Doctor who?

Question

Can anyone describe the doctor for me? (I watch the programme and am a big fan and I've seen some of the old series, so I,m not new to doctor who!) I just want to know the little known facts about him, like what time period he is from and some other little known facts, like what happened in the time war ect.

Answer 1

Everything you always wanted to know about Dr. Who and the Time War...

The character of the Doctor was initially shrouded in mystery. All that was known about him in the programme's early days was that he was an eccentric alien traveller of great intelligence who battled injustice while exploring time and space in an unreliable old time machine called the TARDIS. The TARDIS is much larger on the inside than on the outside and, due to a chronic malfunction, stuck in the shape of a 1950s-style British police box.

However, not only did the initially irascible and slightly sinister Doctor quickly mellow into a more compassionate figure, it was eventually revealed that he had been "on the run" from his own people, the Time Lords of the planet Gallifrey.

Like all Time Lords, the Doctor has the ability to "regenerate" his body when near death, allowing for the convenient recasting of the lead actor. A Time Lord can regenerate twelve times, with a total of thirteen Doctors. The Doctor has gone through this process and its resulting after-effects on nine occasions, with each of his incarnations having his own quirks and abilities:

First Doctor, played by William Hartnell (1963–1966)
Second Doctor, played by Patrick Troughton (1966–1969)
Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee (1970–1974)
Fourth Doctor, played by Tom Baker (1974–1981)
Fifth Doctor, played by Peter Davison (1981–1984)
Sixth Doctor, played by Colin Baker (1984–1986)
Seventh Doctor, played by Sylvester McCoy (1987–1989, 1996)
Eighth Doctor, played by Paul McGann (1996)
Ninth Doctor, played by Christopher Eccleston (2005)
Tenth Doctor, played by David Tennant (2005–present)
Other actors have also played the Doctor, though rarely more than once.

Despite these shifts in personality, the Doctor has always remained an intensely curious and highly moral adventurer, who would rather solve problems with his wits than through violence.

Throughout the programme's long history certain controversial revelations about the Doctor have been made. For example, in The Brain of Morbius (1976), it was hinted that the First Doctor may not have been the Doctor's first incarnation (although the other faces depicted may have been incarnations of the Time Lord Morbius); throughout the Seventh Doctor's era it was hinted that the Doctor was more than just an ordinary Time Lord, and in the 1996 television movie it was revealed that the Doctor is actually half-human on his mother's side. The very first episode, An Unearthly Child revealed that the Doctor has a granddaughter, Susan Foreman, and in Fear Her (2006), it was revealed that he was once a father. The 2005 series revealed that the Ninth Doctor had become the last known surviving Time Lord, and his planet had been destroyed.

When Sydney Newman commissioned the series, he specifically did not want to perpetuate the cliché of the "bug-eyed monster" of science fiction. However, monsters were a staple of Doctor Who almost from the beginning and were popular with audiences.

Notable adversaries of the Doctor include the Autons, the Cybermen, the Sontarans, the Sea Devils, the Ice Warriors, the Yeti, the Silurians, the Slitheen and the Master, a rival Time Lord with a thirst for universal conquest. Of all the monsters and villains, the ones that most secured the series' place in the public's imagination were the Daleks. The Daleks are lethal mutants in tank-like mechanical armour from the planet Skaro. Their chief role in the great scheme of things, as they frequently remark in their instantly recognisable metallic voices, is to "Exterminate!", even destroying the Time Lords in the often referenced but never shown Time War. Davros, the Daleks' creator, also became a recurring villain after he was introduced.

The Daleks were created by writer Terry Nation (who intended them as an allegory of the Nazis) and BBC designer Raymond Cusick. The Daleks' debut in the programme's second serial, The Daleks (1963–64), caused a tremendous reaction in the viewing figures and the public, putting Doctor Who on the cultural map. A Dalek even appeared on a postage stamp celebrating British popular culture in 1999, photographed by Lord Snowdon.

