Moffat explained to Screen Rant: “[The Doctor] has slightly borderline irrational anger at soldiers and religious people, even though he’s full of faith and is pretty much a warrior himself, all self-loathing. I think it just gets him a bit wound up, and I wanted to wind him up. A soldier with a clerical collar, who he ends up really liking, of course, is the perfect person to face him with when he is trying to control his mood state on a smart landmine.”
But the last time we saw the Anglican Marines in “A Good Man Goes to War,” they were going up against the Doctor in his fight to save Amy. So, is Mundy technically aligned with the bad guys?
“I never saw them as straightforward bad guys, to be honest, at all,” Moffat revealed to Screen Rant. “In ‘Time of Angels’ and ‘Flesh and Stone,’ Father Octavian is the most heroic character there. The way he dies to save the Doctor, and the Doctor realizes throughout that story that he’s misjudged him brutally, as he’s inclined to, just because he gets wound up. He’s a scientist adventurer who has a slight suspicion that he might be God himself, so he just gets really annoyed at that.”
Varada Sethu Won’t Be the First Actor to Play Multiple Roles on Doctor Who
When it comes to Sethu’s Mundy, the relevant detail is that she survives her debut episode. This is in stark contrast with Coleman’s first appearance in Doctor Who, as well as the time Freema Agyeman popped up in Doctor Who’s “Doomsday” a full season before she appeared as Martha Jones in “Smith and Jones.” Agyeman’s first Who character was Adeola, though we were later told that was Martha’s cousin and that they just happened to look identical.
In fact, there’s a very long history of Doctor Who accidentally casting actors in small roles, and, later, bringing them back in bigger roles. Lalla Ward appeared as a character named Princess Astra in the January-February 1979 Doctor Who serial “The Armageddon Factor.” By September 1979, Ward became the second known regeneration of the Time Lord Romana, starting with “Destiny of the Daleks.” Hilariously, in her first appearance as Princess Astra, Ward starred alongside Mary Tamm, who played the first Romana. “Destiny of the Daleks” finds Romana II telling the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) that she chose to look like Princess Astra on purpose, lamp shading the return of Lalla Ward in a different part.
Doctor Who later did this exact same thing when Peter Capaldi played the Twelfth Doctor, after having previously played Lobus Caecilius in the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) episode “The Fires of Pompeii.” In the 2015 episode “The Girl Who Died” the Twelfth Doctor remembered when he was David Tennant, and rescuing a guy who looks like Peter Capaldi!
