Seventh Doctor: Difference between revisions
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{{Infobox Individual | {{Infobox Individual | ||
|image=SevenSurvivalLookLeft.jpg | |image = SevenSurvivalLookLeft.jpg | ||
|name=Seventh Doctor | |name = Seventh Doctor | ||
|alias= | |alias = [[Aliases of the Doctor|List of Aliases]] | ||
|species= | |species = Gallifreyan | ||
|origin=[[Gallifrey]] | |origin = [[Gallifrey]] | ||
|first=Time and the Rani (TV story) | |first = Time and the Rani (TV story) | ||
|appearances=[[Seventh Doctor - List of Appearances|Full List of Appearances]] | |appearances = [[Seventh Doctor - List of Appearances|Full List of Appearances]] | ||
|actor=Sylvester McCoy | |actor = Sylvester McCoy | ||
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Revision as of 13:03, 20 September 2012
The Seventh Doctor was the seventh incarnation of the Time Lord known as the Doctor. Originally an eccentric, light-hearted buffoon, this incarnation's jolly persona eventually darkened into that of a mysterious, cunning manipulator to properly combat the return of Fenric.
Initially, the Seventh Doctor travelled with Melanie Bush, his predecessor's final companion. After several adventures with Mel, she left to travel with Sabalom Glitz. The Time Lord then began adventuring with Ace, a troubled teenager from the 1980s. The Doctor did his best to help heal Ace's psychological wounds by helping her overcome or come to terms with her past misdeeds and fears. Though he initially planned to take Ace home, they ultimately travelled together for several years. How they separated remains unknown.
He later became champion to the Eternal known as Time, while his old foe the Master became champion to another Eternal, Death. The Doctor did many good deeds while under his title as Time's Champion.
Later in his life, the Seventh Doctor regenerated in San Francisco on 31 December 1999, following gunshot wounds and Dr Grace Holloway's subsequent exploritory surgery with a camera accidently clogging a vein. Anaesthetic also nearly prevented him from regenerating, and left his next incarnation with near-total amnesia.
Biography
Post-Regeneration
The Doctor's previous incarnation had been weakened from fighting the Lamprey (PROSE: Spiral Scratch) when the Rani bombarded his TARDIS with lasers and caught it in a tractor beam, forcing him to crash-land on the planet Lakertya. (TV: Time and the Rani) During the crash, the Doctor suffered a "bang to the head", which knocked him out. (AUDIO: Zagreus, The Four Doctors) Right after the Rani broke into his TARDIS to kidnap him for her own nefarious purposes, he regenerated.
According to Death, this new incarnation influenced his predecessor into flying into the Rani's attack, to be born. (TV: Love and War)
Following his awakening, the Doctor immediately recognised the Rani, but was knocked out. She injected him with an amnesia-inducing drug, which allowed her to trick him into assisting her with "his" project while disguising herself as Mel. Before going further, the Doctor decided to choose a new look, shedding the chaotic, clownish attire of his predecessor for a simpler suit and hat, noting to the Rani that his new incarnation had regained a sense of haute couture. (TV: Time and the Rani)
Travels with Mel
Returning to work on the Rani's machine, the Doctor found what was wrong with it, but caught the Rani when she slipped up in her lies. He ended up trapped in her lab with Mel, who had snuck into the building. Escaping, the Doctor found several geniuses from throughout time, including Einstein, had been captured to be components for the Rani's "time brain". Forced to be the final component, the Doctor made it backfire and explode because it could not handle his new clownish personality. Rescuing the captives, the Doctor took them back to their own times.(TV: Time and the Rani)
Shortly after leaving Lakertya, the Doctor dropped Mel off to investigate a strange institute where Time Lords, specifically the CIA were experimenting on humans, trying to graft TARDIS minds into their bodies. He was electrocuted and went insane. Fortunately, he had programmed the TARDIS to collect Mel and bring her to him. She helped restore his mind, before they confronted the doctors of the Institute. (AUDIO: Unregenerate!)
