Doctor Who

Since 1963, one show has lasted a long time and become one of the world's most loved programs, that show is Britain's BBC's Doctor Who. After 50 years and over hundreds of episodes the science fiction blockbuster is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
The show, which originally aired from 1963-1989 and then cancelled until it was brought back in 2005, is about a time traveling alien who calls himself The Doctor" wherever he goes. He travels through space and time, anywhere and any when, through the use of his TARDIS, or Time And Relative Dimension In Space, a time machine that, as everyone who goes inside it say, it's bigger on the inside. The exterior, through the use of a broken disguise mechanism, is in the shape of a blue British police public call box. Everywhere he goes there's always a danger he has to face which he fixes by the end of the episode, whether it's an alien invasion, mutated super beings, or any other crazy situation. The show is called Doctor Who, not because it's The Doctor's name, but because every time he introduces himself as The Doctor, the usual response is "Doctor Who?".

Doctor Who has had hundreds of great actors appear on the show, mostly from Britain, over its fifty year run, including Michael Gough, Eric Roberts, Toby Jones, Diana Rigg, Timothy Dalton, and many other actors. The Doctor rarely ever travels alone in the TARDIS, always meeting new people to become his next companion for a while until they leave and he meets another. He fights the most fascinating of monsters and enemies, including the Daleks, Cybermen, The Master, the Weeping Angels, The Silence, and many others. One of the most memorable things that have kept the show going is that The Doctor, being an alien known as a Time Lord, is able to change his appearance every time he dies or is close to death in a process known as regeneration where the cells regenerate along with his brain cells, and because of that he has been played by eleven actors so far. Although, there's a limit in that Time Lords only get 13 lives and after that they die permanently, or if there's too much damage to regenerate. Although even his brain cells change he still maintains all of his memories but each regeneration has a different personality.
The First Doctor, played by William Hartnell from 1963-1966 and then again in 1973 for the 10th anniversary special and with Richard Hurndall playing the First Doctor in 1983 for the 20th anniversary special after Hartnell died, is the one that started it all. Ironically, however, he's the least recognizable of the Doctors, as he was an old man who was always grumpy and was just there to provide a plot for each episode as the show was originally supposed to run for a few weeks as an educational show on history and science. Being known as a citizen of the universe, the First Doctor's run were very different from the succedding Doctors, one being he would immediately talk his way out instead of running. He first traveled with his granddaughter, Susan Foreman, after stealing, or as he says borrowing the TARDIS which by that point was already ancient, trying to find a way back to their home world. When they first landed in a junkyard in London of 1963, Susan attended a school there and two of her teachers were surprised at the level of intellect that she had and decided to follow her one day. Ending up in the junkyard, they discover the TARDIS, with The Doctor deciding to kidnap them to prevent them from telling. It's when they land in the time of the cavemen where The Doctor begins to understand humans and develop his love and intrigue of them. Traveling to different places in space and time, The Doctor and his companions encounter the Daleks, a mutated race of hateful humanoids in a nuclear ravaged planet who all live inside man size tanks, who have invaded Earth and made their own time machines, landed in the time of the Aztecs, met Marco Polo, and fought the Cybermen, humans from an Earth like planet who replaced everything in their bodies with robotics and which to do the same to others. It's the first time The Doctor faces the Cybermen that is when we see the Doctor regenerate for the first time.
Patrick Troughton would succeed Hartnell as The Doctor in his second regeneration from 1966-1969, and then again in 1973 and 1983 for the 10th and 20th anniversaries, along with a special in 1985. Deciding to continue the show even after Hartnell left do to illness, the producers came up with the interesting concept of The Doctor changing after dying or close to it and having a different actor play the character whenever the actor playing him couldn't play the role anymore, although at the time the process was called renewal and the change in personality didn't come up. After defeating the Cybermen for the first time, The Doctor, by that point frail and weak, died from old age and was surprisingly changed by a bright light into Troughton's Second Doctor. Although the change in personality wasn't established yet, The Doctor was very different from before, one being is that he was called a space hobo because he was more scruffy and childlike than his previous regeneration. Also, instead of trying to find his way home he instead considers himself a renegade who wants to do nothing but travel. Because The Doctor was now younger the show became more action packed then before with The Doctor and his companions running a lot from danger. The Second Doctor's companions included those who were with him when he first regenerated as well as one of the longest lasting companions in the show, Jamie McCrimmon, a young 18th century Scottish piper. In his new body, The Doctor would face more Daleks, including one story that was supposed to be their last, Cybermen, the Martian Ice Warriors, the introduction of one of The Doctor's greatest allies UNIT, or United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, and the Brigadier; he would gain his most famous tool the Sonic Screwdriver, battle the Great Intelligence, and in his last story face another Time Lord, The War Chief. In his last story, Troughton's Doctor must call upon the other Time Lords to assist him against The War Chief, which they do, but in the end they also capture The Doctor and punish him for stealing the TARDIS and interfering in the history of other planets by sending his companions back to their time with no memory of their adventures, force The Doctor to regenerate, banish him to present Earth, and take away most of the knowledge of how to work the TARDIS.
Appearing for the first time in color, the show introduces Jon Pertwee as the exiled, fancied dressed Third Doctor, from 1970-1974, where in his first episode we learn that Time Lords have two hearts. Wanting to keep the budget low for a while, the Third Doctor's adventures for the first two or three years were less time and space travel science fiction and more spy-fiction inspired by The Avengers show, with a lot of gadgets and vehicles. Being stuck on Earth, The Doctor worked for UNIT as a scientific advisor and worked alongside The Brigadier who he had met as the Second Doctor. The Time Lords would occasionally have The Doctor go on missions for them as a mediator during his exile. Pertwee, being a former British spy during the second World War, pushed for The Doctor to have less technological talk and more action scenes, fighting the bad guys himself, and being interested in gadgets. It was during the tenth anniversary of the show that the first multi-Doctor story was shown where Hartnell and Troughton reprised their roles as the First and Second Doctors to help out the current. This would happen almost every ten years after the show first aired as a way of remembering the show and pleasing the fans. It was his exile on Earth that The Doctor became more and more caring of the human race and started to warm up to them. The Third Doctor's companions included The Brigadier, who has appeared with almost all of the Doctors, fellow scientist Liz Shaw, who left the show as many felt she didn't connect with the audience, Shaw's replacement assistant Jo Grant, and the most famous companion of the franchise Sarah Jane Smith, a reporter who tags alongside The Doctor in his last few adventures as the Third Doctor and when he's allowed to travel in time and space again. Such things as the return of the Daleks would plague Pertwee's Doctor, as well as introducing the Autons, an alien race of living plastic, in his first episode, introducing his greatest enemy yet The Master, another Time Lord bent on ruling everything, one of the founder of Time Lord society gone mad Omega, the clone race Sontarans, Silurians, and Sea Devils, although he never faced the Cybermen until the 20th anniversary special. One of the most memorable things about the Third Doctor is that in most situations he would solve most of it by saying to "reverse the polarity". The Third Doctor died when after battling giant alien spiders in an alien planet The Doctor is hit by huge amounts of radiation and returns to UNIT in the TARDIS where he regenerates.
