The War Doctor

The War Doctor is a bit of timey-wimey retconning by Steven Moffatt that totally shouldn’t have worked, and yet it did, brilliantly. He needed a Doctor who’d fought in the Time War, but the Eighth was a bad fit, and Christopher Eccleston declined to return. Hence the invention of a new incarnation who denied his own name, played impeccably by Sir John Hurt. And that should have been it, really, as Big Finish at the time didn’t want to show the Time War itself. But when Sir John asked if he could continue to play the Doctor on audio, what could they do? Say no? So with the rights to new-series concepts obtained as of 2013, four boxed sets of the War Doctor were recorded. Unfortunately, one of the reasons John Hurt had wanted to do audio was because he had cancer, and wanted a role he could do without overexerting himself. After his passing, four boxed sets seemed like a reasonable place to leave it. Except in 2021, they recast Jonathon Carley, who does an uncanny John Hurt impression, and went back to the beginning of the War Doctor’s life, leaving the two halves of this era entirely out of order. And the 60th anniversay of the show threw in yet another curveball into the middle of the war.