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Doctor Who 10 for 10 Part 4/10: Series 4

This is the dream team, ladies and gentlemen. Following her brief appearance in The Runaway Bride, Catherine Tate was given the opportunity to reprise her role as Donna Noble, which she quickly accepted. During a tweetalong for that same episode in December 2020, Russell T Davies threw out the idea of returning to Doctor Who and asked Catherine Tate and David Tennant if they were interested. The two of them accepted and now, RTD is back as showrunner with David Tennant and Catherine Tate returning for three 60th Anniversary Specials in November 2023. But for now, let’s focus on their original series from 15 years ago.

This instalment will encompass the 2009 Specials alongside Series 4. During the production of Doomsday, RTD, Julie Gardner, Phil Collinson and Jane Tranter agreed to do two more series before putting the series on a break with a year of specials as they prepared to transition to a new production team, with Steven Moffat accepting the role of showrunner in September 2007. David Tennant had been offered to continue on for Series 5, but he ultimately declined and he announced his departure via livelink at the National Television Awards on 29 October 2008.

Interestingly, the production of Series 4 is probably the most documented out of all of Doctor Who. This is thanks to a collaborative project between RTD and Doctor Who Magazine writer Benjamin Cook, starting off as emails to create a series of articles in the magazine, but as the amount of correspondence grew, it was decided to create a book with them, resulting in The Writer’s Tale being released in September 2008 covering emails (and text messages) from February 2007 to April 2008. Later on, it was decided to compile another 18 months worth of emails up to September 2009, eventually resulting in The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter being released in January 2010. In those books you can get the biggest insight behind-the-scenes and see just how much planning and time goes into the production of a series of Doctor Who. You can also see RTD’s health slowly deteriorating as he oversaw three flagship programs over six years. Seriously, it makes me look like a joke, compressing decades worth of work into 10 years, and that’s mostly just writing, not all the filming and work that goes into pre-production and post-production.

Anyway, let’s jump into the retrospective for Series 4.

1. A Noble return

During the planning for Series 4, RTD intended for the companion to be a “leftover” woman in her mid-30s called Penny Carter, however when Catherine Tate agreed to return (possibly also because Penny’s character was similar to that of Donna’s), the plans were changed and Penny’s story became a continuation of Donna’s story.

Jacqueline King and Howard Attfield were signed back on as Donna’s parents, Sylvia and Geoff Noble, however during the filming of Partners in Crime, Attfield broke his leg after only having filmed a few scenes on a hill. After some quick discussions, Attfield was replaced by Bernard Cribbins as Donna’s maternal grandfather, Wilfred Mott, who was featured in the 2007 Christmas Special, Voyage of the Damned (the highest-rated episode of the revived era, presumably thanks in no part to the appearance of Kylie Minogue) and the scenes on the hill were refilmed. Cribbins’ character was originally named Stan, but after he signed on for Series 4, his character was changed to accommodate (luckily his name was never mentioned in the special so all they needed to do was change his name in the credits). If you ask me, given what we see in those scenes, I think Bernard Cribbins was a better fit in them, given what he was saying about aliens in the special. Attfield died a couple weeks after the recast, with his scenes being included as deleted scenes on the Series 4 DVD box set. The return of the Nobles marked the beginning of a storyline that tied the Doctor and Donna’s fates together, which would be concluded in the finale and later extended to the 2009 Specials.

The Nobles weren’t the only characters returning in Series 4, however. As RTD intended for this series to be his last, he wanted to make the finale as big as possible. Rose Tyler made a surprise appearance in the season premiere, followed by two brief appearances (filmed for one episode then added to the other) before her main involvement in the series finale and the episode before it. Martha Jones rejoined the Doctor for three episodes before returning again in the finale. Jack Harkness and Sarah Jane Smith also returned for the finale, bringing in characters from their respective spinoffs, namely Gwen Cooper, Ianto Jones, Luke Smith, Mr Smith and K9. Harriet Jones, Francine Jones, Jackie Tyler and Mickey Smith also returned in the finale as well. Most of them would appear again for cameos near the end of The End of Time Part Two, including Alonso Frame (who was originally scheduled to return in The Stolen Earth but declined due to other commitments) and Verity Newman, the great-granddaughter of Joan Redfern from Human Nature and The Family of Blood.

