Seventh Doctor

The Seventh Doctor was the seventh incarnation of the Time Lord known as The Doctor. Originally an eccentric, light-hearted buffoon, this incarnation's jolly persona eventually darkened into that of a mysterious, cunning manipulator to properly combat the return of Fenric.

Post-Regeneration
The Sixth Doctor regenerated due to injuries incurred as his TARDIS was forced to land on Lakertya by the Rani. (DW: Time and the Rani)

Exactly how the Doctor was able to injure himself so severely during the attack was never revealed. However it's been suggested the regeneration may have been intentional to prevent the chain of events which could have led to the creation of the Valeyard. (NA: Timewyrm: Revelation) Also suggested was the regeneration was a result of the Doctor being weak from the events leading to the destruction of the Lampreys. (PDA: Spiral Scratch) A third possibility suggests he ended his sixth incarnation deliberately so a champion for Time could be born. (NA: Love and War)

Regardless of cause, his regeneration was followed by a usual period of post-regenerative trauma, which resulted in a somewhat chaotic, almost comic personality emerging. He also suffered amnesia, which caused the Doctor to briefly mistake the Rani for his companion, Mel. After regenerating, he indicated that he was exactly 953 years old at this time - the only Doctor to date, other than the Eleventh Doctor, for whom a specific age was given soon after regeneration.
 * This number has been called into question a number of times. See Separate article.

While still under the Rani's influence, the Doctor chose a new look for his persona, shedding the chaotic, clown-like attire of his predecessor for a more subtle suit and hat, noting to the Rani that his new incarnation had regained a sense of haute couture. It was not known if the Rani actually had any influence on the Doctor's new look, but she agreed with his decision.

Travels with Mel
After regaining his memory, the Doctor found the Rani had forced his TARDIS to crash-land in order to gain his unwilling assistance in repairing her "time brain" invention and be part of its components along with fellow brilliant minds such as Albert Einstein. However, thanks to the Doctor's new persona, the Rani's machine backfired and the Doctor saved the geniuses while trapping the Rani in her TARDIS. (DW: Time and the Rani)

Shortly after leaving Lakertya, the Doctor dropped Mel off to investigate a strange institute where Time Lords, specifically the CIA were experimenting on humans, trying to graft TARDIS minds into their bodies. He was electrocuted and went insane. Fortunately, he had programmed the TARDIS to collect Mel and bring her to him where she helped restore his mind, before they confronted the doctors of the Institute. (BFA: Unregenerate!)

On a vacation attempt, the Doctor found himself part of an alien expedition to 1959 to experience earth rock n' roll. Once there, he found the last Chimeron queen, Delta hiding with her newborn young from the vicious Bannermen. The Doctor defeated the Bannermen by having their leader fall into his own trap, scaring them off. (DW: Delta and the Bannermen)

After a final adventure on Iceworld, Mel chose to leave the Doctor and instead travel with Sabalom Glitz, a con man she felt could be turned to the side of right with her help. On Iceworld, the Doctor met Ace, a troubled teenager from 1980s Earth who had somehow been transported to the planet. After Mel's departure, Ace agreed to travel with the Doctor. (DW: Dragonfire)

Travels with Ace
The Doctor's first trip with Ace took him back to Coal Hill School in 1963, only a few days after he had left Earth with Susan, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. (DW: An Unearthly Child) He returned to take care of unfinished business left behind by his first incarnation: the retrieval of the Hand of Omega. As the Doctor had anticipated, this mission was disrupted by the arrival of Daleks, one faction of which was controlled by the new emperor, Davros. In defeating the Daleks, the seventh incarnation displayed a growing darkness of character, tricking the Daleks into using the Hand to destroy their own homeworld, Skaro. (DW: Remembrance of the Daleks)

Afterwards, the Doctor and Ace arrived at 20th century Windsor, encountering the Cybermen and Lady Peinforte, a woman who displayed disturbing knowledge of the Doctor's true character. However, the Doctor stopped the Cybermen and Peinforte by using the Nemesis statue against them. (DW: Silver Nemesis)

