Doctor (Doctor Who)

The Doctor is the only known name of the central character in the long-running BBC television science-fiction series Doctor Who, and also featured in a vast range of spin-off novels, audio dramas and comic strips connected to the series.

Footnotes

• 1. We do not see Patrick Troughton turn into Jon Pertwee's Doctor. The War Games had Troughton spinning away into nothingness as the serial ended and the next time we saw the Doctor in Spearhead from Space it was Jon Pertwee who stumbled out of the TARDIS, wearing Troughton's clothes. This left a possible gap between War Games and Spearhead into which some have inserted a hypothetical "Season 6B" for the Second Doctor (see The Two Doctors).
• 2. Colin Baker did not actually appear in the regeneration scene from Time and the Rani, as he declined to participate. Instead, Sylvester McCoy was seen briefly, wearing a blond wig, with his facial features obscured by a video effect before he regenerated into the Seventh Doctor. According to the Past Doctor Adventures spin-off novel Spiral Scratch, the Sixth Doctor was exhausted by a battle with a Lamprey and his regeneration had already begun when the tractor beam of the Rani ensnared the TARDIS. The canonicity of this event is unclear.
• 3. Paul McGann did not return to film a regeneration scene, nor was a regeneration scene filmed with another actor to link between the 1996 Doctor Who television movie and the 2005 series. At the beginning of the 2005 series, it is implied that the Doctor has just regenerated when he comments on his his facial appearance in Rose. No reason is given for his regeneration, but some fans assume that this was a consequence of the Time War. Russell T. Davies has said that no regeneration scene was filmed because the scenes would only work if the audience had an emotional attachment to the previous Doctor, and one had not been established with the Eighth Doctor.