The first Doctor? Although it's traditional to refer to
the William Hartnell incarnation as the "first" Doctor, we know that there were many others before
him. There are at least eight immediately preceding the Hartnell incarnation, and these are seen
clearly during the mind-wrestling sequence in The Brain of Morbius.
Information about these eight earlier incarnations is sketchy and scarce. The best
source is Cold Fusion, in which Patience remembers
her husband as one of the first explorers of the time vortex - a hero revered by the Time
Lords even though they've forgotten his name. (Although, it has to be said that her
confused memories could be mixing up various people she has known: Omega, the Other, the
Doctor's father, as well as the Doctor himself.) She particularly recalls being married to
the fourth of these incarnations, and his regenerating into the fifth. At this time, the Doctor
is a member of the Supreme Council, with 13 children and his first grandchild soon to be born.
But the family are arrested after it is decreed that no more Time Lords shall be born of
woman - only the Loom-born will rule Gallifrey.The Doctor is not present when the guards
arrive, and we can only speculate what happens to him next. Maybe he escapes from
Gallifrey, and spends the subsequent three incarnations as a fugitive. What is certain is
that the Doctor eventually returns to Gallifrey and is born from the Loom of Lungbarrow as
the Hartnell incarnation, with little or no memory of having lived before. As far as his
cousins are concerned, he's a new person. Perhaps this was imposed upon him as a form of
punishment - but in the absence of any contradictory evidence, I prefer to think that the
Doctor has done something clever to elude his pursuers. He has regenerated, but arranged
things so it appears he's being woven from the Loom. The fact that he still has a navel
shows he's really the same womb-born Time Lord as the previous incarnations.
(And indeed in Lungbarrow, the young Doctor says that he can remember being
in the Loom, waiting to be born, which is dismissed as "impossible".) However, we cannot
dismiss completely the notion that the Time Lords themselves wiped the Doctor's memories and
effectively let him be born again as a new person. They certainly seem to have form for this -
evidence revealed in The Timeless Children suggests
that the Doctor's history may go back much further than we hitherto suspected - maybe even to
an origin preceding Gallifrey and the Time Lords - but the veracity and reliabilty of this
information is as yet uncertain. Nevertheless, we have seen the suggestion of multiple regenerations.
Though the true history has been hidden, overwritten and destroyed, there are strong clues that the Division wiped
the Doctor's memories to cover their tracks. But was this the same incident as described above? Or was it perhaps
one of several, repeated mind-wipes and resets that have occurred throughout the Doctor's life? We simply don't
know yet.
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| Ambassadorial status The notion of the Doctor
serving as an ambassador has precedent in the series - it is presumably in this capacity
that he first met Dastari. In the two missions presented here, the Tardis is nowhere to
be seen - presumably the Doctor travels by Time Ring. In the first mission, he is dressed
in some sort of spacesuit. The second assignment could be some considerable time later -
the Doctor has now adopted an Edwardian costume. The fact that he encounters the Daleks
here, and indeed makes peace with them, is forgotten later on.
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| Departing Gallifrey One of the more nebulous
areas in the Doctor's backstory is his flight from Gallifrey. The tv episodes offer
contradictory information about it. Several different authors have attempted to depict it,
with different results each time. Here, I'm trying to reconcile these different accounts
into a whole. In Nightshade, the Doctor is shown entering the Tardis on his own -
no sign of Susan or the Hand of Omega - and dressed in Time Lord robes. It could be that
this is a clandestine trip he's undertaking to test how easy it will be to get away.
Alternatively, he could be responding to a stronger impulse. Though his original memories
were suppressed at the time of his Looming, he might have left himself some post-hypnotic
commands - such would explain his returning to the past, to rescue Patience and her
granddaughter, as seen in flashback in Cold Fusion. Patience recognizes that the
Doctor is wearing her husband's ring.
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| Susan Susan is of course the Doctor's granddaughter -
but again, we have different stories about her origins. In Cold Fusion, we learn
that the Doctor's granddaughter is born just as his family are being arrested in the
persecution of the womb-born. Patience recalls the first Doctor arriving to spirit her
and the granddaughter away. Was this Susan? Presumably the Doctor then took her to the
Old Time, where we next see her. However, in Lungbarrow, Susan is said to be the
granddaughter of the Other, trapped on Gallifrey during a time of civil war. When the first
Doctor turns up, she recognizes him as her grandfather. As the Other had thrown himself
into the Looms, the implication is that his essence has somehow been reborn in the Doctor.
As I've said above, the Doctor was not really Loom-born, but it is possible that he picked
up some of the Other's life force as he passed through. Both of these accounts of Susan's
origin come with the caveat that they're memories of uncertain provenance - I suspect that
the truth is somewhere in between. When we see the Doctor and Susan entering the Tardis in
Time & Time Again, it's also to escape some sort of civil war or revolution,
which could tie in with Lungbarrow - although the implication is that
they're leaving contemporary Gallifrey, as it is in The Name of the
Doctor and The Exiles. Did they therefore return to modern times?
