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).

Books: The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Price of Freedom by A.C. Crispin (2011)

Historical note: The events of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Price of Freedom takes place about a dozen years before the first film.

“Twenty-five-year-old Jack Sparrow is a clean-cut merchant seaman pursuing a legitimate career as a first mate for the East India Trading Company. He sometimes thinks back to his boyhood pirating days, but he doesn't miss Teague's scrutiny or the constant threat of the noose. Besides, he doesn't have much choice—he broke the Code when he freed a friend who had been accused of rogue piracy, and he can no longer show his face in Shipwreck Cove. When Jack's ship is attacked by pirates and his captain dies in the altercation, he suddenly finds himself in command.”

A little bit of background here:

It was during the production on Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, when the editors at Disney Press, who produce tie-in novels, felt there needed to be a tale that would fill in Jack Sparrow’s back-story. There were already a few kids books series released dealing with his childhood and teen years, but all were geared towards the younger demographic. I’m not sure this was direction Disney Press wanted to go in, but impressed with A. C. Crispin’s (1950-2013) work on Bantam Spectum Han Solo Trilogy -The Paradise Snare (1997), The Hutt Gambit, (1997), and Rebel Dawn, (1998) - they felt she could bring some serious gravitas to a tale about 25 year-old Jack Sparrow, and not just a slap-dash effort to sell additional titles. Plus she was well established in tie-in novel field, having written several titles within the Star Trek universe. Two of those Trek books -Yesterday's Son and Time for Yesterday- were direct sequels to the third-season episode of TOS, All Our Yesterdays, and detail an alternate timeline where Spock and Zarabeth raise their child. Yesterday's Son would become the first non-novelization Star Trek novel to appear on the New York Times Best Seller list.  

Somewhat inspired by Tim Powers research done for his homage to the Disney ride that was released in 1987 as On Stranger Tides (which would become the fourth film in the franchise), Crispin did a lot of exploration on the historical period and all the nautical stuff. She goes into great detail explaining how a sailing vessel works, which are better than others, and why some pirates could easily overtake other ships. While she was doing this, Disney provided the script for At World’s End (which filmed in 2005 and 2006) before it was released in 2007, so she could see where the franchise was going. However, she had finished this book before the script for On Stranger Tides (2011) was even written. 

The only instructions for writing The Price of Freedom, all Disney told Crispin was to "stick to historical fact, unless it conflicts with established Pirates of the Caribbean continuity." So Crispin did a deep dive into researching the time period in an effort to do just this with Under the Black Flag by David Cordingly (2006) being one of the four pirate-related books she found herself using the most consistently. 

So with its seemly Patrick O’Brian inspired cover, the novel was released in 2011. And promptly vanished.

Like a few of the movies, though, the book is overlong. I understand Crispin’s desire to include as much as Jack’s back story as possible, but we did not need to be reminded again and again that Jack hated slavers and that the East Indian Trading Company had a dubious history with slavery and men who saw wealth, title, and power as way to move up in the company. Crispin really makes it obvious that –despite the time period- a lot of the EITC members were corrupt, evil, pathetic white men.

The there is the main villain of EITC, one Cutler Beckett, a character who makes his debut in the third film in the franchise, who’s horrible family problems gave him a sort of bizarre reason to be the asshole he was, but then Crispin adds an additional suitcase of vileness that could make some reader have sympathy for him. It was just unnecessary.

For the film fans, we get various cameos from Davy Jones, Hector Barbossa, Captain Teague, and Tia Dalma gets’ named dropped a lot.

While at 672 pages and clearly a more adult tale of young Jack Sparrow (which may explain why this title was never released in paperback and now has become a very expensive book to obtain on the secondary markets), it does slot neatly between two series for kids, Pirates of the Caribbean: Jack Sparrow and Pirates of the Caribbean: Legends of the Brethren Court. But I don’t think this is a kids book, maybe YA, but not kids.

So I’m not sure this was the book Disney was exactly looking for, but remains an interesting and cautious experiment about trying to overly explain Jack Sparrow’s life before the film series. Perhaps too much detail here, or a book split in two may have made it work fully, but this epic tale just suffered.  

Books: Winter’s Gifts By Ben Aaronovitch (2023)

“When retired FBI Agent Patrick Henderson calls in an ‘X-Ray Sierra India’ incident, the operator doesn’t understand. He tells them to pass it up the chain till someone does. That person is FBI Special Agent Kimberley Reynolds. Leaving Quantico for snowbound Northern Wisconsin, she finds that a tornado has flattened half the town – and there’s no sign of Henderson. Things soon go from weird to worse, as neighbors report unsettling sightings, key evidence goes missing, and the snow keeps rising – cutting off the town, with no way in or out. Something terrible is awakening. As the clues lead to the coldest of cold cases – a cursed expedition into the frozen wilderness – Reynolds follows a trail from the start of the American nightmare, to the horror that still lives on today.”

