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The Complete Adventures
| The first Doctor? Although it's traditional to refer to the William Hartnell incarnation as the "first" Doctor, there were eight before him. These incarnations are seen clearly during the mind-wrestling sequence in The Brain of Morbius.
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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. Back
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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. Back
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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 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. Back
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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. Back
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| The Masters of Luxor All right, I know this story doesn't really fit here, and The Firemaker leads straight into The Dead Planet. This story would have been the second tv serial if things had worked out differently, and it's written specifically to follow on from The Firemaker. This is our first example of a quantum reality. It won't be the last... All possibilities can exist in a quantum universe, but the observer can only be aware of whichever reality he's in. In our original observation of the universe (i.e. the tv series), the Tardis went straight from prehistoric Earth to Skaro; from a different perspective, we see that it travelled to Luxor first. Back
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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 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. Back
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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. Back
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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. Back
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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. Back
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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. 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. Back
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| Seven Keys to Doomsday I'm placing this play as it was originally presented to audiences - between the Doctor's tv incarnations - which means it has to fit after the Doctor's escape from Metebelis 3. In the play, the Doctor is on a mission for the Time Lords when he is wounded in an ambush on Karn - this appears to be the cause of his regeneration. Conventional wisdom is that the Doctor's body has been destroyed by the radiation in the Great One's cave - but he's well enough to escape from the mountain and make it back to the Tardis without obvious ill effects. This suggests that the radiation poisoning is slow-acting and cumulative. In Love and War, we learn that it takes ten years for the Doctor's body to slowly decay before he makes it back to UNIT HQ, so there's plenty of scope there for him to have undertaken a few missions for the Time Lords during the early stages of the infection. I speculate that it's the effects of the radiation that make his regeneration unstable, causing him to revert back to his dying third incarnation. This is supported by the events of Ancient Whispers, where the weakened Doctor is unsure of his chances of achieving a successful regeneration without outside assistance. Back
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| Robot Although the end of Robot would seem to lead into The Ark in Space and thus the whole Nerva Beacon/time ring arc, Death Flower! opens with the Doctor and Sarah both commenting on the novelty of his new face, indicating that it takes place soon after the regeneration. So it seems that the Tardis trip at the end of Robot is no more than a quick bit of showing-off to Harry. Back
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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. Back
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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. Back
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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. Back
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| Mel Meets Evelyn The Doctor takes Mel to meet Evelyn in Instruments of Darkness, and the story ends with the three of them departing for the Eye of Orion together, and the implication that the Doctor will subsequently return Evelyn to her own time. In Thicker Than Water, we see that Evelyn in fact travelled with the Doctor to Világ, and remained behind there. Mel and the Doctor later arrive on the planet and Mel meets Evelyn, seemingly for the first time again. My suggestion is that after Evelyn is taken home, she decides she doesn't want to return to her old life. The Doctor agrees to take her for a couple more trips, whilst Mel has some reason for remaining behind. While the Doctor is away, 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. Back
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| After Interference One of the biggest problems with fitting the eighth Doctor's era together is the fact that there were three separate ongoing storylines in different media. How do the comics fit with the audios, and how do they fit with the books? One notion is to regard them as separate and distinct segments of the eighth Doctor's life, perhaps with many years between. The only problem with this is that both comics and audios feature Gallifrey, and Gallifrey is destroyed halfway through the book line. By implication, the comics and audios need to fit somewhere before The Ancestor Cell. (Yes, I know Gallifrey must be restored at some point in order to be destroyed again in the Time War - but it just seems unrealistic to me that Gallifrey would be restored exactly as it was before, with the same people and everything. Only the knowledge in the Matrix is saved, the new world built on that foundation might be weird, wonderful and completely unrecognizable.) So, we need to find a gap in the book line where the other stories can plausibly fit. 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 I don't believe the Doctor would willingly leave his current companions behind for extended periods. (He leaves Sam for a while prior to Vampire Science, but I think that gap is too early in his life for some of these cataclysmic events.) The only conceivable gap is after Interference. The structure of the novel actually supports 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 we don't really know how long that process might take. Nor has Compassion actually become a companion yet - indeed when Foreman asks the Doctor what he did with her, he side-steps the issue. By the next novel, the Doctor, Fitz and Compassion have become the current Tardis crew, but we don't see that happen nor what the Doctor's been up to on his solo travels in the meantime. Back
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| After The Gallifrey Chronicles The events of the later years of the eighth Doctor's life are sketchy at best. I presume that after defeating the Vore, he restores Gallifrey - who knows how long that might take nor how long for Gallifrey to become a major galactic power once again? I think we could be looking at centuries before the last Time War takes place. We see only glimpses of different periods of the Doctor's life after this point - travelling with new companions like Ayfai and Lucie, a period working for the UN in the year 2040, more adventures with Destrii, commemorating the death of a companion fighting against a dictator, and finally founding a scientific institute with other time travelling beings. There could be hundreds of years between all these events. However, the final fate of the eighth Doctor is unreported. We still don't know why or how he regenerated - and we may never... Back
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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.) When this happens, I like to see if the story can work with one of the existing Doctors. (And anyone who's been following this site for some time will see that I've actually changed my mind on this one...) But at the present time, I'm suggesting that it's the ninth Doctor who's a prisoner of the Daleks in this book. I can see this story as marking an increase in hostilities between the Daleks and the Time Lords, in the build-up to the final Time War. Obviously, the Doctor eventually escapes from the Daleks... Back
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| The last great Time War Just as nebulous and uncertain as the later years of the eighth Doctor's life are the early years of the ninth. There's a school of thought that it was the eighth Doctor who fought in the Time War, and that as a consequence of injuries sustained in the war, he regenerated. This seems to be mainly based on a throwaway moment in Rose when the Doctor caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror and commented on his ears. That's not really conclusive evidence, and I suspect was only there to give fans who crave such things a post-regeneration scene. (And my placing of The Dalek Factor could actually suggest a reason why the Doctor is unfamiliar with his appearance.) There's far more evidence to suggest the ninth Doctor has been around a while, such as the images Clive has been collecting - one of which shows the Doctor in a completely different period costume. Also, on a conceptual level, the Time War is part of the backstory of the new series, it makes far more sense (and has greater emotional impact) for it to have occurred to the ninth Doctor. He could have lived for many years before getting involved in the War. But all we see is the aftermath. The ninth Doctor is war-scarred and shellshocked, and driven by his survivor guilt. If he'd regenerated as a result of the War, then we wouldn't have seen that, as his regeneration would have cured him of the guilt (as it seems to have done for the tenth Doctor for instance). The whole narrative thrust only works if the ninth Doctor himself has lived through the Time War. (Also, the producers of the show were happy enough for the eighth Doctor's regeneration to have been depicted in the spin-off media - and there were 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 this demonstrates clearly that the producers did not intend to suggest the eighth Doctor had perished as a direct result of the Time War.) So what we see in this series is not the ninth Doctor's entire life, merely the last few months. Back
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