The Time War is an event referred to on several occasions in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who, beginning from its 2005 series. Although the programme has yet to show any of the events of the Time War on screen, some fans have speculated that the war was responsible for the Eighth Doctor's regeneration into the Ninth. The Doctor also referred to this conflict as "the last great Time War," implying that there had been others.

The term Time War can be applied to at least two types of time-spanning conflicts in the Doctor Who universe. The first type of time war is where the two sides are fighting the war across different points in history, separated by centuries or millennia. The second type of time war is where Time itself is used as a weapon, with pre-emptive strikes, time loops, temporal paradoxes and the reversal of historical events. The last great Time War appears to be of the latter variety.

The last great Time War should not be confused with the War against the Enemy that features in several of the spin-off novels in the Eighth Doctor Adventures series. It is implied in the various spin-off media that there have been several previous Time Wars, but that all traces of them have been removed from history.

One such war is mentioned in the 1995 Virgin New Adventures novel Sky Pirates! by Dave Stone. Lasting thirty thousand years, it was fought between the Doctor's people, the Time Lords, and other races that were developing time travel. The Time Lords destroyed one such race, the Charon, before they even existed. This war took place a generation after the time of Rassilon, the founder of Time Lord society.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The last great Time War is first alluded to in the first episode of the 2005 series, Rose. There, the Ninth Doctor explains to his companion, Rose Tyler, that the reason behind the Nestene Consciousness' invasion of Earth was because its food planets were destroyed in a war. Later in the episode, the Doctor states that he fought in the war, but he was unable to save the Nestenes' planet.

In the following episode, The End of the World, set five billion years in the future, Jabe of the Forest of Cheem expresses amazement that the Doctor, a Time Lord, still existed, implying that the war had consequences up and down history. At the end of that episode, the Doctor confesses to Rose that the war had destroyed his home planet (presumably Gallifrey, though never named as such) and left him the only surviving Time Lord.

In the third episode, The Unquiet Dead, the Doctor encounters the ghostly Gelth, aliens from another dimension whose bodies had been destroyed by the war. The Gelth say that the war was unseen by "lower species" but devastating to the "higher" ones.

In Dalek, the sixth episode, it is revealed that the Time Lords' adversaries in the war were the Daleks. What actually started the war was not stated, but executive producer Russell T. Davies commented in an episode of the documentary series Doctor Who Confidential that the origins of the war dated back to the 1975 serial Genesis of the Daleks, where the Time Lords send the Fourth Doctor into the past in an attempt to avert the Daleks' creation or affect their development to make them less aggressive.

Further details of the War are sketchy; in Doomsday, the Tenth Doctor mentions that he fought on the front lines and was present at the Fall of Arcadia. In any case, at the war's end, the Doctor was responsible for the destruction of the Dalek fleet, an action that also destroyed the Time Lords and Gallifrey. Although at least the single Dalek in Dalek had survived, the Doctor dismisses the possibility that other Time Lords may have survived as well, saying that he would have sensed it if they had.

The destruction of the Time Lords creates a vacuum that may have left history itself more vulnerable to change. In The Unquiet Dead, the Doctor tells Rose that time is in flux and history can change instantly — a more fluid definition to that which had been seen in earlier stories, which had implied that history was either immutable (The Aztecs) or capable of being changed only by very powerful beings (Remembrance of the Daleks).

The most dramatic demonstration of this was in Father's Day, when Rose creates a paradox by crossing her own timestream to save her father's life just before his destined death in a traffic accident. This summons the terrifying Reapers, who descended to sterilise the "wound" in time by devouring everything in sight. The Doctor states that if the Time Lords were still around, they could have prevented or repaired the paradox. The consequences of creating a paradox are also why the Doctor cannot go back in time and save the Time Lords. Indeed, such actions may have directly contributed to their near-extinction: "They’re all gone," the Ninth Doctor laments, "And now I’m going the same way."