Additionally, there were plans for the Shadow Proclamation scene in The Stolen Earth to feature various aliens from across the RTD era, but that was cut for time and budget, resulting in the scene only having a group of Judoon. A similar scene would be realised in The End of Time Part Two.

2. Warnings from the future

After Donna officially joined the Doctor, their first adventure (in The Fires of Pompeii) was to Pompeii in the year 79 AD, right on Volcano Day. Since they knew what would happen that day, the Doctor insists that they can’t change anything about it, even though Donna tried her best to do so. This story also shows that while an actual historical event was hijacked by alien forces, the Doctor’s intervention allowed history to continue as normal. Other examples would come later in Series 6 with the Silence and Series 11 with Rosa Parks.

The Pyroviles’ homeworld was lost, though a group of them managed to escape and crashed to Earth, eroding to dust in the core of Mount Vesuvius. Following an earthquake in 62 AD, the soothsayers began to predict the future accurately, but they were never able to predict Volcano Day because the Pyroviles were using Vesuvius’ power for their plan to convert Earth into their new home planet. When the Doctor and Donna managed to expose their plans, the Doctor explains that he can invert the system and blow up the Pyroviles, but in doing so, he would be the one to cause Volcano Day.

The Doctor and Donna push the lever together and they manage to get back to Pompeii. As they head back into the TARDIS, Donna insists to the Doctor that he at least save someone, and he briefly goes back to rescue Caecilius and his family.

Karen Gillan, who played a soothsayer in the episode, would be cast as companion Amy Pond for Series 5 onwards, while Peter Capaldi, who played Caecilius, played John Frobisher in the third series of Torchwood before being cast as the Twelfth Doctor in 2013. In the behind-the-scenes episode, RTD suggested that Frobisher may have been a descendant of Caecilius and that his conclusion was time reasserting itself after the Doctor saved Caecilius in the past. This was confirmed by Moffat in 2015, but the rest will have to wait until we get to Series 9.

3. Double returning villains

Series 4 saw the return of not one, but two villains from the classic series. The Sontaran Stratagem and The Poison Sky saw the reintroduction of the Sontarans in a story that has them utilise humanity’s reliance on cars, GPSes and petrol to turn Earth into a cloning planet. Aside from Martha’s return in this story, we saw the Doctor’s attitude to soldiers and weapons, as evidenced by his aversion to weapons and people saluting him.

Davros, the creator of the Daleks, also makes a return in the series finale, with him reuniting with Sarah Jane Smith many years after their first meeting in his debut episode, Genesis of the Daleks. Although the Sontarans and Davros appeared considerably less than the Daleks, Cybermen or the Master, the production team’s confidence in bringing back gradually obscured villains from the classic series was proven by the success of the series so far. A scene featuring a young Davros in the past was scripted for the finale, but like the aforementioned Shadow Proclamation scene, was scrapped for time and budget.

4. The end of the river

After two single-parter episodes in the last two series, Steven Moffat’s contribution to Series 4 was Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead, his last two-parter in the RTD era to round off his first two-parter in Series 1. The story featured the debut of River Song, a character at the end of her timeline who would become more relevant in future episodes as the Doctor’s timeline continues and her past is gradually explored. I think Moffat wrote the story knowing that he was going to be taking over from RTD and so he wanted to get a head start on his storylines.

The story also features the Vashta Nerada, carnivore piranhas of the air that live in shadows (thereby creating another innocuous thing for people to be scared of) and an underlying storyline involving the mind of Charlotte Abigail Lux, or the command node CAL. A century prior, CAL tried to save the 4022 people that were in the Library when the Vashta Nerada began to emerge, but since she was unable to teleport them away, she had to save their minds to the data core, leading to Donna being “saved” as well when the Doctor attempted to teleport her back to the TARDIS. In the end, River sacrificed herself to teleport Donna and all 4022 people out of the data core, but the Doctor managed to upload her data ghost into it, where she lived with the data ghosts of the rest of her crew and the avatars of CAL and Donna’s children.

5. Thematic story arcs

The story arc of this series was teased more subtly compared to previous seasons as multiple elements from the finale were scattered across the episodes of the series. Those elements included the bees disappearing, the Medusa Cascade, lost worlds, the return of Rose Tyler and the DoctorDonna. Other elements from other series were also resolved in this series, such as Harriet Jones, the mystery of the Doctor’s hand (which the Doctor retook possession of at the end of the last series) and Dalek Caan of the Cult of Skaro.

