Sixth Doctor
The Sixth Doctor was the sixth incarnation of the Time Lord known as the Doctor. Arrogant, dramatic, self-absorbed, driven and stubborn, the sixth incarnation instantly believed himself superior to almost anyone he encountered. Nevertheless, he did possess great reserves of compassion, which occasionally shone through.
Biography
Post regeneration
The Doctor's fifth incarnation regenerated after being exposed to spectrox toxaemia on Androzani Minor and giving Peri Brown the only cure he had. This saved her but doomed him . He regenerated in his TARDIS (DW: The Caves of Androzani) after Nyssa had saved him from the Master's intervention. (BFA: Winter)
He was immediately challenged by Peri to prove he was still the Doctor. He got her to believe it was still him despite his new face and personality. The Doctor saw his previous life as unbecoming and was happy to have changed. Despite having stabilised physically, he suffered initial personality and mental issues which caused him lapse into extreme paranoia. He lost control and tried to strangle Peri. After regaining control, the horror of his actions caused him to decide to exile himself on Titan III as punishment until he had attained appropriate humility, but soon got involved with stopping Mestor and his gastropods. On Titan III, he met another Time Lord, his old friend Azmael. During these early days, the Doctor's personality ranged from extreme lows to bouts of manic near-insanity and violence. (DW: The Twin Dilemma)
Early travels
The Doctor set out to fix everything wrong with his aging TARDIS, even succeeding in fixing its broken chameleon circuit. For a brief time, it began changing shape again. All the while he worked to stop the Cybermen from trying to destroy Earth with Halley's comet and save Mondas, which was destroyed by the First Doctor, and keep the Web of Time from being damaged by their carelessness. (DW: Attack of the Cybermen)
After the TARDIS ran out of Zeiton-7, the Doctor landed on Varos for more to resupply the TARDIS. The society on Varos nearly forced him to participate in their deadly "games" when he attempted to free those trapped in the Punishment Dome. The Doctor stopped Sil, the swindler behind the "games", and obtained Zeiton-7 for the TARDIS. (DW: Vengeance on Varos)
Tracing a time distortion to 19th Century England, the Doctor found the Master and a female renegade Time Lord called the Rani working together for one of her monstrous experiments and for the Master's plan to accelerate Earth technology beyond its normal level. The Doctor sabotaged the Rani's TARDIS and had her and the Master thrown off into the Time Vortex. (DW: The Mark of the Rani)
When he landed on Space Station Chimera, the Doctor became involved with the Androgum, Chessene. He also encountered his second incarnation and Jamie McCrimmon. Together they foiled a Sontaran bid for time travel and that of Chessene, who wished to have the second Doctor for her consort. The Sixth Doctor was forced to commit murder in self-defence against Chessene's fellow Androgum, Shockeye. He was greatly disgusted with himself while experiencing temporary bouts of Androgum behavior, so much so that at the conclusion of these events, he declared himself to be a vegetarian. (DW: The Two Doctors)
The Doctor and Peri accidentally went through a time corridor to arrive at Karfel, where the sinister Megelen ruled. The Doctor found the amulet that let Megelen throw people to different points in time and space. He stopped Megelen from mutating Peri into a form as hideous as his own and sent the villain through the Timelash. The Doctor believed he would end up becoming the Loch Ness Monster. During these events, the Doctor met H.G. Wells, who he unintentionally gave the idea for his book "The Time Machine" to. (DW: Timelash)
Peri parted company with the Doctor for a short time to travel to New York City. (DWM: Kane's Story) He stumbled upon a Whifferdill, a shape-shifter, who called himself "Avan Tarklu". Avan had planned to collect a bounty from Josiah W. Dogbolter. He turned "the Doctor" in, only it was secretly only him in the Doctor's form. He and the Doctor escaped, with Rrobisher deciding to stay with the Doctor. He eventually changed his name to Frobisher and his shape to that of a large, rather cartoonish penguin. (DWM: The Shape Shifter)
The Doctor and Frobisher joined with Peri. They travelled together for some time before Frobisher took his leave.
