Doctor Who Team-Up Guide

I know, it seems to be Doctor Who month here on my blog, eh? Since I like organizing info, I decided to take some of my vector drawings of all the Doctors and make a chart listing the various team-up episodes that have aired over the years. You'll definitely have to click on the image and magnify to read it.

Every now and then the Doctor faces a situation that even he can't tackle alone. That's when he uses his TARDIS to go back in time and recruit his past selves for help. Think of it as your 30 year old self using a time machine to get your 20 year old self to help you move the furniture into your new house.

The first two team-up stories were not without their problems. The first was The Three Doctors. Unfortunately by the time this episode was shot, William Hartnell, the First Doctor, was in poor health and only appeared via the TARDIS viewscreen, so it was pretty much just the Second and Third Doctors running around.

The next team-up story was The Five Doctors. This one was a fun romp, but not as fun as it could have been. Sadly, by now William Hartnell had passed away, so he was played by a different actor, Richard Hurndall. He did a fine job, but it just wasn't quite the same as having the original there. Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor, declined to appear in the episode, saying he didn't want "his" Doctor sharing the screen with the others, so he only makes a cameo appearance through unused footage from an old episode (Baker has recently admitted that he regrets this decision). So really out of the original five Doctors we only got to see three interacting.

Finally with The Two Doctors and Time Crash, we got episodes starring the original actors, with no substitutes.

Since the first three Doctors have passed away and the fourth, fifth and sixth have aged significantly, I wonder if fans would accept lookalike actors in the roles for an Eleven Doctors team-up episode?

The Seventh through Tenth Doctors still look enough like themselves to team up for a new Five Doctors episode, if the BBC ever decided to do one.

I laid out my chart all in InDesign.