After Evolution of the Daleks, Dalek Caan’s Emergency Temporal Shift somehow took back into the Time War, which was meant to be time-locked. He travelled to the Gates of Elysium, where he managed to save Davros from the jaws of the Nightmare Child. Although his mind was damaged in the process, he gained the ability to clearly see through time, allowing him to manipulate events as he saw fit.

Davros was brought to the present day, where he used the cells from his body to create the New Dalek Empire before creating a reality bomb to destroy every reality. To power it, they stole 27 planets, some from different times, and relocated them to the Medusa Cascade one second out of sync from the rest of time. This caused some bees from Melissa Majoria to leave Earth as they sensed a disturbance.

Without the Doctor to stop it, the reality bomb’s effects began affecting other universes as stars began disappearing. Rose Tyler journeyed out from Pete’s World in search of the Doctor and ended up in Donna’s World, a world created around her when a Time Beetle was attached to Donna. It was revealed that reality had been bending around her since she was born, causing her to meet the Doctor again and be dragged into two parallel worlds, the other instance being in the data core of the Library.

In the Doctor’s universe, however, the Doctor’s absence led Harriet Jones, the former Prime Minister of Britain who was deposed thanks to the Doctor’s words near the end of The Christmas Invasion, to activate the Subwave Network in an effort to find anyone who could help contact the Doctor. Harriet found the Doctor’s former companions and used the network to call the Doctor, but the Daleks tracked her down and confronted her, but not before she gave control of the network to Torchwood.

Harriet was apparently exterminated by the Daleks, but in the anthology Now We Are Six Hundred written by James Goss and illustrated by RTD, there is a poem that details how Harriet managed to escape the Daleks by falling through a trapdoor and riding away on her motorbike. Phil Collinson was apparently not happy with RTD killing off Harriet Jones and “nagged” him about it ever since, so RTD took the first opportunity he could to send the poem to him. Collinson asked RTD if it counted and he said that he did. During the lockdown tweetalong for the Series 4 finale on 19 April 2020, RTD elaborated on Harriet’s escape, even going so far to suggest that it was a part of the Trickster’s long game, “but that’s a story for another time”.

6. My Choice, My Life, My Death

Fun fact - the title to this was the former title for my version of Turn Left in my personal project, which was a result of me ripping off bits of the RTD series while writing the first few series of Doctor Who.

Turn Left was the Doctor-lite episode of the series, double-banked alongside Midnight as the companion-lite episode of the series. As a result of the Time Beetle mentioned in the previous topic, a parallel world was created where Donna never met the Doctor, which led him to die in what would have been the events of The Runaway Bride. The timeline would continue to go on with the following differences; Sarah Jane and her group would take over the events of Smith and Jones before dying alongside Martha; the Titanic replica crashed into Buckingham Palace, destroying London and flooding all of southern England with radiation; the Adipose seeding happened in America instead of London; and the Sontarans activated ATMOS to convert Earth into a clone planet, but Captain Jack and the Torchwood team gave their lives to stop them.

Rose Tyler found Donna while in search for the Doctor. She kept Donna alive by diverting her away from London before the Titanic replica crashed into Buckingham Palace because she realised that she needed the Doctor and Donna together to stop the oncoming darkness. With the help of UNIT, Rose sent Donna back in time to where the split in the timeline happened and Donna ended up sacrificing her life to ensure that her past self wouldn’t make the decision that would inadvertently create the alternate timeline. Rose did manage to leave a message for the Doctor - “Bad Wolf” - to catch his attention.

7. The mystery of the Doctor’s hand and the DoctorDonna

After the Doctor regained possession of his spare hand at the end of Series 3, it has ended up playing a significant role in two Series 4 stories.

In The Doctor’s Daughter, the Doctor’s hand appeared to react as the TARDIS was brought to Messaline, which happened due to the creation of Jenny from the Doctor’s genes. Later on in The Stolen Earth, the Doctor was shot by a Dalek upon reuniting with Rose and proceeded to regenerate, sparking speculation as to whether David Tennant had resigned despite it being reported that he would be in the 2008 Christmas Special. In the next episode, Journey’s End, the Doctor ended up directing most of his regeneration energy into his spare hand, leading to speculation over the years as to whether a regeneration was actually used, though that was dispelled in 2013 when Steven Moffat confirmed as such in The Time of the Doctor. I wasn’t a fan of the regeneration twist initially, though I understand how it was needed for the rest of this storyline to work out.

