"The Doctor" or "Doctor Who"?

1963-1980: Doctor Who and the Early Days

From 1963 to 1980, the main character on the show was listed as "Doctor Who" in the show's credits, and in most of the promotional materials. When people involved in the show were interviewed, they usually called the character "Doctor Who".

In-story, the character is almost always just called "The Doctor". There are a few exceptions, but they can all be fan-wanked away. (In "The War Machines", WOTAN demands the presence of "Doctor Who"; in "The Highlanders", the Doctor translates his name to German as "Doktor von Wer"; in "The Underwater Menace", the Doctor signs a message as "Dr W.".)

However, the early comic strips explicitly referred to "Dr Who" in the captions, and sometimes in dialogue.

And the novelizations (which are more important than many newer fans think—for the first few decades, reruns were rare, and there were no home videos, so the novels are the way the older fans remember the old stories) often mixed things up, sometimes calling him "Doctor Who" and sometimes "The Doctor". And most of the titles were Doctor Who and the Foo.

1981-2003: The Doctor and JN-T

John Nathan-Turner took over as producer in 1980, at the end of the Fourth Doctor era. He decided that, since the character is always called "The Doctor" in-story, he should always be called "The Doctor" everywhere else. Starting in 1981, the credits were changed, as was the promotional material. New star Peter Davison and everyone else involved in the show were instructed to use "The Doctor" consistently, and even correct interviewers who got it wrong. The comics also changed to always refer to "The Doctor", and Doctor Who Magazine even had an editorial "reminding" fans that the character is not named "Doctor Who". The novelizations took a bit longer to change over, but they did as well.

After the show was canceled, the franchise continued on in novels, comics, and audios. These were mostly written by staffers and fans from the JN-T era, who continued to use "The Doctor" consistently. In fact, the novels even played with the idea that "Dr Who" was a different person from the Doctor—or, rather, two. The Peter Cushing movies, existed as fiction in-universe, and were about a character named Dr Who only loosely based on the Doctor; meanwhile, the Dr Who of the early comics existed in the Land of Fiction.

In 1996, Peter Segal tried to bring the show back with the American TV movie. While some of the early promotional material referred to the character as "Doctor Who", at some point, they switched to using "The Doctor" consistently. This may have been part of his attempt to appeal to the hardcore fans (as when he said that the movie wouldn't have to describe Ace's fate because the New Adventures novels had already done so). The new series didn't happen, so the franchise continued on, as before, in novels, comics, and audios, which continued to refer to "The Doctor".

In 2003, Paul Cornell tried to bring the show back in animated form, with the webcast "Scream of the Shalka" as a pilot. Cornell, who was a hardcore fan from the JN-T era and one of the most popular novelists, also used "The Doctor" consistently. The animated series was announced, and then canceled a few days later in favor of the new series we all know.

2003-2005: The New Doctor Who

In 2003, Russell T Davies convinced the BBC to let him bring the show back to TV, with the first episode to air in 2005.

In the pre-launch marketing blitz, the character was referred to under both names. Stars Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper called him "Doctor Who" far more often than "The Doctor". When asked about it specifically, rather than saying that the character is named "The Doctor", RTD would give a long explanation that in-universe he's called "The Doctor", but there's nothing wrong with calling him "Doctor Who" out-of-universe.

And when the show was launched, Eccleston was listed in the credits as "Doctor Who".

This is strange—RTD was, like Cornell, a hardcore fan from the JN-T era and one of the novelists. He'd written letters to Doctor Who Magazine about the issue. He'd written characters from other franchises who got into arguments with people who misnamed the character "Doctor Who". Maybe this was his attempt to distance himself from his fan background, like when he claimed that he didn't know much about the novels while a complete set of the New Adventures were visible on a bookshelf in the corner of his office.

2006-2013 The New Doctor

In 2006, David Tennant replaced Eccleston. Tennant was another hardcore fan from the JN-T era, and a participant in the audios and one of the webcasts. He insisted that the credits, and the marketing materials, be changed. He corrected interviewers who asked him about being "the new Doctor Who" (by using the same line as Davison: "Doctor Who is the show, not the character. I'm the new Doctor."). He even corrected Billie Piper on-screen a few times.

In 2010, Steven Moffat took over as show-runner, along with an entirely new production team, and a new cast, starring Matt Smith. At first, Moffat put great emphasis on continuing the established success of the last five years. Also, Smith was primarily a fan of the recent Tennant-era show. So, the character continued to be "The Doctor", although co-stars Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill, and Alex Kingston did call him "Doctor Who" a few times.

2014- The New Whatever

In 2014, Matt Smith was replaced by Peter Capaldi. Capaldi frequently refers to his character as "Doctor Who". While Capaldi was a big fan growing up, he remembers the early years of the show, and the novelizations, better than the JN-T era.

Moffat has also referred to him as "the new Doctor Who" or "the 12th actor to play Doctor Who". While Moffat is yet another of the hardcore JN-T era fans who'd written (just a short story, not novels) during the wilderness days, he also loves to annoy the kind of fans who like to argue about things like this.

So What Do We Call Him?

RTD's suggestion, that in-universe he's "The Doctor" but there's nothing wrong with calling him "Doctor Who" out-of-universe, may seem a bit hypocritical given RTD's background, makes a lot of sense.

For one thing, to bring up the Doctor in a conversation, it's a lot easier to just say "Doctor Who" than to say "The Doctor, from Doctor Who", or to find a way to reword your sentence so the context is clear in advance, or to hope nobody thinks you're talking about some other Doctor. (For example, when talking about Star Trek, if you say "The Doctor would never do that", people are liable to think you're talking about the Emergency Medical Hologram, aka The Doctor, from Voyager.)

Also, it's hard to argue that the pre-JN-T fans, including Capaldi, are somehow less important than the later fans from the JN-T and Tennant eras.

But still, it somehow feels wrong to call him "Doctor Who". I feel like I'm talking about the Cushing character, or the early comics character escaped again from the Land of Fiction.

Just don't correct other people when they call him "Doctor Who". You always looked like a prat doing that, but even more so now that the star of the show agrees with them.

Why you should read the novels

Background

As eventually knows, Doctor Who was canceled at the end of 1989.

Virgin Books, the publishers of the Target novelizations, had obtained the rights to write "side" books that weren't direct novelizations of TV stories, and they decided to use these rights to carry on the story of the Seventh Doctor and Ace (and, later, other companions). While they could have published the usual unambitious tie-in books that most TV and movie series go with, the editors instead decided to aim their books at an older audience, and to try to tell stories that were "too big for the small screen." After a rocky start, Virgin found their tone, and their audience, and most of the 61 NA books were deep, riveting stories that deserved to carry the mantle of Doctor Who.

Then came the TV movie, and with it an anticipated reboot of the TV series. BBC canceled Virgin's licensed (although they continued to publish New Adventures novels with the Doctor's last companion, Benny) and began publishing their own Eighth Doctor Adventures. Initially, the plan was to make them completely separate from the Virgin novels, and watered down for a more mainstream audience. But after the new show failed to materialize, and most of the Virgin writers became BBC writers, the EDAs too became serious sci-fi/fantasy rather than just hack novels.

The EDAs ended with the resurrection of the TV series in 2005, when the BBC began publishing the New Series Adventures, as mass-market tie-in books.

As excellent as the NA and EDA novels are, there are countless fans who refuse to read them. Many of these fans have read thousands of pages of forum threads, blog posts, and so on about Doctor Who. The simple fact is that Larry Miles, Paul Cornell, etc. are better writers than most of the fan base, and they're writing fiction that's meant to entertain and/or illuminate rather than forum posts meant to argue, so it's almost certain far more interesting to read them.

Why you should read them

First, many of the novels are great stories. Alien Bodies is one of the best science fantasy books ever written; even if it weren't a Doctor Who story, it would be worth reading.

