Season 6B

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Season 6B — also known as Season 6b and Season 6 (b) — is the narrative space between the end of the televised Doctor Who stories The War Games (which concludes Season 6) and the beginning of Spearhead from Space (the opener to Season 7).

Explanation

The gap exists because the regeneration of the Second Doctor (played by Patrick Troughton) into the Third Doctor (played by Jon 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 untelevised, 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 The War Games and Spearhead dates back to 1969, the very year Patrick Troughton left the series.

When the First Doctor (William Hartnell) had regenerated into the Second (Patrick Troughton), things had been relatively easy for Polystyle Publications, the official Doctor Who comic licensees. There had been precisely a one-week gap between Hartnell and Troughton on TV, and their TV Comic, a weekly publication, had easily followed suit. In 1969, though, Troughton was leaving at the end of the season. To make matters worse, 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, easily the longest gap between new televised episodes of Doctor Who there had ever been at the time.

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, Polystyle kept on publishing stories featuring the Second Doctor. In the stories, the Doctor has 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 in Space aired 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 the 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 the Third Doctor, just as he did in the first episode of Spearhead from Space. (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 as the Second Doctor, each time looking a little older. At the same time, it became easier to get home video of early serials such as The War Games and Spearhead from Space. 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 clandestine Time Lord organisation established to exist in The Deadly Assassin. 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, the Doctor's association with the CIA ended for reasons not known, and his full War Games sentence was executed at the beginning of 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 to put the theory into action. Dicks' "Players trilogy" pressed the theory into service, making it explain the presence of the Second Doctor in Players and World Game. The latter novel, in fact, walks the reader from the end of The War Games into the beginning of the Doctor's association with the CIA, and into his first adventure on their behalf.

Thus, this final Second Doctor novel, published after David Tennant had made his first appearance as the Tenth Doctor, effectively rewrote the book on the Second Doctor's era. It had taken more than 30 years since people first started scratching their heads at the adventures of the Second Doctor in colour, but at last there was something in print, bearing a BBC logo, that actually explained it all.

Season 6b, in pretty much all the detail that Cornell and company had envisaged, was no longer just a theory, but the narrative explanation embraced by Terrance Dicks — the man who had created most of the discontinuity in the first place.

Stories taking place during this period

All stories listed are a part of season 6B from the perspective of the Second Doctor.

Medium Series Story Title Notes
Television DW The Three Doctors [1]
The Five Doctors [1]
The Two Doctors [1]
Novels PDA Players [2]
World Game [2]
Comics TVC The Killer Wasps - Martha the Mechanical Housemaid Jamie and the Doctor are travelling alone together.[3]
The Duellists - Operation Wurlitzer The Doctor is travelling alone, but he still has use of his TARDIS.[4]
Action in Exile - The Night Walkers The Second Doctor is explicitly in exile on Earth and we actually see him regenerate by Time Lord fiat at the end of the story cycle.[2]
Short stories ST The Time Eater Jamie gets his first look at the Stattenheim remote control.[2]
All of Beyond [4]
That Time I Nearly Destroyed the World Whilst Looking for a Dress [4]
Mother's Little Helper [4]
Scientific Adviser [4]
Reunion [4]
Dust [4]
The Steward's Story [5]
Golem [4]
Blue Road Dance [4]
The Man Who (Nearly) Killed Christmas [2]
BE Loop the Loup [4]
Time, Love and TARDIS [6]
Audio CC Helicon Prime [2]
Video Games VG Destiny of the Doctors [7]
  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Retroactively made part of season 6B by stories in other media
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Some aspect of season 6B positively referenced
  3. ↑ Some chronologies, like the Doctor Who Reference Guide figure that the Second Doctor's entire TVC run happen after The War Games and thus in 6B. That's certainly possible, but the waters are muddied by the fact that NA: Conundrum and DWM: The Land of Happy Endings explicitly call John and Gillian fictional creations of the Doctor. Thus this list goes back only as far as the first adventure which doesn't include John and Gillian at all — Jamie's second TVC appearance.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 This story features the Second Doctor travelling alone, and so is logically assumed to be a part of 6B. The televised Second Doctor in his regular run didn't have enough control over his TARDIS to drop off companions and pick them back up later. Thus, any instance of the Doctor travelling alone is deemed to take place after The War Games.
  5. ↑ The incarnation in this story is vague. It could be the Second Doctor or the Seventh Doctor. If the Second, then it's a 6B story.
  6. ↑ The Tardis states that the Time Lords want him to use a newer model so he is of more use to them, suggesting that this is placed possibly during SEason 6B.
  7. ↑ The Doctor recognises The Master (Tremas), thus placing his encounter after The Five Doctors, a Season 6B story.
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