Somewhere in the Doctor Who production offices, deep within the BBC Wales complex (if there is such a place — go with me here) there is surely a list of “Stories Not to Pitch Us.” Nearly all serials have a list like this, consisting of stories ideas that are unsuitable because they change the lead character too much, because they hurt the franchise, or just because you don’t seriously think you’re the first freelancer to pitch that, do you? The following story idea is undoubtedly on that list:

It begins, as so many Doctor Who stories do, with the TARDIS arriving on a future Earth where everything seems calm and orderly… too calm and orderly, at least to the Doctor (“Never trust a utopia,” he’ll say to whatever fetching young lady is his companion at the time.) A bit of investigation reveals that this peace and order is, indeed, artificial, but it’s not achieved by force: instead all war, violence and conflict are defused before they even begin by a mysterious, unseen figure only ever referred to as “He” or “Him.” The Doctor can sense that time manipulation is afoot, and begins to suspect that this is the work of Daleks, or the Master, or even a lost Time Lord who somehow survived the Time War. Until he finds a little asteroid in the middle of nowhere where time literally stands still and finds the machine that is constantly making all those little alterations to history, to maintain “His” utopia —

— and finds it’s the TARDIS. His TARDIS. And it’s screaming, because it’s being made to violate time in ways it was never made to do — and to end history itself, grinding it down into the stasis of enforced peace.

Now He makes his appearance — he’s been watching the Doctor for some time, of course — and reveals that he is a future incarnation of the Doctor. It’s not clear whether he’s the last regeneration or whether he somehow extended his lifespan beyond the normal limit for Time Lords, but one thing is clear: he’s on his last go-round. (We’ll call him “Doctor Thirteen” for convenience; if this were a two-parter, that would be a good title for the second episode.) He explains how he saved the Earth, and the universe, again and again, and still it needed saving; how his allies died, and he got older and older, but his enemies just kept coming back.

Now the Doctor is given a choice: he can leave, and let things run their course until he winds up here again, or Doctor Thirteen will use his bastardized TARDIS to make him relive all the agonizing steps between them almost instantaneously. And the Doctor runs, but it’s no use because Doctor Thirteen is older and cannier than he is, and knows all his tricks, and in the end the Doctor is caught once more. The Doctor’s fetching young companion rescues him, of course, but it’s too late: in just a few minutes he’s experienced everything that brought Doctor Thirteen to where he is — the last defender of the Earth, all alone.

Except that our Doctor isn’t alone: though his companion couldn’t save him in time, the fact that she was there for him makes him realize that the only way he’ll ever run out of allies is if he turns humans into something not fit to be his companions. Together he and his companion fight Doctor Thirteen and defeat him, and Doctor Thirteen begs him not to destroy everthing he’s built, to have pity — after all, he was the Doctor once. But the Doctor turns back from the door to his TARDIS, shakes his head and says “Not you. You were never me.”

THE IMAGINED SITUATION IS: The BBC has decided to air a one-time four-hour miniseries event of Doctor Who. The miniseries will be entitled “The Eleven Doctors” and feature every single Doctor as the cast, with a number of companions rounding it out.

Paul McGann, Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant and Matt Smith will play the Eighth through Eleventh Doctors. (Some suggested that at 51 McGann was too old to play his Doctor, but fans argued that he deserved a second chance to play the Eighth Doctor again and really, 51? That’s not a big deal.) However, the remaining living former actors who have played the Doctor all agreed that they should let more age-appropriate actors play the younger incarnations of the earlier Doctors (perhaps with one or two making jokes about “the need for a sonic cane,”) and of course Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell are all long dead.

So:

1.) Who plays each of the first seven Doctors?

2.) Which companion does each Doctor get, if any? (Assume, for marketing purposes, that Amy Pond will be present and accounted for. Possibly Rory as well. And Sarah Jane Smith is a definite, played by Elizabeth Sladen.) Note that some Doctors will have to go without.

3.) Who then should play those companions?

