Doctor (Doctor Who)
The Doctor is a title character and the protagonist of the long-running BBC television science fiction series Doctor Who, and has also featured in two cinema feature films and one made-for-television movie, as well as a vast range of spin-off novels, audio dramas and comic strips connected to the series.
To date, eleven actors have played the role in the television series, with continuity being maintained by the ability of the character's species to regenerate. Several other actors have played the character on stage and film, in audio dramas, and in occasional special episodes of the series. The character's enduring popularity led the Daily Telegraph to dub him "Britain's favorite alien". The Doctor, in his eleventh incarnation, is currently played by Matt Smith, who took on the role in January 2010 and became the first Doctor to be nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 2011
The Doctor is a Time Lord, an extraterrestrial from the planet Gallifrey, who travels through time and space in an internally vast time machine called the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension's) In Space) which appears relatively small when seen from the outside.
The Doctor explores the universe at random, using his extensive knowledge of science, technology and history to avert whatever crisis he encounters. The imprecise nature of his travels is initially attributed to the age and unreliability of the TARDIS's navigation system. However, the 1969 serial The War Games reveals that the Doctor actually stole the TARDIS, and subsequent stories such as "Planet of the Dead", "The Big Bang" and "The Doctor's Wife" have incorporated this. Additionally, it has been mentioned that the TARDIS is meant to be piloted by six Timelords, rather than just one. He was presumably unfamiliar with its systems but was able to operate it correctly until his exile when the Time Lords wiped it from his memory. The Doctor initially had the manual for operating the TARDIS but destroyed it (by throwing it into a supernova) because he disagreed with it. After his trial and exile to twentieth century Earth, the Doctor still visits other planets on missions from the Time Lords who pilot the TARDIS to precise locations for him.
After his exile is lifted, the Doctor returns to his travels and demonstrates the ability to reach a destination of his own choosing more often than not. In the 2011 episode "The Doctor's Wife", the Doctor tells the TARDIS (whose matrix, or soul, was temporarily transferred to the character Idris) that she has never been very reliable in taking him where he wanted to go. The TARDIS explains that she always took the Doctor where he needed to be. In "Journey's End", the Doctor states that the reason for the previous bumpy navigation was that the TARDIS is meant to have six pilots, but in "The Time of Angels", River Song demonstrates superior piloting skills and says the Doctor pilots the TARDIS "with the brakes on" (hence the classic noise), though she could have been teasing him. The Doctor generally travels with one or more companions. Most of these make a conscious decision to travel with him, but others, especially early in the series, are accidental passengers or kidnap victims.
The Doctor's childhood
The Doctor's childhood is described very little. The classic series often refers to his time at the academy and that he belongs to the Prydonian chapter of Time Lords, who are notoriously devious. His teachers included Borusa, who would eventually become President of the High Council, and other pupils included the Master and possibly the Rani. The Eighth Doctor, in the 1996 television movie, is the first to mention his parents or childhood before this, when he tells Grace Holloway that he remembers watching a meteorite shower from a grassy hill top in the company of his father.
During "The Girl in the Fireplace", Madame de Pompadour "saw" memories of his childhood during a telepathic exchange between the two and commented that it was "so lonely." When asked if he has a brother in "Smith and Jones", the Doctor simply replied "not anymore". In the same episode, he mentioned "playing with Röntgen blocks in the nursery." He was also once good friends with the Master.
In The Time Monster, the Doctor says he grew up in a house on the side of a mountain, and talks about a hermit who lived under a tree behind the house and inspired the Doctor when he was depressed. He is later reunited with this former mentor, now on earth posing as the abbot K’anpo Rinpoche, in "Planet of the Spiders".
In the BBC novel The Nightmare of Black Island the Doctor stated his favorite childhood story was Moxx in Socks. In "Mission to Magnus", the Doctor tells how at the Academy he was bullied by another Time Lord named Anzor. In "Master", the Doctor tells how he killed a bully who tormented him and the Master. It's possible this could be Anzor as well.
In "The Sound of Drums" (2007), the Doctor describes a Time Lord Academy initiation ceremony where, at the age of eight, Time Lord Children are made to look into the Untempered Schism, a gap in space and time where they could view the time vortex. Some are inspired, some go mad (as he suggests happened to his nemesis, the Master), and some run away. When asked to which group he belonged, he replied, "Oh, the ones that ran away --- I never stopped!"
In The End of Time, the Master describes his and the Doctor's experiences together, saying, "I had estates. Do you remember my father's land back home? Pastures of red grass, stretching far across the slopes of Mount Perdition. We used to run across those fields all days, calling up at the sky."
The most complete glimpses into the Doctor's childhood occur in the Virgin New Adventures novel Lungbarrow; however, as with all non-televised Doctor Who media, the canonicity of this story is unclear. Lungbarrow portrays the Doctor as being one of 45 cousins grown from the House genetic loom as an adult. (In New Adventures continuity, the Time Lords are not capable of sexual reproduction and survive through genetic looms producing a quota of cousins.) The Head of the Family Ordinal General Quences knew that the Doctor had a special destiny and built him a robot tutor called Badger and planned the Doctor's eventual rise to the post of President. His fellow cousins resented the Doctor's position and he spent most of his childhood being bullied by his cousin Glospin and was equally brutally treated by the Housekeeper Satthralope. Eventually he rebelled against Quences's grand plans and was exiled from the family, stealing a TARDIS and leaving Gallifrey. This depiction of events is seemingly contradicted by "The Sound of Drums", showing the Master as a child. The BBC Books novel The Infinity Doctors, for example, states that the Doctor was born from the loom, but it adds that he was also the son of a Gallifreyan explorer and a human mother.