The Daleks brought the TARDIS up to the Crucible and ordered everyone out. Donna became distracted by a heartbeat in her head and found herself unable to leave when the TARDIS locked her in. The Daleks dumped the TARDIS into the core of the Crucible, where it was to be destroyed, but as Donna fell to the floor, she reached for the Doctor’s hand, which formed into a copy of the Doctor while the ensuing biological meta-crisis gave Donna the Doctor’s mind, though it laid dormant until Davros shocked her. This allowed Donna to deactivate the reality bomb and send the stolen planets back to their original places in space and time. As such, Donna became the DoctorDonna, with the Meta-Crisis Tenth Doctor’s creation being the cause of the timelines converging around her, allowing her to meet the Doctor again despite missing events in previous stories through coincidences.

Sadly, the Meta-Crisis Tenth Doctor and the DoctorDonna weren’t able to stay in the Doctor’s universe for long. After destroying the Daleks in one fell swoop, the Doctor left his meta-crisis self with Rose in Pete’s World, because he was like himself when he first met Rose and he needed her to change him. As for Donna, she began to find herself being overwhelmed by her newfound knowledge, which would have killed her if not for the Doctor wiping her memories of their adventures together, thereby “killing” her mercifully. When the Doctor told Sylvia and Wilf of this, he noted to them that there are worlds out there singing praises of Donna, for she was the most important woman in the whole universe, though she can never know it.

8. The Time Lord Victorious

As stated at the start, there would be a series of specials broadcast throughout 2009 in lieu of a fifth series, which would come later in 2010 with a new production team. The Next Doctor saw the return of the Cybermen and a special guest companion, Jackson Lake, who began to see himself as a new incarnation of the Doctor due to an incident with the Cybermen. Planet of the Dead was an Easter adventure with scenes filmed in Dubai and the beginning of a mini-arc that would see the end of the Tenth Doctor’s life - “He will knock four times.”

The Waters of Mars shows the Doctor at his most reckless as he tried to avert a fixed point in time by saving Adelaide Brooke and two of her crew from Bowie Base One when an aqueous viral infection known as the Flood infested the rest of the crew. Originally, Adelaide was supposed to die with her crew and the cause of Bowie Base One’s destruction remained unknown. After the Doctor returned to Earth, Adelaide allowed the surviving members of her crew to leave and share their story. As the Doctor proclaimed to Adelaide that he was the Time Lord Victorious, Adelaide became horrified and angry at the potential of the Doctor’s power, so she took her own life in an effort to preserve the timeline, which led the Doctor to realise the seriousness of his actions, though he seemingly remained defiant.

I suppose I would have liked to see this attitude continue into the final specials, but it would be revisited a decade later with the multi-platform Time Lord Victorious series, covering books, comics, audios, games and webcasts. The series explored the Tenth Doctor going into the Dark Times, where he encountered a species known as the Kotturuh, who assigned lifespans to species based on their significance to the universe. By stopping the Kotturuh, the Tenth Doctor rewrote history and altered timelines, eventually resulting in the Eighth and Ninth Doctors allying with the Daleks and a group of vampires to make their future incarnation see the error of his ways.

Ironically, in the 2015 Titan Comics miniseries Four Doctors, the Tenth Doctor defied his fate and became the Time Lord Victorious again, conquering the universe before he was assassinated by a Raxacoricofallapatorian.

9. The evil of the Time Lords

Originally, three specials were commissioned for 2009, but in April 2008, Jane Tranter pushed for David Tennant’s final story to be a two-parter, and as such, RTD had to work hard in order to make The End of Time the big story that it was. The 2008 global financial crisis led to budget cuts across the BBC and with countries like Canada and Japan no longer deciding to buy rights to the series, RTD feared that the two-parter would be cut to 45 minutes each or that The Waters of Mars would be dropped, but luckily, Julie Gardner managed to raise the money to make all four specials possible. Both parts of The End of Time made up the 2009 Christmas Special and the 2010 New Year’s Special, the latter being the first of its kind before the Chibnall era decided to move the Christmas Specials to New Year’s Day.