The Doctor travelled to the Paradise Towers with Mel to enjoy the several attractions. However, he found that the male staff and the several female residents residing within the Towers either had suffered from mental breakdowns, became cannibalistic or were simply bone-dead stupid. He managed to save them from the wrath of the even more insane architect that built the Towers and wished to remove the residents to keep it perfect. The Doctor was made an honorary Krang by the younger girls as thanks, being given a new half blue and red scarf. (TV: Paradise Towers)
Afterwards, the Doctor and Mel encountered the Quirks and left in the TARDIS to find some crystals highly poisonous to them. They arrived on the planet Puxatornee in the year 3090 where the inhabitants were struggling to live in peace with a race called the Slithergees who arrived there as refugees some 30 years ago, but were slowly taking over. The Doctor and Mel were forced by Stuart and Reed, two inhabitants, to travel back to 3060 to kill the president of Puxatornee before she could invite the Slithergees to stay. When they returned, history had changed so that the Slithergees went to war with the Puxatornees. The Doctor and Mel became separated with Stuart and Reed and captured, but realized that an alternative Mel and Doctor were due to land in the same place as them and quickly escaped back to their TARDIS and left. Another Doctor and Mel landed successfully and were captured by this alternative history’s Lt. Stuart and Reed and interrogated before the now-non-existent history’s Reed and Stuart arrived to help them escape, but were killed shortly afterwards. This history’s Lt. Stuart and Reed arrived and forced the Doctor and Mel to take them back 30 years so that they could prevent the president’s death and make peace with Slithergees. The Doctor and Mel took them back then to see their new history, which was the first version before he and this Mel showed up. Lt Stuart and Reed ordered the Doctor to take them back to yesterday to prevent their earlier selves from time travelling, but the Doctor couldn’t as that history no longer existed. The Doctor worked out that an alternative version of himself and Mel were due to land any minute and took off in the TARDIS just as their earlier selves showed up. (AUDIO: Flip-Flop)
The events above form part of a time loop which the Doctor and Mel are able to escape, but it isn’t clear which reality is the correct version or which Doctor and Mel are the real ones and which are the alternative versions. Presumable, the Doctor retains knowledge of both sets of events happening after they leave Puxatornee due to him being a time sensitive entity.
On a vacation attempt, the Doctor and Mel found themselves part of an alien expedition to 1959 to experience Earth rock n' roll. The Doctor found the last Chimeron queen, Delta hiding with her newborn from the vicious Bannermen. The Doctor defeated the Bannermen by having their leader fall into his own trap, scaring them off. He also bid good-bye to Delta, her daughter and the recently-transformed Billy (a human boy in love with Delta, who ingested royal Chimeron jelly to do so) as they departed for the Chimeron hatchery. (TV: Delta and the Bannermen)
On
Iceworld, the Doctor met Glitz again, ending up on an expedition with him to find the "dragon" living in the caverns. However, the "dragon" was a robot that guarded the Dragonfire, a powersource sought by Kane, an exile who wished to use it to power Iceworld, his prison ship, and return to his home planet to get revenge. However, Kane commited suicide when the Doctor showed him his planet no longer existed; there was no-one for Kane to enact venegence upon.
Preparing to leave, the Doctor found Mel wished to stay with Glitz, hoping to put him on the right path. During his time on Iceworld, the Doctor also met Ace, a troubled teenager from 1980s Earth who somehow got to Iceworld. The Doctor took Ace with him, promising to take "the long way" to get her home. (TV: Dragonfire)
Travels with Ace
The Doctor's first trip with Ace took him back to Coal Hill School in November 1963, only a few days after he had left Earth with Susan Foreman, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. (TV: An Unearthly Child) He returned to take care of unfinished business left behind by his first incarnation: the retrieval of the Hand of Omega. As the Doctor had anticipated, this mission was disrupted by the arrival of Daleks, one faction of which was controlled by Davros. In defeating the Daleks, the seventh incarnation displayed a growing darkness of character, tricking the Daleks into using the Hand to destroy their own homeworld, Skaro. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks)
The Doctor later landed on Terra Alpha, where he helped remove the tyrannical Helen A from power; her people were being unreasonably killed if they did not follow her completely unreasonable and insane rule to be happy all the time. To show Helen A that sadness was needed to balance true happiness, the Doctor was forced to kill her beloved pet monster in self defence. Much to his displeasure, the Doctor found the TARDIS painted pink upon his arrival, due to Helen A's rules saying pink was a happy colour; the Doctor had the TARDIS painted blue once again before leaving. (TV: The Happiness Patrol)