And, more to the point, they're great Doctor Who stories. There are plots, themes, and characters worth reading. There are insights into the history and workings of the Whoniverse, and into the characters you already know, and into the events you've already seen. Even if (just as with the TV show) some of those insights are later contradicted by later stories, you've still been given a new way of looking at everything you've seen. If you're really a fan of Doctor Who, why wouldn't you want that?

Finally, the novels have clearly inspired Steven Moffat. You don't have to know anything about Fitz to follow Rory's story, but you'll get more out of both stories if you've experienced both.

So, why don't people read the novels?

There's too much to read

This objection was stated by none other than Stephen Moffat. He claims that he originally followed the novels, but a dozen new full-length Doctor Who novels a year was just way too much to keep up with, compared to the 4 or so serials the TV series used to deliver.

Moffat has a point. You also don't have to read them all at once, any more than you have to watch all 26 seasons of the classic series. Read a couple of them and see what you think. If you decide it's not worth it, you've wasted a few hours of time. If you decide you want to read more, you can. Even if you decide you need to read absolutely everything, well, you've got a whole lifetime to catch up.

There's too much continuity

It's true that the novels were always more closely connected than the TV show. You can watch the rest of season 26 without having seen Battlefield and you're not missing anything except for Battlefield itself; if you read the early Benny books without having read Love and War, they won't be as good, and you may even be confused.

But again, you still don't have to read everything. Read the best and most important books, and read the summaries on the Discontinuity Guide for the ones you skip.

The novels also have a lot more continuity references to the TV show, and you probably haven't seen all 26 seasons. But if you just watch the first episode, The Invasion of Time, Remembrance of the Daleks, The Curse of Fenric, and Survival, you've pretty much got enough to follow everything that happens in the novels. You'll miss out on some clever references and inside jokes, but who cares?

The novels are just fan fiction

I don't know what this is even supposed to mean. The novels were commercially published books sold by Virgin Books and BBC Books. By definition, they're not fan fiction. The ranges had editors who solicited writers, reviewed unsolicited submissions, and worked with the writers. And of course they're licensed by the BBC In every possible sense, they're professional fiction, not fan fiction.

Meanwhile, it's true that some of the novels were written by people who had never published professional fiction beforehand. But so what? Yes, RTD and Paul Cornell had only written for TV; Larry Miles had only published non-fiction; Mark Gatiss hadn't done any professional writing. But they turned out to be great writers. You're not picking from a random slush pile or a blog somewhere; for the most part, the novels that were published were the good ones, by writers who went on to become professional writers, if they weren't already.

Of course there are some that aren't as good as the others, but you can always skip those. (In a few cases, the plots of the weaker novels are important to later stories, but in that case there's always sites like the  to give you detailed overviews of the novels you want to skip.)

But the novels aren't "real" Doctor Who

Says who? They were intended to be "real" Doctor Who. And, except for a handful of truly oddball books, most people who read them take even the worst of them as fitting into the universe, themes, and stories of the franchise. Sure, they're different stories than what you saw on TV, but then Series 7 and Season 1 are even more different, and you wouldn't claim either of them doesn't count as "real" Doctor Who. These are stories of the Doctor, his companions, his TARDIS, and his adventures in saving the universe.

But the novels didn't really happen

Who says?

RTD never said that the events of the novels were out of continuity or canon. And he certainly knew the novels, having written one of them himself, and argued at length about others, and if you watched Confidential, you saw the full set of NAs on the bookshelf in his office. When directly asked whether the novels were still in continuity, he always avoided answering. But there's a reason he had Gary Russell on staff as a continuity adviser.

Moffat, meanwhile, hasn't been afraid to answer. If you ask him whether the books are in continuity, he'll tell you that it's a stupid question, because there is no linear continuity to a show about time travelers changing the past. Everything you saw in Turn Left was on a timeline outside of normal continuity. The end of Last of the Time Lords erased everything that happened after the Toclafane arrived. The events of other stories, like Journey's End, were removed from history by the cracks in time. Hell, everything before The Big Bang happened in a different universe, before the new one was created in part out of the memories of Amy rather than actual history. Does that mean all of those  stories aren't worth watching anymore?

The EDAs, like the Moffat-era TV series, were constantly changing history as they went along, and were clearly on a path toward undoing most of what happened in the second half of the series. Nobody at the time complained that they'd wasted their time reading Unnatural History because it turned out that much of what happened in that novel ended up not in the main timeline; it was worth reading because it was worth reading, not because it was source material for filling out a chronological history of the Doctor's travels. So, if the EDAs as a whole were somehow officially removed from continuity, it still wouldn't make any difference to whether they were readable.

Whether the Doctor or Clara or whoever remembers those events or not, you will remember them, just as Moffat does, and that's all that matters.

A lot of fans are resistant to the idea that history can and does change, no matter how much Moffat (and the Doctor, with Moffat's words in his mouth) tries to hammer it home. Frankly, I have no idea why those people are watching the show. But anyone who can accept Turn Left or the Cracks storyline should have no problem accepting the novels.

What about the Looms?

This one always comes up. If you don't know the story:

In one of the early NAs, Time's Crucible, we learn that in the time of Rassilon, the pre-scientific leaders of Gallifrey cursed their successors in some way. Rassilon dealt with that by replacing natural childbirth with the Looms. A couple of later novels follow up on this idea, and Lungbarrow explicitly tells us that no Time Lord except possibly the Doctor and a few other exceptions has been born naturally from Rassilon's time up to the end of that novel.

Many fans never liked the idea of the Looms. They make the Time Lords alien in exactly the wrong way. The idea of these people who sprang to life as fully formed adults and then spent decades in bizarre Gormenghast-like isolated Houses but somehow ended up as human as Drax or Rodan is just implausible to the point of silliness. 

This is one of the few major plot points from the books that the TV series explicitly contradicted, and RTD even directly said that the Looms never happened as far as he's concerned.

So, does this mean the books are irrelevant? Of course not. It means that RTD has changed one element of Time Lord history that was established in the books. And that means even less when you consider that the same element of history had also been contradicted in later books. In Unnatural History, it's made pretty clear that the Doctor had 17 different and contradictory pasts, and only 1 of them involved been Loomed. If that didn't make the previous novels somehow irrelevant and unworthy of reading, why should RTD's proclamation make any difference?

Also, as silly as the Looms may have been initially, some later authors used them more interestingly, as part of making the Time Lords as alien as they were originally intended to be (before The Invasion of Time).

Finally, the Looms are hardly the only silly thing about the Whoniverse that anyone ever invented. The classic series, and even the new series, is chock full of silly ideas, some of which were ignored, others used as the germ to make more interesting stories later.

What about Human Nature, etc.?

Yes, the novel Human Nature was adapted into a different TV story, and it seems unlikely that the Doctor went through such similar events twice.

But it's hard to see why this makes a difference. Again, it doesn't matter which stories are still in the current, ever-changing continuity. Human Nature is a great novel, and having both read the book and seen the episodes makes both of them better. You don't have to pick one or the other.

If you're worried about being "spoiled", well, the stories are different enough from each other that you don't really know the story, and neither version relies too heavily on surprise anyway, but if you really want to skip this novel, nobody's stopping you; that doesn't affect the others in any way.

Why not the audios or comics or other novels instead?

This one is the best objection there is.

You've got 26 classic seasons, 7 new seasons (plus the shorts and animated episodes), the Adventure Games and other games designed to be in-universe, hundreds of books, over 100 audios, 50 years of comic strips and books, plays, etc., not to mention spinoffs like the Torchwood TV series, the Faction Paradox books, the BBV videos, and the Kaldor City audios. Why put your time into the NA and EDA novels instead of any of the other sources?

To some extent, this is just a matter of personal preference. I think the NA and EDA novels (along with a handful of Virgin Missing Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures) are the best version of Doctor Who outside of the TV series, and add the most to the TV series. Also, the fact that the novel editors and writers really believed they were carrying forward the main storyline of the franchise makes a difference.

But not everyone agrees.