Playing the most recognized Doctor, Tom Baker played the Fourth Doctor for seven years, the longest, from 1974-1981, through archive footage for the 20th anniversary and a small appearance in the 30th. Baker, unlike the previous actors who had played The Doctor before him, was not a well known actor in well known movies, shows, or plays, but never the less he's The Doctor most people recognize. The one thing that makes him so recognizable is the long scarf he wore with a big coat, how more of an alien he was than before, and his love of Jelly Babies. After spending his last regeneration stuck on Earth and working for UNIT, this Doctor was happy to travel again and no longer be put down by authority, which is one of the reasons the show became such a huge success throughout the late '70s and early '80s. With the Fourth Doctor we learn that the process Time Lords go through to survive is called regeneration, there is a 13 life limit, and that The Doctor's home planet is called Gallifrey. Going to such places as Victorian London, a planet that sees The Doctor as a god, the creation of the Daleks, and beyond, The Doctor once again became the traveler that he wanted to be. Traveling with Baker's Doctor included Sarah Jane, the futuristic robotic dog K-9, Leela- a girl from an alien tribe that saw The Doctor as a god, a fellow Time Lord Romana, UNIT doctor Harry Sullivan, a young parallel universe genius named Adric, alien Nyssa, Australian plane stewardess Tegan Jovanka. Traveling through time and space, The Doctor faces off against The Master who has wasted all of his regenerations and is just a walking skeleton who eventually finds a way to take over bodies to continue living, Davros who created the Daleks- in a mission by the Time Lords to prevent the Daleks from being made which he fails, shape-shifting aliens Zygons who controlled The Loch Ness Monster, The Black Guardian a personification of evil and chaos, an Ancient Egyptian god, and so much more. When battling The Master to stop him from controlling another planet, The Doctor stops him but falls from a satellite they were on from a great height. Surrounded by his friends, The Doctor has visions of his past companions and states that the moment has been prepared for, to which he points at a white figure who was a manifestation of The Doctor's future regeneration and when they become one The Doctor once again regenerates.
Being the youngest at the time to play The Doctor, Peter Davidson at 29 played the Fifth Doctor as a staunch pacifist with a vulnerable side from 1981-1984, including the 30th anniversary special and a web special in 2007 alongside the Tenth Doctor. Unlike Baker, Davidson was well established in the public eye as he had appeared in the popular BBC show All Creatures Great and Small. Wanting to have a back to the basics attitude, the producers wanted the show to have a minimum of silly humor and horror that the show had throughout Baker's time. Beginning with a problem after he regenerated, the Fifth Doctor started to act a lot like his past regenerations until he regained his own persona and continue traveling, treating his friends more like a team then past regenerations. This Doctor's wardrobe consisted of an Edwardian cricketer's outfit, including at times a cricket ball in one of his pockets, cream-colored frock coat, striped trousers, plimsoll shoes, glasses that he didn't need but made him look smarter, a Panama hat, red question marks embroidered onto the collar, and the most famous feature being a stick of celery taped to his left lapel which, as shown in his last story, turned purple in the presence of a gas he was allergic to. In 1983, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the show, another special was made called The Five Doctors, where Troughton and Pertwee reprised their roles as the Second and Third Doctors, while another actor took over Hartnell as he died ten years before and because Baker was too busy to film they used footage from an unaired episode to explain what had happened to the Fourth. Seeing such things as 17th century Britain, the extinction of the dinosaurs on Earth, a desert planet, and much more, the Fifth Doctor traveled with Nyssa, Tegan, and Adric as he had in his last regeneration a long with alien and stuck on Earth student of The Brigadier Vislor Turlough who's actually working for The Black Guardian but becomes fond of The Doctor, robot companion Kamelion who he had to destroy because of The Master, and American botany student Peri Brown. As he travels throughout time and space, the Fifth Doctor fought Daleks and Davros, the seven year return of the Cybermen where Adric sacrificed himself to stop one of their plans, the return of Omega who tried to control The Doctor's body, The Master, the destruction of his Sonic Screwdriver and so much more. In the Fifth Doctor's last story he and Perri become infected by a toxic drug and when after finding the cure there's only enough for one which The Doctor gives to Peri while he at first thinks he won't be able to regenerate until he sees an image of The Master and is able to once again regenerate. Davidson's reprisal of the Fifth Doctor in the web special in 2007 was a charity special that co-starred the Tenth Doctor, David Tennant, who was a huge fan of Davidson's Doctor.
Being a bit older than Davidson at 40 and with a personality more closer to the First Doctor then his past regenerations, Colin Baker played the brash and overbearing Sixth Doctor from 1984 to 1986 and then again in the 30th anniversary special. Appearing at first to go mad from a regeneration crisis, the Sixth Doctor almost strangles Peri to death until he overcomes his crisis and continues on to his travels. The Sixth Doctor's outfit was as unpredictable as his personality, wearing a rainbow coat, a white shirt with question marks in the collar, yellow and striped trousers, green and black ankle boots with orange spats, and a cat badge along with a multicolored umbrella. This Doctor's personality was still caring and heroic but when he didn't want to show it the Sixth Doctor was very unpredictable, an egoist, very confident to the point he fixed the TARDIS's chameleon circuit but left it as a police box, and very much loved cats. Because many of his stories were very violent and much criticized, and with him at first not being very likable, the show was almost cancelled and was put in hiatus for the 1986-1987 after the 23rd season was an entire serial where The Doctor is put on trial again by the Time Lords. During Baker's run, the show started showing less episodes and most of them suffered from not as great writing and not too sell special effects. After the hiatus, sadly, Baker was fired and the show started with The Doctor's regenerating without Baker. In a 1985 serial, Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines reprised their roles as the Second Doctor and his companion Jamie, respectively, in The Two Doctors where the current doctor must save his past self from the Sontarans in Troughton's last time as The Doctor. At first traveling with Peri in his adventures to a planet whose people are forced to watch torture as entertainment, Spain, a planet in the future that resembles Earth, and much more until Peri's mind is taken over by an alien and The Doctor then meets computer programmer Mel Bush who has The Doctor exercise a lot. In these adventures, the Sixth Doctor faces Daleks, Davros, Cybermen, Sontarans, The Master, another renegade Time Lord The Rani, and the prosecutor of The Doctor's second trial The Valeyard who turned out to be a future evil manifestation of The Doctor himself that exists between his 12th and last regeneration. Even though Baker didn't play the Sixth Doctor when he died, The Doctor regenerates at the start of the next serial after the hiatus after being attacked by The Rani.
Playing an unconscious Sixth Doctor with a wig and having his face turned to reveal another regeneration, Sylvester McCoy would play the Seventh Doctor in the show's last years from 1987 to 1989 before it would be cancelled due to low ratings and then at the beginning of the 1996 TV movie that was supposed to bring it back. Although, in between the 1989 cancellation and '96 movie McCoy and all of the past actors who played The Doctor, except Hartnell and Troughton who had been dead by the time they shot it, and past companions and villains reprised their roles for a 1993 30th anniversary charity special that's not actually considered canon in the series. In his first episode the Seventh Doctor was in a state of confusion and amnesia caused by both his regeneration and The Rani drugging him, but soon he would defeat her again. Starting out as bumbling and a buffoon, McCoy's Doctor would later show how dark and manipulative he could be, especially as a chess master. During this time, the producers of the show wanted to add a new layer to The Doctor, one with a bigger secret than before that, if the show wasn't cancelled, would have revealed a lot more about The Doctor. It was this darkness, such as tricking his enemies into killing themselves, why in other Doctor Who media and the later revival why his past and future regenerations aren't too fond of him. Although, like the Second he would do things to make himself look foolish to trick his enemies and like the Third opposes violence and likes to use gadgets. The Seventh Doctor wore mostly normal clothing, like a safari-styled jacket, red paisley scarf, a plain white shirt, red tie, a pullover adorned with red question marks, a Panama hat, and an umbrella with a question mark-shaped handle, although his clothes became darker later on. This regeneration of The Doctor could also hypnotize opponents better than before and was very much in love with using magic tricks and props against his enemies. Traveling with Mel and then picking of time-stranded teen genius and rebel Ace, who loved making explosives while carrying a baseball bat which she once used to beat up a Dalek because it called her small and calling The Doctor "Professor", The Doctor would travel to the spot he first landed in for the first episode of the show mere months after he was there, a haunted house in 1983, and a British naval base during World War 2. In his time, The Seventh Doctor fought against the Daleks and Davros in a story where The Doctor tricked Davros into using a Time Lord artifact into destroying the Dalek homeworld Skaro, Cybermen, The Master, The Rani, intergalactic rogue Sabalom Glitz, and so much more. After the cancellation, McCoy and his past actors still played The Doctor in various other media including audio novels. At the start of the 1996 TV movie, McCoy reprised his role as the Seventh Doctor to introduce the next Doctor after McCoy's Doctor crash lands in California during New Years Eve where he's shot by a gang and the doctor operating on him accidentally kills him because of his alien physiology.
