Post by Glen on Dec 17, 2019 16:14:42 GMT -5
originally posted HERE
.doctor who
On a chilly November day in 1963, television screens across England flickered to life with a hum as a new show entitled Doctor Who began it’s dark, black-and-white pilot episode; but no one could have foreseen it’s colorful and wide-spread future. Produced by the BBC, Doctor Who depicts the fantastic adventures of a Time Lord – an alien from the planet Gallifrey – known only as “the Doctor”, who travels through time and space in his ship, the TARDIS (an acronym for Time and Relative Dimension in Space), whose exterior appears to be a blue 1950s Police Public Call Box. With companions ranging from across the universe, the Doctor explores both time and space; solving countless problems while facing alien threats and righting the wrongs of the universe.
The character of the Doctor was initially shrouded in mystery. All that was known about him in the program’s early days was that he was an eccentric alien traveler of great intelligence who battled injustice while exploring time and space. However, not only did the irascible and slightly sinister Doctor quickly mellow into a more compassionate figure, it was eventually revealed that he had been on the run from his own people, the Time Lords of Gallifrey. Along with a binary vascular system (two hearts), the Doctor has the ability to regenerate his body when near death. Introduced into the storyline as a way of continuing the series when the writers were faced with the departure of lead actor William Hartnell (the first Doctor) in 1966 due to health problems, it has continued to be a major element of the series, allowing for the recasting of the lead actor when the need arises. The old serial The Deadly Assassin established that a Time Lord could only regenerate twelve times, for a total of thirteen incarnations. To date, the Doctor has gone through this process and its resulting after-effects on nine occasions, with each of his incarnations having his own quirks and abilities but otherwise sharing the memories and experience of the previous incarnations.
The show itself is listed in Guinness World Records as the longest-running science fiction television show in the world and is a significant and iconic part of British popular culture. It has been recognized widely for its imaginative stories, creative (though often low-budget) special effects during its original run, and pioneering use of electronic music. In Britain and elsewhere, the show has become a cult television favorite and has influenced generations of British television professionals, many of whom grew up watching the series. It has received recognition from critics and the public as one of the finest British television programs, including the BAFTA Award for Best Drama Series in 2006. During its original run, Doctor Who ran for twenty-six seasons of varying lengths—encompassing more than one hundred and fifty stories and over five hundred episodes—before its run finally came to an end in December 1989. In the last scene of "Survival", broadcast on December 6th, the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy, the seventh actor to play the lead role) and his companion Ace (Sophie Aldred) walked down the hill into new adventures. That was the last broadcast of the original Doctor Who series. In 1990, the BBC announced that they were putting Doctor Who on "hiatus" until a way to "bring the series into the '90s" was found. In reality, the Doctor Who production office was shut down, in part because producer Philip Segal (then at Columbia Pictures) had contacted the BBC enquiring about the rights to Doctor Who. At the time, the BBC was very interested in getting outside production companies to make its programs, and Doctor Who being produced in-house was becoming very much an anachronism. Also, the show's ratings had never really recovered after the BBC's first attempt to cancel it in 1985 (which was reversed after public outcry).
In 1991, Virgin Publishing began releasing original Doctor Who novels under the banner of Doctor Who: The New Adventures. These purported to tell stories "too big and too broad for the small screen". The New Adventures brought a more adult sensibility to Doctor Who, with deeper characterization and themes. In 1994, Virgin also began publishing novels about the First through Sixth Doctors, under the banner of Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures.
Doctor Who returned to the television for the show's 30th anniversary in 1993, after a fashion. A short (13-minute), two-part story, "Dimensions in Time", was made for the British charity Children in Need, and filmed in a new 3-D television process. In keeping with the anniversary theme, the story featured all the living Doctors and many companions. It was also a crossover with popular BBC soap Eastenders. With all these elements included in so short a time, the story doesn't hold much water; most fans regard Dimensions in Time as a bit of an embarrassment.
