Seventh Doctor (Earth-12)

The Seventh Doctor was the twentienth incarnation of the Time Lord known as Sir Loki the Other and the seventh incarnation of his rebirthed body that was born to the House of Lungbarrow.

Originally an eccentric, light-hearted buffoon, this incarnation's jolly persona eventually darkened into that of a mysterious, cunning manipulator to properly combat the return of Fenric.

Later in his life, the Seventh Doctor regenerated in San Francisco on 31 December 1999 after Dr. Grace Holloway performed exploratory surgery on him after he was shot. The regeneration itself was delayed due to the anaesthesia. (DW: Doctor Who)

Post-Regeneration
The Sixth Doctor regenerated after being weakened by fighting the Lamprey (PDA: Spiral Scratch) and willingly allowing the Rani to bombarded his TARDIS with lasers to prevent the creation of the Valeyard. (NA: Timewyrm: Revelation) After the Rani forced the Doctor's TARDIS to land on the planet Lakertya, the seventh Doctor forced his predecessor to regenerate so a champion for Time could be born. (NA: Love and War)


 * "No, no Mel... Ahh! That was a nice nap, now down the business. I'm a bit worried about the temporal flicker in sector 13... there's the bicentennial refit of the TARDIS to book in, I must pop over to Centauri 7, then perhaps a quick holiday. Right, that all seems quite clear, just three small points: where am I, who am I, and who are you? The Rani! STAY BACK..."

- First Words of the Seventh Doctor

Perhaps because of this, this regeneration was followed by a usual period of post-regenerative trauma, which resulted in a somewhat chaotic, almost comic personality emerging. The Rani injects him with an amnesia-inducing drug, which caused the Doctor to briefly mistake the Rani for his companion, Mel.

While still under the Rani's influence, the Doctor chose a new look for his persona, shedding the chaotic, clown-like attire of his predecessor for a more subtle suit and hat, noting to the Rani that his new incarnation had regained a sense of haute couture.

After regaining his memory, the Doctor found the Rani had forced his TARDIS to crash-land in order to gain his unwilling assistance in repairing her "time brain" invention and be part of its components along with fellow brilliant minds such as Albert Einstein. However, thanks to the Doctor's new persona, the Rani's machine backfired and the Doctor saved the geniuses while trapping the Rani in her TARDIS. (DW: Time and the Rani)

Travels with Mel
Shortly after leaving Lakertya, the Doctor dropped Mel off to investigate a strange institute where Time Lords, specifically the CIA were experimenting on humans, trying to graft TARDIS minds into their bodies. He was electrocuted and went insane. Fortunately, he had programmed the TARDIS to collect Mel and bring her to him where she helped restore his mind, before they confronted the doctors of the Institute. (BFA: Unregenerate!)

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On a vacation attempt, the Doctor and Mel found themselves part of an alien expedition to 1959 to experience earth rock n' roll. Once there, the Doctor found the last Chimeron queen, Delta hiding with her newborn young from the vicious Bannermen. The Doctor defeated the Bannermen by having their leader fall into his own trap, scaring them off. (DW: Delta and the Bannermen)

After a final adventure on Iceworld, Mel chose to leave the Doctor and instead travel with Sabalom Glitz, a con man she felt could be turned to the side of right with her help. (DW: Dragonfire)

Travels with Ace
On Iceworld, the Doctor met Ace, a troubled teenager from 1980s Earth who had somehow been transported to the planet. After Mel's departure, Ace agreed to travel with the Doctor. (DW: Dragonfire)

The Doctor's first trip with Ace took him back to Coal Hill School in November 1963, (DW: Remembrance of the Daleks) only a few days after he had left Earth with Susan Foreman, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. (DW: An Unearthly Child) He returned to take care of unfinished business left behind by his first incarnation: the retrieval of the Hand of Omega. As the Doctor had anticipated, this mission was disrupted by the arrival of Daleks, one faction of which was controlled by the new emperor, Davros. In defeating the Daleks, the seventh incarnation displayed a growing darkness of character, tricking the Daleks into using the Hand to destroy their own homeworld, Skaro. (DW: Remembrance of the Daleks)

The Doctor later lands on Terra Alpha, where he helped remove Helen A from power as her rules were completely insane and lead to the deaths of her people if they weren't happy 24/7. He showed Helena that sadness is also needed to balance true happiness. (DW: The Happiness Patrol)

