Doctor Who and Wing Commander

Lt.Overload

Lt.Overload

Rear Admiral
I never noticed how many actors from the Wing Commander movie have played roles in the BBC Sci-Fi show Doctor Who.

It started when I was watching the recent season finale; Ken Bones, the admiral from Pegasus Base at the beginning of WC, is The General, wearing some familiar-looking armor. He also appeared in the 2013 special "The Day of the Doctor" but, somehow, I totally didn't realize it was the same person. Don't expect to see him in future episodes, because he was killed off (and subsequently regenerated into a new person). I decided to look back and see who else I missed.

Criag Kelly, who played Falk in the movie, voices a character named Joe in the 2003 flash-animated Doctor Who story, Scream of the Shalka.

Obutu, played by Hugh Quarshie, who you may also know as General Panaka in Star Wars Episode I, played Solomon, the leader of a Hooverville, in the 2007 two parter Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks.

And finally Admiral Tolwyn, David Warner, played Professor Grisenko in the 2013 story Cold War.

I knew there was a reason I liked this show. :)
 
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I was a huge fan as a kid, didn't much care for the reboot aside for the occasional Moffat and Cornell script but since 2010 it's become a full blown obsession for me. Episodes like Heaven Sent, Flatline, The Girl Who Waited, The Doctors Wife and The Big Bang couldn't exist in any other show and are the best it has ever produced in its very long history.

I don't have many other guest appearances to contribute, but David Warner also appeared in serveral Big Finish Doctor Who audios.

Nicholas Briggs (the voice of the Daleks) is fond of more traditional scifi and so many of his audios, such as the Nowhere Place introduce Wing Commander-esque scenarios.

Obviously John Hurt was in Privateer 2 and played the War Doctor on TV and audio.
 
It should come as no surprise that there is a LOT of crossover between Doctor Who and Privateer 2: The Darkening, as both were genre productions in the UK. A likely incomplete list…

Possibly the biggest: Mary Tamm was the first Time Lady Romana alongside Tom Baker for a series in 1978 and went on to be the escaping Auntie Maria Gabriel in The Darkening. Sadly, she passed away in 2012.

Stephen Jenn played Secker (the suspected drug smuggler) in Nightmare of Eden, alongside the second Romana and then Hugo Carmichael’s assistant in Privateer 2. He has also sadly passed away recently.

Brian Blessed played boisterous (when isn’t he?) King Yrcanos in Mindwarp and then the beer-swilling Bexian friar, Uncle Kashumai, in Privateer 2. (I had my first crush on Peri!)

Don Warrington was the doomed helmsman of the Canera in Privateer 2’s introductory cutscene, and then he played the alternate-universe president in the Doctor Who relaunch’s Rise of the Cybermen.

Kevork Malikyan (bless you) played Kemel Rudkin (bless you) in the classic The Wheel in Space (he’s the guy who discovers the Cybermats and then is killed) and then Tri-System hacker Dimitri Avignoni (bless you) in Privateer 2.

Derek Lea was the horrific Kronos in Privateer 2 and then in several earlier episodes of the Doctor Who relaunch.

Jessica Martin played Mags, the werewolf in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, and then provided comm voices in Privateer 2.

Joh Rowe (Alberto Fossa) and Nadim Sawalha (Nelson Ramirez) have done voice work for Doctor Who Big Finish audio productions.


A couple more from the Wing Commander movie (which owes most of these to the fact that Chris went for a cast of European character actors and shot the film in Luxembourg.)

Richard Dillane played Hunter in Wing Commander and then Carter in Let’s Kill Hitler and The Wedding of River Song.

Cyril Nri was a Confed security officer (blink and you miss him) and The Shopkeeper in two episodes of Sarah Jane Adventures (the guardian of time fellow introduced late in the show.)

Paul Courtenay Hyu was a comm officer in Wing Commander and then one of the space marines in Sleep No More.

And then the Tiger Claw’s helmsman, Fraser James, went on to do voice work for multiple Big Finish audio productions.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
(I had my first crush on Peri!)
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Same here, small world (that or her outfit in the two Doctors preoccupied the thoughts of every 80s child).

I take your encyclopaedic knowledge of wing commander as a given these days but I have to say that's the most impressive name dropping of Doctor Who bit parts I've heard since Toby Hadokes Moths Ate My Dr Who Scarf.
 
I will confess it wasn't from memory, I updated a list I posted in a Usenet discussion long ago :)
 
Pedro said:
I was a huge fan as a kid, didn't much care for the reboot aside for the occasional Moffat and Cornell script but since 2010 it's become a full blown obsession for me. Episodes like Heaven Sent, Flatline, The Girl Who Waited, The Doctors Wife and The Big Bang couldn't exist in any other show and are the best it has ever produced in its very long history.

I don't have many other guest appearances to contribute, but David Warner also appeared in serveral Big Finish Doctor Who audios.

Nicholas Briggs (the voice of the Daleks) is fond of more traditional scifi and so many of his audios, such as the Nowhere Place introduce Wing Commander-esque scenarios.

Obviously John Hurt was in Privateer 2 and played the War Doctor on TV and audio.
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I KNEW I recognized your profile picture. It's the robot things from The Girl Who Waited, specifically, Rory the robot.

Makes you think if an episode could work in the Wing Commander universe. Some human would be explaining that we're fighting a bitter war against anthropomorphic feline aliens--

Oh wait, they did have cat people in two episodes...shoot.
 
Lt.Overload said:
Oh wait, they did have cat people in two episodes...shoot.
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Lets forget that episode ever happened... make that all of series 2 bar Girl in the Fireplace and School Reunion.

Still, a slightly better costume than the Cheetah people...
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Lt.Overload said:
Not a fan of David Tennant or just Russel T Davies?
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Russell T Davies as a showrunner I liked, he brought in a lot of talent - as a writer not a fan at all. In series 1 that was all ok as every one of the guest writers was phenomenal. Rob Shearman, Paul Cornell, Steven Moffat, and Mark Gatiss gave his best episode by far in that first year. Series 2 didn't have such strong guest writers so my dislike for RTDs writing style actually put me off so much that I gave up making a point of watching the show live from Love and Monsters right up until the End of Time.

Still he will always have Midnight and Waters of Mars to his name - Midnight in particular was a superb piece of writing which played to his strengths and had none of his usual excesses.

David Tennant I like, I'm not as wild about his portrayal of the Doctor as the rest of the fanbase, but he sits comfortably in the upper half of my rankings. Matt Smith has been my personal favourite of the revived series. Eccleston and Capaldi are superb when the scripts are playing to their personal strengths but less capable of making a middling episode watchable like Smith or Tom Baker.
 
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