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8. "Doctor Who 2000": The Eighth Doctor
THE EIGHTH DOCTOR
Anthony Stewart Head
(2000 – 2002)
Joss Whedon's supernatural action drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer had debuted on the WB in 1997, the same year that the Sci-Fi Channel had entered into its deal with Gallifrey Pictures and the BBC to co-produce and co-finance a new series of Doctor Who. Almost immediately, it had earned plaudits for its writing and the performances of its young cast and established itself as a bona fide cult classic with a high level of mainstream appeal. As far as Sci-Fi was concerned, this was the future of genre television, and they would be damned if they did not get in at the ground floor. When they were approached by Philip Segal, he had held screenings of several older Art Malik episodes for Sci-Fi executives, and while the production values may have been somewhat less-impressive than they were used to, they deemed the writing and plotting ahead of their time.
Anthony Stewart Head was a graduate of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and had been acting since the 1970s; although he had made some minor appearances as a young actor on television, [6] Head first achieved serious recognition for (of all things) his appearances in a series of Nescafé Gold Blend advert broadcast on British television in the late 1980s. From there, he had made the jump to the USA, where he appeared in a number of series before being cast in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. His character, the staid Watcher and librarian Rupert Giles, quickly became a fan favourite.
Head was approached by Lambert in 1999, while the third season of Buffy was nearing the end of its run on television, to gauge his interest in playing the lead role in the Doctor Who reboot. Although he felt a sense of loyalty to Whedon, Head was aware that if he accepted, it would represent a significant opportunity to headline a major franchise by himself and define its lead character for a potentially very wide audience. Further, he had been advised that filming would likely be split between North America and Britain, which would allow Head (who had been living full-time in America) more opportunities to see his young family. He opted to discuss the matter with Whedon, and was surprised when he was encouraged not to let the opportunity slip him by. [7] His conscience clear, Head agreed and signed a contract to play the Doctor under conditions of utmost secrecy.
Much like his predecessor, the Eighth Doctor debuted without a regeneration, despite Segal's interest in bringing Art Malik back to film a regeneration scene (a position which was discouraged by both Head and Verity Lambert, who reasoned that new viewers would be confused by an apparent "main character" being killed off and replaced in the first 15 minutes of the premiere), instead arriving on the scene implied to have assumed his new form relatively recently. Mindful of the need to avoid coming across as "Giles with a time machine", Head and scriptwriter Matthew Jacobs agreed that the Eighth Doctor should from the off be a charming and romantic figure, with a strong affinity for what he called his "human side" and a corresponding commitment to the weak and helpless. He was much more charismatic and confident than Giles had ever been, but Head was keen that he should betray a degree of vulnerability and weariness, and (in light of the story ideas that had been discussed as potential plots for the first American season) often seemed as though he was either running away from or looking for something.
In the first reboot adventure – a feature length episode entitled "The Enemy Within" – the TARDIS materialises on New Year's Eve in San Francisco, a city on the brink of the 21st century, and the Doctor is introduced to his first new companion, a sceptical homicide detective called Grace Holloway (played by Yancy Butler) when she catches him poking around the scene of a seemingly inexplicable murder and places him under arrest. After a series of mishaps and misadventures involving leaps backward and forward in time to the San Francisco of 1899 and 2099, Grace inevitably comes to accept that the Doctor is an alien being with two hearts and a time machine that's bigger on the inside, and helps him to uncover and bring to justice a shape-changing extra-terrestrial criminal he had tracked to and cornered on Earth. In the process, they learn that this villain's schemes were mere cover for a plot by a mysterious masked antagonist (the so-called Time Spectre), whose attempt to steal the Doctor's TARDIS and use it to destroy Earth at the instant of the new millennium they only narrowly foil. When the Spectre flees, the Doctor invites Grace to join him on the chase, "Perhaps with a stop or two to see the sights along the way?" and together they embark on a new era of adventure. While a straightforward plot, the episode was well-received, and received strong ratings in both America and Britain. The powers that be and fans alike breathed a sigh of relief: Doctor Who was back.
Grace was conceived as an audience surrogate, someone to whom the Doctor could explain the strange phenomena to which he himself was accustomed and, through her, to the audience (and to scrap hand-to-hand with villains, a dimension of the Doctor's character which was purposefully downplayed in favour of emphasising his ability to out-think his foes rather than out-fight them). Indeed, the Eighth Doctor more than most of his classic predecessors was a relatively constant character throughout Head's run on the show, and much of his development focused on how he related to his companion.
