Jimmy Akin

Just a note about the recent, 50th anniversary Doctor Who special, The Day of the Doctor.

I’m glad they didn’t try to put all of the living Doctors in it.

Even with ensemble casts, there is a maximum number of main characters that a story can sustain and still be emotionally moving.

One that number, which varies from story to story, is exceeded, the addition of new main characters begins to detract, as the sheer task of finding things for all of them to do takes over and the core of the story is muddied–or lost.

The program–er, programme?–Doctor Who has passed the maximum number of main characters more than once.

For example, in the two-part David Tenant spectacular The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End (y’know, the one where the earth gets stolen and the journey ends–also the one where the metacrisis regeneration happens), they tried to do a story which had the Tenth Doctor and all of his previous companions and their families.

Some where reduced to contributing basically nothing to the story. Martha Jones, for example, ends up running around talking dramatically about something called “the Osterhagen Key”–an ominous device that they never actually use (thus violating Chekhov’s rule that if you show a gun on the mantlepiece in Acts I of a play, it must be used by Act III).

Martha is plot superfluous. If you delete Martha from the story entirely, it would have wound up exactly the same way. (Though the same thing has been said of Indiana Jones.)

Even worse was the show’s 20th anniversary special, The Five Doctors, which tried to give major parts to all five incarnations of the Doctor to have appeared by then–as well as some of their companions.

It didn’t work.

The plot was a mess, and in large part because of the excessive number of main characters.

Steven Moffat wisely shunned this approach in The Day of the Doctor. Instead of trying to give major screen time to all eleven of the Doctors, he wanted to focus just on those since the new series began–plus one more. That would have made for main characters, plus several supporting ones.

Eminently doable.

Then, to pay homage to all the Doctor’s incarnations, he gave a brief moment of screen time to each of them via previously-recorded footage and images.

Unfortunately, spoilsport Christopher Eccleston (the 9th Doctor) wasn’t game to play one of the core Doctors of the story, but the show went on without him.

Not having pre-2005 Doctors as principal actors apparently didn’t sit well with some of them. Colin Baker (the 6th Doctor), in particular, has made some peevish remarks on not being included.

But I didn’t mind that.

Apart from the maximum-number-of-principal-characters problem, some of the previous Doctors are dead. That can be solved by recasting their parts, though (as happened in The Five Doctors, since William Hartnell was already dead).

Then there is the fact that some of the actors who played previous Doctors have aged so much that they could not play their younger selves. This being a mushy-science science fiction show, you could get around that by explaining that they all passed through some kind of field as they were pulled together, causing them to age, and that will reverse itself when they go back to their own spots in the Doctor’s timeline. (It is an unsatisfying explanation, but it could be done.)

But the fundamental problem remains: Too many principal characters will ruin the story, and there is no way to have eleven main characters would be a nightmare.

So that’s my thought about that. Now: Here’s an awesome 30-minute video by Peter Davison (the 5th Doctor), about the actors’ attempt to get into the 50th anniversary special.

Hilarious. Drags a bit in parts, but has some jaw-dropping moments.

If you need a key to decode everything going on in the video, THIS GUIDE SHOULD BE HELPFUL.