Doctor Who: Season 6B: Fan Theory that Could Work?

 

With the advent of home video and repeat airings in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, fans who were watching Doctor Who started to notice a few things between the end of The War Games –the last serial featuring The Second Doctor- and beginning of Spearhead from Space (1970) - the first serial featuring The Third Doctor. Fans pointed out several inconsistencies with this new Doctor, such as when did acquire a ring, a bracelet, and a TARDIS homing watch when he makes his first appearance, falling out of the TARDIS, if events happened the way it did –that there was no time between Patrick Troughton’s final appearance and first appearance of Jon Pertwee?

 

Back in 1969, in the final episode of the epic 10-part Classic Doctor Who serial, The War Games, we see the Second Doctor (Patrick Toughton) go through a “forced” regeneration after being found guilty by his fellow Time Lords for breaking their cardinal rules of time travel - interference in the natural order of the universe, planets, and its people. Time Lords sentenced him to exile on Earth in the 20th Century, and as viewer saw in the closing seconds of that finale was an image of

the Second Doctor, him twirling around the cosmic maelstrom on his way to Earth to begin his exile.  

 

It’s worth noting a few things were happening at this point in the series' history. First, the show was now going from black and white to full blown color season; the episode output would be cut nearly in half, from around forty episodes a year to just twenty-six. Also, for first time since the series debuted, there would be a close to a six-month gap between seasons. How would this gap affect Polystyle Publications, the a company who was producing the weekly comic strips of adventures featuring the Doctor since it started? It was easy with the one-week gap between the First and Second Doctor, but with nearly 24 weeks with no Doctor Who, not knowing how season seven was going to go, what would the fill this space with?

 

They quickly decided to soldier on and created (non-conically, but this changes a bit later) a series of adventures featuring the Second Doctor. The interesting bit, and seemly long since forgotten, are these adventures would take place not before The War Games, but after. In these comics, the Doctor has indeed been exiled to Earth, but is awaiting his Time Lord-imposed regeneration. For a time, the comic portrays the Second Doctor living the high life as a celebrity based in London’s swanky Carlton Grange Hotel. He travels the Earth, responding to calls received via the Carlton Grange switchboard, with nary a UNIT soldier in sight.

 

In 1995 came The Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping. This non-fiction book looked at the Doctor’s adventures and tried to make sense of the continuity errors that kept cropping up, including the Third Doctor’s arrival, and these mid-1960’s weekly comic strips.

 

What came out of it was Season 6B.

 

The Season 6B idea is rather than undergoing the “forced” 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 organization first shown to exist in the Fourth Doctor serial, The Deadly Assassin, some seven years after The War Games. During this time, the Second Doctor regained Jamie and Victoria as companions, acquired a Stattenheim remote control device to summon his TARDIS and undertook an unknown number of missions, including three serials Troughton returned for years later. Eventually, the Doctor's association with the CIA ended for reasons not known, though in a comic entry entitled The Nightwalkers, it shows the Doctor being dragged into the TARDIS by animated scarecrows, allowing his and his full The War Games sentence to be executed at the beginning of Spearhead from Space.

 

But Pandora’s Box was opened, and the authors also asked these:

 

 

How, in The Five Doctors, does the Second Doctor know that the Time Lords had erased the memories of Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot?

Why do the Second Doctor and Jamie appear 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?

Why is the Second Doctor 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 have in The Two Doctors?

In The Two Doctors, why is the Second Doctor's TARDIS control room of an obviously different design to that which he used prior to his trial?

Possibly, related to the above: How can the Second Doctor be confident of his ability to retrieve Victoria after The Two Doctors when he could never control the TARDIS during his own era?

Why is the Doctor's recorder in the second console room in The Masque of Mandragora?

 

Still, for a long time, The Discontinuity Guide's notion of the post-War Games Second Doctor working for the CIA would remain a purely theoretical idea –it was just a cute and clever way to explain the discontinuity on such a long-running show.

However, Terrance Dicks, one of the great architects of Doctor Who in the 1970s (that also included Barry Letts, Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe), took the idea of Season 6B and put theory into action decades later. Dicks' was prolific author, penning dozens of adaptations of Classic Doctor Who serials, writing many, many of those serials, and then took on a few original novels that were released in the 1990s. Here the whole Season 6B would begin to take shape.

In Players (1999), the Sixth Doctor and companion Peri meet Winston Churchill at three of the “wilderness” periods of his life and discover that he is under threat from a group of aliens who use Earth as their gaming table. It seems that Churchill is one of the most important pieces. The Players were a group of the Immortals who tampered with history to amuse themselves. They were capable of traveling through time, but their abilities were limited. They had knowledge of the Time Lords, and knew them to be devious. If anyone with a working familiarity with The War Games serial will note that these Players and their plan resembled a lot of the plot of that final Second Doctor story (which was co-written by Dicks and who had a habit of recycling ideas). This book, though, features a lengthy cameo for the Second Doctor, which is set after the events of The War Games, which finally canonizes the once theoretical Season 6B.

 

It would be another six years before this theme would be explored again, in Dicks Second Doctor novel, World Games (2005). Under threat of execution after his conviction by the Time Lords at the end of The War Games, the Doctor is granted a reprieve if he agrees to undertake missions for the Celestial Intervention Agency (Dick’s also pilfered psychic paper here, and idea not introduced until the series return in 2005). It’s the ultimate Terrance Dicks novel. It's got it all: sequels or prequels to most of his other novels, continuity overdosing on The War Games, the Players, a the Raston Warrior Robot, you name it.

In the end, though, while the whole Season 6B idea became fact in the books, on TV it never became “canon”. Nevertheless, by using the theory explored in that 1995 book by Cornell, Day, and Topping, it apparently gives us a logical reason, maybe willing reason (which is interestingly, btw) why the Third Doctor was working for the Time Lords who exiled him to Earth in the 20^th Century in The Three Doctors and again, much later, in The Five Doctors and The Two Doctors (1985).