From: ira2p@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU (Iain Robert Asplin)
Subject: Re: Many Questions About Dr. Who
Organization: University of Virginia
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 05:03:12 GMT

In article <01OCT92.19460128.0063@VM1.MCGILL.CA> CXMP@MUSICA.MCGILL.CA (CXMP) writes:
>Hi.  I got an email from Iain Robert Asplin inviting me to look at
>rec.arts.drwho.  I have but I couldn't find a FAQL.  Anyway, I'll
>talk about what I know about Dr. Who and ask questions along the way.
>
>HARTNELL  A few years back, the PBS station from Wattertown started
>showing Dr. Who episodes every evening starting with the original
>Hartnell Dr. Who.  When they showed "The Web Planet", my dad said
>"I used to think this was good" and we went back to watching Jeopardy.
>(I thought it was worth a try but I didn't think it was worth taping
>so that was that.)  I was also told that the first appearance of the
>Daleks wasn't that good either.  My questions:
>
>Did Dr. Who slowly get better or were these some initial aberations?
>When did Dr. Who reach its first peak in terms of quality?  Was it with
>Pertwee?

The "peak of quality" is something that is constantly being argued over
on this newsgroup.  
When watching William Hartnell stories, one must remember that these
were made on British television in the early to mid 1960s.  
The fast-paced MTV American television style had not yet infiltrated
across the globe, and in particular to the BBC, so the British were
still doing television mu ch like live theatre, all television, not
just "Doctor Who."  I will not argue for "The Web Planet," as it is
one of the dullest things I've ever seen, but there are some good
Hartnell stories.  I would number "The Daleks," "The Sensorites,"
"The Space Museum," "The Aztecs" as some good Hartnell stories.


>
>SECOND DR. WHO  My questions:
>
>What happened to Hartnell?  Did he die?  Did he quit?  Did he want too
>much money?  Was the second Dr. Who chosen to look like Hartnell?

William Hartnell's health was slowly deteriorating over the three years
that he played the part of the Doctor.  By 1966, he had become very
unwell indeed, requiring frequent rests and holidays and he was finding
it more and more difficult to remember his lines.  
The show's creators still wanted it to continue, so they decided on
a new process that the Doctor would be capable of, a renewal of his
physical form which would later become known as "regeneration."
A regeneration is the rapid rearrangement and renewal of the cells of
a Time Lord's body, the aftermath of which leaves them with a new
body and new personality.  the Doctor didn't pay much attention to
any of his classes on Gallifrey and so his changes of form and
personality are more volatile. :)
All Time Lords can and do regenerate, but they are limited to twelve
in their total lifespan.  After the twelfth regeneration, they die like
any other living being.  They can also die before then if the death
is very sudden (ie being shot in the head), or if the body is damaged
beyond repair (say, half of it is vaporized by a laser blast or some
such thing.)

Patrick Troughton was chosen to succeed William Hartnell as the Doctor,
and both he and the show's producers felt that he should *not* play
the Doctor as William Hartnell had done, since there would already be
a comparison between him and Hartnell.  By casting against type, that
"he's an impostor" effect on a viewer is minimized, and indeed, every
Doctor is very different to the one just before him.
Troughton's Doctor was much like a cosmic hobo, an adorable little
bumbling man, who is bumbling to mask his intelligence underneath.




>
>PERTWEE  When TVOntario from Toronto first showed the Pertwee episodes
>they were fairly new.  I thought Pertwee portreyed a very scholarly
>Dr. Who.  I liked the idea that present day Earth was in danger and not
>the Earth from the future or distant past.  Seemed awfully relevant.
>Also, with so many friends in present day Earth, Dr. Who couldn't just
>get up and go when the going got tough.