How did the Doctor explain Susan on a world with no more children? The highly-stylized
account in The Longest Story in the
World suggests there may have been difficulties. The other account of their
departure is in Birth of a Renegade.
Again, the Doctor seems to be fleeing a contemporary civil war/revolution
- although his memories of it are vague and have apparently been selectively wiped. He
finds a 7 year old Susan hiding in the Tardis, and adopts her as his "granddaughter". Here,
she is said to be the Lady Larn, the last surviving descendant of Rassilon. It is possible
though that the Doctor is deliberately misremembering events in order to confound the
Master.
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| Earthman? Where's Susan in these stories? I've
decided to place them here rather than later on with the other Annual stories as they seem
to chronicle early voyages - The Sons of the Crab is the first time the Doctor has
been outside the Milky Way, and The Lost Ones is his very first visit to
Vortis. But they need to go after Frayed as that documents the Doctor's first
encounter with humanity. (I'll gloss over his earlier ambassadorial work - there have been
enough mind-wipes and memory losses to forget about that - this might also explain why he
doesn't remember the Daleks...) What's interesting about these tales is that the Doctor
refers to himself as human and coming from Earth. So is it possible that he's settled on
Earth for a while, long enough to think of it as home? It's even possible that he has
family living there. Think back to the pre-Hartnell incarnations - what was the Doctor up
to during his three incarnations on the run? Perhaps he was rescuing members of his
family who had escaped the purge - where better for the half-human Doctor to take them
than the Earth, his mother's home planet? If some of his children ended up living on
Earth, that would explain how two Earth children can turn up later as his grandchildren -
also that would be someone to leave Susan with while he explores. It's interesting to
note that the Tardis is already in police box form in these tales, before the chameleon
circuit has actually stuck. We could infer that the police box is a default setting
for visiting twentieth century England, and that the Doctor has temporarily switched off
the circuit. (The fact that the earlier Doctor's hidden Tardis, as seen in
Fugitive of the Judoon, is also in the shape of a
police box might support this idea.)
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| Give-a-Show I've cheated a bit here. Rather than
treating each of the Projector slides as a separate story, I've arranged them into a single
epic tale. After first discarding four slides that were essentially re-tellings of tv
stories (The Secrets of the Tardis deriving from An Unearthly Child; Doctor Who
in Lilliput from Planet of Giants; On the Planet Vortis and The Zarbi Are
Destroyed from The Web Planet) I rearranged the other 12 into a travelogue-style
story, culminating in a battle with the Daleks, making use of the new order to reinforce
continuity. So for instance, the Watermen could have given Ian the ray pistol he uses on
the Aquafien; and the scientist rescued from the Daleks is the one who invents the weapon
that repels their invasion.
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| First Doctor solo? The Hartnell era is perhaps
the most tightly-knit segment of Doctor Who: many stories leading into the next, and a
continuous roster of companions. Just about the only place where there seems a distinct
break between stories is after The Dalek Masterplan. Some considerable time seems
to have passed by The Massacre - the Doctor and Steven are back to normal, and make
no mention of the cataclysmic events on Kembel. So this is clearly the place to insert
extra stories. Tales like Ash and Roses deal with the aftermath of The
Dalek Masterplan, leading into the first Doctor's role in The Five Doctors -
and then the framing story of The Witch Hunters clearly indicates that the Doctor
has been given some freedom by Rassilon. I have interpreted this as meaning he now has a
degree of control over the Tardis - this deals with the main objection to inserting extra
stories here, that the Doctor would never be able to get back to pick up Steven. I also
like the idea that the Doctor has glimpsed some of his future during his mindlink with his
other incarnations - hence he can sign Rebecca Nurse's release papers with the name
Benjamin Jackson - and he is clearly aware of his coming regeneration. This fits with the
notion of him taking some time out, checking up on his grandchildren, and so on.
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| Where did John and Gillian go? At the end of
The Experimenters, the Doctor leads his grandchildren back to the Tardis to head
off on another adventure. When we next see them, in The
Extortioner, they are waiting inside the Tardis for the second Doctor who's gone
outside to explore on his own. There's no comment about the Doctor's change of appearance,
and interestingly enough, they never call him grandfather again. I'd suggest there's an
unseen story here where the first Doctor takes his grandchildren forward and hands them
into the safe keeping of the second - perhaps telling them he's a friend who'll look after
them from now on. This might also explain why the second Doctor leaves them inside the
Tardis at first - he's uncertain about this new responsibility and doesn't want to
expose them to danger, and has perhaps forgotten how resourceful they can be. Indeed, he
comes back saying he missed their assistance and will take them with him in future.
