So you’re saying to yourself, “Hey! That Doctor Who-thing I’ve always heard about is going to be on Disney+ soon. Maybe I’ll start watching. What do I need to know to jump on board?”
Oh, my sweet summer child, let’s you and I have a talk. Now I know that one of the first things out of your mouth will be, “I can just start with the new show, right?” and maybe I could nod and tell you that it would absolutely be fine to pick it up when Russell T. Davies resurrected the show with Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor in 2005… But I can’t do that. I care about you too much. Did you notice that I said “Ninth” Doctor? Eventually, it would start to eat away at you. Who are the other eight? What’s the deal with the phone box? (Or, if you’re of a certain age, what’s a phone box?) Why does he say he’s the last of his kind? What’s with the five-foot tall upside down thimble-looking thing with a bathroom plunger stuck on?
You see? To quote Tolstoy, “Gentlemen, I am tormented by questions. Answer them for me.” I’d like to help. Have a seat, maybe some herbal tea, take a deep breath and let me offer you a primer on a show now about to enter its sixtieth year, Doctor Who.
1963 — A brilliant but strange teenager is followed home from school by two of her teachers and it is discovered that she is living in a police call box in a junkyard with her slightly unhinged grandfather. (For non-Brits, a police call box was a sort of emergency phone set-up for law enforcement that could also serve as a temporary holding cell as suspects could be locked inside awaiting transportation to a facility.) The inside of the box is far larger than it could possibly be based on its dimensions outside. Seemingly unable to produce a recognizable name, he is referred to as “The Doctor.”
The Doctor, not wanting the teachers to report his whereabouts, locks them inside and — having revealed that the ship is not only their home but also a machine able to travel through space and time (a TARDIS — Time and Relative Dimensions in Space) — takes off for an adventure!
Along the way, the crew meets the Daleks (mutated blobs that live inside metal casings and are powered by static electricity, like bumper-cars) who will become The Doctor’s arch enemies, Marco Polo, lots of aliens, Robespierre, The Daleks, human-sized dancing butterflies, Richard the Lionheart, The Daleks some more, Achilles, even more Daleks, The Celestial Toymaker, Wyatt Earp, an evil post office and The Cybermen.
The Cybermen are a race of human-like beings who live on a planet identical to our own, in our own solar system, that we’d never noticed before. Things had been going poorly there and they’d started to modify their bodies to adapt, eventually replacing so much that they no longer held human emotions. It’s very much the tale of the Tin Woodsman, but much scarier.
And, in the story that introduces them, something remarkable happens; The Doctor dies. Hero to British children everywhere, he defeats the proto-Borg, but doesn’t survive the encounter. His eyes close, a weird miasma of haze covers his face and he suddenly looks like a different person. He has become someone new. He has all the same memories, but an entirely new face and personality. He has “regenerated.”
What to watch: An Unearthly Child (though really only episode one is necessary). The Daleks. The Aztecs. The Dalek Invasion of Earth. The Web Planet (unionized grubs!). The Tenth Planet.
1966 — The Second Doctor, a sweeter, more childlike, character than the First is something of a monster magnet. His adventures with companions Jamie, Victoria, and Zoe are characterized as being a bit scarier.
The Second Doctor meets… The Daleks! Also, the King of Atlantis, the Jacobites, the Cybermen (again), giant crab monsters who run summer holiday camps, the Daleks (I know.), the Cybermen (You think this is bad now, wait until the new series.), the Yeti, the ancient rulers of Mars, the Yeti, the Cybermen (several more times), space pirates, more Mars guys and, finally, his own race: the Time Lords!
We learn that he’s been running from them the whole series and they have finally caught up with the renegade. They seem extraordinarily powerful, able to slow or even stop time. Even though he has violated their edict on non-interference with other cultures, they tell The Doctor that they will let him remain free provided that he never leave the Earth where he’s generally been a decent guy. Because of his numerous enemies on Earth, he requests to be regenerated, again.
What to watch: The Tomb of the Cybermen. The War Games.
1970 — Now in color! The Doctor wears velvet and ruffled sleeves and knows Venusian Akido! Every problem is solvable by “reversing the polarity of the neutron flow!” He serves as a scientific advisor to a global military task force! We have entered the swinging, err, seventies! He barely runs into The Daleks at all! He literally never sees a Cyberman!
New bad guys for The Third Doctor, Jo, Sarah, and the team from U.N.I.T. include The Silurians and their cousins The Sea Devils, the Nestene (who are sentient plastic), the Sontarans but most of all, The Master.
The Master is another Time Lord also stuck on earth and bent on subjugating the planet to his will. He likes shrinking people to death with a “Tissue Compression Eliminator” and, at least once, kills someone with a comfy chair. (You have to see it. It’s hard to explain.) The Master is Moriarty to The Doctor’s Holmes and, like the Cybermen and Daleks, remains with the show to this day.
After teaming up with his previous selves (Yes, you can do that and, oh boy, does this get complicated after a while.) to help the Time Lords, he is released from his earthly prison and allowed, once again, to roam the stars. Soon after he is killed by a giant spider.
What to watch: I’m tempted to say all of Season Seven because it is one of the best, but in the interest of time, Spearhead from Space. Doctor Who and the Silurians. Inferno. Terror of the Autons (Ahhhh! The comfy chair!!!). The Daemons. The Three Doctors. Carnival of Monsters.
