<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

The Doctor is the main character in Doctor Who, the long-running television program of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The character is also featured in the various spin-off media from the show: books, radio dramas, online serials on (at first) the BBC's Cult TV site, later the BBC's official Doctor Who website and finally movies.

Contents 1 The Name 2 Time Lords 3 Early Life 4 Susan 5 Subsequent History

The Name

Although the program is called Doctor Who, the title is actually a running gag rather than the character's name. The character usually introduces himself as simply "The Doctor." This often prompts other characters to ask the question framed by the show's title - which invariably causes The Doctor to change the subject. In the more than 40 years (and hundreds of episodes) since the show's beginning, the character has never revealed his actual name. Friends and acquaintances address him as "Doctor."

The Doctor has, however, used various aliases when the need arises -- most often "Dr. John Smith." It has also been revealed that his nickname at school may have been "Theta Sigma." (This, itself, was a bit of a scholarly joke to the writers. These two Greek letters vaguely resemble a jumble of the characters W, H and O).

Note: the TV show varies from the two Doctor Who feature films of the 1960s in this aspect. In these films, Peter Cushing's character is actually called "Doctor Who.")

Time Lords

The Doctor is a Time Lord, a member of the ruling class of the planet Gallifrey in the constellation Kasterborous. The Gallifreyans have possesed time travel technology for many thousands of years and seem to have a greater mastery of it than any other race. The Time Lords have many powers over time and space and many methods for traveling to any location within the spacetime continuum (and other dimensions). The usual vehicle they employ is called a TARDIS.

Although The Doctor has occasionally been in favor with his people (on one occasion even ascending to Gallifrey's highest political office), he has most often been a renegade from Time Lord society. This is partially because the Doctor's tendency to tamper with history is highly illegal by Time Lord standards and partially because The Doctor seems to find his home planet rather boring.

As a Time Lord, the Doctor has the capability of "regenerating" -- renewing his body when it wears out or is fatally damaged. This has allowed many actors to portray the Doctor, each with his own unique interpretation.

Although both Gallifrey and other Time Lords have appeared in the TV series, more recent episodes of the series indicate that Gallifrey has since been destroyed. The Doctor now believes himself to be the last of his kind.

Early Life

Since one of the key concepts of Doctor Who is that not much of the main character's past is known, much of the Doctor's early history is shrouded in mystery. In the 1996 made for TV movie, he says that his mother was human (an idea disliked by many long time fans). The 2006 story "The Girl in the Fireplace" suggests that he was a very lonely child. In 1973's "The Time Monster," he claims that his childhood home was halfway up a mountain and that he used to listen to stories told by a hermit who sat beneath a tree not far behind his house. Given the fact that Gallifreyans in later stories seem reluctant to venture outside their cities, halfway up a mountain would seem to be a very isolated childhood indeed. In the 2007 episode "The Sound of Drums," the character indicates that Time Lord children are taken from their families at the age of eight to study at the Academy.

He graduated from the Prydonian Academy, the most prestigious of the Time Lord colleges, with a barely passing 51% on his final exams. Among his classmates were future renegades the Master and the Rani. Apparently, he knew the Rani much better because the Doctor's first incarnation does not recognize the Master when he sees him in 1983's "The Five Doctor's." Yet, the Rani remembers that the Doctor's "special subject" at school was thermodynamics.

He implies that he stole his TARDIS from a repair depot on Gallifrey.

In the 2006 season, he indicates that "I was a father once."

The first concrete knowledge we have of the character comes with his first appearance on the show when he has already reached the age of 450 years. In this episode (1963's "An Unearthly Child"), the Doctor appeared as an elderly gentleman (played by William Hartnell) who frequented a junkyard in London. It was later revealed (in 1988's "Remembrance of the Daleks") that the Doctor had come to Earth to hide a powerful piece of Time Lord technology, the stellar manipulator known as The Hand of Omega.

Susan

When the Doctor first appeared on television screens, he was in the company of a teenager who referred to him as "Grandfather." It later became a matter of speculation among fans whether Susan was in fact related to the Doctor or whether this was merely a term of endearment. However, the producers of the television show itself have generally maintained that the granddaughter appellation should be taken at face value.

Susan had been enrolled as a student at Coal Hill School in London under the pseudonym of Susan Foreman. Observant viewers noted that the name I.M. Foreman appeared on the gates of the junkyard in which the TARDIS was parked and could easily guess that Susan had "borrowed" this surname to use when attending school. Feeling the girl's behavior to be a bit odd, two of her teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, followed her back to the junkyard...

Subsequent History

The events of the Doctor's life after his first appearance on Doctor Who are somewhat clearer. He seems to have spent the majority of this period wandering through time and space and combating various threats to the local populace wherever he goes. He has often been accompanied in his travels by one or more traveling companions - frequently young and female.

At the end of the show's first episode, the chameleon circuit in the Doctor's TARDIS failed, locking it in the shape that it had taken in 1963 London, a British Police Box.

A few episodes later, the Doctor first encountered the Daleks, a race of insane supremacist aliens that would eventually become his most feared and often encountered opponents.

Susan departed the Doctor's company, presumably to marry a young man she had met in 1964's "The Dalek Invasion of Earth." Ian and Barbara chose to leave a few stories later.

In 1966's "The Tenth Planet," the elderly Doctor collapsed after his initial conflict with the Cybermen, an evil race of cyborgs that also become a major recurring menace in the Doctor's life. This caused his regeneration into a somewhat younger second incarnation (played by actor Patrick Troughton).

The Doctor's travels continued until 1969's "The War Games." This story resulted in the arrest of the Doctor by his fellow Time Lords and his subsequent trial for meddling in time. He was sentenced to exile on Earth and forced to regenerate into his third incarnation (played by Jon Pertwee). To enforce his exile, the Time Lords removed his memory of time travel technology.