Arriving in 20th century Windsor, the Doctor found the Nemesis statue, which he sent off into space every twenty five years, had returned. Tired of the chaos it caused, the Doctor needed to find its bow and arrow for his plan to be rid of it for good. During his search, he encountered two old foes: Lady Peinforte, who shockingly knew a great deal about him, and the Cybermen. The Doctor stopped the Cybermen and Peinforte by using the Nemesis; Peinforte was absorbed by it and the Cybermen's fleet was destroyed when he sent the statue into space; it exploded. (TV: Silver Nemesis)
During a trip back in time to see how Lady Peinforte got to the future, the Doctor discovered a chess board in her study. He immediately knew Fenric was responsible. (TV: The Curse of Fenric)
While travelling in the TARDIS, the Doctor received "junk mail" advertising the Psychic Circus. Attending, the Doctor was captured and sent to the Gods of Ragnarok, who kidnapped patrons for their own twisted entertainment; when no longer amusing, they murdered their captives. However, the Doctor managed to turn the tables on them when he ran out of tricks to entertain them; he reflected a death beam meant for him back at them. (TV: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy)
Much to his surprise, the Doctor reunited with his old friend, the Brigadier, in an adventure in which he worked again with UNIT. During this time, he met people from an alternate Earth, who (possibly) mistook him for Merlin. Taking advantage of this, the Doctor found the sorceress Morgaine was waiting for a final battle with King Arthur, who had entered this universe some time ago. However, the Doctor discovered that Arthur was dead, and informed Morgaine, preventing her from setting off a nuclear missile by using her sense of honor. (TV: Battlefield)
After learning of Ace's guilty conscience for burning down a "haunted" mansion, the Doctor brought her to its past, a hundred years before she would burn it down as a none-too-pleasant surprise for her. He found a temporarily imprisoned and dangerous entity called Light. Light planned to destroy the Earth in a childish fit because the world had evolved while it was trapped, making the catalogue it had compiled centuries earlier worthless. The Doctor used Light's childish logic to convinced it to destroy itself; it had been evolving as well. (TV: Ghost Light)
The Doctor accidentally caused Ace to meet and interact with her grandmother and infant mother during a trip to 1943. The Doctor revealed that he knew Ace's arrival and Peinforte's time travelling were arranged by Fenric, an evil entity he encountered before and trapped in another dimension; it escaped thanks to manipulations. The Doctor convinced the Ancient One, one of Fenric's servants, to kill Fenric's host in revenge for trying to trick it into creating his hellish future. However, Ace's faith in the Doctor held back the Ancient One's, forcing the Doctor to temporarily break her faith in him. (TV: The Curse of Fenric)
Soon after, the Doctor took Ace back to her time in Perivale. Kitlings had been spotted and people had been disappearing. The Doctor soon found his arch-nemesis, the Master, had been trapped and infected on Cheetah World and was trying to escape by bringing people to change partially and escape to Earth. After everyone escaped to Earth, the Doctor defeated the Master by playing on his sense of dignity. Once Ace mentioned it was time to go home, the Doctor was curious by what she meant. When she said the TARDIS, he happily hugged her and walked off, talking about how there are many adventures waiting for them. (TV: Survival)
Work to do
The Doctor's original plan for Ace involved trying to shape her mind to the point that she would be able to attend the Time Lord Academy. The Doctor's manipulation of her was ultimately for the benefit of Time Lord observers who were assessing her potential. The assessment took the form of a journey to Moscow and London in 1967, involving the Ice Warriors. Ultimately, however, she refused this academic opportunity and continued to travel with the Doctor. (AUDIO: Thin Ice)
The Doctor spent an undisclosed time visiting a young girl named Raine Creevy when she was a child before travelling to her future. In 1989, she was now a skilled thief. He recruited her to steal a sword for him while he sent Ace to Russia on a secret mission. He plotted to use the sword to ward off an alien incursion called the Metatraxi. After the Metatraxi were defeated, the Doctor offered Raine the chance to travel in the TARDIS. (AUDIO: Crime of the Century)
The Doctor, Ace and Raine subsequently travelled in the TARDIS to the Margrave University in 2001. (AUDIO: Animal) As well as going undercover on the Space Vessel Vancouver, where they encountered the Metatraxi again. (AUDIO: Earth Aid)
