 After
being put on trial by his own people, the Time Lords - and having
been forced to attend to some missions for them they officially
wanted to avoid being associated with - The Doctor's punishment for all the meddling he has done is a forced regeneration
and to be exiled on Earth with his knowledge of how to operate
the TARDIS removed.
After recovering in hospital, where it is disclosed that he
has 2 hearts, a pulse of only 10 beats a minute and non-human
blood, The Doctor finds himself in an uneasy alliance with the
British branch of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce
(UNIT) which is led by Brigadier
Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart who he met during the
story "The
Invasion", agreeing to a position as Scientific
Advisor for the newly-formed ‘anti-alien’ organisation
in exchange for access to materials that might allow him to
repair the TARDIS.
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| Spearhead From Space |
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with his own people The Doctor's main priority is to get his TARDIS working
again and UNIT is the ideal place to obtain the equipment for him
to do so. However, due to the many alien threats and invasions
that UNIT became involved in The Doctor always ended up speeding
to the Brigadier's side, but his dedication to his new home remained
evident even on occasions where its sacrifice would have allowed
him to regain his ability to travel through the galaxy ("The
Claws of Axos", "Verdigris"). During this period of
the shows history the viewer was presented with many fast vehicles,
thrilling high
speed chases, lots of interesting gadgets, Jon's passion for flamboyant
clothes and his piercing face of tremendous mobility. (After his
regeneration the Third Doctor commented that his new face would be
useful on Delphon where the inhabitants communicated with their eyebrows).
He dressed very gaudily in a frilled shirt and a velvet jacket and
was described as 'A Dandy,' by his first incarnation and 'Fancy-Pants,'
by his second. He enjoyed the finer things of life, including good
food and fine wine and he relished in the task as an 'Inter-planetary
Crusader'.
The
Doctor's various vehicles included speed boats, hovercrafts, a gyrocopter,
and the Whomobile, a strange saucer-like vehicle with the ability,
thanks to seventies television, to fly. However, The Doctor's most
famous vehicle was a souped-up bright yellow Edwardian roadster,
equipped with such diverse technology as an anti-theft force field,
a remote control unit allowing him to drive from a distance, and
a minimum inertia hyperdrive allowing him to drive at breakneck speeds
with no danger to himself or others, which he nicknamed Bessie and
was later used by the Fourth and
Seventh Doctors during later reunions with UNIT. His brilliance and
love
of gadgets meant that he was always tinkering together numerous items
to create an outlandish device to deal with whatever menace he was
currently facing, once even cobbling together a Time Flow Analogue
from a wine bottle, forks, a corkscrew, a coffee-maker, a bunch of
keys, a bottle of ink and a cup of tea leaves to disrupt the Master’s
attempt to use the TOMTIT machine ("The
Time Monster").
He was also rarely without his trusty sonic screwdriver,
which he could always depended upon to get him out of trouble, and
is well-remembered for his catch phrase of 'Reverse the polarity
of the neutron flow' (Although he is only recorded as having
said this once).
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| Terror of the Autons |
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Whereas
William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton played
the part of The Doctor more as a thinker, and so leaving the rough stuff to the
younger male companions, The Third Doctor was much stronger, more athletic and
more of a man of action, always ready to tackle the villains in person especially
with his flair for Venusian Aikido (Allowing him to disarm and disable his foes
with just a touch); a particularly impressive feat, as many incarnations have
later noted that Venusian martial arts are very difficult for a creature to master
when they only possess two arms. However, he had a strong streak of compassion
and he always tried to see the viewpoint of others, even giving his old enemies
the Ice Warriors a chance to prove their innocence when investigating a murder
on the planet Peladon despite his negative history with them ("The
Curse of Peladon"). While he could be compassionate for others, assuring a Thal
soldier that courage was being frightened and taking action rather than rejecting
fear completely ("Planet
of the Daleks"), he risked his life to inform
the governor of an Earth colonised by the Daleks that he was nothing but a coward
for collaborating with the Daleks, prompting the governor to allow him to escape
and erase that timeline ("Day
of the Daleks").
He was always concerned for the well being of those around him especially his
female companions, once hesitating to destroy The
Master’s TARDIS to break
his control of the powerful Chronovore Kronos as that action would have killed
the currently-imprisoned Jo Grant as well ("The Time Monster"). Like
his predecessors all life was important but now he was more willing to put his
own life on the line when things got dangerous. The Doctor loved being the centre
of attention and he needed constant reminders of his brilliance and lots of admiration,
which were generally supplied by his assistants. Jo
Grant filled this role perfectly,
becoming almost like a daughter to him as they faced such threats as The Master,
the Daleks, and the Chronovores, Jo growing and maturing under his tutelage,
and he was truly sorry when she left him to get married.