However, in 1995, Philip Segal established a co-production deal between the BBC and Universal Pictures for a Doctor Who television movie, which was filmed and broadcast in 1996. In the United States, the TV movie was broadcast on the Fox network.
Filmed in Vancouver and starring Paul McGann as the Eighth incarnation, the TV Movie was a continuation of the original series (beginning with Sylvester McCoy's Doctor, who regenerated into McGann some 20 minutes into the film). There were, however, several changes from the series' continuity, most notably the claim (which was later disproved in the finale of Series Four in July 2008) that the Doctor is half-human. Also (at the insistence of Fox executives), the Doctor shared a few kisses and hints of romance with the companion character, Dr. Grace Holloway, something which the original series had deliberately shied away from.
Segal said at the time that this project was intended as a "back-door pilot", but it is unclear how realistic a prospect this actually was. At any rate, in the United States the TV movie faced strong competition and was watched by only 5.5 million viewers (9% of the television audience for that night), which was far too few for Fox to be interested in a series or further films. In Britain, the TV movie was much more successful, with 9.08 million viewers (the 9th most watched show that week). But, under the terms of the co-production deal, without American interest no more Doctor Who could be made for television until Universal's rights expired. In 1999, Big Finish Productions obtained the license to make new Doctor Who audio dramas. They began by releasing stories featuring the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors (Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor, declined to participate). The original actors were joined by most of their companions from the television series. In 2001, Big Finish released their first audio featuring the Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann), and paired him with self-styled "Edwardian Adventuress" Charley Pollard (played by actress India Fisher), whom he rescued from the R101 airship disaster. There have now been four "seasons" of Eighth Doctor stories from Big Finish, and they've recently put the Eighth Doctor into the regular rotation of past Doctors rather than releasing his adventures in consecutive months. While Doctor Who was off the television, it thrived in almost every other medium conceivable. And that's not to mention the stage plays, the computer game, the charity fiction anthologies, and even a pinball game. But now it's back in television, where it all began.
The current revived Doctor Who series premiered in March of 2005 with a manic, Northern-accented and leather-clad Doctor portrayed by brusque and winningly conflicted Christopher Eccleston. The first episode of the series, Rose, saw the Doctor traveling by himself, trying to seek out the Nestene Consciousness (originally seen in the Third Doctor’s first episode, Spearhead from Space, with Jon Pertwee as the lead actor), but stumbles upon a London shopgirl named Rose Tyler (portrayed by British sensation Billie Piper), whose job he blows up in an attempt to destroy an alien transceiver. Rose, at the climax of the episode, ends up saving the Doctor from the Autons, plastic mannequins which are controlled by the Nestene Consciousness, and in thanks he extends the offer of traveling the very reaches of the universe. After initially declining and watching the TARDIS vanish into thin air, Rose is surprised to see it appear again eighteen seconds later, the Doctor stepping out to mention that “it also travels in time,” to which Rose responds by running through the TARDIS doors and into her new future. In the second episode, The End of the World, the Doctor takes Rose to the year five billion – the day the sun expands and destroys the Earth. It is during this episode that the audience learns that not only is the Doctor a Time Lord, he’s the last of the Time Lords; the sole survivor of his planet due to the Time War. It is unspecified whether it was this incarnation of the Doctor or the previous who fought in the war, though popular continuity argues that it was the events of the Time War that caused the Eighth Doctor's regeneration into the Ninth. The Doctor shows Rose the wonders of time travel, the ability to “visit days that are dead and gone” to the rest of the world by taking her to Cardiff, 1889, where the dead are apparently rising, and Charles Dickens gets to meet the dynamic duo. It is revealed in this episode (titled The Unquiet Dead) that a rift in space and time is running through the heart of Cardiff, allowing a gaseous alien species known as the Gelth to slip into Earth and invade it. The time travelers stop it, of course, with the help of a slightly psychic servant girl (“The things you’ve seen – the Darkness.. The big bad wolf!” she cries out after reading Rose’s mind), before whisking away to Rose’s modern time. Of course London doesn’t remain the place Rose is accustomed to, since an alien family, named the Slitheen, plan to rip apart the Earth and sell the land. This is easily solved by a missile blowing up 10 Downing Street. They then journey to Utah in 2012, where the Doctor found that a single Dalek, was being kept in a secret museum filled with alien artifacts. There, the first details of the Time War fought by the Time Lords and Daleks were revealed, and how it concluded with the mutual annihilation of both races, leaving the Doctor the last of the Time Lords. A young man named Adam Mitchell traveled with them from Utah.