While Peri attended a botany symposium, the Doctor responded to a call from a friend, Willis but encountered Davros and was forced by Arnold Baynes, one of the richest men in the galaxy, to work with him. (BFA: Davros)
The Doctor went to the planet Necros to pay his respects to an old friend, Arthur Stengos. It was a trap set by the "Great Healer" to kill him. The Great Healer was in fact Davros, who had arranged for the Doctor to be killed at a funeral home. During his time trading barbs with Davros, the Doctor saw Davros had created Imperial Daleks loyal to him. He was glad the original Daleks were too dense to realise his identity when Davros tried to distract them and escape persecution on Skaro by the Dalek Emperor. Following the events on Necros, the Doctor promised to take Peri to (DW: Revelation of the Daleks) Blackpool. (BFA: The Nightmare Fair)
Later travels with Peri
Throughout several adventures together the Doctor and Peri began to rekindle and develop their relationship. (BFA: The Nightmare Fair)
Travelling to the Gogglebox again in search of a book he left behind on a previous trip, the Doctor and Peri learned of the death of a man known to Peri as Anthony Chambers. They rushed back to Earth – 1984 – where they met Peri’s mother Janine and her best friend Katherine Chambers. They also learned that the Cybermen were at work converting dead people. Anthony, now a Cyberman, rose from the grave and attacked them. The Doctor was captured by the Cyber-Leader who informed him that he has travelled back in time to lay a trap for the Doctor to force him to time travel them back to Earth’s early history and create a new timeline of Cybermen. The Doctor tricked the Cyber-Leader by taking him to 1984 – Mondas. He left and found that Nate, Katherine’s brother, had been brutally attacked and paralyzed by Anthony. Peri, feeling the weight of all the deaths, decided to leave the Doctor after a teary goodbye. The Doctor returns to the Gogglebox and learns that there will be an explosion in Peri’s house that will claim the lives of her mother and another. He rushes back to Earth, but arrives too late. After a sad reunion, Peri returns to the TARDIS now that she has no family left on Earth. (BFA: The Reaping)
At some point, the Doctor and Peri arrived at what appeared to be a medieval kingdom with a cybernetic created creature called the Hern terrorising the villagers. After some further investigation, they discovered that the entire kingdom was an artificially created environment stored on a gigantic space ship. (BFA: Leviathan)
Upon being warned in a dream about time experiments, the Doctor and Peri arrived on a colossal spaceship and became separated after Peri fell through a ventilation shaft. The Doctor discovered that the ship’s computer was planning to cause the Big Bang and avert man’s creation into such a violent race. Before he could intervene, a Timelord drew him, Peri and his TARDIS away and informed him that this event was always destined to occur. Angry at almost averting the existence of the universe, he and Peri took off. When asked where they were going, the Doctor commented that he was going to find the biggest library he could and study up on his history. (BBCR: Slipback)
Shortly afterwards, the Doctor and Peri visited a galactic fair and took part in a virtual immersion experience that played out as a fantasy. Peri became trapped, while the Doctor tried to convince her virtual self of the danger. An alien parasite using the name Mr. Darcy asked Peri to marry him, knowing that if she accepted, he’d be able to take over her mind. The Doctor intervened, but fell prey to Darcy who had planned on taking him over from the very start. Peri woke up in the immersion room and supplied the system administrator – Crompton – with her own story to feed into the fantasy before returning to help the Doctor and defeat Darcy. (BFA: A Most Excellent Match)