Appearing only once onscreen in the 1996 TV movie but doing his voice in various audio novels, Paul McGann played the Eighth Doctor with as much charm as the rest. After the original series was put in hiatus in 1989 and not aired again, it was official that BBC had cancelled the show because of all the problems it faced. It wasn't until 1996 when BBC and 20th Century Fox teamed up to revive the show as a FOX show with a television film that fans finally heard something new from The Doctor. Airing in Canada, the US, and Britain at different dates in May the film was very much praised but due to low ratings a revived show did not happen, and it would be another nine years before The Doctor returned to television. In the film, McCoy's Seventh Doctor brings the remains of his old foe The Master, having been executed by the Daleks, into the TARDIS to bring to Gallifrey as part of The Master's will. While The Doctor is reading a book, The Master escapes from the box he was stored in as a sentient ooze and causes the TARDIS to malfunction. The TARDIS lands in the very early morning of New Years Eve San Francisco in 1999 just as a gang was shooting at a young Chinese-American teen named Chang Lee. When The Doctor steps out, the gang shoots him and run away after for fear of the TARDIS appearing out of nowhere. When The Doctor is brought to a hospital thanks to Lee, the doctor who operates on him, Grace Holloway, takes the bullet out but because the X-rays show two hearts, she uses a prove to inspect his vessels but in doing so damages his circulatory system and it kills him, and soon after Lee runs away with The Doctor's things-including the TARDIS key and a new Sonic Screwdriver. Meanwhile, the oozing form of The Master takes control the body of the ambulance driver that took The Doctor to the hospital and gets a new but deteriorating body, played by Eric Roberts, who plans to steal The Doctor's remaining regenerations. With The Doctor being put in the morgue, he once again regenerates but slowly because of the anesthetics into McGann's Eighth Doctor, who gains amnesia because of the time it took for him to regenerate and the anesthetics. When Lee finds the TARDIS and enters it he is surprised to see that it's bigger on the inside, and that the TARDIS's interior have changed looking more like a steam-punk room. There, Lee finds The Master is tricked by him into believing that The Doctor is evil and helping with his plans. By daylight, The Doctor has found new clothes, Edwardian clothes intended for a party, from the hospital and with some memory being revived finds Holloway and convinces her that he was the same man as before. With her help, the Eighth Doctor is able to remember who he is, what had happened, and realizes that The Master's plan involves opening the Eye of Harmony, which if left opened would suck the Earth into it. When they get to the TARDIS, however, The Master traps The Doctor and hypnotizes Grace to continue his plans. Just as Lee sees through the ploy and realizes what's really going on, The Master kills him and de-hypnotizes Grace to open the Eye. When it does open, Grace rearranges the TARDIS console which causes the process to stop just right before midnight and frees The Doctor, unfortunately, The Master kills her. Being freed, The Doctor is able to push The Master into the Eye of Harmony causing time to revert and bringing Lee and Grace back to life. Arriving moments before the New Year, Lee departs but is warned by The Doctor, who in this regeneration can see into people's futures and give out tips, to not be in San Francisco next New Years, while Grace politely declines The Doctor's invitation to travel in the TARDIS. Although in the movie the Eighth Doctor was shown to be youthful and wide-eyed enthusiastic as the Fifth, various spin-offs showed he had a darker side, especially since he went through a lot more things than previous regenerations. Something that caused controversy among fans was how he would say he was half human and the romantic involvement that The Doctor had with Grace, which by now wouldn't be such a big deal considering what the Ninth to Eleventh Doctors dealt with. In a lot of other media inspired by the film, the Eighth Doctor regularly goes through bouts of amnesia. It's unknown how the Eighth Doctor died, but it's possible that it happened some time during or after the Time War that would be discussed in the revival. On November of 2013, McGann once again played the Eight Doctor in a mini web episode that ties in to the 50th anniversary special. In there, The Doctor offers to save the last remaining pilot of a crashing ship, but when she learns he's a Time Lord she refuses due to the Time War that's happening. When the ship crashes, The Doctor actually died, along with the pilot, and are found by a group The Doctor met before in his fourth regeneration. They revive him for four minutes to tell him how the war between the Time Lords and Daleks is tearing the universe apart. After avoiding the war for so long and deciding that he has to break his own rules, The Doctor decides to finally end it by drinking a potion made by the group that makes him regenerate into a completely different form outside of his regeneration cycle known as the War Doctor who declares that The Doctor is no more and played by John Hurt.

After nine years without anything new, The Doctor returned in a new revival to the show in 2005 with Christopher Eccleston as the scarred and very dark Ninth Doctor. The main difference between the revival and original show is that instead of serials, each season or series has at least 13 standalone episodes with two or three-parters and with a lot multi-season arcs that are referenced in almost all of the episodes of a particular season, and with a theme that can last just one season or stretch more. Eccleston played The Doctor for only one season before deciding to depart due to the schedule of the show, but he played the Ninth Doctor with such emotion that viewers and fans fell in love with Doctor Who all over again. In the first episode, The Doctor meets Rose Tyler while trying to stop the Autons from taking over the Earth and in the end she joins him in his travels, while her mother and boyfriend Mickey Smith worry and sometimes join them. Throughout the season, we learn that in between the film and the revival The Doctor and his people took part in a war that wiped out all Time Lords but him. Because of that the Ninth Doctor is more prone to survival's guilt, being very brooding, and at times was prone to mood swings because of what he witnessed in the Time War. His clothes reflect it as well as he wears a beat-up leather jacket showing how the times have changed for him. In his travels with Rose he has gone to the very last moments of Earth, met Charles Dickens, fought an alien family wanting to destroy Earth for profit, stopped alien nano-tech plague during The Blitz, and faced old enemies. We learn throughout the season that the war the Time Lords fought in were against the Daleks, and it was The Doctor who was the one that ended it by killing both his species and what he thought were all of the Daleks. Besides Rose, The Doctor also picks up a young British genius from 2012 who only lasts one episode as he disobeys The Doctor's rules and 51st century Time Agent turned con man Jack Harkness who they met during the Blitz. Throughout the first series, the Ninth Doctor and his companions find that wherever they go the words "Bad Wolf" appear in some form or another and it's solved at the end of the season. In the last two episodes of the season The Doctor, Rose, and Jack, are transported to a satellite thousands of years in the future that shows game shows where the players are actually vaporized for real, and the satellite is made by a company called Bad Wolf. When Jack and The Doctor escape their games they see Rose get vaporized, but The Doctor learns that the vaporization is really a transporter. It's with that, that The Doctor learns that the Dalek Emperor survived the war and made a whole new army of Daleks from the humans of the game show and ready to invade Earth. The Doctor saves Rose and without telling her, traps her in the TARDIS and sends her back to her time with him still on the satellite since the only way to stop the Daleks is to use a weapon that can kill anything in its path, including the people of Earth. With Rose stuck in the past she once again sees Bad Wolf written across the floor and walls and uses Mickey's truck and a chain to open the TARDIS console, wherein she absorbs the time vortex. Arriving just as Jack and a few others are killed, and The Doctor feeling guilty about the possibility of killing so many innocents and refusing to activate the weapon, Rose arrives and reveals she is the Bad Wolf, spreading the words across time and space as a message, reviving Jack, and disintegrating the entire Dalek fleet. Unfortunately, since she can't handle the power and will die if she keeps holding it, The Doctor absorbs it all through a kiss and gives it back to the TARDIS. In there, as they're traveling back to Rose's time, The Doctor tells her that absorbing the vortex is killing him and tells Rose that he's changing, which he does when energy bursts from his body and he once again regenerates to a new man, much to Rose's horror and confusion, all the while the new Doctor comments on how weird it is to have new teeth. One thing we learn about The Doctor and the Daleks, is that they have given The Doctor the title of Oncoming Storm.