During his travels with Ace, the Doctor worked to heal his troubled companion, who displayed discomfort at certain memories of her earlier life, such as her fear of clowns. (DW: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy) He also found himself reuniting with an old friend, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart in an adventure that once again brought him to work with UNIT. During this event, it was revealed that the Doctor had or perhaps would lived in the time of King Arthur and had been known as Merlin. Using this possibly mistaken identity to his advantage, the Doctor stopped Morgane from using a nuclear missile. (DW: Battlefield)

After learning of Ace's guilty conscience for burning down a "haunted" mansion in her time, the Doctor brought to Ace to its past, a hundred years before she would burn it down as a none-too-pleasant surprise for her. He found a temporarily imprisoned and dangerous entity called Light. Light planned to destroy the Earth in a childish fit as Earth had been evolving while it was trapped, making the catalogue it had made centuries earlier worthless. However, the Doctor was able to use the Light's childish logic to his advantage and convinced the Light to destroy itself as it had been evolving as well. He was delighted to have Ace overcome her guilt, but not so amused when she joked about blowing up the mansion instead of burning it down. (DW: Ghost Light)

The Doctor inadvertently caused Ace to meet and interact with her grandmother and infant mother. The Doctor learned that Ace's arrival and several intervening adventures had been arranged by Fenric, an evil entity the Doctor had encountered before. Fenric had been trapped in another dimension by the Doctor and had escaped through its temporal manipulations. However, the Doctor convinced the Great One, one of Fenric's servants, to kill its corporeal host in revenge for trying to trick it into beginning the Heamogoth. (DW: The Curse of Fenric)

Soon after, the Doctor took Ace back to her time in Perivale. However, Kitlings had been spotted and people had been vanishing. The Doctor soon found that his arch-nemesis, the Master, had been trapped and infected on Cheetah World and was trying to escape by bringing people to change partially and depart to Earth. After defeating the Master, the Doctor was surprised to learn Ace had decided the TARDIS was her home and still wanted to accompany him on his travel. Delighted, the Doctor departed with her. (DW: Survival)

The adventures continues...
The Doctor spent an undisclosed time visiting a young girl named Raine Creevy when she was a child before travelling to her future where she was now a skilled thief and recruited to steal a sword for him while he sent Ace to Russia. He plotted to use the sword to ward off an alien incursion called the Metatraxi. (BFA: Crime of the Century)

In the TARDIS, Ace found some overdue library books which the Doctor explained were from the library on Kar-Charrat. They travelled to the planet in order to return the books. The Doctor met an old friend, the chief librarian Elgin. The Daleks had used time corridor technology to deploy Daleks on every planet in the sector, and then waited hundreds of years to capture a time-sensitive Time Lord in order to penetrate the library's defences and allow them to seize the Wetworks Facility. They created a duplicate of Ace, which — replete with the DNA tag — would be able to get through the library's barriers. The Doctor was forced to surrender. The Daleks took him to the facility, and connected him to the machinery. They successfully download the entire knowledge of the Universe into a Dalek test subject. After the download was completed, the test-subject went out of control. Trying to allow the Doctor to re-enter the surrounded TARDIS, the Kar-Charratians killed the Daleks surrounding the time machine, but the duplicate Ace arrived. The duplicate was impervious to the rain unlike the Daleks, and threatened to kill Elgin. However, the chief cataloguer Prink rushed to his aid and attacked the duplicate, damaging it. The Doctor proceeded to the Wetworks with the intention of destroying it, using Ace to pretend to be her own duplicate to get past the Daleks. At the facility they encountered the Dalek test-subject and the Dalek Supreme arguing. Having obtained something of a conscience, the test-subject was refusing to destroy the Wetworks facility against the Supreme's orders. The Dalek Supreme retreated to its mother-ship leaving the Special Weapons Dalek to kill the test-subject, but the Nitro-9 succeeded in blowing up the machinery of the Wetworks, and the Kar-Charratians managed to escape. (BFA: The Genocide Machine)