Although the Doctor believes himself to be the last survivor of the Time War, in The Parting of the Ways he discovers that, in addition to the lone Dalek in Dalek, the Dalek Emperor itself had also survived, and had built a new Dalek race. Whether this means that other Time Lords may have survived as well is unclear. The apparent destruction of the Emperor and his fleet at the conclusion of the 2005 series by a time vortex-augmented Rose Tyler is accompanied by her declaration that "the Time War ends."

In the 2006 series episode School Reunion, while being tempted by the power of the Skasis Paradigm which would give him the ability to reorder the universe, the Doctor muses that he can "stop the war". In Rise of the Cybermen, the Doctor notes that when the Time Lords were around, travel between parallel universes was less difficult, but with their demise, the paths between worlds are closed. In The Satan Pit, the Beast says that he recognises the Doctor as "the killer of his own kind".

In Doomsday, it is revealed that a group of Daleks from the elite Cult of Skaro fled into the Void between dimensions and survived the original end of the Time War, taking with them the Genesis Ark, a Time Lord prison ship containing millions of Daleks. The new Dalek army released from the Ark is eventually sucked back into the Void due to the actions of the Doctor, but the black Dalek named Sec manages an "emergency temporal shift" and escapes to parts unknown.

Answer 2

Doctor, Doctor Can I have moment opinion? Of direction, come again day after today! Doctor, Doctor I've broke my arm in 2 locations Well do not return there once more then! Doctor, Doctor, all people maintains ignoring me. Next please! Doctor, Doctor I’ve misplaced my reminiscence! When did this occur? When did what occur? Doctor, Doctor all people thinks I'm a liar I cannot think that!

Answer 3

Right the doctor has a son his main arc he enemy is the master along with davros and the daleks he is 900 years old give or take he is the last time lord but you will get to meet the master (played by john simm from life on mars) he destroyed the daleks but at the same time destroyed the time lords. There is a female time lord called the Rani who will be coming back to doctor who soon. His tardis stands for Time and relative dimensions in space

Answer 4

okay i think i can answer your question for you i will try my best so don't get mad at me please. we have the 9th doctor that meets rose and they go off and battle the cybermen and the delicks and of the course the timewar but before the time war rose becomes the bad wolf and the 9th doctor saves her and he turns into the 10th doctor and the timewar comes and the planet earth is destoryed by the cybermen. the doctor fines an alternate earth and the tardis goes crazy and rose is stuck on the alternate earth and they say goodbye and that's about it. the new season doesn't start until march or april in the U.S. but billie piper that plays rose is not going to be in the new season but david tennant that plays the 10th doctor will be but he has a new companion. the doctor loves chips and is very funny all the time and sometimes is annoying but i love the show and i hope this answer's your question and if it doesn't go to the uk site of doctor who.

Answer 5

Hmm...it's difficult to determine what time period he's from, because Galifreyan history is far longer and more ancient than human history. During his trial in his sixth incarnation, the Doctor refers to the Time Lords as having had "absolute power" for "ten million years", but we have very little reference to how long they had existed beofre "becoming" Time Lords. Since Time Lord society, and particularly their time travel technology, is said to have centred around two ancient figures - Omega and Rassilon - we can assume that these two were around at that point ten million years ago.
Omega, incidentally, was a stellar engineer, who harnessed the power of a black hole to power their society and their time travel experiments. One of his devices, the Eye of Harmony, is said to be what gave the Time Lords their ability to regenerate, and has been used in one story - The Deadly Assassin - to suggest that exposure to it could begin a Time Lord's regeneration cycle all over again - another twelve bodies to use etc.
During his experiments, it was believed that Omega perished. In fact, he was trapped inside the black hole, and has subsequently escaped twice (The Three Doctors, Arc of Infinity).
Rassilon on the other hand was a politician. In the early years after their achievement of time travel technology, the Time Lords were like the senators of Imperial Rome, loving nothing more than diversion. They kidnapped other races and created thier own "arena" called the Death Zone, and set them to fight and die for Time Lord amusement. Rassilon, who had also worked with Omega, stopped these games, laid down many laws and laid the basis of the more evolved Time Lord society from which, many millions of years later, the Doctor would emerge.

