Doctor Who (12 page)

But none of this came to pass. On June 18, 1973, while shooting the never-completed movie
Bell of Tibet
in Turkey, Roger Delgado, age fifty-five, died along with two film technicians when their chauffeur-driven car went
off the road and over a ravine. His sudden and unexpected death shocked family, friends, and fans. “He and his wife, Kismet, were very close friends to Ingeborg and me, and we loved them dearly,” Pertwee said. “I was desperately shaken when he was killed. We looked after Kismet until she managed to get herself together, and we still see a lot of her . . . I loved working with him, and still miss him tremendously.”

Even though regeneration meant they could recast the Master without much explanation, writers waited over three years before bringing the character on-screen again, and from then on they used him more sparingly. Delgado's version of the Master is remembered fondly to this day, his incarnation appearing in different novels and comic strips. One story has the evil Time Lord journey to the Land of Fiction and confront Professor Moriarty, criticizing him as a one-dimensional antagonist introduced for the sake of convenience. It's an interesting villain indeed who can overcome the character that inspired him.

With his old adventures now on DVD, a new generation of fans is discovering the original Master, who set the path that the rest have followed. In
Return to Devil's End,
John Levene spoke about his departed friend, who had helped him feel more secure as an actor. “I love Roger because he was the most honest and decent man I'd ever met. His morals were very high, and it's ironic that someone who loved God and loved the world should play the most evil man in the world.”

10

Doctor Meets Doctor

“Ah, the Doctor. Wonderful chap. All of them.”

—Lethbridge-Stewart, from “The Five Doctors” (1983)

 

After three years of having the Doctor largely time-locked on Earth, Barry Letts was ready to give the hero his freedom again and phase out UNIT's dominance in the program. Each of Pertwee's seasons began with a major story: The seventh season started with the Doctor's exile and joining UNIT; the eighth season opened with the debut of the Master; and the ninth season had begun with “Day of the Daleks,” in which the Doctor dealt with alternate futures and fought the monsters for the first time in five years. Letts wanted the tenth season to involve a menace that threatened all of the Time Lords. The story would also feature a new TARDIS interior, since Letts hadn't liked the previous one that Pertwee used and it had warped in storage anyway.

But the ideas didn't stop there. For years, many fans had written to suggest that Hartnell or Troughton return for a story, arguing that the Doctor could visit his younger selves through time travel. Barry Letts had habitually dismissed this but now considered it a good way to celebrate the tenth anniversary.

The original story was called “Deathworld,” revealing a conflict between the Time Lords and a powerful group known as the Federation of Evil, led by a living avatar of Death itself. The Time Lords, wishing to avert all-out war, send the Doctor and his first two incarnations to Underworld, a strange realm that the Federation calls home. There, the three Doctors fight their way through reanimated corpses as well as representations of the mythological cyclops Polyphemus, the Hindu goddess Kali, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse before finally joining forces against Death itself.

Letts decided that the Underworld setting and its inhabitants were too bizarre for the show. Another suggestion conjured a villain called Ohm, a
name taken from the measure of electrical resistance, which also spelled “Who” upside down and backward. Letts disliked this idea as well since the Doctor's real name wasn't “Who.” So “Ohm” evolved into “Omega,” a reference to the Greek letter (Ω) that represents Ohms and has been used at times as a symbol for Death, following a passage in the Book of Revelations: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”

Strange Reunion

As the story “Deathworld” changed, it was retitled “The Three Doctors” and opened the tenth season of
Doctor Who
on December 30, 1972. The next three episodes followed in January. The adventure featured forces from an antimatter reality invading our universe and placing Gallifrey under siege. Unable to leave their world, the Time Lords decide that only the Doctor can save them. But he'll need help and no other Time Lords can aid him, so they must break the First Law of Time, which states that no one should encounter an older or younger self. Using great amounts of energy, the Time Lords snatch up the First and Second Doctors from other points in history and transmit them to the Third Doctor's side.

The adventure offered more detail about Gallifrey, showing hints of the Time Lord government and bringing back one of the Second Doctor's judges in the role of Chancellor. Viewers were introduced to a special security force on the planet that ignored the laws of non-interference and the First Law of Time when the circumstances warranted it. We also learned how, long ago, the Gallifreyan named Omega had been a solar engineer whose experiments in harnessing a supernova created the power source for Gallifrey's original time ships.

