SERIES ONE - SCHEDULE
2012
EPISODE ZERO(1): RING OUT THE OLD, RING IN THE NEW (Film - short prequel)
EPISODE ZERO(2): EMERGENCY CODE ONE (Audio - short prequel)
EPISODE ONE: BRAINSTORM (Film prt 1)
EPISODE TWO: THE RISE OF TERROR (Film prt 2)
2013
EPISODE THREE: WIRED FOR SOUND (Audio)
EPISODE FOUR: FIFTY DAYS TO ARMAGEDDON (Film - 50th Anniversary Special prt 1)
EPISODE FIVE: RETURN OF THE DOCTOR (Film - 50th Anniversary Special prt 2)
2014
EPISODE SIX: WHEN THE WIND BLOWS (Audio)
EPISODE SEVEN: THE MARK OF SKARO (Audio)
EPISODE EIGHT: TEENAGE KICKS (Film)
EPISODE NINE: VACATION OF DOOM (Film)
2015
EPISODE TEN: THE ROAD TO GALLIFREY (Audio)
EPISODE ELEVEN: THE FIVE DEATHS OF STEPHANIE GREENE (Audio)
EPISODE TWELVE: CLASS OF 66
EPISODE THIRTEEN: FLATLINE
THE DRAFT SYNOPSIS FOR SERIES ONE
EPISODE ZERO (1): RING OUT THE OLD, RING IN THE NEW (Film)
SHORT PREQUEL:New Years Eve and Stephanie is looking for a new start, something exciting to happen. Meanwhile The Doctor is running for his life, Will he regenerate before it’s too late?…….
EPISODE ZERO (2): EMERGENCY CODE ONE (Audio)
SHORT PREQUEL (Part two): A secret branch of GCHQ on a remote scottish island have intercepted a signal deep in outer space - so why is this a job for U.N.I.T
EPISODE ONE: BRAINSTORM (Film)
Stephanie has to find John Smith. Only he can help Jake. Why are the Disciples of Arcolis taking teenagers into their cult and who is the chosen one?...
EPISODE TWO: THE RISE OF TERROR (Film)
Stephanie and the Doctor must face their demons. A battle of wits that will sink the Doctor into a Psychological world that he doesn’t want to face. The Universe will kneel with fear.
EPISODE THREE: WIRED FOR SOUND (Audio)
A radio station in New York has become the centre of mysterious goings on. Is it a poltergeist or something more sinister?
EPISODE FOUR: FIFTY DAYS TO ARMAGEDDON (Film)
50th Anniversary Special (part one): It’s time to face the past. It’s finally caught up with the Doctor and there is nowhere to hide. They are coming to wipe them all out – Destination: Earth!
EPISODE FOUR: RETURN OF THE DOCTOR (Film)
50th Anniversary Special (part two): Fifty days are up....but where is the doctor???
EPISODE SIX: WHEN THE WIND BLOWS (Audio)
The Planet of Doniatos have developed a living organism made from the power of the wind. But when it starts to question its creator, The Doctor must intervene to save a race, but can he destroy new life?
EPISODE SEVEN: THE MARK OF SKARO (Audio)
The Daleks are back, and they need the Doctor’s help. What would this race want with their arch enemy – And will he help?
EPISODE EIGHT: TEENAGE KICKS (Film)
Being Bullied is no fun. And Karl has had enough. Time to take revenge. Maybe the Alien Artefact he found in the woods can help him?
EPISODE NINE: VACATION OF DOOM (Film)
Stephanie convinces the Doctor to try something different. A camping trip, but when people start disappearing, The Doctor has to look beyond the camp for answers.
EPISODE TEN: THE ROAD TO GALLIFREY (Audio)
How can it happen? A planet has appeared 250 million lightyears from earth. Has Gallifrey returned??
EPISODE ELEVEN: THE FIVE DEATHS OF STEPHANIE GREENE (Audio)
When alternative universes collide and begin to unravel, The Doctor only has one solution. He must sacrifice Stephanie to save the whole universe.
EPISODE TWELVE: CLASS OF 66 (Film)
Stephanie has a passion for sixties music. So if you have a time machine, who wouldn’t want to travel back and experience it. But who is waiting in the shadows. An old nemesis perhaps???