Sometime after facing the Daleks, the Doctor decided to travel to the current location of The Scream. He planned to add it to his collection since it was part of established history that it would be stolen. He and Ace arrived on a barren, sandy planet and discovered a deadly curse on the painting, living dust and encountered the Master in the form of a previous incarnation. The Trakenite body could not be sustained and the Master’s decaying body returned. He planned to unleash a terrible, ancient force on the universe through the dust, but the Doctor and Ace stopped him. Ace remarked that the Doctor should save them trouble and start collecting stamps. (BFA: Dust Breeding)

The TARDIS materialized in Colditz Castle where the Doctor was shot in the shoulder and Ace was captured. The TARDIS was confiscated by the Germans and the Doctor was questioned about it. Soon after, a woman named Elizabeth Klein arrives and demands that the Doctor hand over his TARDIS key. The Doctor, fearing for Ace’s safety, does so and tries to work out how Klein knows about his TARDIS. He was informed that he was to be placed in Klein’s custody. Klein forged her identification papers and travelled to this parallel time period in the Doctor’s TARDIS to capture him to take him back to her alternative future so he could teach her to fully control the TARDIS. In her future, the German’s won the war, the Doctor’s TARDIS was discovered and he was killed. Klein accessed the TARDIS flight logs to travel here to learn about the TARDIS before the Doctor dies. The Doctor refuses, but Klein bargains Ace’s life for his co-operation. They discover that the TARDIS in which Klein arrived, has dematerialized and are forced to use the TARDIS the Doctor and Ace arrived in. Back at Colditz Castle, the Doctor manipulates a duty-bound Krutz to expose Klein and prevent Klein's timeline from happening by locating the CD-player Ace had left behind. Klein escapes, now an anomaly. (BFA: Colditz)

After the traumatic events of Colditz, Ace asked to relax. The Doctor and she visited Ibiza where a strange DJ called Gabriel was using the power of music and his belief that he was an angel to raise an army for his brother out of the young people who came to party at their club. The army was needed to fight a war in another dimension. The Doctor stopped Gabriel, but his brother opted to continue their work until the Doctor was forced to stop his plans as well. (BFA: The Rapture)

On Earth again, in the 2021 the Doctor and Ace were investigating signs of "xenotech" alien technology in use at St Gart's Brookside Hospital in London, here, while combating a Cyberman threat he encountered Thomas Hector Scholefield the son of Cassandra Scholefield, whom the Doctor had met in his earlier sixth incarnation. Following their encounter and battle against the Cyber threat Hex joined the Doctor and Ace in their travels. (BFA: The Harvest)

The Doctor stood for presidency on Colony 34. The reigning leader was trying to avoid an election for fear of losing and was using his influence to discredit the parties that stood against him. The Doctor faked his own death and with the help of Ace and Hex and managed to expose everything the government had been trying to keep secret including deaths, disappearances. (BFA: Live 34)

When TARDIS materialized in the woods, where Ace accidentally fell into a nearby lake. Taking her to a nearby cabin, the Doctor discovered people being killed and that the people there are experimenting with time. 10 Years ago, a girl had been killed as a result of a misdiagnosis and the scientists were trying to send a message back to warn their past selves. This interference with the timeline caused the girl to become alive again in a state of zombie-like limbo. To correct their mistake, the Doctor travelled back and undid the damage. (BFA: Night Thoughts)

The Doctor sent Ace and Hex to Monte Carlo in 1969 to recover the Veiled Leopard diamond. (BFA: The Veiled Leopard)

In 1854 the the Doctor paid a visit to Michael Faraday where he delivered the remains of the Special Weapons Dalek. Ulrick showed up and was followed by several Daleks tracking him through time. The Doctor manipulated the events so that Ulrick would time travel once more and send the Daleks after him – knowing that they would encounter his previous incarnation. The Doctor joined his Fifth, Sixth and Eighth incarnations briefly before being returned to his own timeline. (BFA: The Four Doctors)

When the Doctor, Ace and Hex arrived in Egypt in 1902. They met a young Time Lady named Jane who had been stranded for centuries on Earth trying to find her TARDIS. She accidentally transgressed the laws of time by becoming a god to the locals. The Doctor informed Jane that her TARDIS was dying. Afterwards, Jane flew her TARDIS into the sun, but rejected the Doctor's help to save her life. (BFA: False Gods)

