I’ve been avoiding posting, as Doctor Who Things of the Day, any news about Doctor Who cast members that isn’t actually related to Doctor Who. I mean, I love John Barrowman as much as anyone, but it simply isn’t specifically a Doctor Who thing that he’s been cast in a movie remake of The Birdcage. (He hasn’t — I just made that up.) There’s certainly so much stuff happening online that is expressly Doctor Who that there’s simply no reason to create some filler from the rumor that, oh, Alex Kingston will join the big-screen reunion of ER. (Again, not true. I made that up. Could be cool, though…)
That said, reader Dan sent me a link recently that I at first dismissed as not sufficiently Doctor Who-ish… yet something prevented me from sending Dan an email thanking him for the suggestion but explaining that it wasn’t quite a DW Thing. What Dan sent me is this photograph:
It is, obviously, Karen Gillan — aka Amy Pond — and David Tennant — aka the Tenth Doctor. They were together at an industry event celebrating the Radio Times (for the uninitiated, that’s sort of the British equivalent of the U.S.’s TV Guide, though it’s been around so long that, as its name suggests, it predates broadcast television), an event that Tennant was hosting and at which Gillan was in attendance.
Initially, I looked at the photo and I thought: Well, what’s the big deal? It’s just two actors doing the PR side of their job. Yeah, sure, it’s two actors who coincidentally happened to be in Doctor Who, but that’s really incidental to the photograph.
But I just realized — after the photo has been knocking around in my head for a week — that there is something specifically Doctor Who-ish about it. Two things, in fact. The first is the subtext of my own reaction to the photo. In my head, I see not only the two actors but also “Amy and the Doctor”… but the fact is that they never appeared onscreen together as those characters: Amy never knew the Tenth Doctor. In my own fangirl head, however, “the Doctor” is all the Doctors, so at first I failed to see the fact that he wasn’t “her” Doctor. Which leads me to the second thing, which the Doctor Who fansite Kasterborous (via which that image comes) touches on:
Tell me you felt it? It was as if the previous year had popped out for a pint of milk and never returned.
Suddenly there he was, the Tenth Doctor, the dapper Doctor, arm in arm with his companion of choice, Amy Pond. Cutting a swish through the halls of the great and the good. Nobody was going to make him go. The Time Lord Inebriated with TV’s finest.
It was 2010 and 2011 skewering off to create an alternate 2011- alternate to you, me and Einstein.
That’s it: There’s something fan-fiction-y inherent in that photo: Amy meets the Tenth Doctor!
*sigh*
(If you stumble across a cool Doctor Who thing, feel free to email me with a link.)
Wow, I had no idea. I’ll have to rewatch that.
What about “voyage of the damned” or “the family of blood” or “partners in crime” and many more?
I would think that it would’ve been great if Amy was one of the possible love interests for the Tenth Doctor *sigh* Too bad…