This wasn't the main reason he remained on Earth.
In the Second Doctor's final story, we are introduced for the first time
to the Time Lords, and the Doctor is captured by them and placed on
trial for transgrsssing their most important law of non-interference in
the affairs of other peoples and planets (the Star Trek Prime Directive
in a way, only this one covers Time too.).  
The normal sentence would be either execution or dematerialisation
(whereby your lifespan is rolleb back in time so that you never exist at
all), but as the Doctor had been helping people (and had just alerted
them to one of the biggest Time crimes in the Universe), they chose
a lenient sentence.  They forced him to regenerate and exiled him to
20th century Earth.
Enter Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor.  
When we next se e the Doctor in "Spearhead form Space," he has regenerated
into a new form, his personality having changed again, and now the
TARDIS no longer works, and the Time Lords have imposed blocks on his
memory of Time Travel law and TARDIS maintenance so that the exile to
Earth will stick.
Thus the reason the Third Doctor didn't up and leave in the TARDIS very
often was that he couldn't.  he was in in exile.
Occasionally, a covert wing of the Time Lords (later known as the CIA),
would send the Doctor on missions during his exile to planets whose
history is in the balance and needs a little help.  The first such
mission occurred a year and a half into his exile in "Colony in Space"
after the Time Lords learned that the Master had stolen a file from
their Archives on an ultimate Doomsday Weapon on a forgotten, decaying
planet.  They despatch the Doctor after the Master to stop him.
At the start of his fourth year of exile, an emergency arises that
threatens the Time Lords themselves in which it becomes necessary to
bring all of his former selves together with the present one in order
to combat the threat.  This happens in the 10th Anniversary story,
"The Three Doctors," and at the end, to show their gratitude, the
Time Lords restore his memory and the TARDIS, ending the exile and
setting him free. 
During his exile, he worked as an Unpaid Scientific Adviser to the
British Section of UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce), an
international paramilitary organization set up to deal with the odd
and unexplained, and events that threaten the entire globe.
By having so many stories on Earth, the realism did increase
dramatically, however after a time this format began to wear thin,
as you can only think of so many reason why aliens would want to
invade Earth (and why they always wind up in the UK :).  
One way they combatted this was by introducing an archenemy of the
Doctor, namely the Master, who would have a vendetta against the
Doctor and thus would do all sorts of nasty things on our planet to
get at the Doctor's goat.  The other way they combatted this was
the missions for the Time Lords, and eventually they freed him
altogether.   The Third Doctor still made return trips to UNIT and
20th Centrury Earth, but gradually the UNIT format was being phased
out as it was just too limiting to the writers.  
After the Doctor's next regeneration, the format was left behind
altogether as this new Doctor was much more alien and disliked the
limitations of staying on Earth.  he wanted to get back to exploring.



>
>BAKER  Fuzzy hair and a crazy look in his eyes?  Baker seemed like a
>departure from the last Dr. Who and it puzzles me to this day how they
>could expect people to believe such a personality change.  These Dr. Who
>stories really went over the top.  I remember
>one episode when the President of Galifrey was revealed to be corrupt
>and Dr. Who was made President.  In the end, he just left.  My
>questions:




>How did they choose their President (I didn't catch that)?  Who became
>Prseident after he left?  How many Galifreyans are there?  Are they all
>Time Lords?  Just what do the Time Lords *do*?
>How many rooms are there in the TARDIS?  When was it first
>revealed that there was more than one room and was it important to the
>plot?  Why does he need so many rooms?  Is Dr. Who privaledged to have
>so much space?  Does the Master have anywhere near as much space in his
>TARDIS?  If the Master is evil, why don't Time Lords actively track him
>down?  Do Time Lords ever marry and have children?  What kind of society
>did they have before they mastered time travel?

As for the Presidency, you are perhaps confusing two seperate stories,
"The Deadly Assassin" and "The Invasion of Time."
In "Assassin," the current President of the High Council is retiring
and is about to name his successor when he is assassinated.  The Doctor
has been framed for the murder.  He delays a summary execution by
offering himself as a candidate for the Presidency itself, s the
Gallifreyan constitution says all Presidential candidates must be
allowed liberty to present their claim.  (Elections of Time Lord
Presidents are very rare, thus this unforseen loophole.  Elections
are only held when a President dies without naming a successor.)
The people who have framed the Doctor turn out to be the Number Two
ranking member of the Council, Chancellor Goth, being goaded on by
a near-death Master in his last regeneration.  Goth wanted to become
President, and the President had already told him he was not his choice.
The Master came to him and offered a plan to take the Presidency by
force using the Doctor as a scapegoat.  (I won't reveal the Master's
altogether more dangerous motives for this in case you want to see
the story, which is on CBS/Fox video I might add.)
At the end of the story, the Doctor leaves, but everyone had forgotten
one little thing....the Doctor was now the only official candidate
for President (which had to be held in 48 hours, BTW) as Goth is dead
by the end.  

In comes "The Invasion of Time."  This sounds like the one you've seen
sinc you started asking about TARDIS rooms.  Personally, I think this
story is a load of rubbish (and a LOT of people on the net disagree
with me), but it basic premise is sound.  The Doctor returns to
Gallifrey and demands to be made President, exploiting that legal 
loophole left open in his last visit.  He behaves very oddly, very
out-of-character, and very dictatorial and almost evil.  This turns
out to all be an act.  Before he returned to Gallifrey, he made
contact with an alien race who offer him a deal if he lets them in
through Gallifrey's defenses for an invasion.  His dictatorial show
is a front, and it needs to be convincing since the aliens are
capable of mind-reading.  (The Doctor's motive for all this is to 
get the aliens into a vulnerable position where he can trap and
imprison them for all time in a Time Loop, i.e. on Gallifrey.
He doesn'w want to be President as he sees Time Lord life as too stolid
and stuffy.)  As it turns out, the aliens themselves are in someone
else's employ , and that leads to a chase through the corridors of
the Doctor's TARDIS.