EPISODE THIRTEEN: FLATLINE
Someone has some unfinished business with the Doctor. It’s time to settle an old score. Could this cost the Doctor his life?
THE CAST (SO FAR)
THE DOCTOR – JAMES LEA
STEPHANIE GREENE – RACHAEL HARDING
MR JENKINS – STEVE FLETCHER
CRAIG STONE- WILLIAM GLENN
MANDY HARRIS - TRISH PARRY
JAKE SAMSON – JP CALLAGHAN
SAMANTHA KENNEDY– LOLLY ELIZABETH SIMMONDS
JENNY VINCENT - LEANNE WILLIAMS
NURSE FLETCHER – REYNAH OPPAL
MRS STEVENS – MARY GRIMMETT
KATIE – SOPHIE CALLAGHAN
DAVE -TAXI DRIVER – FRED FIELDHOUSE
SUPERINTENDANT PHILLIPS - JAMES BRYHAN
THE STRANGER/ DJ – DOMINIC FELLOWS
MRS SLATER – DEBORAH McEWAN
POLICE SARGEANT – MATT KING
MAN IN WOODS - DARRELL ANDREWS
MR SAMSON– GARETH KNIPE
MRS SAMSON – PIPPA WINSLOW
REPORTER 1 – ALAN SMITH
TONY (GYM OWNER) – WESLEY BIGGS
WRITING DOCTOR WHO
Since 1963, entire generations have grown up with Doctor Who, and have been thrilled - and terrified - by the Doctor's adventures against some of the greatest evils in the galaxy, including the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Doctor's arch-nemesis, the Master. The show has been brought back to TV twice since its cancellation in 1989 (the first time, in 1996, being something of a non-starter; the second time in 2005 proving more durable) and has seen a complex and intertwining expanded universe of novels, audio plays, comics and even a set of Alternate Continuity movies. So someone obviously did something right.
You can also take heart in the fact that Doctor Who is in fact really just a framing device for whatever story the writer wants to tell - there's no Star Trek style continuity bible, no fixed limits to The Verse and an almost infinite variety of narrative styles, settings and devices.
Necessary Tropes
First and foremost, Doctor Who is a Walking the Earth story, at least in its televisual incarnation. While the Expanded Universe has had more freedom to explore ideas, the TV series' young target audience means a Monster of the Week (or other villain-of-the-week) format has proved most successful. The best monsters are firmly the stuff of nightmares. Also important is the element of True Companions between the Doctor and his companion, who usually functions as The Watson. Different characters will relate differently to the Doctor, of course, and there have been one or two less-than-lovable companions, but ultimately, both Doctor and companion will rescue the other, if it comes to that.
Some of the things seen by casual viewers as Necessary Tropes are actually not. The companion doesn't need to be a young, attractive human female from contemporary Britain: it's true that that's often the case, but the Doctor's had several male companions, and one of the longest-running companions ever was a man. Similarly, the UST between Doctor and companion is largely an invention of the 2005 Re Tool.
Chase sequences, preferably up and down corridors, are absolutely mandatory.
Using the TARDIS
Who writers frown on using the TARDIS as a Deus ex Machina, and most will use it only as a way to get the Doctor and companions to the plot hook. Actually separating the TARDIS and its crew, and making the Doctor's primary motivation getting back to it, is a classic plot device.
Plot Hook-wise, having the TARDIS answer a Distress Call is a fine old cliché that probably has plenty of milage left. You could do worse, anyway. But here's some advice from Uncle Rusty:
"You wouldn't believe it, but every writer who comes in to write their first script has the TARDIS answering a distress call! You just sit there going, "No, just have him land, why can't he just land, walk out the door and go 'Where am I?' Then he can hear a distress call. But it's the most boring way to start a story."
The standard excuse to the companion (and audience) for "why doesn't the Doctor just go back in time and..." is that once the TARDIS has landed, it has become part of the events. Something called the Blinovitch Limitation Effect was frequently name-dropped in previous series to imply that the Doctor going back in time and fixing things once he's already involved in them would have Extremely Bad Results. (The Russell T Davies era brought out the Clock Roaches as just one of the ways things can go horribly wrong.)
In addition to transportation, the TARDIS is also legitimately used as a Weirdness Magnet and as a repository for whatever technobabble gadgets your plot requires.
