Wednesday 23 November 2022

L is for... Lethbridge-Stewart, Captain


When the Twelfth and First Doctors encountered each other at the South Pole in December 1986, they were joined by a British Army officer who had been taken out of time. In 1914 he had been trapped in a fox-hole with a German soldier with whom he was unable to communicate. Their stand-off was ended when time seemed to stand still, and he then found himself in Antarctica.
An alien group named Testimony were responsible. The two Doctors set out to find out who they were and why they had tried to abduct the Captain. It transpired that Testimony were benevolent. They took people out of time in the instant before their deaths in order to archive their memories, before replacing them back into history.
The Captain was returned to 1914, but the Twelfth Doctor pushed time along slightly so that he survived. There then followed the Christmas Truce, when British and German soldiers temporarily suspended hostilities to play football and share food and drink.
It turned out that the Captain was named Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart, and he was the grandfather of the Brigadier. The Doctor promised to keep an eye on his family.

Played by: Mark Gatiss. Appearances: Twice Upon A Time (2017).
  • Third on-screen appearance by Gatiss in the series, after Professor Lazarus (The Lazarus Experiment) and Gantok (The Wedding of River Song). For the latter, he used the name Rondo Haxton - a tribute to the actor Rondo Hatton who had played the "Hoxton Creeper" in Sherlock Holmes and the Pearl of Death, House of Horrors and Brute Man. Gatiss also voiced the spitfire pilot in Victory of the Daleks.
  • Gatiss has acted opposite 9 different Doctor actors, though not necessarily in Doctor Who itself - and he has also written for nine different Doctors, counting novels and audios as well as on TV.

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