Last of the Time Lords = Time Lord in Exile (Why this blog exists)

As the year 2014 begins, an era has ended for Doctor Who. Two eras, actually. The first, obviously, ended with the Eleventh Doctor's (or the Twelfth Doctor or the Thirteenth Doctor or simply the Matt Smith Doctor) regeneration. Eleven's hour is over now, the clock is striking twelve.

But really, another era ended earlier this year with the 50th Anniversary Special, The Day of the Doctor. Not so much an acknowledged era as a time of particular circumstances and character development for the Doctor, the time between Rose and The Day of the Doctor was marked by the single fact that the Doctor was the last of the Time Lords, a lonely traveler with the weight of the death of his people resting on his shoulders. But with Day, the Doctor is no longer responsible for Gallifrey burning--Gallifrey didn't burn at all--taking the weight off his shoulders and setting the show on a new course.

Or rather, resetting the show on an old course. The Doctor is now back to the way he was before 2005, a traveler wandering around the universe looking for adventures. Sure, he's also looking for Gallifrey, but Steven Moffat has said that the Doctor won't be doing that every episode.

So, we're back to the way it used to be. Which is nice for some fans, and not so nice for others. It really depends upon when you started watching.

I started with The Impossible Astronaut and Series 6 (yes, it actually is possible to get into Doctor Who with Series 6 and not be totally lost; it remains my favorite season of all time), and then went back and watched from Series 1 until I finished all of NuWho*. I had no idea that there had ever been a time when the Doctor hadn't been the last of the Time Lords and responsible for their deaths. I had assumed that the First Doctor had landed on earth in 1963 having just blown up his home planet and looking for somewhere to go. I quickly learned otherwise, of course, which somewhat helped my understanding when I went back and watched Classic Who, not in any particular order, but simply whatever sounded interesting. 

To me, though, the Time War was such an important part of Doctor Who that I would never have imagined that the Doctor would not have destroyed Gallifrey. I knew that if the Doctor had been faced with that impossible choice of whether to use the Moment or let the Daleks win in an actual episode, he would have taken a third option, but I had no trouble accepting that in some nebulous past time, there had been such an impossible situation that he had really had no other option. After all, it was called the Last Great Time War for a reason. 

To bring back Gallifrey, to me, was tantamount to undoing the destruction of Krypton or Alderaan. Its destruction was so important to the Doctor's character that it had to stay gone. I loved The Day of the Doctor, but I was furious that it had undone so much of the Doctor's past. Gone was all the guilt that had defined him, gone were his reasons for flying into a rage every time he saw a Dalek (which, frankly, was what made the Daleks so interesting), gone was so much I had simply, wrongly, assumed was part of what the Doctor was. 

So, because it was the anniversary year, I got to thinking about other anniversary specials, and if there had ever been such a big change in the show in an anniversary before. After not much thinking, I decided The Three Doctors was the only anniversary with any parallels to this one.
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After the end of The War Games, the Doctor was exiled to Earth. He worked for UNIT. He regenerated from Patrick Troughton to Jon Pertwee. The show was in color. But most importantly, the TARDIS didn't work. The Doctor was stuck on Earth. Which, frankly, isn't Doctor Who.

But here's where it get's crazy. Neither is the Last Great Time War.

The Doctor being this alien scientist exiled to Earth, trying to get his space ship to work while working for a military organization isn't Doctor Who. It could be The Avengers or James Bond, but not the show I know. The Doctor being the last of his kind, etc isn't  Doctor Who either. It's Superman or Batman or Star Wars, but it isn't what Doctor Who was before 2005.

In 1973, though, The Three Doctors undoes the Doctor's exile and gives him the TARDIS back. In 2013, The Day of the Doctor undoes the fact that the Doctor is the last of the Time Lords and brings Gallifrey back. In both cases, the show is reset to basics.

I always regarded the Pertwee Era as this sort of strange anomaly in the show's history, that couldn't be very interesting to watch, stuck on Earth with no working TARDIS. But it's no stranger than the era I had started watching the show in.

And so, from the idea that the Pertwee Era is somehow similar to the Time War Era, I decided that maybe the Pertwee Era wasn't such a waste of time to watch after all. It might not be ordinary Doctor Who (whatever that is), but maybe that would make it more interesting, just like with the Time War. And from that comes my plan: to watch the entire Pertwee Era whilst waiting patiently (or not so patiently) for Peter Capaldi's first season. One episode every night I have the time and reviews of every one. I'll be doing this so that I review each episode, not each serial, so there will be predictions of what will happen after the cliffhanger in most reviews. I figure it's more fun that way.

I have already seen three Pertwee serials (Spearhead from Space, Inferno, and Planet of the Spiders) as well as parts of other ones that I gave up on in the middle (Terror of the Autons, The Daemons). Basically, I know quite a few spoilers about this era (More on that in the next post). But mostly, this is a NuWho fan who has watched quite a bit of Classic Who watching Jon Pertwee's Doctor for the first time. Should be fun, right?


*NuWho being the post-2005 series and Classic Who being the 1963-1989 series. Whether or not they should be called something else, it's easier to have a standard way of referring to them.