The Next Doctor

"The Next Doctor" is a special episode of the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who, broadcast on 25 December 2008 as the fourth Doctor Who Christmas special of the revived series. During its original airing, the episode had an audience of 13.1 million viewers and was the second-most-watched programme of Christmas Day 2008. It was the final Doctor Who episode to be filmed in standard definition. David Tennant stars as the Tenth Doctor with one-off companions Jackson Lake (David Morrissey) and Rosita Farisi (Velile Tshabalala). The episode is set in London during the Christmas period of 1851. In the episode, the Doctor teams up with a man who appears to be another incarnation of himself; in their quest to foil a plot by the Cybermen to create a giant Cyberman called a CyberKing under the control of workhouse matron Miss Hartigan (Dervla Kirwan), the two inadvertently discover that the "new" Doctor is actually Jackson Lake, a regular human who began suffering from amnesia and believing himself to be the Doctor after interacting with Cyberman technology. Plot The Tenth Doctor lands in London on Christmas Eve, 1851. Overhearing cries for help, he encounters a man calling himself "the Doctor" and his companion Rosita attempting and failing to capture a Cybershade. The Doctor believes the man, who is suffering from amnesia, may be a future incarnation of himself. The man, dubbed the Next Doctor, takes the Doctor to a nearby house of a recently deceased reverend, believing him to be tied to a series of disappearances around London. Inside, they discover a pair of Cyberman data-storage infostamps, which the Next Doctor recalls holding the night that he lost his memories. The two Doctors regroup with Rosita at the Next Doctor's base. The Doctor comes to realize that the Next Doctor is really a human, Jackson Lake, the supposed first missing person. The Doctor suspects that Jackson had encountered the Cybermen and used the infostamps, containing knowledge of the Doctor, to ward them off. Jackson's mind then entered a fugue state from the trauma of the Cybermen killing his wife, and as the infostamp had infused his mind with knowledge of the Doctor, he came to believe he was the Doctor. The Doctor and Rosita set off to try to find the source of the Cybermen.