Well, as we saw from the last two entries in this What If?, quite a lot.
Mickey joined the TARDIS crew a Series earlier along with Rose's often mentioned but never actually seen best friend Shareen.
The Doctor showed a far more callous and far less forgiving demeanor when dealing with alien threats such as the Slitheen, the Dalek in Henry van Statten's basement, or Jack during the events of The Doctor Dances and The Empty Child.
Also, the words "Bad Wolf" actually had a point, rather than being used because Russell T. Davies thought they sounded cool and thought that sounding cool was enough to make an arc.
When we last left the Doctor, he had left Mickey back on Earth in 2006 after their desperate ploy to defeat the Daleks and Fenric left the Earth in the year 200,100 as a mass grave of billions. Mickey has left the TARDIS, seemingly for good, and the Doctor is once more alone as he was after the Time War.
So where do we begin with Series Two? Well, obviously with The Christmas Invasion. The events with the Sycorax invasion were still going to happen whether or not the Doctor was involved. Now, instead of a mostly comatose David Tennant and the companions having to lead most of the episode, the Doctor is actively involved in things. While Harriet Jones - MP for Horrible Running Joke - tends to things alongside UNIT (and Torchwood), the Doctor is skulking about to see the arrival of Guinevere One on Mars and take his mind off of his troubles. When he picks up the satellite being snatched up by the Sycorax, however, he decides to get involved for real.
The Doctor is a little bit different than we remember him from the finale. Like the picture above, Nine's close-cropped hair is a little less closely cropped and he's started on that rugged Christopher Eccleston beard as in the picture at the top. We're also going to change up the look a little bit, since this is a what if? story. While I like the Ninth Doctor's outfit (I know a lot of people don't, but still), it's in the Doctor's nature to change up his outfit every so often. Therefore, in this scenario, the Doctor still wears his leather jacket but is also quite comfortable in just a jumper or even a nice button-down shirt in a few episodes.
A little bit of visual variation goes a long way.
Also, I like the thought of the Doctor having adventures that aren't onscreen, something which Russell T. Davies seemed to be violently afraid of during his era what with the Doctor aging with the show over his tenure.
Regardless, the events of The Christmas Invasion would go very much like the latter half of the broadcast episode. The Sycorax would bust out blood control to try and cow the humans, maybe with us getting a cameo of Mickey being among those affected by it to give us a bit of stakes. Likewise the Sycorax would pull Harriet Jones and her detail up to speak to them and for the Earth. Here's where the Doctor would get involved, probably after the death of Mr. Welsh Name but before the UNIT officer, and challenge the Sycorax Leader to a sword fight for the fate of the Earth.
Notably, the Doctor doesn't lose a hand to the Leader, but still manages to handily defeat him. Likely with the same exchange that Ten has in the broadcast episode with the satsuma that ended with the sudden fall. Then, of course, would come the use of the Torchwood weapon and...the Doctor not having it in him to drum up the righteous fury that Ten had in the episode to bring down Harriet Jones' government.
While it has clearly been some time for him, the wounds from Satellite Five are still very fresh. It's clear that the Doctor is still haunted by what happened there and perhaps we get an echo voice-over of Mickey's last words to him to drive the point home. In the end, all he can do is wish the Prime Minister a Happy Christmas before heading off back to his TARDIS, still alone.
So, already, we get some big changes - Harriet Jones still being Prime Minister and Britain's Golden Age continuing unimpeded without a Harold Saxon to be found. More on that much later.
So, as we said with The End of the World last time, New Earth doesn't happen. Lady Cassandra is living as flat as ever (if not flatter) after making piles of cash from the deaths on Platform One, and the terrible experiments of the Sisterhood of Cat Fetish Nuns are not exposed. So what does happen here? New companion introduction story, of course! This time, I've decided to play with the timeline a little bit and bring in a companion a little early, specifically - Martha Jones.
No, seriously.
I haven't gotten to Martha's episodes in my retrospective of the revived series of Doctor Who but, in short, I do actually like her. I just find it a shame that her era was completely overshadowed by Saint Rose of Tyler. Here, we don't have that problem.
Here, I'm thinking of a scenario set up in a hospital to maintain the overall theme, perhaps going City of Death-esque with an alien or aliens trying to work through time to cure some plague in the future that's destined to wipe out their species in the future. Something that would give Martha a valuable lesson about changing the past or the future early on. The Doctor might see something in her and give her the opportunity to travel with him, which she accepts as she does in Series 3 of the actual show.
So basically Smith and Jones without the vampire shenanigans and more people ripping off masks to reveal alien heads that were clearly too big to have been under the mask.
Next comes Tooth and Claw, which can pretty much go as broadcast while removing the tone deaf "comedic" bet. The werewolf, the monks (though kung fu for no reason that's never used again can probably go), and the establishment of Torchwood along with the Doctor and Martha being knighted and banished by Queen Victoria.
After that, School Reunion. A major change in the episode is that the Doctor and now Martha don't get a call from Mickey to investigate. Rather, the two arrive of their on volition to the ongoing events. Here, the Doctor takes over the caretaker position (as he will in the Capaldi era in the proper timeline) while Martha serves as a substitute for the currently missing school nurse. This lets the pair have their respective meetings with Sarah Jane Smith and Mickey. Yes, Mickey Smith is back in rotation but has become a companion to Sarah Jane rather than the Doctor.