After their series of stressful adventures, the Doctor decided to take Peri to the planet Ravolox to relax due to its similarity to Earth. However, he soon learned that Ravolox was indeed Earth, moved thousands of light years from its original position. He met the primitive and dimwitted descendants of humans, whom he barely avoided being killed by multiple times, and prevented a black light explosion by the egotistical machine Drathro. The Doctor also met a con man named Sabalom Glitz and learned Ravalox had been moved to protect secrets stolen from a higher species. Who they were remained a mystery. (DW: The Mysterious Planet)
On the planet Thoros Beta, the Doctor found the Mentors were back at work, trying to make deals with a savage king named Ycarnos through a failed attmept to manipulate his mind. After a failed attempt to probe his mind to see if the Time Lords had sent him to intervene on their behalf, the Doctor pretended to be on the Mentors' side and helped Mentor Kiv transplant his mind to a deceased Mentor. When Peri was in danger of having her mind overwritten by Kiv's, the Doctor was put under the control of the Time Lords. They forced him to board his TARDIS and re-materialise in the Space Station Zenobia. (DW: Mindwarp)
The Trial
The Doctor, whose memory of having been separated from Peri was temporarily suppressed, tried to use his status as Lord President of Gallifrey to avoid a trial. However, they had brought him here long after the Fifth Doctor had been appointed and removed from office due to absence. In the trial, the Valeyard acted as prosecutor, with an Inquisitor as judge. Having been taken out of time, the Doctor suffered from partial amnesia. He was again on trial for interfering in the affairs of the universe. He represented himself in the trial, during which he and his prosecutor, the Valeyard, would present as evidence events from his life via the Matrix. (DW: The Mysterious Planet, Mindwarp) The Doctor suffered an emotional blow as he witnessed the apparent destruction of Peri's mind and her physical death on Thoros Beta. (DW: Mindwarp)
The Doctor presented the case for his defence, offering an adventure from his future, by which time he had met an Earth woman Melanie Bush. The Doctor was called to a spaceship to be used as a scapegoat to drive out hijackers. However, it turned sour when the Vervoids had emerged from their pods in storage and killed the passengers. The Doctor destroyed them by fast-forwarding their lifecycle. After the footage was shown, the Doctor pointed out that he had gotten better in a short time as he was clearly asked to intervene and deserved to be let go. However, the Valeyard seized on this to charge the Doctor for the genocide of the Vervoids, prohibited by Article 17 of the Constitution. The Doctor pointed out the hole in the Valeyard's claim of genocide; the Vervoids were artificial in nature; they were never truly alive to begin with. (DW: Terror of the Vervoids)
By this time, the Doctor had won over Darkel to his side. To his surprise, the Doctor watched the arrival of both the Mel from his personal future and Sabalom Glitz; they were brought to act as witnesses. Furthering his shock, the Doctor learned that the Master had done this while in the Matrix. Much to his continued confusion, the Doctor learned that the Valeyard was infact a manifestation of his inner darkness created between his 12th and 13th lives.
Since the defendant and the prosecuter cannot be the same person, the trial was made moot. However, the Valeyard to advantage of the confusion and fled into the Matrix. The Doctor followed and entered a battle of wits with the Valeyard. However, the Master intervened with this and tried using him as bait for his own plots. The Doctor overcame this and proceeded to find out that the Valeyard had prepared a weapon to kill all the Time Lords in the court room.