After Raine left, while in the TARDIS, Ace found some overdue library books which the Doctor explained were from the library on Kar-Charrat. They travelled to the planet in order to return the books. The Doctor met an old friend, the chief librarian Elgin. The Daleks had used time corridor technology to deploy Daleks on every planet in the sector, and then waited hundreds of years to capture a time-sensitive Time Lord in order to penetrate the library's defences and allow them to seize the wetworks facility. They created a duplicate of Ace, which — replete with the DNA tag — would be able to get through the library's barriers. The Doctor was forced to surrender. The Daleks took him to the facility, and connected him to the machinery. They successfully download the entire knowledge of the Universe into a Dalek test subject. After the download was completed, the test-subject went out of control. Trying to allow the Doctor to re-enter the surrounded TARDIS, the Kar-Charratians killed the Daleks surrounding the time machine, but the duplicate Ace arrived. The duplicate was impervious to the rain unlike the Daleks, and threatened to kill Elgin. However, the chief cataloguer Prink rushed to his aid and attacked the duplicate, damaging it. The Doctor proceeded to the Wetworks with the intention of destroying it, using Ace to pretend to be her own duplicate to get past the Daleks. At the facility they encountered the Dalek test-subject and the Dalek Supreme arguing. Having obtained something of a conscience, the test-subject was refusing to destroy the wetworks facility against the Supreme's orders. The Dalek Supreme retreated to its mother-ship leaving the Special Weapons Dalek to kill the test-subject, but the Nitro-9 succeeded in blowing up the machinery of the Wetworks, and the Kar-Charratians managed to escape. (AUDIO: The Genocide Machine)
Sometime after facing the Daleks, the Doctor decided to travel to the current location [statement unclear] of The Scream. He planned to add it to his collection since it was part of established history that it would be stolen. He and Ace arrived on a barren, sandy planet and discovered a deadly curse on the painting, living dust and encountered the Master in the form of a previous incarnation. The Trakenite body could not be sustained and the Master’s decaying body returned. He planned to unleash a terrible, ancient force on the universe through the dust, but the Doctor and Ace stopped him. Ace remarked that the Doctor should save them trouble and start collecting stamps. (AUDIO: Dust Breeding)
The TARDIS materialised in Colditz Castle where the Doctor was shot in the shoulder and Ace was captured. The TARDIS was confiscated by the Germans and the Doctor was questioned about it. Soon after, a woman named Elizabeth Klein arrived and demanded that the Doctor hand over his TARDIS key. The Doctor, fearing for Ace’s safety, did so and tried to work out how Klein knew about his TARDIS. He was informed that he was to be placed in Klein’s custody. Klein had forged her identification papers and travelled to this parallel time period in the Doctor’s TARDIS to capture him to take him back to her alternative future so he could teach her to fully control the TARDIS. In her future, the Germans won the war, the Doctor’s TARDIS was discovered and he was killed. Klein accessed the TARDIS flight logs to travel here to and planned to learn about the TARDIS before the Doctor died. The Doctor refused, but Klein bargained Ace’s life for his co-operation. They discovered that the TARDIS in which Klein arrived in, had dematerialised and were forced to use the TARDIS the Doctor and Ace arrived in. Back at Colditz Castle, the Doctor manipulates a duty-bound Krutz to expose Klein and prevent Klein's timeline from happening by locating the CD-player Ace had left behind. Klein escapes, now an anomaly. (AUDIO: Colditz)
After the traumatic events of Colditz, Ace asked to relax. The Doctor and she visited Ibiza where a strange DJ called Gabriel was using the power of music and his belief that he was an angel to raise an army for his brother out of the young people who came to party at their club. The army was needed to fight a war in another dimension. The Doctor stopped Gabriel, but his brother opted to continue their work until the Doctor was forced to stop his plans as well. (AUDIO: The Rapture)
Meeting Hex
On 2021 Earth, the Doctor and Ace investigated signs of "xenotech" alien technology in use at St Gart's Brookside Hospital in London. Here, while combating a Cyberman threat, he encountered Thomas Hector Scholefield, the son of Cassandra Scholefield (whom the Doctor had met in his sixth incarnation). Following their encounter and battle against the Cyber threat, Hex joined the Doctor and Ace in their travels. (AUDIO: The Harvest)
The Doctor stood for presidency on Colony 34. The reigning leader was trying to avoid an election for fear of losing and was using his influence to discredit the parties that stood against him. The Doctor faked his own death and with the help of Ace and Hex and managed to expose everything the government had been trying to keep secret including deaths, disappearances. (AUDIO: LIVE 34)
