Doctor Who on Disney+: A Chaotic Primer — Part Two
Part Two — NuWho to the Present
A lot happened in the world of Doctor Who between its cancellation in 1989 (chronicled in Doctor Who on Disney+: A Chaotic Primer — Part One) and its regeneration in 2005. Perhaps the most remarkable thing was that the fans were able to put the franchise on their backs and carry it themselves for a while. Not only did they make video and audio dramas, but they managed to generally do it without running afoul of copyright or trademark protections.
The BBC had this policy, you see, where the writer who created a character, owns that character and they didn’t, for many years, secure the rights beyond that point. So, if you wanted to make a spin-off series with the Autons or Sontarans, you just had to write Robert Holmes and ask him if it was ok. A few fan-based companies took this loophole and exploited it for all it was worth.
Around the same time, the BBC licensed Virgin Publishing to continue the Seventh Doctor’s adventures as novels. They not only hired writers from the show itself but brought some fan authors along as well.
Fairly soon after the Virgin New Adventures launched, Big Finish Audio, currently the most prolific producers of Doctor Who stories, began gradually coaxing the Beeb to hand them the rights to more and more of the show’s canon until they truly were Doctor Who in every way that counted.
The cross-pollination of fans, writers of the show, and actors who seemed to generally delight in revisiting their characters created something truly unique in any sort of fandom. The barriers had completely fallen. The inmates were running the asylum.
Now I don’t mention all of this because you need to go and listen to hundreds of hours of Big Finish audio (though you could do a lot worse with your time) or read all the Virgin New Adventures or watch tape after tape of fan-made video; I mention it because the foundations of the 2005 revival of the show — Nu-Who as it is often called — arise from this miasma.
The Doctor becomes darker and more manipulative and, in some ways, colder. He becomes something more dangerous. The New Adventure novel Transit refers to him as an infection and his companions “white blood cells” that the earth sends out to keep him from losing his sense of compassion and doing more damage.
It gets real dark at times.
Both Big Finish and the Virgin New Adventures also play with the idea of long-term story arcs, which become the meat and potatoes of Nu-Who. In classic Who we saw major changes in the mythology extremely rarely; the stories were almost completely self-contained. In Nu-Who, the mythology is ever-present and ever-shifting. Almost every series has a season-long arc and changes something fundamental about The Doctor or their history.
This is to say that it was easy in part one of this piece to talk about Gallifrey or the Time Lords or the Daleks and not spoil much. Not so here. Consider yourself warned.
2005 — The Doctor shows up in London to investigate an Auton invasion, just like the Third Doctor used to do! He’s traveling alone and meets up with Rose Tyler, Nu-Who’s ur-companion. Fairly quickly we learn that things have changed a lot since Paul McGann’s ill-fated turn as The Doctor in the mid-nineties. Remember how, in part one of this guide, we talked a lot about the Daleks and The Master the the Cybermen?
Daleks — gone!
The Master (and all other Time Lords) — gone!
The Cybermen — it’s less clear, but maybe also gone.
An intra-temporal conflict known as “The Last Great Time War” had happened, drawing many worlds and species into the middle of a conflict between the Daleks and Time Lords which threatened to wipe out, well, everything. Somehow, The Doctor was able to keep the conflict from swallowing up time itself by destroying both the exterminating pepper-pots and his own people all at once.
It’s like a reboot without actually being a reboot. When The Ninth Doctor appears, we’re at narrative ground zero.
Now look, I did warn you about spoilers, yes?
By the sixth episode, Dalek, guess who’s back? Former Big Finish writer Robert Shearman — who is one of the greatest horror short story writers of all time as well, I feel compelled to add — adapts his audio story Jubilee for the series and makes the return of one single Dalek, terrifying.
By the twelfth episode, we learn that the Emperor Dalek somehow escaped the Time War and has been slowly, over centuries, building a new Dalek army using human DNA. So, so much for narrative ground zero, but it was refreshing while it lasted.
At the end of the series, Rose saves the day by staring into the heart of the TARDIS: destroying the Daleks (well, some of them), saving the life of Captain Jack Harkness — swashbuckling space con-man — leaving him with an odd case of immortality and generally putting things in the timeline in some sort of order. Power like that, however, comes with a price; her human body cannot contain it and survive and it thus has to be siphoned off into The Doctor who must then regenerate after a brief thirteen episodes.