The Doctor escaped and learned that the Valeyard falsified some of the evidence with the aid of the High Council in a plot to steal his seven remaining lives. To his surprise, he learned Peri had not died, but was now wed to Ycarnos as his queen. As the populace of Gallifrey reacted to news of the dishonesty of their High Council, they seemed ready to overthrow their leaders. Subsequently, Darkel suggested the Doctor as the new Lord President for the third time, but the Doctor suggested that Darkel herself would make a better choice. The Doctor left in his TARDIS with Mel. (DW: The Ultimate Foe)
The Doctor returned Mel to her original point in time following the conclusion of the trial, after which he travelled on alone. (MA: Time of Your Life, PDA: Business Unusual)
Later travels
After dropping Mel off, the Doctor travelled to Bianca’s Bar; a place where the answers did actually reside at the bottom of a glass. He also discovered the bar was built on the remains of an old TARDIS, a very drunk Iris Wildthyme being thrown out and a dimensional Nexus Point holding everything together through universal wormholes. He also fell in love with the bar’s star singer Bianca, who he later learned was an evil future distillation of one of Iris’ regenerations who had a similar plan as the Valeyard did in stealing the remainder of Iris’ lives. After confirming his love for Bianca, almost shooting Iris and causing a time ram, together with Iris, the two managed to defeat Bianca and her army of shadows and Wyrms. (BFA: The Wormery)
Following his trial, the Doctor appears to have become a more sombre individual. He reunited with Frobisher, and for a time they again travelled together. (BFA: The Maltese Penguin)
The Doctor received a distress signal and he crash landed on a planet where his TARDIS was heralded as a godly artefact. He encountered Peri, who had tended to him while he was unconscious. Apparently the Timelords lied about her being happy and that she was now stranded on the planet. The two discovered the Doctor’s TARDIS was emitting a dangerous temporal energy that was ageing the people of the planet into dust. While investigating, Peri contracted a deadly decease and died. Furious, the Doctor set about to uncover the plot he was being tangled in. he discovered that everything that had happened after he received the distress signal had been a hallucination and that he was hooked up to a dream machine. The death of Peri and his TARDIS had been a ploy to lure the Doctor into committing suicide. (BFA: Her Final Flight)
While visiting the Kurgon Wonder, the Doctor was led into a series of events involving an alternate timeline, the Knights of Velyshaa and an invasion of Gallifrey. Following an encounter (and seeming absorption) by the Temperon, he found himself on Gallifrey with his fifth and seventh selves. Together they worked to attempt to escape Gallifrey and set history along its correct path. However it was the Doctor (his sixth self) that freed the Temperon, allowing it to set history amongst its correct path. (BFA: The Sirens of Time)
The Doctor then spent some travelling alone. He, at some point after his trial, was tracking a nexus point distortion and encountered Evelyn Smythe. The Doctor then took her back in time to stabilise the nexus point and save her life. (BFA: The Marian Conspiracy)
Whilst travelling with Evelyn the Doctor once again met his old friend Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and while on the planet Etra Prime the Daleks once more. He also assisted Romana's escape from them and her return to Gallifrey. (BFA: The Apocalypse Element)
The Doctor and Evelyn investigated an ancient Mayan temple on an expedition group after being informed of a distress call mentioning "Cybermen". The Doctor met a young doctor named Goddard who turned out to be a hybrid Cyberman from the 1930s and also came under attack by partially converted Cybermen. After nearly causing a paradox involving the Earth and the late 32nd century, the Doctor was able to defeat the Cyber-Leader, but unbeknownst to him, Evelyn had contracted the virus that is responsible for infecting Goddard’s people in his timeline. (WC: Real Time)
After finding a cure for the Twilight virus, the Doctor and Evelyn return to find Cassie, five years after the events of Project: Twilight. They learn that Cassie is now an agent of the Forge and of Nimrod. The Doctor is captured by Nimrod while Evelyn tries to undo Nimrod’s control over Cassie. Nimrod attempts to force the Doctor into undergoing regeneration so that he can study it. Cassie is freed from Nimrod’s influence and rescues the Doctor, but is killed by Nimrod’s crossbow before she can escape with the Doctor. (BFA: Project Lazarus)
The Doctor and Evelyn travelled to Rome, 101 BC, approximately, October. They meet a young lady of 19, Aurelia. She mentions her husband - Julius Caesar. Evelyn is excited, but her excitement soon turns to confusion. (BFA: 100 BC)
The Doctor came under the influence of an external force that informed him that they had sent an assassin to inject him with a lethal virus that would kill him in 100 days. Together with Evelyn, he narrowed down the planets and went to investigate, seeing some of his other incarnations that included his previous incarnation, Peri and Erimem attending a party, his next incarnation being held at gunpoint and being rescued by two of his companions and two of his Eighth incarnations playing poker in a bar, he tracked down the assassin and tricked him into thinking that he too was dying. The Doctor managed to retrieve the antidote just in time. (BFA: The 100 Days of the Doctor)