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| The Black Hole This story goes to great efforts to
position the second Doctor's involvement in The Two Doctors
between its second and third episodes, which is at odds with most other sources that suggest it
occurs post-The War Games in the so-called "Season 6B" period. For one thing, the
sheer number of stories (particularly comic strips) that feature further adventures of the Doctor
and Jamie seem to me too many to be encompassed by the provisions of The Black Hole, which
suggests only that they take a few detours before getting back to the Habitat. I also have to
acknowledge the very deliberate set-up for The Two Doctors at the end of the novel
World Game. In addition, there's specific dialogue in
The Two Doctors which generally seems to support the 6B placement. The Doctor tells Dastari
that he undertakes missions for the Time Lords as the price for his freedom. (Now, this could
conceivably - at a pinch - fit with The Black Hole, if one reads it to means he won't get
turned in if he does this favour for Constable Pavo.) But he also objects to the fitting of the remote
control to the Tardis console, and says he'll complain about it when they get back to the Time Lords,
which to my mind, fits awkwardly with The Black Hole, in which Pavo/the Monk had already advised
him that this would be happening. (And one thing is certain - however one spins the ramifications of
The Black Hole, it definitely does not invalidate "Season 6B".)In an attempt to
reconcile all the evidence, I would suggest that this is what is really happening in The Black
Hole: The Monk has discovered that the Sontarans are about to attack Space Station Camera and
slaughter the crew, so he decides this will make a suitable trap to send the Doctor into. It's made
abundantly clear in dialogue that he knew the Sontarans would be there - and as Jamie says: "you sent
us there to die!" We can assume the Monk also detects temporal distortions there from the time travel
experiments, making it a totally plausible environment into which the Time Lords would send an agent.
(What the Monk doesn't know is that the CIA have also spotted what's going on, and are going to send
their own agent to look into it - that agent being the "Season 6B" Doctor!) So the Doctor
and Jamie set off for Camera at the Monk's behest. When they get there, the Tardis won't allow them
to land because it has detected its own future self present on the station. Because both iterations
of the Tardis are operating using the remote control systems, we might assume there's some sort of
safety protocol that stops them materializing on top of each other. The Doctor then detects the
Sontarans about to attack the station, and realizes that it's a trap. He also spots the presence of
the future Tardis, and knows he just has to leave his future self to sort it all out. So the Doctor
breaks the remote control, and sets off to get himself and Jamie back to the Habitat, via a number
of unplanned detours. At the end of The Black Hole, it's implied that (the real) Pavo wipes
the Doctor's memory of all that has happened, so neither he or Jamie will remember any of it. Now,
let's jump ahead to World Game. The CIA have instructed the Doctor to go and put a stop to
the time travel experiments on Camera. The Doctor asks for Jamie as a companion, which of course
means undoing the memory wipe that was done on Jamie at the end of The War Games. I reason
that the Doctor doesn't want Jamie to have to go through all the heartbreak of their separation again,
so he suggests that the CIA reset Jamie's memory to an earlier time. But when considering which point
they should roll Jamie back to, some subconscious memory of The Black Hole comes back to him -
the mention of Dastari and Space Station Camera triggering the thought of Victoria studying graphology -
so he gives it as the new backstory for Jamie. And so the events of The Two Doctors unfold from there.
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| Future Imperfect We have to take a bit of a leap
here. As written, the story seems to takes place at the end of The Mind Robber, with
the Doctor encountering Gulliver again in the Land of Fiction. It then transpires that
Gulliver is in fact Goth (a joke based on the fact that actor Bernard Horsfall played both
parts), and this leads into the second Doctor's involvement in The Three Doctors.
But this doesn't work because The Three Doctors must clearly take place after The
Invasion, as the Doctor recognizes Benton and talks about the Cybermen. In The Three
Doctors, we see the second Doctor run out of a building on a fog-covered landscape,
implying he's lifted from an otherwise unseen adventure. I suggest that he's disorientated
by being lifted from his timestream, and temporarily believes himself to be still in the
Land of Fiction when he meets Goth - perhaps he even assumes that The Invasion was
all a fantasy.
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| The Eye of the Giant/The Scales of Injustice
There are a few inconsistencies apparent during the early years of the third Doctor's exile on Earth,
notably around events like Mike Yates joining UNIT, and Liz Shaw's decision to leave. Though a few
details here and there don't match up, most of the information we receive is broadly consistent. The
young Lieutenant Yates get seconded to UNIT (Vengeance of the Stones), promoted to Captain, in
time to clear up the aftermath of the Auton invasion - remains as a background character (the "new Captain"
mentioned in The Blue Tooth) - and finally moves up to become the Brigadier's second in command
prior to Terror of the Autons. Meanwhile, The Blue Tooth sees Liz starting to think about
leaving the Doctor - she spends some time away from UNIT in The Devil Goblins from Neptune, and is
definitely considering her future plans in Reconnaissance and Country of the Blind before
making her final departure in Prisoners of the Sun. It's only the novels The Eye of the Giant
and The Scales of Injustice that seem really out of step with this pattern. In the latter, Liz makes
a different and seemingly quite final decision to depart UNIT - whilst Mike Yates is only a Sergeant in
these tales and gets promoted to Captain right at the end. (I'll leave aside the fact that such a promotion
seems militarily unlikely - if not downright impossible.) I speculate therefore that when the Doctor crosses
to the parallel universe in Inferno, he breaks open the dimensional barriers and allows some quantum
instability to flood into our universe, creating a jumble of overlapping timelines. The broad flow of events
is more or less the same, but a lot of the details are different and shifting - which covers these
inconsistencies. We might also note that an alternative timeline is established and then deleted in
Prisoners of the Sun as well - as this involves some Time Lord intervention, it might help
explain why things return to normal after this.)