The Doctor travelled to the Island of Mendavelia 33AD to help solve a code, but fell into a trap laid by The Order of Simplicity. He was infected with a virus that drains the intelligence from the brain. Using the intellect of primitives, the Doctor frees himself. (BFA: Order of Simplicity)

The TARDIS crew attempted to track down an alien artefact that controlled others into telling the truth. Ace met a child version of her mother while the Doctor and Hex follow Joey, the person who stole the artefact...from the Forge. (BFA: Casualties of War)

The Doctor encountered a being from a dimension made out of language and communication - Nobody No-One. This being followed him into a top secret facility and proceeded to cause chaos until the Doctor captured him inside a book only for him to escape again. (BFA: The Word Lord)

The Doctor, Ace and Hex landed on Bliss, a jungle planet under Dalek attack. While Ace and Hex helped in the battle with the Daleks, the Doctor discovered that a local professor had combined larvae and Piranha-locust DNA to create a new species known as the Ki-sabia. The Ki-sabia feed on metal and was created to save mankind from the Daleks, but quickly became uncontrollable. They decimated the Dalek forces. The Doctor decided to blow up the station and slaughter this new species, but in the end, Beth, a former prisoner of the Daleks stayed behind to finish the job. (BFA: Enemy of the Daleks)

Shortly afterwards, the TARDIS materialized in Alaska in the 1930s with the Doctor wanting to investigate a strange ice formation. They soon met an expedition team looking for an ancient secret. The Doctor and Ace became separated from the rest of the group and were presumed dead. In reality, they had arrived at what appeared to be an island psychiatric facility and met a young poet who took them to the person in charge. There, the Doctor learned that the entire facility was in fact not a psychiatric complex, but a prison for the most dangerous being on planet Earth. (BFA: Lurkers at Sunlight's Edge)

Nearing the end
The Doctor kept Klein as somewhat of a reluctant companion as to prevent her from causing any more damage to the web of time. She recounted what caused her to use the TARDIS that resulted in the destruction of her timeline. It turned out that the Doctor; an alternate Seventh Doctor orchestrated his regeneration into the Eighth to manipulate Klein into using the TARDIS and re-rewrite history. (BFA: Klein’s Story)

After travelling together for a period of time, the Doctor and Klein arrived on an insectoid planet and met the Vril, who communicated through smell, although the TARDIS’ translation circuits helped the duo in understanding the Vril. In the midst of a war, Klein stole the Doctor’s TARDIS and abandoned him on the planet. (BFA: Survival of the Fittest)

Klein used the Doctor’s TARDIS to rewrite history so that the Germans had won the war. She captured this new timeline’s Doctor and imprisoned him on the moon. She helped the Galactic Reich conquer the Daleks and Sontarans and any other potential threats by travelling in time and informing the past. While visiting the Doctor, trying to find out where this version’s TARDIS was, Klein, along with the rest of Moonbase came under attack by a race of shark-like warriors. The Doctor had sent them there and supplied them with the necessary technology to destroy the base. Klein discovered that this alternate Doctor had retained the memories of her version’s life as well. The two of them escaped in his TARDIS where the Doctor informed her that the Timelords had tried her and found her guilty. She was erased from history, along with the alternate Doctor, restoring things to their correct order. Afterwards, the original Doctor paid a visit to UNIT where he encountered a different version of Klein who was now working for UNIT. (BFA: The Architects of History)

The Doctor decided to take a vacation long overdue to the planet of Ormelia. The TARDIS materialized aboard a spaceship orbiting the planet. There, the Doctor befriended a genetically reconstructed creature named Vilgreth. It was only later the Doctor discovered that Vilgreth’s ship travelled through space by devouring planets, and so was forced to stop him. (BFA: Last of the Titans)

