Doctor Who (22 page)

Clarke wanted to reveal the Doctor's identity, but JNT didn't want to destroy the character's mystery. Further complicating the situation, Clarke wasn't familiar with the Cybermen and was later criticized for his treatment of the characters.

David Banks, who reprised the part of the CyberLeader, told
Doctor Who Magazine,
“The writer didn't really understand the Cybermen, so he used them as a kind of metaphor for Nazis. . . . Nazi ideology is not logical, it's emotional.”

“Silver Nemesis” came only weeks after “Remembrance of the Daleks,” and many fans noted that it felt recycled. Both adventures had monsters teaming up with Nazis of some sort. Both involved groups searching for a great item of power that the Doctor had hidden. Both ended when the Doctor seemingly turned this weapon over to the villains, only to turn the tables on them. Not helping matters, Ace herself even remarked in “Silver Nemesis” that the Doctor's victory over the CyberFleet mirrored his recent victory over the Daleks.

Despite this story, Ace was gaining a strong fan base, and viewers found this new take on the Doctor intriguing. The program would continue for another year.

The Other

“Do you feel like arguing with a can of deodorant that registers 9 on the Richter scale?”

—Ace, from “Dragonfire” (1987)

 

Clarke's pitch—asking the question “Doctor
who
?”—helped seed what became known to fans as the Cartmel Masterplan, though the script editor himself said it wasn't so much a plan as a “mood and direction.” Cartmel wanted to remind people of the mystery that surrounded the Doctor, believing that ratings had fallen because the character was now taken for granted. He liked the idea that the hero was more powerful than anyone suspected.

Along with remarks in “Silver Nemesis” that the Doctor was more than simply a renegade Time Lord, a scene in “Remembrance of the Daleks” implied that he had been present during his people's original time travel experiments. Previous stories indicated that Gallifrey had barriers safeguarding its past from observation or alteration. How then could the Doctor have been there, even with a time machine at his disposal?

Cartmel envisioned that Time Lord society had been founded by three figures: Rassilon, Omega, and the Other, whose name was lost to the ages. The Doctor would turn out to be a reincarnation of the Other. Along with this, Cartmel considered that the Doctor was preparing to send Ace to Gallifrey, where she would train to become the first human Time Lord, bringing a new point of view to a society that prided itself on never changing. Cartmel then proposed that Ace's true mission and the Doctor's identity as the Other would be revealed in a twenty-sixth season adventure called “Lungbarrow,” written by Marc Platt. In the 1970s Robert Holmes had rejected an earlier draft of the script, called “Fires of the Starmind.” Cartmel worked with Platt to incorporate his own ideas. The story takes the Doctor to his childhood home, the House of Lungbarrow on Gallifrey. The Doctor's family is introduced, all cousins, and it's revealed that Gallifreyans have been sterile for centuries, using biological looms to procreate. There the Doctor would face some of his greatest fears from his past.

JNT thought the story revealed too much and didn't care for some of the concepts. “Lungbarrow” was reworked into the story “Ghost Light,” now with Ace confronting her past in a large house on Earth. It involved a group of aliens obsessed with cataloging life, and an angelic being named Light. Many viewers found the adventure bizarre and vague.

Older fans were quite pleased, however, that the twenty-sixth season featured the return of retired Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT. In “Battlefield,” the Brig and the Doctor join forces against Morgaine le Fey and Mordred. Morgaine and many of the other characters recognize the Time Lord as Merlin—though they remark that he is wearing a different face. The Doctor tells Ace that he has never been Merlin but perhaps he will be one day.

Nicholas Courtney (Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart)

Photograph courtesy of Big Finish Productions

“Battlefield” was meant to end the Brigadier's career, the old soldier sacrificing his life to stop a demonic entity. Nicholas Courtney endorsed this plotline, believing the show wouldn't last much longer due to low ratings and lack of BBC support. But after several rewrites, the creative team decided that the Brigadier's death didn't work. Instead, the Doctor finds his friend lying on the ground and cries out, “You're supposed to die in bed!” The Brigadier then smiles as he opens his eyes. This ending allowed Courtney to reprise Lethbridge-Stewart in Big Finish audio dramas with the Sixth and Eighth Doctors—having adventured with neither in on-screen episodes—and to appear in
The Sarah Jane Adventures,
by which point he'd been knighted.

In the 2012 episode “The Wedding of River Song,” the Eleventh Doctor calls up a nursing home facility, possibly operated by UNIT, and asks a staff member to wake his old friend. But he is told that Sir Alistair has recently died in his sleep. This sad moment reflected Nicholas Courtney's own passing months earlier.