When the TARDIS materialised in the woods, where Ace accidentally fell into a lake. Taking her to a nearby cabin, the Doctor discovered people being killed and that the people there were experimenting with time. 10 years earlier, a girl had been killed as a result of a misdiagnosis and the scientists were trying to send a message back to warn their past selves. This interference with the timeline caused the girl to become alive again in a state of zombie-like limbo. To correct their mistake, the Doctor travelled back and undid the damage. (AUDIO: Night Thoughts)
The Doctor sent Ace and Hex to Monte Carlo in 1969 to recover the Veiled Leopard diamond. (AUDIO: The Veiled Leopard)
In 1854 the the Doctor paid a visit to Michael Faraday where he delivered the remains of the Special Weapons Dalek. Ulrik showed up and was followed by several Daleks tracking him through time. The Doctor manipulated the events so that Ulrik would time travel once more and sent the Daleks after him – knowing that they would encounter his previous incarnation. The Doctor joined his fifth, sixth and eighth incarnations briefly before being returned to his own timeline. (AUDIO: The Four Doctors)
At some point afterwards, the Doctor collected Ace and Hex from Monte Carlo and continued on travelling.
When the Doctor, Ace and Hex arrived in Egypt in 1902, they met a young Time Lady named Jane who had been stranded for centuries on Earth trying to find her TARDIS. She accidentally transgressed the laws of time by becoming a god to the locals. The Doctor informed Jane that her TARDIS was dying. Afterwards, Jane flew her TARDIS into the sun, but rejected the Doctor's help to save her life. (AUDIO: False Gods)
The Doctor travelled to the island of Mendavelia in 33 AD to help solve a code, but fell into a trap laid by The Order of Simplicity. He was infected with a virus that drained the intelligence from the brain. Using the intellect of primitives, the Doctor freed himself. (AUDIO: Order of Simplicity)
The TARDIS crew attempted to track down an alien artefact that controlled others into telling the truth. Ace met a child version of her mother while the Doctor and Hex followed Joey, the person who stole the artefact from the Forge. (AUDIO: Casualties of War)
The Doctor encountered a being from a dimension made out of language and communication - Nobody No-One. This being followed him into a top secret facility and proceeded to cause chaos until the Doctor captured him inside a book only for him to escape again. (AUDIO: The Word Lord)
The Doctor, Ace and Hex landed on Bliss, a jungle planet under Dalek attack. While Ace and Hex helped in the battle with the Daleks, the Doctor discovered that a local professor had combined larvae and Piranha-locust DNA to create a new species known as the Ki-sabia. The Ki-sabia fed on metal and were created to save mankind from the Daleks, but quickly became uncontrollable. They decimated the Dalek forces easily. The Doctor planned to blow up the station and slaughter this new species, but in the end, Beth, a former prisoner of the Daleks stayed behind to finish the job. (AUDIO: Enemy of the Daleks)
During an adventure in 1854, Hex was fatally shot (AUDIO: The Angel of Scutari), so the Doctor and Ace returned him to Earth in 2025, where, after an adventure involving Nimrod and The Forge, it was revealed to Hex that the Sixth Doctor was involved in his mother's death. (AUDIO: Project: Lazarus) It was this revelation that prompted Hex to leave the TARDIS crew. (AUDIO: Project: Destiny) However, his departure was short lived, after an encounter with Evelyn Smythe, who convinced Hex that it wasn't the Doctor's fault that his mother died. After Evelyn died, Hex was convinced to rejoin the TARDIS crew. (AUDIO: A Death in the Family)
Shortly afterwards, the TARDIS materialised in Alaska in the 1930s with the Doctor wanting to investigate a strange ice formation. They soon met an expedition team looking for an ancient secret. The Doctor and Ace became separated from the rest of the group and were presumed dead. In reality, they had arrived at what appeared to be an island psychiatric facility and met a young poet who took them to the person in charge. There, the Doctor learned that the entire facility was in fact not a psychiatric complex, but a prison for the most dangerous being on planet Earth. (AUDIO: Lurkers at Sunlight's Edge)
The Doctor left Hex And Ace for a while, and began travelling alone, encountering the Sandminer robots (AUDIO: Robophobia), and meeting a copy of Nostradamus. (AUDIO: The Doomsday Quatrain) Eventually, he met his new companion, Sally Morgan, on Earth, 2020. (AUDIO: House of Blue Fire)
Time's Champion
In the years that followed, the Doctor continued to travel extensively, gaining and losing companions as he went. Ace left to fight in a war, but later returned, older and wiser. (PROSE: Love and War, Deceit) The Doctor also gained a valued companion in Dr. Bernice Summerfield, who was herself a fellow adventurer. (PROSE: Love and War)
The seventh incarnation's travels saw him reuniting with many past friends, not always in a positive fashion, including Peri Brown, (PROSE: Bad Therapy) Romana, (PROSE: Lungbarrow) Liz Shaw, (PROSE: Eternity Weeps) and some of his former UNIT colleagues, (PROSE: Happy Endings) among others.