Travelling to the Forge in hopes of destroying it completely, the Doctor found his Sixth incarnation assisting Nimrod and reluctantly helped the Forge fend off a telepathic transporting alien incursion. His predecessor’s arm was lost in the battle which confirmed that this Doctor was a fake. The fake Doctor explained that Nimrod used DNA samples from the real Doctor when they last met to clone the Doctor, Project Lazarus, in an attempt to learn the secrets of regeneration. The Doctor initiates a plan to blow up the Forge, but the Lazarus Doctor was the one that delivers the final blow, killing everyone in the base. (BFA: Project: Lazarus)Near the end of his life, the seventh incarnation returned to the House of Lungbarrow on Gallifrey. During his time on Gallifrey, President Romana assigned him to collect the Master's remains from Skaro. (NA: Lungbarrow)

Death
The Doctor, now much older, had been travelling alone and had been assigned to transport the ashes of the Master from Skaro to Gallifrey as the Master's final request. The Doctor knew the Master was just as much a threat in death as in life and tried to stow away his ashes safely. However, he was more right than he had realised; the Master escaped from his ashes' container and damaged the inner workings of the TARDIS console. The Doctor was forced to make an emergency landing in San Francisco on 30 December 1999.

No sooner had he left the TARDIS, than the Doctor was caught in a San Francisco gang gun battle and shot, once straight through the shoulder and twice in the leg. The Doctor failed to get Chang Lee to stop the Master from leaving the TARDIS before losing consciousness. Taken to hospital, the bullets were found to have caused only minor injuries. However, due to a seeming abnormality in the Doctor's X-ray, caused by his second heart, cardiologist Dr. Grace Holloway undertook exploratory surgery to "fix" his abnormal heartbeat. Waking up just as Grace was to begin, the Doctor tried to stop the surgery by explaining his non-terrestrial origins, but was quickly put under anesthetic. The Doctor was accidentally killed when Grace damaged his circulatory system with a probe. Though they attempted to revive him, the Doctor's seventh body was dead, but had not yet regenerated.

Unlike his previous deaths, the Doctor did not regenerate into a new body until several hours later in the hospital morgue. His eighth incarnation later attributed this to having been under anesthesia at the time of his "death". (DW: Doctor Who)

Undated Adventures

 * The Seventh Doctor attended the funeral of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. (ST: The Gift)
 * The Seventh Doctor was at Chartwell on 16 November 1936, where he met Winston Churchill again. The Doctor told Winston that King Edward VIII's lover, Wallis Simpson, was an alien. (REF: The Brilliant Book 2011)


 * For a list of Seventh Doctor stories in the order in which he experienced them, see Seventh Doctor - Timeline.

Personality
The Seventh Doctor was originally light-hearted and prone to clownish behaviour, which masked his intellect and courage. As he matured, he took a much darker turn. This "darker" side would come to define him, as he became a master manipulator who saw the battle between good and evil as a game of chess and everyone around him as pawns to be manipulated in the game of fighting evil. Frequently, he would only see the "bigger picture" rather than the world before him. An example of this was when the Doctor devastated Ace by labelling her, among other things, an "emotional cripple" during his battle with Fenric. This was necessary for her to briefly abandon her belief in him, weakening Fenric's power, which he did not explain until later. (DW: The Curse of Fenric)

Despite his manipulative actions, such as (by one account) using psychic powers to make Mel leave (NA: Head Games), the seventh incarnation did care for his companions. He had a paternal relationship with Ace, which ultimately soured when Ace found herself unable to deal with the Doctor's growing emotional coldness.

Aspects of his light-hearted nature did continue. He seemed to relish his game against Light. (DW: Ghost Light) He was not totally unfeeling when it came to the "bigger picture"; he appeared apprehensive about his decision to destroy Skaro, and agonised when he had to convince Ace that he did not care about her. (DW: Remembrance of the Daleks, DW: The Curse of Fenric)

Upon meeting his future self, the Fifth Doctor was repulsed by his manipulative nature. The Seventh Doctor had a similarly low opinion of his fifth incarnation, describing him as "bland" and "not even one of the good ones." (MA: Cold Fusion)

