Welcome to Day 45 of my 47-day series about the revival version of Doctor Who (2005-present). I’ve come up with 47 topics / questions to answer, all of them basically positive and upbeat about the program. Each day (or as often as I can actually write these–so far so good!) I’ll pick one of them at random (using this convenient random number generator) and then write up an answer.
Why 47? It’s my favorite number.
Why Doctor Who? It’s my favorite show.
Why the modern day Doctor Who only? Simply because I remember it better.
Why only positive stuff? Because really, I write enough snark.
So, today, we spin the Random Number Generator, and it lands–amazingly quickly since there are really only two numbers left–on 8, which means today’s topic is
“Best Recurring Character”
So, technically a recurring character is anyone who wasn’t a regular, but appeared more than once (and I’d say, beyond just appearing in both parts of a two-parter.) They can be friends or enemies of the Doctor, heroes or villains, whatever. Some of the more popular ones include Captain Jack, Madame Vastra, Missy, Mickey Smith, Rory (before he became a regular), Danny Pink, Jackie Tyler, Wilfrid Mott…the list goes on and on.
Some of those guys I like, some I don’t. But I think my favorite has got to be…
River Song
It’s not so much that I’m enamored with River Song as a character, although I do generally like her. It’s more that by far she had the most interesting story out of all of these characters. She was intriguing when she debuted in Season 4’s Silence of the Library, but when Steven Moffat took over as the showrunner of the show a bit later, he turned her into a central figure of his first few seasons…really, of pretty much Matt Smith’s entire tenure as the Doctor. It’s Season Six where she really shines, though, appearing in six episodes, and having her identity & origins really the central mystery of the entire year.
Alex Kingston is a lot of fun in the part, and it’s interesting to note that she has decent chemistry with all three of the Doctors she’s played against. (Although she actually has appeared with others thanks to her recently showing up in some Big Finish audios).
Even though The Husbands of River Song was clearly intended to be a mighty send-off the character forever, with the earlier story The Name of the Doctor serving as her epilogue, I’ve always wanted to see her in one more final adventure, in which you find out that sometime after her “death”, the Doctor returned to the Library and downloaded her a flesh duplicate of her body and enjoyed another fifty years of off-screen adventures before she finally passed away completely. As is stands, the way the Doctor seems to ignore her in The Name of the Doctor kind of makes the final victory in Forest of the Dead a little pointless.
Click here for a master list for this series.
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