In both the original run and since the 2005 revival, the long-running British science fiction television programme Doctor Who has featured a number of story arcs. A story arc is an extended story which takes place over a large number of episodes or serials, characterised by a gradual unfolding of plot points and introduction of narrative devices which come together in the arc's climax and dénouement. While character arcs exist over the course of many stories, they do not necessarily take the shape of an expanded story arc.
References to these arcs have since been made in both Doctor Who and its spin-offs such as Torchwood. Early seasons would feature story arcs which made up extended serials such as The Trial of a Time Lord but also loose umbrella titles such as The Key to Time. The new series has continued this trend with the introduction of "arc words" which are recognisable to the larger viewing audience such as "Bad Wolf", "Torchwood" and "Mr Saxon", which also constitute the story arcs for individual seasons.
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The classic series sporadically featured loose story arcs at several times in the series, often spanning half of a season or a full season. Several story arcs were later released on DVD as boxsets; for example, The Key to Time
Season 8 of Doctor Who involved the first appearance of the Doctor's arch enemy, the Master, portrayed then by Roger Delgado. Every story in the season involved the Master. At the very beginning, the Doctor is warned by a Time Lord that the Master, a convicted criminal and enemy of the Doctor's, has escaped from Gallifrey and may come to Earth seeking revenge, as proves to be the case. During this first story, the Doctor sabotages the Master's TARDIS and so traps the Master, as he is, on Earth in the 20th century. The Master later retrieves a missing component and escapes – only to return subsequently as a prisoner of Axos. He is next encountered in the future on an alien world and finally returns to Earth; in both these last two adventures his intention is to subvert an ancient power source having previously stolen secret files on such things from the Time Lords. At the very end of the season (in The Dæmons), UNIT finally captures the Master and takes him into custody.
The entirety of season 12 features an ongoing plot involving a space station in orbit around Earth, which is visited in two different time periods, as well as the temporary disappearance of the TARDIS.
The Key to Time is the umbrella title that links all six serials of Season 16 of Doctor Who. The arc was originally conceived of by producer Graham Williams, who had proposed it as part of his application for the producer's job in 1976.[1] The name refers to the powerful artifact whose segments the Doctor, Romana and K-9 are searching for during the season.
A figure calling himself the White Guardian commissions the Doctor and K9, assisted by a new companion, the Time Lady Romana, to find the six segments of the Key to Time, a cosmic artifact resembling a perfect cube that maintains the equilibrium of the universe. Since it is too powerful for any single being to possess, it has been split into six different segments and scattered across space and time, disguised by the raw elemental power within them into any shape or size. However, since the forces balancing the universe are so upset, the White Guardian needs to recover the segments of the Key to stop the universe so that he can restore the balance. The White Guardian also warns the Doctor of the Black Guardian who also wishes to obtain the Key To Time for his own purposes.
The first segment is disguised as a lump of Jethryk on the planet Ribos. The second is the planet Calufrax, shrunk to miniature size by the space-hopping pirate planet Zanak. The third is the Great Seal of Diplos, which has been stolen by a criminal of that planet. The fourth is part of a statue on the planet Tara. The fifth has been consumed by the squid Kroll, causing it to turn into a gigantic monster. The final segment is a female humanoid – Princess Astra.
In the final episode, the Black Guardian, disguised as the White Guardian, attempts to take the Key from the Doctor. However, the Doctor sees through the figure's charade and orders the segments of The Key to Time to once again become scattered across all of time and space, bar the sixth, which he reinstates as Princess Astra. Afterward, the Doctor decides to install a device called a randomizer into the TARDIS' navigation system for a period of time to make his following voyages unpredictable to evade the Black Guardian.
The complete running time for all six serials in the arc is 633 minutes.
The Black Guardian returns in the three serial arc, The Black Guardian Trilogy involving the 5th Doctor and Vislor Turlough.
The Key to Time is available on DVD in North America and was released on region 2 (Europe) DVD on 24 September 2007.[2]
Key 2 Time is a series of CD audio plays released by Big Finish Productions. Over the course of three stories, the Fifth Doctor must hunt down the redistributed segments of the Key, which are decaying the dimensions around them. The Doctor soon discovers the decay is a direct result of his actions in the first search for the Key, his attempt to assemble the Key using a makeshift sixth segment disrupting the balance between the segments and causing them to decay. The story ends with the Key being reassembled and the Doctor subsequently destroying the Key in the Chaos Pool where it was first made, undoing the damage it has caused and preventing anything from ever using the Key again. The three stories are The Judgement of Isskar, The Destroyer of Delights and The Chaos Pool.