Behind the scenes, Hartnell and Troughton happily returned for the anniversary. Initially, the script gave each Doctor an equal part to play in saving the day, but Hartnell's declining health prevented him from coming to the studio. To involve him still, the script changed so that the First Doctor was caught in a time eddy—a distortion in space and time. The Time Lords couldn't expend any more energy to free him; he could only advise his two future selves through the TARDIS scanner screen. Although Hartnell
was able to meet Troughton and Pertwee for a promotional photo shoot, his scenes were filmed entirely separately at BBC's Ealing Studios, with someone holding cue cards for him. A common fan myth is that they were shot at his home in his garage.

Some thought that Jamie and Zoe might return with the Second Doctor, and Terrance Dicks apparently suggested a romantic attraction between Jamie and Jo. But Frazer Hines had a conflict in his schedule, and Pertwee objected to too many characters in one story.

While some criticized the anniversary story for being padded in areas and simplistic, many fans loved seeing the three Doctors interact, particularly as they engaged in many amusing arguments. Along with adding humor to the story, these interactions highlighted the differences in each Doctor.

The convergence of Doctors became a tradition. On the twentieth anniversary, the TV special “The Five Doctors” aired. Hartnell had died in 1975, so Richard Hurndall played the First Doctor in the story, joining forces with Pertwee, Troughton, and Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor. Tom Baker had decided not to participate, so footage from the unaired story “Shada” explained that the Fourth Doctor was trapped outside of space and time. The TV story was also the first to feature both Daleks and Cybermen (though sadly, they didn't fight).

Doctor Who
was off the air during the thirtieth anniversary, but the surviving Doctors appeared together on the charity special “Dimensions in Time” (more about that later). In 2003, Big Finish Productions celebrated the fortieth anniversary with
Zagreus,
an Eighth Doctor audio drama starring Paul McGann in which every cast member was a former companion. Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy played all-new characters before reprising their roles as previous Doctors. A recording of Jon Pertwee brought in a bit of him as well.

The anniversaries haven't been the only times different Doctors meet. Numerous team-ups have happened in the tie-in media. In 1985, then show runner John Nathan-Turner tried to repeat the success of “The Five Doctors” by producing “The Two Doctors,” featuring the Sixth Doctor meeting the Second. In 2007, the charity Children in Need broadcast the mini-episode “Time Crash.” Written by Steven Moffat, the story has the Tenth Doctor
accidentally merge his TARDIS with the Fifth Doctor's, leading to a comedic meeting and a love letter to the past.

“Time Crash” seems to be the only time the later Doctor remembered a team-up from his younger counterpart's perspective. Perhaps this is because the Time Lords were around all the other times, placing memory blocks on the younger Doctors as they had with Jamie and Zoe.

Since the advent of the modern-day program, some have requested repeatedly that classic Doctors appear. “I'd love for it to happen,” said Matt Smith in an interview for this book. “How amazing would it be to see Tom Baker? Can you imagine seeing him back in the scarf? And Paul McGann is a great actor and a great Doctor. I say bring back Chris and Dave, too! How many Doctors can we get into one story? Imagine if there were five or six of us in one ep and we could all look at one another and judge one another.”

Family Ties

Having saved Gallifrey (with the help of his earlier selves), the Third Doctor is given a new dematerialization circuit and regains his memories concerning his ship's operations. Either because his memory's been refreshed or since the ship has new, better circuits now, the Doctor at last has a greater deal of control over the TARDIS, whereas the first two incarnations were always flying blind. But rather than rush off without a second glance, he takes Jo on a few trips, always returning to the UNIT lab that he has called home for years. The season ended with the story “The Green Death,” in which Jo falls in love and decides to leave UNIT. Hurt, the Doctor tells her to save him a slice of wedding cake and quietly departs. (A few years after leaving the show, Katy Manning caused quite a stir when she posed nude alongside a Dalek in photos for
Girl Illustrated.
“Typical Katy!” said Pertwee. Decades later, Manning rejoined the Whoniverse in Big Finish audio dramas as Iris Wildthyme, a hard-drinking, flirtatious Time Lord first introduced in prose.)

