Doctor Who, Year 60

Fifty-nine years ago today, the BBC aired the first episode of a new show called “Doctor Who”. That makes today the first day of year sixty for the program.  

 

To Spoil or Not to Spoil?

After watching the most recent episode (“The Power of the Doctor”), I had to decide whether or not to discuss it here in this post. There’s something for me to complain about in that episode (which is always fun for me here in the blog), but I’d rather not give away the big ending for those few of you who not only have yet to see it but have also managed to miss the myriad news leaks about the big ending in the months leading up to that episode’s airing.

Ultimately, I’ve decided to go ahead and spoil. I’m going to count on everyone who chooses to read this having seen up through last year’s episodes. And before I get to the most recent episode I’ll post a SPOILER WARNING.

You have been warned.

Origins of a Young Whovian

At some point in the early 1980s, my friend Bob started to watch a British sci-fi program on the local PBS affiliate (OPB) called “Doctor Who”. (Actually, I suspect that his mom started watching it and then got him watching it. Bob’s mom was always cool like that.)

Bob convinced our friend Chad to start watching it, and then sometime in the fall of 1983 they started telling me that I should watch it. I didn’t right away. Always doing other stuff at that time, or didn’t remember, or whatever the excuse of the day was. But eventually I managed to catch my first episode. It wasn’t an ideal starting place, being part 3 of a 4 part story (“The Visitation”). But it apparently held my interest enough for me to keep watching, because once I saw an entire story, I was a fan.

So, I mentioned to Bob and Chad at school one day that I’d just started watching, and they both cried out, “No!” in unison like they’d been rehearsing it. When I just stood there, looking at them questioningly, Bob quickly explained, “They changed the actor who plays the Doctor! This new guy is horrible!”

My first Doctor was Peter Davison. Theirs had been Tom Baker. Looking back at it, I can see where the transition between those two actors would have been somewhat jarring for a 7^th grader. Despite their protests, I continued to watch it.

It wasn’t too long after I started watching it that OPB aired the 90 minute long 20^th anniversary special “The Five Doctors” where the Doctor had to team up with his previous incarnations. Making me realize that there was a lot about this show that I still needed to learn.

So, I started doing research. Which, in 1983 meant buying reference materials. Books and such. (My good close personal friend the Internet was still in its infant form back in 83, and in no position to inform me about Doctor Who.) Fortunately, being that the show had just celebrated its 20^th anniversary, reference materials were available aplenty. Of particular importance to my Doctor Who education was a BBC published magazine I had bought via mail order called Doctor Who 20^th Anniversary Special.

It had all sorts of useful information. A look at the show’s beginnings, write-ups on all five Doctors, all of the companions, some of the more prominent enemies, and if memory serves, even a complete episode guide. Between that magazine and a couple of books I’d managed to pick up, I’d been able to gain enough academic knowledge about the program to understand a lot of what was going on.

I discovered the origins of the show in 1963 as a quasi-educational children’s show intended to teach science and history via stories about travel through time and space. I was greatly amused by the edict from series creator Sydney Newman that the show would be hard sci-fi with no bug-eyed monsters… which was completely disregarded when Terry Nation created the fan-favorite Daleks for the second Doctor Who story.

I learned about the companions. Various people (usually human) who traveled with the Doctor for a time, serving as an audience surrogate to help balance the sometimes alien nature of the Doctor. Typically handsome men and sexy young women.

I learned how after three seasons, William Hartnell (the actor playing the Doctor) was in declining health and could no longer continue in the role. And that rather than casting an actor of similar age and appearance, they opted instead to use the Doctor’s alien nature to cast a younger actor (Patrick Troughton) who the character would be ‘renewed’ into. A later cast change from Troughton into actor Jon Pertwee would be referred to as a forced ‘change of appearance’ by his fellow Time Lords. But the change from Pertwee into Tom Baker finally used the term ‘regeneration’ which was now a biological process that all Time Lords were capable of.

When OPB ran out of new Peter Davison episodes, they cycled back to the beginning of the Tom Baker run. I was very excited at the prospect of getting to watch what everyone I knew thought of as ‘the best Doctor’. Vocally excited. So much so that about an hour before that first episode aired that mid-December day, Mom pulled a package from underneath the Christmas tree and told me to go ahead and open it early. That present was my first ever blank VHS video cassette. (Which I used to tape not only that afternoon’s episode, but also the ten episodes that followed it, by which time I had obtained a couple other new blank tapes to continue my collection of Doctor Who recordings.)