All serials of season 18 are linked together by the central theme of entropy. Within the season, the stories Full Circle, State of Decay and Warriors' Gate form the infamous sub-arc known as The E-Space Trilogy.[3] The trilogy saw the TARDIS accidentally pass through a Charged Vacuum Emboitment (CVE) from its normal universe, N-Space, into a smaller one called E-Space. The trilogy served to introduce Adric as a companion in the first story Full Circle and marked the departure of companions Romana and K-9 Mark II in the final story Warriors' Gate. The season culminated in Logopolis where we learn that the CVEs were created by the Logopolitans to combat an Entropy field that ends up growing out of control due to interference by the Master and threatens to destroy the entire universe.
Overlapping the entropy arc are these three stories which cover the regeneration into Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor, chronicles the Master as he attempts to procure a new body, and return to his old patterns of trying to conquer the universe and defeat the Doctor. The trilogy was also used to introduce Nyssa of Traken and Tegan Jovanka as the Doctor's new companions. They were released on DVD in 2007 under the title New Beginnings.
During these three stories in season twenty, the Black Guardian tries to have the Doctor assassinated for denying him the Key to Time. To this end, he employs the mysterious extraterrestrial English boys' school student Vislor Turlough.
The Trial of a Time Lord is the title of the fourteen-part serial that encompasses the entirety of Season 23. In the serial, the Sixth Doctor stands accused of transgressing the First Law of Time, with adventures from his past, present, and future examined and used as evidence of guilt or innocence.
In the revived series of Doctor Who, story arcs span an entire series. Under Russell T Davies, these arcs involved a repeated phrase that generally went unnoticed by the characters, only receiving any actual story-based attention when they were explained in the finale. In contrast, Steven Moffat's arcs have been evolving storylines woven through individual episode plots, with entire episodes dedicated to more information given to the characters.
The phrase "Bad Wolf" first appeared in episode 2 of the 2005 series, when the Moxx of Balhoon spoke the phrase "Indubitably, this is the Bad Wolf scenario", and then in every story of that series thereafter. It also occasionally appeared in the 2006 to 2008 series, as well as in online and print spin-off media; in the latter it often constitutes an in-joke or a continuity nod. It was eventually revealed that "Bad Wolf" was actually Rose Tyler, who had gained godlike powers after absorbing the energy of the time vortex at the heart of the TARDIS, while attempting to get back to Satellite 5 to help the Doctor defeat the Daleks in "The Parting of the Ways", which granted her omnipotent reality warping abilities.
When she arrived, Rose destroyed the entire Dalek fleet, including the Dalek Emperor, and brought Captain Jack Harkness, who had been killed by the Daleks, back to life and he became immortal as a result. She then took the words "Bad Wolf" from the sign in Satellite 5 and spread them through all space and time as clues for her past self to return to Satellite 5 and save the Doctor (i.e. to do what she had just done).
| “ | I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself. I take the words. I scatter them ... in time, and space. A message to lead myself here. | ” |
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—Rose Tyler as the Bad Wolf entity, in "The Parting of the Ways". |
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The Doctor then had to extract the TARDIS energy from Rose before it killed her. He did this by kissing her and absorbing the energy himself, which saved her life but caused all the cells in his body to start decomposing, so that he had to regenerate. Once the power of the time vortex was removed, Rose could not completely recall her actions and was surprised at Captain Jack's recovery from death in "Journey's End". It was seen in "Turn Left" as a message for the Doctor.
