Feature: 6B or Not 6B?

Steven Moffat’s only gone and done it again.

First we had the mystery of what to call 2010’s series – Series Five? Series One? Season 31? Our Moffat’s own (less than serious) suggestion “Series Fnarg”? The history of the great internet flame wars has, thankfully, been lost, hidden amongst the great broken URLs in the digital ether.

Fnarg+1 we could just about get our heads around, but Moffat and his sinister BBC overlords then saw fit to snap the 2011 series in two, with seven episodes in the Spring and the remaining six in the Autumn.

Most folk of a sensible disposition (TV viewers, 2|entertain and the rest of us non-editors of DWM alike – I kid, I kid) have continued numbering the series where RTD left off, so Matt Smith’s debut series is by and large referred to as Series Five, and his second would sensibly enough be referred to as Series Six. But what have we here? Series Six “A” and Series Six “B”?

Well, we can’t be having that, can we? As any anorak hiding in the mid Nineties Who closet knows, we’ve already HAD a Season 6b, and it starred Patrick Troughton – whether he knew it or not...

You see, not everything in Doctor Who makes sense. No, really.  Only to be expected in a show sailing past fifty with gay abandon (no, not agenda!), but – and you may have noticed this – Doctor Who’s memory isn’t quite what it once was.  In fact, Doctor Who’s memory was never all that to begin with.

As early as December 1972, a mere three and a half years after we’d seen Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor giddily spinning to his supposed death at the conclusion of The War Games, continuity went for a burton as the cosmic hobo himself happily explained to his dandified Pertwee alter ego that he’d popped up in the TARDIS to help him defeat Omega at the behest of the Time-Lords in the tenth anniversary story The Three Doctors.

Come again? The same Time-Lords that, the first time they got hold of him, sentenced him to death (well, regeneration, which is pretty much the same thing) and exile to Earth?  Well how the ruddy hell could that be right? Of course, we got the lines about lifting the Doctors from their time streams and all that, but what does this actually mean? It’s not clear, is it?

Needless to say the Doctors triumph and the Second and First Doctors are returned to their relevant time streams, meaning that the whole thing can just be overlooked as a bit of harmless anniversary fun.  That is, until the next bit of harmless anniversary fun rocks the boat even further.

In The Five Doctors, Terrance Dicks, who really should know better after having co-written The War Games and script-edited The Three Doctors, gives us a Second Doctor who can not only steer his TARDIS to the Brigadier’s reunion party but knows that Jamie and Zoe had their memories of him erased after they were returned to their own times at the conclusion of Troughton’s swan song.

Now that just can’t be right at all, can it?  After all, we know, don’t we, that immediately after said memory tinkering, the Time Lords popped Troughton in a blender and whisked him off to face the Autons, ably assisted by Liz Shaw and the good old Brigadier.  The only way he can possibly know about Jamie and Zoe’s memory-mangling is if he didn’t, in fact, immediately regenerate, and something else happened between the end of The War Games and the disabled TARDIS’ arrival on Earth in Spearhead from Space.

But here’s the thing.  Obviously something’s happened in the interim, because the newly regenerated Third Doctor is in the TARDIS, when we last saw the spinning Second Doctor outside it.  He’s also in possession of a ring, a bracelet, and a watch which homes in on the TARDIS, none of which he had at the close of The War Games.

Things become a little clearer, and the same time more confused, in The Two Doctors, when the Sixth Doctor encounters the Second.  This time around, it’s even more obvious that continuity’s gone on holiday and forgotten to cancel the milk – the story begins with a visibly aged Second Doctor, sporting a silver variation of his usual Beatles moptop do, inside a TARDIS console room that is clearly not a version he’s ever been seen to use before, accompanied by an older Jamie McCrimmon, chatting merrily about missions for the Time-Lords, steering the TARDIS and claiming to have recently dropped Victoria off to study graphology.  His altered TARDIS even has a recall device and is dually controlled by the Time-Lords.

All of which is entirely at odds with everything we thought we knew at the conclusion of The War Games.  Continuity snafu or something altogether more sinister?

Well, okay, it’s clearly the former, but those wilderness years of the nineties gave rise to some of the very wankiest of fanwnak, don’t you know.  To account for all these continuity discrepancies surrounding the Second Doctor, Paul Cornell proposed the “Season 6B theory” in 1995’s “The Discontinuity Guide” (co-written with Martin Day and Keith Topping).

Steven Moffat has been quoted as saying a show about time travel can never have an official continuity – even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff, but in the nineties, continuity was all we had, so Season 6B and its’ ilk were very much the order of the day.

The theory goes that rather than undergoing a regeneration at the end of The War Games, the Second Doctor was recruited to work for the Celestial Intervention Agency, a branch of the Time Lords, first mentioned in 1976’s The Deadly Assassin.

During this time, the Second Doctor is allowed to regain Jamie McCrimmon (and possibly Victoria Waterfield – more on her in a bit) as a companion, is given a Stattenheim remote control device for his TARDIS, and undertakes an unknown number of missions, including the one in The Two Doctors.

Then, presumably after the Doctor has gone against their wishes or tried once more to escape them, the Time Lords carry out their original sentence and force him to regenerate as well as exiling him to Earth, with Jamie’s (and Victoria’s) fate unknown.  They are obviously no longer with him when he arrives on Earth in Spearhead from Space with a convenient amount of memory loss meaning that the Third Doctor does not, in fact, remember this period.

All good and fanwanky, but in fact not only does it not stop there, it didn’t even start there…

Season 6B might not have been fully fanwanked into existence in the months following broadcast of The War Games, but the pages of TV Comic (TVC #916) saw the Second Doctor, having in fact escaped from the Time Lords before they could complete his sentence of a forced change of appearance, and fled to Earth for further adventures, arrive in London without his TARDIS and base himself at the swanky Carlton Grange Hotel for a further five stories.