That first episode started with Jon Pertwee’s regeneration into Tom Baker. My first ever regeneration scene. I immediately loved Tom Baker’s portrayal of the character. I could easily recognize that of the two I’d seen, his was the better Doctor. Although I still ended up kind of missing Peter Davison from time to time.

Meeting Other Whovians and Writing Fan Fiction

I eventually discovered the existence of a local Doctor Who fan club. The Whovian Alliance of Salem (aka WAS). WAS met one Saturday a month in the basement of the Salem Public Library. And for a while, I was able to convince my Mom to drive me there and back again on a semi-regular basis.

When I got there, I discovered a group of very strange looking people. It was my first ever encounter with (non-casual) sci-fi fans in their own environment. Almost everyone in that room had some kind of nerdwear on them. Doctor Who t-shirts, buttons, and – of course – the long multicolored scarves. (Including the partial scarf that one guy was actively knitting during the meeting.)

Of most immediate importance to me was the man handing out that month’s newsletter. WAS had their own monthly newsletter called “Matrix Extracts”. Later on during the meeting I discovered that man to be the newsletter’s editor (John C. Bunnell, who would go on to be an impressive and published figure in my young mind as a book reviewer for Dragon Magazine) when he requested submissions. I got the impression that this was a request that frequently went unheeded.

So, when I attended my second meeting, the first thing I did was to hand John the first part of what was intended to be a thirty-six part story (only six parts of which were ever actually written) entitled “Time Attack”. This story would see the Doctor, King Arthur and Merlin, and Wolverine and Kitty Pryde of the X-Men being sent on a quest by the White Guardian, the details of which I currently cannot remember at all.

At my third meeting, John handed me a copy of that month’s “Matrix Extracts” (which had my story in it), and I handed him part two of the story, along with the first installment of a (theoretically) monthly column called “Bizarre Thoughts”. (The monthly column format would go on to become a recurring thing with me in my work with fanzines and the zine community in general.)

The sporadically appearing column had me delving into some of the mysteries of the show’s lore and the Doctor’s history. I enjoyed writing it. And given that I did receive comments and conversation about it, it seemed like people actually enjoyed reading it.

During my time with WAS I forged several friendships that would last for years and years. Richard, Wade-o, and the Fletch would all become part of the local zine community as time went on. And Ed (who took over the editor position when John left) was a prominent figure in my life when I opened my own comic book store. All of which will no doubt be discussed in future blog posts.

Meanwhile, Back on Television

Once OPB had shown me the entire Tom Baker run, they continued back into Peter Davison’s episodes, showing me the early episodes I had missed, and then all of the ones I had seen when I first started watching the show.

After that, they jumped much farther back in the timeline, and began the third Doctor’s episodes. The Jon Pertwee era. The first Doctor to have his episodes shot in color.

Pertwee’s run on the show was very different than those of his predecessors or successors. Having been exiled to Earth in the end moments of Troughton’s final season, Pertwee’s Doctor is stranded here with a non-working TARDIS (the Time Lords had taken its spark plugs or something). He ends up becoming the scientific advisor for the recently formed UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce), an organization devoted to protecting Earth from extraterrestrial and paranormal attacks.

Pertwee’s era seemed very James Bond-esque to me. The somewhat spy-like UNIT, Earth-based adventures, travel mostly done by souped-up cars (or hovercraft), and the Doctor’s constant use of Venusian Aikido to combat his enemies.

That era was also notable for introducing the Master, a fellow renegade Time Lord who was basically the Doctor’s evil counterpart, and intended by the writers to be the Moriarty to the Doctor’s Holmes.

After the final Jon Pertwee episode, OPB skipped Tom Baker and went directly into what was now the complete run of Peter Davison, including his regeneration into Colin Baker.

The Next Regeneration(s)

My reaction to Colin Baker’s incarnation of the Doctor was pretty much the same as Bob and Chad’s reaction to Peter Davison’s had been. If someone had told me that they had just started watching the show, I was all prepared to scream, “No!” at them.