Using the screwdriver
"Less is more" goes for the sonic screwdriver, too. Yes, it is essentially a magic wand: it can do whatever you, the writer, need it to. But it shouldn't solve all the Doctor's problems—and it is emphatically not a gun. Beware of Invincible Hero.
In general, the screwdriver works best when limited to performing small, concrete tasks: opening doors, disabling security cameras, etc.
The Doctor as a character
The standard truism for writers is that the Doctor is never cruel or cowardly (cautious, yes, cowardly, no). You can, however, have an Unreliable Narrator like the Valeyard or the Dream Lord accuse him.
Human traits that the Doctor particularly admires include tenacity, creativity, and courage. That he values these traits is a clue to his own character and problem-solving style.
The Doctor always sides with the oppressed against the oppressors. Government Drug Enforcement or any other form of coerced happiness counts as oppression in his book.
He prefers to incapacitate — or, better yet, outmanoeuver — his enemies rather than kill them. He does have a weakness for poetic justice, though, and especially likes to catch enemies in their own traps.
He usually obeys a sort of temporal Prime Directive, in that he doesn't trust a society — or even an individual person — to have and use technology too far ahead of its time (or, more generally, that they didn't develop themselves). (This is the primary reason why he doesn't like the Torchwood Institute, whose whole purpose is to get hold of alien technologies and develop them for human users.) However, unlike most, this Directive does allow for him to intervene in history in order to combat a particular injustice or wrong. It does mean that he finds himself faced with the problem of certain events he can change and others he cannot; the new series usually phrases this as the Doctor being 'part of events', meaning he cannot go back and change something which he is already involved in.
The Doctor's first choice in solving a problem is communication. He will attempt to figure out the nature of the story's antagonists (e.g. which species, and what they want). If the problem is one he can fix (e.g. the alien can't communicate with humans, or the alien is just lost and needs a lift back home), he will generally do so.
The Doctor honors his word, and expects (sometimes naively) everyone else to honor theirs.
He seems to view "life" as more or less equivalent to "sentience". That is,
if someone's been taken over by an outside force and there's absolutely no way of getting the real personality back, then the Doctor views him as already dead;
the Doctor will treat androids, monsters, members of a race that is shunned or stigmatized, etc., as he would any fellow sentient beings.
Note also how many of the Doctor's more notable enemies (Daleks, Cybermen, etc) fall within a race which has become homogenized to the point of the almost-complete obliteration of individuality; a sense of the individual is clearly important to the Doctor's conception of 'life'.
The Doctor only rarely has a plan of action at the outset. He makes it up as he goes along.
Unless it's the Seventh Doctor. And even then, extenuating circumstances usually force him to improvise on the fly.
Violence is the Doctor's last choice, and he nearly never uses guns himself. That the Doctor prefers to keep his hands clean by letting other people do his dirty work is a fair criticism. The Doctor is at best a Technical Pacifist; he doesn't like to fight, but he will if he has to, and whilst he might not use guns personally he's found plenty of ways to get around that in the past.
In keeping with the above two points, the Doctor generally doesn't go around picking fights or looking for trouble (he does, however, look for excitement or something interesting, which generally leads to trouble); he usually just wanders across a problem, and his first instinct when faced with someone planning on starting something is to ask — or warn — them to change their course of action. (This is especially true of New Series Doctors, who make a special point of offering the enemy a peaceful way out.) When they (inevitably) refuse... well, though he didn't start the fight, he is perfectly willing to end it by any means necessary.
The Doctor prefers to vanish right when the action is resolved; he doesn't want to be around for the cleanup.
The Doctor feels some responsibility for the people travelling with him, and will always save them if he can — even at the cost of his own life. If they or any of the other people he meets are really determined to make Heroic Sacrifices to save the day, though, he will applaud their courage and perhaps look mournful, but not stop them.
The Doctor can and will lie when it suits his purposes, even to his companions. He will not, generally, lie about having lied.