At one point, the Doctor physically changed himself into a human called John Smith and lived for a time as such, even falling in love with a human woman called Joan Redfern. (PROSE: Human Nature)
Travelling alone
At some point after this, the Doctor met Elizabeth Klein again living in 1953 Kenya, during the Mau Mau Uprising. Despite their animosity, they worked together to solve the mystery of the virus and stop the Cheylis plot to use Earth as a testing ground for biological warfare. The Doctor, knowing Klein would continue to pose a threat to history, insisted she accompany him as a companion on his travels so he could keep an eye on her. (AUDIO: A Thousand Tiny Wings)
Immediately upon entering the TARDIS, Klein recounted what caused her to use the TARDIS that resulted in the destruction of her timeline. It turned out that the Doctor; an alternate Seventh Doctor, orchestrated his regeneration into the Eighth to manipulate Klein into using the TARDIS and re-rewrite history. (AUDIO: Klein's Story)
After travelling together for a period of time, the Doctor and Klein arrived on an insectoid planet and met the Vril, who communicated through smell, although the TARDIS’ translation circuits helped the duo in understanding the Vril. In the midst of a war, Klein stole the Doctor’s TARDIS and abandoned him on the planet. (AUDIO: Survival of the Fittest)
Klein used the Doctor’s TARDIS to rewrite history so that the Germans had won the war. She captured this new timeline’s Doctor and imprisoned him on the Moon. She helped the Galactic Reich conquer the Daleks and Sontarans and any other potential threats by travelling in time and informing the past. While visiting the Doctor, trying to find out where this version’s TARDIS was, Klein, along with the rest of the Moonbase came under attack by a race of shark-like warriors. The Doctor had sent them there and supplied them with the necessary technology to destroy the base. Klein discovered that this alternate Doctor had retained the memories of her version’s life as well. The two of them escaped in his TARDIS where the Doctor informed her that the Time Lords had tried her and found her guilty. She was erased from history, along with the alternate Doctor, restoring things to their correct order. Afterwards, the original Doctor paid a visit to UNIT where he encountered a different version of Klein who was now working for UNIT. (AUDIO: The Architects of History)
Nearing the end
The Doctor decided to take a vacation long overdue to the planet of Ormelia. The TARDIS materialised aboard a spaceship orbiting the planet. There, the Doctor befriended a genetically reconstructed creature named Vilgreth. It was only later the Doctor discovered that Vilgreth’s ship travelled through space by devouring planets, and so was forced to stop him. (AUDIO: Last of the Titans)
Travelling to the Forge in hopes of destroying it completely, the Doctor found his sixth incarnation assisting Nimrod and reluctantly helped the Forge fend off a telepathic transporting alien incursion. His predecessor’s arm was lost in the battle which confirmed that this Doctor was a fake. The fake Doctor explained that Nimrod used DNA samples from the real Doctor when they last met to clone the Doctor, Project: Lazarus, in an attempt to learn the secrets of regeneration. The Doctor initiates a plan to blow up the Forge, but the Lazarus Doctor was the one that delivers the final blow, killing everyone in the base. (AUDIO: Project: Lazarus) Near the end of his life, the seventh incarnation returned to the House of Lungbarrow on Gallifrey. During his time on Gallifrey, President Romana assigned him to collect the Master's remains from Skaro. (PROSE: Lungbarrow)
Death
The Doctor knew the Master was just as much a threat in death as in life and tried to stow away his ashes safely. However, he was more right than he had realised; the Master escaped from his ashes' container and damaged the inner workings of the TARDIS console. The Doctor was forced to make an emergency landing in San Francisco on 30 December 1999.