Working from the premise that the Doctor had not travelled with a companion in quite some time, the Eighth Doctor initially viewed Grace simply as someone to keep him company, charm and show off to, the Doctor came to value Grace as a true friend, and perhaps, as the season progressed, as something more. Indeed, controversially, Grace developed romantic feelings for the Doctor, which he appeared to struggle to reciprocate for much of the first season of the rebooted series. While more traditionalist fans cried foul, the Doctor and Grace's budding relationship would nonetheless become one of the most popular elements in the programme with its new expanded audience.
After several adventures which took the Doctor and Grace to the past, the future and an array of alien worlds, the final confrontation with the Time Spectre came in the season's two-part finale ("Crisis In Time, Pts. 1 & 2") in which the villain finally removed his mask to reveal the face of none other than Miles Richardson, back again as the Master, confirming months of online fan speculation on both sides of the Atlantic. Their long-running rivalry was revamped, [8] with the introduction of a mysterious event in their recent past which had driven them to truly hate one another. This would not be revealed until the tenure of Anthony Head's successor, but was the subject of extensive speculation in the meantime. The Master's scheme brought the Doctor and Grace back to San Francisco, except in 1969, where they discovered that the Master's plan was to murder Grace's mother before Grace was born and thus prevent her birth, partly because she had saved the Doctor's life while foiling his plot in the premiere episodes, and partly (cryptically), "Because you took as much from me, Doctor." Defeated, the Master was once more seemingly killed, but the Doctor knew that his old enemy would be back.
Curiously, despite their historical status as the Doctor's most persistent enemies and the most recognised Doctor Who antagonists in America, the Daleks were quite conspicuous in their absence in much of the first season of the Eighth Doctor's adventures. A single allusion was made in the final episode, indicating that the Dalek Empire still existed and suggesting that they had become a distant threat that the Doctor would one day need to deal with. Official, the writing staff argued that the Doctor's first enemy in the rebooted series should be a singular villain, and the Mater was the ideal choice. In fact, behind the scenes, Gallifrey Pictures had been embroiled in discussions with the estate of the late writer and Dalek co-creator Terry Nation (who had died in 1997), and had been unable to strike a deal regarding the use of the Daleks on television before the new series entered production. An arrangement would not be reached until mid-2000, resulting in the Daleks not appearing as adversaries to the Eighth Doctor until Head's second year in the role.
Head's first season had been well-received in both Britain and North America (where it promptly vindicated the Sci-Fi Channel's investment by becoming its highest-rated series) and renewal was almost a formality. A second season followed in 2001, in which the Daleks (slightly redesigned to use the rank-denoting colour scheme they had been given in the Patrick Troughton Dalek films) made their triumphant return to menace the Doctor in an ongoing plot involving their attempts to take control of Earth in the past, present and future. In the next year, the Cybermen and their Cyber-Controller (memorably played by Jeffrey Combs in one of his own favourite roles) reappeared, reimagined as unfeeling but not intrinsically evil menaces who sought to "improve" the human race through cyber-conversion and transform Earth into a recreation of their lost homeworld, Mondas.
Although the Doctor defeated every enemy who emerged to oppose him, Anthony Head had developed a desire to move on from the role and, more importantly, to move back to Britain full-time for the benefit of his young children; despite the more manageable arrangements as compared with Buffy, Head still felt that he was missing out much of his daughters' childhood and felt that, having been in Doctor Who, he would have just as many opportunities waiting for him in Britain anyway. It was thus agreed that, after three very successful years, the Doctor would "die" stopping the Cybermen's cyber-terraforming machine and undergo his first regeneration on American television in 2002, at the end of its third rebooted season. [9] This time, in line with the agreement they had made with the Sci-Fi Channel several years earlier, the TARDIS would be piloted by an American actor for the first time in its history…
----
[1] The disclosure of confidential board minutes of Gallifrey Pictures Ltd in 2008 would reveal that a further condition of the concession to the production company by the Sci-Fi Channel was a "handshake agreement" that the former would make "reasonable endeavours" (a classic example of legalese, but one that Sci-Fi would hold Gallifrey Pictures to several years later) to cast an American actor as the Ninth Doctor.