The companion as a character
We've talked a lot about the Doctor so far, but what about those he travels with? They're just as important to get right as the Doctor, and perhaps more so:
Although not exclusively, the companion is generally female. The Doctor has travelled with male companions before, but male companions are greatly outnumbered by female ones, and the Doctor has rarely travelled with just a male companion (and not for long at that); the few occasions there has been a male companion on board, there's usually been a female companion as well (even Jamie, the male companion who travelled longest with the Doctor, also travelled along with two women — Victoria and Zoe). This has the effect of establishing a clear male-female dynamic to the Doctor-companion relationship which, while not exclusive, provides a handy template to work from.
The Doctor also usually travels with one or two people at a time; certainly no more than three. Having more than one companion around tends to be tricky for writers to handle, in terms of giving everyone enough to do story-wise; two companions on as well as the Doctor seems manageable, but having three or more seems to be a bit of a struggle. Something to keep in mind.
So, who is the companion? Generally, they're:
Human. The Doctor seems to like having humans around, often vocally considering them his favourite species. This is obviously a matter of practicality (it saves on make-up costs for a start, budget considerations being something the Doctor Who production team cannot afford to sniff at). This also enables the audience to engage with what's happening easily. He has travelled with non-humans before, to great success — Romana, a fellow Gallifreyan, was quite popular with the audience, as was the robot dog K9 (although due to his tendency to break down, K9 was not popular with the production team) — but they're outnumbered.
From the twentieth / twenty-first century. Again, the companion is usually intended as an audience identification figure, and it's often easier to do this if the companion comes from a time which roughly coincides with that of the viewer. This tends to mean the recent past or the near future at most. Of course, there are exceptions.
Less 'intelligent' / more naive than the Doctor. This enables them to again act as an audience stand-in by asking all the questions the audience will have ("Where are we? What's going on? What's that?!"), enabling the Doctor to act as Mr. Exposition. Even Romana, who was established at times as more intellectually gifted than the Doctor, was still less experienced than him, allowing her to fill this role at times.
Important note: 'Less intelligent' does not equal 'stupid'. Companions who have clung on too tightly to the Idiot Ball in the past have generally not gone down well.
Curious. They have an interest in the universe around them and the wonders the Doctor shows them. Particularly in the new series, in their introductory / early episodes they're often directly compared with more jaded, less intellectually curious or more timid people around them to demonstrate how they stand out, and consequently why they appeal to the Doctor.
Moral and ethical. The companion generally supports the Doctor in his battles against evil. However, particularly in the new series, the companion has often acted as the Doctor's moral guide; even when he's not being an Anti-Hero, the Doctor is still an alien, and therefore does not often operate according to human morality. The companion has often acted to guide the Doctor into doing what is right, express outrage when he does go too far and steer in him the right direction once again. Much has been made in the new series about how the Doctor needs someone around him to 'stop him' from going too far. (It may be that his new status as Last of His Kind has something to do with this.)
Trustworthy. The companion usually functions as the Doctor's best friend, and unscrupulous types rarely get invited aboard. Although mileage has and can be made from making the companion an untrustworthy sort who may even be acting against the Doctor (such as Turlough in the classic series, and Adam in the new series), these generally don't tend to last long; Turlough eventually did a Heel Face Turn and became a genuine companion, and Adam was booted out of the TARDIS after one adventure because he betrayed the Doctor's trust and lied about it.
Able to be frightened. It's a big, bad, scary universe the Doctor inhabits, and it's often been the companion's job to get scared by it when necessary (such as when the Monster of the Week is baring down on them). Be careful with this one, however; in the past, this has translated to the typical cliche of the companion standing around doing a lot of screaming. Keeping in mind that the companion is generally female, and this can lead to some quite outdated gender roles and Unfortunate Implications very quickly (it also tends to make the companion look rather useless and come off as rather irritating). Consequently, this means that more modern roles for the companion have made them more:
Capable. Although they are usually still not as competent as the Doctor, the companion is expected to look after herself. You don't have to make the companion Ellen Ripley (although you could do worse), but modern audiences will find the timid, screaming, near-useless cliche of the Doctor Who companion unacceptable these days.
In the past, the companion's relationship with the Doctor has tended be more a close friendship or a teacher / student-style connection, with little over romantic tension. The new series companions have generally introduced more romantic subtext between the Doctor and the companion. This also impacts on the male companion / female companion dynamic as well; the male companions in these cases are often the female companion's 'everyman' boyfriend, and is less than pleased at both the female companion's obvious interest in the daring, charismatic and heroic Doctor, which often expresses itself in hostility towards the Doctor.