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| The Ultimate Adventure This is my attempt to explain
Jon Pertwee's being replaced by an understudy part-way into a performance of the play - to
acknowledge how the audience would have experienced it. I also want to establish the
David Banks interpretation as being more than just an
alternative reality - but that he actually exists somewhere in the quantum universe. More modern
evidence suggests that this might be a bi-generation. The Doctor's ailing state at the time could
explain why he doesn't later remember having bi-generated. I like the idea that Jason and Crystal can
exist in these two separate timelines - combining this with my speculations on the
sixth Doctor's version of this adventure fits rather neatly with
the story Face Value, in which Crystal can somehow
remember all three stage Doctors. As to whether the Banks Doctor continues on his own timeline, eventually
to regenerate himself - who knows? (Although see the notes below about the regeneration crisis.)
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| Regeneration Crisis Here, I'm trying to place these stories as they would have
been originally perceived by the audience - between the Doctor's tv incarnations - which means they have to take place
after the Doctor's escape from Metebelis 3. Conventional wisdom has it that the Doctor's body is destroyed by the
radiation in the Great One's cave - so it's interesting that we manage to get a number of adventures here when he is
supposedly dying. So could there be something that happens - at least initially - to stabilize the Doctor's condition?
Looked at with modern eyes, I think that a bi-generation could be the answer. In Seven Keys to Doomsday, we're
told that the Doctor is making an archaeological expedition to the ruins of Karn - why would he do this when he's dying
and should just be trying to get back to UNIT HQ? Well, it's also implied that the Tardis is being remotely piloted by
the Time Lords, so maybe he didn't have a choice in the matter. The Doctor tells Jimmy and Jenny that he was wounded in
an ambush on Karn and that this has caused him to regenerate - but he also seems to have lost a lot of his memory of
recent events. So what if, in fact, he has bi-generated? - but just doesn't remember it. It's interesting that the new
Doctor becomes lucid and normal-acting almost immediately, without any of the usual post-regenerative instability - exactly
as would happen to the fifteenth Doctor many centuries later.So while the Trevor Martin Doctor carries on as a sort of
off-shoot incarnation, the Pertwee Doctor remains behind - still irradiated, still dying. The burst of energy from the
bi-generation may have helped to temporarily hold the effects of the radiation at bay, allowing the Doctor to carry on
for a while - although there are still clues that all is not well. Perhaps one of the effects is a gradual breakdown of
the morphic structure of the Doctor's body - which accounts for why he looks slightly different from normal in The Story
of Aladdin. (Other than the fact that stuntman Terry Walsh is standing in for Pertwee here.) And then the deterioration
continues. In Ancient Whispers, the now weakened Doctor is unsure of his chances of achieving a successful regeneration
without outside assistance. Finally, he can't even operate the Tardis, and has to rely on the ship to bring him back home.
(Although in Love and War, we learn that it takes him ten years to finally make it back
to UNIT HQ.) I don't intend to speculate as to whether the Trevor Martin incarnation continues on his own timeline and has
further regenerations. As with the David Banks version, I suspect eventually the biodata will be re-absorbed into the Doctor's
primary timeline. Maybe the Time Lords get involved to sort things out. After all, they know who the actual fourth Doctor should
be - especially since he became President and saved the planet twice, they've got a vested interest in ensuring the Doctor's
timeline remains stable.
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| Doctor Who and the Ark This story acts as an alternative version of
The Ark in Space, serving as a different account of Harry's first journey in the Tardis. It's so different
from the eventual TV story (bar a vague similarity of background details) that it can easily exist as a separate tale
in its own right. If we postulate a return to Earth soon afterwards, this affords us space to place other early fourth Doctor
adventures. Death Flower! for instance opens with the Doctor and Sarah both commenting on the novelty of his
new face, indicating that it takes place soon after the regeneration. Likewise the stories of the 1976 Annual can fit here, which
otherwise have always been problematic. What's interesting here is that we know there is a certain amount of flux in the Doctor's
timeline at this point. The events of Interference change the end of third Doctor's
era, writing some events out of the timeline - (a notion I'll return to later) - so it seems equally plausible that new events
involving the fourth Doctor could be written into the timeline. So we end up with conflicting and overlapping timelines that are
constantly over-writing each other like a temporal palimpsest. (See also my notes on Return of the Cybermen below.) When the
timeline ultimately resets, we can see the events of The Ark in Space and eventually the whole Nerva Beacon/time ring arc becoming
the version of events that the Doctor properly remembers. This might also explain, for instance, why the Doctor initially fails to remember his
first encounter with Xoanon.