The 2006 series featured "Torchwood" as its arc word, an anagram of "Doctor Who" that was used as the codename for the new series of Doctor Who while filming its first few episodes and on the 'rushes' tapes to ensure they were not intercepted.[4]
The word first appeared in Doctor Who in the 2005 series episode "Bad Wolf", as an answer in the game show, The Weakest Link. The actual "Torchwood" arc of Doctor Who spanned from "The Christmas Invasion" to "Doomsday".[5] The word was seeded throughout the 2006 series as a means for the BBC to introduce the basis for a spin-off series, Torchwood, set in modern-day Cardiff and involving a mysterious organisation which investigates alien activities and crime. The series features John Barrowman as former companion Jack Harkness and premiered in October 2006. References to Torchwood have also since reappeared in Doctor Who. The Doctor and Rose repeatedly encountered mentions of "Torchwood" throughout the series until the episodes "Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday", which included Torchwood as an integral part of the plot. Here the Doctor meets the organisation, and learns they have been monitoring him (his Tenth incarnation) since his encounter with Queen Victoria. As a conclusion of the story arc, the Torchwood Institute's London branch was destroyed. In addition to episodes of the 2006 series, the organisation was given a similar treatment to "Bad Wolf" in spin-off material such as web literature, webcasts and novels.
The name "Mr Saxon" has appeared several times, beginning with a newspaper headline in "Love & Monsters" in Series 2 (2006), and continuing with a mention of him in dialogue in "The Runaway Bride" (2006), where it was established as the new arc word for Series 3 (2007). In "Smith and Jones", the first episode of the third series, a "Vote Saxon" poster is seen in the background when Martha Jones is invited into the TARDIS by the Doctor; an identical poster had previously been seen in the Torchwood episode "Captain Jack Harkness". The arc was more thoroughly explained in "The Sound of Drums" (2007), which connected the rise of the mysterious Mr Saxon as a new Prime Minister to an old enemy of the Doctor's, as well as the fall of Harriet Jones (Penelope Wilton) from office at the Doctor's own hands after she ordered Torchwood to shoot down the Sycorax spaceship during "The Christmas Invasion".
In "Utopia", when the resurrected Master (John Simm) attempted to steal the TARDIS, the Doctor used his sonic screwdriver to lock the TARDIS to no more than 18 months prior to its last location, which was February 2008. Arriving in Britain during the power vacuum left by Harriet Jones' departure, the Master created an alias for himself as "Mr Harold Saxon", and quickly rose to prominence as Secretary of State for Defence; he redesigned the cabinet rooms destroyed during "World War Three", established the "Archangel network" of satellites, and commissioned the UNIT aircraft carrier Valiant. Using the Archangel network, Saxon sent subliminal messages encoded in the sound of drums to cause the British people to trust him and ensure his election as Prime Minister. The satellite signal also counteracted the Doctor's telepathic ability to sense the presence of another Time Lord on Earth.
The Master began setting traps for the Doctor through his companion Martha (Freema Agyeman) and her family. He funded Professor Lazarus's genetic rejuvenation experiments in "The Lazarus Experiment", and ensured that Lazarus hired Martha's sister Tish (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) to lure the Doctor. Using the events of "The Lazarus Experiment" at LazLabs as a catalyst, he ensured Martha's mother Francine's distrust of the Doctor, and manipulated her to trace Martha's phone calls on her superphone. When the Doctor, Martha and Jack (John Barrowman) return to Earth in 2008, the Master had established his identity as Mr Saxon, and married Lucy Saxon (Alexandra Moen). He ruled Earth for a year, but was eventually defeated when the world's remaining population — united by Martha's stories about the Doctor — psychically connected to the Doctor, enabling him to rejuvenate himself and overpower the Master.
The Medusa Cascade is an area of space where the stolen planets in Series 4 Finale are taken to. Russell T Davies hinted in Doctor Who Magazine that the next arc word for Doctor Who was something spoken by The Master in the final two episodes of Series 3—"The Sound of Drums" and "Last of the Time Lords".[6] He has since stated that there is no specific arc word, but each episode of series four will have an element of the arc theme, which will carry through to the finale.
Four takes a somewhat different approach to the previous series. Russell T Davies says: "You've got to watch and listen closely. It's been seeded for a long time, with small but vital references going all the way back to series one. And remember the Master, in 'Last of the Time Lords', mentioning the Medusa Cascade? Oh, that's going to come back to haunt us..."
—Doctor Who Magazine #394
Series 4 is seeded with allusions to the "bees disappearing", planets gone missing, and continues with further allusions to the Shadow Proclamation and the Medusa Cascade. Its series finale, the two-part story "The Stolen Earth" and "Journey's End", sees the climax of many references and events made over the course of the entire revived series. Most of these culminate in "The Stolen Earth". The disappearing bees are explained as bees, being in alien in origin, leaving the Earth in anticipation of its "theft" from space by Davros (Julian Bleach), the same fate that befell the Lost Moon of Poosh, Pyrovilia and Adipose 3. The Doctor later reveals that the 27 missing planets were a second out of sync.