Choices, Choices
Two main choices to make - setting and genre. Doctor Who is a very versatile format and continuity has never been strictly observed. The setting can be pure space fantasy with Crystal Spires and Togas, Twenty Minutes into the Future, ancient Rome, Victorian Cardiff, Space Opera - or, of course, contemporary London. (His sojourns in places outside of Europe are quite rare by comparison.)
Doctor Who can fit into any genre, from Gothic Horror to Film Noir to Political Allegory to straight Action Adventure. Pick one you'd like to write, and go with it.
Pitfalls
The main pitfall is in writing something that your effects budget can't create (leading to Special Effects Failure), or a story too big to fit into the time allowed. Steven Moffat once observed that Who monsters tend to work best right up until the moment they're revealed. Judicious use of Nothing Is Scarier can really stretch an anemic budget.
The other pitfall many writers seem to fall into is over-use of the Villain Ball (so many villains were only caught because they pointlessly murdered people) — or the Idiot Ball (companions wandering off and into trouble ... again...)
The 2005 reboot has also been frequently accused of over-relying on the Reset Button and / or the Deus ex Machina as a means of resolving the plot. To be fair, this isn't entirely limited to the new series, as the old series also had numerous moments where things built up to someone pressing the right button at the right time, which conveniently resolved the plot for them.
Techno Babble can also be a bit of an issue. In fairness, Doctor Who has always generally hovered around the 'soft' side of the 'hard' science fiction / 'soft' science fiction scale, but the over-use of technobabble can easily switch an audience off.
Some of the show's longer stories, particularly in the 'serial' format of the classic series, also tended to run out of steam by the third episode or thereabouts, generally relying on a lot of Padding wherein the Doctor and friends would get captured, locked up, threatened with death, escape, run around the villain's base a bit, and then get cornered again just in time for the end of episode cliffhanger (lather, rinse, repeat, depending on how many more episodes were left in the story). The new series, with a shorter running time, has generally avoided the problem of padding, but instead can seem to go the opposite route, resulting in a lot of frantic running around, shouting and waving of arms in the last fifteen minutes or so to effect a hurried (and not necessarily coherent) conclusion to events.
A note also about the fan-base: as might be expected with a series that has being going strong in some form for almost fifty years in a wide variety of styles, formats and approaches, Doctor Who has a huge fan-base. And this fan-base is incredibly varied, intensely committed and, so it sometimes seems, unable to agree on anything. Some like the new series not the old series, some like the old series not the new series, some like parts of the old / new series and absolutely nothing else, and so on. As such, no matter what you do, the fans will be split roughly between those who think you're the best thing to happen to the series and who worship everything you've ever written, and those who believe you're a soulless demon sent from Hell by Satan himself to spite them personally by ruining the show. Take this into account when you're reading the reactions of both groups.
Potential Subversions
Try taking one of the Aesops mentioned below and turning it on its head is always a good place to start. Maybe sometimes there are problems that no one can overcome, no matter how determined they are, or how great a team they have with them. Maybe there can be Happiness in Slavery. Maybe we would be happier if we were all the same.
Of course, keep in mind that a Long Runner like Doctor Who has probably already explored many of these themes in some form or another.
Suggested Themes and Aesops
Probably the biggest theme of Doctor Who is that one man can make a difference and that it's always a worthy thing to try to help people. Even in the stories where the Doctor fails miserably and almost everybody dies, there's at least one person left who is better off for having met him, or some malignant entity who's worse off (and deservedly so) for having opposed him.
Another major theme is freedom. The Doctor is beholden to no one, goes where the wind takes him and on the few occasions he finds himself having to bend to the whims of authority he resents it with a passion. Those authority figures who aren't evil are usually well meaning, but incompetent, or at least woefully unequipped to deal with whatever predicament has come up this week.
Paradoxically, the importance of teamwork is also a major force in many stories, with the Doctor and his companions, or UNIT and/or others putting their heads together to solve the problem. It's even been suggested a few times the the Doctor would be happier if he could find a place to belong, but this is usually dismissed fairly quickly.
The Doctor values self-actualization and the realization of hidden potential as much as he values freedom: "there's no such thing as an ordinary human".