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| Return of the Cybermen This story has the unusual distinction
of being an early draft of what became Revenge of the Cybermen, which might lead one to view
the two stories as mutually exclusive and thus relegate Return to an alternative timeline.
However, the author of the audio adaptation originally scripted a scene explaining that the Doctor's interference in the
past in Genesis of the Daleks had created alternative, shifting and overlapping timelines, and eventually concluded
with the events of Return being erased, and the Doctor arriving back on Nerva to experience the different events of
Revenge. This actually ties in with the timeline alterations seen in A Device of Death - and with the benefit
of hindsight, can be seen as the first repercussions of the Time War, offering an explanation for many of the
contradictions of the series continuity. Ultimately, this scene went unrecorded as the author decided it was "too
silly" - but it certainly seems a viable solution to me, and I choose to accept it.
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| The Changing Face of Doctor Who This is an
attempt to explain some of the TV Comic strips being re-drawn with Tom Baker's face.
Interference, by altering the end of the Doctor's
third incarnation, gives a plausible reason why some of his later adventures might be
written out of the timeline. As for the other redrawn strips, (one dating back as far as
the second Doctor) any number of factors could have removed them from the original
continuity - further mucking about by Faction Paradox, the actions of the Time Lords or
the Celestial Intervention Agency. Who knows? What it means is that there are certain key
events in the Doctor's past that are now missing from history, and need to be relived to
ensure the continued integrity of the timeline. The Doctor initiates this himself in the
case of Shada, but there doesn't seem to be any
such conscious action at work here. Is the Tardis seeking out these areas of instability
in an attempt to protect the Doctor's timeline? Or is there some universal force at work?
It may be significant that these repeated stories take place here, between The Invasion
of Time when the Doctor communes with the Matrix, and his first meeting with the White
Guardian in The Ribos Operation. In the case of Doomcloud, the divergence
from the previously established history is quite drastic: in the new timeline, Sarah Jane
is replaced by Joan Brown, and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart by General Maxwell-Lennon -
although it's interesting to note that at one point, the Doctor calls Joan "Sarah", as if
on a subconscious level, he's aware of the previous iteration of these events.
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| Tegan comes back In Lonely Days, Nyssa
feels that she will be reunited with Tegan very soon. This might have seemed plausible when
the story was written, but since then the plethora of stories occurring before Arc of
Infinity make her cosmic intuition seem a bit over-hopeful. There is an answer however,
and it comes from trying to fit in the stories from the 1983 Annual. These feature Nyssa
and Tegan as companions, which suggests a setting after Adric's death - but Tegan is still
a stewardess, which puts them before Arc of Infinity. So after the initial grieving
for Adric stories, I postulate that the Doctor returns for Tegan, perhaps in an attempt to
cheer Nyssa up. Fortunately, the last Annual story is set at Heathrow airport again - so we
can imagine Tegan leaving once more at the end of that, and all references in subsequent
stories to her being left behind at Heathrow still work.
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| Frobisher The author of Mission: Impractical
suggests the novel is set between the comic strips War-Game and Funhouse. He's
obviously forgotten that the comics featured Peri, placing them before The Trial of a Time
Lord, whereas his book is definitely post-Trial. This opens up the possibility
of Frobisher travelling with the Doctor both before and after his trial (and indeed he
later partners the seventh Doctor for a while). I see Frobisher as having become a
character more akin to the Brigadier - a friend of the Doctor's whom he sometimes visits
and involves in his adventures. A couple of the stories in this section start with
Frobisher apart from the Doctor, implying that he's starting to move away from being a
companion.
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| Mel Meets Evelyn In both Thicker
Than Water and Instruments of Darkness, the Doctor takes Mel to meet Evelyn, seemingly for
the first time. I suggest that, between these two stories, Mel is snatched out of time to testify at the
Doctor's trial. The process causes Mel some recent memory loss, which is why she can't remember having met Evelyn before.
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| The Brink of Death Although it might seem that this final sixth Doctor story
is incompatible with the previously published novel Spiral Scratch, it actually only overlaps with the last
chapter of the book, and might well be considered to be depicting the same events from different viewpoints - the
novel from Mel's and the audio play from the Doctor's. The only real contradiction is that the fact that in the
book, the Doctor is already dying after his experiences in the Spiral Chamber. I suggest that the Valeyard's
interference here alters this outcome - his plan is to steal the Doctor's life after all. Since the multiverse has
been cracked open and alternative Doctors have co-existed, we can suppose that the Valeyard has interfered to ensure
the Doctor survives, perhaps diverting the brunt of the chronon energy onto one of the alternative Doctors. When the
Doctor defeats the Valeyard here, the overlapping timelines collapse into one, and the Doctor's regeneration puts
everything back onto its proper track.
