Appreciating the Ninth Doctor

So here I am at 31 years of age and I finally experienced the appeal of a comic convention. I get it. I don't know why I never went to more of them. I decided that if I was going to do it, I was going to dive head on into it and dress up as someone. But who was I going to do a cosplay of? I knew I wasn't going to spend too much money. I needed something cheap but something that was cool and something that people recognized. What I needed was a Doctor!

 

I decided to go to Lexington Comic and Toy Con as the Ninth Doctor from Doctor Who. I had the leather jacket. All I needed was the black paints, a deep colored v-neck t-shirt, and a Sonic Screwdriver and I was set. All of this was found pretty quickly. 

As I set about to do this, I watched a couple of the episodes from the ninth doctor's era. Watching them, I realized what it was about this era that got me into the show. My friend Natasha had told me before I watched the show that the first Doctor that I watched was always going to be my favorite. She was right. Christopher Eccleston is my favorite doctor. 

Everybody loves David Tennant or Matt Smith and both of those guys are very good in their portrayals of the Doctor. But Eccleston for me set the tone for those guys. His portrayal of the doctor was not the overly jovial one that we are use to, but one of a man who just got out of a war and lost too many of his friends. We see it in his eyes, in his attitude and even in his clothes. He is in a dark place at this period of his life. The Doctor has just lost his home planet of Gallifrey and all the people from it. He is the last of his kind and it has hit him hard. 

Throughout the series, we see him start to come alive again thanks to the help of Rose Tyler, the companion he picks up in the first episode. The attitude is still there but it is more in a defensive mode now. He gets mad at Rose for screwing up but we also see him have compassion with her. We see this in my favorite episode from the series, Father's Day. In the episode, we see the Doctor take Rose back in time to the moment her father died in the street after being struck by a car. Rose was only suppose to watch the accident happen and comfort her father as he died. But Rose can't help herself and ends up saving her father causing a time paradox. The Doctor is angry throughout the whole episode. But in the end, when Rose's father sacrifices his life in order to restore the timeline, we see the Doctor be comfort Rose as she finally gets the chance to say goodbye to her father. It is a very beautiful moment in a great episode.

Like all the doctor's before him though, the doctor was doomed to die at some point. The ninth doctor would be no different. In The Parting of the Ways, we see him die in order to save the life of Rose. The last moments of the ninth doctor are really touching. Eccleston is very smart and doesn't over play the moment at all. We see the sadness in his eyes as he realizes this is end. He plays it like a man who was just starting to enjoy his life again and is sad that he is not going to have another day to live it. Quite different from the man who pushed literally pushed Rose away in the first moments they met. 

Tennant and Smith have of course gone on and taken Doctor Who to bigger heights and huge ratings. But I don't think none of that would have been possible without the acting talents of Christopher Eccleston and what he brought to the role of the Doctor. Eccleston set a high bar and brought real weight to the role. It something that I have noticed has been carried on by the other two actors who went on to play the part. Plus Eccleston was cool and he took no prisoners. That is something I found to be very cool. 

So dressing up as the man for a comic convention in a way has made me think of the ninth doctor quite a bit this week. Looking around the convention hall, I saw a ton of people dressed up as Doctor Who. Mostly as of them dressed up as either Tom Baker or David Tennant. I might have been the only person there dressed as Eccleston. I was okay with that. I got quite a few complements from people for dressing up as the Ninth Doctor. The outfit I had was pretty "fantastic" as the ninth doctor would say. I realized that although Eccleston's time on the show was short, the impact he had on it's success was something that should be appreciated for years to come.