Some of the Big Finish audios, in particular, occupy a ground halfway between the novels and the TV series. Besides the format being half-way to video, they're also typically half-way between the two in terms of accessibility and scope. And of course they feature the actors you know and love from TV. And Big Finish shares a lot of authors with the novels, so it's not like the stories are written by useless hacks. And they do an even better job of trying to keep their continuity together than the novel ranges did.

The comics, meanwhile, started off as childish stories that made no attempt to be consistent with anything, and progressed to typical Marvel youth-oriented fare, but they began to improve around the time of the Sixth Doctor's hiatus on TV, and after end of the classic series, the writers (including the show's final script editor Andrew Cartmel—who also wrote some NA novels) were taking them seriously as a continuation of the story of the Seventh Doctor, and produced some great stories. While they're not quite as deep or adult-oriented as the novels or audios, that also means they sometimes fit the tone of the TV series even better. The biggest problem with the comics is that they're just harder to get hold of (at least legally—I'm pretty sure you can torrent everything if you want to).

Also, the BBC animated webcasts, if you can find them, are worth watching. (If you're worried about figuring out which stories are part of continuity, Death Comes to Time should make you give up and just start enjoying yourself; if it doesn't, there's no hope for you.)

As for the various spinoffs, definitely go watch Torchwood, and the Sarah Jane Adventures, if you haven't. But skip their tie-in books. Faction Paradox, Iris Wildthyme, and the Benny New Adventures have some great books, but you'll do better to start off with their predecessors in the NA and EDA lines. For example, Faction Paradox is more fun if you've read Christmas on a Rational Planet, Alien Bodies, and Interference. And all of the rest are fun, but amateurish; it's not as easy to produce compelling video on a shoestring budget as compelling novels.

But really, try a bit of everything, and see what you enjoy most? If you disagree with me and decide to start buying all the Big Finish audios you can and skip the novels, I've got no problem with that.

What's wrong with the past-Doctor and New Series stories?

I'm guessing the Seventh and Eighth Doctors aren't your favorite, or most familiar, incarnations. And there were as many books written about the other Doctors as about them. So, why read the NAs and EDAs instead of those other books?

The first past-Doctor stories were the Virgin Missing Adventures, published as an adjunct to the NAs. They were written by many of the same writers, and some of them were pretty good (and a couple of them fit closely into the NA storylines). But the need to fit the stories into established gaps in the timeline, and to avoid doing anything memorable enough that we'd expect the Doctor and companions to have commented on the events at some point on TV, was very restrictive. Also, there was only 1/6th as much experience writing for each of the past Doctors as for the Seventh—and, unlike the NAs, many of the writers saw the MAs as a less-important diversion, a fun chance to get to play with characters they didn't really control. And of course there was no continuing storyline to build up. Finally, many of them were written with the explicit intention of retconning some troubling bit of continuity or "redeeming" some unpopular character. So, while the MAs may have been as much professionally-published fiction as the NAs, they often feel a little bit like fan fiction. The BBC Past Doctor Adventures were basically the same, only by that time the writers knew that everyone expected less from a PDA than an EDA.

The Telos novellas, on the other hand, are mostly great stories—and there aren't too many of them, and they're short—so if you want to read about your favorite past Doctors, maybe start there.

The Short Trips short story collections (both the original Virgin collections and the later Big Finish ones) also have some great stories about past Doctors; most of the books have a few real clunkers, but you can always skip over those.

Meanwhile, the New Series Adventures, on top of having all of the problems of the MA/PDA books in trying to fit into an existing story instead of building a new story, were explicitly aimed more at mass appeal. Instead of encouraging the writers to push the boundaries of what a Doctor Who story could be, they encouraged them to write the kinds of stories TV viewers would expect. Of course they ended up with many of the same writers, and some of them produced some pretty good books, but the NSAs never lived up to the standards of the NA and EDA lines.

What order?

Unless you're really ready to commit to reading 100+ novels, don't worry about that yet. Pick up a couple of the best-regarded books, maybe skipping over the ones that are too tied to a specific story arc (which, sadly, rules out some of the best ones…), and see what you think. I'd recommend Love and War, Alien Bodies, The Also People, The Scarlet Empress, Damaged Goods, Vampire Science, Just War, The Taking of Planet 5, Conundrum, Blood Heat, The Tomorrow Windows, and Sky Pirates!

The Doctor's Wife

The Doctor's Wife was originally described as the ultimate TARDIS runaround episode, but of course it turned out to be much more than that.

The TARDIS Runaround

The TARDIS interior is discussed more in the post about Journey to the Center of the TARDIS. However, it's worth pointing out that this episode follows the Logopolis/Castrovalva tradition just as much as that one follows the Invasion of Time tradition: Most of the TARDIS is made up of rooms and corridors that look similar to the console room. Logopolis also introduced the Architectural Configuration System, which (among other things) allowed the Doctor or the TARDIS herself to adjust the configuration of rooms, create new rooms, or jettison rooms (which could be used for "ballast" or "thrust"), which shows up here again.

In this episode, we learn that the Architectural Configuration System contains console rooms that have been jettisoned, and even rooms that haven't been created yet—which is cool, but not a shocking addition to the TARDIS mythology. We also learn that time can behave oddly inside the TARDIS, something the NAs and EDAs both covered but which hasn't yet been seen on TV.

Idris

The real point of the story, of course, is Idris, a woman who gets the TARDIS matrix dumped into her head.

The idea of a humanoid TARDIS is not new, it permeates the EDA novels—although Gaiman may not have known that.

Alien Bodies introduces Marie, a humanoid TARDIS from the future (in a timeline that ended up never happening), who became stuck in the form of a women's police constable after visiting London in 1963. We learn that in the future, as part of their War effort, the Time Lords began breeding TARDISes that can take humanoid (well, Gallifreyanoid) form because it makes them more effective. Besides being able to walk around and talk to people, they can directly see how the abstract block transfer computations they run on interact with the world their pilots have to live in. We get a bit more of that in other novels, like The Taking of Planet Five.

But it's in Interference where things start to get interesting. The Doctor picks up a new companion named Compassion, who's a member of the Remote. The Remote are a colony of humans created by Faction Paradox, who connect directly to their media signals at a subconscious level. They're also are effectively immortal, but in a very odd way—when one dies, a new body is grown in the Remembrance Tanks, based on the memories of all of the living people who interacted with her—so eventually, everyone becomes their own public personas. The Compassion the Doctor meets is on her sixth life.

Over the next few novels, Compassion becomes increasing dysfunctional, being separated from her culture's media signals, and she begins picking up stray signals from the TARDIS instead. The Doctor tries to encourage her to interact more with human society (and with her fellow companion Fitz, although he has his own remote-and-TARDIS-related issues), but she withdraws further. A complicated sequence of events over multiple novels culminates in Shadows of Avalon: the Doctor's TARDIS is destroyed, but Compassion becomes a TARDIS.

This is a unique event, with almost no hope of anyone ever recreating it; the Time Lords realize that the only way they're going to get the humanoid TARDISes they need for the War (and know they will have during the War) is to kidnap Compassion and force her to breed.

Meanwhile, over the subsequent novels, the Doctor is able to interact with Compassion both as a TARDIS (e.g., the way she controls her interior) and as a humanoid. He learns, for example, that the randomizers that he's installed into his TARDIS in the past to avoid detection by the Time Lords are not only painful, but feel like a violation, in an almost rapey way. He's forced to reconsider the entire pilot-TARDIS relationship.

The story has two different endings. In The Ancestor Cell, we learn that the Doctor's TARDIS hasn't really been destroyed, but has become linked to Gallifrey and the War in a complicated way, which is only resolved when the Doctor destroys Gallifrey. Compassion sets his TARDIS to regrow (although will take over a century to complete), and leaves him for a TARDIS mechanic, someone who loves her like a man loves a car rather than with the Doctor's complex relationship to his TARDIS. Later in the EDAs, the Doctor runs into Compassion, who's apparently checking in on him to see if he's ready for the next stage of her plan, but we never get to see how that turns out. Meanwhile, the Faction Paradox spinoff series is set in a timeline where Ancestor never happened, the War wasn't averted, and Compassion becomes a major player in a game that may be even greater than the War, until she ultimately turns herself into the City of the Saved, which is another huge story not relevant here (but definitely worth reading).

