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Posts tagged as “Doctor Who”

List of actors to have played Doctor Who

· Tagged as Doctor Who, fiction, alternate history · Leave a comment

Author’s note: I first wrote up this wee bit of allohistorical silliness in March of this year, posting it a few places online, but never actually bothered on my own website until now. Enjoy.

  • Doctor Who?, on CBS
    • 1963–1966: Vincent Price (Doctor Who)
      First episode: “The Girl from Another World”
      Last episode: “Planet of the Daleks”
    • 1966–1967: Jack Nicholson (Doctor Who, Theta Sigma)
      First episode: “Planet of the Daleks”
  • Doctor Who and the Daleks, on CBS
    • 1967–1972: Jack Nicholson (Doctor Who, Theta Sigma)
      Last episode: “The Paradox Web”
  • Doctor Who: Alien Agent, on CBS
    • 1973–1975: David McCallum (Agent John Smith / Doctor Who, Theta Tau)
      First episode: “The Mannequin Men”
      Last episode: “Doctor Who’s Mind”
  • Doctor Who and the Cyber-Man, produced by New World Pictures
    • 1980: Clu Gulager (Doctor Who / “That existed?”)
  • Doctor Who, on UPN
    • 1986–1989: Kyle MacLachlan (The Doctor)
      First episode: “Pilot”
      Last episode: “The Deadly Assassin (Part 1)”
    • 1990–1993: Bruce Campbell (The Second Doctor)
      First episode: “The Deadly Assassin (Part 2)”
      Last episode: “The Edge of Time”
    • 1994–1998: John Rhys-Davies (The Third Doctor / The Professor)
      First episode: “For Want of a Nail”
      Last episode: “Seta (Part 2)”
    • 1999–2002: Kate Mulgrew (The Fourth Doctor)
      First episode: “Changes”
      Last episode: “Hourglass”
  • Doctor Who, on NBC
    • 2005–2011: Neil Patrick Harris (The Fifth Doctor)
      First episode: “The Interstellar Interruption”
      Last episode: “Paradise Lost”
    • 2012–2013: Donald Glover (The Sixth Doctor)
      First episode: “…We Have a Problem”
  • Doctor Who, on Blockbuster
    • 2014–2015: Donald Glover (The Sixth Doctor)
      Last episode: “The Three Doctors”
    • 2015–2019: Nathan Fillion (The Seventh Doctor)
      First episode: “The Three Doctors”
      Last episode: “World Enough and Time (Part 5)”
    • 2019–2023: Daniel Dae Kim (The Eighth Doctor)
      First episode: “Grandfather Clock”
      Last episode: “1963”

Season 26 of Doctor Who is slated for a release in the late summer of 2024, starring Matt Smith of TCM’s A Song of Ice and Fire.

Actors who played the Master include…

  • James Shigeta as “the Celestial Master”, a one-shot villain from the Price era who would reoccur as a trickster figure in army fatigues in Doctor Who and the Daleks
  • Robert Z’Dar as “the Master of Time”, a larger-than-life egomaniac who forced MacLachlan’s Doctor’s regeneration and would regularly clash with him in the “actionised” Campbell years
  • John Anderson as “Mr. Seta”, a master (heh) of disguise who was written as a throwback to the Alien Agent era
  • Christopher Walken as “Professor Tannhauser”, who, in the far future, devises an equation proving humanity can escape the end of the universe — a plan that NPH’s Fifth Doctor gladly assists in, until one of them realises just who the other is…
  • Lady Gaga as “Claire Oswald”, a companion throughout the first season of the Fillion era who always seems to know a bit more than she lets on

Stuff i watched recently, August ’24

· Tagged as films, monthly recaps, Doctor Who · Leave a comment
A montage of the undermentioned works
  • First up is Enemy (2013), a movie somebody peed on. Summarising the plot it sounds a bit thin — Jake Gyllenhaal meets his evil twin Jake Evyllenhaal and not much else happens — but Denis Villeneuve does a fantastic job of building up tension and dread around a slow-burning premise which, in itself, isn’t necessarily the scariest thing. 6/10.
  • Took a trip to the cinema to see Longlegs (2024), starring the greatest living actor himself, Nic Cage. I say “starring”; he’s not in it so much, as it’s more about the internal tensions of our mildly psychic, mildly autistic Clarice Starling stand-in, played wonderfully by Maika Monroe. Again, the plot’s a bit thin, falling apart with a whimper in the third act, but the style and execution more than makes up for it. There are so many looming shots of doors and windows just at the edge of frame, snippets of interspersed terror, ominous rumbling soundscapes… pretty good! 7/10.
  • Green Room (2015) is a solid little low-budget thriller where a punk band get trapped in a nazi bar. Not much to say other than 6/10.
  • Watched Schindler’s List (1993) for the first time. Cue several hours of inelegant blubbering from me. (“I could have got more…”) I would like to apologise for calling John Williams a hack. I was not familiar with your game, sir. 10/10, but it feels wrong to give it a numbered score in the first place.
  • In Bruges (2008)! The online hype for this is ravenous and i’m not quite sure it lives up, but i was suitably entertained. Colin Farrell has very kind eyes. 6½/10.
  • The Olympics were as uplifting as always. A Discord friend of mine put it best: “The Olympics makes me feel patriotic for the human race”. For a few glorious weeks, it doesn’t matter that the IOC is the third most corrupt organisation on the planet behind Fifa and the Mafia. It doesn’t matter that there are wars raging across the old world. All that matters is that the most fit people on the planet have come to show what the human body can really do when pushed to its limits.
  • After years of putting it off, i finally got around to The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), all 3½ hours of it. It’s hard to review just the first part of the trilogy, but if the rest is as good as this, it’s on track for an easy 9.
  • I’ve been getting into the Eighth Doctor audio dramas recently and “The Chimes of Midnight” might be among the best things to come out of Doctor Who. Very dark. Very weird. It builds up this offputting atmosphere perfectly, Paul McGann and India Fisher making you wish they’d gotten a proper series, with the traditional timey-wimey twist. 9/10.