1974 — Most Americans are thinking of this era when they think about classic Doctor Who. Darker, more eccentric, unpredictable; Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor, with his 21′ long scarf and a face all teeth and curls — for many he IS The Doctor. It’s a remarkable claiming of a legacy given that it had been on the air for thirteen years when he took the role.
Most of the mythology of the show becomes codified during his seven-year run.
First off, let’s talk about the Daleks. “Can you please drop it with this Dalek thing,” I hear you cry. Bear with me here. You’ll thank me later.
The Daleks have gone from a truly strange one-off monster of the week, to recurring bad guys, to conquerors of the Earth, to a threat to the entire galaxy. And they have learned to travel through time. Frankly, it had all gone too far. Somehow a species that couldn’t go up stairs had enslaved the human race? They had become a joke. Until Terry Nation, their original writer returned them to their roots, affixed them firmly into their roles as Nazi metaphors and gave them an insane creator, Davros.
The Daleks were back, baby! And they were scary again!
This, also, is the era where we learn a LOT of things about the Doctor’s own people, The Time Lords.
They live on a planet called Gallifrey inside giant domes. (We learned the planet’s name a few years before, but not much else.) They are insufferable snobs and hypocrites, for the most part. They can all regenerate, but only 12 times. After that, it’s over for good. All Time Lord knowledge is stored in a giant computer/VR-center called “The Matrix.” They really don’t like The Doctor, but occasionally decide to make him President of the planet for… reasons. After spending any time with The Doctor’s people it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to stay there.
During his seven-year run, The Doctor and his companions Sarah, Harry, Leela, K9 (robot dog), Romanadvoratrelundar I, Romanadvoratrelundar II, Nyssa, Adric and Tegan encountered the Daleks (of course), alien space ants, the Sontarans, Sutekh the Destroyer, the Fendahl, The Second Master (all melty), The Third Master, space Vampires… Oh heck, it went on for 7 years for heaven’s sake. There were a lot of bad guys. Let’s move on.
What to watch: The Ark in Space. Genesis of the Daleks. The Pyramids of Mars. Terror of the Zygons. The Deadly Assassin. The Robots of Death. The Sun Makers. The Ribos Operation. City of Death (written by Douglas Adams!).
1981 — A new guy! Folks had almost forgotten that there even could be a new guy! The Fifth Doctor shows up bright eyed, blond and bushy-tailed. (Hey, maybe he has a tail! How would we check?) He becomes President of Gallifrey again. A companion, Adric, actually gets killed by the Cybermen which is a death that continues to haunt his TARDIS crew: Nyssa, Tegan and Turlough (who was sort of a double-agent spying on The Doctor, but nothing much came of it). There was another robot companion, Chameleon. Most people don’t remember him, though.
Oh, and he gets to meet all of his earlier selves again, except for that The First Doctor, William Hartnell, had already passed away and the Fourth, Tom Baker, just didn’t show up.
Bad guys in this iteration: The Master III (a lot), The Black Guardian, Daleks, Cybermen, The Mara, trauma, Sharaz Jek.
What to watch: Kinda. The Five Doctors. The Caves of Androzani.
1984 — Look, Colin Baker, The Sixth Doctor, seems like a really nice guy. And we have seen that, in spin-offs and audio drama, he should’ve been great in the role. But these seasons just aren’t good. They lean on gore and bad writing. Just walk away.
1987 — A new, inexperienced, script editor, takes over and re-invents Doctor Who, introducing one of the finest Doctor/companion pairings — The Seventh Doctor and Ace — as well as a new sense of mystery to the, now, 23-year-old character. The Doctor may be Merlin! The Doctor may be something other than a Time Lord (which turns out to be a whole deal later), or may, even, be one of the first architects of time travel altogether! He may also be running his companions through psychological gauntlets which may be helping them or may very much not be. The Doctor is restored as a trickster, a chess player, something far beyond anything we’d understood or expected.
And the Daleks (I know, I’m sorry, ok?) are also re-invented as a metaphor for racism, and it really really works! In the same story, The Doctor’s 1963 origin story is upended to show that he had been carrying a powerful Time Lord artifact that he was hiding in London near the school that his grand-daughter had been attending. (Remember the teachers that followed her home in episode one? That school.) He returns to 1963, ostensibly to keep the Daleks from finding the device (“the Hand of Omega”), but it rapidly becomes clear that his plan is a great deal more complicated than we’d thought.
Sadly, this refreshing of the show’s roots and darkly innovative storytelling was too little too late, and Doctor Who was canceled in 1989.
What to watch: Remembrance of the Daleks. The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. The Curse of Fenric. Ghost Light.
1996 — The TV Movie. There was a TV Movie starring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor. It’s fine. It was discovered that he was half-human, but that was retconned away later. As you might expect, he meets the Daleks (in a cameo) and also the Fourth Master.
At this point, The Doctor is somewhere around 1200 years old. It’s all speculative but is widely believed that he is in his mid-200s when the show began. (This all gets blown out of the water by the end of the Thirteenth Doctor’s era.) He’s had about 25 companions travel with him. He’s saved the world an incalculable number of times, defeated more bad guys than we can mention, and has generally tipped the scales toward the honest, good, and kind.
Ok, now if you want to start the modern series from 2005, you’re good to go. Otherwise keep an eye out for Part Two of this primer, where things get even weirder as we meet the Doctor’s wife and daughter (sorta) and try to unravel what happened to all the Time Lords and learn about alternate dimension Cybermen and how, with only twelve regenerations, we’re up to the Fifteenth Doctor and… Well, you’ll just have to wait. Hope to see you then!
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
