Doctor Who: 11 Previous Stories That The Peter Capaldi Era Should Learn From

3. The Unquiet Dead

The moment when Christopher Eccleston really earned the title of The Doctor occurred around the halfway mark of The Unquiet Dead. Prior to this point he had been good, if a little goofy, but so surface level. You could tell that there was something more going on beneath the surface if you really watched him, but so far he'd just rolled along through a couple of fairly wacky adventures. The good guys were good, the bad guys were bad. Ethical positions were clear. Then The Gelth happened. It was a simple enough set up; They needed dead bodies in order to survive. We had dead bodies that we were sort of not using at the moment. Looked at from a clinical perspective it's a perfectly reasonable exchange to propose. Rose, being human and not looking at things clinically decreed that there was no way we could let disembodied alien gas walk around wearing other peoples dead bodies on the grounds that it was unseemly. To which The Doctor retorted. 'It's a different morality. Get used to it or go home.' It was a direct slap down to Rose's assumption that her perspective was the only valid one and it's at the heart of what the best of Doctor Who is saying. Because you are able to travel space and time, it doesn't mean that you get to impose your own standards onto it.