Whenever fans talk about Doctor Who, or any other long-running work of fiction, they’re really talking about “their” version of the franchise. Relatively few people have seen all the episodes, and even fewer have gone through all the spinoffs and related media. Moreover, people put their own subjective weights on different stories. I personally despise the Doctor’s decision to turn humanity into soldiers against the Silence at the end of “Day of the Moon,” while others see it as an awesome moment for the character. The Doctor, like most people, is a mass of quirks and contradictions that can lead different people to have different interpretations of them.

With that in mind, here’s a list of some of the stories that most influenced my personal take on the Doctor. When I give my opinion on who the Doctor is or what they would/wouldn’t do, these are the tales that helped shape that point of view.

The Space Museum

I think the choice of William Hartnell as an older, professorial First Doctor made a huge difference to the development of the show. Hartnell was not an action hero, and couldn’t rely on fighting his way out of things (although he did occasionally get to show some combat skills, such as in “The Romans”). As a result, he had to rely on the relationships he formed with others–something that plays a key role in “The Space Museum.”

“The Space Museum” begins with a timey-wimey glitch where the Doctor and his companions Barbara, Ian, and Vicky see a possible future where they have been captured, killed, and put on display in the titular museum. The serial then focuses on their attempts to avoid that fate…and reaches its climax when all four characters are captured with no way to escape.

Our heroes don’t rescue themselves directly, but they have put into motion events which lead to their rescue. “In the short time we’ve been on this planet,” says the Doctor, “we’ve met people, spoken to them and…who knows? We might have even influenced them.”

Through their interactions with the native Xerons, who are enslaved within the museum, the TARDIS crew wound up inciting a revolution. Thus, when everything seems bleakest for our heroes, the events they set into motion come full circle and rescue them.

I like the idea that Doctor Who doesn’t rely just on technobabble to save the day, but is also about the way in which our connections with others can make major changes in the universe. The First Doctor’s stories showcase this especially well, since Hartnell’s character was a little more callous than the Doctors who would follow until his companions softened him. “The Space Museum” really brings this concept home, where simple travelers change the course of an entire world and save themselves in the process.

The War Games

In a long-running series where the hero can’t ever be totally defeated, it’s important to ground the protagonist with stories that show their limits. “The War Games” does that while also giving the first real glimpse of the Doctor’s own people (and naming them the Time Lords).

“The War Games” is a ten-episode long epic that ultimately brings the Doctor face-to-face with one of his own kind. This had happened once before, when the First Doctor met the Meddling Monk, but that meddler pales in comparison to the War Chief who uses time travel technology to displace dozens of soldiers from wars all across Earth’s history. When the Doctor ultimately unravels the dilemma, he has to admit that he doesn’t have the ability to bring people back to where they belong courtesy of a malfunctioning TARDIS that wouldn’t be fixed for several more seasons. As such, he has to call upon the Time Lords to solve the problem…which also means that he has to answer for his own interference in Earth’s history.

“The War Games” showcases Patrick Troughton’s range as the Second Doctor, giving him moments of buffoonery and guile while also forcing him into serious dilemmas. In one episode he’s bluffing his way through a futuristic compound while wearing silly glasses, while in another he’s facing a firing squad. More importantly to the long-term development of the Doctor, it shows what he is willing to sacrifice when he doesn’t have all the answers.

This serial also highlights the cold, dispassionate nature of the Time Lords. They erase the memories of the Doctor’s companions and send them back to their own time, and they also straight up execute the Doctor. The execution was called a “change of appearance” in the original story, but as continuity has expanded we’ve learned that the Time Lords forced the Doctor to regenerate, expending one of his then-limited lives.

Seeing the Doctor among his fellow Time Lords helps to establish exactly who he is. Like the rest of his people, he has great power. Unlike them, he is willing to use it–not for personal benefit like the War Chief and not for amusement like the Monk, but rather in pursuit of what he considers justice. When given a chance to defend himself during his trial, the Doctor doesn’t deny that he meddles with history, instead arguing that the Time Lords don’t meddle enough. That, to me, is the Doctor: someone who is brave enough to push back against unjust laws, but who is also arrogant enough to assign himself as the arbiter of right and wrong.

Doctor Who and the Silurians

While the Doctor had talked about the sanctity of all life before, most of the show’s early adventures focused on him and his companions killing evil aliens. “Doctor Who and the Silurians” gave the Doctor a chance to put his money where his mouth was. As the newly-appointed science advisor of UNIT, the Doctor spends this series’ seven episodes doing everything possible to keep humanity from going to war with the prehistoric creatures known as the Silurians.