Obviously this isn't at all the same story. In fact, in many ways, it's the exact opposite. Compassion is a human who has to come to terms with being a TARDIS; Idris is a TARDIS who has to come to terms with being a human. Compassion is a new TARDIS, something the Doctor hasn't dealt with in centuries; Idris is the Doctor's own TARDIS. The Doctor's love for his TARDIS is played off as a bittersweet and touching relationship in Idris's eyes (although it's also played for laughs in Amy's), but it looks deeply disturbing from Compassion's. Most importantly, the Doctor and his TARDIS have always been equal companions, while Compassion was a companion who often found herself as a spectator in events beyond her control, comprehension, or interest, until suddenly she became the most important thing in the universe and saw the Doctor as little more than a pawn.

Also, because the EDAs had the Doctor and Compassion interacting for a half dozen novels instead of one 45-minute episode, there was ample room both for more depth, and for long stretches where the core themes were basically ignored and Compassion was just another companion or just a TARDIS.

Still, both stories serve to let us—and the Doctor—look at the pilot-TARDIS relationship from a new angle, primarily because he can finally talk to the TARDIS. While Journey to the Center of the TARDIS lets us see the TARDIS as a machine, and as a world, The Doctor's Wife lets us see the TARDIS as a character.

Also, in both the post-Ancestor Cell novels and the post-Doctor's Wife episodes, the TARDIS often seems a little dark and threatening; after being forced to see just how big, how powerful, and most of all, how alien a TARDIS is, even when in human form, it's hard to take it for granted as just a magical box for adventures. Ancestor and The Name of the Doctor both had a dying TARDIS looming over the proceedings; The Gallifrey Chronicles and Journey had a damaged and dangerous and largely unknown TARDIS for part of the setting. Multiple stories in both ranges show the TARDIS accomplishing things that we'd never seen before, with no real explanation, reinforcing the idea that the TARDIS is far beyond our comprehension, and the little time we had getting to know her wasn't nearly enough. These stories wouldn't have worked nearly as well without Shadows of Avalon and The Doctor's Wife. You can see that in the NAs, which tried similar stories following Time's Crucible, but to less substantial effect. For that matter, the hints of people lost in the TARDIS that the Doctor has forgotten, but the TARDIS probably hasn't, seem less comical in the later stories of each range than they had in, e.g., Interference or the spinoff Adventure Games.

Again, Gaiman probably didn't know most of the history—he read the Target novelizations of the classic series voraciously, but, unlike Moffat, he'd never read any of the original novels. And it doesn't seem like Moffat made any major changes to his story. So, it's just a coincidence that he opened up so many of the same themes that Larry Miles and Paul Cornell had in the novels. But it may not be a coincidence that Moffat chose to follow up on them.

The Name of The Doctor

The Name of the Doctor, and the arc leading up to it, reuses many elements from Unnatural History, and the arc leading up to it, but it also borrows from some other stories.

Doctor Who?

The first EDA, The Eight Doctors, was all about the Doctor trying to discover the answer to the question "Doctor Who?" This was the first time the question had been asked seriously within any story, and Series 7 is the second time. Of course it's the Great Intelligence, rather than the Doctor, asking that question, and he's only interested in the answer because it's the key to opening the Doctor's tomb.

The Eight Doctors is also the novel that explains that every TARDIS has an Eye of Harmony, which is both a symbolic manifestation of the power source on Gallifrey and a link to that power. This idea is reused in the last EDA, The Gallifrey Chronicles, and again in Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.

It also featured the Doctor traveling through his own past, meeting all of his past incarnations, much as Clara did at the end of Series 7.

The recurring amnesiac-Eighth-Doctor storyline set up by the movie and this novel annoyed more fans than it inspired—even more so when later novels re-amnesified him twice, especially the second time, when he lost all memory completely because he'd removed his entire species from history. There's definitely something interesting that could have been done with that (and a few novels, notable The Adventuress of Henrietta Street and The Gallifrey Chronicles, touch on it), but mostly it was just tedious. In Series 7, the Doctor doesn't have the same kind of total amnesia, but he is blocking (or hiding?) something very important (which turns out to be his War incarnation) that, as in the later EDAs, directly connects with his having destroyed Gallifrey (or not, in this case).

Sam and Clara

Finally, The Eight Doctors also introduced a new companion, Sam Jones, who the fans also hated… but who ultimately became fascinating, at least as a plot device if not as a character.

Sam was a perfect companion. In fact, she was so perfect that the Doctor was suspicious. Had some enemy created her, or twisted her into exactly what he needed, to manipulate him? Or, worse, had he somehow twisted her history himself? Starting with Alien Bodies, the novels began to gradually reveal that there was something to this suspicion. And then, in Unnatural History, the story came out.

As a result of the leakage from the Eye of Harmony in the TV movie, a dimensional scar opened in time. Sam had split into two people, and the Doctor had a conversation with her where he explained that she was impossible. Blonde Sam—the one who was traveling with the Doctor as his perfect companion—was destined to sacrifice herself to close the rift. But the problem was worsened as a result of first the TARDIS and then the Doctor's biodata becoming entangled with the rift, just as Griffin was trying to manipulate it, not to mention Faction Paradox and all the other contingents trying to rewrite history at the time. The Doctor tried to find a way to keep both Sams alive and in history, but ultimately, Dark Sam sacrificed herself by walking into the rift, disappearing into the Doctor's past histories, leaving Blonde Sam free to travel with the Doctor.

Clara was, in the Doctor's words from He Said, She Said, "Always exactly what I need. Perfect. Too perfect." A few hints were dropped throughout the series, then, in The Name of the Doctor, the story came out.

As a result of the TARDIS explosion at the end of the previous series, there were cracks in time. The Eye of Harmony as also involved again. Clara had split into multiple people, and the Doctor had a conversation with her with very similar wording to that in Unnatural History. One version or another of Clara was apparently destined to sacrifice herself to save time. But the problem was worsened when the Doctor's biodata became entangled with the cracks (the TARDIS had obviously been entangled from the start…), just as the Great Intelligence was trying to manipulate it, not to mention the renegade faction of the Church and all of the enemies in the Alliance trying to rewrite history. The Doctor tried to find a way to keep Clara alive and in history, but ultimately, she sacrificed herself by walking into a rift, disappearing into the Doctor's past histories.

Of course things went differently from there. The Eleventh Doctor stepped into his own past, and with Clara's help he was able to sort out the root problem and get history back on track, and then the Doctor regenerated and Clara went off with his new incarnation.

Also, their personalities are very different. Sam was a strident teenage activist, always sure of her ideals but unsure of herself, while Clara is a self-assured young woman who doesn't seem to care too much about political causes. Sam was insecure and hesitant with men, with little middle ground between platonic friendship and stalker-level seduction, while Clara was breezily flirty with everyone. They're both smart, and they both somehow have knowledge they shouldn't have had (primarily about computers), but they're smart in different ways.

So, as usual, Moffat has taken an idea from the novels and spun a different story out of the same major plot points, around characters who have many superficial similarities but feel like completely different people, and he's even used dialogue from the novels in ways that fit the different situation differently, but at the same time perfectly.

The Great Intelligence's Plan

In a nutshell, the Great Intelligence wanted to change history by rewriting the Doctor's timestream, and in particular by changing his death.

Alien Bodies gave us the idea of biodata, the timestream made physical and manipulable. Unnatural History had multiple agents trying to manipulate history through the Doctor's biodata. Griffin was particularly interested in changing the Doctor's history, while Faction Paradox (and, behind the scenes, the Enemy) were more interested in using the Doctor's insanely connected biodata to change everything.