The Doctor, Rose, and Adam traveled to the year 500,000 to Satellite Five, where they discover a plot by the Mighty Jagrafess (a gigantic, slimy, many-toothed alien) to manipulate Earth through its mass media. When Adam tries to smuggle future knowledge about the microchip back to his own time using Rose’s super-phone which the Doctor gave her, he became the first companion within Doctor Who’s history to be deliberately expelled from the TARDIS. Following this, Rose persuades the Doctor to return to the day her father, Pete Tyler, died. She says, simply, that she only wanted to be there for him – give him a hand to hold during his final minutes. However, the viewing of the incident upsets her greatly, and she runs away. After a plea to do it over again (which the Doctor surprisingly grants), Rose cannot bare to see her father killed, and instead saves him; ultimately creating a temporal paradox, which nearly leads to disaster until Pete understands the consequences of his being alive, and sacrifices himself to set time right once more.
While in the Time Vortex, the Doctor and Rose follow a mysterious spaceship to World War II London in 1941, and meet Captain Jack Harkness, a charming conman and former Time Agent from the 51st century, whose “retirement” from his previous life is due to two years of his memory being wiped. Jack's latest con nearly causes a deadly nanotechnological plague to sweep through the human race, turning all humans into gas mask zombies, but ends up risking his life to help the Doctor and Rose stop it from spreading. The Doctor offers the Captain a place in the TARDIS crew.
The trio goes back to Cardiff to refuel the TARDIS from the rift, but find that one of the Slitheen has survived, posing as Margaret Blaine, the city's mayor. Blaine (whose actual name is Blon Fel Fotch Pasameer Day Slitheen) planned to cause a nuclear power plant called Blaidd Drwg (Welsh for “Bad Wolf”) to melt down, in order to cause a planetary explosion that would catapult her back to her home world. At the culmination of the episode, however, she was exposed to the heart of the TARDIS, and regressed into an egg. It was during this episode that the Doctor first noticed that he and Rose had kept coming across the words "Bad Wolf".
When the Doctor and his companions become caught in a series of deadly versions of 20th Century game shows (Rose, for example, was placed in a version of The Weakest Link, where Anne Droid would vaporize the person who was eliminated in each round), they find themselves at the mercy of the Bad Wolf Corporation, based on Satellite Five, but a full century after their last visit during the year 500,000. However, the true enemy was soon revealed to be the Daleks; the Dalek Emperor had survived the Time War, and had rebuilt the Dalek race by transporting the humans who were eliminated from the games onto his ship, and sifting through their DNA until only hate remained; the basic form of a Dalek. The Doctor tricks Rose into entering the TARDIS and sends her back to her own time before attempting to destroy the Dalek army with a Delta Wave. In doing so, he would have been forced to destroy most of the human race, which he ultimately finds himself incapable of doing. Meanwhile, after seeing more "Bad Wolf" graffiti in 21st century London, Rose realizes that the words are somehow a message linking her to the Doctor and the war that lies hundreds of thousands of years into her future.