Some sources suggest that the Doctor's second incarnation was actually compelled as part of his sentence to run errands for the Time Lords prior to his forced regeneration and subsequent exile. This is referred to as the Season 6b theory because it concerns events that supposedly occurred between the program's 6th and 7th seasons.

While exiled on Earth, the Doctor became the scientific advisor to UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce), a paramilitary organization whose mission seemed to be dealing with alien threats. The Doctor's first recorded encounter with the evil rival Time Lord known as the Master also occurred during this period. Although there was obviously some existing relationship between the two Time Lords, little is known about their previous meetings except that the Master had clearly developed a disdain for the Doctor. Subsequent encounters with the Doctor seems to have changed his disdain to pure hatred.

The Doctor's exile was lifted and his memories restored after helping the Time Lords avert an attack by one of their own founding fathers, the legendary stellar engineer Omega (in 1973's "The Three Doctors"). Free to roam through time and space again, the Doctor received a fatal dose of radiation on the planet Metebelis 3 when he entered the lair of a giant spider queen in 1974's "Planet of Spiders." This caused him to regenerate again.

The Doctor's fourth incarnation (played by Tom Baker) quickly lost interest in UNIT and began wandering again in earnest. The Doctor was summoned home to Gallifrey in 1976's "The Deadly Assassin" only to find himself framed for the murder of the Lord President. To avoid immediate execution, the Doctor exploited a legal technicality by declaring his own candidacy for the office. However, after having cleared his name, the Doctor quietly slipped away before an election could actually be held.

He returned, however, when Gallifrey was invaded in 1977's "The Invasion of Time." On his return, he promptly exploited another legal technicality to declare himself the new Lord President, giving him the power he needed to combat the threat to his home world. However, once the danger had been averted, he fled Gallifrey once again to avoid the daily tedium of actually running the planet. He was eventually deposed from his lofty office due to neglect of his duties.

In 1981's "Logopolis," the Doctor journeyed to the city of that name in an attempt to fix the faulty chameleon circuit in his TARDIS. However, tampering by the Doctor's old enemy, the Master) caused chaos to ensue, resulting eventually in the Doctor's fall from a great height. This triggered yet another regeneration.

The Doctor's fifth incarnation (played by Peter Davison) saw the continuation of the Doctor's wanderings unitl he contracted Spectrox Toxemia on the planet Androzani Major (in 1984's "The Caves of Andozani"), resulting in still another regeneration.

In 1985's "Attack of the Cybermen," the Doctor's sixth incarnation (played by Colin Baker) attempted to complete the repairs to his TARDIS's chameleon circuit begun at Logopolis. For the next few flights it changed into random shapes such as a working pipe organ and an ominous looking door. When at last, it returned to the familiar blue police box shape, the Doctor seemed to conclude that it had grown fond of that form and didn't want to change.

In 1986's "Trial of a Timelord," the Doctor was once again arrested and put on trial by his fellow Time Lords. This time, however, the charges were eventually dropped.

1987's "Time and the Rani" saw another regeneration when rival renegade Time Lord The Rani shot down the Doctor's TARDIS. The Doctor's seventh incarnation (played by Sylvester McCoy) proved to be more circumspect. Mysterious and full of complex plots, this incarnation actually laid elaborate traps into which he lured both the Daleks and the Cybermen, one of which actually resulted in the destruction of the Daleks homeworld, Skaro.

The Doctor's adventures seem to have continued despite the end of the classic Doctor Who series in 1989. A visibly older version of the Doctor's seventh incarnation appears at the beginning of the 1996 made for TV Doctor Who movie, suggesting that he had been traveling for decades (if not centuries) since viewers last saw him. When technical difficulties forced the Doctor to land in San Francisco, he found himself in the crossfire of a violent gang war as he stepped out of his TARDIS. The physicians in the hospital to which he was rushed, unaware and unwilling to believe that the Doctor was an alien, hastened the Doctor's decline rather than helped him. This resulted in another regeneration.

The Doctor's eighth incarnation (played by Paul McGann) appeared on viewers screens only in the 1996 TV movie. Nevertheless, this incarnation appears to play a pivotal role in the Doctor's life. However, it is not what viewers saw on screen that makes him so. It is what apparently happened afterwards. It was almost certainly this incarnation of the Doctor that was involved in the Time War. Although there were no televised adventures of the character between the 1996 TV movie and the 2005 debut of the new series, related novels and audio dramas featuring the eighth Doctor began to appear. Both of these sources began to suggest that the Time Lords had been at war. Both sources stated that the war resulted in destruction of the Doctor's home planet, Gallifrey and indeed most of the Time Lords. However, the novels and the radio plays disagree widely on the details and in any case, the canonicity of such spin off materials is hotly debated by fans. The new series clearly endorses the idea that such a war occurred, but also seems to differ on the details. For example, the new series is the only source that states that the Daleks were the main antagonist in the Time War. The BBC has addressed the divergence of these materials on their web site simply by saying that many stories are told of this era, but the era is clouded in uncertainty. Apparently, the chaos caused when two races capable of altering history clash makes it difficult to determine which events actually happened.

The new series in 2005 opened with a new incarnation of the Doctor (played by Christopher Eccleston), leaving fans to speculate what events led to his regeneration into this new form. It is most widely assumed that this is also a result of the Time War, which had left this new incarnation a bitter and broken man. A new clash with the Daleks led to a further regeneration at the end of the 2005 season.

The Doctor's tenth incarnation (played by David Tennant) continues to wander through space and time. He is more upbeat than the previous incarnation, only occasionally exhibiting flashes of the sadness and anger caused by the destruction of his home world.