Faction Paradox was especially interested in changing the Doctor's death—both his future death (as seen earlier in Alien Bodies) and his past reincarnations (as seen later in Interference), and they succeeded in the latter. Interestingly, in the TV version of the story (in the following episode), it's ultimately the Doctor who changes history by changing the death of a previous incarnation.

There are some clear differences. Neither Griffin nor the Faction Little Brother attempt to enter the Doctor's biodata; Griffin edits it with some kind of technological tool, while Little Brother entices the Doctor into causing a paradox that will affect it indirectly.

Other Connections

"Time travel has always been possible in dreams" is lifted straight from Larry Miles. The whole idea of time travel via candlelit rituals, which somehow manages to violate the rules of time travel as the Time Lords (and we) know it, is exactly what Faction Paradox have always done.

Little Brother's long conversation with the Doctor in Unnatural History has a lot that resonates with The Name of the Doctor, even though on the surface it's all different.

• "Is this the version where they banned all mention of his name, and yours, for consorting with aliens? Or the one where he got every record of himself deleted from the files?" This was about the Other and about the Fifth Doctor in Cold Fusion. But it can just as easily be read as about the War Doctor, and about the Eleventh Doctor deleting every record of himself from every file in the universe.
• "Maybe you're living in the middle of a time war. Maybe there's an Enemy out there... who's rewriting you when you're not looking… Maybe there's no one left on Gallifrey... Or maybe the whole planet's being destroyed, and undestroyed, and destroyed, and you just caught them at the wrong moment." That's probably about the Second War in Heaven and its aftermath, although if so, it's mostly referring to events that hadn't happened yet for either Little Brother or the Doctor, and hadn't been written yet for the authors to know about. So it applies just as well to the Last Great Time War and its aftermath that they also couldn't possibly have known about. The War Doctor destroyed Gallifrey, but the Eleventh Doctor is (next episode) able to go back in time and undestroy it, leaving it sealed in a bubble permanently on the verge of destruction, which the Twelfth Doctor will presumably be able to undo (otherwise, how are the Time Lords going to give him that new cycle of regenerations that they gave him for saving them?).

The ghost of River has some similarities to the ghost of the Master as glimpsed in the late EDAs.

Beyond Series 7

At the largest scale, the EDAs are about the aftermath of a Time War. The Time Lords were going to lose—and, because of how they'd changed to fight the War, they didn't deserve to win anyway (as seen in The Taking of Planet 5 and a few other novels, in addition to those discussed above, and to some extent the Faction Paradox spinoff series and the Benny New Adventure Dead Romance). The Doctor erased most of the Time War by destroying Gallifrey (in The Ancestor Cell), erasing both the Time Lords and their Enemy from history. The Doctor carried this secret knowledge with him, unknowingly also carrying the means to undo what he'd done and restore Gallifrey. The novels end—like this episode—with most of the secrets being revealed. So now, the TV series has gone beyond the EDAs; in Day of the Doctor we see how the Doctor changes the history of the War and saves his people. It still remains to be seen how he restores them from the time bubble, and how he stops Rassilon's Final Sanction, and so on, but the novels never got to explore any of that territory. It'll be interesting to see whether this means that Series 8 will have a lot less of the EDAs than the past three have.

The other major theme in the EDAs has been changing both universal history, and personal history—both things that should be impossible, but with the Time Lords at first challenged and then removed from the universe, everything is up for grabs. That's been a theme of the entire revived series, and especially the Moffat era, but if the Time Lords return, will that change?

Meanwhile, in Unnatural History, Interference, Anachrophobia, and other novels, Faction Paradox realized that if the Doctor were to create paradoxes by changing his history, this would give him unfathomable power, but also place him in some sense under their control. This is a much more interesting threat than the direct threats the Doctor has faced in most of the TV series, and it's one of the few things from the novels that Moffat hasn't touched on at all. But in the last three episodes, the Doctor has stepped into his own timeline, went back and changed the most significant event of his life, found his Fourth incarnation alive at the same time as him, gotten a new cycle of regenerations by the Time Lords even though they're still locked in a time bubble… Will any of that have consequences? If the Twelfth Doctor has no shadow, we'll know Moffat's still reading Miles…

Moffat and the Novelmen

Steven Moffat loves to reuse characters, plot lines, and themes from the New Adventures and Eighth Doctor Adventures novels—but always with a new twist, and often a whole new meaning.

Background

The classic series was accompanied by comic strips almost from the start, with the publication of "The Klepton Parasites" in TV Comics on 14 November 1964. But these early stories are barely Doctor Who at all.

Things began changing in the mid-80s. TV producer John Nathan-Turner was explicitly raising (and attempting to answer) questions about continuity. The comic strips in Marvel's Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly/Magazine, largely written by fans like Gary Russell, attempted to fit their stories into that continuity. Target expanded beyond novelizations and into original stories about the companions. Some of the TV writers even began writing for other media.

But Virgin's New Adventures (launched in 1991) and BBC's Eighth Doctor Adventures (launched in 1997) were different. These novel ranges were designed from the beginning to take over where the TV series left off. They were also intended to tell stories for adults that were "too big for the small screen". And they deliberately tried to police their continuity far more seriously than the TV show had, even in the JNT/Cartmel era. RTD and Moffat both read the novels, and RTD even wrote one.

Continuity

When the series came back, novel fans immediately began wondering whether the novels were part of the continuity of the new TV show. But that was always a silly question. The EDAs were all about changes to not just history, but the very nature of history. And the new series was set in the aftermath of a Last Great Time War that had removed the Time Lords from space-time and again changed the way history works.

While RTD was always cagey about the question, Moffat has told people from the start that it's not even a question worth answering. Off-camera, he pointed people to Paul Cornell's blog post on Canonicty in Doctor Who. On-camera, even before he was in charge, he had the Doctor describe post-Time War continuity as a ball of "timey-wimey". His first story arc was about cracks in time eating history, ending with Amy and the Doctor rebooting the whole universe. And, just to hammer to point home, he gave us this speech:

The thing is, Amy, everyone's memory is a mess. Life is a mess. Everyone's got memories of a holiday they couldn't have been on, or a party they never went to, or met someone for the first time and felt like they've known them all their lives. Time is being rewritten all around us, every day. People think their memories are bad, but their memories are fine. The past is really like that.

Anyone who asks whether the novels are part of continuity is missing the point of Doctor Who entirely. Sure, if you're trying to put together a wiki like the TARDIS Data Core, you have to make some decisions about what does and doesn't count—but if you think there's a "right answer" out there to be discovered, you're watching the wrong show. If you remember the Doctor fighting Kleptons with John and Gillian, your memories are fine. The past is really like that.

The more interesting question is how the new stories have made use of the enormous amount of source material. Even ignoring the stories that weren't written to carry on the main narrative, you've got 26 years of classic shows, 61 NA novels, the TV movie, 73 EDAs, two web animations, and dozens of audio plays that were.

RTD

Early in the EDAs, the novel Alien Bodies began dropping hints of a Time War in the Doctor's personal future. Some of the other novels followed up on this. About halfway through the range, in The Ancestor Cell, the Doctor finally caught up with this War, and ended it by destroying both Gallifrey and their Enemy. The Enemy in the novels were definitely not the Daleks, and RTD has said behind-the-scenes that his Time War was a different one to the one in the novels, but the idea is the same. Both the later EDAs and the revived TV series are set in a post-Time Lords universe. Both took advantage of the narrative freedom from continuity, while at the same time exploring what the effects of such a change would have on both the Doctor and the universe.


