I’m watching a documentary on the new Doctor Who; in it is a retrospective of all the previous Doctors, and in that is enough footage to remind me why I like McGann’s. It’s a shame he never got more time; with some refinement he could have been close to the best. Almost ideal.

McGann’s was the emotional Doctor. It seems, after seven lives and a terrifying regeneration, something finally hit him. He becomes wistful, pensive, idealistic. At one point, he actually kisses his companion. It feels like he’s started to grasp the value of this life, of his whole situation. Of what it all means. He is sad, and fragile — and appreciative of everything. I guess he realizes that he might not have as much time as he’s always thought. Which must be weird, for a time lord.

All of the pieces are there. A roundness, a sense of dimension and balance. He gives the impression he’s looked through his past and decided who he is, and what matters to him. McGann brings a certain poignance to the whole arc of the series; he seems to imply that it’s going somewhere, that it has some internal structure, that there is some real evolution going on in the character. That we’ve been building to this moment. He makes it easier to go back and extrapolate, to get a piece of the Doctor’s mind. Just enough to understand him as a person, without robbing him of his mystery.

I say all this as I learn that Eccleston has ditched the role after a single season. After he leapfrogged all of the other actors in line to ask for the role, after he decided past Doctors were too foppish and that he wanted to modernize the character, and after exactly one episode has aired (to ten million viewers), away he goes. That’s… I mean. Hell. If you’re not up for commitment, then why bother with Doctor Who? Of all series? I taste lemons. There’s something weird when a companion hangs around longer than the Doctor himself.

This stunt puts Eccleston second to McGann in brevity, though McGann is to no blame for his part. Colin Baker was yanked out by the teeth, too. And McCoy just had the series cancelled on him. When Davison signed up, he only wanted to do three years; that was supposed to be a short run. And when his time was almost up, he regretted his earliier decision. So — yeah. Eccleston’s in a class of his own. Recall that the character is supposed to be running out of regenerations, and make of him what you will.

I still want to see McGann again. Surely there is some backstory to patch up here. We never did find out what happened to him — and there is plenty precedent for crossover.

EDIT: Or did we? I wasn’t aware that McGann had taped four full “seasons” of audio episodes. I knew he’d done some more work with the character; that these are actually considered seasons 27-30, however, is new to me. And this final episode was only released in December.

Well. Hell, then. I need to get ahold of these. I wonder how.

EDIT AGAIN: Jesus. It turns out that, after all of the novels and audio plays and junk, McGann is the second most well-recorded Doctor of all (following at 116 to McCoy’s 120). And a lot of stuff has happened during his era. And after the second episode of the new series, it seems that Davies considers it all canon. So maybe he hasn’t done that poorly after all. I still would like to see him in action again.