I’ve mellowed somewhat since then. I no longer consider him to have been a bad Doctor. Bad wardrobe, yes. Bad writing, also yes. But Colin Baker himself, if he were given better writing and a different outfit, would be just fine as the Doctor.

That being said, at the time I regarded Colin Baker as the worst Doctor (not even having had seen the first two Doctors aside from the multi-Doctor anniversary stories), and the person most likely to destroy the show. Especially when it was during his run that the BBC’s Controller Michael Grade put the show on hiatus for eighteen months in an effort to kill the show off. (He’d wanted to cancel it outright, but wasn’t allowed to. His reasoning? He simply didn’t like it.)

Despite having episodes that introduced characters like the Rani and the Valeyard, the only sixth Doctor story I really liked was “The Two Doctors”, and that was largely due to the other Doctor (Patrick Troughton) in that story.

I don’t remember what order we got more Doctor Who episodes on OPB following the end of Colin Baker’s run. I do know that we got some of the few complete stories from the first and second Doctor’s eras. (During the early years of the show, the BBC had no idea that there would be money to be made with the show’s episodes in the future, so many of the original films ended up being destroyed.)

A month after the actor Sylvester McCoy (who, like most of the Doctor Who cast, was someone I’d never even heard of prior to their inclusion in that series) was announced as the next Doctor, a cartoon ran in the Matrix Extracts that depicted Sylvester the Cat (of Looney Tunes fame) in the Starfleet medical uniform of Dr. Leonard McCoy. And until I finally saw my first episode with the seventh Doctor in it, that was the image that was burned into my brain whenever I heard or saw the name Sylvester McCoy.

Following what I saw as the Colin Baker debacle, I was seriously worried about who would be piloting the TARDIS next, and that weird little fan cartoon didn’t help me out at all.

Once I finally saw the first Sylvester McCoy story, I was relieved. I liked the guy. His portrayal of the Doctor during the often wonky post-regeneration story entertained me. The Doctor’s personality had stabilized for the next story, and then I really liked him. By the fifth story (the outstanding “Remembrance of the Daleks”) I was starting to question whether Tom Baker was really my favorite Doctor after all.

All told, we got twelve stories with McCoy’s seventh Doctor (all but three of them with Sophie Aldred’s character Ace, my favorite of the original series’ companions) before the show was cancelled.

No new Doctor Who on television for me.

Escape to Other Media

Nearly all of the television episodes had been novelized in a series of books starting back in 1973. But a couple of years after the show’s cancellation, novels depicting new adventures began to appear. Picking up where the show had left off, these Doctor Who New Adventures continued telling the stories of the seventh Doctor and Ace. Eventually, however, Ace would leave and the traditional revolving roster of companions would continue.

A couple of years after the New Adventures got underway, they were joined by the Missing Adventures, new stories featuring the first six Doctors.

Return to Television… in America?

And then in 1996, a mere seven years after the show’s cancellation, a revival was planned. Across the pond, here in America. The plan was for a BBC/Universal Studios co-produced TV movie that would, assuming the ratings were there, serve as the pilot for a new American-produced Doctor Who series.

A new Doctor was cast, this time actor Paul McGann. Sylvester McCoy was brought back for an onscreen ‘death’ and regeneration scene. Eric Roberts played yet another incarnation of classic Doctor Who enemy the Master, this time with a plan to steal the Doctor’s remaining regenerations to extend his own life.

While it was nice to see the Doctor back on the television screen again, the story wasn’t exactly great. And it included the never-again-mentioned revelation that the Doctor is half-human (on his mother’s side). This is something that Whovians decried as the worst retcon in the show’s history, a position they held firmly on right up until 2020 (more on that later).

The ratings for the movie were apparently abysmal. (It did great over in Britain, but here in the States it tanked.) Which killed any plans for an American Doctor Who series. Which from what we’ve heard of the intended storylines after the fact, is probably a good thing. That thing about the Doctor being half-human would have been a major recurring plotline as he went off in search of his long lost father. The entirety of Doctor Who canon would have been entirely rewritten for this new series.

Back to the Books…and Audio!

After Paul McGann’s debut as the eighth Doctor in the TV Movie, the books stopped following the seventh Doctor in favor of the new guy. The occasional seventh Doctor story was now shuffled in with those of the other six previous Doctors.

