Story Arcs in Doctor Who - Other Arcs

Other Arcs

Other story and character arcs comprise a number of other episodes across the programme's history:

• The Earth Exile term comprises all of Seasons Seven to Nine. For breaking the Time Lord rules of non-interference the Second Doctor is stripped of the ability to use his TARDIS at the end of The War Games and exiled to Earth in the late 20th century, as well as being forced to regenerate. Throughout this arc, the Doctor is constantly attempting to get the TARDIS working again, with the Time Lords occasionally sending the TARDIS to certain locations where certain problems are taking place that they wish to assist in without appearing to get explicitly involved themselves. The Time Lords finally lift the sentence at the conclusion of The Three Doctors. The reason for the exile in terms of production, was due to the switch from black and white to colour and the difficulties of producing realistic alien planets in colour.

• The Dalek Civil War trilogy comprises three stories from three different Doctors. The civil war among the Daleks is established in the story Resurrection of the Daleks, where Davros conditions a pair of Daleks and a number of Human duplicates into being loyal to him and hostile to the Dalek Supreme. Revelation of the Daleks sees Davros building a whole new race of Daleks, only for a group of Daleks loyal to the Supreme to arrive and foil his plan. And finally, Remembrance of the Daleks sees the war come to an end in London, 1963, where Davros' Imperial Daleks destroy all the Renegade faction bar the Dalek Supreme in a battle for a Time Lord artefact called the Hand of Omega. Davros uses it, but it destroys his ship along with all the Imperial Daleks, and Skaro. The Doctor then uses logic to destroy the Supreme Dalek.
• The Cartmel Masterplan was a loose story-arc started in 1986 for the Seventh Doctor's era by script editor Andrew Cartmel. The 'masterplan' was to add subtle hints to the dialogue that there was some dark secret behind the Doctor. This was to add some mystery to the Doctor, since Andrew reckoned that all the mystery of the Doctor had been lost due to the information given on Gallifrey and the Time Lords. The arc was to be concluded in a story called Lungbarrow by Marc Platt, but it was originally rejected and replaced in 1989, and the production ceasing on Doctor Who after 1989 meant the arc was never resolved. However, the novel Lungbarrow and other novels from the New Adventures novels by Virgin Publishing were written to show how the arc would have been concluded.

• Face of Boe: Three stories centre on the end of the Earth, the planet called New Earth, and the enigmatic Face of Boe in a distant future. It spread across the episodes "The End of the World" (2005), "New Earth" (2006) and "Gridlock" (2007) which concluded with the Face's message to the Doctor that "You are not alone." The Face of Boe is also briefly mentioned in the episode "The Long Game" as part of a news report being reviewed by the editor, and is the answer to one of Rose's questions on the Weakest Link in the episode "Bad Wolf". In "Last of the Time Lords", Jack Harkness states that he once had the nickname "the face of Boe", implying that he might become the Face of Boe in the future.

• Cult of Skaro: Three two-part stories involve four members of an elite Dalek sect called the Cult of Skaro. These Daleks are different from normal Dalek drones in that they have individual names (Dalek Sec, Dalek Caan, Dalek Thay, and Dalek Jast), and are allowed to think creatively. The Cult first appeared in the series two finale "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday", and escaped being pulled back into the Void by executing an emergency temporal shift. The Doctor later discovered them in 1930s New York City in the series 3 story "Daleks in Manhattan"/"Evolution of the Daleks". Sec, Jast, and Thay were killed, but Caan again escaped via a temporal shift. In the fourth series finale "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End", it was revealed that Caan travelled into the first year of the Time War to rescue Davros, despite the Time War being time-locked; Caan survived, but exposure to the time vortex gave him prescience that drove him insane and eventually led him to turn against his own race.