Then there's the importance of diversity. The Doctor travels to many different places and touches the lives of many different people; generally, the only ones who are portrayed as irredeemable are those bent on trying to take away the freedom and/or individuality of others. This is best exemplified by his two greatest foes, the Daleks, who wish to EX-TER-MIN-ATE all other forms of life, and the Cybermen, relentless collectivists who believe the universe will be a much happier place when everyone else is turned into a faceless machine like them.
Similarly, the new series has taken criticism for the prevalence of the Heroic Sacrifice as a means of resolving a plot.
In either case, write whatever you want to write, but it does pay to be aware of form, and if the audience feel a particular device has been overused of late it may be wise to avoid it.
Potential Motifs
Motifs for the entire series include the police box form of the TARDIS; although initially just a way of cutting the budget by making the Doctor's time machine something cheap and easy to recognize and place in different locations, it's become an icon of the series. It's also quite tempting to view it at least partially as part of the Doctor's overall character; like the best police officers, he protects and defends the innocent.
Being an obvious symbol of time (and hence time travel), clocks are also a potential; they were quite a motif in the 1996 telemovie, and it's worth mentioning that the new series has had plenty of shots of Big Ben (which formed a central part of the plot of at least one of them).
The new series has opened several episodes with a long zoom shot from Earth in orbit to an aerial view of London.
Suggested Plots
There has been a preponderance of plots in the new series about plots to destroy/take over the entire Earth, or the entire galaxy/universe. Or even just plots where destruction would be an unfortunate side-effect.
The season finales to the past few series notwithstanding, not every plot that puts the Doctor and his companions in danger, and makes for intriguing viewing, has to imperil a planet (or an entire race, or the universe...) Smaller stories were done plenty of times within the original run of the series: take "The Caves of Androzani", mentioned below. The Doctor and his companion find themselves caught in the middle of a drug war and spend the entire story just trying to get back to the TARDIS - it's widely regarded as one of the best stories in the show's history.
In addition to the old standby of "plop the Doctor in the middle of (or run-up to) some famous historical event that he must prevent (or not prevent)", plenty of events in Earth's history are kinda weird, even if we know what happened and there's a perfectly logical, natural explanation. Take one, and tell us what really happened.
Here are some archaeological anomalies. We're sure you can provide the real story.
The Doctor would feel honor-bound to topple any society in the Help, Help, This Index Is Being Repressed! index.
A Busman's Holiday is another frequently used device to get the Doctor and his companions planetside. Basically, if the Doctor steps out of the TARDIS promising "Nothing bad ever happens on Halcyon VII!", then the Daleks are on their way.
You can also take heart in the fact that Doctor Who is in fact really just a framing device for whatever story the writer wants to tell - there's no Star Trek style continuity bible, no fixed limits to The Verse and an almost infinite variety of narrative styles, settings and devices.
Necessary Tropes
First and foremost, Doctor Who is a Walking the Earth story, at least in its televisual incarnation. While the Expanded Universe has had more freedom to explore ideas, the TV series' young target audience means a Monster of the Week (or other villain-of-the-week) format has proved most successful. The best monsters are firmly the stuff of nightmares. Also important is the element of True Companions between the Doctor and his companion, who usually functions as The Watson. Different characters will relate differently to the Doctor, of course, and there have been one or two less-than-lovable companions, but ultimately, both Doctor and companion will rescue the other, if it comes to that.
Some of the things seen by casual viewers as Necessary Tropes are actually not. The companion doesn't need to be a young, attractive human female from contemporary Britain: it's true that that's often the case, but the Doctor's had several male companions, and one of the longest-running companions ever was a man. Similarly, the UST between Doctor and companion is largely an invention of the 2005 Re Tool.
Chase sequences, preferably up and down corridors, are absolutely mandatory.
Using the TARDIS
Who writers frown on using the TARDIS as a Deus ex Machina, and most will use it only as a way to get the Doctor and companions to the plot hook. Actually separating the TARDIS and its crew, and making the Doctor's primary motivation getting back to it, is a classic plot device.