In 1999, Big Finish (a British company that produced audio plays on CD and MP3 formats) started producing new Doctor Who material as well. Starting with the multi-Doctor story “The Sirens of Time” (which featured Doctors five through seven), and then focused primarily on single Doctor stories that featured those three plus the new eighth Doctor.

Eventually, they started releasing spin-off audios as well. Stories of former companions, UNIT adventures, and so on.

Return to Television…For Real, This Time!

Doctor Who made its big television comeback in 2005. With a new Doctor, new companion, and a new (and much larger) TARDIS console room.

The show’s head writer and executive producer was Russell T. Davies. The format of the show changed from its classic serialized format consisting of 22 minute long episodes to mostly stand-alone 45 minute long stories. Changes in the status quo of the mythos were the result of a ‘Time War’ between the Time Lords and Daleks taking place off-screen between the classic and new series.

Christopher Eccleston was the newly regenerated ninth Doctor, and in the premiere episode (titled “Rose”) former pop singer Billie Piper stepped into the TARDIS as his new companion Rose Tyler. (Marking the first time in the series history that the companion was as much the star of the show as the Doctor.)

Sadly, Eccleston’s run as the Doctor only lasted a single season, due to friction between him and the showrunner and producers.

David Tennant was the next actor to take on the role, and he quickly became the ‘Tom Baker’ of the revived series: The favorite of the assembled fandom. (Not actually my favorite, but I’ll get to that later.)

After playing the Doctor for three seasons (including a regeneration that left him with the same physical form but also spawned a hybrid human/Time Lord referred to as a meta-crisis), Tennant took a year off to do a stage play, and only did four Doctor Who specials that aired throughout that year. At first I was irked at losing a full season. But when Tennant announced that he’d be leaving the show following the last of those specials, I upgraded ‘irked’ to ‘pissed’. If he was going to leave the role anyway, why not just do it and let a new actor play the part during what had now become a missing season?

Anyway, the Doctor’s eleventh incarnation was played by Matt Smith who at 26 years old became the youngest actor to take on the role. Along with a new Doctor, the show also got a new showrunner in Steven Moffat. Along with a new companion, and a new TARDIS console room.

Smith was the Doctor during the show’s 50^th anniversary, which was celebrated with a 77 minute long episode entitled “The Day of the Doctor”, which starred not only Smith’s Doctor, but also the return of Tennant’s, along with the introduction of a previously unknown (and unnumbered) incarnation between the 8^th and 9^th Doctors called ‘the War Doctor’… played by British legend John Hurt.

Quick aside: During the early 90s, I started writing a piece of Doctor Who fan fiction which gave the Doctor an enemy that used time travel to travel to alternate realities. During this story, that enemy captured two different versions of the sixth Doctor, and made the fifth Doctor play a game to determine which path he would take in life… the path that led to the familiar Colin Baker Doctor, or the path that led to my alternate sixth Doctor, who I had based on John Hurt. I’d seen several of Hurt’s movies by that point, but my main exposure to him had been as the eponymous character in Jim Henson’s the Storyteller. I felt that Hurt would have made an incredible Doctor, and it was just too bad that the show had been cancelled before someone realized that and offered him the role. Can you even begin to guess how excited I was when John Hurt was revealed as the War Doctor?

The War Doctor was shunned by his other incarnations for having been the one who fought in the Time War, ultimately destroying not only the Dalek War Fleet, but his own home planet of Gallifrey and all his fellow Time Lords.

The special’s happy ending was achieved by having all of the Doctors (including future Doctor number #12 in a cameo of just his eyes and very angry eyebrows) pilot their respective TARDISes around Gallifrey and locking the whole planet into a time loop in a pocket dimension mircoseconds before it would have otherwise been destroyed.

There was one other notable cameo in the 50^th anniversary special, and that was from Tom Baker himself. Playing a character purporting to be a future incarnation of the Doctor ‘revisiting a familiar face’. Not an explanation I really care for. (I have an alternate fan fiction-style explanation for who he really was, but it’s long and convoluted, and this post is already longwinded enough without including it.)