Having grown up watching the original show during Tom Baker's and Davidson's times as a kid and wanting to be an actor just so he can play The Doctor, David Tennant achieved his dream and more when he played the light-hearted, talkative, pop culture loving but at times vengeful, unforgiving, and just as scarred Tenth Doctor who frequently tells people he's sorry and loves to say Allons-y from 2005 to 2010 and again in 2013 for the 50th anniversary special. With his first full story being in the 2005 Christmas special, the Tenth Doctor prevented an alien invasion-by sword fighting its leader wherein his hand was cut off but regrown due to his regeneration process and then winning- that finally revealed the existence of aliens to the world, all the while The Doctor was in a coma throughout most of the episode because of his regeneration. At the end of the special, Tennant's Doctor acquired his outfit which consisted of either a dark brown (with blue pinstripes) or a blue (with rust red pinstripes) four-buttoned suit, a shirt and a tie, a light brown faux-suede overcoat, and different colored pairs of trainers, depending on his suit as well as a pair of glasses that, like the Fifth Doctor, just made him look smarter. In the end, after having Harriet Jones, whom The Doctor met in his previous regeneration, be seen as unfit to be the Prime Minister of England after destroying the fleeing aliens' ship, The Doctor and Rose continued on to their travels. In the following season, The Doctor and Rose (and at times Mickey) would travel to a new Earth billions of years in the future, the Tenth Doctor reuniting with Sarah Jane Smith and K-9 thus getting their own spinoffs, travel to a parallel universe to fight a new breed of Cybermen and Mickey deciding to stay behind, fight a Devil like creature near a black hole, and other such adventures, all the while the mention of Torchwood is heard at times. In the season finale, The Doctor, Rose, and her mother investigate Torchwood, a British institute that acquires and uses alien technology to protect Earth, and how it relates to ghost like images appearing throughout the world while also wondering where a giant sphere that shouldn't exist came from. The ghosts turn out to be the Cybermen from the other universe trying to get through the other with some already there having followed the sphere and using Torchwood to get them here, while the sphere is really a container that opens to reveal four Daleks who were made to think like the enemy and thus escaped the Time War. Their plan is to open a Time Lord prison that since it's bigger on the inside holds millions of Daleks and invade Earth while also battling the Cybermen. Mickey is there as well since the breach in the universe allowed him to use a device that lets him travel between universes, which is actually destroying the other universe if used repeatedly. In the end, The Doctor and Rose use the same machine that brought the Cybermen and Daleks into the universe to put them back into an empty void but not before the four Daleks and a few Cybermen time travel out of the area and Rose almost gets sucked in before the alternate version of her dad saves her and takes her to the other universe wherein she, her mother, and Mickey are stuck in and presumed dead during the attack and with The Doctor unable to travel there. Sometime later The Doctor uses a supernova to send a message to Rose which ends abruptly as they say goodbye. As he prepares to once again travel, The Doctor sees a woman in a wedding dress appear out of nowhere in the TARDIS, all without The Doctor knowing how it could be possible. This leads to the next Christmas special where the woman, named Donna Noble, demands The Doctor to take her back to her wedding in England during Christmas. It's there that The Doctor learns of a plot to conquer Earth by an alien race that hid inside it since it was first formed, using Donna as a key by having had her coffee laced with particles that will open the prison in which the rest of the aliens are hidden, particles that got attracted to the TARDIS hence her appearance. In the end, The Doctor defeats the aliens by drowning them in the Thames River and almost staying there had Donna not convinced him to move, all the while the leader of the aliens is blown out of the sky on the orders of a Mr. Saxon, a name that will be referenced a lot in the third season. In the end the Tenth Doctor offers Donna a chance to travel with him but refuses since she deems him too dangerous but to not travel alone as he needs to be controlled. At the start of the next season, The Doctor has to help a hospital he was in that got transported to the moon by an alien police force looking for an alien criminal with the help of medical student Martha Jones. In the end, Martha agreed to travel with him and together they fight the four surviving Daleks in 1930s Manhattan where one of the Daleks survives by once again time traveling, battle alien witches with Shakespeare, introduce the Weeping Angels (aliens that only move when not seen and resemble stone statues), escape from an alien family in pre WWI Britain with The Doctor turning himself human for fear of what he could do to them, and much more. In the three part season finale, The Doctor and Martha meet with Jack Harkness, now working for Torchwood in his own spinoff, who used The Doctor's severed hand to find him and accidentally travel to the very end of the universe where they encounter the last people left alive. There, The Doctor learns that one of the elderly scientists is a Time Lord like him, although when he steals the TARDIS the Tenth Doctor realizes that he's actually The Master who escaped the Time War and turned himself human like The Doctor did. Although The Doctor manages to lock the TARDIS at only 18 months before they left from, The Master manages to get away and The Doctor, Jack, and Martha using Jack's vortex manipulator to get back to when they previously left. There, The Doctor learns that Mr. Saxon is actually The Master using his powers of hypnotizing to become a rich man and then the Prime Minister of Britain. In the end, the three defeat The Master after he turned the TARDIS into a paradox machine and had the last surviving humans invade Earth for an entire year until the TARDIS was fixed and the events reset themselves to when the invasion started without it actually happening. At first, The Doctor decides to take The Master prisoner until The Master's wife sees through his insanity and shoots him and he refuses to regenerate as a way to hurt The Doctor by making him the last Time Lord. Jack is dropped off back in Torchwood and Martha decides to leave to take care of her family as they were there throughout the whole ordeal. In between the finale of this episode and the start of the next Christmas special, there was a web special in which Tennant's Doctor meets Peter Davidson's Doctor due to a malfunction in the TARDIS that made the Fifth Doctor look more aged than before. The Fifth Doctor at first thinks the Tenth as a fan boy who sneaked into the TARDIS until the Tenth, remembering when he was the Fifth, manages to fix the problem. When the problem is fixed, Tennant's Doctor tells Davidson's how of all the previous regenerations, he was his favorite especially since he copied a lot of the Fifth Doctor's things-like the glasses and shoes. This was a dream come true for Tennant as he became an actor because of Davidson playing The Doctor. The end of the special led to the next Christmas special where The Doctor had to prevent a giant space liner modeled after the Titanic from crashing to Earth. In the next and last regular season in Tennant's time as The Doctor, he reunites with Donna to investigate a company making diet pills that turns the fat into aliens and from there they travel to 1920s England where they meet Agatha Christie, battle Sontarans wanting to invade Earth with the help of Martha now working for UNIT, travel to a planet where The Doctor is clones with the clone played by Peter Davidson's daughter and whom Tennant would later marry, meet a mysterious woman from The Doctor's future in a planet sized library filled with microscopic creatures who eat flesh and live in the shadows called the Vashta Nerada, freeing an alien race known as the Ood from enslavement, and other such things while also investigating why certain planets are disappearing without a trace and how it relates to the bees disappearing. In the two part season finale, The Doctor and Donna find that the Earth has somehow moved from where it was and learning from the Shadow Proclamation that over twenty planets have gone missing in the same manner throughout time and space. Using a computer model, the missing worlds rearrange themselves into a pattern that the model immediately forms once all the worlds are put in. When The Doctor is reminded of the bees disappearing he realizes that a signal only the alien bees recognize is the reason they left and he uses that signal to trace where the worlds went, unfortunately once there they find nothing. On Earth, Jack and Torchwood, Sarah Jane and her son, Martha and UNIT, and Rose who was able to crossover because of how both universes were breaking apart by what was going on learn that they were moved by an entire army of Daleks and have no way of fighting them or contacting The Doctor. Just when all hope seems lost, Harriet Jones contacts all but Rose about a network they can use to help contact and get The Doctor to where they are, at the cost of Jones' life. It works as the worlds and Daleks were hiding in that same spot just one second out of synch from the rest of the universe. There, The Doctor learns that Davros has returned thanks to the one surviving