[2] Despite this near miss, Paul McGann would become a regular on a Sci-Fi franchise several years later when he joined the main cast of channel stalwart Stargate: SG-1 following star Richard Dean Anderson's decision to "downgrade" to a recurring role after the fifth season of that series.
[3] Rhys-Davies played Arturo in Sliders, a science-fiction series developed by Tracy Tormé for the Fox network and broadcast for three seasons between 1995 and 1997. Prior to entering into its arrangement with Gallifrey Pictures, the Sci-Fi Channel had considered picking up Sliders for a fourth season, but ultimately opted for the Doctor Who deal instead, citing the lower cost commitments anticipated. Rhys-Davies (whose character had been ignominiously killed off part way through the third season of Sliders) subsequently commented that this was a mercy killing, calling his former series "rubbish". Conversely, David Peckinpah (producer of the third season of Sliders, notorious for his poor relations with several members of the cast) insisted that Doctor Who had "ripped off" his show and insisted until his death in 2006 that Sliders "would have run for 10 seasons" if Sci-Fi had opted for it instead.
[4] Darkman vs M.A.N.T.I.S. (1997) opposite Carl Lumbly was a major hit and is today fondly remembered as the first superhero crossover film. In later years, Neeson would comment that he would have been happy to play the Doctor, "so long as I could have used my own accent; I imagine lots of planets have a Ballymena." In 1997, he had received the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in the title role of the biopic Michael Collins.
[5] Shortly after The X-Files ended, Stewart would be cast in a similar role but as a villainous character in J. J. Abrams's spy-action series Alias, in which he played primary villain Arvin Sloane.
[6] One of Head's early television roles was a small part in The Extraordinary Adventures of Richard Mace, Esq, the Doctor Who spin-off created by Doctor Who writer and subsequent series producer Eric Saward. By the time he was cast as the Eighth Doctor, even Head had forgotten his appearance in that programme, although its rediscovery would not put future writers of tie-in media off trying to make connections between their characters.
[7] Whedon had planned for the fourth season of Buffy to take the show in a different direction: several regular characters, including series mainstays Angel and Cordelia, had been written out with a view to turning them into the nucleus of a new spin-off focusing on Angel's adventures as a supernatural detective, while Buffy and her friends were to move on to college. With the Giles character left without an obvious role in the ongoing story, Whedon decided to take advantage of Head's departure to write the character out, reasoning that Buffy had by that time grown up enough that Giles had no more left to teach her; Buffy's best friend Willow was repurposed as her new Watcher. Head would make a guest appearance in the penultimate and final episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in May 2001 and, after his exit from Doctor Who, made occasional guest appearances in the spin-offs Angel and Spike & Faith, which each outlasted their parent series.
[8] Many of those writers engaged to write for the series familiar with its history – particularly former comic book writer and Doctor Who super-fan Dan Slott – believed that the rivalry between the Doctor and the Master had become "too friendly" and wanted to re-establish the villain as a more serious, threatening adversary.
[9] Frequently placed first in historical rankings of Doctors, Anthony Stewart Head would reprise the role of the Eighth Doctor in "missing adventures" produced by Audio Visuals from 2006 onwards.
"DOCTOR WHO 2000"
Selecting a new Doctor for the new millennium was always going to be a challenge. The executives at the programme's new home in America, the Sci-Fi Channel, encouraged the casting of an American actor to improve stateside appeal. While not averse to the idea in principle, Verity Lambert and Philip Segal were equally adamant that, in the interest of duly respecting the history and ethos of the series and its main character, a British actor should feature as the Eighth Doctor in the Time Lord's American debut. Eventually, Sci-Fi acquiesced, on the condition that his companion would be an American and played by an American actor. [1] Nevertheless, Lambert and Segal were keenly aware that whoever they chose would need to be someone recognisable to an American audience in general and a Sci-Fi audience in particular; the search for the Eighth Doctor thus commenced.