Matt Smith left the show just shortly after the 50^th anniversary, replaced by the aforementioned angry eyebrows. Peter Capaldi played the 12^th Doctor for three seasons, in what seems to have become a tradition for the revived series. After the David Tennant era brought back the Master (in two different incarnations, no less), the Capaldi era brought us Missy. (“Short for ‘Mistress’. Well, I couldn’t very well keep calling myself ‘The Master’ now could I?”) Was the Master having regenerated into a woman foreshadowing of some sort? Possibly, because…

Jodie Whittaker then became the first woman to play the Doctor. A lot of fans give the thirteenth Doctor a lot of crap. Some of them because “the Doctor can’t be a woman” (which is a load of bullshit), and others because the show just isn’t as good as it was before she took on the role. But that is not the actresses’ fault. Because along with the new Doctor came yet another new showrunner, Chris Chibnell.

Personally, I liked Whittaker’s portrayal of the Doctor. But the scripts that she was given… not so much. The best of them were only so-so, and most of them were simply bad.

During Whittaker’s run, we were introduced to another previously unknown (and unnumbered) incarnation of the Doctor, this time played by Jo Martin, an actress who can now lay claim to bragging rights as the first black Doctor. Jo Martin’s Doctor was the Fugitive Doctor, on the run from the Judoon (a race of anthropomorphic rhinoceros-people acting as a galactic police force). The Fugitive Doctor was a conundrum, as neither her nor the thirteenth Doctor remembered one another, which would seem to indicate that neither was a younger incarnation of the other.

We did eventually get answers about her. Stupid and fandom infuriating answers.

The Timeless Child Controversy

When Chris Chibnall became showrunner, he apparently decided that he was going to leave his mark on the show by telling a story that would change everything you knew about the Doctor. What he failed to realize (or simply didn’t care about) was that the fans liked everything they already knew about the Doctor.

Time Lord? Nope, the Doctor isn’t actually a Time Lord. Hell, the character isn’t even from Gallifrey. The Doctor is an abandoned orphan from another universe with the power to regenerate their body an infinite number of times. Who was found as a child by a space explorer named Tecteun. Realizing the potential that regeneration held, she took the child back to Tecteun’s home planet of Gallifrey and began experimenting on her to learn the child’s biological secrets. Once Tecteun understood how regeneration worked, she genetically grafted the ability into her own people (albeit with a limit of twelve regenerations per individual.)

Eventually, both Tecteun and the child were brought into a clandestine organization called the Division, whose purpose – contrary to the official Time Lord policy of non-intervention – was lots and lots of intervention. To the point that the Division eventually saw fit to meddle with the entire universe, changing it to meet their needs. The Timeless Child, now calling herself the Doctor, ran from the Division and was hunted by the Judoon. (This was the basic origin of Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor.)

After some time as a fugitive (and possibly several regenerations as well) the Doctor was recaptured, forced to regenerate into the body of a male child, and had his memories erased so that he would think he was the original and only version of the Doctor to that point.

Have your eyes glazed over yet? I know, the preceding three paragraphs read like the worst possible fan fiction. But, sadly no, that’s all now canon. That is officially the new history of the Doctor.

SPOILER WARNINGS

Then came the most recent episode, “The Power of the Doctor”. Overall, it was a good episode. Possibly one of the best of Whittaker’s era. This episode had pretty much everything. Daleks, Cybermen, the return of classic era companions (4^th/5^th Doctor’s companion Tegan Jovanka and 7^th Doctor’s companion Ace), the return of UNIT, and cameos by lots of actors who played former Doctors. Plus, of course, the current incarnation of the Master (played by Sacha Dhawan).

This time the Master’s evil plan is once again to steal the Doctor’s (now infinite number of) regenerations… by using Gallifreyan technology to force her to regenerate into the Master. Her body changes to his, and his mind occupies that new form.

After a wardrobe change into a piecemeal outfit incorporating the looks of many of the previous Doctors, the Doctor/Master tries to force current companion Yaz to stay on as his new companion. Meanwhile, the mind of the thirteenth Doctor is in a sort of psychic limbo where she is informed by manifestations of Doctors number one and five through eight that it may still be possible to reverse the forced regeneration.

Of course, by the end of the episode, all of the enemies are defeated and the regeneration is reversed. But the Master gets in one last shot, wounding the Doctor and triggering her very slow (she has enough time to take Yaz home in the TARDIS and then park it somewhere else) regeneration.

