Nine
From Relativespace
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| The Ninth Doctor | |
| Character Journal: | [ninewho] |
| Race: | Time Lord |
| Home Planet: | Gallifrey |
| Home Era: | Post-Time War Gallifrey |
| Affiliated with: | Rose Tyler, The Tenth Doctor, Jack Harkness, Mickey Smith, Jackie Tyler |
| Writer: | Sam |
Contents |
Basic Character Information
Entry Point
After the events of "Boomtown" and prior to "The Parting of the Ways" with a little bit of assumed, non-canonical adventures in between.
Personality
The Ninth Doctor, perhaps the most gritty and informal of the Doctor's incarnations, masked a lonely, melancholic personality with an almost manic exterior. As with the Fourth Doctor, he would often make jokes in the face of danger, but would then become grim and serious when on his own. Despite being impatient with humans, who he often referred to as "stupid apes", the Ninth Doctor was far more tactile with, and reliant upon, his human companions than previous incarnations.
The Ninth Doctor was quite colloquial in his language and spoke with a distinctly Northern accent. Although the Seventh and Eighth Doctors spoke with non-Received Pronunciation accents, the Ninth was the first time this was commented on in the series. When Rose questioned him on why, if he was alien, he sounded like he was from the North, the Doctor retorted, "Lots of planets have a North!"
Much of the Ninth Doctor's melancholy, lack of patience, and hard-bitten edge could be attributed to feelings of guilt at being the sole survivor of the Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks. This darker side came to the fore when he encountered the lone Dalek in Dalek, exhibiting an angry, merciless and vengeful streak which surprised even Rose and led to the Dalek commenting that the Doctor would make a good Dalek. However, the Doctor seemed to find peace towards the end of his incarnation.
The Ninth Doctor's catchphrase, used in a variety of manners, and sometimes sarcastically, was "Fantastic!"
Finally admitting his feelings for Rose has softened the Doctor somewhat, though he still appears outwardly disdainful of most people.
History
After his regeneration, the Ninth Doctor helped save London from an invasion by the Autons, living plastic automatons animated by the Nestene Consciousness. He did this with the help of Rose Tyler, a teenager whom he subsequently invited to be a companion in his travels. The Doctor showed Rose the far future and Victorian Britain before returning to Rose's own era where they fought off an attempt to destroy the Earth by the alien Slitheen family. After this, they journeyed to 2012 where the Doctor found that a single Dalek was being kept in a secret museum filled with alien artefacts. There, the first details of the Time War fought by the Time Lords and Daleks were revealed and how it concluded with the mutual annihilation of both races, leaving the Doctor the last of the Time Lords. The Doctor and Rose were also joined by a young man named Adam Mitchell.
The Doctor, Rose and Adam travelled to the future to Satellite Five, where they discovered a plot by the Jagrafess to manipulate Earth through its mass media. When Adam tried to smuggle future knowledge back to his own time, he became the first companion to be deliberately exiled from the TARDIS. After this, Rose persuaded the Doctor to return to the day her father, Pete Tyler, died, creating a temporal paradox by saving him which nearly led to disaster until Pete sacrificed himself to set time right once more.
Following a mysterious spaceship to 1941, the Doctor and Rose met Captain Jack Harkness, a confidence trickster and former Time Agent from the 51st century. Jack's latest con nearly caused a deadly nanotechnological plague to sweep through the human race, but he helped the Doctor and Rose end it before joining the TARDIS crew.
Going back to Cardiff to refuel the TARDIS from a space-time rift, the Doctor, Rose and Jack found that one of the Slitheen had survived, posing as Margaret Blaine. Blaine was exposed to the heart of the TARDIS and was regressed into an egg. It was during this episode that the Doctor first noticed that he and Rose had kept coming across the words "Bad Wolf".
At some point, the Ninth Doctor had at least three unchronicled adventures involving the sinking of the RMS Titanic, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the eruption of Krakatoa in the 19th Century. These are revealed in Rose, but their placement in the Ninth Doctor's chronology remains unknown. Many fans assume that they must occur after Rose — but necessarily before his regeneration at the end of the series — since the Doctor's comments about his appearance in that first episode suggest he has only recently regenerated (or at least not had an opportunity to look in a mirror since). However, the first of these adventures may actually have taken place immediately after his regeneration, since he is shown in a photo (taken in Southampton in 1912) to be wearing period clothes (Eccleston was dressed and shot specially) which resemble those worn by the Eighth Doctor. The Ninth Doctor refuses to make any concessions to contemporary fashion elsewhere in his travels (though he later insists that Rose dress appropriately for the Victorian era), being very precious about his look, which is deliberately most unlike that worn by any previous incarnations. Also, it is strongly implied that he saved the family pictured with him, by dissuading them from boarding the doomed ship — and, one episode later, he reveals that he himself was on board and ended up clinging to an iceberg.
When the Doctor and his companions became caught in a series of deadly versions of 20th century gameshows, they found themselves at the mercy of the Badwolf Corporation, based on Satellite Five, but a century after their last visit. However, the true enemy was soon revealed to be the Daleks. The Dalek Emperor had survived the Time War and had rebuilt the Dalek race. The Doctor sent Rose back to her own time in the TARDIS, before attempting to destroy the Dalek army. However, when she saw more "Bad Wolf" graffiti, she realised it was somehow a message linking her to the events in the future. Managing to open up the heart of the TARDIS, she absorbed the energies of the time vortex, and used it to destroy the Daleks. In order to save Rose from being consumed from within by those energies, the Doctor absorbed the fatal energy himself. However, the damage to his cells caused him to regenerate into the Tenth Doctor.