Agency telephones were soon ringing all over Hollywood. As was ever the case in the classic series, numerous actors were considered and approached. Former James Bond actor Lewis Collins was one of the first contacted and seemed genuinely interested; a former star of British television in his own right, Collins's casting would have been a major coup for the regenerating franchise, but in the end he had to be turned down when his quoted salary request was deemed too high for the Sci-Fi Channel's tastes (and budget). Likewise, Hollywood's leading Shakespeare revivalist, Kenneth Branagh, was approached as a long shot, but the news of his casting as Obi-Wan Kenobi in George Lucas's first Star Wars prequel film, Episode I: The Phantom Menace, rendered moot this avenue of inquiry.
Next in line were Paul McGann and Bob Peck, each of whom had been considered for the Seventh Doctor back in 1987. McGann had made his name as an actor in the lead role in Robin of Sherwood and subsequently as the title character in ITV's adaptation of Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe novels. In light of pending movie work, McGann declined the invitation to audition. [2] Peck, meanwhile, had received recognition for his role as Ronald Craven in the BBC miniseries Edge of Darkness in the mid-1980s and later in a memorable performance as gamekeeper Robert Muldoon in the first Jurassic Park film (the highest-grossing movie of all time prior to its displacement in 1999). Peck was more receptive than McGann and for a time it looked like Gallifrey Pictures might have found their Eighth Doctor, but tragedy struck when Peck's cancer recurred, and eventually took his life in 1999.
Although not widely-discussed at the time, Welsh actor John Rhys-Davies would in later years reveal that he had attended meetings with Gallifrey Pictures to discuss taking the Eighth Doctor role, and indeed came very close to signing a contract. However, both the producers and Sci-Fi ultimately decided that his take would likely be too similar to Professor Maximilian Arturo, a role he had recently departed. [3] Other mainstays of genre television and film considered included Liam Neeson (star of Sam Raimi's superhero franchise Darkman, who like his countryman Branagh may have been an outside remote possibility in the first place [4]), Geraint Wyn Davies (a Welsh-Canadian actor who had first received attention for his performance in the lead role of the romantic vampire detective series Forever Knight and then in the lead role of Duncan MacLeod in all eight seasons of the small screen spin-off Highlander: The Series) and Patrick Stewart (who had enjoyed a long career in film and television but in 1997 was best known for his recurring roles as ADA Walter Skinner in The X-Files [5]). All were grateful for being considered, but each declined the role.
All of these candidates and more were good options; each of them would undoubtedly have played a very good Doctor and the possibility remains open for most of them to do so in the future. However, the eventual Eighth Doctor would finally be located in the cast of the very series that Sci-Fi had been so keen to emulate; a series and franchise which would for a time serve as one of Doctor Who's chief rivals on American's airwaves and remains so in global genre fandom to this day.
Agency telephones were soon ringing all over Hollywood. As was ever the case in the classic series, numerous actors were considered and approached. Former James Bond actor Lewis Collins was one of the first contacted and seemed genuinely interested; a former star of British television in his own right, Collins's casting would have been a major coup for the regenerating franchise, but in the end he had to be turned down when his quoted salary request was deemed too high for the Sci-Fi Channel's tastes (and budget). Likewise, Hollywood's leading Shakespeare revivalist, Kenneth Branagh, was approached as a long shot, but the news of his casting as Obi-Wan Kenobi in George Lucas's first Star Wars prequel film, Episode I: The Phantom Menace, rendered moot this avenue of inquiry.
Next in line were Paul McGann and Bob Peck, each of whom had been considered for the Seventh Doctor back in 1987. McGann had made his name as an actor in the lead role in Robin of Sherwood and subsequently as the title character in ITV's adaptation of Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe novels. In light of pending movie work, McGann declined the invitation to audition. [2] Peck, meanwhile, had received recognition for his role as Ronald Craven in the BBC miniseries Edge of Darkness in the mid-1980s and later in a memorable performance as gamekeeper Robert Muldoon in the first Jurassic Park film (the highest-grossing movie of all time prior to its displacement in 1999). Peck was more receptive than McGann and for a time it looked like Gallifrey Pictures might have found their Eighth Doctor, but tragedy struck when Peck's cancer recurred, and eventually took his life in 1999.