As for the rooms in the TARDIS, it's had more than one room ever
since the hartnell days, but the sheer size wasn't hinted at until
a story called "The Masque of Mandragora" and then much expanded
upon in "The invasion of Time" and later stories.
The interior of the TARDIS is indeed quite large, and in theory can
be as large as the Doctor wants it.  The interior does not exist
as a normal space/time event, i.e. the interior is in another but
relative dimension.  (TARDIS stands for Time And Relative Dimensions
In Space)  Think of the interior as a pocket of permanantly warped
space/time (warped from gravity control, Gallifrey has the eye of
a Black Hole imprisoned and balanced out for a power source which may
also have a role in TARDIS construction.).
As the interior is, in effect, an artificially created microcosmic
universe, it can be molded and reshaped at will (as long as the controls
are functioning). Thus, the rooms can be changed around in order,
redecorated, and with an influx of matter from the outside world
rooms can be presumably added.   We have seen rooms deleted entirely,
and those deletions can be used to give the TARDIS extra flight
thrust (the burned up TARDIS rooms are converted to momentum.)

Two other things about the TARDIS:
Because the interior doesn't really exist in our universe, it is
invulnerable to attack from things in our universe.  Other time
or dimension-altering phenomena or ships are another matter however...

What you see in our universe is an "outer plasmic shell," and is
the only part that exists as a real space/time event (the interior
is, in effect, imaginary).  It is mapped onto one of the interior
continua, the upshot of which is that the exterior should be able
to be changed into anything at all.  In practice, this ability in
a TARDIS is driven by a "Chameleon Circuit," and the Doctor's
no longer works.  (His TARDIS is an obsolete Type 40)  He's twice
tried to repair the circuit to no avail.  In the first story,
it disguised itself as a London Metropolitan Police Call Box to
blend into the surroundings in 20th century London.  As the Doctor
much later says, there was probably something funny with the circuit
even before its getting stuck, since the ship landed in a junkyard
and Police Boxes are not often found in junkyards (or anywhere 
nowadays come to that).


>
>I also seem to recall a story in which Dr. Who learns of a future
>version of himself being evil.  What was the story there?

Your memory here is of "The Trial of a Time Lord," four stories
united under an umbrella theme of the Doctor again being placed on
trial by the Time Lords.  Near the end, the prosecutor in the case
is revealed to be the Doctor himself, "an amalgamation of the darker
sides of the Doctor's nature, somewhere between his twelfth and
final incarnations."  This version is called the Valeyard (the
Gallifreyan name for a learned court prosecutor), and it one of
the most intriguing characters we've met to date, IMHO.  His
origins or origins-yet-to-come were deliberately kept hazy to allow
for more fun with this character in the future.



>
>DAVIDSON  Is it true that Peter Davidson wasn't a Dr. Who fan when he
>was given the part?  If so, I can picture the following dialogue:
>
>This seems to be the way he played Dr. Who: straight!  He really seemed
>to mean it whenever he'd speak technobabble and this made it seem that
>much more funny.  It was like he was playing straight man to a show that
>was (sorry if this is a poor choice of words) a joke.  It was funny when
>he would go into the Earth's past (nice art direction in these episodes)
>and you knew that one of three things would happen: 1) an alien invasion
>2) the Master would try to kill him or 3) the Master would open a portal
>through which aliens would appear and he would use them in an attempt to
>kill the Doctor.  It always puzzled me how their encounters had a sense
>of order.  Why did the following never occur?

First of all, no second d in Davison.  
Second, you're completely on the opposite track with him.  He was and
in a way still is an ardent fan of the show and in fact says he
watched William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton's stories extremely avidly.
(I think he even says he never missed one of those two.)
When Pertwee took over, Davison was eighteen and as you may know, when
one turns eighteen, life starts to take precedence over regularly
watching a television serisal, although he did catch it when he could.

>
>Doctor: The Master!  How did you escape after we managed to turn the
>        alien invaders against you?
>Master: That hasn't happened to me yet!  Thanks for the info!
>Doctor: opps

A question posed by many a Who-fan.  You're learning!  :)
I believe the accepted answer is if they met each other in one or
the other's past, then any actions they do to each other (usually very
nasty too between these two) could wind up adversely affecting their
own pasts.  
As to whyit doesn't happen accidentally, I think the general feeling
is that TARDISes have internal "clocks" that stay locked in with
present time on Gallifrey and some safety systems to prevent them
crossing each other's paths at the wrong times.