Dalek from Manhattan escaping to the Time War and bringing him back and making a new race of Daleks with the cost of making the Dalek precognitive but also insane. When The Doctor lands on Earth he's hit by a Dalek when running to Rose and as he's regenerating, Sarah Jane drives right behind two other Daleks who are about to kill her. As The Doctor is regenerating he transfers most of the energy to his severed hand thus preventing him from changing and just healing, while Sarah Jane is saved by Rose's mother and Mickey who also crossed over. The TARDIS is teleported to the Dalek flagship where The Doctor learns from Davros that the Daleks plan to use the planets as a reaction that will destroy every single universe, with the Daleks keeping themselves safe and the only organisms left. With the TARDIS turned off and Donna being locked in, The Doctor watches in horror as he sees it being destroyed by the core of the ship. As the TARDIS is being destroyed Donna breaks the container containing The Doctor's hand and her touch causes some of the regeneration energy to bounce onto her and back causing Donna to have Time Lord knowledge and making a whole new Doctor out of the hand, albeit half human. As the original Doctor watches his companions be teleported before activating certain weapons that either would have destroyed the ship or Earth and just as the reaction was about to activate, the new Doctor and Donna teleport back with the TARDIS and help the others defeat the Daleks. The new Doctor, inspired by the Dalek who brought back Davros since his precognition made him realize the atrocities the Daleks had done, destroys all of the Daleks, with Donna teleporting the other planets save the Earth as the controls are destroyed in the chaos, all the while the original Doctor gets all of his friends into the TARDIS and offers to save Davros who refuses. The Doctor, with the help of his friends, use the TARDIS to tow the Earth back to its location and gets Sarah to her son, Mickey going with Jack and Martha, and leaving Rose and her mother in the other dimension with the new one hearted half human Doctor. Because she couldn't handle the Time Lord knowledge she was hit with, The Doctor had to wipe out Donna's memory of him and what they did as it would have burned and killed her. He tells her mother and grandfather about this, much to their shock, and The Doctor leaves alone and miserable, deciding that traveling alone is safer. Starting with the 2008 Christmas special to the start of 2010, the show didn't have a regular season for 2009 as a new production team and head writer were hired for the fifth series and they wanted to have more time to prepare for new episodes. From late 2008 to the start of 2010, the show had four specials all leading up to Tennant's last story as The Doctor. The first special was the 2008 Christmas special where The Doctor lands in London of 1851 at Christmas Eve. There The Doctor meets what he believes at first to be his next regeneration but actually an ordinary man who gained the memories of The Doctor from an infostamps that backfired at him as he was fending off the Cybermen who escaped the void from when they came as ghosts. With the help of the man and his friend, Rosita, the Tenth Doctor defeats the Cybermen and goes on to have Christmas dinner with the two. For the Easter special in April, The Doctor meets a famous female crook in a London bus that goes through a wormhole into a desert planet. There, as the other passengers are working on the bus, The Doctor and his new friend learn that the planet was turned into a desert by stingray-like aliens who devoured everything in the planet and through their use of their metallic exoskeleton plan to enter the wormhole to consume Earth. With the help of two aliens stuck in the planet and UNIT, The Doctor and the rest of the passengers get through the wormhole thanks to the bus being able to fly and close the hole when they get through, able to destroy a few of the stingray aliens. In the end, after The Doctor helps the thief escape the police and as he's entering his TARDIS, one of the passengers has a premonition that his song will soon end and it will happen when he hears four knocks. In the Fall special that aired November, The Doctor meets the first human colony of Mars in 2059 which, as The Doctor realizes, is destined to be destroyed by a nuclear blast, killing the entire crew and thus a fixed-point in time. It soon shows that the water the crew was getting from a frozen glacier contains a virus that makes however touch it have cracks in their mouths and generate a lot of water, plus making them violent and bloodthirsty. In the end, as The Doctor leaves, after telling the captain that she and her crew are meant to die in an event that inspires the rest of Earth to explore space, he decides that since he's the last of his kind he can use all of his power to save the captain and the rest of the crew. When they get back to Earth on the TARDIS, the captain scolds him about what The Doctor told her about how her death inspired millions and how he's abusing his powers over time. The Doctor responds that he now sees himself not just a survivor but, now acting more like The Master, dubbing himself Time Lord Victorious. Entering her home, the captain kills herself to maintain the timeline and The Doctor realizes that nothing changed and that he's gone too far after seeing an image of an Ood, to which he wonders if this is when he dies. After a nervous breakdown, The Doctor enters his TARDIS and decides to see the Ood to know what they want to tell them. The next two specials, that aired on Christmas and New Years Day 2010, were two-parters that saw the end of the Tenth Doctor. After visiting the Ood, The Doctor learns that The Master will be back, to which the Ood see it as "the end of time itself". On Earth, a cult loyal to The Master use a ring that belonged to him to resurrect him, to which his ex-wife sabotages. Although The Master is alive again, the sabotage made him constantly hungry but also gain super speed and strength and energy projections. With the help of Wilfred Mott, Donna's grandfather who he talked to about his possible death and fear of regenerating again, The Doctor finds The Master feasting on humans to make him get rid of the hunger. Being subdued by The Master, The Doctor realizes that the four drumbeats in his head isn't from insanity but an outside force. Soon after, The Master is captured under the orders of a billionaire who wants The Master to fix an alien machine he has. Wilf and The Doctor find where The Master is being kept and find two alien scientists who made the machine as an unsuccessful medical tool, to which The Master uses to heal himself. He also uses it to turn almost every other human on Earth into a replica of himself that look and think like him. Escaping from The Masters, The Doctor and Wilf hide with the two aliens in their spaceship in space. There The Doctor learns that The Master's drum beats are really signals sent by the Time Lord president, Rassilon, during the Time War to the Master when he was a child, making him go crazy. After The Master multiplied, Rassilon's signal strengthened and sent a diamond to Earth, to which The Master recovered. When The Doctor learns from a message sent by The Master about the diamond, The Doctor learns that Rassilon plans to use the diamond to not only escape the Time War but bring all of Gallifrey with it. When The Doctor is back on Earth, The Master's clones are brought back to normal by Rassilon who reveals that he plans to destroy all of time and space while the Time Lords become gods. With a gun given to him by Wilf, The Doctor shoots the diamond, causing the Time Lords and their planet to return to the Time War, but not before Rassilon tries to kill The Doctor. Wanting revenge for the drums in his head, The Master sacrifices himself by attacking the Time Lord president and then vanishing in a bright white light. Realizing he's still alive, The Doctor is happy and exited until he hears four continuous knocks from behind. Seeing Wilf stuck in a Nuclear Vault that only opens when one enters the other area, which if done will cause the area to fill with radiation after the events that happened, The Doctor can't use his Sonic Screwdriver as it will activate the radiation spreading and has a nervous breakdown since he has enjoyed this regeneration so much that even if he does regenerate, The Doctor considers it like dying anyway. Realizing how far he has gone, The Doctor enters the chamber, freeing Wilf, and absorbs all of the radiation. Knowing that the process will be slow, he takes Wilf home and proceeds to get his reward by visiting Sarah Jane and her son, Mickey and Martha who are now engaged, Jack who he introduces to one of the crew of the space Titanic, and Wilf on Donna's wedding and getting him winning lottery tickets for her. The last place he goes is New Year's Day in 2005 and seeing Rose from a distance and telling her that she's have a great year. Entering the TARDIS in pain, another image of an Ood appears and tells him that although his song is ending, the story never ends. Walking around the TARDIS, the camera closes up on the Tenth Doctor's face as he says that he doesn't want to go just as his face and hands begin to glow and he regenerates. As he's regenerating, the energy from it causes most of the interior of the TARDIS to be destroyed, making it crash onto Earth as the new Doctor yells out with excitement "Geronimo!" but not before checking to see if he still has legs, hands, fingers, thinking he's a girl due to longer hair that he finds sad that it's not ginger, realizing how big his chin is, and taking a moment to remember that he's crashing.
