 After
being put on trail by his own people, the Time Lords, 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".
Cross
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. 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,
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. 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).
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). However, he had a strong streak of compassion and he always tried to see the viewpoint of others. He was always concerned for the well being of those around him especially his female companions. 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, 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. 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).
The
Doctor did mellow over the course of time, and, when his own race
were threatened and he managed, with the help of his former incarnations,
to defeat the mad Time Lord Omega, his own people 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). Even so, the TARDIS still
seemed to end up back on Earth, and the Doctor seemed happy that
this was so, actually boasting about his status in UNIT when investigating
missing scientists at a conference. 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. At the same time,
the Doctor was clearly shocked at Yates’s betrayal, demonstrating
how highly he had valued the captain’s friendship.
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, he knew that he had
no option and as he suffers an overdose of lethal radiation he is
forced to regenerate again. The Doctor manages to return to his TARDIS
which returns him to Earth and the UNIT lab. As his body began to
change the Brigadier muttered 'Here we go again!' (Planet of the
Spiders).
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The
Third Doctor
(1970 - 1974 & 1983) |
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The
Sound Vault |
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| Jo
Grant |
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The Best Doctor
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if I am your favourite Doctor |
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(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 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 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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