>
>Actually, these episodes had two very pretty companions: Sarah and the
>one from the future.  Of course, there was also that annoying little
>"I'm so smart I know what E=mc^2 means" brat.  Somehow, I found it hard
>to believe they were upset when he died.  (Actually, when he first died,
>I was puzzled as to why they couldn't go back in time to save him but
>I realise now that they would either 1) meet themselves or 2) meet him
>before they orginally met him, right?)

Oops.  Sarah was a companion of the Fourth Doctor.
Peter Davison's two main female companions  were Tegan Jovanka (from
modern-day Australia) and Nyssa of Traken (the one from the future 
you're thinking of.)  The brat you speak of is Adric, and not only 
would they run the risk of meeting themselves or Adric, but they
would be changing history, and if the Time Lords ever got wind of that,
the Doctor really would be in trouble this time.

>
>C. BAKER  Is anyone willing to defend his portreyal of Dr. Who?  Was it
>bad acting, bad writing, both or am I way out of line here?  OK, I admit
>Peri looked *very* nice but, well, while one might consider that
>entertaining, it doesn't make for solid science fiction, does it?

I think I can defend it.  Remember, the point of regenerations is to
cast against type.  Peter Davison is undoubtedly the most pleasant
and "gentle" Doctor of the bunch, and so his successor, Colin Baker,
was decided to be a rather unagreeable person, much the way William
Hartnell portrayed him at first.  
Personally, I find his massive ego and arrogance and terrible coat
*hysterically* funny, and if you can stop and see that's how it was
meant to be taken by the audience, I think you might just agree.
Also, I think Colin Baker could tear down a villain with pure insults
better than any other Doctor.

>
>THE LATEST DR. WHO  I've never seen the latest Dr. Who.  (The Burlington
>PBS station shows Dr. Who Saturday nights at 11:00!)  Is he any good?
>The program Dr. Who has staunch supporters so I assume the *program*
>must have gotten better.

Sylvester McCoy is the Seventh Doctoor, and to date, the current one
(even though we've been in hiatus since 1989.)
McCoy is Scottish, and thus his Doctor is is the first to speak without
a "pure" English accent.  He plays him like much like Patrick Troughton
did, but with more of a temper, and with a very dark edge in his later
stories.  In his second and third seasons, the producers deliberately
decided to reignite the "mystery" of the Doctor's origins and truly
make the program Doctor *Who* again, something it arguably hadn't been
since Patrick Troughton left.  
The new mysteries are around the reasons he had for leaving, and 
suggestions that he either has or will interfere with his own planet's
past.



>
>Note on time travel: Iain was telling me that in the episode "Pyramids
>of Mars" (which sounds familiar), the Doctor told Sarah and Lawrence
>that time can be "shaped", that there are "alternate" time lines and
>that a being of sufficient power can "destroy the future".  My
>questions:
>
>OK, so Dr. Who is a learned individual but how can he be sure of the
>history of various worlds when there's always the possibility of the
>future having been changed?  When he appears and saves Earth, doesn't
>he change the future?  How can Earth exist if the normal course of
>events was always to have the Earth destroyed/invaded until the Doctor,
>*coincidentally*, would appear just as the invasion began and before it
>became common knowledge that Earth was being invaded?

Time travel just isn't all that common in the Doctor Who universe,
and it is carefully monitored by the Time Lords.  Only the Time Lords
*really* know how its done, the Daleks are probably a distant second,
and only a few other races have ever had any success with it.
Does he change the future when he interferes and stops alein invasions?
Depends from situation to situation.  I think often the alien invasions
still wouldn't succeed even without the Doctor around, however his
presence greatly improves the death toll.
Yes, I think he does interfere and probably affect history, but his
intervention is not for the sake of intervention and changing history.
Doctor Who seems to use the idea that Time is capable of sorting
itself out after minor interference or coincidental interference,
but whenever somebody uses foreknowledge of events deliberately for
changing the course of history, then you've got trouble, and that's
the kind of thing that needs stopping.  
The Doctor does in fact mention this once, in "Attack of the Cybermen,"
both he and another occupant are aware that in 1986, Earth is due
for an encounter with the Cybermen and their home planet Mondas.
The story takes place in 1985 (at least the first half does) and
the Doctor is asked why he doesn't warn Earth it's coming, and it
is because he would indeed be changing history.
Many of the other alien invasions could be the result of the interfernce
of another Time Lord, the Master.  He has little regard for the Time
Laws and the Time Lords, and even less for the Doctor and his 
favorite planet, so perhaps he tells every nasty alien race he meets
about our fair planet (an act of interference, so then anything the
Doctor does is counter-ionterference.)  There is precedent  for this,
when he is physically forced to lead the Axons to Earth in "The Claws
of Axos."  He also assists the Daleks for an Earth invasion in 
"Frontier in Space," and the Nestenes in "Terror of the Autons."
Come to think of it, there aren't that many "alien invasions" that
can't be tied in some way to the Master or some other Time Lord.....