The Doctor and Rose faced Autons, Slitheen, Dickensian gas ghosts (with Charles Dickens’ help), a Dalek, greedy American dudes, Reapers, and more Daleks.
What to watch: Honestly, it’s a pretty terrific season, but to narrow it down, Dalek and the two-part story, The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances.
Later in 2005, around Christmastime — At this point we meet the, arguably, most popular person to perform the role, Scottish actor David Tennant. He is SO popular, in fact, that The Doctor has regenerated into a body that looks like that of Scottish actor David Tennant four times making him The Tenth, Tenth, and a bit, parallel half-human other Tenth and The Fourteenth Doctor (thus far).
So let’s take a sideline and talk about regeneration: Most Time Lords regenerate gracefully as their old forms wear out. The Doctor almost always regenerates during some sort of trauma as a desperate attempt to survive. This leads to a situation where he occasionally has a difficult time settling into his new form and can be behaviorally erratic, even violent. We see this most clearly in the regeneration from The Fifth to The Sixth Doctor and from The Ninth to The Tenth Doctor.
Regeneration, we learn in both of these cases, is a lingering process and, as we discover in The Tenth Doctor’s debut story, The Christmas Invasion, it can have odd lingering effects. If you are to, say, have your hand cut off while in the wake of a regeneration, it’ll grow back. And if you do get a second hand, for heaven’s sake save the first one! You never know when it might come in handy!
For example, when The Doctor is fatally shot by a Dalek in The Stolen Earth, rather than regenerating into a new actor at the beginning of the next episode, he uses the regeneration energy to heal himself and then takes the extra bit that would force a change in appearance and shunts it into the hand in order to stay looking like Scottish actor David Tennant.
Very soon after this, The Doctor’s companion, Donna Noble, bumps into the container with the hand while it’s all regenerate-y and her DNA merges with the regeneration energy to form a partially human new Tenth Doctor also played by Scottish actor David Tennant.
And this is not the last time the Scottish actor David Tennant becomes the result of a regeneration. You think this is complicated now? Just wait.
Let’s take a look at some of the characters, new and old, that are introduced during The Tenth Doctor’s era that will form a sort of playing field across which much of the rest of Nu-Who will play out.
The Daleks — I was afraid you’d ask. A group of psychologically modified Daleks called “The Cult of Skaro” evidently hid gobs of bronze Daleks in the “Genesis Ark” outside of our dimension during the Time War and thus escaped destruction.
The Cybermen — Cybermen from a parallel universe find their way to ours through the Genesis Ark’s dimensionally promiscuous portal. They wage war with the Daleks from the Ark. Everything works out ok, but Rose gets stuck in the other dimension. It’s kind of cool for her, though, because her dad — dead in the primary Who dimension — is still around in the new one! So that’s pretty great, right?
Davros — Remember him, from Classic Who? Creator of the Daleks? He’s still around.
The Weeping Angels — Easily the most successful and popular of Nu-Who’s villains, Weeping Angels are stone statues who are “quantum-locked” when observed and unable to move, but when unobserved can most at frightening speed. They feed on temporal potential; in other words, if they touch you, you are transported way back into the past.
Companion Cavalcade — I’m dwelling a bit more on the companions here because they all return — many several times — later in the series. Rose ends up in the other dimension. Martha Jones eventually leaves The Doctor and joins Torchwood. Donna Noble — “the most important person in the universe,” we’re told — has her memories of The Doctor wiped after she took on parts of his mind during the creation of the half-human Tenth Doctor mentioned above. And finally, Sarah Jane Smith, the Fourth Doctor’s greatest friend, is back!
Captain Jack Harkness — Captain Jack is now the head of the Cardiff office of Torchwood, a sort of U.N.I.T.-style, alien monitoring and suppression, group. He’s still immortal.
River Song — Oh boy, this one gets tricky, but let’s start here; River is another time traveler who has a relationship with The Doctor (which she says is a marriage) and she is meeting him out of sync. In other words, she has had an entire life with The Doctor and he has no idea who she is. When he first meets her, she is at the end of her timeline… if you catch my drift.