To finish this post, I’ll give my answer for number 1:

First Doctor: Alan Rickman. Really, kind of obvious.
Second Doctor: Richard Coyle (of Coupling and Going Postal, among others). Has “Impish-but-clever-and-wise” down to a T.
Third Doctor: Stephen Fry. Has the sort of combination of comedic aura/gravitas that Jon Pertwee did; age-appropriate; would balance out Rickman as the second of the “older doctors” by being the friendlier one to the First Doctor’s icy, alien cool.
Fourth Doctor: Rowan Atkinson. A bit old for it, maybe, but he’s got the rubberface that the Fourth Doctor demands. Also, it would be fun to see him in an whiteboy Afro.
Fifth Doctor: Andrew Garfield (The Social Network). The Fifth Doctor is trickiest because you need someone young, from the “lost generation” of kids who grew up without a lot of Doctor Who. I considered Tom Hardy initially but Hardy is too buff and rugged to be the Fifth Doctor, who’s slightly unassuming in his looks. Garfield, I think, can pull it off. (And yes, he is British.)
Sixth Doctor: James Nesbitt (Jekyll). If you’re going to redeem the least-favorite Doctor, you need a real charismatic madman to pull it off.
Seventh Doctor: John Oliver (yes, The Daily Show‘s John Oliver). This is my stuntcasting pick, but I think Oliver can do the job.

Your turn.

My last TV column of 2010 is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

I am happy because this week I had the chance to reference the old “Give Like Santa, Save Like Scrooge” commercials Canadian Tire did every Christmas when I was growing up:

And we may joke about the prices back then for a Commodore 128 (and I had a Commodore when I was growing up and it was the best computer ever, dammit), but what strikes me is that this advert dates itself not by what’s being sold so much as the fact that they actually mention the specific prices in the ad. That just doesn’t happen any more.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

If you have not watched The Wire, incidentally, you are less of a human being. I am just saying: get on that.

I was vaguely tempted to do the legendarily mediocre progressive rap band instead, but they didn’t have enough members and there’s no “Chaotic Not Good at Songs” alignment.

Also, Andrew Wheeler, in homage, did an alignment chart for Glee here, although he made Rachel not be evil, which – no.

Over at BadAssNerd I’m getting called out for the Mad Men alignment chart:

Betty isn’t evil. At all. Frankly, I think it’s sexist that she keeps getting pigeonholed as the bad guy on the show when she’s no more bad than many of the men. Her crime – she’s not that much fun. Which is why the truly evil Roger Sterling gets to be Neutral Evil on the chart. He’s fun. We like watching him. But unlike Betty, Roger deliberately hurts people, and he does it for his own pleasure. He’s mean and he’s untrustworthy and he’s vain and he’s selfish. Truly Chaotic Evil.

Firstly, “the men” on Mad Men are varying levels of bad. Lane is honestly pretty decent, all things considered (yes, I know, disintegrating marriage – but he tries to make it work for longer than he frankly should, continues to support his estranged wife as is proper, and immediately tries to find another dedicated relationship). Sal is a big sweetheart. Don usually tries to be a good person and succeeds maybe half the time if he’s lucky. Ken is self-interested, but not amorally so. Bert Cooper is old-school for both good and bad. Harry is developing his asshole streak at present. The only real bastards on the show are Pete and Roger, and oh look they’re in the bottom row with Betty.

Secondly, I take issue with the idea that Betty isn’t evil because she’s “no worse than many of the men.” Betty is a meanspirited person. She clearly takes pleasure in hurting people she doesn’t like. She’s incredibly hateful – even borderline abusive – towards Sally. She’s capricious, inconstant and unreliable. She’s wildly paranoid and a massive control freak as regards her own personal preferences.

Now, because Mad Men is a good show, it develops why Betty is these things. I mean, Betty is pretty clearly fucked up. The show’s implied that she’s the product of an abusive, loveless upbringing. She’s so terrified of her own problems she’s only willing to talk about them with a child psychologist and then only in the context of small talk.

All of this is certainly true, but just because there are valid, understandable reasons that Betty has become a horrible person doesn’t change the fact that she’s a horrible person. It honestly strikes me as patronizing to say that because she’s a woman and therefore without an equivalent degree of personal agency to the men of the show, she can’t make her own moral and ethical decisions: she does so over the course of the series and unflaggingly makes the wrong/bad/selfish ones constantly. That’s evil, for the purpose of the Alignment Game.

Since the Mad Men one started up nerd slapfights in half a dozen places on the internet, here is another! I hereby declare it Alignment Chart Week here at mgkdotcom!

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.