Now, it had been previously announced that Ncuti Gatwa was going to be ‘the Next Doctor’ months earlier. So if it hadn’t been for a whole bunch of media leaks spoiling the ending of the episode, Whovians worldwide would have crapped themselves when Jodie Whittaker regenerated into… David Tennant? A David Tennant portrayed Doctor who almost immediately recognizes the body he’s in and ends the episode asking, “What?!?”

My problems with all of this:  First things first, Jodie Whittaker regenerates from her Doctor wearing her outfit into David Tennant wearing a suit. Now, this isn’t the first time that clothing has changed during a regeneration. In the first television regeneration Hartnell’s outfit changed along with his body. But that was before they had established all the rules of regeneration.

Now, when my brain is confronted with some inconsistency like this, it usually tries to make sense out of it. So I rewatched the regeneration scene, and the actual transformation effect looked different to me, leading me to suspect that what had actually happened was that the tenth Doctor had been taken out of his timeline and teleported into the middle of the thirteenth Doctor’s regeneration, taking over the body for a time.

But then incoming-and-returning showrunner Russell T. Davies was interviewed and stated that A.) David Tennant was now playing the fourteenth Doctor and Ncuti Gatwa would be playing the fifteenth. And B.) The wardrobe change was done so that the internet wouldn’t have the one single image of David Tennant in women’s clothing for the year-plus before the next actual episode.

Hmm. Do I believe all of that? I don’t know yet.

Here’s what I do know: Even though the forced regeneration was reversed, it still happened. Shouldn’t that make Sacha Dhawan the fourteenth Doctor? And then Tennant the fifteenth and Gatwa the sixteenth?

Also, the justification for the wardrobe change is bullshit. After reversing the regeneration, the Doctor changes out of the piecemeal reminiscence outfit and back into her own. Why? If she would have stayed wearing what the Doctor/Master had worn, that would have been what Tennant still wore immediately post-regeneration. Something about this seems off to me.

Although my real question is: How long before we get a multi-Doctor story featuring David Tennant (ten), David Tennant (ten point two), David Tennant (the metacrisis Doctor) and David Tennant (fourteen)?

The Mouse in the TARDIS?

And as if all of that wasn’t enough… shortly after that episode was broadcast, an announcement was made that for Doctor Who’s foreseeable future, the BBC would be partnering with… Disney Plus.

To echo David Tennant: What?!?

At first, all the details we had were that Disney Plus would be the new home for Doctor Who everywhere except in Britain where the BBC would still be airing the new episodes. But then we heard that it was actually a co-production deal, which means that on the one hand, Doctor Who would now be budgeted with Disney money. On the other hand, it sort of implies that Disney might have some measure of creative control, which brings my mind back to the American TV movie debacle of 1996.

Disney Plus will only be adding new episodes of the show to its library, and the classic series and all current seasons of the new version will stay on whatever streaming platform they’re currently on. (For how long, who knows?)

Prior to the Disney Plus announcement, Russell T. Davies had said in interviews that he’d like to expand the Doctor Who universe into multiple shows, making a true MCU-style universe out of it. And with the resources of Disney Plus, he can now certainly do that.

My Favorite Doctor

Okay, this post is nearing 5000 words now. But I have one last bit of business before I stop writing. And that’s the question that every Whovian is faced with at one point or another. Who is my favorite Doctor.

Wow, that’s not an easy question to answer.

I automatically have to split the show’s history into two parts, and give you separate answers for both classic and the current series.

For the classic series, it’s a two-way tie between Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy. (Unless I’m watching a Peter Davison episode, in which case it becomes a three-way tie.)

For the new series… I can’t answer Christopher Eccleston, because there weren’t enough of his episodes. I can list him as having had the most unused potential. (Actually, that’s a two-way tie as well, if you include John Hurt. Oh, three-way! I had almost forgotten about the interim-era’s Paul McGann. So much unrealized potential with all three of those Doctors.)

Anyway, for the new series we once again have that two-way tie. Matt Smith’s Doctor simply blew me away from his first episode. And I cannot say enough good things about Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, either.

So, yeah. My favorite Doctor is four different guys. Possibly eight. And that’s just so far.