>
>Another thing that bothers me: if Doctor Who was important during two
>periods in history, namely the period when he worked with the Brigadeer
>and the overthrow of the Daleks, how come when he encounters people in
>Earth's far future and he introduces himself as "The Doctor,
>a Time Lord", *nobody* knows who he is?  Also, how did the Daleks take
>over Earth and what's to stop Dr. Who from travelling to that point in
>time and preventing it (I do recall one episode where Dr. Who has the
>opportunity to prevent the Daleks from ever coming to be but he wimps
>out for no good reason - "the alliances that would never have been
>forged" indeed!)?

It's a bloody big universe out there, and sometime people do know who
he is.  In fact, I think this became a fault in more recent stories,
i.e. too many people knowing who he is or knowing about the Time Lords.

The argument you are quoting from "Genesis of the Daleks" is a very
big moment in the series' history.  Here he has the chance to legally
wipe out one of the most dangerous races in the cosmos and in all
of time, but it is still interference, and more importantly to him,
it is genocide.  
If you have the Sci-Fi channel, try watching late next week, as "Genesis"
will begin its six-episode run next Wednesday (if they stay on schedule.)

>
>General questions: how long did each actor play Dr. Who?  Does anyone
>have a *current* timeline for Dr. Who (Here I'm assuming that
>time is changing all the time but the Time Lords are so ancient that
>they exist regardless of the changes that are made.)?
>
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
>                                ! Address as above or use
>Martin Phipps                   ! LOULA@hep.physics.mcgill.ca or simply
>                                ! MUHEP::LOULA if you're on a VAX
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
>Terminal freeze, duplicate posts, lost posts and email-come-posts,
>these are a few of my least favorite things.

The Doctor says the Time Lords have had "absolute power" for 10 million
years in "The Trial of a Time Lord."

And here's a table of the Doctors.....

WILLIAM HARTNELL (1963-1966)  
	Reason for leaving, health failing.
	Reason for regeneration (in context of the show), old age.
Three Seasons plus two four-part stories.
29 stories, 134 episodes	


PATRICK TROUGHTON (1966-1969)
	Left to avoid being typecast in any one role.  Troughton was very
	much a character actor.
	Regeneration:  Forced on him as part of his punishment by the
	Time Lords as he is exiled.
Three Seasons minus two stories.
21 stories, 110 episodes

JON PERTWEE (1970-1974)
	The "team" he had worked with was breaking up, and he felt it
	seemed the right time to move on too.  Also the death of Roger
	Delgado (the first Master) shook him up very much.
	Regeneration:  All the cells in his body were devastated by
	radiation from the blue crystals of Metebelis Three.
Five Seasons.
24 stories, 128 episodes

TOM BAKER (1974-1981)
	After seven years, Tom just got tired and felt he'd better get
	out of the show before he started to hate it.
	Regeneration:  Fell from a great height, from the gantry of
	 a radio telescope.  
Seven Seasons.
42 stories, 178 episodes

PETER DAVISON (1981-1984)
	Didn't want to be typecast.
	Regeneration:  Poisoned by spectrox toxaemia on Androzani Minor.
Three Seasons minus one story.
20 stories, 74 episodes

COLIN BAKER  (1984-1986)
	Contract was not renewed after it expired, by decision of same
	BBC executive who shortened season lengths , set the show in a
	terrible time slot, and ordered an 18-month hiatus for illogical
	reasons (he said it was to save money, but the show brings in
	five times more revenue than it costs to produce)
	Regeneration:  Injuries suffered when the TARDIS is shot down
	and crash lands.  (another Time Lord did the shooting, just to
	keep the invulnerabilty bit somewhat secure).
Two Seasons plus one story.
11 stories, 44 episodes

SYLVESTER McCOY (1987-1989, and more?)
	Still the Doctor in a way, though Sylvester did ask the BBC
	to refer to him as a former Doctor (producers of television
	shows and plays he's auditioned for thought he was tied down
	by a contract to theBBC before this action.)
Three Seasons
12 stories, 42 episodes