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| Ground Zero
This story has often been seen by fans as presenting one of the biggest discrepancies in the continuity
since it features the death of Ace, which would seem to contradict depictions of her future in both novels
and audio plays. The problem has, I think, been somewhat overstated - not helped by inflammatory comments
from the editor of Doctor Who Magazine that the comic strip would pursue its own course and would not
consider itself bound by the novels' continuity. This led many to assume that the strip was specifically
denying the existence of the novels and creating a completely new path for the characters. The fact that Ace
is depicted wearing her jacket from the tv episodes also reinforced the impression that she was the teenage
character seen there and not the older, more mature and battle-hardened Ace of the novels. (And I must admit,
I fell easily into that trap myself.) The actual artwork is less clear-cut about it. Yes, Ace is wearing what
appears to be her old jacket, but it seems to fits her better than it did on television, suggesting that she
has grown. In fact, she's been drawn with... well, let's say a much more mature figure. It's hard to determine
the age of a character in a comic strip, but coupled with the fact that the Doctor is also drawn older,
resembling his appearance in the 1996 tv movie, it's not hard to imagine that these are depictions of an
older Doctor and Ace who have known each other for years - and what's to stop someone putting on an old
jacket for the fun of it? So I don't think Ground Zero is as out-of-step with the other media as
fandom tends to believe. It's depicted as one of the possible futures for Ace in Signs and
Wonders - and the epilogues to Set Piece show us glimpses of Ace's future as "Time's
Vigilante", suggesting that she meets up again with the Doctor on occasion as their time-travelling
paths cross. Of course, there is still a contradiction: if Ace dies here, then she doesn't get to enter
the Time Lord academy later on. We should note that we never see what happens to Ace's body after the Doctor
carries it into the Tardis. Maybe he takes her back to Gallifrey, and asks the Time Lords to use some regeneration
energy to restore her to life? After all, the President is one of his closest friends, so he certainly ought to
be able to pull some strings in high places.
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| Death Comes to Time This story has always been a bone of contention,
presenting rather an odd take on certain aspects of the Doctor Who mythology, so much so that many fans
are keen to see it as an alternative universe tale. There's also the ending, in which the Doctor apparently
dies - which could be taken as negating all Doctor Who stories following the seventh Doctor
(and indeed denying the very existence of the eighth Doctor, who'd already been around for five years by the
time this story was produced). However, many of the more controversial elements seem consistent with past
continuity, even if not always with "current" developments. (It's like a mix-and-match approach to
continuity, which in many ways is what the series has always done.) The notion of the Time Lords possessing
god-like powers which they keep suppressed (with that being the real point of their non-intervention policy)
doesn't seem so strange when you consider that when we first met them in The War Games, the Time Lords
most definitely exhibited what we could only describe as god-like powers. And when one considers that the seventh
Doctor (always the incarnation most in touch with the ancient past of Gallifrey) has been displaying more and
more unexpected powers as he's gone along, his unleashing of his long-hidden powers at the end doesn't seem so
strange either. Meanwhile, Ace being trained to become a replacement for the Time Lords - well, that's like a
development of her going to the Academy. And how much is the Kingmaker character like one of the Sisterhood of
Karn (or maybe even the Pythia)?The story does seem to be set in a different continuity, one in which the
Time Lords are all but extinct. What I find interesting about this is the way it echoes later developments in
the Eighth Doctor novels, particularly in the aftermath of The Ancestor Cell, when there are said to be
only four Time Lords left alive in the universe - one of whom is the Minister of Chance. It's as if the events
of that War in Heaven are so cataclysmic that they have repercussions in the past as well as the future. (In
fact, if this had been an eighth Doctor story, I doubt there would have been half as much controversy around
it.) So maybe that's what's going on here, future events rippling back and overwriting the established timelines.
One presumes that the ending, and the Doctor's defeat of General Tannis, cancels all that out and puts events back
on their proper course. I've placed the story almost at the end of the seventh Doctor's life. This is quite a
nebulous period, perhaps a long time after any other recorded adventures of
this incarnation, and we may never know what leads to these events. Obviously, the Doctor does not actually die
at the end of the story - and it's made quite clear that they never find his body. I believe that he withdraws
from circulation following this, and keeps a deliberately low profile. (Doom Coalition suggests that the
Doctor turns into a sort of errand boy for the President; and in his final days, he appears quite low key and
introspective.)
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| After Interference One of the biggest problems
I encountered when trying to fit the eighth Doctor's era together was the fact that there were three
separate ongoing storylines in different media, all of which seemed to be following on from the TV movie, and
featured their own often incompatible events. So how do the comics fit with the audios, and
how do they both fit with the books? One notion that's been suggested is to regard them as separate and distinct
segments of the eighth Doctor's life, perhaps with many years between them. I do like this idea, but I felt it
was a problem that both the comics and audios featured Gallifrey, whilst Gallifrey was destroyed
halfway through the book line - which by implication, suggests that the comics and audios needed to fit somewhere
prior to The Ancestor Cell. So I decided to break the various lines into smaller segments that could be
inter-sorted, each following the arc of a particular companion almost like the tv series. It's relatively simple to
split the comic strips between the adventures with Izzy and those (sadly truncated) adventures with Destrii. Likewise,
there are distinct eras of the audio adventures, first with Charley and C'rizz, then later with Lucie. The real issue
was deciding where to split the novel line, which always seemed to have a totally continous narrative.
