Dr. Who….

Do you know all the regenerations of Doctor Who?

I just finished reading SHADA, by Garth Roberts. It is the Lost Adventure by Douglas Adams, of THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY fame, a regular Doctor Who script writer, and so much more. It’s the story of the Time Lord’s prison for those really bad Time Lords. One would think there should be a place for The Master. Sigh. But no, no mention here.

And I’m not talking about  the most recent regenerations of The Master, although they are very bad, very wicked Time Lords. No, I mean the very campy and almost more scary Masters of the 1960-70 Doctor Who.  Like the Terrance Dicks books that used the Tom Baker Dr. Who as the main character, SHADA also uses the fourth reincarnation or regenerated Doctor.

The book jacket to one of Dicks books proclaims–He’s tall and thin, wears a motley array of garments that includes an incredibly long scarf and a battered, wide-brimmed hat–and he’s a centuries old Time Lord. 

Yeah, that Doctor Who.  The one of the toothy grin, the flash of insanity in his eyes when he had his first initial burst of an idea and it went wrong, the flapping of his long coat, the flying scarf [which I was always nervous would hang him some day 🙂 and the one with the longest run 1974-81] the one with K-9. Back when he wasn’t the LAST of the Time Lords.  In SHADA, Doctor Who is around 532 years old. And there are still Time Lords and the planet Gallifrey.

So, not the 900+ Doctor of the more recent regenerations. Although, out of all the new ones, I thought Christopher Eccleston did the best job of staying true to the Doctor that I was first fascinated with in back in the early 70’s when I watched it on PBS in LA. The sort of nutty one who would have been a blast to travel with.

In SHADA, the Doctor has to remember the Time Lord prison in order to save the universe from THE UNIVERSAL MIND. The jacket cover suggests that Skagra is a Time Lord,  at the end of the book, Doctor Who says he’s from Drornid, a Gallifreyan colony. Skagra is a humorless, egomaniac bent on universal domination and, of course, the Doctor has to stop him, but first he has to….

No. I won’t tell you what he has to do. Read the book. Enjoy the story. It goes back to the hammy, over the top humor and story line of the 4th Doctor. The one who seemed to have THE most fun playing the part.