No sooner had he left the TARDIS, than the Doctor was caught in a San Francisco gang gun battle and shot, once straight through the shoulder and twice in the leg. The Doctor failed to get Chang Lee to stop the Master from leaving the TARDIS before losing consciousness. Taken to hospital, the bullets were found to have caused only minor injuries. However, due to a seeming abnormality in the Doctor's X-ray, caused by his second heart, cardiologist Dr. Grace Holloway undertook exploratory surgery to "fix" his abnormal heartbeat. Waking up just as Grace was to begin, the Doctor tried to stop the surgery by explaining his non-terrestrial origins, but was quickly put under anaesthetic. The Doctor was accidentally killed when Grace damaged his circulatory system with a probe. Though they attempted to revive him, the Doctor's seventh body was dead, but had not yet regenerated.
Unlike his previous deaths, the Doctor did not regenerate into a new body until several hours later in the hospital morgue. His eighth incarnation later attributed this to having been under anaesthesia at the time of his "death". (TV: Doctor Who)
Undated adventures
- The Seventh Doctor attended the funeral of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. (PROSE: The Gift)
- The Doctor trapped Fenric in another dimension. (TV: The Curse of Fenric)
- The Doctor set up events to tell himself Morgaine's attempts were in vain. (TV: Battlefield)
- The Doctor parted ways with Ace.
- River Song met the Seventh Doctor, calling him "surprisingly Scottish." She wiped his memory with mnemosine recall-wipe vapour so their personal timelines wouldn't be contaminated. (GAME: The Eternity Clock)
Personality
The Seventh Doctor was originally light-hearted and prone to clownish behaviour, which masked his intellect and courage. As he matured, he took a much darker turn. He became a master manipulator who saw the battle between good and evil as a game of chess and everyone around him as pawns in the game of fighting evil. Frequently, he would see only the "bigger picture" rather than the world before him. He devastated Ace by labelling her, among other things, an "emotional cripple" during his battle with Fenric. This was necessary for her to briefly abandon her belief in him, weakening Fenric's power, which he did not explain until later. (TV: The Curse of Fenric)
Despite his manipulative actions, such as (by one account) using psychic powers to make Mel leave (PROSE: Head Games), the Seventh Doctor did care for his companions. He had a paternal relationship with Ace, which soured when Ace found herself unable to deal with the Doctor's growing emotional coldness.
Aspects of his light-hearted nature persisted. He seemed to relish his game against Light. (TV: Ghost Light) He was not totally unfeeling when it came to the "bigger picture" as he appeared apprehensive about his decision to destroy Skaro and agonised when he had to convince Ace that he did not care about her. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks, TV: The Curse of Fenric)
On meeting his future self, the Fifth Doctor was repulsed by his manipulative nature. The Seventh Doctor had a similarly low opinion of his fifth incarnation, describing him as "bland" and "not even one of the good ones." (PROSE: Cold Fusion) However, it would seem none of the other Doctors (past or future) liked this incarnation either. (PROSE: The Eight Doctors)
The renegade Time Lady Iris Wildthyme was not fond of the Seventh Doctor. She subsequently described him to the Eighth Doctor as "a portentous little feller, swaggering around, thinking he’s got all the world’s darkest secrets under his hat." Furthermore, she thought that he was "a pretentious old thing" who "got on [her] nerves" as he regarded himself as the Guardian of Forever and Time's Champion. (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress)
The Eighth Doctor came to view his immediate predecessor's manipulative nature with disdain. He compared the Seventh Doctor to his fellow renegade Time Lord the Monk, telling his companion Lucie Miller that he used to be "the man with the master plan" who arranged the destruction of his enemies and the toppling of dictatorships in order to serve the greater good to the point where he began to countenance sacrificing the lives of the few to save the many. He eventually began travelling on his own as he was no longer willing to risk the lives of his companions after an incident which he did not want to discuss. Following his regeneration, the Eighth Doctor abandoned these tendencies and vowed that he would never travel alone again as he did not want to forget how precious life is. (AUDIO: The Resurrection of Mars)
Appearance
At the beginning of his seventh incarnation, the Doctor wore an off-white safari-styled jacket. He wore a red paisley scarf under the lapels and had a matching handkerchief in the left pocket. Like many of his previous incarnations, he wore a fob watch as part of his clothing. He also wore a yellow pullover with turquoise zigzag lines and red question marks, sometimes tucking this into his sand-coloured tweed plaid trousers in order to attach a pair of red braces over it. Under the pullover he wore a white shirt with red tie. He wore white and brown brogued spectator shoes and a white colonial-styled Panama hat, similar to the hat he had worn in his fifth incarnation, though this one had a paisley hat band and an upturned brim. He carried an umbrella with him, the first a black one with a brown wooden handle, then a second, which had a red, question-mark shaped handle. (TV: Time and the Rani et al.)