At some point after his travels with Evelyn, but prior meeting Mel, the Doctor picked up a distress signal from a desert island in the year 500,002. There, he rescued a young girl named Charley Pollard who, unbeknownst to the Doctor, was, in fact, the companion of one of his later incarnations. Together they landed in a hotel room in the early 22st century and found a dead body. Investigating further, they realised that an alien named Slater had let slip a case full of a strange new toxin that bonded its victims to the building itself. The toxin infected a man named Sam. The Doctor was too late to save Slater from Sam’s wrath and reluctantly took Charley on as his companion. (BFA: The Condemned)
The Doctor became suspicious of Charley’s secretiveness and eventually confronted her. She collapsed in the TARDIS and was placed in the Zero Room to recover. The Doctor discovered that Charley had been infected with a virus and spent several years trying to cure her. He traced the virus to a planet and found a conspiracy involving the Daleks. The Daleks were trying to find Patient Zero. Charley woke up in the TARDIS and confronted a strange woman that seemed to have a large amount of knowledge about the Doctor. This person identified herself as Patient Zero and confessed that she had infected Charley with the virus. The virus was created to turn infected people into copies of whoever infected them. Patient Zero had been experimented on by the Daleks and infected with the virus. She snuck abroad the TARDIS while the Doctor was being chased by them and had remained in the TARDIS ever since. While the Doctor took care of the Daleks, Charley discovered that Patient Zero (Mila) had been infected by Charley after she infected Charley. Mila had planned to take over Charley’s life by transforming into a replica of her. Unable to stop her, Charley faded out of existence while Mila took her place. (BFA: Patient Zero)
The Doctor received a summons from an old deceased friend and travelled to Draconia once more. There he discovered a conspiracy involving the new crown prince of Draconia, his mother and an army of paper soldiers that were used by the previous kings of Draconia to amuse themselves while they drifted in their tombs in space. (BFA: Paper Cuts)
The Doctor also at one point was reunited with a version of Jamie McCrimmon, and the two shared several adventures together. (BFA: City of Spires, The Wreck of the Titan, Legend of the Cybermen)
History takes its course
The Doctor finally met Melanie Bush (for the first time in her timeline) on a beach in Brighton in 1989. Mel was a computer programmer. She elected to travel with the Doctor until the end of the Doctor's sixth incarnation. (PDA: Business Unusual)
While playing a game of monopoly, the Doctor’s TARDIS answered a distress signal from the far future where everything had already been discovered. On the planet Generious, he and Mel encountered two scam artists who were claiming to be the Doctor and were creating fake dangers to con the people into paying them to help. Another threat, a real one appeared in the skies and offered to let the people live if they handed over the three greatest treasures of Generious. The Doctor and Mel teamed up with their phony counterparts and underwent a quest to find the treasures. (BFA: The One Doctor)
While visiting her uncle in 2003, Mel was transported to 1782 where she awoke with amnesia. The Doctor and her uncle travelled there and learned that she had been taken in by a local aristocrat. Mel had mistakeningly been drugged by one of the village doctors, not knowning it was partly because of the medicine that her memory stayed distorted. The Doctor realised that Mel had become one of her own ancestors and struggled with trying to maintain the timeline, but found a way around it in order to save Mel. (BFA: Catch-1782)
Death
After being weakened by fighting the Lamprey (PDA: Spiral Scratch), the Rani bombarded The Doctor's TARDIS with lasers and caught it in a tractor beam. The Rani forced the TARDIS to land on the planet Lakertya. The Doctor finally regenerated into his Seventh incarnation after the Rani had entered his TARDIS. (DW: Time and the Rani)
Undated/Unchronicled events
- The Sixth Doctor had met Captain Travers previously. (DW: Terror of the Vervoids)
- The Sixth Doctor attended the funeral of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. (ST: The Gift)
- Presumably at some point after this the Doctor and Mel experienced the encounter with the Vervoids chronicled during the Doctor's trial, and the Doctor's personal chronology finally synched with Mel's after she was returned to her proper time zone after having assisted the Doctor earlier in his life during the trial. (DW: Terror of the Vervoids)
Encounters with other incarnations
He encountered his second incarnation and Jamie McCrimmon whilst investigating temporal research. (DW: The Two Doctors) The Doctor also met his fifth and seventh incarnations in an alternate timeline. (BFA: The Sirens of Time). He briefly encountered the fifth, seventh and eighth incarnations after helping to change the course of the Jariden / Dalek conflict, but the memory of the meeting was erased by temporal changes. (BFA : The Four Doctors)
Personality
The sixth incarnation saw his new body as an improvement and felt that his fifth incarnation had a feckless charm that wasn't him. This Doctor was unpredictable, consistently arrogant and self-absorbed, stubborn and childish, argumentative and tasteless, and often unlikeable or even loathsome. He could be melodramatic. He rarely doubted his abilities and considered himself greatly superior to nearly everyone he encountered. This included his companions, especially Peri, though he seemed to have mellowed by his time with Evelyn.
