to the original idea of a race seeking perfection and sacrificing their humanity in the process. Landing on their home planet of Mondas, the fifth Doctor and Nyssa realise that as the sphere drifts through space and slowly becomes uninhabitable, the entire population is going to receive cybernetic implants in order to survive which will have the side effects they’ve already seen in the races’s future. The Doctor is essentially a tourist at this race’s destruction.

This is body horror at its darkest as instantly likeable characters are slowly operated on and become beings with a vague notion of their original life, whose relatives, like those at the bedside of coma victims, cling onto the hope that the person they know is still in there, somewhere, behind those darkfriends, but at the time it was thrilling and heartbreaking as the beach scene with Rose in Doomsday and the mind-wiping climax of Journey’s End.

Meet The Doctor by Russell T Davies

With such a short life onscreen, the Christopher Eccleston model had precious little time to establish himself as a presence off, with just a few comic strips, six novels and an annual, most of it still in the process of trying to get used to the show being back and the audience for the stories skewing backwards to children again after years of playing to an aging fan choir.

Unlike the McGann era which eventually ran to hundreds and hundreds of tales with only one on television, Eccleston’s version appeared in just twenty-five including his thirteen tv appearances.

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