Thursday, September 20, 2012

WHO  WAS  THE  FOURTH  DOCTOR ?


Tom Baker: 1974 - 1981
Teeth and curls. Jelly babies. Lovable robot dog. Ahhhhh-har. Scarf. Have I the right? Ooh, my everything! It's the end...
 
The Fourth Doctor was the fourth incarnation of the Time Lord known as the Doctor. He left all ties of his previous incarnation's exile behind on Earth, setting off to travel the cosmos. He initially travelled with Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan, but Harry chose to remain on Earth when the opportunity arose. The Doctor and Sarah continued on their adventures until the Doctor was summoned to Gallifrey, necessitating that he leave Sarah Jane behind as humans were not allowed on Gallifrey at that time.
After leaving Gallifrey, he met and travelled with Leela of the Sevateem. During his travels with Leela, the Doctor gained a new companion in the robot dog, K9. Returning once more to Gallifrey to stop an invasion, Leela and the original K9 stayed behind there. On the White Guardian's orders, the Doctor began looking for the Key to Time with fellow Time Lord Romana and K9 Mark II. Once that search was concluded, the Doctor and a newly-regenerated Romana went on the run from the Black Guardian. They accidentally passed into the smaller universe of E-Space.
During his travels in E-Space, the Doctor gained a new companion in the young mathematical genius Adric. Romana and K9 stayed behind in E-Space as the Doctor and Adric departed for N-Space.
Once again encountering his old enemy the Master, the Doctor and Adric met a Traken girl named Nyssa. She later joined them, along with the human Tegan, to help him prevent the destruction of the Universe by entropy. While stopping the Master from using this threat to blackmail the Universe into servitude, the Doctor fell from the Pharos Project telescope and regenerated for the fourth time.

 
Souvenirs from many different worlds littered the fourth incarnation's pockets. He would sometimes relax by playing with a yo-yo and liked to drink ginger beer.
He would often have jelly babies with him and offer them as a greeting. While past and future incarnations also showed occasional fondness for the sweet, it was never as frequent as this incarnation's love for them. In his later life he developed a great fondness for tinkering about in his TARDIS. He relied upon his sonic screwdriver at least as much as in his previous incarnation.
He was also not adverse to winding up his companions on occasion, such as once fooling Leela into standing and playing with a yo-yo for an extended period of time, with her believing it was an experiment.  On another occasion, he caused Romana to nearly panic when he pretended to become possessed by the Black Guardian.



Like several of his later incarnations, his pockets were dimensionally transcendental. The array of items he carried included:
  • a seemingly endless supply of Jelly babies
  • a galactic passport
  • a cricket ball
  • a yo-yo, which, with a sheepish grin, he would explain was useful for taking gravity readings
  • a selection of books, including his 500 Year Diary, Oolon Caluphid's Origins of the Universe and a Tibetan language handbook
  • a magnifying glass, gemstones, handcuffs, and an etheric beam locator which also detected ion-charged emissions
  • a lockpick
  • a football rattle
  • a magician's cane
  • a clockwork egg-timer
  • a breathing tube, a barrister's wig, and an instant camera
  • On one occasion, he even dropped a cup containing a hot beverage into his pocket.

 
The Fourth Doctor brought the world of Doctor Who to a broader audience than any of his previous incarnations.  The next Doctor to reach the prominence of Tom Baker would be David Tennant.  Tom Baker was my First Doctor.






1 comment:

  1. He's my favorite of the classics :-D

    http://thegeekypeacock.blogspot.com

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