Crash landing his damaged TARDIS, the Eleventh Doctor's intro showed showed audiences how wild and crazy the show will get during his time. Originally wanting an actor of middle age, Matt Smith is now the youngest at 26 to play The Doctor, 3 years less than Peter Davidson. Unlike Tennant, Smith wasn't a fan of the show when he grew up as he grew up after the original was cancelled. However, when he was considered Smith watched past episodes and it was watching the Second Doctor story Tomb of the Cybermen where he saw his inspiration of his Doctor. From 2010 to now, Smith's Doctor was a lot like the Second in that he was very childish and acted more like an old man in a very young body. He was very well aware of his reputation and would use it as a threat at times against his enemies and at times, like the Seventh, was very manipulative and secrecy, which, along with many things, gave him self-loathing for all the things he's done which he hides through a facade of cheerful arrogance. Unlike Tennant's Doctor, Eleven is ignorant towards human pop culture and adult activities, as well as finding things that people find odd, like fezzes, as cool, slow to realize things, and finding mild curiosity in things that seem impossible. At times, when things look bleak, the Eleventh Doctor would act more like his own age by being alone and retiring at one point. Like the Second Doctor, Eleven was prone to using his hands a lot and would run most of the time, and he dressed a lot like him. At the end of his first full episode, after spending most of it with the tattered clothes of Ten, he starts to wear a brown tweed jacket, bow tie-which he claims are cool and like the Second, braces, black trousers, and black, ankle-high boots, while at times wearing a green military coat, fezzes, stetsons, and a purple-brown cashmere frock coat. After the control room of the TARDIS is destroyed by the energy from his regeneration, the Eleventh Doctor crash lands in 1996 on the backyard in the small English village of Leadworth. There a young girl named Amy Pond sees The Doctor come out of the crashed TARDIS asking for something to eat. After she makes him fish custards with custards, Amy asks The Doctor if he could fix a crack in her room. The Doctor realizes that the crack is actually a crack in time and space and when he opens it a prison is shown with the words "Prisoner Zero has escaped" repeated and a giant eyeball appears before the crack closes. Although the crack closed, The Doctor knows that Prisoner Zero has escaped through and hiding somewhere. Just before he can do anything, The Doctor hears the TARDIS's engine and goes down to fix it, promising Amy that it will only take a moment and he'll come back to travel with her. When he does come back, however, the still damaged TARDIS lands 12 years later and meets an older Amy who grew up seeing The Doctor as an imaginary friend, her Raggedy Doctor. Realizing that Prisoner Zero is hiding in one of Amy's rooms and that it can shape shift into whatever people are dreaming of, The Doctor learns that if the Atraxi, an alien police force, does not find Zero they will burn the Earth. With the help of Amy and her boyfriend, Rory Williams who's a nurse, they learn that Zero is using coma patients to disguise himself. Using his Screwdriver to attract the Atraxi as he's found Zero, The Doctor overuses it and it blows up, dismissing the Atraxi's attention. In the hospital, The Doctor's new plan is to use Rory's phone to send out a signal to the Atraxi that lets them know what the coma patients look like so as to find Zero better. Zero then knocks out Amy and uses her dreams of a younger self and The Doctor to hide again, which works. The Doctor convinces a sleeping Amy to remember what Zero looked like when it first attacked them, which causes Zero to revert to his true form and be captured. As he's being imprisoned, Zero gives a cryptic warning to The Doctor that "the Pandorica will open, and silence will fall". After Zero is captured, The Doctor calls the Atraxi to see him at the roof of the hospital, where he reprimands them, as he's choosing what to wear, for wanting to destroy an innocent planet that never was a threat to them and asks it if it's protected to which the Atraxi show holographic images of past monsters who have invaded, and when The Doctor asks what had happened to them The Atraxi show images of The Doctor's past regenerations until The Doctor steps in, wearing what he decided to wear, telling them that he's The Doctor and to run, which they do. Once they do, The Doctor's key to the TARDIS starts glowing, signaling that his ship has fixed herself, before disappearing in it once more. Unknowingly appearing again in Amy's backyard two years later, Pond readily agreed to travel with him, after being alone for so long, and showing her the TARDIS's new interior looks. The TARDIS gives The Doctor a new Sonic Screwdriver and Amy wants The Doctor to get her back for the next day once they travel, and in the end Amy's room is shown with, among other things, a wedding dress. For the fifth season of the revival, and the first for the Eleventh Doctor, he, Amy, and later on Rory would investigate other similarly shaped cracks that erase people from existence as they see a giant spaceship carrying all of the people from the UK, witness the return of pure Daleks during the London Blitz when Daleks from the previous invasion accidentally escaped the destruction of their race into WW2 Britain where they pretended to be inventions to make The Doctor angry enough to say who he is and what they are which is what they needed to activate a machine that created new Daleks, fight the Weeping Angels in a maze with the help from the woman The Doctor met in the planet sized library, River Song, who travels at different points than he does, fight an evil manifestation of The Doctor called The Dream Master, prevent an invasion of Silurians in 2020 where Rory is killed but then erased by another crack that makes Amy forget him, and fight an invisible monster with the help of Vincent van Gogh. On the two-part season finale, The Doctor, Amy, and River investigate a van Gogh painting of the TARDIS exploding and the coordinates of Stonehenge in 102 A.D.. There, they discover the fabled Pandorica, a prison box said to contain the most powerful and feared being in the universe. They also discover Rory, dressed as a Roman soldier, who remembers who he is even though he was killed and erased. Soon, all of The Doctor's enemies arrive for the Pandorica, as well as the Roman soldiers who turn out to be Autons, including Rory, but with human emotions. River takes the TARDIS to Amy's house and discovers there some things in Amy's room resembling the Pandorica and other things, and when River tries to go back the TARDIS explodes in a way that caused the cracks to appear. As this is happening, The Doctor's enemies reveal to have formed an alliance against him to trap him in the Pandorica after luring them there from Amy's memory, believing he's the cause for the cracks, all the while Amy remembers Rory before he tries and fails to not shoot her as he's an Auton. All this while the first part ends with everything but Earth being erased from history by the crack caused by the TARDIS exploding. In the second part, a future version of The Doctor appears and gives Rory his sonic screwdriver to open the Pandorica, rescue the present Doctor, and then put Amy in it to heal her as they wait over one thousand years as the universe is slowly being destroyed. In 1996, the younger version of Amy opens the Pandorica and the older version, after being in stasis by the Pandorica, joins The Doctor-who used River's vortex manipulator- and Rory-being alive as he's living plastic for over a thousand years- in stopping the TARDIS from destroying all of time. They discover the sun is actually the TARDIS exploding very slowly and by now ready to end everything and inside it is River, being kept alive by the TARDIS putting her in a time loop, who then is rescued by The Doctor. When one of the Daleks from the alliance is revived by the Pandorica after being turned to stone due to the TARDIS's explosion, they avoid it long enough for The Doctor to enter the Pandorica and set it to go right into the center of the explosion to stop it and fix the cracks, all this by causing a Big Bang. However, in order to let the cracks close he has to stay inside them, that is until when everything is reset and Amy and Rory have their wedding, she's able to remember him and with that The Doctor and the TARDIS return. In the end, Amy and Rory join The Doctor as they investigate who blew up the TARDIS and what the words "silence will fall" refer to. In the following Christmas special, The Doctor helps an old man understand the source of why he's so angry in life. In the two part season six premiere, Amy, Rory, and River meet The Doctor in Utah, who tells them about the 1969 moon landing, and later they see him killed by someone in a spacesuit. Meeting a younger version of The Doctor, the three don't tell him about what they saw but tell him about 1969. Landing in the Oval Office during Nixon's presidency, they investigate calls he's been getting of a little girl, which The Doctor traces to a warehouse in Florida. With the help of Secret Service agent Canton Delaware they investigate the warehouse and find an Apollo spacesuit with alien modifications, while River and Rory find a control room in the sewers. When The Doctor and Amy find Canton knocked out, Amy tells The Doctor that she's pregnant before she sees the figure in a spacesuit from before. Wanting to prevent The Doctor's death, she grabs Canton's gun and fires at the figure before she sees that the little girl is inside it. At the beginning of the second part, three months have passed and The Doctor is captured by Canton while he chases down Amy, Rory, and River. This is all a ruse by The Doctor to trick aliens, that he believes are the Silence, that can make people forget about them when they turn around and give subliminal messages. Amy and Canton go to an orphanage where she finds the