The renegade Time Lady Iris Wildthyme was not fond of the Seventh Doctor. She subsequently described him to the Eighth Doctor as "a portentous little feller, swaggering around, thinking he’s got all the world’s darkest secrets under his hat." Furthermore, she thought that he was "a pretentious old thing" who "got on [her] nerves" as he regarded himself as the Guardian of Forever and Time's Champion. (EDA: The Scarlet Empress)

Appearance
At the beginning of his seventh incarnation, the Doctor wore an off-white safari-styled jacket. He wore a red paisley scarf under the lapels and had a matching handkerchief in the left pocket. Like many of his previous incarnations, he wore a fob watch as part of his clothing. He also wore a yellow pullover with turquoise zigzag lines and red question marks. Under the pullover he wore a white shirt with red tie. For trousers, he wore sand-coloured tweed plaid trousers with white and brown brogued spectator shoes. He also wore a white colonial-styled Panama hat, similar to the hat he had worn in his fifth incarnation. The hat had a paisley hat band and an upturned brim. He carried an umbrella which had a red, question-mark shaped handle. (DW: Delta and the Bannermen et. al.)

When the Doctor's personality began to change, his outfit changed alongside it. His jacket, hat band, handkerchief, scarf and tie became darker, varying between shades of burgundy and brown. (DW: Ghost Light et al)

By the end of this incarnation, his outfit had altered again. He wore a light brown tweed jacket, with a red waistcoat and a black and brown, zigzag patterned tie. He still wore his Panama hat. (DW: Doctor Who)

Habits and Quirks
The seventh incarnation was a consummate fan of chess, to the point of treating his companions and enemies as pieces on a chess board. (DW: Silver Nemesis, The Curse of Fenric) Despite his tendency toward a dark personality, the seventh incarnation was known for his use of words to resolve problems instead of violence.

He also rolled his 'R's, and spoke with a Scottish accent.

He liked to carry around a question mark umbrella, often using it for practical purposes unrelated to keeping the rain away. (DW: Remembrance of the Daleks)

A habit occasionally displayed was a tendency to mangle and combine earth idioms, such as "Time and tide melt the snowman" ,"A stitch in time... takes up space" and "Fit as a... trombone".

Also, early into this incarnation, the Doctor showed a knack for playing the spoons as a musical instrument, though this was seen less as he matured.

Casting
Actors considered for the role of the seventh incarnation before McCoy was cast included Rowan Atkinson, who later played the ninth incarnation in the satirical The Curse of Fatal Death; McCoy's mentor Ken Campbell; Chris Jury; Tony Robinson; and Alexei Sayle. Sayle had previously played the DJ in DW: Revelation of the Daleks.

Cartmel Masterplan
Season 25 and 26 had broad hints that the Doctor was not simply a Time Lord, as previously shown and stated. This overarching plot, conceived by Script Editor Andrew Cartmel and referred to by fans as the Cartmel Masterplan, was designed to restore an element of mystery in the Doctor and his true nature as in the stories of the first and second incarnations. Although the cancellation of the series at the end of Season 26 prevented further on-screen exploration of this arc, it was later given full rein in the Virgin New Adventures novel series.


 * For further discussion, see Cartmel Masterplan.

Parodies and pastiches

 * After the original series ended, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred played characters called the Professor and Ace, respectively, in a series of audio adventures produced by BBV Productions. Initially the stories were clearly based upon Doctor Who, but these connections decreased when the character was renamed the Dominie and Aldred's character Alice.
 * McCoy also parodied his version of the Doctor in the BBV production, Do You Have a Licence to Save This Planet? in which he played the Foot Doctor. Although the film featured several monsters from Doctor Who, this production was not considered canonical in any way.
 * In the BBC series, Doctors, Sylvester guest-starred as Graham Capelli, an actor who had played the title role in The Amazing Lollipop Man, a cult 1980s children's television series of the same name. The Lollipop Man had many similarities to the Doctor.
 * An Easter Egg referencing the Seventh Doctor appears in the seventh episode of the first season (The Tale of the Captured Souls) of the Nickelodean children's horror series, Are You Afraid of the Dark?. The Seventh Doctor's hat and coat can be seen hanging from a hatstand at two points in the episode.