'An Adventure In Space And Time' Update Gives Ncuti Gatwa Onscreen Debut As Fifteenth Doctor
His emergence from David Tennant regenerating again as the Fourteenth Doctor isn’t until Saturday, but he’s got a head start.
On Doctor Who Day on November 23, there was a lot of content to commemorate the British sci-fi series’s 60th anniversary. Some of it’s already been covered here. The Brits however did get a little more. BBC Four premiered a colorized, streamlined 75-minute version of the second Doctor Who serial ever, The Daleks, which is the first in chronological order not being held hostage by the writer’s estate but that’s a whole thing. It was followed by an airing of An Adventure in Space and Time.
An Adventure in Space and Time is a docudrama film written by Doctor Who writer Mark Gatiss and directed by Terry McDonough, made and aired for the 50th anniversary a decade ago. It chronicles the creation of Doctor Who with David Bradley as William Hartnell, a casting that would allow him to portray the First Doctor for “The Doctor Falls” and “Twice Upon a Time” in 2017, the BBC Centenary special “The Power of the Doctor” last year, and Big Finish audio dramas over the period. And this was after portraying a different character in series 7’s “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”. He stars alongside Jessica Raine as producer Verity Lambert, Brian Cox (the actor) as Head of Drama Sydney Newman, and eventual Master portrayer Sacha Dhawan as director Waris Hussein. The film encompasses Hartnell’s entire tenure, and as he’s about to pass the torch to Patrick Troughton, he gets an assuring vision from Matt Smith, who was the outgoing incumbent Eleventh Doctor, that the show has a lengthy future ahead. Except on this rebroadcast, it wasn’t Smith.
It was indeed Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor giving the assurance in this version, complete with a wink. The film has essentially been George Lucas’d in this way, like when Hayden Christensen replaced Sebastian Shaw as Anakin Skywalker’s force ghost in the 2004 Special Edition version of Return of the Jedi. Reportedly, periodic updates with the latest Doctor were always the plan, and if true this is the first implementation. It makes sense to at least give the Smith version some shelf life and not immediately flip to Capaldi within a year or two. Even with him lasting four and Jodie Whittaker lasting five years, it seems the timing just never felt right until this cozy moment.
Gatwa was announced as the next Doctor in May 2022. However, he wasn’t going to be plopped right into the 60th anniversary specials, at least as the main brand new incarnation without any prior stories. Thus, “The Power of the Doctor” revealed David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor, not Gatwa. It would be Tennant who starred in the three specials, which began airing November 25, and will culminate in the third and final special, “The Giggle”, where Fourteen will regenerate into Gatwa’s Fifteenth, kicking off Gatwa’s tenure as the Doctor and heading into the Christmas special “The Church on Ruby Road” on Christmas Day.
In truth, the update to the film wasn’t all positive, as the licensing issues from writer Anthony Coburn’s estate for An Unearthly Child meant scenes with its dialogue had to be edited out. Specifically, Coburn’s son Stef had taken issue with the show’s direction castings such as Gatwa’s and Jinkx Monsoon, publicly blasting such on Twitter. While the Gatwa version seems to be the only one on iPlayer because of these changes, both versions of the vision scene are available on the show’s YouTube channel. The Smith version is above and the Gatwa version is below.