little girl alive thanks to the suit but is kidnapped by Silence and a woman with an eye patch, while Canton is able to shoot one and brings it to The Doctor. Canton uses Amy's cell phone to record the Silence telling him that they've been on Earth for so long that they should kill them on sight. After The Doctor works on the Apollo 11 module, he, Rory, and River trace Amy five days later to one of the Silence's control rooms where The Doctor offers them to surrender. When they refuse, he has Canton send the message of the shot Silence to the middle of Neil Armstrong's famous speech on the moon, which causes everyone who sees it from then on to kill the Silence once they see one. After they rescue Amy, they are thanked by Nixon and The Doctor brings River to the prison she's incarcerated in since she made a promise and kisses The Doctor, with him not understanding why. Telling Rory about the pregnancy, Amy believes she was just sick, with The Doctor checking one of the monitors to find that it couldn't tell if she was pregnant or not. Before the first half season finale, The Doctor and his friends faced pirates, an entity that took over the TARDIS and put it's soul into the body of a dying woman who reveals that she took The Doctor not where he wants to go but where he needs to go, and witness the birth of a new species formed by liquid cloning where, in the end, is revealed Amy is actually a cloned and still being kept by the woman with eye patch. In the first half of the season's finale, The Doctor gathers up an army of people he has helped over the years against the Silence, actually a religious order who wants to kill The Doctor, to rescue Amy and her baby. Once they infiltrate the Silence's base and find Amy and her baby Melody, The Doctor learns that the baby is part Time Lord due to being conceived in the TARDIS and want to use that to kill The Doctor. The eye patch wearing woman reveals that the baby Amy has is another clone and that the Silence have the real baby. River arrives, after she declined The Doctor's help for reasons unknown, and reveals that she's actually Melody. The second half of the season starts with The Doctor, Amy, and Rory being held at gunpoint in the TARDIS by Amy and Rory's childhood friend Mels and they arrive in Nazi Germany in Hitler's office just as he was going to be killed by shape shifting robot piloted by miniature people called the Teselecta. When Hitler shoots wildly at the robot as it gets up, Rory knocks him out and places him inside a closet, although Mels is hit. It soon shows that Mels is regenerating and turns into the person that the three come to know as River Song. River, going by Mels since she doesn't know of her future self, tries to kill The Doctor since the Silence have trained her to kill him. She then kisses him, with her revealing that the lipstick she used is laced with a poison that will slowly kill The Doctor and prevent his regeneration. The Teselecta recognizes River as the one who kills The Doctor and instead focuses on her by torturing her and then planning to kill her. Being in the way of its shrinking beam, Amy and Rory board the robot and forces its pilot to reveal to The Doctor why the Silence want him dead. It reveals that the Silence believe that when the oldest question in the universe is asked silence will fall across the universe, although the captain doesn't know what the question is. When The Doctor begs for River's freedom, the captain refuses and just as it is about to kill River, Amy uses the Sonic Screwdriver to make the robot's defenses attack the crew, though they teleport out leaving Amy and Rory inside. Begging River to help them, The Doctor falls unconscious from the poison and River, remorseful of what she's done and grateful towards him, rescues Amy and Rory in the TARDIS and uses her last remaining regenerations to cure The Doctor. After falling unconscious, The Doctor takes her to a hospital in the future where she will become an archaeologist. In the TARDIS, The Doctor secretly learns of the date of his death and where from the records of the Teselecta. After that, The Doctor and his companions face a boy whose fears become reality, an alien that feeds on the beliefs on others, and other adventures. In the season six finale, The Doctor goes around the universe trying to find answers about the Silence and why they want him dead including from one of the friends that helped him rescue Amy. When he learns that his old friend Brigadier Stewart has died in present Earth, The Doctor accepts his death. When he finds the Teselecta and its crew undercover as a Silence member it asks the captain for one last favor. After giving the invitations to Utah from the start of the season to his friends, his younger self, and an older Canton, The Doctor meets with the figure in the space suit who turns out to be the River who he had left in the hospital having been kidnapped by the Silence again to kill The Doctor. Unable to control the suit, River instead drains the suit's power causing all of time to happen at once due to the event being a fixed point in time. Needing to touch each other in order to continue time, River does whatever she can to keep The Doctor away even if it means the destruction of the universe. Fighting an army of the aliens from the beginning of the season with Amy and Rory, The Doctor decides to marry River in order for them to touch. Accepting that nothing can change, River accepts to the marriage and The Doctor whispers something in her ear, which she says is his name and then kiss, thus fixing time and making sure The Doctor dies. In the end, River visits Amy and tells her that besides The Doctor telling her his name, he also revealed that The Doctor in Utah and in the broken time world was actually the Teselecta with The Doctor inside. When he returns his friend from the beginning of the episode, The Doctor tells him how his "death" will make people forget him as he had gotten to big. As he leaves, The Doctor is told of the prophecy that will happen in the fields of Trenzalore, where the most important question will be asked, that question being "Doctor who?". The following Christmas special had The Doctor traveling alone during Christmas of 1938 in a crashing alien ship. After the ship explodes and The Doctor successfully escapes thanks to an impact space suit when landing on Earth, he befriends a woman whose husband is fighting in WW2. When he visits her and her kids three years later, her husband has gone missing but she has not told the kids since it was Christmas. The Doctor helps them out and in the end helps the family find the missing father before he joins Amy and Rory for Christmas dinner. At the beginning of the first half of season seven showed in September of 2012, Matt Smith's last as the Eleventh Doctor, the trio are kidnapped by the Daleks who ask for The Doctor's help. They want The Doctor to enter a planet that serves as an asylum for battle scarred Daleks and deactivate the already weakening force field in order to destroy it to prevent the insane Daleks from getting out. The Doctor only agree when he hears of a woman named Oswin Oswald sending transmissions from the asylum planet after crashing there and causing the force field to be broken about hiding from the Daleks and making souffles, which The Doctor wonders how that would be possible. In the asylum planet, The Doctor is able to contact Oswald who reveals herself to be a hacker who has been messing with the Daleks' computerized psychic link as a way of hiding from them. She promises to help him lower the planet's shield if he can find and rescue her, to which The Doctor agrees to. When encountering Daleks that have survived in battles with The Doctor, Oswin erases their memory of him in order for The Doctor to get through and enter the area in which she is hiding in. When he does find her, however, it turns out she was already turned into a Dalek because of her intelligence but kept her humanity and sanity by making up a fantasy that she was still human. Initially going insane from the revelation, Oswin regains control of herself and lets the force field's down in order for him and his friends to escape as she wants The Doctor to promise her that he remembers her as the human she was. Escaping the destruction by teleporting back to the TARDIS, The Doctor appears to the Daleks who no longer remember him, continually asking "Doctor who?", because Oswin messed not only with the memories of the Daleks in the asylum, but with all the Daleks. Leaving Amy and Rory back at home, The Doctor dances around the TARDIS, jovial that the Daleks no longer remember him. Before the first half season finale, The Doctor, Amy, and Rory confront an alien cyborg in the Old West, stop an alien invasion through the use of small, square cubes with the help of the Brigadier's daughter who now heads UNIT, and much more. In the first half season finale, The Doctor and his friends visit Manhattan where they face the Weeping Angels. The Angels are using an old building in the 1930s wherein whoever enters it will be sent to the past and will live there for the rest of their lives, with the Angels feeding on the energy of what their victims could have done. With the help of River Song, who has been set free from prison due to The Doctor erasing himself from any database that houses information on him as a way of hiding, and of a book that details everything that has happened, they track Rory to the building. In the end, Amy and Rory, after seeing an older version of him in the 1930s hotel, defeat the Angels by killing themselves, thus destroying the paradox created by the Angels which kills them and puts the four back in present-day New York, in a cemetery. Believing that the Angels have been defeated, and the TARDIS not allowed to ever be in Manhattan, Rory notices a tombstone with his name in it. Suddenly, one surviving Angel takes Rory back fifty years before he was born, with a horrified Amy watching him disappeared. The Doctor tries to convince Amy to return to the TARDIS, but cannot save Rory due to many time paradoxes, and so Amy, against The Doctor's