Everything Ends

Star Trek: The Next Generation
began airing in the US in 1987. Within two years, its fan base had increased significantly and was about to grow even more, thanks in part to a dramatic third-season finale episode involving its own race of cyborgs villains. By comparison, though,
Doctor Who
seemed childish with its lesser special-effects budget and stories that relied more and more on supernatural beings. While the
Star Trek
franchise was gaining acclaim for political and social allegories,
Doctor Who
's story “The Happiness Patrol,” intended to mock the politics of Margaret Thatcher, featured a robot villain made of candy. John Nathan-Turner still wanted to move on and the BBC still couldn't find anyone in house to take over.

In the meantime, BBC moved
Doctor Who
from its slot on Saturday evenings and placed it opposite
Coronation Street,
a highly successful drama on ITV. Many saw it as a sign that the BBC had lost faith and was setting the program up to fail in order to justify cancellation. Slumping ratings indeed led to the announcement that the Doctor wasn't returning for a new season. The last story broadcast was “Survival,” and a voiceover by McCoy was added over the ending scene, giving a sense that while the Doctor and Ace were leaving television, they would still have many adventures across space and time.

In the documentary
The Story of Doctor Who,
McCoy said: “We were not advertised at all when we came back for that season. I think there was a desire to get rid of it then. . . . We were kind of ignorant of that because, you know, you've got to be an optimist. . . . So it was a bit of a surprise when I was told it wasn't carrying on.”

Sophie Aldred agreed that the move was unfortunate. Had there been a twenty-seventh season, her character would have gone to Gallifrey to begin Time Lord training. The next adventure would have involved the Doctor meeting a skilled thief named Raine Creevy. There was also talk of a new interior for the TARDIS, the time rotor connecting to the ceiling and suspending the control console above the ground, and possibly another regeneration. But all of this was not to be, and
Doctor Who
ceased production after twenty-six seasons.

Never Say Die

“I just do the best I can. I fight monsters. I win.”

—The Seventh Doctor, from the audio drama
Love and War

 

The adventures of the Seventh Doctor and Ace continued in comic strips in
Doctor Who Magazine.
In 1989, two years after the show's cancellation, Virgin Publishing purchased Target Books. Rather than continue the Target tradition of novelizing TV stories, editor Peter Darvill-Evans got licensing rights from the BBC. Virgin published original material that took place after the events of “Survival,” calling the series
Doctor Who: The New Adventures.
Since these books directly followed the path set forth for the Seventh Doctor in the program, writer John Peel coordinated with several of the television writers, including Andrew Cartmel, to create consistent themes and background information. Known
Doctor Who
writers wrote the first three books in the Timewyrm saga, a four novel mini-series that started the
New Adventures
line. But a new author, Paul Cornell, wrote the final part. A fan since
childhood, Cornell had won a writing competition in 1990, and the BBC produced his entry, “Kingdom Come” for TV broadcast.

Chase Masterson, who voices Vienna in several of the audio dramas, and Sylvester McCoy

Photograph courtesy of Big Finish Productions

As Paul Cornell explained it, “the
New Adventures
worked on the principle of an author introducing some new element and the following authors reacting to it, rather than them being editorial-led or with group discussions. I still have never met John Peel, that I recall.”

According to writer Dan Abnett, “The Sylvester/Sophie partnership was an extremely important one in
Doctor Who
because they became the gatekeepers. They were the last Doctor and companion we saw on television. It gave them a life in the comics and novels that was much longer than they would have had if they'd stayed on the air for another year, with Ace being replaced and then the Doctor regenerating a year or so later. . . . I think only Sarah Jane Smith has had more impact than Ace.”

Along with the novels, McCoy and Aldred have reprised their roles of the Seventh Doctor and Ace for many Big Finish audio dramas, showing how their characters were meant to evolve. Eventually, the “lost stories” of Andrew Cartmel were adapted into audio, meaning the Seventh Doctor finally met Raine Creevy, as played by Beth Chalmers. Since it wasn't established just how much time passed between “Survival” and the TV movie where the Seventh Doctor met his end, there's very little limit on how far they can take McCoy's incarnation. And we never did find out for sure just what happened to Ace in the end. Accounts vary.

B
enny and Canon

“Every great decision creates ripples, like a huge boulder dropping in a lake. The ripples merge and rebound off the banks in unforeseeable ways.”