There's been a tendency to seize upon almost any moment when the Doctor is temporarily without his companions
to crowbar in any number of adventures - but my personal belief is that the Doctor would not willingly leave his current
companion(s) behind for extended periods. (Except on those rare occasions when we're told in the narrative itself that
he has. So for instance, we know he leaves Sam for a while prior to Vampire Science, and this might seem the
ideal place to put the early comic strips and audios. However, my personal feeling is that this "gap" is too early in
the eighth Doctor's life for some of these cataclysmic events to be occurring - the whole Universe being rebooted for
instance.) So I made an arbitrary decision to break the novel series after Interference. I felt that the structure
of the novel actually supported this: it starts with the Doctor travelling alone, and the main body of the story
is a flashback - by the end of which, Sam has left him and Fitz is dead. True, he's being recreated by the Tardis's memory
banks, but that's where the story ends. Does Fitz need time to recuperate from this process? Another interesting point is that
we don't see any moment in Interference when Compassion actually becomes a companion - indeed in the framing story, when
Foreman asks the Doctor what he did with her, he side-steps the issue. In the next novel the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion are simply
depicted as the current Tardis crew, but the formation of that team is something we don't see happen - so I
maintain that there is some latitude to play with there. It fits with my schema of dividing the stories into the arcs of
different companions. Interference definitely ends Sam's arc, and The Blue Angel can be seen as the start of
a new arc about Compassion. Now don't get me wrong: I'm aware that this is not an ideal solution, but it created a structure that
worked for Complete Adventures, and to my mind, is still the most satisfying way of doing it. I don't think it's any more
unreasonable than some of the places where Big Finish have crowbarred years of adventures between two seemingly contiguous
tv stories. On the other hand, if one is only following the novels, then they can still be read as a continuing narrative.
Of course, I should note that I devised all this before the new tv series started. It's now obvious that Gallifrey must be restored
at some point following the events of The Gallifrey Chronicles - so that it's there to be "destroyed" again during the Time
War! - so one could place the audios and comics after the novels if one so desired. The trouble there is that
both End Game and Storm Warning feel like the starting points of "early" series of adventures - it's certainly
difficult to conceive of either series picking up after the events of The Gallifrey Chronicles - so overall I'd
still like them to go somewhere before the destruction and restoration of Gallifrey.
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| After The Gallifrey Chronicles Though we know a lot about the eighth Doctor's later
life - and indeed his eventual fate - there are still periods where our knowledge is sketchy at best. In particular,
we've seen only fragments of what he gets up to between the open ending of The Gallifrey Chronicles
and when he meets Lucie Miller in Blood of the Daleks. We can presume that after defeating the Vore, the Doctor
restores Gallifrey - but we don't really know how long that might take, nor whether the reborn Gallifrey hits the ground
running - or whether it takes a long time for the Time Lords to re-establish themselves as a major galactic power. I think
we could be looking at centuries here about which we know very little. We see mere glimpses of the
Doctor's life during this period: travelling with new companions like Ayfai; a period working for the UN in the year 2040;
more adventures with Destrii (which is another narrative sequence left open-ended); commemorating a companion who died
fighting against a dictator; and finally a long period of withdrawal in which he founds a scientific institute with
other time travelling beings. There could be hundreds of years between all these events. But eventually, he
takes up adventuring again, and re-establishes contact with the Time Lords (though seemingly not on very good
terms).
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| The last great Time War Before we knew of the War
Doctor's existence, we didn't really have any idea about what the Doctor did in the Time War,
nor indeed which incarnation was involved. There was a school of thought in fandom that it was
the eighth Doctor who fought in the War, and that he regenerated as a consequence of injuries
sustained. However, it seems this was never the intent of the show's producers. We might note
that they were happy enough at the time of the show's relaunch for the eighth Doctor's regeneration
to have been depicted in the spin-off media - and indeed there were advanced plans for it to appear
in the comic strip. Ultimately, this was not followed up and the eighth Doctor's comic strips
concluded with a more open ending - but the fact that it was even mooted with the producers' full
blessing demonstrates clearly that they did not intend to suggest the eighth Doctor had perished
in the act of ending the War. Consequently, I always proceeded on the assumption that it was the
ninth Doctor who fought in the war. And as it turns out, that was indeed the case - but the ninth
Doctor wasn't who we thought he was! (The Time War is - indirectly - the reason for the eighth
Doctor's death, and his ultimate decision to become the War Doctor.) We still don't know many of the
details of the War Doctor's life - though he appears to age greatly during the course of the War,
implying that he fights it for a very long time.