Managing to open up the heart of the TARDIS, she absorbs the energies of the Time Vortex, and becomes the Bad Wolf. “I create myself,” she tells the Doctor with a voice full of power, “I take the words-- I scatter them, through time and space. A message to lead myself here.” Rose possesses, quite literally, the powers of a god, and is able to see what is, what was, and what could be all in the same moment (something which the Doctor admits he sees all the time.) With her innumerable power, Rose destroys the entire Dalek fleet with a wave of her hand, and in so doing ends the Time War. She also unwittingly brings Captain Jack Harkness back to life, who had been shot dead by a Dalek only moments before. In order to save Rose from being consumed from within by these energies, the Doctor absorbs the Time Vortex himself, and they leave Jack behind, not knowing his fate. However, the damage to his cells causes the Doctor to regenerate into his tenth incarnation—currently portrayed by fan-favorite actor David Tennant. The Doctor continues to travel with Rose throughout the second series, but she is trapped in a parallel universe during the heart-wrenching “Doomsday” finale. Carrying his grief for her very plainly, the Doctor then takes on another companion for the following Christmas Special The Runaway Bride– Donna Noble, who appears again during the fourth series as his companion. Series three saw medical student Martha Jones as his traveling companion, and after her own decided departure, during the Christmas Special Voyage of the Damned, he befriends Astrid Peth, played by Kylie Minogue. Captain Jack Harkness (portrayed by actor John Barrowman) was slated to return in the 2006 series, but because his character was so complex and so well-received by the public, he earned his own spin-off series entitled Torchwood—which, curiously, is an anagram of Doctor Who. This lead to odd filming schedules, and his character made a brief three-episode appearance during the finale of the third series in 2007 before returning to Torchwood; the secret agency protecting the human race from alien threats, of which he is the director.
The current series of Doctor Who ended with the series four finale Journey’s End which featured several companions returning to the TARDIS to help the Doctor save the universe. Torchwood finished its second series, and is filming its third. Also within the little niche of spin-offs lies the children’s show the Sarah Jane Adventures – which features the companion of both the Third and Fourth Doctors, Sarah Jane Smith (portrayed by Elisabeth Sladen).
.doctor who
On a chilly November day in 1963, television screens across England flickered to life with a hum as a new show entitled Doctor Who began it’s dark, black-and-white pilot episode; but no one could have foreseen it’s colorful and wide-spread future. Produced by the BBC, Doctor Who depicts the fantastic adventures of a Time Lord – an alien from the planet Gallifrey – known only as “the Doctor”, who travels through time and space in his ship, the TARDIS (an acronym for Time and Relative Dimension in Space), whose exterior appears to be a blue 1950s Police Public Call Box. With companions ranging from across the universe, the Doctor explores both time and space; solving countless problems while facing alien threats and righting the wrongs of the universe.
The character of the Doctor was initially shrouded in mystery. All that was known about him in the program’s early days was that he was an eccentric alien traveler of great intelligence who battled injustice while exploring time and space. However, not only did the irascible and slightly sinister Doctor quickly mellow into a more compassionate figure, it was eventually revealed that he had been on the run from his own people, the Time Lords of Gallifrey. Along with a binary vascular system (two hearts), the Doctor has the ability to regenerate his body when near death. Introduced into the storyline as a way of continuing the series when the writers were faced with the departure of lead actor William Hartnell (the first Doctor) in 1966 due to health problems, it has continued to be a major element of the series, allowing for the recasting of the lead actor when the need arises. The old serial The Deadly Assassin established that a Time Lord could only regenerate twelve times, for a total of thirteen incarnations. To date, the Doctor has gone through this process and its resulting after-effects on nine occasions, with each of his incarnations having his own quirks and abilities but otherwise sharing the memories and experience of the previous incarnations.