Furthermore, the Doctor's acquisition of his severed hand and Martha's superphone at the end of Series 3 become key plot devices in the episode. The former plot device allows for the creation of a clone Doctor, and the latter facilitates a reunion of the Doctor and several past companions (from 2005 to 2008), as well as a crossover with spin-offs Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. Harriet Jones' (Penelope Wilton) storyline from Series 1 and "The Christmas Invasion" is also concluded. The Doctor's decision to let Mr. Copper (Clive Swift) remain on earth in "Voyage of the Damned" has beneficial consequences in the finale episodes, too. Finally, Davros' attempt to guilt the Doctor triggers archive footage flashbacks from the previous four series, showcasing various guest actors whose characters died.
Additionally, Series 4 contains an ongoing motif of cloning: the Sontarans are a clone species and create a Martha clone, and pivotally, in the series finale, the Doctor himself is cloned, providing a solution to the end of the universe.
It was noted by Ood Sigma in "Planet of the Ood" (2008) that the Doctor's "song" would be ending soon. In reference to the Doctor's encounter with who he believes to be future regeneration of himself in "The Next Doctor", Russell T Davies commented to the Radio Times: "the Doctor finds himself staring at that inevitable day when his tenth incarnation must die." For the 2009–10 specials, beginning with "Planet of the Dead", a prophetic character tells the Doctor, "It is returning. It is returning through the dark, and then Doctor... oh but then... he will knock four times." Subsequently, in "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith" (a crossover with The Sarah Jane Adventures), the Trickster mentions that "the Gate" is waiting for the Doctor, foreshadowing the events of "The End of Time". In "The Waters of Mars", the Doctor contemplates the four knocks; he tries to save the life of Adelaide Brooke (Lindsay Duncan), whose death is a fixed point in time, and tries to prove to himself that he is above the laws of time. Ood Sigma later appears to the Doctor, who takes it as a sign of his impending death; in defiance, he takes part in a number of unseen adventures between then and "The End of Time" to delay the eventuality.
In "The End of Time", the Doctor tells Wilf (Bernard Cribbins), for the first time in explicit terms, that he has grown attached to the individual identity of his present incarnation. He fears a literal death, but adds that even regeneration would amount to a loss of self, and a "new man" taking over where he left off. What is returning through the dark is revealed to be Gallifrey, in furtherance of the Time Lords' design to escape the Time Lock and the Time War, and to destroy time itself as a means to ascend victorious beyond time and space. The Doctor defeats the Time Lords, and believes he has escaped his fate, but at the moment of relief, there are four hesitant knocks—Wilfred is trapped within a sealed radiation chamber, and can only be saved by the self-sacrifice of another. He switches places with Wilf (breaking the lock) and absorbs radiation that floods the chamber. His explosive regeneration occurs in the TARDIS after a protracted period of slow dying.
In the first episode of Series 5, the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) meets young Amelia Pond (Caitlin Blackwood) later Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) who shows him a scary crack in her bedroom wall, which he recognises as a crack in "the skin of the universe". Later, as the Doctor and Amy travel, they are unaware of similar-shaped cracks that appear on the hull of Starship UK in "The Beast Below", in a wall in the Cabinet War Rooms in "Victory of the Daleks", or in a kitchen in "The Lodger". The Doctor also hides an image of the crack on the TARDIS monitor from Amy at the end of "The Eleventh Hour". Throughout his encounters with the cracks, the Doctor is warned about the Pandorica, which he dismisses as "a fairytale", and that "silence will fall" when "the Pandorica opens". The nature of the cracks is revealed in "Flesh and Stone", when the Doctor discovers that the crack is a result of a time explosion on 26 June 2010, the day of Amy's wedding to Rory (Arthur Darvill). They observe people consumed by the crack, erasing them from history; in "The Vampires of Venice", they learn of the crack's threat to other species and civilisations. In "Cold Blood", Rory is absorbed by a crack underground, causing Amy to forget him. Having pulled a piece of TARDIS shrapnel out of the crack, the Doctor worries for its future.