He once described this incarnation as pragmatic. (BFA: The Sirens of Time)
He did not suffer fools gladly. He sometimes seemed to endure his companions' presence far more than he enjoyed it, but the new incarnation's brash exterior hid the fact that this was a Doctor more determined than ever to defeat the evil he encountered. He was possessed of a tenacity and a thirst to do what was right far more visible than before. Despite his often unstable demeanour, he was quick to act when the situation called for it, and very little, even his companions, could hope to get in his way. More than his other incarnations, the Doctor was a fatalist, more than once deciding he was doomed and resolving to accept his fate.
During this incarnation he began to see the logic in murder. (EDA: Alien Bodies) This might be reflected in being a bit more accepting of violence. While his physical attack on Peri could be attributed to a post-regenerative
crisis, he reacted with humour at witnessing two men fall to their death in an acid bath. (DW: Vengeance on Varos) He smothered Shockeye to death in self defence. (DW: The Two Doctors) He also killed Chintor at close range with a double-barreled shotgun. (DWAN: Retribution) Peri sometimes seemed nervous around the Doctor, (DW: Attack of the Cybermen, Timelash) perhaps due to his initially erratic behaviour as his memory seemed to "been through a grinder' due to him often mistakenly calling her by the names of his past companions.
When Peri was distressed over the non-existence of London, the Doctor tried to comfort her, even showing empathy for her plight. However, he encouraged her not to become emotional. Peri noted he talked about the planet's ruin as if he were in a planetarium instead of there in person. (DW: The Mysterious Planet)
The Sixth also veiwed how he ended up dying to be less than oppropriate as "a bang on the head" is not how he pictured the cause for his regeneration being. (The Four Doctors)
However this incarnation also had a more emotional and caring side. He was determined to save the survivors of the Ravolox conspiracy from Drathro, stating "I can't let people die if there's a chance of saving them." He was devastated when presented with the false news of Peri's demise on Thoros Beta, and was enraged that the Time Lords had decided to act like second rate gods and engineer her execution, threatening he had every intention of discovering what they were up to. When he discovered the Time Lords were behind the Ravolox conspiracy and had murdered billions of humans to preserve their secrets, he announced his purpose was to stop evil and power mad conspirators, but that he should have stayed on Gallifrey and not travelled the universe to do so.
Habits and Quirks
After an unpleasant encounter with an Androgum in Spain, the Doctor said he was becoming a vegetarian, though there is little in the chronicles to suggest he actually followed through with this. (DW: The Two Doctors)
Commonly, he would overreact with rage when questioned about his methods or if his plan seemed insane.
He also had a taste for poetry, often reciting bits of it. (DW: The Twin Dilemma, The Mark of the Rani, Terror of the Vervoids) On occasion, the Sixth Doctor would carry a multi-coloured umbrella that matched the clashing colours of his clothing (DW: The Two Doctors, The Mysterious Planet, Time and the Rani).
This Doctor also had a habit of walking in a direction other than his proclaimed intention. This quirk was later mirrored by his tenth incarnation and once by the eleventh incarnation, although these incidents were caused by a lack of knowledge of directions and post-regeneration "steering" problems, respectively.
