Mini-Review: The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot

It’s the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who, and Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy aren’t feeling celebratory. Grand Moff Steven’s shooting this Day of the Doctor thing and is using their likenesses from archive footage, but is he giving them a guest spot like Tom Baker? No. Is he giving them a fun little minisode like Paul McGann? No! This is rubbish, and something must be done – so the three spurned classic Doctors team up. If Moffat won’t even invite them to participate, they may as well simply gatecrash the filming and sneak their way into the production…

Whilst The Day of the Doctor marked the show’s 50th Anniversary with a continuity-heavy episode which leaned into the show’s mythology whilst also revising it, and An Adventure In Time and Space provided a hagiography of the original production team (and proved fresh for revision in its own way, with the final scene where William Hartnell has a vision of Matt Smith at the TARDIS controls being remixed to show Ncuti Gatwa in the most recent retransmission), The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot might be my favourite part of the anniversary celebrations. It’s a zero-budget, cheap little thing that’s full of heart, and that’s what those three Doctors’ eras were at their best, and whilst it could have gone very, very self-indulgent with the cameos, it actually uses them more artfully.

Peter Davison not only co-stars in this – he also wrote and directed it, and it was produced by Georgia Tennant, his daughter and David Tennant’s wife. This isn’t a Davison family love-in by any means, however – as well as bringing Colin and Sylvester along for the ride, Davison crams in cameos from a dizzying number of actors and behind-the-scenes contributors to the show from over the years, both from the classic era and the revival period, giving a heap of folk who weren’t participating in either of the bigger, fancier anniversary spectaculars a chance to be involved in some small way.

Most of the humour is at Davison, Baker, and McCoy’s expense; Davison is initially set up to be desperate to be involved because he told his younger children he would be, but it quickly becomes apparent that they don’t really care and so he’s only trying to get into The Day of the Doctor to serve his own ego. The dream sequence he has where Matt Smith, Jenna-Louise Coleman, and Steven Moffat all heap praise on him as he turns up to take part in the reboot, only for Janet Fielding to show up to tell him he’s fooling himself, is superb.

McCoy overhyping his part in The Hobbit (and Davison dismissing it as a “flash-in-the-pan $5 million dollar picture” and Colin Baker being openly catty about the whole thing) is similarly good – and he even managed to get Peter Jackson and Ian McKellen to film a bit for the special on the set of The Hobbit, which is probably the best thing shot on that set come to think of it. Colin Baker is a particularly good sport here, depicting himself obsessively trapping his family in the living room to endlessly rewatch the Vengeance On Varos DVD extras, but all three Doctors throw themselves into the joke where each of them is fixated on their past in the show.

Having thoroughly made fun of himself and his co-conspirators, Davison has room to take a few pops at others. The joke where they call Tom Baker only to call the Fourth Doctor midway through Shada (at the same instant he and Romana are snatched away during The Five Doctors) is particularly good, because on the one hand, you can read it as praising Tom for being more authentically Doctor-y than any of them, but on the other hand you can read it as razzing him for not taking part in The Five Doctors.

The best jokes, however, are those directed at the showrunners. Moffat at his desk playing with his action figures is about as devastating a slam on his stewardship on the show as you can hope for, and he’s going along with it happily here with all the lack of self-awareness of someone who doesn’t realise how accurate the joke it is. Moffat having a nightmare in which a host of companion’s faces swirl around, like the Fifth Doctor’s dying vision in The Caves of Androzani, is also chuckle-worthy, particularly with the way Matthew Waterhouse/Adric prompts him to jerk awake like it’s a nightmare, and having the final scene showing the Grand Moff in the process of editing The Day of the Doctor and cutting to credits when he says “cut it” is a neat Vengeance On Varos nod.

Moffat isn’t the only showrunner to get it in the neck; the gag where RTD phones up towards the end and it turns out he’s just as desperate to appear in the spoof as the Doctors are to be in The Day of the Doctor is lovely too, as is the shot of action figures on his desk. (It’s even funnier now he’s showrunner again – talk about playing the long game!) Still, at a point when the show under Moffat had lost the sense of effortless fun it had formerly enjoyed, something like The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot was just what was needed to bring things down to Earth a bit.

According to McCoy, the BBC said no to a sequel for the 60th Anniversary, but really that’s fair enough – between cameos in The Power of the Doctor and episodes of Tales of the TARDIS focused on them, the Fifth to Seventh Doctors have been getting a fair bit of love recently, so the schtick wouldn’t work. Besides, a better comedy concept presents itself – Mark Gatiss has been talking up the idea of doing a sequel to An Adventure In Time and Space chronicling the 1985 hiatus and The Trial of a Time Lord, and that has scope to be an even better farce. Unless and until that happens, this is the Doctor Who equivalent of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace or Cruise of the Gods, in terms of being a comedy about the people behind a beloved show – except this time the show is real.