The show itself is listed in Guinness World Records as the longest-running science fiction television show in the world and is a significant and iconic part of British popular culture. It has been recognized widely for its imaginative stories, creative (though often low-budget) special effects during its original run, and pioneering use of electronic music. In Britain and elsewhere, the show has become a cult television favorite and has influenced generations of British television professionals, many of whom grew up watching the series. It has received recognition from critics and the public as one of the finest British television programs, including the BAFTA Award for Best Drama Series in 2006. During its original run, Doctor Who ran for twenty-six seasons of varying lengths—encompassing more than one hundred and fifty stories and over five hundred episodes—before its run finally came to an end in December 1989. In the last scene of "Survival", broadcast on December 6th, the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy, the seventh actor to play the lead role) and his companion Ace (Sophie Aldred) walked down the hill into new adventures. That was the last broadcast of the original Doctor Who series. In 1990, the BBC announced that they were putting Doctor Who on "hiatus" until a way to "bring the series into the '90s" was found. In reality, the Doctor Who production office was shut down, in part because producer Philip Segal (then at Columbia Pictures) had contacted the BBC enquiring about the rights to Doctor Who. At the time, the BBC was very interested in getting outside production companies to make its programs, and Doctor Who being produced in-house was becoming very much an anachronism. Also, the show's ratings had never really recovered after the BBC's first attempt to cancel it in 1985 (which was reversed after public outcry).
In 1991, Virgin Publishing began releasing original Doctor Who novels under the banner of Doctor Who: The New Adventures. These purported to tell stories "too big and too broad for the small screen". The New Adventures brought a more adult sensibility to Doctor Who, with deeper characterization and themes. In 1994, Virgin also began publishing novels about the First through Sixth Doctors, under the banner of Doctor Who: The Missing Adventures.
Doctor Who returned to the television for the show's 30th anniversary in 1993, after a fashion. A short (13-minute), two-part story, "Dimensions in Time", was made for the British charity Children in Need, and filmed in a new 3-D television process. In keeping with the anniversary theme, the story featured all the living Doctors and many companions. It was also a crossover with popular BBC soap Eastenders. With all these elements included in so short a time, the story doesn't hold much water; most fans regard Dimensions in Time as a bit of an embarrassment.
However, in 1995, Philip Segal established a co-production deal between the BBC and Universal Pictures for a Doctor Who television movie, which was filmed and broadcast in 1996. In the United States, the TV movie was broadcast on the Fox network.
Filmed in Vancouver and starring Paul McGann as the Eighth incarnation, the TV Movie was a continuation of the original series (beginning with Sylvester McCoy's Doctor, who regenerated into McGann some 20 minutes into the film). There were, however, several changes from the series' continuity, most notably the claim (which was later disproved in the finale of Series Four in July 2008) that the Doctor is half-human. Also (at the insistence of Fox executives), the Doctor shared a few kisses and hints of romance with the companion character, Dr. Grace Holloway, something which the original series had deliberately shied away from.
Segal said at the time that this project was intended as a "back-door pilot", but it is unclear how realistic a prospect this actually was. At any rate, in the United States the TV movie faced strong competition and was watched by only 5.5 million viewers (9% of the television audience for that night), which was far too few for Fox to be interested in a series or further films. In Britain, the TV movie was much more successful, with 9.08 million viewers (the 9th most watched show that week). But, under the terms of the co-production deal, without American interest no more Doctor Who could be made for television until Universal's rights expired. In 1999, Big Finish Productions obtained the license to make new Doctor Who audio dramas. They began by releasing stories featuring the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors (Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor, declined to participate). The original actors were joined by most of their companions from the television series. In 2001, Big Finish released their first audio featuring the Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann), and paired him with self-styled "Edwardian Adventuress" Charley Pollard (played by actress India Fisher), whom he rescued from the R101 airship disaster. There have now been four "seasons" of Eighth Doctor stories from Big Finish, and they've recently put the Eighth Doctor into the regular rotation of past Doctors rather than releasing his adventures in consecutive months. While Doctor Who was off the television, it thrived in almost every other medium conceivable. And that's not to mention the stage plays, the computer game, the charity fiction anthologies, and even a pinball game. But now it's back in television, where it all began.