Mickey and Sarah Jane have swapped stories about the Doctor. Mickey is still rather embittered because of everything that happened with Shareen and Fenric. Sarah Jane is still fond of the adventures she had alongside the Third and Fourth Doctors and is rather shocked by what she's heard of the Doctor from Mickey's events. Here, too, we have definitive links established that the classic series and the new are one and the same, or at least the new is a continuation of the old.
This all comes to a head during the nighttime investigation into the Defry Vale school. Mickey is a bit more openly hostile to the Doctor, very much taking on Rose's role rather than the one he had in the episode. Martha has a far more friendly relationship with Sarah Jane than Rose did with her, since she's mostly new to the scene and has only really had two adventures. She marvels at the tales that Sarah Jane tells - stories of Sontarans in the Middle Ages, the Loch Ness Monster coming up the Thames, and anti-matter monsters from the far future, among others - and gets a taste of the wonderful and exciting things that traveling with the Doctor can bring.
She also gets the negative side of traveling with the Doctor from Mickey, both Martha and Sarah Jane are horrified at Mickey's stories about what happened on Satellite Five in the far future. The Doctor does nothing to defend his actions besides saying that it was the only way. Twice he had to destroy a world he loved, and twice he regretted it, but could see no other way. He uses his telepathic powers to show Sarah, Martha, and even Mickey projections of some of the things in the Time War, which leave them rattled.
The Doctor tells Sarah that it's been centuries since they parted ways, but that he's never forgotten her. This would also serve as a definitive mark on how old the Doctor actually is, since I didn't really like Russell T. Davies winding the clock back to 900 and Moffat's shrug of God on it wasn't any better in that regard. The Doctor, in my mind, should have been somewhere between 1,800 and 1,900 during the David Tennant era, and so that will be the Doctor's age in this scenario (maybe 1,881 if you want me to be exact and cheeky).
Either way, it has been quite some time since they parted and the Doctor is definitely not the man he was, wishing he knew who that was. Sarah Jane tells him that, while she can't tell him who he is, she can tell him who he was.
To her, the Doctor is the man who makes people better. Makes the universe better. Whether or not Gallifrey and the Time Lords exist doesn't change that. The Doctor realizes that she's right, and that he has a long road ahead of him to get back to the person that he was. There are also obvious undertones of the romantic feelings the two share and have since Sarah left the TARDIS way back in The Hand of Fear.
As for the plot of the episode, it goes about the same, tying into the Doctor's guilt with the destruction of Gallifrey and how the Skasis Paradigm could fix everything, even what happened back on Satellite Five if he wanted to. Sarah and Mickey both manage to talk him out of it, both having come to the consensus on the Doctor and life - everything ends. They defeat the Krillitanes and save the day, though K-9 is still destroyed and later replaced by the Doctor.
Sarah passes on the same advice she does to Rose in the original episode to Martha, namely that some things are worth getting your heart broken for. However, Martha does not have any romantic feelings toward the Doctor...at the present, anyway.
Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of what Russell did with Martha's tenure as a companion, but I'll get to that when I get to that in the actual reviews for Series 3.
Mickey has come to be able to forgive the Doctor, but he reinforces what he said in the Series One finale - he can't do it anymore. Like Sarah Jane, though, he encourages Martha to keep traveling with the Doctor in spite of it all. Mickey leaves the Doctor his cell phone just in case something like this comes up again, before he leaves.
The Girl in the Fireplace comes next and plays out very much the same with only a few minute differences. The most egregious would be that of the Doctor, being that the Ninth is a bit more cynical and withdrawn than the Tenth. Would he still fall in love with Madame de Pompadour? Probably not, though I could still see it easily going the other way. Perhaps, in the end, a poignant little moment as the Doctor wishes he could feel that sort of thing again, as he did with Sarah Jane many centuries before. Martha, in this instance, being a supportive friend rather than a love interest who is given nothing to do and reaffirming their friendship as just that: a friendship.
Next is Rise of the Cybermen, with the TARDIS crashlanding on the parallel Earth as in the original episode. Luckily, Pete's world isn't quite the complete hellhole that it was the last time we visited it. Rather, it's like it is at the beginning of Rise. John Lumic is about to unveil Human.2 to mass critical forced acceptance, Jackie Tyler is about to celebrate her "39th" birthday, and a familiar face is leading an insurgent group known as the Preachers - that being Anna Jones.
Like in the episode, the Doctor gives up a decade of his life to power the TARDIS, but as they still need time to charge it, he and Martha help the Preachers investigate Pete Tyler and thus Lumic and Cybus Industries. As expected, the party goes to pot almost immediately as the Cybermen arrive and begin their rise. Detecting the Doctor's strange biology, they declare that he and his fellows are rogue elements and must be deleted...
As in the version of The Age of Steel that we saw onscreen, the Doctor uses the TARDIS part to blast the Cybermen to Kingdom Come and allow himself, Martha, and the Preachers to escape. The same beats play out overall, leading to the showdown with Lumic and actually managing to avoid the death of the double as Martha manages to save Anna. Lumic is defeated and the Doctor gives Jake, Anna, and Pete the means by which to defeat the Cybermen - the inhibitor code. The Doctor and Martha then depart in the TARDIS, heading back to their own universe having inspired another one to fight the good fight.
And...that's the end of Part 1. How will the rest of Series 2 play out? So far, we've seen it mostly the same as it was broadcast with only a few variations. Will this remain the same as we go on? Or will MadCap decide to throw a little zig-zag into it as he did for Series 1? Keep your eyes peeled for Series 2, Part 2. It'll be coming next week!
For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin.
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