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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.
The gap exists 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. Season 6B thus contains stories in which the Second Doctor is living under the threat of these two sentences. Depending on the story involved, he may be living on 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.
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:
- Why does the Third Doctor begin Spearhead from Space with several items that the Second Doctor didn't have at the end of The War Games, such as a ring, a bracelet and a TARDIS homing watch?
- How does the Second Doctor in The Five Doctors know that the Time Lords had erased the memories of Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot? The erasure took place immediately before the Doctor is seen to "twirl around" at the end of War Games, so that twirling must not have indicated regeneration.
- Why do the Second Doctor and Jamie appear noticeably older in The Two Doctors?
- How does Jamie know about the Time Lords in The Two Doctors unless The Two Doctors comes after The War Games for him?
- How come the Second Doctor is working, apparently willingly, for the Time Lords in both The Three Doctors and The Two Doctors?
- Why does the Second Doctor possess a TARDIS recall device of a type the Sixth Doctor does not possess in The Two Doctors?
- In The Two Doctors, why is the Second Doctor's TARDIS of an obviously different design to that which he used prior to his trial?
- Why is the Doctor's recorder in the second console room in The Masque of Mandragora? We never saw him use the second console room on television, so he must've used the room at some point after The War Games.
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.
Established as narrative fact
TV Comic had long-established an actual, narrative period of time where the Second Doctor was exiled on Earth. But for a while, The Discontinuity Guide's notion of the post-War Games Second Doctor working for the CIA had remained purely theoretical. It was just a way to explain the discontinuity. It really took Terrance Dicks — the guy who had created the Second Doctor's discontinuity in The Five Doctors and The Three Doctors — to fix the theory into a narrative. Dicks' "Players trilogy" made it a major narrative feature, which explained the presence of the Second Doctor in Players and World Game. World Game, in fact walks the reader from the end of The War Games into the beginning of the Doctor's association with the CIA, and on into his first adventure on their behalf. Thus, this final Second Doctor novel, published just as the BBC Wales series was beginning, effectively rewrote the book on the Second Doctor's era.
Stories taking place during this period
Television
- From the Second Doctor's perspective:
Novels
- Players (a Sixth Doctor novel featuring a flashback to the Season 6B period]
- World Game (set just before the Second Doctor's part of The Two Doctors from the point of view of the Second Doctor)