Winter’s Gifts is another delightful novella linked to, but not central to, Ben Aaronovitch’s fun urban fantasy novels, the UK based Rivers of London series. Kimberley, as side character in other books, comes forward here in a well-paced, but not really deep tale about Native Spirits of Wisconsin and ill-conceived 1844 Marsh Expedition.  I like her, but at some point a British writer trying to write about an American women in the United States –and in Wisconsin to boot-, you get a bit distracted by some Aaronvitch’s failed attempts –deliberate or not- to sound like he knows what he’s writing about. But American writers make British characters all stereotypes, so why not a British author doing light urban fantasy? Like all winter coats are called parkas, everyone has guns and pulls them on visitors; coffee is brewed on a kettle on the burner, uses the word flashlight (instead of torches), but uses tyres instead of tires, frostbite into frostnip, and headlights into headlamps. There are other examples, but you get the point.

Still, nothing feels too off. I grew up in northwestern suburbs of Chicago, and my paternal Great Aunt lived in Waupaca, Wisconsin (where my uncle now lives), so Aaronvitch gets the basic aspects of the state correct. It’s also another avenue in the Rivers of London books to explore, which opens the series, as any series ages, it can become stale. He’ll do that again later in the year when The Masquerades of Spring novella is released and is set in New York at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th Century.

Books: Lincoln's Dreams (1987)

“For Jeff Johnston, a young historical researcher for a Civil War novelist, his reality is redefined on a bitter cold night near the close of a lingering, brutal winter. He meets Annie, an intense and lovely young woman suffering from vivid, intense nightmares (seems to be dreaming General Lee's dreams). Haunted by the dreamer and her unrelenting dreams, Jeff leads Annie on an emotional odyssey through the heartland of the Civil War in search of a cure. On long-silenced battlefields their relationship blossoms–two obsessed lovers linked by unbreakable chains of history, torn by a duty that could destroy them both.”

 

While Willis had been publishing short stories and novellas for years, Lincoln’s Dreams is her debut novel released in 1987. The book is about parapsychology, metaphysical speculation, death, and love. Willis explores the social sciences, something she would continue to do in latter works. she weaves technology. The book portrays a young man’s unrequited love for a woman who might or might not be experiencing reincarnation or precognition, and whose outlook verges on suicidal. The historical research is top notch. The Civil War scenes well drawn out, they felt intimate and personal. But some of the characters, especially Annie, come across too trusting of both creepy Richard and Jeff.

 

And the truth of the matter, nothing much really happens here –despite it being a clever and original idea. It runs rather smoothly, but I did expect something to happen. But nothing really does. Also, as another review pointed out, Willis was –maybe- being too clever:

 

“When you look at the fact that Traveller's (Lee’s horse) original name was Jefferson Davis, and the protagonist is Jeff, and as he says in the end, he is sold to Annie (the Lee stand-in) in a way, which gives the ending further echoes. But still. Too clever, too obvious. ”

Books: Rendezvous with Rama By Arthur C. Clarke (1973)

“At first, only a few things are known about the celestial object that astronomers dub Rama, after the Hindu god. It is huge, weighing more than ten trillion tons. And it is hurtling through the solar system at an inconceivable speed. Then a space probe confirms the unthinkable: Rama is no natural object. It is, incredibly, an interstellar spacecraft. Space explorers and planet-bound scientists alike prepare for mankind's first encounter with alien intelligence. It will kindle their wildest dreams...and fan their darkest fears. For no one knows who the Ramans are or why they have come. And now the moment of rendezvous awaits — just behind a Raman airlock door.”

 

A cornerstone of late 20^th Century science fiction, Rendezvous with Rama is a great book for what it really does not reveal. Sure, there are multiple conversations, philosophical conversations about the ship, where and why it’s here. These were the tropes that set off the imagination of writers during the Golden Years of this genre. What I appreciated from the tale was Clarke not going into great detail about how complicated it might be to get a ship to latch onto an alien one and time it would take to do it. This led to some fantastic exploration of the ship itself, with the of the Endeavour postulating of how such a spaceship might really work in terms of our Earthbound physics. Pondering things like how can it generate gravity, how could it travel? What would the aliens be like? What is the purpose a large body of water, and those featureless buildings on an island within?

Though published 51 years ago, I think the book holds up pretty well. Like all science fiction set centuries ahead, you can be cynical about what these “futurist” were thinking (like the ones published in the 50s that still had everyone smoking like chimney’s in the 21^st Century), like characters having two wives (one on Earth, one on the Moon or Mars). That seemed a weird choice for Clarke. I also appreciated the shortness of this classic take on First Contact (though not with any actual aliens, but the technology left behind). The arcs of the characters were satisfying and to the point, and everything was wrapped up (I guess) in 274 mass market paperback pages.

One interesting bit: the book was meant to stand alone, although its final sentence suggests otherwise:

“And on far-off Earth, Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one how he had wakened from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious still echoing in his brain: The Ramans do everything in threes.”

Clarke denied that this sentence was a hint that the story might be continued. In his foreword to the book's 1989 sequel, Rama II, he stated that it was just a good way to end the first book, and that he added it during a final revision.

Still, he and Gentry Lee pen a total of four novels set in the Rama universe, including 1991’s The Garden of Rama, and 1993’s Rama Revealed (Lee would write two more novels set in the same universe without Clarke, 1995’s Bright Messengers and 1999’s Double Full Moon Night).