The Master — Did you think he’d be gone for long? The Master hid his Time Lord-iness in a stopwatch and placed himself near the end of time itself. Upon his regeneration he remembers who he is and escapes back in time to the 21st century in order to take over the earth and then return his own people, the Time Lords, from the “Time Lock” in which they’d been hidden since the end of the Last Great Time War. (It doesn’t work out.) In order to attempt to help stop this plan, Donna Noble’s grandpa Wilfred takes a lethal dose of radiation which the Doctor must then siphon off causing his first regeneration in quite some time that doesn’t result in the body of the Scottish actor, David Tennant.
Are you as exhausted as I am here? Much is great about the Tenth Doctor’s era on Nu-Who and not much of that is due to the involvement of Daleks or Cybermen or The Master. Self-contained stories are still the show’s strength.
The Tenth Doctor, Rose, Mickey, Martha, Donna, and Sarah meet all of the above as well as Werewolves, Anthony Stewart Head (I love that guy.), The Wire, the Abzorbaloff (Well, The Doctor and company are less involved in this than a newly formed ELO cover band are.), the Macra (return of The Second Doctor bad guys!), Sontarans, Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, the Vashta Nerada.
What to watch: School Reunion. The Girl in the Fireplace. Love and Monsters. Smith and Jones. The Family of Blood. Blink. Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. Midnight. The Waters of Mars.
2010 — I’m going to have to take a very deep breath here. No era of Doctor Who is more convoluted than that of Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor. New companion Amy Pond knows The Doctor from her childhood and sees cracks in time and is eventually stored in a prison cell meant for The Doctor which is guarded for 2000 years by her fiance, Rory, who is turned into an Auton and Earth’s sun is a constantly exploding TARDIS; the universe ends, I think, and The Doctor’s death is predicted a few times and enacted at least once by a person in a spacesuit on a beach that may be River Song, but it may not actually be The Doctor and, and-. Deep breaths. Deep breaths.
Okay, so what do you really need to know at the end of all this?
River Song is Amy and Rory’s child who, since she was conceived in a TARDIS (really more than any of us needed to know), is a time traveler with regeneration energy.
The Great Intelligence (another Second Doctor villain!) enters The Doctor’s timeline to try and turn many of his major victories into defeats and thus punish him, but new companion, Clara Oswald, enters the timeline after him and rescues every incarnation of The Doctor making her the only companion to meet every single Doctor.
Here’s the really important bit about The Eleventh Doctor’s era: turns out that there’s a whole other Doctor in-between Eight and Nine that we never knew about before, The War Doctor! All those terrible things we thought The Ninth Doctor did? It was actually this guy! And the narrative is different that what we had been led to believe! Or it was about to have become different — tenses can be hard in Doctor Who.
The Eleventh Doctor now knows that The War Doctor didn’t, in fact, destroy Gallifrey, but instead hid it away in a pocket universe with the assistance of several of his other selves. He vows to find and free Gallifrey and his people — which is a little bit weird given The Tenth Doctor’s resistance to letting The Master bring them back.
Now any of you keeping count are going to have deduced that if there is another Doctor we didn’t know about and Scottish actor David Tennant actually comprises two regenerations, at this point the Doctor is cooked. As he prepares to die of old age on Trenzalore, it seems that this will be the end of The Doctor!
Nah, the Time Lords shoot some regeneration energy through the crack leading to their pocket dimension and the cycle starts all over again.
Very shortly, this deus ex machina will turn out to have been unnecessary, but we’ve got a couple more regenerations before we get there.
The Tenth Doctor, Amy, Rory, Clara and The Paternoster Gang go toe-to-toe with The Silence, Daleks, Cybermen, Weeping Angels, The Great Intelligence, dinosaurs, a cybernetic gunslinger (Take THAT, Westworld!), and Hitler.
What to watch: A Christmas Carol. The Doctor’s Wife. The Girl Who Waited. The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe. The Day of the Doctor (Tom Baker returns! But as… who?).
2014 — Peter Capaldi, arguably the best actor to play The Doctor, takes over the role. Now recall, if you will, how we discussed difficult regenerations, earlier. The transition from Eleven to Twelve wasn’t in itself that difficult, but in Twelve we find a Doctor deeply unsure about himself and his place in the universe. Even though he now knows that he didn’t, in fact, destroy his entire species in the Last Great Time War, he is still reckoning with the trauma from that imagined event as well as the sheer amount of loss and destruction that he’s seen throughout his lives.
As he himself says to Clara, “Am I a good man?”