These culminate in The Night Walkers (TVC #934-#936), in which the Doctor investigates walking scarecrows, who, it transpires have been animated by the Time Lords to capture him.  The scarecrows take him into the TARDIS and proceed to trigger his regeneration, leading directly into Spearhead from Space.

 

These scarecrows get a brief mention in Big Finish’s alternate timeline “Unbound” tale, Exile, and Cornell later employed a variation of the Scarecrows when RTD informed him that the televised version of his Virgin New Adventure Human Nature was lacking a suitable monster.

 

The  BBC’s own Doctor Who website uses excerpts both from The Discontinuity Guide and The Television Companion by David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker, and them mentioning  Season 6B on their own site could be taken as the BBC lending some legitimacy to the theory, but perhaps the real seal of approval has come from one of the people that left the door ajar in the first place.

Never one to pass up a good idea that wasn’t necessarily his good idea, Terrance Dicks himself turned out the novel Players,  in which the Sixth Doctor and Peri encounter not only Winston Churchill, but the sinister eponymous “Players”, and the Doctor shows Peri an incident from his past, one in which the Second Doctor, at the conclusion of The War Games, insists that the Time Lords show him that they have returned Earth’s history to normality and let him travel via Time Ring to visit with Lady Jennifer and Lieutenant Carstairs. After doing so, they discuss with him that he has work to do.

Dicks then goes the whole hog with World Game, and gives us the first fully fledged, self-consciously Season 6B tale.

In World Game, Dicks shows us that the Celestial Intervention Agency required an operative who could discreetly investigate temporal disturbances but could also be disavowed, and therefore approached the Doctor and the Time Lord High Council, proposing that the Doctor's sentence of death and exile be commuted if he becomes their agent.

The portion of Players, in which the Doctor is sent via time ring to 1915 France, is a test of this arrangement, with World Game seeing him subsequently given a Type 97 TARDIS and a supervisor/companion in the politically ambitious Time Lady Serena. Although their relationship is at first antagonistic, over the course of the mission they come to respect one another and Serena eventually sacrifices herself for the Doctor's principles.

The Doctor, having learned enough of Gallifreyan politics from her to negotiate with the CIA, is able to demand the return of his TARDIS and Jamie. They agree, giving him the Stattenheim remote control seen in The Two Doctors, and fitting the TARDIS with an override to give them ultimate control.  Dicks even explains that Victoria was never on board the TARDIS at this point; Jamie's memories have been altered again so that he only believes Victoria is away studying graphology, thus leading into the events of The Two Doctors.

So it’s during this Season 6B period that the Doctor takes time off to visit the Brigadier at a UNIT reunion in The Five Doctors, thus being aware of Jamie and Zoe's return to their own people, and regales him with a reminiscence about creatures that were “covered with hair, [and] used to hop like kangaroos”.  This actually tallies with the description he gives of the Medusoids, whom he mentions in Frontier in Space, as having detained him whilst he was on the way to a peace conference – presumably at the behest of the Time-Lords.

Although The Two Doctors shows us the Doctor and Jamie in a console room similar in style to that seen in the latter part of the Fourth Doctor’s life, and the early part of the Fifth’s, Sarah Jane Smith's discovery of the second Doctor's recorder in the wooden control room (referred to by him as “the old one”) in The Masque of Mandragora indicates that this console room was also used during this period.

The trouble with this control room, the Doctor tells Sarah, was that he was never in control of where the TARDIS landed, tying in with the idea that it was the Time-Lords dictating his whereabouts.

Since Dicks, the man who created the discontinuity in the first place, embraced it, it has given rise to further short stories appearing in Big Finish’s since deleted “Short Trips” series, including The Time Eater, All of Beyond, That Time I Nearly Destroyed the World whilst Looking for a Dress, Mother’s Little Helper, Scientific Adviser, Reunion, Dust, The Steward’s Story, Golem, Blue Road Dance, and The Man Who (Nearly) Killed Christmas, as well as the acclaimed Companion Chronicle audio play, Helicon Prime.

This tale sees Fraser Hines recant a tale from the point of view of Jamie McCrimmon, whilst at the same time turning in a spooky impersonation of the late, great Patrick Troughton, rivalled only by the once Doctor’s own son David, and takes the work laid down by Cornell and Dicks and gives it the legs to run and run by bringing Season 6B to audible life.

So what of the second Season 6B, the one that picks up where A Good Man Goes to War left off with the loveably bonkers serving suggestion of Let’s Kill Hitler, Mark Gatiss’ Night Terrors, Toby Whithouse’s The God Complex, Tom MacRae’s “most accomplished piece of plotting ever” (his words), Gareth Roberts’ almost sequel to 2010’s The Lodger, and Steven Moffat’s own brain twisting series finale?

Will we, in years to come,  have uncle Terry’s Futurama-style head-in-a-jar writing fanwanky tales of the ganger Doctor battling Madame Kovarian and the Silence to rid the universe of all things "gween"?

Well, perhaps not, but seeing as World Game has already shown us a Second Doctor employing some psychic paper, maybe it’s only a matter of time until we’re leafing our way through The Fourteen Doctors, in which the Silence pay a visit to Coal Hill School in 1963 and persuade two teachers that there’s something a bit odd about Susan Foreman, with the Time-Lords dispatching the silver-haired Second Doctor to convince them that the only way to get their oddly misshapen hands on a space suit is to shoot for the moon…

 

It couldn’t get much more fanwanky than that… Could it?

TTFN! K.