His
sense of humour and comic timing could ridicule the many pompous
bureaucrats he came across. However, his intolerance of fools, especially
those who did not heed his warnings and his greater dislike of authority
often got the better of him. 'I sometimes think that the term "military
intelligence" is a contradiction,' he once commented. Frequently
the Brigadier would have to intervene to smooth things over. Even
though The Doctor and the Brigadier had their share of disagreements
and The Doctor would be quick to criticises or take advantage of
the Brigadier they soon became the best of friends, forming a bond
that would endure through all of The Doctor’s future incarnations
no matter how else The Doctor s might change or whatever personal
conflicts the two might have, such as when The Doctor disagreed with
The Brigadier’s decision to destroy the Silurians ("Doctor
Who and the Silurians"). In many ways,
in a somewhat ironic touch, his affiliation with UNIT, although initially
a reluctant one, made him an ever more authoritative figure than
ever before, as he could now actually demonstrate that he had official
authority to get involved in the crisis that he now had to deal with
(Although the Ninth and Tenth
Doctors have since used psychic paper
to get around that problem).
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| The Dæmons |
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The
Doctor did mellow over the course of time, accepting those brief
occasions where the Time Lords sent the TARDIS to other planets
on missions for them with calm acceptance rather than the hostility
he had displayed for them in the beginning, simply grateful
for the chance to see other worlds regardless of how limited
the opportunity was (Most likely used to such treatment from
them after they used his second incarnation in a similar manner
between his trial and his exile ("World
Game")). Despite those occasions where he assisted
them in some crisis or another - such as when they sent him
to the planet Peladon during a conference to decide whether
to admit it to the Galactic Federation ("The Curse of Peladon"),
when they sought his aid in preventing The Master gaining control
of the Doomsday Weapon ("Colony
in Space"), or when - his exile was only lifted when
the Time Lords themselves were directed threatened by the insane
ancient Time Lord Omega and
were forced to send The Doctor’s past selves to aid him.
After the three Doctors had defeated Omega, the other two Doctors
being returned to their proper places in time, the other Time
Lords admitted that he had been right to interfere, subsequently
releasing him from his exile and allowing him to wander of his
own accord through time and space once again. ("The
Three Doctors").
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| Carnival of Monsters |
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Even
after his freedom was restored, the TARDIS still seemed to regularly
return to UNIT HQ, and The Doctor seemed happy that this was
so, actually boasting about his status in UNIT when investigating
missing scientists at a conference ("The
Time Warrior").
Despite his unorthodox attitude, The Doctor also won a great
deal of respect from his colleagues in UNIT; when he was framed
for bringing dinosaurs into the present by a group whose members
included a general and the traitorous Captain
Mike Yates, despite all the evidence against The Doctor, Sergeant
Benton not only believed he was innocent but actually offered
to be knocked out so that The Doctor could escape, The Brigadier
subsequently disregarding a general’s orders to recapture
The Doctor to give his friend time to find the answers he sought.
At the same time, The Doctor was clearly shocked at Yates’s
betrayal, demonstrating how highly he had valued the captain’s
friendship ("Invasion
of the Dinosaurs").
In
the end however, The Doctor is finally forced into a confrontation
with the Giant
Spiders of Metabelis 3 and the only way he could defeat
them was through self-sacrifice. Though scared, a meeting with his
old teacher helped him to acknowledge that he had no option and as
he suffers an overdose of lethal radiation he is forced to regenerate
again. After apparently spending a decade drifting through the time
vortex as he died of radiation poisoning, The Doctor manages to return
to his TARDIS which returns him to Earth and the UNIT lab - only
three weeks after his departure from their perspective - weakly explaining
that the TARDIS had brought him home. As his body began to change
the Brigadier muttered 'Here we go again!' ("Planet
of the Spiders").
(In an alternate
timeline created by the time-travelling voodoo cult known as
Faction
Paradox, an encounter with his Eighth incarnation
resulted in the Third Doctor and Sarah
Jane Smith travelling to the planet
Dust,
where The Doctor regenerated after being shot by a defender
of the planet who believed that killing him was the only way
to ensure there would be no more danger brought to her world.
As a result, The Doctor was infected by a Paradox virus when
his immune system was occupied by the regeneration, the virus
gradually mutating his system over his subsequent lives until,
by the time of the Eighth Doctor, he would turn into an agent
of the Faction. However, the TARDIS managed to preserve the ‘true’ timeline
within itself - to the extent that the ‘temporal ghost’ of
the Third Doctor that should have existed appeared in the TARDIS
control room as the virus progressed, communicating with his
future self to help him try and find a resolution for the crisis
- until the Eighth Doctor managed to restore the reality that
had been in "The
Ancestor Cell" by draining the TARDIS’s
power and forcing the universe to ‘choose’ whether
the Dust or the Metabelis regeneration was the third regeneration,
thus resetting history back to the way it should have been).
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| Planet of the Spiders |
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Even
after his regeneration, this Doctor’s skills in his various
fields have continued to be admired and respected by his future
selves. When the Sixth
Doctor’s morphic field was destabilised after a matter-duplicating
entity drew the TARDIS into a pocket universe, causing him to
shift between his past incarnations as his body tried to stabilise
itself, he instinctively tapped into the Third Doctor’s
persona when he was called upon to engage in physical combat
("State
of Change"), and when the Seventh Doctor was forced
to disarm a cobalt bomb connected to his companion Ace’s
brain, he used the telepathic circuits to summon the persona
of his third incarnation as he was uncertain about his own technical
expertise in dealing with such a delicate piece of technology
("Timewyrm:
Genesys").
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