What to Binge This Weekend: Travel Back in Time to the Christopher Eccleston Incarnation of 'Doctor Who'

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These days, it’s hard to imagine a time when Doctor Who and its time-traveling, face-regenerating titular character weren’t a regular staple of the sci-fi TV landscape. But there was a prolonged 15-year period where the Doctor and his preferred mode of transport, the dimension-hopping TARDIS, were buried in deep storage. Debuting in 1963 in its native England, the series enjoyed a 26-season run on the BBC (along with accompanying airings on PBS in America) before it was yanked from the schedule in 1989. Aside from a widely derided TV movie that aired on Fox in 1996, Doctor Who was allowed to languish in the past, a relic of a bygone era of noticeably (but adorably) cheesy low-budget science fiction.

That changed a decade ago, when Russell T Davies brought the franchise out of the past and into the 21st century. Premiering in England on March 26, 2005, the rebooted Who kicked off a revival that’s currently working on its ninth season and fourth Doctor. Davies himself has long since departed the series, along with the actor who played the first contemporary Doctor, Christopher Eccleston. But Eccleston’s entire 13-episode run is streaming on Netflix, and there’s no better way to celebrate new Who’s 10th birthday than by looking back at its first year and appreciating how it reconstructed the franchise into something that, for now at least, seems built to last.

It’s worth remembering that Doctor Who returned to television in the wake of the Battlestar Galactica reboot, which took a goofy ‘70s sci-fi show aimed primarily at kids and transformed it into a gritty and intensely serialized adult drama. While Davies avoids pushing his Who into territory that’s as dark as BSG, there’s a distinct line of demarcation between this Doctor and the ones that came before. That’s because Eccleston’s Doctor — the ninth in a line of 12 regenerations — is a war survivor, having emerged from the prolonged and deadly Time War as the only living Time Lord. (Or so he believes anyway.) And even though he doesn’t openly admit it, the writing and Eccleston’s performance make it clear that the Ninth Doctor is suffering from the Time Lord version of PTSD. He’s temperamental, prickly, and prone to doing and saying odd things. But he’s also a compelling presence, which is why adventure-seeking British lass, Rose (Billie Piper), willingly becomes his traveling companion.

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The Doctor/companion partnership had always been a key part of Who history, with the tenor of the relationship generally being either parental or collegiate. But Rose and the Ninth Doctor share a bond that’s still unique in the show’s previous and subsequent run. It’s not romantic — that would come later, with the Tenth Doctor, and besides, Rose already has an age-appropriate boyfriend throughout the season — but there’s a definite charge to their interactions that’s more intense than mere friendship. Though Piper was still relatively new to acting, having come off a career as a teen pop star, she holds her own against Eccleston, whose Doctor comes to respect and depend on Rose in ways he probably never would have imagined prior to their first encounter. Behind the camera, Davies does an excellent job threading the needle of their relationship and devising an overall arc that reveals itself as the episodes progress, building to a genuinely emotional farewell to Doc No. 9 and an amusing introduction to Doc No. 10, played by David Tennant, who arguably has risen to the position of being the agreed-upon Top Doctor.

Related: 5 Ways David Tennant Was Everything You Hoped He’d Be at His First Wizard World Comic Con

In the decade since his one-and-done season, Eccleston has shied away from publicly discussing his reasons for cutting his time in the TARDIS short. An online account of a 2011 acting master class conversation with the actor at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket provides some clues, though. The actor is reported to have said, “I left Doctor Who because I could not get along with the senior people. I didn’t agree with the way things were being run. I didn’t like the culture that had grown up, around the series. So I left, I felt, over a principle.” The fact that he declined to return for the all-star 50th anniversary special shows that he’s sticking to that particular principle. But his resistance to revisiting the franchise doesn’t undermine his achievement during new Who’s freshman year. Doctor Who exists and endures today in large part because Eccleston created a complex, fascinating Doctor that was made for that particular time… and for the ages.    

All 13 episodes of Doctor Who’s first season are streaming on Netflix, along with six additional seasons.