Afterwards, the Doctor and Ace arrived at 20th century Windsor, encountering the Cybermen and Lady Peinforte, a woman who displayed disturbing knowledge of the Doctor's true character. However, the Doctor stopped the Cybermen and Peinforte by using the Nemesis statue against them; Peinforte was absorbed by the statue and the Cybermen fleet was destroyed by the exploding statue. (DW: Silver Nemesis)

He later stopped the Gods of Ragnarok from kidnapping people who watched the Psychic Circus for their own twisted form of entertainment and destroyed them by reflecting a death beam directed at him towards them. (DW: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy)

Sometime later, the Doctor had begun dressing in darker shades and ended up reuniting with his old friend, the Brigadier in an adventure that once again brought him to work with UNIT. During this event, it was revealed that the Doctor had or perhaps would live in the time of King Arthur and be known as Merlin. Using this possibly mistaken identity to his advantage, the Doctor stopped Morgane from using a nuclear missile by playing on her sense of honourable warfare. (DW: Battlefield)

After learning of Ace's guilty conscience for burning down a "haunted" mansion in her time, the Doctor brought to Ace to its past, a hundred years before she would burn it down as a none-too-pleasant surprise for her. He found a temporarily imprisoned and dangerous entity called Light. Light planned to destroy the Earth in a childish fit as Earth had been evolving while it was trapped, making the catalogue it had made centuries earlier worthless. However, the Doctor was able to use the Light's childish logic to his advantage and convinced the Light to destroy itself as it had been evolving as well. He was delighted to have Ace overcome her guilt, but not so amused when she joked about blowing up the mansion instead of burning it down. (DW: Ghost Light)

Later, the Doctor accidentally caused Ace to meet and interact with her grandmother and infant mother during a trip to 1943. The Doctor revealed that he knew Ace's arrival and several intervening adventures had been arranged by Fenric, an evil entity the Doctor had encountered before. Fenric had been trapped in another dimension by the Doctor and had escaped through its temporal manipulations. However, the Doctor convinced the Great One, one of Fenric's servants, to kill its corporeal host in revenge for trying to trick it into beginning the Heamogoth. (DW: The Curse of Fenric)

Soon after, the Doctor took Ace back to her time in Perivale. However, Kitlings had been spotted and people had been vanishing. The Doctor soon found that his arch-nemesis, the Master, had been trapped and infected on Cheetah World and was trying to escape by bringing people to change partially and depart to Earth. After defeating the Master, the Doctor was surprised to learn Ace had decided the TARDIS was her home and still wanted to accompany him on his travel. Delighted, the Doctor departed with her. (DW: Survival)

The Doctor spent an undisclosed time visiting a young girl named Raine Creevy when she was a child before travelling to her future where she was now a skilled thief and recruited to steal a sword for him while he sent Ace to Russia on a secret mission. He plotted to use the sword to ward off an alien incursion called the Metatraxi. (BFA: Crime of the Century)

In the TARDIS, Ace found some overdue library books which the Doctor explained were from the library on Kar-Charrat. They travelled to the planet in order to return the books. The Doctor met an old friend, the chief librarian Elgin. The Daleks had used time corridor technology to deploy Daleks on every planet in the sector, and then waited hundreds of years to capture a time-sensitive Time Lord in order to penetrate the library's defences and allow them to seize the Wetworks Facility. They created a duplicate of Ace, which — replete with the DNA tag — would be able to get through the library's barriers. The Doctor was forced to surrender. The Daleks took him to the facility, and connected him to the machinery. They successfully download the entire knowledge of the Universe into a Dalek test subject. After the download was completed, the test-subject went out of control. Trying to allow the Doctor to re-enter the surrounded TARDIS, the Kar-Charratians killed the Daleks surrounding the time machine, but the duplicate Ace arrived. The duplicate was impervious to the rain unlike the Daleks, and threatened to kill Elgin. However, the chief cataloguer Prink rushed to his aid and attacked the duplicate, damaging it. The Doctor proceeded to the Wetworks with the intention of destroying it, using Ace to pretend to be her own duplicate to get past the Daleks. At the facility they encountered the Dalek test-subject and the Dalek Supreme arguing. Having obtained something of a conscience, the test-subject was refusing to destroy the Wetworks facility against the Supreme's orders. The Dalek Supreme retreated to its mother-ship leaving the Special Weapons Dalek to kill the test-subject, but the Nitro-9 succeeded in blowing up the machinery of the Wetworks, and the Kar-Charratians managed to escape. (BFA: The Genocide Machine)

