To continue my Doctor Who for Beginners series I began a million years ago with Daleks for Dummies, I’d like to start a new subseries where I introduce you to each of the Doctors and plow my way through the first four so I can start talking shit about Davison, Colin Baker, and McCoy. To introduce you to the different regenerations of the Doctor, however, it is necessary for me to introduce you to the character of the Doctor. Please bear with me here, as they have changed a thousand things over time to try to explain inconsistencies or screwdrivers or time vortexes.

The Doctor is of a race called the Time Lords, who inhabit (or once inhabited- um, well, whatever, who knows when anything happened in a time travel show) the planet Gallifrey. He has two hearts, occasional superhuman strength and resilience, a respiratory system that allows him to go without breathing, and a machine called the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimensions in Space, with a silent “Machine” I guess) that can travel through space and time. Most importantly (and conveniently), he can regenerate when he dies and his new regeneration is a whole new person with a whole new personality and wardrobe style ! Depending on what episode you’re watching or what book you’re reading, the Doctor was either kicked out of Gallifrey or is being hunted through the Universe by his fellow Gallifreyans, or is just tired of Gallifrey and now roams the universe (and history ! and the future !), stumbling upon space and time crises that require his intervention.

In the revitalization of the show, there are numerous references to the Doctor’s life on Gallifrey and his family and his childhood, but I haven’t gotten around to watching the fourth series yet, so whatever. The original incarnation of the Doctor was a Very Old Crotchety Man whose companion was his granddaughter, Susan (also presumed to be a Time Lord? Which also suggests that the Doctor had a child to get a grandchild, unless Time Lords also practice nonlinear reproduction). He leaves Susan on some planet with some dude and KIND OF never mentions her again, at least not by name. The basic story, though, is that he is from Gallifrey, he is very smart, he is very well-educated, and his meddling and rouge manner are not typical for a Time Lord- the Time Lords try not to get involved with history.

Since the creators of the show realized that it would be boring If the show were just about an alien in a phonebooth, the Doctor picks up companions along the way to help him get into a really big mess to push the plots of the stories along. The Doctor likes companions who are either smart and male, feisty and female, or helpless and female- the latter two are best for the plot, as people like that tend to wander away from the TARDIS and meddle with things and get caught in nets and lean against a wall that is actually a rotating panel. He prefers companions from Earth, or failing that, from another planet where the inhabitants look exactly like pretty humans. Since most of the Doctor’s companions are pretty females, there’s occasionally some tension (well, not so much with Doctors 1-3, because they are old dudes, though I’m pretty sure there was something going on with Doctor #3 and Jo), which has only really been addressed in the revitalized series. The Doctor is usually too caught up in his Doctoring and mental anguish (lately about apparently being the last of his race, and about being slightly too immortal for love) to notice or act on his affections toward his companions.

Besides the TARDIS, the Doctor’s accessories include a Sonic Screwdriver, which is a device that uses… sonic… to do whatever he needs it to do at the time. It can stun people, open doors, crack an encrypted computer system, glow, act as a truth beam, etc. He also has a pad of “psychic paper,” which is a paper he can show to anyone and on it will appear exactly what they need/want to see (he can use this as credentials to get into basically anywhere).

The Doctor has a few nemeses, including the aforementioned Daleks, the Cybermen, and the Master. These are all characters who were popular with fans so they made a thousand storylines with all of them and ran them into the ground. The Master is a fellow Time Lord who isn’t quite as good as the Doctor, but is way more narcissistic and has a much fruitier looking TARDIS. He plots to… I don’t know, ruin everything, with some regularity, and the Doctor then ruins him ruining everything and then he gets away, shaking his fist from his fruity TARDIS. Interestingly, once they lost the original actor for the Master, they did not choose to have him regenerate until 2007 and instead pasted a Van Dyke beard and baby powder sideburns on different actors. The Doctor is vaguely familiar with every alien race in the entire Universe, though, and since he’s been traveling for hundreds of years, IN hundreds of years, he’s encountered/defeated/helped/studied like everybody at some point.

The Doctor has regenerated numerous times when actors’ contracts expired or they mistakenly thought they were being typecast and could ever act in another role; to date, there have been nine Doctors: William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Christopher Eccleston, and the current Doctor, David Tennant. Eccleston and Tennant are called the ninth and tenth Doctors, however, because between McCoy and Eccleston there was a Fox TV movie starring Paul McGann. I am a McGann denier and firmly insist he doesn’t count, but I respect the numbering convention since it’s generally accepted as canon.

Tune in next time for another hastily written article- our next topic will be William Hartnell’s Doctor.