One particular SPOILER from The Name of the Doctor

[DalekJim]

Re: John Hurt as The Doctor

I have to confess I was completely unaware that Jon Hurt was going to be in Doctor Who. Having written that, my first thought was that he could be an older Paul McGann. I'm not sure why but it makes perfect sense to me but we'll see.

I think if they wanted an older Paul McGann they'd have hired Paul McGann .

 

[The Wormhole]

Re: John Hurt as The Doctor

I have to confess I was completely unaware that Jon Hurt was going to be in Doctor Who. Having written that, my first thought was that he could be an older Paul McGann. I'm not sure why but it makes perfect sense to me but we'll see.

I think if they wanted an older Paul McGann they'd have hired Paul McGann .

Agreed. Stunt casting can only go so far, if they wanted to use McGann's Doctor then there is no reason they couldn't use McGann.

 

[PorthosShadow]

Re: John Hurt as The Doctor

I have to confess I was completely unaware that Jon Hurt was going to be in Doctor Who. Having written that, my first thought was that he could be an older Paul McGann. I'm not sure why but it makes perfect sense to me but we'll see.

I think if they wanted an older Paul McGann they'd have hired Paul McGann .

Has anyone ever seen Jon Hurt and Paul McGann in the same room together? Think about it...

 

[MikeS]

Interesting debate. I am in the "ninth incarnation" camp.

Sorry to go slightly off topic but why does this thread say it has a spoiler? There is nothing in here that wasn't broadcast on televison. We are merely having a debate about who Hurt might be. I only ask because I wanted to ask a few questions of my own and I'm not sure what is classed as a "spoiler", (I thought it was anything that is known but yet to be broadcast, ie not what this thread is!)

 

[RoJoHen]

Interesting debate. I am in the "ninth incarnation" camp.

Sorry to go slightly off topic but why does this thread say it has a spoiler? There is nothing in here that wasn't broadcast on televison. We are merely having a debate about who Hurt might be. I only ask because I wanted to ask a few questions of my own and I'm not sure what is classed as a "spoiler", (I thought it was anything that is known but yet to be broadcast, ie not what this thread is!)

Because the episode just aired over the weekend, and some people might not have seen it yet. The spoiler warning is a courtesy.

 

[MikeS]

Gotcha.

So I'll ask then. Was it ever revealed why Pertwee was marooned on Earth? I've heard the idea of a season 7(?)b. Could Hurt be the incarnation between Troughton and Pertwee? One that did something so terrible he was exiled by the Timelords and became the Doctor's great secret?

 

[Christopher]

Was it ever revealed why Pertwee was marooned on Earth?

There was never any mystery about that. From Troughton's final episode, the conclusion of "The War Games":

TIME LORD: We have accepted your plea that there is evil in the universe that must be fought, and that you still have a part to play in that battle.
DOCTOR: What? You mean that you're going to let me go free?
TIME LORD: Not entirely. We have noted your particular interest in the planet Earth. The frequency of your visits must have given you special knowledge of that world and it's problems.
DOCTOR: Yes, I suppose that's true. Earth seems more vulnerable than others, yes.
TIME LORD: For that reason you will be sent back to that planet.
DOCTOR: Oh, good.
TIME LORD: In exile.
DOCTOR: In exile?
TIME LORD: You will be sent to Earth in the twentieth century, and will remain there for as long as we deem proper, and for that period the secret of the Tardis will be taken from you.
DOCTOR: But you, you can't condemn me to exile on one primitive planet in one century in time! Besides, I'm known on the Earth. It might be very awkward for me.
TIME LORD: Your appearance has changed before, it will change again. That is part of the sentence.

So basically they sentenced him to community service.


And the hypothetical season between "The War Games" and "Spearhead from Space" (possibly incorporating the Second Doctor's appearances in "The Five Doctors" and "The Two Doctors") is season 6b.

 

[Chaos Descending]

My theory: John Hurt is the Second Doctor.

Rationale: At the end of "The War Games" the Doctor is sentenced to exile and "a change of appearance". By the time we see Jon Pertwee in "The Spearhead from Space" we ASSUME that this follows immediately and Troughton directly became Pertwee.

I assert that Troughton's "appearance was changed" into John Hurt (i.e. no actual Time Lord regeneration), but by the time we see Pertwee, John Hurt has gone through a regeneration proper.

So yes, "Season 6B" theory, but with a half a twist.

 

[Sindatur]

Nice to see a couple people finally commenting on The possibility of HurtDoctor being between Troughton and Pertwee. I don't necessarily believe it to be true, but, it certainly is just as viable a possibility as Pre-Hartnell or between McGann and Eccelston, since we didn't see Troughton morph into Pertwee.