As for the Time War - the story of this is told in a series of "fanfiction" style books which were released while the programme was off the air. But ultimately, it seems that while the Time Lords originally had a huge advantage over most species in the universe, they "foresaw" a time when the Daleks would become the dominant power in the universe. So sure were they of this outcome that the Time Lords sent the Doctor back to the "birth" of the Daleks, to try and wipe them out before they ever became powerful. He had the opportunity to do just that (Genesis of the Daleks) but questioned the morality of genocide on such a scale, and did not complete his mission.

The Daleks eventually developed their own time travel technology (Day of the Daleks, Resurrection of the Daleks, Remembrance of the Daleks), and the Time War was between the Time Lords and the Daleks - an out-and-out war throughout the whole of space and time. The problem with which of course is thatthe more you do it, the greater the strain on the universe becomes - if time is rewritten, and then rewritten again, and again, and again, it becomes weakened. The Doctor destroyed the Dalek's home planet Skaro in Remembrance of the Daleks, and it's evident from the set-up of the 9th Doctor's season that Gallifrey, the planet of the Time Lords, was destroyed during the Time War too. The universe of time and space was ruptured, giving rise to all sorts of peculiarities like the Rift (The Unquiet Dead, Boom Town, Torchwood), and the thinned-out walls between universes seen in Doomsday.

At the end fo the Time War, the Doctor was left as the sole survivor of the Time Lord race - Rassilon, Omega, Gallifrey, the black hole, all of it gone. But it was worth it because the Daleks had been entirely exterminated.

Except of course now we know they weren't. Not only were some sealed in a prison ship, which was then "hidden" in the space between realities, but the emperor Dalek survived, and rebuilt over hundreds of Earth years, to emerge triumphant with his armies in Bad Wolf and the Parting of the Ways. Rose was able to utterly defeat this new army of Daleks, leaving only those in the prison ship left alive. At the end of Doomsday, we know that Dalek Sec escaped - and the Daleks evidently still have their time travel capability, because he disappeared in modern-day Earth, and will next be seen in "Daleks in Manhattan", which is set in 1930s New York, in Season 3.

As for other facts about the Doctor - we know he was a good but fairly dilletante student, specialising in Thermodynamics, and studying alongside The Master, The Rani and Drax, each of whom have made an appearance in the show. He originally escaped from the confines of Time Lord society by stealing a Tardis, and taking his granddaughter Susan along with him to see the universe. He has twice been appointed Lord President of Galifrey, shamelessly decamping on both occasions. he has also been put on trial by his own people no fewer than three times - the first time, he was spared death but forced to regenerate and had the knowledge of time travel stripped from his mind. The second time he was sentenced to death, but was saved by servants of Omega who wanted to use his body, and the third time, he was eventually pardoned when it became clear that the evidence had been distorted by the prosecutor, who (for reasons that were never made entirely clear) turned out to be a renegade version of the Doctor himself, which will come into being sometime between his final regeneration and his death).

In the faintly dodgy eighth doctor movie, starring Paul McGann, we hear tell of him as a boy with his father on Gallifrey looking up at the stars, and we assume, given the existence of his granddaughter, that he has had at least one lover among the Time Lords (he recently drew attention to the fact that he had been a father once, in Dear Her). What happened to this family before he went exploring, we do not know. We do know he had a close friendship with an Aztec woman during his first incarnation, and that he was in love with Rose Tyler during his ninth and tenth incarnations, though to what extent her ability to heal the mental wounds of the Time War played a part in this, we do not know.

What happens next? I guess we'll just have to keep watching ;o)