The Doctor gets captured repeatedly, goes against the orders of his new superior officer, and risks his life to broker a peace between awakened prehistoric humanoids and the current inhabitants of the Earth. Sadly, his attempts ultimately fail, as the Brigadier destroys the Silurian caves once the Doctor’s back is turned. Nonetheless, the great lengths the Doctor goes to during this long (and, admittedly, sometimes repetitive) serial cemented him to me as somebody whose primary mission is one of peace, even when achieving that peace seems impossible.

Inferno

Not long after “Doctor Who and the Silurians” came “Inferno,” where the Doctor’s attempt to repair his TARDIS winds up sliding him into a parallel universe. As seems inevitable when it comes to interdimensional travel, this parallel universe is a dark mirror of the Doctor’s own, where everyone he knows is part of a fascist regime. Nonetheless, both universes are conducting dangerous experiments involving the Earth’s core…and unleashing dangerous radiation that transforms people into monsters as a result.

The Doctor fails to save one world, watching as the experiment in the alternate universe utterly destroys the planet. The massive destructive sends the Doctor into a temporary shock-induced coma, and he just barely wakes up in time to save his own world.

“Inferno” is the first time the Doctor ever really confronts death on a planetary scale, and it scars him for the rest of his many lives. The traumas caused by the Time War open up old wounds, but those wounds began when the Doctor was just a scientific advisor stranded on Earth.

Remembrance of the Daleks

By the time the Seventh Doctor rolled around, our titular Time Lord was more or less a known quality. We had seen his people, his planet, his mentor, and many details of his past. Some worried that the Doctor was too familiar now, losing the air of mystery that followed him through the early incarnations. Script editor Andrew Cartmel made a concerted effort to give the Doctor a sense of the unknown again, mostly by hinting that he was something much more than a normal Time Lord. To me, though, his greatest addition to the show was presenting a pragmatic Doctor…something that “Remembrance of the Daleks” highlighted well.

In a serial that saw the Doctor and Ace travel to 1963, a short few months after the First Doctor had left with his original Earth-based companions, the Doctor basically played speed chess with the Daleks, playing two factions off each other while protecting a powerful item known as the Hand of Omega.

This serial cemented Sylvester McCoy as one of my favorite Doctors. He is equal parts clever, frantic, buffoonish, and ruthless. The Doctor definitely has a leg up on the Daleks for much of the story, but he loses control of his plan now and then–such as when a Dalek nearly catches him alone in a basement and Ace has to rescue him, or when a new special weapons Dalek touches down on Earth and ups the evil aliens’ firepower.

“Remembrance of the Daleks” kicked off a series of stories where the Doctor stops being just a traveler and starts actively causing a good kind of trouble in the universe. It is followed by “The Happiness Patrol,” where he and Ace intentionally overthrow a fascist government because the Doctor had been hearing “disturbing rumors” about the planet. I don’t know that Cartmel really accomplished his goal of making the Doctor more mysterious, but he certainly did provide some interesting stories where we saw what happens when our favorite Time Lord decides to be more proactive about fighting the evils of the universe.

This serial also has one of my favorite discussions about time and how choices can change history, when he is offered sugar for his tea:

DOCTOR: What if I could control people’s taste buds? What if I decided that no one would take sugar? That’d make a difference to those who sell the sugar and those that cut the cane.JOHN: My father, he was a cane cutter.
DOCTOR: Exactly. Now, if no one had used sugar, your father wouldn’t have been a cane cutter.
JOHN: If this sugar thing had never started, my great-grandfather wouldn’t have been kidnapped, chained up, and sold in Kingston in the first place. I’d be a African.
DOCTOR: See? Every great decision creates ripples, like a huge boulder dropped in a lake. The ripples merge, rebound off the banks in unforeseeable ways. The heavier the decision, the larger the waves, the more uncertain the consequences.

(Transcript courtesy of Chrissie’s Transcript Site)

In many ways, “Remembrance of the Daleks” crystallized my interpretation of the Doctor. The story combines silly antics, quick thinking, a heaping dose of help from the Doctor’s companion, themes of social justice, and an explosive climax where the villains are hoisted by their own petard, creating what I would consider to be an almost perfect Doctor Who story.

_{Images: BBC}