The current revived Doctor Who series premiered in March of 2005 with a manic, Northern-accented and leather-clad Doctor portrayed by brusque and winningly conflicted Christopher Eccleston. The first episode of the series, Rose, saw the Doctor traveling by himself, trying to seek out the Nestene Consciousness (originally seen in the Third Doctor’s first episode, Spearhead from Space, with Jon Pertwee as the lead actor), but stumbles upon a London shopgirl named Rose Tyler (portrayed by British sensation Billie Piper), whose job he blows up in an attempt to destroy an alien transceiver. Rose, at the climax of the episode, ends up saving the Doctor from the Autons, plastic mannequins which are controlled by the Nestene Consciousness, and in thanks he extends the offer of traveling the very reaches of the universe. After initially declining and watching the TARDIS vanish into thin air, Rose is surprised to see it appear again eighteen seconds later, the Doctor stepping out to mention that “it also travels in time,” to which Rose responds by running through the TARDIS doors and into her new future. In the second episode, The End of the World, the Doctor takes Rose to the year five billion – the day the sun expands and destroys the Earth. It is during this episode that the audience learns that not only is the Doctor a Time Lord, he’s the last of the Time Lords; the sole survivor of his planet due to the Time War. It is unspecified whether it was this incarnation of the Doctor or the previous who fought in the war, though popular continuity argues that it was the events of the Time War that caused the Eighth Doctor's regeneration into the Ninth. The Doctor shows Rose the wonders of time travel, the ability to “visit days that are dead and gone” to the rest of the world by taking her to Cardiff, 1889, where the dead are apparently rising, and Charles Dickens gets to meet the dynamic duo. It is revealed in this episode (titled The Unquiet Dead) that a rift in space and time is running through the heart of Cardiff, allowing a gaseous alien species known as the Gelth to slip into Earth and invade it. The time travelers stop it, of course, with the help of a slightly psychic servant girl (“The things you’ve seen – the Darkness.. The big bad wolf!” she cries out after reading Rose’s mind), before whisking away to Rose’s modern time. Of course London doesn’t remain the place Rose is accustomed to, since an alien family, named the Slitheen, plan to rip apart the Earth and sell the land. This is easily solved by a missile blowing up 10 Downing Street. They then journey to Utah in 2012, where the Doctor found that a single Dalek, was being kept in a secret museum filled with alien artifacts. There, the first details of the Time War fought by the Time Lords and Daleks were revealed, and how it concluded with the mutual annihilation of both races, leaving the Doctor the last of the Time Lords. A young man named Adam Mitchell traveled with them from Utah.
The Doctor, Rose, and Adam traveled to the year 500,000 to Satellite Five, where they discover a plot by the Mighty Jagrafess (a gigantic, slimy, many-toothed alien) to manipulate Earth through its mass media. When Adam tries to smuggle future knowledge about the microchip back to his own time using Rose’s super-phone which the Doctor gave her, he became the first companion within Doctor Who’s history to be deliberately expelled from the TARDIS. Following this, Rose persuades the Doctor to return to the day her father, Pete Tyler, died. She says, simply, that she only wanted to be there for him – give him a hand to hold during his final minutes. However, the viewing of the incident upsets her greatly, and she runs away. After a plea to do it over again (which the Doctor surprisingly grants), Rose cannot bare to see her father killed, and instead saves him; ultimately creating a temporal paradox, which nearly leads to disaster until Pete understands the consequences of his being alive, and sacrifices himself to set time right once more.
While in the Time Vortex, the Doctor and Rose follow a mysterious spaceship to World War II London in 1941, and meet Captain Jack Harkness, a charming conman and former Time Agent from the 51st century, whose “retirement” from his previous life is due to two years of his memory being wiped. Jack's latest con nearly causes a deadly nanotechnological plague to sweep through the human race, turning all humans into gas mask zombies, but ends up risking his life to help the Doctor and Rose stop it from spreading. The Doctor offers the Captain a place in the TARDIS crew.