Although not widely-discussed at the time, Welsh actor John Rhys-Davies would in later years reveal that he had attended meetings with Gallifrey Pictures to discuss taking the Eighth Doctor role, and indeed came very close to signing a contract. However, both the producers and Sci-Fi ultimately decided that his take would likely be too similar to Professor Maximilian Arturo, a role he had recently departed. [3] Other mainstays of genre television and film considered included Liam Neeson (star of Sam Raimi's superhero franchise Darkman, who like his countryman Branagh may have been an outside remote possibility in the first place [4]), Geraint Wyn Davies (a Welsh-Canadian actor who had first received attention for his performance in the lead role of the romantic vampire detective series Forever Knight and then in the lead role of Duncan MacLeod in all eight seasons of the small screen spin-off Highlander: The Series) and Patrick Stewart (who had enjoyed a long career in film and television but in 1997 was best known for his recurring roles as ADA Walter Skinner in The X-Files [5]). All were grateful for being considered, but each declined the role.
All of these candidates and more were good options; each of them would undoubtedly have played a very good Doctor and the possibility remains open for most of them to do so in the future. However, the eventual Eighth Doctor would finally be located in the cast of the very series that Sci-Fi had been so keen to emulate; a series and franchise which would for a time serve as one of Doctor Who's chief rivals on American's airwaves and remains so in global genre fandom to this day.
THE EIGHTH DOCTOR
Anthony Stewart Head
(2000 – 2002)
Joss Whedon's supernatural action drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer had debuted on the WB in 1997, the same year that the Sci-Fi Channel had entered into its deal with Gallifrey Pictures and the BBC to co-produce and co-finance a new series of Doctor Who. Almost immediately, it had earned plaudits for its writing and the performances of its young cast and established itself as a bona fide cult classic with a high level of mainstream appeal. As far as Sci-Fi was concerned, this was the future of genre television, and they would be damned if they did not get in at the ground floor. When they were approached by Philip Segal, he had held screenings of several older Art Malik episodes for Sci-Fi executives, and while the production values may have been somewhat less-impressive than they were used to, they deemed the writing and plotting ahead of their time.
Anthony Stewart Head was a graduate of the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and had been acting since the 1970s; although he had made some minor appearances as a young actor on television, [6] Head first achieved serious recognition for (of all things) his appearances in a series of Nescafé Gold Blend advert broadcast on British television in the late 1980s. From there, he had made the jump to the USA, where he appeared in a number of series before being cast in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. His character, the staid Watcher and librarian Rupert Giles, quickly became a fan favourite.
Head was approached by Lambert in 1999, while the third season of Buffy was nearing the end of its run on television, to gauge his interest in playing the lead role in the Doctor Who reboot. Although he felt a sense of loyalty to Whedon, Head was aware that if he accepted, it would represent a significant opportunity to headline a major franchise by himself and define its lead character for a potentially very wide audience. Further, he had been advised that filming would likely be split between North America and Britain, which would allow Head (who had been living full-time in America) more opportunities to see his young family. He opted to discuss the matter with Whedon, and was surprised when he was encouraged not to let the opportunity slip him by. [7] His conscience clear, Head agreed and signed a contract to play the Doctor under conditions of utmost secrecy.
Much like his predecessor, the Eighth Doctor debuted without a regeneration, despite Segal's interest in bringing Art Malik back to film a regeneration scene (a position which was discouraged by both Head and Verity Lambert, who reasoned that new viewers would be confused by an apparent "main character" being killed off and replaced in the first 15 minutes of the premiere), instead arriving on the scene implied to have assumed his new form relatively recently. Mindful of the need to avoid coming across as "Giles with a time machine", Head and scriptwriter Matthew Jacobs agreed that the Eighth Doctor should from the off be a charming and romantic figure, with a strong affinity for what he called his "human side" and a corresponding commitment to the weak and helpless. He was much more charismatic and confident than Giles had ever been, but Head was keen that he should betray a degree of vulnerability and weariness, and (in light of the story ideas that had been discussed as potential plots for the first American season) often seemed as though he was either running away from or looking for something.