Part One saw the Master being resurrected thanks to his contingency plan, but an accident left him with an energy deficit. Meanwhile, Wilf was contacted by a mysterious woman who told him to take up arms. Wilf manages to find the Doctor to see if he can bring Donna’s memory of him back, but he refuses to go to her. On Christmas morning, the Doctor finds Wilf again in an effort to find the Master, which he does thanks to a subconscious suggestion from Donna. Wilf goes with the Doctor to the Naismith mansion and confronts the Master, who uses the Immortality Gate to transform every human (except for Wilf and Donna) into himself, creating the Master Race.

Part Two sees two Vinvocci rescuing the Doctor and Wilf while the Master uses the Master Race to trace the origin of the drumbeat inside his head. The drumbeat was revealed to the the work of the Time Lords, who put the signal in the Master’s head when he was eight years old and was taken for initiation to the Time Lord Academy on Gallifrey. This was an effort by Rassilon and the High Council to win the Time War by breaking Gallifrey out of the time lock and ripping the Time Vortex apart, which was what made the Doctor destroy Gallifrey to stop them (apparently). Only two Time Lords opposed this plan, with one of them being the woman that contacted Wilf. The Doctor fell back into the Naismith mansion and confronted the Master and Rassilon, struggling to choose who to kill until a glance from the woman leads him to break the link, sending the Time Lords back into the Time War, with the Master going as well in an attempt to exact revenge for turning him into what he was.

In all honesty, it feels kind of surreal to see Rassilon becoming a villain in this story, given how he was revered by the Time Lords and also the fact that the Time Lords were written in a better light during the classic series (but what would I know, the only Gallifrey-related classic series episode I really watched was The Five Doctors). Then again, I don’t think the Doctor ever saw eye-to-eye with the Time Lords in the classic series, so it kind of makes sense how he wouldn’t see eye-to-eye with them in the revived series.

10. The grandest farewell

Once Rassilon and the Time Lords were sent back into the time lock with the Master, the Doctor was initially relieved to still be alive until Wilf knocked four times. After ranting about how he could do so much more, the Doctor couldn’t bear leaving Wilf to die and allowed himself to absorb the Immortality Gate’s regeneration to get him out of the control chamber. He then dropped Wilf off at home and went off on his final reward, visiting all his previous companions and other people he met (even those from spinoff media and the classic era, as would be revealed in SJA Series 4), seeing Donna at her wedding, and visiting Rose on New Year’s Day 2005 before struggling back to his TARDIS, setting it into flight and regenerating into the Eleventh Doctor, setting the console room on fire in the process.

Aside from the returning cameos in The End of Time, there was some bonus farewell content from the production team to celebrate the end of the RTD era. At the wrap party, two videos were produced by Jennie Fava for the cast and crew; a video of everyone singing to The Proclaimers’ I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) and The Ballad of Russell and Julie, featuring David Tennant, Catherine Tate and John Barrowman.

Although The End of Time was David Tennant’s final episode, he would also be involved in the filming of the 2009 BBC One Christmas idents and the SJA episode The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, which would premiere that October.

Unlike Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant readily embraced his role even after his time on Doctor Who, appearing at the Birmingham Lords of Time Fan Convention in September 2012, reprising his role in the 50th Anniversary special The Day of the Doctor in 2013 and making his Big Finish debut with the first volume of The Tenth Doctor Adventures, released in May 2016. And then of course, he returned again at the end of The Power of the Doctor in preparation for the 60th Anniversary Specials in November 2023.

In the end, there were too many things to say about Series 4 to summarise in 10 topics, so I’m putting in some honourable mentions below:

Was Mr Copper ungrateful?

One of the most notorious things about Series 4, or rather Voyage of the Damned, is the Doctor Who Magazine interview with Clive Swift, who played Mr Copper in the special and also Jobel in Revelation of the Daleks (he was also due to star in a Big Finish audio in 2003, but he withdrew due to a family illness). When Benjamin Cook interviewed Swift (on set in his trailer towards the end of the shooting), he didn’t seem to take the interview seriously, complaining about why Cook taped the interview instead of using shorthand and commenting about how he wasn’t getting paid for the interview. In 2017, Cook commented that RTD and Julie Gardner had to approve the interview before it was published, suspecting it was “testament to what a sod he’d been on set all month”.

Apparently, it was rumoured that RTD was going to have Clive Swift reprise his role in The Stolen Earth, but he changed his mind after the DWM interview. This was never confirmed, however his character was mentioned, as it is implied that Mr Copper established the foundation that developed the Subwave Network.