But in a sense, the Time War was an idea whose time had come. The 1996 TV Movie had tried to weaken the links to the past without openly severing them, as did the 2003 webcast animation Scream of the Shalka. But in 2000, the EDAs openly broke history, in-universe. 2001's webcast Death Comes to Time, the Big Finish audios did the same starting in 2004, and the new TV series starting in 2005 all similarly gave us a war that destroyed the Doctor's people and changed the nature of history. The four Time Wars were very different in their particulars, but the effect was the same. They loosed the bonds of continuity without breaking the narrative connection to Doctor Who's past, opening the scope for new stories. Most fans who followed the novels agree that the second half of the EDA series was far better than the first half, and of course it's Rose, not the TV movie or Shalka, that kickstarted a new series that finally brought Doctor Who back to the masses.

Outside the Time War, RTD didn't borrow much from non-TV stories, or from the classic series. (While some fans have drawn parallels between Rose and Ace, they seem pretty thin to me.) When he did, the borrowings were far from subtle.

Most obviously, the RTD era directly adapted stories from other media. Dalek was based on the audio story Jubilee, Human Nature/The Family of Blood on the novel Human Nature, and Rise of the Cyberman (partly) on the audio Spare Parts. These are among the best stories of the era, or at least the best that weren't penned by RTD or Moffat.

Less obviously, RTD sometimes lifted scenes out of novels and dropped them into the series. In general, they were lifted almost verbatim, and often didn't fit their new context. For example, compare the scene in Journey's End where the Doctor beats himself up over all the people he's led to their deaths to the equivalent scene from the novels. Some of the words are lifted verbatim. But in the novels, they come from a manipulative puppet-master Doctor who's deliberately led people to sacrifice themselves for the greater good, finally admitting that his companions Ace and Benny had been right to accuse him. In the TV series, they come from a heroic Doctor who does everything he can to prevent others from sacrificing themselves, being manipulated by Davros getting into his head. So, what comes across as a powerful cathartic moment for the Seventh Doctor (and, meta-textually, the NA authors) instead plays out as whiny angst from the  Tenth Doctor (and RTD).

The writer responsible for most of the exceptions to that rule was Steven Moffat—who would go even farther once he took over the show.

Moffat

Future posts will explore the various specific instances where Moffat has borrowed from non-TV media, but here I'll attempt to paint an overall picture.

Unlike RTD, Moffat rarely borrows elements unchanged. He often lifts character elements, plotlines, and themes rather than specific lines or scenes. But, even when he does reuse a speech, he puts it into a completely different context, giving the same lines a completely new meaning, that's perfectly in keeping with the new story he's trying to tell.

For the most obvious example, no one would mistake River Song for being the same character as Benny Summerfield, even though they're both dodgy archaeologists from the future, with a taste for drink, skilled at combat despite not being very warrior-like, who keep a journal, who the Doctor has had sex with, etc.

For a less obvious example, both Anji and Rory accuse the Doctor of being dangerous because he inspires his companions—Fitz and Amy, respectively—to try to be like him. In the novels, this is ultimately Anji failing to realize that Fitz is doing what he wants to do; in the series, it's Rory realizing that neither Amy nor the Doctor are being honest to themselves about the danger she's in.

While Moffat borrows from all eras and media, he seems to borrow a lot more from the EDAs than anywhere else. Given that the EDAs were primarily about the idea that "history can change", this isn't too surprising. Moffat wants to write stories that are actually about time travel, the meaning of history and memory, the line between technology and magic, the natural of reality and fairy tale, the nature of the Doctor-companion relationship, and the effect on the universe of the Time Lords' absence. These are all central ideas in the EDAs. When Moffat focuses on other areas, he does borrow more from other stories—for example, the NAs had a lot more to say about the nature of the TARDIS, and when Moffat turns to the TARDIS, he turns to the NAs.

It's probably worth pointing out that Moffat borrows more from some authors than others, and from Larry Miles more than anyone else. Miles seems to think, at least at times, that this is done out of spite, but I think there's a much more innocent reason. Most of what was interesting about the EDAs grew out of Miles' first and last novels for the range, Alien Bodies and The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. Also, his novels are so full of ideas that are so central to understanding Doctor Who in general and the EDAs in particular, that it's hard to imagine how anyone could be inspired by the EDAs without being especially inspired by Miles.

It's always possible that some of these apparent borrowings are just coincidences. There are only so many stories to tell, and the number of stories that can be told about a madman in a box traveling through time are even more restricted. With 73 EDAs, plus 61 NAs and hundreds of classic TV stories, comic strips, short stories, audio plays, and past-Doctor stories in all media, you eventually run into the "Simpsons Did It" effect. Plus, in some cases, the borrowings might be not coincidental, but still unintentional—if you were writing a story about being trapped in a damaged TARDIS, and you read Time's Crucible 20 years ago, you might incorporate some ideas from it without consciously realizing you're doing so. But there are enough connections that are sufficiently blatant that they can't _all_ be unintentional.

Finally, why does it matter? Really, the only thing that matters is whether Doctor Who gives us a compelling story that's worth following. And in many cases, seeing the parallels, and seeing how Moffat has used some element from an earlier story to tell a completely different story enhances your enjoyment of both. Fitz's 1000 years as a Remote and Rory's 2000 years as an Auton are both great stories, and when you notice that they use the same lines to describe their very different stories, it sheds new light on both.

Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS borrows from various TV stories, NAs, and EDAs. But, more than anything, it seems like a story written to explore some ideas raised by the NA Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible and a few other novels—ideas that The Doctor's Wife could have, but didn't (whether because it was written by outsider Neil Gaiman, who never read any of the novels, or because there were already too many ideas to explore).

Damaged TARDISes

With a few minor exceptions (notably season 1's The Edge of Destruction), Time's Crucible is really the first story about the consequences of a damaged TARDIS. In this novel, the Doctor's companion Ace and a group of outsiders are trapped in a damaged TARDIS, caused by collision with another vessel while under emergency operations. They're beset by what ultimately turn out to be future versions of themselves, and the Doctor later explains that this is possible because, inside a damaged TARDIS, time cannot flow normally. Some of the present-day outsiders also cause problems by betraying the others through their own selfishness.

While many later stories, such as the EDA The Ancestor Cell and series 6's The Doctor's Wife, are "damaged TARDIS" stories, Journey basically follows the same sketch as Crucible, and doesn't add much from those later stories.

However, there are major differences.

First, Crucible has an entire secondary plot full of flashbacks to the early days of Gallifrey. The outsiders are the explorers from the first great Time Scaphe experiment, and as such are connected to the turbulent politics of the last days of the Pythia and the rise of Rassilon. While this story is at times compelling, it's also often silly and sometimes tedious, and the explicit parallels to Greek history and legend are hard to take seriously. This is also the story that introduced the Curse of Pythia and the subsequent Looms, and various other controversial plot elements that annoyed so many fans. The Gallifrey story also has very little to do with the main plot; if the characters had been 49th century human time-travel experimenters, or, say, a space salvage crew, it wouldn't have made much difference.

Also, in Crucible, the TARDIS is fleeing an attacking data-eating organism, the Process, when it's captured by the TARDIS collision. The Process turns into a very silly giant leech monster inside the TARDIS, and becomes the main enemy in the novel. The TV episode has no equivalent. The TARDIS attacks when one of the salvage workers betrays everyone out of greed, but really the future selves are the only real enemy. Simplifying the story by removing the Gallifrey subplot and the Process streamlines it tremendously. Crucible was a long, slow novel, and even it barely had room for all of its ideas; there's no way they could have fit into 45 minutes of TV with any of that. 

The inclusion of the Process and the Time Scaphe also means it's never clear how much of what we were seeing was the consequence of a damaged TARDIS, and how much was caused by other factors, which made the central idea of the story weaker.

Meanwhile, the novel's future selves have been living inside the damaged TARDIS for decades. We discover that the sadistic tormentors are the same characters we've met over the first few hundred pages, even the ones we thought of as heroic, beaten down by decades of futility until they've given up and allowed the Process to enslave them. Journey's future selves are just "time zombies", turned bestial by leakage from the Eye of Harmony. The novel's version of the story allows it to explore the idea that anyone can turn evil, and that definitely adds something the episode is lacking. 

