Season 6B

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Stand well clear, Jo!

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Season 6B — also known as Season 6b and Season 6 (b) — is the narrative space between the end of The War Games and the beginning of Spearhead from Space.

It arose because the regeneration between Troughton and Pertwee was never explicitly shown on television. Instead, viewers were left only with the impression that the Doctor had been sentenced to two fates: enforced regeneration and exile on Earth. The "gap" contains stories in which the Second Doctor is living under the threat of these two sentences. Depending on the story involved, he may be exiled to Earth or not. But all stories in this period have him waiting to be forcibly regenerated.

Season 6B is regarded as a theory or fanon by those fans who hold that only the televised stories are "proper" or "canonical", but it has been the backdrop to many officially licensed, if un-televised, stories. Because this wiki takes the view that all officially licensed stories are of equal value, the basic notion that the Second Doctor had many adventures after The War Games is regarded here as a "truth" of the Doctor Who universe.

Origins

The idea of a gap of time between War Games and Spearhead dates back to 1969, the very year Patrick Troughton left the series.

When Hartnell had regenerated into Troughton, things had been relatively easy for TV Comic, the official Doctor Who comic licensees. There had been precisely a one-week gap between Hartnell and Troughton on TV, and TV Comic, a weekly publication, had easily followed suit. In 1969, though, Troughton was leaving at the end of the season and there would be a significant break as Doctor Who cut its annual episode output almost in half. In fact, it was almost six months between the end of War Games and the beginning of Spearhead.

The only licensed image of the actual regeneration of the Second Doctor. (TVC: The Night Walkers)

Not wanting to stop publication of their Doctor Who comic strip, they did what the narrative of War Games allowed: they kept on publishing Troughton stories. They said that the Second Doctor had indeed been exiled to Earth, but that he was awaiting his Time Lord-imposed regeneration. For a period of time, the Second Doctor lived the high life as a celebrity based in London's swanky Carlton Grange Hotel. (TVC: Action in Exile) He then travelled the Earth, responding to calls received via the Carlton Grange switchboard, with nary a UNIT soldier in sight. (TVC: The Mark of Terror, The Brotherhood, U.F.O.)

One day — conveniently around the time Spearhead launched on TV — he was a celebrity panelist on Explain My Mystery, a game show of sorts that asked experts to explain supernatural phenomena. Unable to diagnose the caller's mystery over the phone, the Doctor went out into English countryside to a farm. There, in the deep of night, scarecrows animated by the Time Lords captured him and forced him to regenerate. Then, they sent the TARDIS on one last journey, leaving the reader to believe that when the Doctor arrived, he'd fall out of the TARDIS in Oxley Woods as Jon Pertwee, just as he did in Spearhead. (TVC: The Night Walkers)

These comic strips, however, were soon forgotten. In an internet-less age, it wasn't easily possible for fans in possession of the comic strips to share them with the broader fanbase. They would lay outside of fans' grasp for another few decades.

Fans start to ponder things

In the meantime, Patrick Troughton returned to Doctor Who three more times — each time looking a little older. At the same time, it became easier to get home video of early serials such as War Games and Spearhead. And fans began to question what they were seeing. Amongst the questions that got asked were:

These questions were given detailed consideration in The Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping. A theory grew from this book which was quickly embraced by fandom. Indeed, it eventually became "fanon". When the BBC eventually started printing excerpts from the Guide on their website, it crossed over from fanon into essentially BBC "policy". As of 2011, "season 6B" remains a part of the official BBC episode guide. The full text of the official position on 6B is more extensive than this, but the core of the idea goes something like this:

Rather than undergoing the regeneration shown starting at the end of The War Games, the Second Doctor was recruited to work for the Celestial Intervention Agency, a branch of the Time Lords. During this time, the Second Doctor regained Jamie and Victoria Waterfield as companions, acquired a Stattenheim remote control device to summon his TARDIS, and undertook an unknown number of missions, including that depicted in The Two Doctors. Eventually, either the Time Lords tired of keeping the Doctor on a leash, or the Doctor rebelled and attempted to escape once more. This resulted in the exile which begins in Spearhead from Space.

Stories taking place during this period

Television

From the Second Doctor's perspective:

Novels

Short stories

Audio story

See also

  • Exile on Earth, for an in-universe time-line that incorporates various elements of the Season 6b theory

External Links