Posted in: BBC, Disney+, TV | Tagged: doctor who, Ncuti Gatwa

Doctor Who: Looking Back at How The Anniversary Specials Have Evolved

In honor of Doctor Who Day, a look at how the anniversary specials have evolved from ratings-grabbing events to character-centred efforts.

Anniversary Specials are a big deal, and for Doctor Who, they're as much business decisions as celebrations for fans. They're done to attract as many viewers as possible, not just hardcore fans but casual viewers or people who like the show but drop in and out. For Doctor Who, the chosen gimmick of the anniversary specials was always to have crossovers between multiple Doctors from the past and present. And the changes in storytelling style are interesting to note.

There has always been a sense that Doctor Who is a bit thrown together, and the anniversary specials even more than ever. The first, "The Three Doctors," for the series' tenth year, introduced the trope of the Doctor meeting past versions of themselves, and they would always bicker. So far, so good, except William Hartnell could only make an appearance on a video screen in a pre-filmed bit due to his failing health, so he was only in one scene of the entire story. The script wrote around that by having him show up to tell the Second (Patrick Troughton) and Third (Jon Pertwee) Doctors to knock it off and get their act together to save the day. There were still many fans of Troughton and Hartnell at the time who remembered watching them on television in the Sixties, so that was a bit of cool nostalgia for them. The tenth anniversary special "The Five Doctors" was an even more cobbled-together piece of fanfic with a negligible plot to contrive to get the five existing Doctors together when two of the actors weren't available. Hartnell had passed, and they cast Richard Hurndall, who is possibly the most nondescript performance ever. Tom Baker refused to return, so they used footage from an unaired story before benching the Fourth Doctor for the whole story.

The One Anniversary Special That Only Featured One Doctor

"Silver Nemesis," the Twenty-Five Anniversary Special from 1988, wisely opted not to do fanfic with multiple Doctors but opted to have an actual story where the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and Ace fought Neo-Nazis and the Cybermen in a pointed anti-fascism story that was part of then-script editor Andrew Cartmel's more overtly political direction for the show. It was one of the sloppier stories in that era because it repeated too many plot tropes from previous stories in Cartmel's run but at least it tried some ideas. The story recently got a new edit in the Seventh Doctor's second season Blu-Ray set that tightened the story into a shorter 66-minute cut that is said to be better than the original longer cuts.

The Shift in the Modern Era Doctor Who Specials

The 21st Century anniversary specials under Steven Moffat and Russell T. Davies had a better sense of planning. They're also part of the current post-Buffy era of television where the best showrunners realized that shows become popular and get a fanbase because audiences invest in the characters, not the plot, unlike the 1970s and 1980s when the emphasis was on plot, and characters were a bit of an afterthought. Moffat managed to deliver "The Day of the Doctor" despite the up-to-the-last-moment availability of David Tennant and Matt Smith due to late contract negotiations, and he nearly had to deal with a fiftieth-anniversary special without any actors to play any Doctors. He also managed one surprise, which was to tease Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor in a cameo weeks after Capaldi was announced as Smith's replacement. Davies was lucky to have everything in place, including the Disney+ deal and budget for the sixtieth anniversary to bring back Tennant, which made it feel special, and climax with the introduction of Ncuti Gatwa as the new Doctor and a lore-breaking new twist of bigeneration where the outgoing Doctor doesn't die but gets to live on. Who knows what's going to happen on the Seventh Anniversary? Are we going to get a whole bunch of aging Doctors in walkers and zimmer frames? Or will they all just be played by Legos? Are we even going to be around for a seventieth? Time will tell.

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