Jo Grant returned to the screen in a two-part story of
The Sarah Jane Adventures
in 2010, now using her married name, Jo Jones. In the two-part “Death of the Doctor” story by Russell T. Davies, she meets the Doctor's eleventh incarnation and finally encounters her successor, Sarah Jane Smith, a woman who changed what it meant to be the Doctor's friend.

Season 6B

Many fans worship continuity.

In “The Five Doctors,” the Second Doctor navigates his TARDIS to visit the Brigadier in retirement. Yet the show had always shown that the hero had no control over his destination until after the Third Doctor's exile had ended. Later in the story, it became clear that this version of the Second Doctor had already experienced separation from Jamie and Zoe, commenting on their memory loss and remembering the battle with Omega. How was this possible when Jamie and Zoe were sent away just before his exile and forced regeneration?

The matter grew more complicated still in “The Two Doctors.” Though generally regarded as a fun adventure, some fans noted continuity contradictions. The story features the Second Doctor and Jamie on a mission for the Time Lords and able to control the ship's destination. Along with this, the TARDIS doesn't look like the one he used before and has a remote unit that allows the Time Lords to take control. None of this corresponds with the Second Doctor's adventures where Jamie didn't even know about the Time Lords until the trial.

Several viewers pointed out that we never actually see the Second Doctor regenerate. We hear that his sentence is about to begin, and then something happens as the screen fades to black. When “Spearhead from Space” begins, the change has already occurred. Along with this, the Third Doctor possesses equipment that the Second Doctor didn't, such as a device that tracks his ship. It seems odd the Time Lords would give him these devices and explain their uses while he was regenerating. Perhaps
more
than a few minutes had passed between the end of “The War Games” and “Spearhead from Space.”

The
TV Comic
adventures of the Second Doctor had already used this idea. During the six months between Troughton's last adventure and Pertwee's first, the strips depict the Doctor exiled to Earth but still wearing his second face. He has several adventures until finally he is lured to a farm where a group of scarecrows controlled by the Time Lords captures him. He is forced to regenerate and sent off in the TARDIS, leading into the Third Doctor's debut.

By the time “The Five Doctors” aired, these comic strip adventures were largely forgotten. But some Whovians still believed an untold adventure or several may have occurred between the Doctor's trial and exile. The TV story “The Deadly Assassin” fueled this possibility, mentioning that the exile was “subsequently remitted” by the Celestial Intervention Agency (CIA), introduced as a Time Lord black ops group. The remark led many to conclude that the Time Lords who had circumvented the First Law of Time in “The Three Doctors” had belonged to this agency. Perhaps it wasn't the first time they'd recruited the Doctor for special operations, either.

The book
The Discontinuity Guide,
published in 1995, suggests that following the end of the hero's trial, the Celestial Intervention Agency dispatched him on several missions, improving his TARDIS and providing the new equipment the Third Doctor had. During this time, the Doctor temporarily regained an older Jamie and Victoria as companions. Eventually, these assignments stopped and the exile and forced regeneration began, either because the hero proved too difficult to control or because the CIA had accomplished its goals. Along with his knowledge of time travel, the agency also blocked his memories of the missions for security reasons.

This period became known as “Season 6B.” Fans quickly adopted it, and tie-in media started directly referencing it, but many still considered it just a fan theory or “fanon.” Terrance Dicks liked the idea, though, and in 2005 he expanded on it in the novel
World Game
for BBC Books. The novel reveals that the end of “The War Games” seen on-screen was a “re-edited” version of events released for the public record. Now the true story could be revealed under the provisions of the Gallifreyan Freedom of Information Act.

World Game
details the Second Doctor learning that his sentence of execution can be commuted to exile if he performs a task, possibly several, on behalf of the Celestial Intervention Agency. The Time Lords overhaul his ship, explaining the different interior in “The Two Doctors” and why the TARDIS is more reliable following his trial. The novel's epilogue establishes that the stresses of CIA missions cause the Second Doctor to age faster (a nod to Troughton being noticeably older
in his later appearances). The novel's end leads directly into “The Two Doctors.”

Since Terrance Dicks wrote the story, which the BBC issued via its publishing arm BBC Books, many fans took
World Game
as the official version of what occurred between “The War Games” and “Spearhead from Space.” The BBC even adopted “Season 6B” into the official record on the classic
Doctor Who
website.

Fanon had become canon.