When the Doctor's personality began to change, his outfit changed alongside it. His jacket, hat band, handkerchief, scarf and tie became darker, varying between shades of burgundy and brown. (TV: Ghost Light et al)
By the end of this incarnation, his outfit had altered again. He wore a light brown tweed jacket, with a red patterned waistcoat and a black and brown, zigzag patterned tie. He still wore his Panama hat. (TV: Doctor Who)
Habits and quirks
The seventh incarnation was a consummate fan of chess, to the point of treating his companions and enemies as pieces on a chess board. (TV: Silver Nemesis, The Curse of Fenric) Despite his tendency toward a dark personality, the seventh incarnation was known for his use of words to resolve problems instead of violence, and rolled his 'R's, speaking with a Scottish accent.
He liked to carry around a question mark umbrella, often using it for practical purposes unrelated to keeping the rain away. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks, Battlefield, et al.)
A habit occasionally displayed was a tendency to mangle and combine earth idioms, such as "Time and tide melt the snowman", "A stitch in time... takes up space" and "Fit as a... trombone". (TV: Time and the Rani)
Also, early into this incarnation, the Doctor showed a knack for playing the spoons as a musical instrument, though this was seen less as he matured. As he met new people, he often raised his hat to greet them, smiling as he did so, but this began to disappear as his personality changed. (TV: Time and the Rani et al.)
Behind the scenes
Casting
Actors considered for the role of the seventh incarnation before McCoy was cast included Rowan Atkinson, who later played the ninth incarnation in the satirical The Curse of Fatal Death; McCoy's mentor Ken Campbell; Chris Jury; Tony Robinson; and Alexei Sayle. Sayle had previously played the DJ in TV: Revelation of the Daleks. Furthermore, Andrew Sachs and Dermot Crowley auditioned for the role.
Cartmel Masterplan
Season 25 and 26 had broad hints that the Doctor was not simply a Time Lord, as previously shown and stated. This overarching plot, conceived by Script Editor Andrew Cartmel and referred to by fans as the Cartmel Masterplan, was designed to restore an element of mystery in the Doctor and his true nature as in the stories of the first and second incarnations. Although the cancellation of the series at the end of Season 26 prevented further on-screen exploration of this arc, it was later given full rein in the Virgin New Adventures novel series.
- For further discussion, see Cartmel Masterplan.
Parodies and pastiches
- After the original series ended, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred played characters called the Professor and Ace, respectively, in a series of audio adventures produced by BBV Productions. Initially the stories were clearly based upon Doctor Who, but these connections decreased when the character was renamed the Dominie and Aldred's character Alice.
- McCoy also parodied his version of the Doctor in the BBV production, Do You Have a Licence to Save This Planet? in which he played the Foot Doctor. Although the film featured several monsters from Doctor Who, this production was not considered canonical in any way.
- In the BBC series, Doctors, Sylvester guest-starred as Graham Capelli, an actor who had played the title role in The Amazing Lollipop Man, a cult 1980s children's television series of the same name. The Lollipop Man had many similarities to the Doctor.
- An Easter Egg referencing the Seventh Doctor appears in the seventh episode of the first season (The Tale of the Captured Souls) of the Nickelodean children's horror series, Are You Afraid of the Dark?. The Seventh Doctor's hat and coat can be seen hanging from a hatstand at two points in the episode.
The Brilliant Book
According to REF: The Brilliant Book 2011, a non-narrative source, the Seventh Doctor was at Chartwell on 16 November 1936, where he met Winston Churchill again. The Doctor told Winston that King Edward VIII's lover, Wallis Simpson, was an alien.
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