 

[Chrono85]

Didn't we see the second Doctor running around the TARDIS as a memory, or whatever? He may come in between the 2nd and 3rd Doctor's, but I think that it is highly unlikely that he is playing the 2nd Doctor. I also don't think that he is an older version of the 8th Doctor, because i'm sure that the BBC would have simply brought in McGann for that. Of all of the theories, I feel that the most likely one is that he is a secret regeneration between the assumed 8th and 9th Doctors.

 

[Christopher]

Didn't we see the second Doctor running around the TARDIS as a memory, or whatever?

In the Clara montages, we saw him running through a park in the heavy fur coat he sometimes wore; I think he ran right past the Eighth Doctor. In the final scene, I'm not sure if he was one of the multiple Doctors (or photo doubles thereof) that we saw running through the, err, mindscape. However, Clara did say that she'd seen all eleven known Doctors.

 

[Chaos Descending]

I definitely HATE the "secret regeneration between 8 and 9" idea. And I really hope they don't go there.

 

[JRoss]

You could get John Hurt to play Old Eight instead of McGann to show that he stayed in that form for a loooooong time.

 

[Venardhi]

It is better to have a secret regeneration between 2 and 3?

Secret regeneration between 8 and 9 has a built in story to tell, and a good one, about the Doctor gone to the dark side to protect his people and how he came back from it.

 

[intrinsical]

While I agree what The Doctor did during the time war would be an excellent story, I'm not certain it is a story that should be told. Nothing I'll see on screen would live up to my active imagination of who are the Skaro Degradations, the Horde of Travesties, the Nightmare Child, the Could-Have-Been King and his army of Meanwhiles and Never-Weres, or what the Moment is.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

You could get John Hurt to play Old Eight instead of McGann to show that he stayed in that form for a loooooong time.

There are several problems with saying that Hurt is an aged McGann.

For one thing, the dialogue indicates that Clara saw McGann's face, yet she doesn't recognize Hurt's face, which makes it unlikely that Hurt=aged McGann.

The dialogue also seems to indicates that, because he "broke the promise," that whole incarnation was tainted. Whatever good that Doctor may have done, what that Doctor "did without choice, in the name of peace and sanity" overshadows the good. If the Doctor thought of his McGann incarnation in that way, would he have shown it to Craig? Would John Smith have doodled it in the Journal of Impossible Things?

 

[JoeZhang]

She encounters Eight just before two Plus he was one of the Doctor's we saw in the previous episode - hardly a secret.

 

[DalekJim]

My theory: John Hurt is the Second Doctor.

Rationale: At the end of "The War Games" the Doctor is sentenced to exile and "a change of appearance". By the time we see Jon Pertwee in "The Spearhead from Space" we ASSUME that this follows immediately and Troughton directly became Pertwee.

I assert that Troughton's "appearance was changed" into John Hurt

Wouldn't that make John Hurt the Third Doctor?

 

[JoeZhang]

No because he is claiming it's the Second Doctor with a different face not a regeneration - I can't see it myself.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

No because he is claiming it's the Second Doctor with a different face not a regeneration - I can't see it myself.

Yet that would be consistent with what "The War Games" tells us, and it would reflect the way the Doctor's changing face was seen into the early 1980s. Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood devote a sidebar to what exactly is a regeneration in About Time 3 (both editions) in a piece called "When Was Regeneration Invented?" Miles and Wood explain that viewing Hartnell-to-Troughton and Troughton-to-Pertwee as a regeneration like Tennant-to-Smith is a retrospective retcon; it makes sense to call those events "regeneration" in light of later stories, but the terms in which the stories themselves approached the matter aren't similar to the way regenerations are approached later. Hartnell to Troughton was a "rejuvenation" -- the TARDIS made the Doctor younger -- while Pertwee to Baker was a "regeneration" -- every cell in the Doctor's body changed. Troughton to Pertwee, however, is something entirely different than either rejuvenation or regeneration; it's more like extensive plastic surgery to make the Doctor look different. It's not until "The Invasion of Time" that the idea that regeneration is a natural thing Time Lords do takes root, because the series needed to explain why Borusa looked different, and then "Destiny of the Daleks" normalizes it. The idea that the Time Lords did their super surgery on Troughton to make him look like John Hurt and then, once his usefulness was at an end, perform the same surgery to make John Hurt look like Jon Pertwee, is a supportable idea based on "The War Games" and "Spearhead."