References to the Doctor's family are rare in the series. During the first two seasons he travelled with his granddaughter, Susan Foreman, and as noted above he apparently once had a brother.
During his second incarnation when asked about his family, the Doctor says his memories of them are still alive when he wants them to be and otherwise they sleep in his mind (The Tomb of the Cybermen). In The Time Monster, the third Doctor states that as a little boy he lived in a house perched halfway up a mountain. In The Curse of Fenric, when asked if he has any family, the Seventh Doctor replies that he does not know, indirectly hinting that an unspecified fate may have befallen them.
In "Fear Her", the Tenth Doctor mentions to Rose that he "was a dad once", but then quickly changes the subject; he makes the same admission to Donna in "The Doctor's Daughter" when she assumes that he has "Dad-shock". He later clarifies in the same episode that he had been a father but that was lost to him during the Time War. In "The Empty Child", Dr. Constantine says to him, "Before this war began, I was a father and a grandfather. Now I'm neither. But I'm still a doctor." The Doctor's reply is, "Yeah. I know the feeling." When asked by Amy Pond in "The Beast Below" if he is a parent, the Doctor simply changes the subject. When the Doctor gifts Amy and Rory's newborn daughter with an ancient bassinet in "A Good Man Goes to War", Amy again asks if he has children. The Doctor does not answer the question though he does tell Amy that the bassinet was his as a baby. In "Night Terrors", the Doctor attempts to help amuse a little boy by talking about fairy tales he used to enjoy and also uses his sonic screwdriver to make the boy's toys move. The Doctor mumbles that he is "a bit rusty at this."
He mentions his father in the 1996 Doctor Who telefilm, where he also indicates his mother was human.
In "The Doctor's Daughter", the Doctor had his genetic information stolen and used to create a female soldier and comes to refer to the result, a young woman eventually named Jenny (played by Georgia Moffett, real world daughter of Peter Davison and wife of David Tennant), as his daughter; she in turn knows him as her father. At the end of the episode, she is killed, but later regenerates and steals a rocket, intending to become an adventurer like her father. It is unknown if she will ever return.
By the end of the series "Journey's End" a half-human Doctor is created from his severed hand, when the Tenth Doctor transfers his regeneration energy into the hand to prevent a full regeneration of his own body. Both Doctors share the same memories up until that point but the half-human Doctor also has elements of Donna Noble's personality and her DNA as a result of her touching the hand, causing the mass regeneration to occur. The "Meta-Crisis" Doctor has only one heart and cannot regenerate.
In the episode "Blink", the Doctor states that he never was good at weddings, especially his own. According to both his greeting speech to Ood Sigma in The End of Time and his breakdown to Dorium Maldovar in "The Wedding of River Song", sometime between "The Waters of Mars" and the beginning of The End of Time, the Doctor also married the former "Good Queen Bess". During his speech he states "Her nickname is no longer . . . " before being interrupted, and notes on the experience "That was a mistake." The possibility exists that the Doctor could just be having a laugh here; however, the story persisted, as her distant successor Liz Ten ("The Beast Below") comments, "And so much for the Virgin Queen, you bad, bad boy!" In "A Christmas Carol", the Doctor finds himself engaged to Marilyn Monroe but later claims the wedding did not take place in a legitimate chapel. When River Song shows up in "Time of Angels", Amy asks both the Doctor and River if they are married to each other. The Doctor initially says yes but that is in his future but her past while River's answer seems affirmative but ambiguous. In "The Big Bang", the Doctor asks River Song if she is married; she asks if he's asking and the Doctor says he is. Her answer leaves the Doctor puzzled, wondering if she had thought that he had proposed and if she had just accepted. She replies with another enigmatic, "Yes."
In The End of Time, a mysterious individual, referred to only in the credits as "The Woman", appears unexpectedly to Wilfred Mott throughout both episodes. She is later revealed to be a dissident Time Lady, who opposed the Time Lord High Council's plan to escape the Time War. When she reveals her face to the Doctor, his reaction indicates that he recognizes her. Julie Gardner, in the episode's commentary, states that while some have speculated that the Time Lady is the Doctor's mother, neither she nor Russell T. Davies are willing to comment on her identity. When later asked by Wilfred who she was, the Doctor evades answering the question, making their connection unclear. In Doctor Who: the Writer’s Tale – the Final Chapter, Russell T Davies states that he created the character to be the Doctor's mother and this is what actress Claire Bloom was told when she was cast.
In "The Wedding of River Song" the Doctor marries River Song, making her his wife. This also makes Amy Pond and Rory Williams his in-laws as well as both the Ponds and Williams' families now being related to him.
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