In the first reboot adventure – a feature length episode entitled "The Enemy Within" – the TARDIS materialises on New Year's Eve in San Francisco, a city on the brink of the 21st century, and the Doctor is introduced to his first new companion, a sceptical homicide detective called Grace Holloway (played by Yancy Butler) when she catches him poking around the scene of a seemingly inexplicable murder and places him under arrest. After a series of mishaps and misadventures involving leaps backward and forward in time to the San Francisco of 1899 and 2099, Grace inevitably comes to accept that the Doctor is an alien being with two hearts and a time machine that's bigger on the inside, and helps him to uncover and bring to justice a shape-changing extra-terrestrial criminal he had tracked to and cornered on Earth. In the process, they learn that this villain's schemes were mere cover for a plot by a mysterious masked antagonist (the so-called Time Spectre), whose attempt to steal the Doctor's TARDIS and use it to destroy Earth at the instant of the new millennium they only narrowly foil. When the Spectre flees, the Doctor invites Grace to join him on the chase, "Perhaps with a stop or two to see the sights along the way?" and together they embark on a new era of adventure. While a straightforward plot, the episode was well-received, and received strong ratings in both America and Britain. The powers that be and fans alike breathed a sigh of relief: Doctor Who was back.
Grace was conceived as an audience surrogate, someone to whom the Doctor could explain the strange phenomena to which he himself was accustomed and, through her, to the audience (and to scrap hand-to-hand with villains, a dimension of the Doctor's character which was purposefully downplayed in favour of emphasising his ability to out-think his foes rather than out-fight them). Indeed, the Eighth Doctor more than most of his classic predecessors was a relatively constant character throughout Head's run on the show, and much of his development focused on how he related to his companion.
Working from the premise that the Doctor had not travelled with a companion in quite some time, the Eighth Doctor initially viewed Grace simply as someone to keep him company, charm and show off to, the Doctor came to value Grace as a true friend, and perhaps, as the season progressed, as something more. Indeed, controversially, Grace developed romantic feelings for the Doctor, which he appeared to struggle to reciprocate for much of the first season of the rebooted series. While more traditionalist fans cried foul, the Doctor and Grace's budding relationship would nonetheless become one of the most popular elements in the programme with its new expanded audience.
After several adventures which took the Doctor and Grace to the past, the future and an array of alien worlds, the final confrontation with the Time Spectre came in the season's two-part finale ("Crisis In Time, Pts. 1 & 2") in which the villain finally removed his mask to reveal the face of none other than Miles Richardson, back again as the Master, confirming months of online fan speculation on both sides of the Atlantic. Their long-running rivalry was revamped, [8] with the introduction of a mysterious event in their recent past which had driven them to truly hate one another. This would not be revealed until the tenure of Anthony Head's successor, but was the subject of extensive speculation in the meantime. The Master's scheme brought the Doctor and Grace back to San Francisco, except in 1969, where they discovered that the Master's plan was to murder Grace's mother before Grace was born and thus prevent her birth, partly because she had saved the Doctor's life while foiling his plot in the premiere episodes, and partly (cryptically), "Because you took as much from me, Doctor." Defeated, the Master was once more seemingly killed, but the Doctor knew that his old enemy would be back.
Curiously, despite their historical status as the Doctor's most persistent enemies and the most recognised Doctor Who antagonists in America, the Daleks were quite conspicuous in their absence in much of the first season of the Eighth Doctor's adventures. A single allusion was made in the final episode, indicating that the Dalek Empire still existed and suggesting that they had become a distant threat that the Doctor would one day need to deal with. Official, the writing staff argued that the Doctor's first enemy in the rebooted series should be a singular villain, and the Mater was the ideal choice. In fact, behind the scenes, Gallifrey Pictures had been embroiled in discussions with the estate of the late writer and Dalek co-creator Terry Nation (who had died in 1997), and had been unable to strike a deal regarding the use of the Daleks on television before the new series entered production. An arrangement would not be reached until mid-2000, resulting in the Daleks not appearing as adversaries to the Eighth Doctor until Head's second year in the role.
Head's first season had been well-received in both Britain and North America (where it promptly vindicated the Sci-Fi Channel's investment by becoming its highest-rated series) and renewal was almost a formality. A second season followed in 2001, in which the Daleks (slightly redesigned to use the rank-denoting colour scheme they had been given in the Patrick Troughton Dalek films) made their triumphant return to menace the Doctor in an ongoing plot involving their attempts to take control of Earth in the past, present and future. In the next year, the Cybermen and their Cyber-Controller (memorably played by Jeffrey Combs in one of his own favourite roles) reappeared, reimagined as unfeeling but not intrinsically evil menaces who sought to "improve" the human race through cyber-conversion and transform Earth into a recreation of their lost homeworld, Mondas.