—The Seventh Doctor, from “Remembrance of the Daleks” (1988)

 

In 1992, Virgin's
Doctor Who: The New Adventures
series intended to have Ace leave the Doctor in favor of a new companion created by one of the authors. Different writers came up with different interesting characters, including Kadiatu, great-great-granddaughter of Lethbridge-Stewart. But the one who had that extra-special quality was Paul Cornell's Bernice Surprise Summerfield, who called herself a professor even if technically she hadn't earned the title.

An adventurous, flirtatious, hard-drinking archaeologist who recorded her experiences in a journal, Benny came from Earth's future, a child of the Second Dalek War. Behind the scenes, her character was described as “Indiana Jones in space.” She balanced midway between the educated, aloof nature of the Doctor and the passionate, occasionally reckless Ace. As a thirty-year-old—fairly old as far as companions go—and used to following her own path, Benny intentionally didn't fall into the “sidekick” category.

Peter Darvill-Evans described Benny to
Doctor Who Magazine,
“The Doctor's intellectual equal, an adult character, somewhat spiky, but who could also supply a certain amount of sex appeal, as well as being able to handle a heavy weapon. That kind of character was always in the back of my mind. Paul Cornell came up with the rounded character, however.”

Benny arrested the attention of many fans, bringing to the stories a sense of irony and wit that sometimes had been lacking. Although she left his side in the novel
Happy Endings,
she made more appearances afterward, appearing in forty-four
Doctor Who
novels. When the
Doctor Who
license reverted back to the BBC in 1997, editors Peter Darvill-Evans and Rebecca Levene decided to continue the series with Benny
as their lead character.
Doctor Who: The New Adventures
became
The New Adventures,
and Benny stepped into the spotlight, the first companion to have her own spin-off series. Now officially a professor of archaeology at St. Oscar's College, Summerfield starred in twenty-three novels.

Lisa Bowerman (Bernice Summerfield, companion of the Seventh Doctor)

After these books, Big Finish secured the license to produce Benny stories. They have continued publishing various novels and short stories featuring her and in 1999 started producing audio dramas for the character. These have starred actor, director, and photographer Lisa Bowerman, who appeared in the final
Doctor Who
TV story “Survival.”

Bowerman reflected on Summer­field's enduring appeal: “This heroic woman archaeologist with a journal existed years before Lara Croft and certainly before River Song, yet she's more grounded than both, which I find more interesting. She's completely human, and she's not the best athlete. She's very fallible, though she does grow from her experiences. I'd argue that Ace was sort of the embryonic state of Benny, but Ace was a girl, whereas we met Benny as a woman, and over time she's been married and has even been a mother . . . and you almost never see that for an action hero who's a woman. . . . That combination of someone who's completely in charge of her own world and just gets on with things is so refreshing. . . . She's not shouting every few minutes that she's a strong woman; she lets that speak for itself. It's obvious.”

That Benny Summerfield worked so well independently from the Doctor opened the door to other spin-off audio series.
Gallifrey
followed. Jago and Litefoot, two characters the Fourth Doctor met in “The Talons of Weng-Chiang” got their own series. Iris Wildthyme, a hard-drinking woman claiming to be a Time Lord, first appeared in the novels and
now features in different audio dramas starring Katy Manning. Even the military characters whom the Seventh Doctor met in “Remembrance of the Daleks” have their own audio dramas under the title
Countermeasures.
Collectively, these stories have created a fictional universe with many different aspects that don't necessarily reference each other.

Some have argued that these spin-offs and their influence shouldn't be taken too seriously; after all, they're not official or canon. But
Doctor Who
TV episodes have mentioned details from the tie-in media, such as 2005's “Boom Town” in which Rose mentions a place she visited in one of the tie-in novels. Russell T. Davies had the Ninth Doctor use the phrase “The Last Great Time War” because
Doctor Who
novels such as
The Infinity Doctors
had spoken of two previous Time Wars in Gallifrey's past. Many of the TV writers have also written comics, audio dramas, and novels for the overall story, so some fans have adopted the attitude that everything is official except works that clearly don't square with later revelations made on-screen.

According to Paul Cornell,
Doctor Who
continuity is never fixed. At the 2009 Phoenix Convention in Dublin, Ireland (affectionately known as P-Con), he said: “There is nobody in the
Doctor Who
production office who has ever declared anything about canon. . . . I think this has given us a remarkable plasticity and power as a show. . . . The Time Wars rewrote an awful lot of
Doctor Who
history, so in many ways you can say that all the
Doctor Who
in all the different media did happen at some point and then may have unhappened, including bits of the TV show. . . . Because of time travel, the show rewrites its own continuity.”