Plot Hook-wise, having the TARDIS answer a Distress Call is a fine old cliché that probably has plenty of milage left. You could do worse, anyway. But here's some advice from Uncle Rusty:
"You wouldn't believe it, but every writer who comes in to write their first script has the TARDIS answering a distress call! You just sit there going, "No, just have him land, why can't he just land, walk out the door and go 'Where am I?' Then he can hear a distress call. But it's the most boring way to start a story."
The standard excuse to the companion (and audience) for "why doesn't the Doctor just go back in time and..." is that once the TARDIS has landed, it has become part of the events. Something called the Blinovitch Limitation Effect was frequently name-dropped in previous series to imply that the Doctor going back in time and fixing things once he's already involved in them would have Extremely Bad Results. (The Russell T Davies era brought out the Clock Roaches as just one of the ways things can go horribly wrong.)
In addition to transportation, the TARDIS is also legitimately used as a Weirdness Magnet and as a repository for whatever technobabble gadgets your plot requires.
Using the screwdriver
"Less is more" goes for the sonic screwdriver, too. Yes, it is essentially a magic wand: it can do whatever you, the writer, need it to. But it shouldn't solve all the Doctor's problems—and it is emphatically not a gun. Beware of Invincible Hero.
In general, the screwdriver works best when limited to performing small, concrete tasks: opening doors, disabling security cameras, etc.
The Doctor as a character
The standard truism for writers is that the Doctor is never cruel or cowardly (cautious, yes, cowardly, no). You can, however, have an Unreliable Narrator like the Valeyard or the Dream Lord accuse him.
Human traits that the Doctor particularly admires include tenacity, creativity, and courage. That he values these traits is a clue to his own character and problem-solving style.
The Doctor always sides with the oppressed against the oppressors. Government Drug Enforcement or any other form of coerced happiness counts as oppression in his book.
He prefers to incapacitate — or, better yet, outmanoeuver — his enemies rather than kill them. He does have a weakness for poetic justice, though, and especially likes to catch enemies in their own traps.
He usually obeys a sort of temporal Prime Directive, in that he doesn't trust a society — or even an individual person — to have and use technology too far ahead of its time (or, more generally, that they didn't develop themselves). (This is the primary reason why he doesn't like the Torchwood Institute, whose whole purpose is to get hold of alien technologies and develop them for human users.) However, unlike most, this Directive does allow for him to intervene in history in order to combat a particular injustice or wrong. It does mean that he finds himself faced with the problem of certain events he can change and others he cannot; the new series usually phrases this as the Doctor being 'part of events', meaning he cannot go back and change something which he is already involved in.
The Doctor's first choice in solving a problem is communication. He will attempt to figure out the nature of the story's antagonists (e.g. which species, and what they want). If the problem is one he can fix (e.g. the alien can't communicate with humans, or the alien is just lost and needs a lift back home), he will generally do so.
The Doctor honors his word, and expects (sometimes naively) everyone else to honor theirs.
He seems to view "life" as more or less equivalent to "sentience". That is,
if someone's been taken over by an outside force and there's absolutely no way of getting the real personality back, then the Doctor views him as already dead;
the Doctor will treat androids, monsters, members of a race that is shunned or stigmatized, etc., as he would any fellow sentient beings.
Note also how many of the Doctor's more notable enemies (Daleks, Cybermen, etc) fall within a race which has become homogenized to the point of the almost-complete obliteration of individuality; a sense of the individual is clearly important to the Doctor's conception of 'life'.
The Doctor only rarely has a plan of action at the outset. He makes it up as he goes along.
Unless it's the Seventh Doctor. And even then, extenuating circumstances usually force him to improvise on the fly.
Violence is the Doctor's last choice, and he nearly never uses guns himself. That the Doctor prefers to keep his hands clean by letting other people do his dirty work is a fair criticism. The Doctor is at best a Technical Pacifist; he doesn't like to fight, but he will if he has to, and whilst he might not use guns personally he's found plenty of ways to get around that in the past.
In keeping with the above two points, the Doctor generally doesn't go around picking fights or looking for trouble (he does, however, look for excitement or something interesting, which generally leads to trouble); he usually just wanders across a problem, and his first instinct when faced with someone planning on starting something is to ask — or warn — them to change their course of action. (This is especially true of New Series Doctors, who make a special point of offering the enemy a peaceful way out.) When they (inevitably) refuse... well, though he didn't start the fight, he is perfectly willing to end it by any means necessary.
