopher Eccleston and Nick Courtney share scenes together. Sure, you can close your eyes and picture the two together and I suspect the fans and reviewers who will likely sing the boxed set’s praises have better imaginations than I do. And yet, the whole exercise feels hollow and inessential.

But what’s it FOR?!?

The Fourth Doctor, The Pirate Planet

Another upcoming release finds Tom Baker teamed up with Sadie Miller (as Sarah) and Christopher Naylor (as Harry) for two full-cast adaptations of what are essentially the first drafts of The Ark in Space and Genesis of the Daleks. In essence, the inferior versions of the classics we know and love. Is this something we really need? Is it something that requires us to resurrect the dead?

A lot of these stories feel like box-ticking exercises for increasingly niche interests and are indicative of the larger issue of Big Finish’s over-saturation. The company started at a time when Doctor Who wasn’t on TV, providing new audio adventures for our favourite past Doctors. In many ways, it’s strange that, when the show returned in 2005, the studio didn’t fade into the background, it became increasingly prolific in its output. There’s so much Big Finish out there that it’s sometimes easy to forget that there’s also a TV show going on. That’s a problem.

At a time where opinions on everything from politics to pop culture are polarised, Doctor Who fandom hasn’t been able to escape the Culture War draft. The Chris Chibnall/Jodie Whittaker era has dredged up all sorts of ugliness on social media. Those disillusioned fans looking to relive a simpler time aren’t short of opportunities to wallow in nostalgia. Is that why Big Finish have gone all out in recasting so many of these beloved characters? Want a new bit of 1970s Doctor Who? Here it is, it doesn’t quite sound right but if you push that to the back of your mind you’ll be transported back to Saturday teatime in 1970.

What’s interesting about the majority of Big Finish’s recasting of these much-loved characters is that they’re mostly relatives of the original actors. Elisabeth Sladen’s daughter Sadie is playing Sarah Jane, Caroline John’s daughter Daisy is playing Liz Shaw whilst both of Patrick Troughton’s sons have played the Second Doctor on audio. Is this to smooth over the thorny ethical issues in resurrecting the characters without the participation of the original actors?

It’s less of an issue in audio, given that it’s clearly new voice actors performing from a script. However, we’ve seen recently that Disney’s VFX resurrections of both Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing prove more of an ethical conundrum.

Remember how outraged everyone was when, in the climactic cemetery scenes in Death in Heaven, it was revealed that Missy’s plot had reanimated the corpse of the Brigadier as a Cyberman? Given how eager some fans are for BBC Worldwide to deploy Deepfake technology to bring back William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton to remake missing episodes, you really wonder what they were so mad about. The ethical problems of Deepfake are way too detailed to go into here, but the one that seems pertinent comes down to consent.

The dead are coming home Doctor, all shiny and new.

Missy, Death in Heaven

It’s not currently illegal for people to use the technology at their disposal to graft the faces of others onto images and videos without prior consent. There is an ongoing campaign to change the laws in the US and the UK to outlaw the practice. My Image My Choice is responding to the worrying rise in Deepfake pornography, where images have been taken without consent and users have either “nudified” them or grafted them onto existing pornographic videos. It’s horrible, and should quite rightly be considered a sex crime.

Now, this is obviously at the extreme end of the debate and there’s a huge gulf between digital sexual abuse and well-meaning Doctor Who hobbyists experimenting with the technology. However, it’s still a matter of consent. As Doctor Who fans, we don’t own the face of Nicholas Courtney, despite how many pints we bought him at conventions in the 1990s. So it was with some discomfort that I watched Black Glove Studio’s attempts to recreate the Brig in their version of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith.

Again, it’s borne out of a need to see something that never was. Courtney was too ill to appear alongside David Tennant and Lis Sladen, but technological advancements mean that we can sort of see how it would have been. But to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, Doctor Who fans have spent so long wondering about how they could see these moments, they never stopped to think about whether or not they should.

Why should we use Deepfake technology to recreate missing episodes, for example? The BBC barely has the budget to make animated reconstructions for a niche market, let alone reanimate the corpse of William Hartnell. A remounted 2020s Deepfake version of a 1960s TV show would be an inordinately expensive, loss-leading venture and it still wouldn’t bring back Marco Polo to the archives. It would be a weird, stitched together Frankenstein’s monster of a thing. Didn’t we learn anything from The Brain of Morbius?

Maybe we just have to accept that we’re never going to get these things back. We’ve got recordings of the audio, and telesnaps and we can conjure up what an utterly demented story The Celestial Toymaker is in our head if we really want to. Look, it’s not easy to move on when we lose someone but eventually we do have to come to accept that loss and move on with our lives. We don’t forget those people, we still have our memories but we don’t start creating new ones. Ones where they have no agency and act like we sort of, kind of remember them, our ideal of them.

This current need to create new memories of Patrick Troughton, Nicholas Courtney, Jon Pertwee, John Hurt et al. is indicative of a crippling sense of nostalgia within Doctor Who fandom right now. If the show is to survive, we have to stop dwelling on the past and move on. Isn’t that exactly what regeneration has been a metaphor for this whole time?