wishes as it would create a fixed point in time, lets the Angel take her to the same time as Rory, deciding that being with Rory is more important to her. Back in the TARDIS, The Doctor asks River if she could travel with him, with her agreeing but not always, and then tells him that she'll go back in time to write the book they used and have Amy publish it with an afterword in the end. Finding the afterword in Central Park, after he ripped it out before reading it at the start of the story since The Doctor doesn't like endings, Amy wrote that she and Rory both love him and that they had a good and happy life together. She also tells him to visit her younger self as she was waiting for The Doctor when they first met to reassure her about all the things they will go through. The last thing we see is of the younger Amelia Pond sitting in her backyard, smiling as she hears the engines of the TARDIS. In between the first and second half of season seven was another Christmas special, where the Eleventh Doctor has decided to retire in Victorian England. When The Doctor meets a young barmaid named Clara, they investigate snowmen that react to ones thoughts, with The Doctor being helped by Sontaran Strax, Silurian Madame Vastra, and her human wife Jenny Flint who had helped The Doctor fight the Silence before. Through their investigation of the killer snowmen, The Doctor confronts an old enemy, The Great Intelligence, which is the first time for him meeting The Doctor and is being helped by a human he befriended fifty years earlier. Just as The Doctor and Clara escaped The Great Intelligence's forces in the TARDIS, with an all new interior look, Clara is mortally wounded and taken to Vastra to be healed. The Great Intelligence takes over the body of the human he had befriended and almost kills The Doctor before it soon becomes weak due to his psychic link sensing the family that hired Clara as a governess crying because she's dying and thus causing his powers to fade and leave the human's body and disappearing, which kills the human. When The Doctor sees Clara before she dies, he giver her a copy of his TARDIS key as a way of remembering her. In her funeral, The Doctor notices in her tombstone that her full name is Clara Oswin Oswald, just like the woman he met in the Dalek asylum, which makes him investigate how someone could die twice and want to find the real Clara. The last shot is of a contemporary woman, who looks like Clara from Victorian England, pausing at Clara Oswald's tomb. In the second half, The Doctor meets present-day Clara and together they find Ice Warriors in a Soviet submarine, ghosts in 1974, and fight Cybermen. For the season finale, the Great Intelligence kidnaps The Doctor's friends from Victorian England and holds them in Trenzalore. Once there, The Doctor is forced by the Great Intelligence to reveal his real name to the future TARDIS that's used as his tomb in order to open it. Unable to do it, the data ghost of River, from when he first met her, speaks it without anyone being able to see or hear her, and thus opens the TARDIS. Once inside, it's revealed that instead of a body, the future TARDIS holds The Doctor's timeline, what he has and will do. Entering it, The Great Intelligence scatters himself across The Doctor's time to stop every victory he ever had, killing him and destroying the universe. Seeing no other alternative and learning of what The Doctor has seen of her, Clara enters the timeline and spreads across his time and saving The Doctor each time, and thus creating the Oswalds The Doctor met earlier. She also went as far back as being the one to tell the First Doctor which TARDIS to steal, since it's faulty navigation made it more fun to use. After being revived, and seeing the universe fixed, The Doctor decides to enter his own timeline to save Clara, but not before revealing to River that he could always see, hear, and touch her but couldn't reveal it due to the pain he felt of what happened to her. Once inside, he finds Clara, who notices an unknown figure that The Doctor acknowledges as himself but with her saying she saw all his past regeneration but the figure. The Doctor says it's him but that it's not The Doctor since he broke a promise so great he no longer calls him The Doctor, making him his biggest secret. When Clara falls unconscious, the figure tells The Doctor that what he did he did without choice in the name of peace and sanity, to which The Doctor says it wasn't in the name of The Doctor. As he leaves with Clara, the figure turns around to reveal John Hurt playing the War Doctor from before. The next two episodes after this will be specials that will see the end of Matt Smith's reign as the Eleventh Doctor. First, is the 50th anniversary special where the current Doctor investigates mysterious Time Lord made paintings after being contacted by Kate Stewart, the Brigadier's daughter. As he's investigating, the Eleventh Doctor finds a time hole which takes him to 1562 England where he meets the Tenth Doctor who is investigating Zygons planning an invasion in the present, and accidentally gets married to Elizabeth I. Another time hole appears and John Hurt's War Doctor arrives, and at first mistakes the two other Doctors as companions. The War Doctor recently stole the device he would have used to kill both Time Lords and Daleks and end the Time War. The Moment, the device the War Doctor stole from the Time Lord's forbidden vault, is a sentient being that only appears to the War Doctor in the form of Rose Tyler as the Bad Wolf entity. She tries to convince the War Doctor what exactly is the right choice as the three Doctors and Clara stop the Zygons from taking over present-day Earth. When the War Doctor gets back to his own timeline to decide whether to activate The Moment or not, the other two Doctors follow, getting past the time lock thanks to the entity of The Moment allowing them to, and at first decide to help him do it so he doesn't have to do it alone. Clara convinces them that there has to be another way and after they see images of what will happen if they do activate it by the entity, they come up with a new plan. With the help of The Moment's entity, all three Doctors gather all of their past lives and the future 12th Doctor to help them in using what the Zygons used to preserve themselves for four hundred years to preserve Gallifrey and rescue it from destruction of the Time War, which also makes the Dalek fleet firing at it wind up shooting each other. Getting back to the museum, all three Doctors wonder if what they did actually worked, and whether their planet and people were actually saved. As the War Doctor leaves in his own TARDIS, he tells his future regenerations that he's proud of what he will become, although due to the disruption of time streams he and the Tenth Doctor won't remember what has happened and will only remember what they thought before, that the War Doctor destroyed his own people. As he's leaving, the War Doctor starts to regenerate due to his mission in the Time War being over and doing what he was meant to do. As for the Tenth, who will also not remember the events, he is told of their future demise in Trenzalore and that the destination should be different before departing to the events of his last adventure before he regenerates. As the Eleventh Doctor is looking at a painting of a Time War battle in Gallifrey, wondering whether the title of the art is either Gallifrey Falls or No More, he meets the curator who is played by former Doctor Tom Baker. The curator tells him that the name of the painting is actually Gallifrey Falls No More, to which The Doctor believes that it means the plan to save his planet worked and that somewhere out there he has to find his planet and his people. In the last shot of the episode, The Doctor describes a dream he had where he joins all of his past regenerations looking up at the sky as they all get ready to find Gallifrey and the Time Lords once more. The second special is the 2013 Christmas special where in the end The Doctor will once again regenerate into the 12th.
A few months before the 50th anniversary special aired, there was a live broadcast from the BBC about who the next Doctor will be. In the end, it was revealed that the Twelfth Doctor will be played by Scottish actor Peter Capaldi, who previously appeared in a Tenth Doctor story set during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Capaldi, like McCoy and Tennant before him, is from Scotland and would tie with Hartnell for the oldest actor to play The Doctor at 55 and the oldest since the First. Like Tennant, Capaldi is another example of a big fan playing the character he has admired since the show's beginnings. Having a huge age difference from Matt Smith who started at 26 was something that was never anticipated, but before Matt the producers had wanted to originally get an actor much older in middle age for the Eleventh. The producers have also stated that Capaldi's Doctor will be much darker and serious than Smith's Doctor. Capaldi already made a small cameo in the 50th special as his Doctor helping his past regenerations in saving their planet, although only his hands and upper face are shown, and will be shown at the end of the 2013 Christmas special when the Eleventh Doctor regenerates. 2014 will see Capaldi playing The Doctor in his first regular season for the eighth in the revival with Clara continuing on as his companion, and with the overall plot of the season is to find and rescue Gallifrey after all the Doctors prevented its destruction in the Time War.
Like so many great shows, Doctor Who continues to thrive even after fifty years since it first debuted as a children's educational program. With great actors like Hartnell to McCoy and McGann to Capaldi, tremendous stories in the past and future, wonderful settings of alien worlds, and the best character to ever save the world repeatedly. This show would no doubt continue to keep going even if The Doctor runs out of regenerations or he finally defeats the Daleks, Cybermen, The Master, Zygons, Weeping Angels, and whatever else attacks Earth.