Sometime after facing the Daleks, the Doctor decided to travel to the current location of The Scream. He planned to add it to his collection since it was part of established history that it would be stolen. He and Ace arrived on a barren, sandy planet and discovered a deadly curse on the painting, living dust and encountered the Master in the form of a previous incarnation. The Trakenite body could not be sustained and the Master’s decaying body returned. He planned to unleash a terrible, ancient force on the universe through the dust, but the Doctor and Ace stopped him. Ace remarked that the Doctor should save them trouble and start collecting stamps. (BFA: Dust Breeding)

The TARDIS materialised in Colditz Castle where the Doctor was shot in the shoulder and Ace was captured. The TARDIS was confiscated by the Germans and the Doctor was questioned about it. Soon after, a woman named Elizabeth Klein arrived and demanded that the Doctor hand over his TARDIS key. The Doctor, fearing for Ace’s safety, did so and tried to work out how Klein knew about his TARDIS. He was informed that he was to be placed in Klein’s custody. Klein had forged her identification papers and travelled to this parallel time period in the Doctor’s TARDIS to capture him to take him back to her alternative future so he could teach her to fully control the TARDIS. In her future, the Germans won the war, the Doctor’s TARDIS was discovered and he was killed. Klein accessed the TARDIS flight logs to travel here to and planned to learn about the TARDIS before the Doctor died. The Doctor refused, but Klein bargained Ace’s life for his co-operation. They discovered that the TARDIS in which Klein arrived in, had dematerialised and were forced to use the TARDIS the Doctor and Ace arrived in. Back at Colditz Castle, the Doctor manipulates a duty-bound Krutz to expose Klein and prevent Klein's timeline from happening by locating the CD-player Ace had left behind. Klein escapes, now an anomaly. (BFA: Colditz)

After the traumatic events in Germany, Ace asked to relax. The Doctor and she visited Ibiza where a strange DJ called Gabriel was using the power of music and his belief that he was an angel to raise an army for his brother out of the young people who came to party at their club. The army was needed to fight a war in another dimension. The Doctor stopped Gabriel, but his brother opted to continue their work until the Doctor was forced to stop his plans as well. (BFA: The Rapture)

Further Adventures
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Death
Near the end of his life, the seventh Doctor returned to the House of Lungbarrow on Gallifrey. During his time on Gallifrey, President Romana assigned him to collect the Master's remains from Skaro as the Master's final request. (NA: Lungbarrow)


 * "Timing malfunction. The Master! He's out there. I've got to stop him."

- Last Words of the Seventh Doctor

The Doctor knew the Master was just as much a threat in death as in life and tried to stow away his ashes safely. However, he was more right than he had realised; the Master escaped from his ashes' container and damaged the inner workings of the TARDIS console. The Doctor was forced to make an emergency landing in San Francisco on 30 December 1999.

No sooner had he left the TARDIS, than the Doctor was caught in a San Francisco gang gun battle and shot, once straight through the shoulder and twice in the leg. The Doctor failed to get Chang Lee to stop the Master from leaving the TARDIS before losing consciousness. Taken to hospital, the bullets were found to have caused only minor injuries. However, due to a seeming abnormality in the Doctor's X-ray, caused by his second heart, cardiologist Dr. Grace Holloway undertook exploratory surgery to "fix" his abnormal heartbeat. Waking up just as Grace was to begin, the Doctor tried to stop the surgery by explaining his non-terrestrial origins, but was quickly put under anaesthetic. The Doctor was accidentally killed when Grace damaged his circulatory system with a probe. Though they attempted to revive him, the Doctor's seventh body was dead, but had not yet regenerated.

Unlike his previous deaths, the Doctor did not regenerate into a new body until several hours later in the hospital morgue. His next incarnation later attributed this to having been under anaesthesia at the time of his "death". (DW: Doctor Who)

Undated events

 * The Seventh Doctor attended the funeral of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. (ST: The Gift)
 * The Seventh Doctor was at Chartwell on 16 November 1936, where he met Winston Churchill again. The Doctor told Winston that King Edward VIII's lover, Wallis Simpson, was an alien. (REF: The Brilliant Book 2011)

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Personality
The Seventh Doctor was originally light-hearted and prone to clownish behaviour, which masked his intellect and courage. (DW: Time and the Rani) As he matured, he took a much darker turn. This "darker" side would come to define him, as he became a master manipulator who saw the battle between good and evil as a game of chess and everyone around him as pawns to be manipulated in the game of fighting evil. (DW: The Curse of Fenric)

