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Why?

I'm wondering the same thing.

And about Mr. McGann saying that - cool!

True. XD That would be totally weird! I sometimes forget about the audio dramas. :/

You'd want to avoid mirrors around a Time War, wouldn't you? Since Dalek time-tech is based on mirrors.

But yeah, point taken, the implication in Rose is certainly that Ninth Doctor is getting used to his body...but even stronger is the implication from Rose and The End of the World that Nine had his photographic adventure on the Titanic sometime prior to meeting young Ms. Tyler. So there's almost certainly been some madly busy gadding about in Nine's life before we catch him checking himself out in that scene.

I've a couple of little explanations for Nine not knowing what he looked like in that scene. One's sensible and one's barking, and I'd be happy to share them at some point, but they're both as much fanon as is "The Eighth Doctor fought and died in the Time War"...

...Because for all we know, Eight could have survived the Time War and was killed the week after by a falling piano. Or the piano could have hit the week before the War started, and the Doctor could have fought the entire conflict as Nine. Or the quantum-indeterminate state of causality during Time War conditions could cause all Time Lords to exist in Watcher-form while the universe was so unsettled. Or anything really!

The show hasn't said so we just don't know. We don't know half the things we think we do.

Nope.

Whether PaulDoc regenerated into ChrisDoc before, after or during the Time War, Nine is still the number that comes after Eight. wink

Not as much fun as it is for me to have people like yourself around who're not only interested, but quick to spot it when I'm talking utter bobbins. smile



Oooh, a side-trip theory. I approve of these. There's much in Doctor Who continuity that can be explained with a judiciously applied side-trip theory. 3nodding

The most notorious is the Eight Doctors/Dying Days thingy. Virgin ended thier run of Doctor Who New Adventures with The Dying Days, their only Eighth Doctor book. Then BBC Books started thier run with The Eight Doctors which began minutes after the telemovie ended and had the Doctor pick up a new companion, Sam.

So, OH NOES!!! there was nowhere where The Dying Days could have happened!

Until the writers of the next book pulled exactly the trick you describe and had the Doctor drop Sam off for an hour at a Greenpeace rally while he had three years worth of solo adventures before remembering about her.

But back to Nine... And yeah, even though I'm keen to point out that "The Eighth Doctor fought in the Time War and died at the end of it" is something the series has never said, it's how I imagine it happened as much as the next fan does.

I'm less sure about how freshly-minted Nine is in Rose. In terms of his characterisation he seems a lot closer to someone who's been trying for some time to cope with having commited cosmic megaboom double-genocide than he does like someone who commited cosmic megaboom double-genocide a couple of days before.

I know the Doctor's a dab hand at masking his emotions, and I know they're inhuman emotions to begin with... but I just can't watch Rose and make it feel plausible that the Time War ended shortly before the episode.

So...if reckon that the Doctor had been in his ninth body for a fair while before Rose, then how do I get around the fact that he doesn't seem to recognise his own reflection in that story?

One of three ways, depending on my mood. Though I only offer the first one here in any particular seriousness.

1) The 'looking at how the scene is played' way.

I know what I look like. You know what you look like. But whenever I catch sight of myself in a mirror I invariably have a, "So that's what I look like!" moment. I bet you do too. Most people do, with the thought varying from, "Heeyy, check me out!" to "Oh s**t, is that what I look like?" depending on the individual's level of self-esteem.

All ChrisDoc does in that scene is glance in a mirror, say very casually, "Ah, could have been worse. Look at the ears!" and then flap them about a bit.

It's not played with any measure of surprise beyond that "So that's what I look like!" moment that we all get. Indeed, the "Look at the ears!" thing could even be read as amused familiarity with their size.

It's also worth noting what the Doctor was doing immediately before. He was reading heat magazine, a celeb mag that's almost entirely about body image and what people look like. The specific issue was one on "Stars Without Their Make-up."

So, what happens is... The Doctor flicks through an article on how attractive people's faces are. He then catches sight of his own in a mirror and says, without a note of surprise in his voice, "Ah, could have been worse. Look at the ears!"

In a Wikipedia-type summary then the Doctor commenting on his face sounds an awful lot like conclusive evidence that he's recently changed it. But when you see how it's played, and put it in the context of what else the Doctor's doing in that scene, it barely even implies it.

2) The psychological way.

Alright...even if we do decide to imagine that Rose is the first time the Doctor's had a look at his face since regenerating (and again, I stress that we don't have to), that doesn't have to mean that he's all that new.

It could be perfectly plausible that the Nine's been going a while without stopping to have a proper look at himself. Self-neglect and a disregard for the outer body is a classic symptom of depression. An immediately post-Time War Doctor is just not going to be interested in what he looks like. Sure he might have caught a fleeting glimpse of himself, but he's not going to stop and look at himself. In fact, with Nine's gift for acts of emotional avoidance, he's more likely to actively avoid facing himself.

But, once he's re-energised and running again in Rose, he's ready to have a peek.


3) The ubergeek continuity-bomb way.

The Gallifrey Chronicles implies that the sheer ammount of contradiction and paradox in the Eighth Doctor's life caused him to regenerate into three contradictory Ninth Doctors - The guy from Scream of the Shalka, the guy from Curse of Fatal Death and the guy from Rose.

If you go with that then perhaps what we're seeing in the mirror scene is the point where the Doctor's realised the divergent timelines have settled back down and left him as Chris Eccleston rather than as Rowan Atkinson or Richard E.Grant. xd

You've not read The Flood, have you? The story that you're talking about?

Because that's not at all what happened either in the story or behind the scenes.



Interesting... I've not read The Forgotten beyond the first issue (since I hated it), but I'm sceptical that Cardiff would allow that comic to give away quite such specific and important information. Maybe I'll give it a look.

Well, that would fit very well with what we're told in The End of the World, where he says he ended up clinging onto an iceburg! smile

Certainly sounds like the sort of circumstances that'd be enough to trigger a regeneration.



Oh yeah, that was much more like it! biggrin

The story didn't blow me away, but Templesmith's art was just...what's the emoticon for that foodie thing that people do where they kiss thier bunched up fingers then explode them apart while making a 'mwah' noise? Well, anyway, it was that. Certainly the first Doctor Who comic IDW have put out that I've enjoyed.





While we're talking about comics, here's what really happened with the whole "Eight-to-Nine regeneration in the comics" thing that Thowell3's got the wrong end of the stick about.

There wasn't one.

But there almost was.

The Eighth Doctor strips in DWM were a bit of a second golden age for the comic - consistent, compelling and with a real momentum. From The Final Chapter through to The Flood they rattled on with thier own epic continuity.

(It's collected in the trades Endgame, The Glorious Dead, Oblivion, and The Flood. You could all do a lot worse)

So...their story ended with The Flood, which wasn't about the Time War, but was a 'Cyberman Invasion of Earth' type of yarn. Davies, being as huge a fan of the DWM strip as all right-thinking people, gave them permission to conclude this story with Eight regenerating into Nine.

But, but, but...the comic was telling a story. And part of that story was about the Doctor's relationship with his companion, Destrii. Doing the Eighth Doctor's regeneration under the terms the BBC had set out would mean that she wouldn't be involved and that they wouldn't have been able to show her reaction.

The comic decided to stay true to the story it was telling and pass up on the chance to be the official regeneration story. Good for them. Must have taken some balls.

So, yeah. There never was a regeneration shown in the DWM strip, but if there had been then it would have pretty incontovertably shown (for those of us who count the DWM strips in our personal canons) that Eighth died before the Time War.