Season 6B - Season 6b

Season 6b

Although The War Games is the final serial to feature Patrick Troughton as the current incarnation of the Doctor, he would go on to make three subsequent appearances in later stories. His appearances in The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors and The Two Doctors have led to fans raising points about continuity problems regarding the Second Doctor's ultimate fate:

• When the Third Doctor emerges from the TARDIS at the beginning of Spearhead from Space, he has a number of possessions that he didn't have at the end of The War Games.
• In The Five Doctors, the Second Doctor has enough control over the TARDIS to be able to go to the Brigadier's regimental reunion.
• In The Five Doctors, the Second Doctor comes across projections of both Jamie and Zoe, and knows they can't be real because they were returned to their own times and had their memories erased by the Time Lords; however, this happens right at the end of The War Games.
• In The Two Doctors, both the Second Doctor and Jamie appear visibly older than at the end of The War Games.
• Jamie only learned that the Time Lords were the Doctor's people in The War Games, meaning that the events of The Two Doctors would need to take place later in his own personal timeline than this (as he knows he and the Doctor are on a mission for them).
• The Second Doctor appears to be working for the Time Lords willingly in both The Three Doctors and The Two Doctors.
• The Second Doctor possesses a Stattenheim Remote control device with which he can operate his TARDIS remotely in The Two Doctors, something that the Sixth Doctor does not possess.
• The TARDIS console room used by the Second Doctor and Jamie in The Two Doctors is a different design to the one in The War Games.
• In The Two Doctors, the Second Doctor is confident that he has enough control over the TARDIS to be able to go and pick up Victoria once his mission is completed.
• In The Masque of Mandragora, the Second Doctor's recorder is discovered in the wood pannelled console room of the TARDIS that debuts in that story, suggesting that the Second Doctor may have used that room at some point after the events of The War Games.

The authors of The Discontinuity Guide gave voice to these various points and came up with the hypothesis that a significant period of time occured between the end of The War Games and the beginning of Spearhead from Space in which the Doctor remained in his second incarnation and was not immediately exiled to Earth. This hypothesis has been expanded into the Season 6b concept. In this, the Celestial Intervention Agency (CIA, a Time Lord intelligence organisation that first appeared in The Deadly Assassin) recruits the Second Doctor immediately following his trial at the end of The War Games to serve as a clandestine agent, undertaking missions for them on an as-needed basis. For this, he is given back his TARDIS (together with the Stattenheim Remote Control) and allowed to reunite with both Jamie and Victoria as companions. The events of The Two Doctors are just one of the missions that the Doctor subsequently undertakes before, at some point, his association with the CIA ends and his sentence of exile on Earth and forced regeneration is carried out, leading into Spearhead from Space.

The theory outlined in The Discontinuity Guide was eventually picked up and made explicit by Terrance Dicks in his novel World Game in 2005, which details the Second Doctor's recruitment by the CIA and his first mission. The events at the end of that novel subsequently lead in to the beginning of The Two Doctors. Later still, the BBC began utilising The Discontinuity Guide as a source for its own pages on the Doctor Who website, with a separate page laying out in detail the events of "Season 6b".