On the other hand, zombies are always good for action scenes, and they're certainly better than the action scenes against the giant rolling leech monster.

Finally, in the novel, the TARDIS is turned "sort of inside out", and appears (at least to Ace) as a ruined city made up of repeated subdivisions, where each one is more dilapidated than the previous one. This is a fascinating image, and it vividly illustrates how the TARDIS bends space and time into each other. On the other hand, it also means that we don't actually know that's what we're seeing until most of the way into the book. And it means we don't get the TARDIS runaround that Journey gives us.

Inside the TARDIS

Most of the show's TARDIS scenes, both classic and new, take place in the console room. Two Fourth Doctor stories, The Masque of Mandragora and The Invasion of Time, show much more of the interior, including a collection of wildly incongruous rooms, like the famous municipal indoor swimming pool. However, Logopolis and Castrovalva show a handful of rooms that all match the console room, with white roundeled walls.

The NAs and EDAs largely ignored the Castrovalva look in favor of the eclectic style of Invasion. The novels explained time and again that the TARDIS was "potentially infinite", and contained rooms beyond describing. Sometimes we even saw some of them. Most notably, the EDA Vampire Science introduced an meadow full of butterflies, with no walls or ceiling, which featured in a number of later novels. (Time's Crucible had earlier shown that such a thing was possible, but not necessarily normal, as the TARDIS was described as "sort of inside out" at the time.)

The series 6 episode The Doctor's Wife, and scenes from some of the official video games before it, seemed more in keeping with Castrovalva. But Journey followed Invasion and, especially, the EDAs, by showing off what's possible inside a TARDIS. In particular, it had the first on-screen view of an outdoor area within the TARDIS.

It's pretty clear from both promotional materials and statements by the producers that the chance to do a real TARDIS runaround, better than the one they didn't have time for in Wife, was a large part of the reason for making this episode.

The Eye of Harmony

In its only two mentions in the classic series, The Deadly Assassin and The Invasion of Time, the Eye of Harmony was the power source of Gallifrey. These two stories notoriously contradict each other in many regards, but at least that was a constant, and remained so throughout the NAs. However, in the TV movie, the Eye of Harmony is in the Doctor's TARDIS.

The first EDA, The Eight Doctors, explains away this contradiction by claiming that the Eye of Harmony in the TARDIS is both a symbolic manifestation of the power source on Gallifrey, and a link to that power. The Adventuress of Henrietta Street and The Gallifrey Chronicles (and, to a lesser extent, the PDA The Quantum Archangel) later added to this explanation.

The TV movie also introduced the idea that if the Eye "leaks", it can damage space-time. The Eight Doctors followed up with the idea that a leaking Eye would giving visions of the past, and possibly the future. Neither of these ideas had been mentioned in the new series before becoming plot points in Journey.

Historical Secrets

Journey also shows Clara discovering and reading a book, The History of the Time War, that can't possibly exist. Of course the TARDIS is full of things that can't exist, as the novels told us repeatedly, and The Doctor's Wife at least hinted. But this is a particularly interesting thing.

Larry Miles's spinoff series, Faction Paradox, begins with The Book of The War, a sort of novel in encyclopedia form. This book encodes "forbidden knowledge" out-of-universe as well as in-universe—in particular, the "key" that connects Faction Paradox to elements of the Doctor Who Universe which Miles doesn't have a license to use. In particular, it tells you that Grandfather Halfling in FP is really the Doctor in DW. And the book in Journey tells Clara who the Doctor really is.

This also connects up with Time's Crucible again. It's not entirely clear what the Cartmel Masterplan actually was, but Marc Platt (one of Cartmel's stable of writers toward the end of the TV series, and the author of Crucible) clearly believed that the main idea was that the Doctor was actual a reincarnation of the Other, a mysterious character from early Gallifreyan history whose existence is first hinted at in Crucible (and Platt's novelization of Battlefield at around the same time).

Finally, this loosely connects Clara with Fitz from the EDAs. In a loose arc running from Escape Velocity to Halflife, Fitz gradually remembers/discovers the Doctor's role in destroying Gallifrey, and believes that he's the only person in the universe who knows the truth. In the novels, this never really went anywhere interesting. The Doctor also eventually remembered the truth, and then we met a number of other people who knew it, and eventually it became irrelevant anyway. In the upcoming TV stories, Clara's memories may become much more important.

Summary

Overall, it seems clear that the main motivation for this episode was the chance to do a proper TARDIS runaround, showing us the wide variety of environments that she contains and exploring her inner workings.

Given that constraint, the main story was borrowed from Time's Crucible, but ruthlessly stripped down to remove the extraneous subplots that would have slowed things down. This means a few interesting ideas were lost as well.

Familiar Characters

Captain Jack

Captain Jack was Moffat's first creation, and he's a joint character of Moffat and RTD. It's not entirely clear exactly which parts each contributed, but RTD has given us hints in The Writer's Tale and elsewhere.

RTD wanted a companion who was something other than a present-day human, and who was openly non-heterosexual. It could be argued that he borrowed these ideas from the novels—but if so, it's mostly Chris Cwej's story from RTD's own novel, Damaged Goods. It's also RTD who came up with Jack's death and resurrection into a "fixed point" who can't permanently die, and his transformation into the Face of Boe.

Moffat came up with the idea of making Jack a future human Time Agent. Time Agents from the 51st century were briefly mentioned in The Talons of Weng-Chiang, but were never brought up again on TV. Then, in the EDAs, we finally learn more. In the post-Gallifrey universe, humans have been free to develop time travel on their own, and forced to police their own history. Being far less refined than the Time Lords, they do so in a far more primitive way, such as setting off nukes in the past to "sterilize" problems. The first Agent the Doctor meets is Kala, in 1933, in novel Eater of Wasps. The Doctor even considers inviting her along as a companion, but decides that he can't accept her violent methods. Then, in Trading Futures, the Doctor's opponent Sabbath has a companion Jaxa, who's a renegade Time Agent. Jack definitely has elements of Kala and Jaxa, although the connection isn't that strong.

While Jack's irresistible personal charm probably owes more to RTD and to actor John Barrowman than to Moffat, it was Moffat who proposed the idea of making him a lovable rogue and conman. Here, the obvious inspiration is Sabalom Glitz from the classic series, along with similar characters like Star Trek's Harry Mudd and antecedents like Professor Marvel/the Wizard from The Wizard of Oz. However, the idea of using time travel to sell amazing but ultimately useless ahead-of-their-time gadgets to primitive civilizations was a recurring idea in the novels of Larry Miles (and in his proposed but rejected novels).

River Song

The parallels between River Song, Moffat's first recurring character, and Benny Summerfield, the first new recurring character from the New Adventures novels, are obvious. But their differences are also interesting.

Both are very good at integrating themselves into foreign cultures. Both have shown themselves to be skilled combatants when necessary, although neither character is warrior-like. Both have a fondness for alcohol.

Both are human archaeologists from the future, who managed to use a combination of dodgy credentials and real skill to establish themselves. And both series make frequent use of that fact. However, Benny's archaeology background is primarily used as a way to get them into or out of trouble, and occasionally to allow them to go off on separate adventures—and ultimately, it's the lure of working as an archaeologist for the Braxiatel Collection that separates them for good. River's archaeology background, on the other hand, is primarily used as a way to get the characters together—and ultimately, we learn that this is exactly why she became an archaeologist.

Both are independent, strong-willed women, older and wiser—and generally "cooler"—than their fellow companions Ace and Amy. But with River, this is subverted by having her turn out to be Amy's daughter.

Benny and River are the only two characters that we know have had a sexual relationship with the Doctor. However, in Benny's case, their relationship was platonic for their original time together, with the Doctor hoping to give her away at her wedding; she slept with him spontaneously, meeting him after a long absence, in a more attractive new body and more warm and "human" personality. River, on the other hand, had a tragic romance with the Doctor, and in every interaction between them, at least one of them knew of their past/future relationship.