In "The Pandorica Opens", River Song (Alex Kingston) recovers a work of Vincent Van Gogh (Tony Curran) showing the destruction of the TARDIS; the Doctor connects the painting with the Pandorica. The Pandorica is revealed as a trap for the Doctor created by his greatest foes from elements of Amy's childhood imagination, designed to lock the Doctor away and prevent the timestream damage that they believe the Doctor will cause, even though the Doctor warns that the time explosion will be caused by the exploding TARDIS. When the TARDIS explodes, "The Big Bang" shows it creates a new universe, containing only the Earth, its moon, and a sun-like light source- the exploding TARDIS, the TARDIS having put itself into a time loop at the moment of its own destruction to save River Song who was trapped in the TARDIS at the time. Later escaping the Pandorica, the Doctor uses the remaining atoms of the original universe inside the Pandorica to restore the universe to normal- comparing it to cloning a body from a single cell- and closing the cracks, though remains concerned at what caused the TARDIS to explode in the first place. The storyline continues in Series 6, focusing on the agency behind the TARDIS explosion and the recurring phrase "silence will fall".[7]
While previous series have used an "arc word" to tie episodes together, series 6 used a more serialized plot, encompassing a larger story over the entire run. It continues the arc word of Series 5, the phrase "silence will fall", left unresolved from before.[8]
Within the larger plot, Amy, Rory, and River witness the death of the Doctor, 200 years older than they last meet him, at the hands of a figure in a spacesuit on the shores of Lake Silenco, Utah, on 22 April 2011. When the three encounter the Doctor again, the younger version they remember, they decide to not inform him about his death; however, the Doctor learns of this in time after accessing the database of a Teselecta shapeshifting time-travelling robot, aware that it is concerned a "fixed point" in time. The Doctor and his companions learn that events are being driven by the Silence, a religious order that seek to prevent the Doctor from answering the oldest question in the universe, lest "silence will fall"; their agents include an alien species that are able to make people forget their presence when they turn to look away, and agents like Madame Kovarian, who wear "eye drives", eye patches that help to record and remember their encounters with these aliens.
During their travels, the Doctor discovers Amy has been captured by the Silence, and replaced by a doppleganger made of the living organic liquid, the Flesh; Amy, while captive, gives birth to her daughter, Melody, who was conceived aboard the TARDIS on Amy's wedding night, and as a result, has gained Time Lord-like DNA. The Doctor launches a rescue attempt to rescue Amy, but Kovarian tricks the Doctor again, making off with Melody and asserting that they will train her to be a weapon against the Doctor. At this point, River Song reveals that she is Melody. In a later adventure, the Doctor, Amy, and Rory meet a much younger River after her regeneration, who proceeds to try to kill the Doctor. River nearly kills the Doctor, but becomes sympathetic and gives up her remaining regenerations to keep the Doctor alive. The Doctor leaves her in the far future, where she becomes a doctor of archaeology to follow the Doctor through time, but is soon caught again by Madame Kovarian and placed in a spacesuit to await the Doctor at Lake Silenco.
The Doctor leaves Amy and Rory on Earth after a harrowing adventure, and spends the next 200 years travelling on his own, trying to avoid his death. Upon meeting the crew of the Teselecta while trying to determine the Silence's plan, the Doctor schemes with them to pose as the Doctor at his death. The "Doctor" arrives at the lake, and meets River in the spacesuit, but she attempts to rewrite the fixed event by not firing at the Doctor, causing time's progression to stop. As the reality created by River's actions begins to crumble, the "Doctor" weds River on the spot, allowing him to show her that he is really the Teselecta, the real Doctor monitoring from inside it. They are able to restore time to normal, and the "Doctor" is again shot by River and killed. River later informs Amy and Rory of this truth, while on his own, the Doctor acknowledges that the ruse will allow him to slip back into the shadows to continue his good deeds. However, the Doctor remains troubled by the oldest question in the universe, "Doctor who?"
The seventh series will be a continuation of the story arc established by the fifth and sixth series: the continued attempts on the Doctor's life by the Silence, the Doctor now forced to return to "working in the shadows", a battle on the Fields of Trenzalore, the Fall of the Eleventh and the first question hiding in plain sight, lest the universe falls apart; Doctor Who?
Other story and character arcs comprise a number of other episodes across the programme's history:
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