Appearance
Physically, the Sixth Doctor was a tall man, with long, curly, blond hair. His last companion Mel thought him overweight, and forced him to take up both a diet, consisting mainly of carrot juice, and an exercise regime, neither of which he felt he needed. (DW: Terror of the Vervoids).
Clothes
The sixth incarnation's taste in clothes were the subject of much ridicule, though it was suggested that he wore his outlandish coat in order to distract people from noticing anything else about him. He once mentioned that his coat was the "height of sartorial elegance" (BFA: Jubilee). At some point, the Doctor abandoned his outlandish multi-coloured outfit for a more subdued blue costume, (WC: Real Time) though by the time of his regeneration, he had resumed wearing his original garb. (DW: Time and the Rani)
This Doctor usually wore a variety of waistcoats and cravats to accompany his multi-coloured coat, each of which possessing a different colour and design. He first wore a knitted waistcoat that was dark brown in colour, along with a turquoise polka-dot cravat (DW: The Twin Dilemma - Revelation of the Daleks), though during and beyond the time in which he was put on trial by the Time Lords, he wore a bold red gingham dupion silk waistcoat accompanied by a red polka-dot cravat (DW: The Trial of a Time Lord, Time and the Rani). During his struggle with the Vervoids on the Hyperion III, the Sixth Doctor wore a pink, purple and green dupion silk waistcoat with a yellow cravat decorated with a starfield pattern (DW: Terror of the Vervoids). In the pockets of these waistcoats, he usually bore a neon-green watch chain.
It is also worth noting that this Doctor wore a number of other clothing points during his life. While confronting the Sontarans in Seville, Spain in 1985, the Sixth Doctor briefly replaced his usual outlandish coat and jerkin for an open, Hawaiian style waistcoat. (DW: The Two Doctors). On another occasion, he briefly wore a a blue cape over his usual attire as mourning for the supposed death of Professor Arthur Stengos on Necros (DW: Revelation of the Daleks).
Much like his late fourth and fifth incarnations, the Sixth Doctor also wore a plain white shirt with question marks embroidered on the collar (DW: The Twin Dilemma, et. al) Also, like his fifth incarnation, he wore braces adorned with question mark symbols (DW: Vengeance on Varos, DW: The Two Doctors). He took to wearing a set of striped, yellow trousers during this incarnation. His generally preferred footwear was a pair of orange spats over green ankle boots.
The sixth incarnation was very fond of cats, and always wore one of a number of cat-shaped pins or brooches on his lapel (in lieu of the celery stalks favoured by his predecessor). By the time of his tenth incarnation, however, he had developed a dislike for the animal. (DW: Fear Her, implied to be due to the events of DW: New Earth)
Behind the scenes
- According to Colin Baker, his coat was created because John Nathan-Turner had the idea that it should be in "very bad taste". He had wanted to wear black to reveal the Doctor's darker side. (DWM: DWM Issue 118 - Colin Baker Interviewed)
- Baker declined an invitation to film the regeneration sequence at the start of Time and the Rani due to the circumstances of his dismissal from the role. His successor, Sylvester McCoy, donned a blonde wig and briefly appeared on screen as the unconscious sixth Doctor. McCoy's face was obscured from camera view, first by the TARDIS console and then by the regeneration FX, before the final reveal of the Seventh Doctor. McCoy thus became the first and only actor to play more than one incarnation of the Doctor.
- Spiral Scratch by Gary Russell gives a "revisionist" account of the circumstances behind the Doctor's regeneration, explaining that it had not happened simply because he had hit his head. Love and War by Paul Cornell offered a different explanation, or at least implied one, although it should be noted that neither theory expressly contradicts each other. Spiral Scratch features the Doctor being weakened after having his chronal energy drained fighting the Lamprey, while Love and War implies that he deliberately flew into the tractor beam to trigger his regeneration, but it is possible that the injuries the Doctor sustained in the beam were simply made worse by his already weakened state and his incarnation could have otherwise lived for a while longer.
- In BFA: The Curse of Davros, the Sixth Doctor was played by Terry Molloy as the Doctor switched bodies with Davros in an attempt to reform the Daleks.
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