On This Day... 16th July

Season 3 came to a close today in 1966 with the fourth and final instalment of The War Machines.

This ends with the Doctor hanging around Fitzroy Square waiting for Dodo to appear, but being met by Ben and Polly instead. But what if it was they whom he was waiting for all the time...?

We will later find out that the events of this story overlap with those of The Faceless Ones, and both end on the same day. Each story concludes with an obvious passage of time - it is a couple of days after WOTAN's defeat for the First, and the Second Doctor sticks around Gatwick to make sure the Chameleons put everything - and everyone - back as it should be.

The Second Doctor will have been made aware that his earlier self is only a few miles away in central London as the War Machine crisis must be in the news. Could he have possibly popped along to the city and met with himself? 

Maybe to alert him about the forthcoming regeneration, and to reassure him that it works out alright. He certainly, at times, seems to foresee it coming. Naturally, he won't have told his earlier self absolutely everything - just a few highlights.

He waits until after Ben and Polly have let themselves into the TARDIS before dematerialising. The Doctor does seem to know exactly what's going to happen at the South Pole in 1986, and in Cornwall he has a laugh to himself about the adventures Ben and Polly are going to have, as though he already knows what they will be. He takes on Jamie without so much as a comment, like he knows he's going to become part of his crew. This might also explain why the Doctor is so keen to wipe out an intelligent alien species in The Macra Terror - he already knows all about them and that they do actually deserve it.

Discuss...

Also today, in 2017, the reveal of Jodie Whitaker as the Thirteenth Doctor was broadcast.

Today we remember actor and playwright Trevor Baxter, who died on this day in 2017, aged 84. 

He played the Victorian surgeon Dr Litefoot, who formed a partnership with Christopher Benjamin's theatrical impresario Henry Gordon Jago to help the Doctor defeat the malevolent machinations of Magnus Greel in The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Litefoot and Jago became one of the most popular of the Robert Holmes double-acts, and there was talk of their own spin-off series for a time. This finally came about on audio.

We also remember Hugh Martin, who featured twice in the series. The first time was as Munro, the haggis-obsessed oil rig radio operator in Terror of the Zygons. (Today would have been its writer Robert Banks Stewart's birthday). The second was as the fake monk in Vengeance on Varos. Martin died in 1997, aged 82.