The Master returns in a new regeneration as, the now female, Missy. Missy is deeply unhinged, beyond the extremes of most of The Master’s regenerations, making her both frightening and a heck of a lot of fun.
River Song also returns; this time meeting a regeneration of The Doctor that she has never seen before. Seemingly, this is the last night that she spends with The Doctor before her final adventure which we saw as her first appearance with the Tenth Doctor in the episode Forest of the Dead.
Davros also shows up again to try and steal Time Lord regeneration energy and give it to his Daleks.
The two main plots during The Twelfth Doctor’s era involve “The Hybrid” and an origin story for the original Mondasian Cybermen (not seen since The First Doctor’s regeneration story in 1966). The Hybrid is an ancient Time Lord legend of a creature that combines two warring races which will eventually destroy Gallifrey. The Time Lords and their president, Rassillon, decide that The Doctor has become The Hybrid; so, even though they’re still in their pocket universe, they kidnap him and imprison him in a trinket known as a “confession dial.” The Doctor escapes. Clara is sorta condemned to death, but not really. Eventually, not much comes of all this, but The Doctor is left being pretty damn grumpy with his own people.
The Cybermen story, loosely drawn from Marc Platt’s Big Finish audio masterpiece Spare Parts (the finest Doctor Who story of the last thirty years), involves the first ever Master team-up — The Master and Missy — and the tragic loss of The Twelfth Doctor’s second companion, Bill Potts. Bill gets Cyber-converted and dies, sorta, only to be resurrected by an incorporeal traveller through space who makes Bill like her and takes her on, presumably, adventures.
The Twelfth Doctor, Clara, Bill, and Nardole take on Daleks, Cybermen, Davros, Zygons (Fourth Doctor bad guys!), A Mummy and River Song’s ex-husband.
What to watch: The Zygon Invasion. The Zygon Inversion. Face the Raven. Heaven Sent/Hell Bent. The Husbands of River Song. Oxygen.
2018 — Like a blast of fresh air, Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor comes hurtling onto the scene! An argument can be made that the entire run of Nu-Who to this point has been an examination of the stages of working through trauma, with The Twelfth Doctor being the final breakthrough from “Am I good man?” to “Yes, I am!” Thirteen is pure joy that could well be the relief that comes from a newly found freedom from guilt, anger, and doubt. When this era soars — which is admittedly not always — it soars as high as any in Nu-Who.
But along the way, we learn some dark secrets.
The newest Master, it turns out, has at some point returned to Gallifrey and discovered a secret that infuriated him to the point of killing all the Time Lords and then attempting to meld their corpses with Cybermen to give The Doctor’s second-most arch-enemies the power to regenerate. The secret that he learned was this: The Doctor was not Gallifreyan at all, but an inter-dimensional creature that could regenerate. The Time Lords discovered this and stole the power for themselves, but The Doctor was kept as a sort of sleeper agent by a secret Time Lord organization known as “The Division.” Occasionally the “Timeless Child” would escape The Division and have some adventures in time and space as The Doctor — Thirteen crosses time streams with one of these, The Fugitive Doctor, during her run — but then is eventually captured back by The Division and has her memory wiped.
At the end of her adventures, wounded by The Master, The Thirteenth Doctor regenerates into… Scottish actor David Tennant! No, really.
The Thirteenth Doctor, Yaz, Ryan, Graham, and Dan (with help from Captain Jack, Ace, and Tegan) face off with Tzim-Sha, Daleks, Cybermen, Cyber-Time Lords, The Master, racism, the Judoon, and a talking frog.
What to watch: Rosa. Demons of the Punjab. Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror. Fugitive of the Judoon. The Haunting of Villa Diodati.
There you have it, sixty years of Doctor Who in a few thousand words. Maybe it doesn’t all quite fit together, or even completely make sense. Don’t worry too much, the show re-invents itself all the time. When The Fifteenth Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, takes over late in 2023, it will probably do so again. Doctor Who doesn’t work like the other major science fiction franchises, it loves its history but is willing to accept that its canon is as much a fan construct as anything the BBC itself has chosen to do; showrunner Russell T. Davies himself has referred to Big Finish audio stories as being connected to his version of the show and Doctors on-screen have referenced characters that only appear in audios and novels. It’s a free-for-all!
And this is part of the joy of Doctor Who. It can be anything, any shape you want it to be. Make the canon yourself. I can’t wait to hear what you come up with!
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times