Benny was the first character to use River's favorite phrase "The Doctor lies", and she was frequently torn by the fact that she trusted the Doctor completely with her life, but didn't know whether to trust anything he says. River has no problem reconciling the same two apparently-conflicting facts. The Doctor has to lie, and therefore he frequently does; that doesn't mean he isn't always ultimately on both the right side and the winning side. Benny, wracked by her conflict, is unable to console Ace; River, with her acceptance, has no such problem with Amy and Rory.

Benny and River both kept journals of their time with the Doctor, both of which took on major symbolic roles in the stories. But they're very different roles. Benny's journal reminds us that we're following a story, while River's reminds us that we're following a story about time travel. Meanwhile, Benny frequently amending her diary with sticky yellow notes tells us that history (and continuity) is not as simple as it looks; in River's story, that's so obvious that it needs no comment—but her ability  to synchronize her timeline with the Doctor's by comparing notes reminds us that, even in a timey-wimey universe, some things never change, and some stories still make sense.

River also takes some inspiration from Melanie Bush. In the TV series, Mel's timeline makes no sense; she meets the Doctor during his Trial, before their first meeting, then ends up leaving with him. Later novels and audios tried to reconcile this problem. Moffat had commented in the past about how it would be more fun to explore that out-of-order relationship than to try to fix it, and that's obviously part of the inspiration for River Song. And then there's the name Melody Pond. However, her personality clearly has little to do with Mel's. This will be explored more in a post about Silence in the Library.

River's story also shares some features with Scarlette from The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, but again these are more in the way of plotline than character. There are some interesting parallels between the Scarlette-Juliette relationship and the River-Amy relationship, and the way Amy was used by the Doctor's enemies, but River is not much like Scarlette, so this will be explored more in a post about The Wedding of River Song.

The Eleventh Doctor

The Eleventh Doctor is very different from RTD's two Doctors. In fact, he has far more in common with the Seventh Doctor of the novels than with any of the TV Doctors (except maybe the Seventh Doctor in his last season).

Most importantly, he's a master of manipulative schemes, and he's willing to emotionally hurt his loved ones to pull them off. He does this, not with the callous disregard of the First Doctor or the haphazard lack of foresight of the Fourth and Eighth, but simply because he knows it's necessary. As with the Seventh Doctor, this sometimes fills him with a sense of self-loathing. He believes—and not entirely without cause—that he's ruined the lives of everyone he's touched. He's absolutely certain, to the point of arrogance, that on the grand scale, he's the hero; he's just conflicted about whether that makes up for the damage he does at the personal level.

However, there's also an interesting comparison between the Eleventh Doctor and the Second, which is especially interesting given the parallels between the two incarnations' companions. He attempts to act like a kindly uncle to Amy and Rory, much as the Second did with Jamie and Zoe, but Amy mistakes it for a sexual relationship, and then laughs at his idea of himself as "Space Gandalf". He sometimes tries to act like a harmless buffoon, but nobody takes it seriously. When he attempts to disguise ruthlessness as playful innocence, people see through it and are alternately inspired or horrified.

Amy Pond and Rory

Besides Mel, there's another classic companion whose history made no sense, and it's never been addressed at all. Zoe Heriot somehow remembers the year 2000, despite being somewhere between 16 and 19 in a story that can't possibly be before 2020. She also recognizes technology that's from the mid 21st century, and yet knows how to program in Algol, a language that's been dead since the 1970s. There are also hints about her both having and not having parents.

Beyond that, Zoe was a brilliant young woman of the early 21st century. When people in earlier eras expected her to be inferior because of her sex, she often didn't even notice, and found it laughable when she did—although she knew the effect she had on men, and was willing to take advantage of it. She loved to be bossy, and the Doctor and Jamie usually let her get away with it. She considered her home boring and suffocating, and longed to get away and see the universe. She sometimes felt like she understood the Doctor better than he understood himself, and was sometimes proven right. She was also more fashion-conscious than most companions. Most of all, she gleefully rushed into adventure, rarely taking heed of the danger, and usually managed to take care of herself—but occasionally got way over her head, and ended up crying out into the dark for the Doctor and Jamie to save her.

Jamie McCrimmon often appeared to be slow-witted, and the fact that he would sometimes pretend to understand things that he clearly didn't only made things worse. But if you gave him a chance, he'd often figure things out that should have been far outside his technological scope, and he was also often the first one to pick up on things that the Doctor and Zoe had missed noticing. He was also fiercely protective of his fellow companion. He was very cautious, especially if his fellow companion was at risk, but also for his own sake—but when the chips were down, he was unwaveringly brave.

Other than the fact that Jamie was the Scottish one, and Jamie was madly in love with Victoria rather than Zoe, and their names are backward, Zoe and Jamie almost the same characters as Amy and Rory.

But there's a huge twist. Nothing ever came of Jamie's love for Victoria, and it was basically not even addressed on-screen at all—but Rory and Amy's relationship was central to the story, which was largely about the Doctor traveling with people trying to build a family.

Meanwhile, Rory has a lot in common with a different character, Fitz Kreiner from the novels (with Amy at times taking the part of Anji or Trix). While he does share some character traits with Fitz, it's really more the storyline that ties them together. Fitz dies and is reborn in another form, lives for centuries, and is then remembered back to the original Fitz—but still remembers his thousand years as a Remote.

Professor Bracewell

Edwin Bracewell is a bomb who doesn't know it, because he's been programmed with false memories. His story owes a lot to Fatboy, a similar bomb in human shape who accompanies the Time Agents in Eater of Wasps. However, his character is very different, owing more to innocent but naive scientists like Edward Waterfield, Edward Travers, and Edward Watkins, who unwittingly aided the Daleks, Great Intelligence, and Cybermen, and were almost named Edwin. He'll be discussed more in a post on Victory of the Daleks.

Clara Oswald

The Doctor met Sam Jones briefly, then met a different version of her two years later. This new Sam was the perfect companion for the Doctor, almost as if she'd been specifically crafted to fill that role. In She Said, He Said, the Doctor describes Clara in the same way: "She's perfect. Perfect in every way for me… Always brave, always funny, always exactly what I need. Perfect. Too perfect." The Doctor eventually meets the original Sam, and has a discussion with her about how she's impossible. Ultimately, she sacrifices herself by walking into a rip in time. Probably unrelated to all of the above, Sam and Clara are the only two regular companions who definitely know the Doctor's real name. However, despite the connections in their stories, their characters are very different, so this will be discussed in a post on The Name of the Doctor.

Clara also may have some connections to Victoria Waterfield. Victoria and Jamie were the companions in the two classic Great Intelligence stories, and Victoria returned in the non-BBC Downtime to battle the Great Intelligence alongside Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (who was introduced to the TV series in The Power of Three, and will apparently be in the 50th anniversary special).  However, it's too early to tell.

Clara has a number of connections to the show itself. She was born when the original series went off the air, and her mother died the day Rose took place. Her Victorian self was born exactly 100 years before the original series began. All versions of her died at 26, the same age as the original series when it was canceled. The fact that the three named characters on the Dalek Asylum are named Oswald, Harvey, and Lee might also be relevant, given the assassination of JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald the same day the series began.

Her skipping the ages 16 and 23 in her otherwise-yearly signing of 101 Places to See might also be meaningful in connection with the show's history. Season 23 is when the show was nearly canceled and went on hiatus, but 16 doesn't have any similar status. Season 16 had the 100th story, 500th episode, and 15th anniversary, but 23 didn't have any such significance. They were the only two classic seasons to form a single arc story (The Key to Time and The Trial of a Time Lord), and the first two seasons released on DVD, and they had the last completed stories by Douglas Adams and Robert Holmes. Narratively, they could turn out to be relevant as the introductions of Romana and the Black and White Guardians, and the Valeyard. But all of that is highly speculative.