The trio goes back to Cardiff to refuel the TARDIS from the rift, but find that one of the Slitheen has survived, posing as Margaret Blaine, the city's mayor. Blaine (whose actual name is Blon Fel Fotch Pasameer Day Slitheen) planned to cause a nuclear power plant called Blaidd Drwg (Welsh for “Bad Wolf”) to melt down, in order to cause a planetary explosion that would catapult her back to her home world. At the culmination of the episode, however, she was exposed to the heart of the TARDIS, and regressed into an egg. It was during this episode that the Doctor first noticed that he and Rose had kept coming across the words "Bad Wolf".
When the Doctor and his companions become caught in a series of deadly versions of 20th Century game shows (Rose, for example, was placed in a version of The Weakest Link, where Anne Droid would vaporize the person who was eliminated in each round), they find themselves at the mercy of the Bad Wolf Corporation, based on Satellite Five, but a full century after their last visit during the year 500,000. However, the true enemy was soon revealed to be the Daleks; the Dalek Emperor had survived the Time War, and had rebuilt the Dalek race by transporting the humans who were eliminated from the games onto his ship, and sifting through their DNA until only hate remained; the basic form of a Dalek. The Doctor tricks Rose into entering the TARDIS and sends her back to her own time before attempting to destroy the Dalek army with a Delta Wave. In doing so, he would have been forced to destroy most of the human race, which he ultimately finds himself incapable of doing. Meanwhile, after seeing more "Bad Wolf" graffiti in 21st century London, Rose realizes that the words are somehow a message linking her to the Doctor and the war that lies hundreds of thousands of years into her future.
Managing to open up the heart of the TARDIS, she absorbs the energies of the Time Vortex, and becomes the Bad Wolf. “I create myself,” she tells the Doctor with a voice full of power, “I take the words-- I scatter them, through time and space. A message to lead myself here.” Rose possesses, quite literally, the powers of a god, and is able to see what is, what was, and what could be all in the same moment (something which the Doctor admits he sees all the time.) With her innumerable power, Rose destroys the entire Dalek fleet with a wave of her hand, and in so doing ends the Time War. She also unwittingly brings Captain Jack Harkness back to life, who had been shot dead by a Dalek only moments before. In order to save Rose from being consumed from within by these energies, the Doctor absorbs the Time Vortex himself, and they leave Jack behind, not knowing his fate. However, the damage to his cells causes the Doctor to regenerate into his tenth incarnation—currently portrayed by fan-favorite actor David Tennant. The Doctor continues to travel with Rose throughout the second series, but she is trapped in a parallel universe during the heart-wrenching “Doomsday” finale. Carrying his grief for her very plainly, the Doctor then takes on another companion for the following Christmas Special The Runaway Bride– Donna Noble, who appears again during the fourth series as his companion. Series three saw medical student Martha Jones as his traveling companion, and after her own decided departure, during the Christmas Special Voyage of the Damned, he befriends Astrid Peth, played by Kylie Minogue. Captain Jack Harkness (portrayed by actor John Barrowman) was slated to return in the 2006 series, but because his character was so complex and so well-received by the public, he earned his own spin-off series entitled Torchwood—which, curiously, is an anagram of Doctor Who. This lead to odd filming schedules, and his character made a brief three-episode appearance during the finale of the third series in 2007 before returning to Torchwood; the secret agency protecting the human race from alien threats, of which he is the director.
The current series of Doctor Who ended with the series four finale Journey’s End which featured several companions returning to the TARDIS to help the Doctor save the universe. Torchwood finished its second series, and is filming its third. Also within the little niche of spin-offs lies the children’s show the Sarah Jane Adventures – which features the companion of both the Third and Fourth Doctors, Sarah Jane Smith (portrayed by Elisabeth Sladen).