Although the Doctor defeated every enemy who emerged to oppose him, Anthony Head had developed a desire to move on from the role and, more importantly, to move back to Britain full-time for the benefit of his young children; despite the more manageable arrangements as compared with Buffy, Head still felt that he was missing out much of his daughters' childhood and felt that, having been in Doctor Who, he would have just as many opportunities waiting for him in Britain anyway. It was thus agreed that, after three very successful years, the Doctor would "die" stopping the Cybermen's cyber-terraforming machine and undergo his first regeneration on American television in 2002, at the end of its third rebooted season. [9] This time, in line with the agreement they had made with the Sci-Fi Channel several years earlier, the TARDIS would be piloted by an American actor for the first time in its history…
----
[1] The disclosure of confidential board minutes of Gallifrey Pictures Ltd in 2008 would reveal that a further condition of the concession to the production company by the Sci-Fi Channel was a "handshake agreement" that the former would make "reasonable endeavours" (a classic example of legalese, but one that Sci-Fi would hold Gallifrey Pictures to several years later) to cast an American actor as the Ninth Doctor.
[2] Despite this near miss, Paul McGann would become a regular on a Sci-Fi franchise several years later when he joined the main cast of channel stalwart Stargate: SG-1 following star Richard Dean Anderson's decision to "downgrade" to a recurring role after the fifth season of that series.
[3] Rhys-Davies played Arturo in Sliders, a science-fiction series developed by Tracy Tormé for the Fox network and broadcast for three seasons between 1995 and 1997. Prior to entering into its arrangement with Gallifrey Pictures, the Sci-Fi Channel had considered picking up Sliders for a fourth season, but ultimately opted for the Doctor Who deal instead, citing the lower cost commitments anticipated. Rhys-Davies (whose character had been ignominiously killed off part way through the third season of Sliders) subsequently commented that this was a mercy killing, calling his former series "rubbish". Conversely, David Peckinpah (producer of the third season of Sliders, notorious for his poor relations with several members of the cast) insisted that Doctor Who had "ripped off" his show and insisted until his death in 2006 that Sliders "would have run for 10 seasons" if Sci-Fi had opted for it instead.
[4] Darkman vs M.A.N.T.I.S. (1997) opposite Carl Lumbly was a major hit and is today fondly remembered as the first superhero crossover film. In later years, Neeson would comment that he would have been happy to play the Doctor, "so long as I could have used my own accent; I imagine lots of planets have a Ballymena." In 1997, he had received the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in the title role of the biopic Michael Collins.
[5] Shortly after The X-Files ended, Stewart would be cast in a similar role but as a villainous character in J. J. Abrams's spy-action series Alias, in which he played primary villain Arvin Sloane.
[6] One of Head's early television roles was a small part in The Extraordinary Adventures of Richard Mace, Esq, the Doctor Who spin-off created by Doctor Who writer and subsequent series producer Eric Saward. By the time he was cast as the Eighth Doctor, even Head had forgotten his appearance in that programme, although its rediscovery would not put future writers of tie-in media off trying to make connections between their characters.
[7] Whedon had planned for the fourth season of Buffy to take the show in a different direction: several regular characters, including series mainstays Angel and Cordelia, had been written out with a view to turning them into the nucleus of a new spin-off focusing on Angel's adventures as a supernatural detective, while Buffy and her friends were to move on to college. With the Giles character left without an obvious role in the ongoing story, Whedon decided to take advantage of Head's departure to write the character out, reasoning that Buffy had by that time grown up enough that Giles had no more left to teach her; Buffy's best friend Willow was repurposed as her new Watcher. Head would make a guest appearance in the penultimate and final episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in May 2001 and, after his exit from Doctor Who, made occasional guest appearances in the spin-offs Angel and Spike & Faith, which each outlasted their parent series.
[8] Many of those writers engaged to write for the series familiar with its history – particularly former comic book writer and Doctor Who super-fan Dan Slott – believed that the rivalry between the Doctor and the Master had become "too friendly" and wanted to re-establish the villain as a more serious, threatening adversary.
[9] Frequently placed first in historical rankings of Doctors, Anthony Stewart Head would reprise the role of the Eighth Doctor in "missing adventures" produced by Audio Visuals from 2006 onwards.
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