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| The Dalek Factor This is a story in which the
author has deliberately not specified which Doctor is involved. (There are a few stories
like this. I'm not talking about Unbound or parallel timelines or imagined future
incarnations here, but instances where the author has left it to our imaginations.) Anyone
who's been following this site for some time will see that I've changed my mind quite a few
times on the placing of this one. But with the latest turn of events, it seems that the War
Doctor fits this story best - who else might be a prisoner of the Daleks for some unspecified
length of time? We know that the War Doctor ages considerably during his lifetime, so there's plenty of
unseen years where this could take place. Obviously, he eventually escapes from the Daleks to continue the fight...
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| Post-War Doctor
We still don't know how long the ninth Doctor has been around before he first appears. There's a throwaway
moment in Rose when he catches a glimpse of his face in the mirror and comments on his ears,
which led many to assume that he had only recently regenerated. I didn't regard that as particularly
conclusive evidence (and I suspect it was only there to give fans who crave such things a post-regeneration
scene). We had to balance that against the conflicting evidence suggesting the ninth Doctor has been around
for a while, such as the images Clive has been collecting - one of which shows the Doctor in a completely
different period costume. Also notice that the War Doctor, very shortly before his regeneration, gives his
age as 800 - even allowing for the usual amount of flexibility and latitude in the Doctor's age, this seems
to quite deliberately suggest that the ninth Doctor will live for at least a century before the 2005 series.
On the other hand, The Beast of Babylon plainly states that the Doctor had
only recently regenerated when he met Rose, although I think it's ambiguously enough worded (the Doctor
talks about his shell not having hardened yet) to give us some wriggle room here. I can envisage the Doctor,
war-scarred and shellshocked, and driven by his survivor guilt to try and make amends for what he believes
his previous incarnation to have done - hence actions like saving the Daniels family from the Titanic -
acting on a kind of desperate instinct, before his personality starts to settle down. So that could suggest
a lengthy period during which he might consider himself to still be newly regenerated, time in which he has
to adjust to being the Doctor again. As time has gone on, we have been shown an increasing number of the ninth
Doctor's stories set prior to Rose so I think we must now accept that what we saw in the 2005 series
was not the entirety of his life, but merely the last few months.
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| Human Nature One of the more controversial aspects of
modern continuity is the show's adapting of previously-published spin-off stories into new tv
episodes - and that's demonstrated most blatantly with this episode based on the
seventh Doctor novel of the same name. This isn't the place to
get into a discussion of what is and isn't canon, but I will note that some fans who wish to exclude
them try to use this episode as "proof" that the novels don't count - on the grounds that the Doctor
couldn't have the same adventure twice, and that the tv version had to trump the novel.
(Even despite the fact that the novel existed first!) We should however take note of the fact that
the tv story is not simply a straight adaptation of the novel. There are differences in the characters,
and the time period - and most importantly, the Doctor's reasons for becoming human are completely different.
The villains of the piece aren't the same either. So I contend that the original version must still have
happened to the seventh Doctor in one version of the timeline - otherwise, the Aubertides would never have
been defeated. There could be many reasons why this original timeline was undone. (The common explanation
these days is that it happened because of the Time War...)Of course, a different version of the same adventure
occurring to more than one Doctor is nothing new. I've already dealt with The Ultimate Adventure,
Shada and the redrawn TV Comic strips. As with those, I'd suggest that the Doctor is drawn on some
subconscious level towards such areas of quantum instability, as if feeling the need to restore missing
sections of his timeline. Alternatively, it may be that the Tardis is deliberately seeking out these
space-time discontinuities. After all, when the Doctor activates the chameleon arch, he leaves all the details
to the Tardis: creating a credible backstory and finding the right setting for the John Smith schoolmaster
persona. Though the Doctor may not himself recall the events of the original Human Nature, we can imagine that
the Tardis on some quantum level retains that knowledge in its memory banks, and automatically draws upon it to create
the Doctor's new human form; and in locating a setting in which to place him, homes in on an area of quantum instability
to try and protect the integrity of the Doctor's timeline.
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| Bi-generation The most shocking thing to happen in The Giggle is the Bi-generation -
the fifteeth Doctor apparently being born out of the fourteenth like an amoeba bisecting. There are certainly a lot of questions arising
from this. I'll leave aside any pronouncements made by the producers in behind the scenes commentaries, and concentrate solely on what we
see on screen. The most fundamental question to be asked is: are there two Doctors now? Has this broken the continuous thread of personal
existence that defines the Doctor as a single individual? Will the fourteenth Doctor eventually be able to regenerate into another different
fifteenth incarmation? Well, I don't think so. To me, it suggests that the fifteenth Doctor has been
pulled forward from his point in the Doctor's timeline so that he can take on the Doctor's role in the universe, allowing his previous
incarnation the time to quietly retire and get himself back together. The fifteenth Doctor remarks that they're doing "rehab out of
order" - which also ties in with the fourteenth Doctor's comment that he'll need "a million years" to heal. This gives the
Doctor narrative closure, while also allowing the fifteenth Doctor to start with a clean slate, having shed the emotional baggage of his
previous selves. It's like a reversal of the appearance of the Watcher from Logopolis. It also,
of course, allows for possible future guest appearances by the fourteenth Doctor.
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