When Swift died in 2019, RTD apparently claimed that he should have not allowed the interview to be published as he felt that he had a duty of care to Swift, just as with any other actor. Although the only source for this is someone else’s Twitter without any primary source to back it up, it’s very likely that RTD actually said this because Benjamin Cook has replied to people replying to that tweet.

Something that can be verified, however, is a letter that RTD emailed to Doctor Who Magazine shortly after Swift’s death. This didn’t seem to have gotten much attention, but someone managed to take a snapshot of it and posted it online, which I’ll also attach below.

What do you think of RTD’s response? Do you think it made Swift seem less ungrateful about his experience on Doctor Who? Feel free to let me know what you think.

Keeping it (the timey-wimey) in the family

I’m gonna get flamed for the title to this, I just know it. But nonetheless, I’m still stating the obvious.

Peter Davison reprised his role as the Fifth Doctor for the 2007 Children in Need sketch, Time Crash. About a week before it aired, Davison’s daughter, Georgia Moffett, was cast as Jenny in The Doctor’s Daughter, meaning that a daughter of a Doctor was playing the daughter of the Doctor. After Tennant and Moffett married, Peter Davison became the former’s father-in-law.

Although Jenny was shown to have been killed near the end of The Doctor’s Daughter, the ending of the episode showed her being revived, unbeknownst to the Doctor, before stealing a shuttlecraft and leaving to go on adventures. Georgia Moffett was interested in returning to the series and although she hasn’t reprised her role onscreen, her character has returned in extended media, with Moffett returning for a Big Finish audio series featuring Jenny in 2018.

On a side note, former TVB actress Corinna Chamberlain (a Westerner) is literally Georgia Moffett and you cannot convince me otherwise.

That Time Lady

The identity of the Time Lady who contacted Wilf has never been openly explained on-screen, although the popular explanation seems to be that it was the Doctor’s mother since it was what RTD told her actress, Claire Bloom, and the production team. However, RTD acknowledged that it could have been any other Time Lady, such as Romana, Susan Foreman’s mother (aka the Doctor’s daughter) or even the Rani. And before anyone says it, it can’t be Tecteun because she would be with Division.

Another similar woman appeared in Series 9’s Hell Bent when the Twelfth Doctor returned to the drylands of Gallifrey. Steven Moffat said that he would rather leave it to the fans to decide who that woman was, whether she would be the Doctor’s mother, or even if she was the same woman from The End of Time.

“How many have died in your name?”

In Journey’s End, Davros reveals the Doctor’s soul, telling him that while he may abhor violence and never carry a weapon, his self-sacrificing nature convinced the people he meets to do the same, thereby making them into weapons, which makes him recall Harriet Jones and all the people who gave their lives in his name, including River Song and Jenny (again, he didn’t know that Jenny was revived). I’m sure there are many more examples of this from both before and after the RTD era, but that would be way out of scope for both the original episode and this retrospective series. I suppose I like to think that the people who are still alive are proud of having met the Doctor and would do anything they could to help him if he needed it. I mean, that’s what Harriet Jones did, didn’t she?

In my opinion, Series 4 and the 2009 Specials were the peak of the revived series, or rather the first of few. I didn’t get into Doctor Who for a few more years when this series came out (though I did watch one or two stories here and there), but even in Australia, the appeal of the show was as profound as it was in the UK. In primary school, I knew three kids in my year level who were fans of the show; one of them invited me to his house (or maybe his mum invited my mum and brought me along as well, idk) and we watched a story from Series 1 together; and the other two I played with in a Doctor Who-esque LARP with some Dynasty Warriors added in to boot; that LARP was one of the origins of my personal project which I would put to pen and paper (or rather, document and keyboard) in a few years’ time.

When I finally got into Doctor Who around 2011 or 2012, I took my time to watch the RTD era episodes as well; looking back, I only wish someone drilled it into me to start watching Doctor Who, whether by buying the DVDs or watching the episodes as they premiered on ABC, but knowing my mum back then, she would always have something recording on weekend nights, on the one DVR that could receive digital television, so I’d have to settle with watching on analog because the idea never came to me to buy the DVDs or find some way to watch it online (my 10GB internet data plan didn’t help things either).

This ends the Tennant and RTD eras of Doctor Who. Stay tuned for Part 5 as we enter the Smith and Moffat eras with my 10 takes on Series 5.

#doctor who #doctor who 10 for 10 #doctor who series 4 #tenth doctor #david tennant

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