Frequently, he would only see the "bigger picture" rather than the world before him. An example of this was when the Doctor devastated Ace by labelling her, among other things, an "emotional cripple" during his battle with Fenric. This was necessary for her to briefly abandon her belief in him, weakening Fenric's power, which he did not explain until later. (DW: The Curse of Fenric)

Despite his manipulative actions, such as using psychic powers to make Mel leave (NA: Head Games), the seventh incarnation did care for his companions. He had a paternal relationship with Ace, which ultimately soured when Ace found herself unable to deal with the Doctor's growing emotional coldness. (NA: Nightshade)

Aspects of his light-hearted nature did continue. He seemed to relish his game against Light. (DW: Ghost Light) He was not totally unfeeling when it came to the "bigger picture"; he appeared apprehensive about his decision to destroy Skaro, (DW: Remembrance of the Daleks) and agonised when he had to convince Ace that he did not care about her. (DW: The Curse of Fenric)

Upon meeting his future self, the Fifth Doctor was repulsed by his manipulative nature. The Seventh Doctor had a similarly low opinion of his fifth incarnation, describing him as "bland" and "not even one of the good ones." (MA: Cold Fusion)

The renegade Time Lady Iris Wildthyme was not fond of the Seventh Doctor. She subsequently described him to the Eighth Doctor as "a portentous little feller, swaggering around, thinking he’s got all the world’s darkest secrets under his hat." Furthermore, she thought that he was "a pretentious old thing" who "got on [her] nerves" as he regarded himself as the Guardian of Forever and Time's Champion. (EDA: The Scarlet Empress)

Habits and Quirks
The seventh incarnation was a consummate fan of chess, to the point of treating his companions and enemies as pieces on a chess board. (DW: The Curse of Fenric)

Despite his tendency toward a dark personality, the seventh incarnation was known for his use of words to resolve problems instead of violence. (DW: The Happiness Patrol)

He also rolled his 'R's, and spoke with a Scottish accent. (DW: Time and the Rani)

He liked to carry around a question mark umbrella, often using it for practical purposes unrelated to keeping the rain away. (DW: Remembrance of the Daleks)

Also, early into this incarnation, the Doctor showed a knack for playing the spoons as a musical instrument, though this was seen less as he matured. (DW: Time and the Rani)

Appearance
At the beginning of his seventh incarnation, the Doctor wore an off-white safari-styled jacket. He wore a red paisley scarf under the lapels and had a matching handkerchief in the left pocket. Like many of his previous incarnations, he wore a fob watch as part of his clothing. He also wore a yellow pullover with turquoise zigzag lines and red question marks. Under the pullover he wore a white shirt with red tie. For trousers, he wore sand-coloured tweed plaid trousers with white and brown brogued spectator shoes. He also wore a white colonial-styled Panama hat, similar to the hat he had worn in his fifth incarnation. The hat had a paisley hat band and an upturned brim. (DW: Time and the Rani) He carried an umbrella which had a red, question-mark shaped handle. (DW: Delta and the Bannermen)

When the Doctor's personality began to change, his outfit changed alongside it. His jacket, hat band, handkerchief, scarf and tie became darker, varying between shades of burgundy and brown. (DW: Ghost Light)

By the end of this incarnation, his outfit had altered again. He wore a light brown tweed jacket, with a red waistcoat and a black and brown, zigzag patterned tie. He still wore his Panama hat. (DW: Doctor Who)

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Behind the scenes

 * Actors considered for the role of the seventh incarnation before McCoy was cast included McCoy's mentor Ken Campbell, Rowan Atkinson, Chris Jury, Tony Robinson; and Alexei Sayle.
 * Season 25 and 26 had broad hints that the Doctor was not simply a Time Lord, as previously shown and stated. This overarching plot, conceived by Script Editor Andrew Cartmel and referred to by fans as the Cartmel Masterplan, was designed to restore an element of mystery in the Doctor and his true nature as in the stories of the first and second incarnations. Although the cancellation of the series at the end of Season 26 prevented further on-screen exploration of this arc, it was later given full rein in the Virgin New Adventures novel series.
 * After the original series ended, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred played characters called the Professor and Ace, respectively, in a series of audio adventures produced by BBV Productions. Initially the stories were clearly based upon Doctor Who, but these connections decreased when McCoy's character was renamed the Dominie and Aldred's character Alice.
 * In the BBC series, Doctors, Sylvester guest-starred as Graham Capelli, an actor who had played the title role in The Amazing Lollipop Man, a cult 1980s children's television series of the same name. The Lollipop Man had many similarities to the Doctor.