The Doctor prefers to vanish right when the action is resolved; he doesn't want to be around for the cleanup.
The Doctor feels some responsibility for the people travelling with him, and will always save them if he can — even at the cost of his own life. If they or any of the other people he meets are really determined to make Heroic Sacrifices to save the day, though, he will applaud their courage and perhaps look mournful, but not stop them.
The Doctor can and will lie when it suits his purposes, even to his companions. He will not, generally, lie about having lied.
The companion as a character
We've talked a lot about the Doctor so far, but what about those he travels with? They're just as important to get right as the Doctor, and perhaps more so:
Although not exclusively, the companion is generally female. The Doctor has travelled with male companions before, but male companions are greatly outnumbered by female ones, and the Doctor has rarely travelled with just a male companion (and not for long at that); the few occasions there has been a male companion on board, there's usually been a female companion as well (even Jamie, the male companion who travelled longest with the Doctor, also travelled along with two women — Victoria and Zoe). This has the effect of establishing a clear male-female dynamic to the Doctor-companion relationship which, while not exclusive, provides a handy template to work from.
The Doctor also usually travels with one or two people at a time; certainly no more than three. Having more than one companion around tends to be tricky for writers to handle, in terms of giving everyone enough to do story-wise; two companions on as well as the Doctor seems manageable, but having three or more seems to be a bit of a struggle. Something to keep in mind.
So, who is the companion? Generally, they're:
Human. The Doctor seems to like having humans around, often vocally considering them his favourite species. This is obviously a matter of practicality (it saves on make-up costs for a start, budget considerations being something the Doctor Who production team cannot afford to sniff at). This also enables the audience to engage with what's happening easily. He has travelled with non-humans before, to great success — Romana, a fellow Gallifreyan, was quite popular with the audience, as was the robot dog K9 (although due to his tendency to break down, K9 was not popular with the production team) — but they're outnumbered.
From the twentieth / twenty-first century. Again, the companion is usually intended as an audience identification figure, and it's often easier to do this if the companion comes from a time which roughly coincides with that of the viewer. This tends to mean the recent past or the near future at most. Of course, there are exceptions.
Less 'intelligent' / more naive than the Doctor. This enables them to again act as an audience stand-in by asking all the questions the audience will have ("Where are we? What's going on? What's that?!"), enabling the Doctor to act as Mr. Exposition. Even Romana, who was established at times as more intellectually gifted than the Doctor, was still less experienced than him, allowing her to fill this role at times.
Important note: 'Less intelligent' does not equal 'stupid'. Companions who have clung on too tightly to the Idiot Ball in the past have generally not gone down well.
Curious. They have an interest in the universe around them and the wonders the Doctor shows them. Particularly in the new series, in their introductory / early episodes they're often directly compared with more jaded, less intellectually curious or more timid people around them to demonstrate how they stand out, and consequently why they appeal to the Doctor.
Moral and ethical. The companion generally supports the Doctor in his battles against evil. However, particularly in the new series, the companion has often acted as the Doctor's moral guide; even when he's not being an Anti-Hero, the Doctor is still an alien, and therefore does not often operate according to human morality. The companion has often acted to guide the Doctor into doing what is right, express outrage when he does go too far and steer in him the right direction once again. Much has been made in the new series about how the Doctor needs someone around him to 'stop him' from going too far. (It may be that his new status as Last of His Kind has something to do with this.)
Trustworthy. The companion usually functions as the Doctor's best friend, and unscrupulous types rarely get invited aboard. Although mileage has and can be made from making the companion an untrustworthy sort who may even be acting against the Doctor (such as Turlough in the classic series, and Adam in the new series), these generally don't tend to last long; Turlough eventually did a Heel Face Turn and became a genuine companion, and Adam was booted out of the TARDIS after one adventure because he betrayed the Doctor's trust and lied about it.
Able to be frightened. It's a big, bad, scary universe the Doctor inhabits, and it's often been the companion's job to get scared by it when necessary (such as when the Monster of the Week is baring down on them). Be careful with this one, however; in the past, this has translated to the typical cliche of the companion standing around doing a lot of screaming. Keeping in mind that the companion is generally female, and this can lead to some quite outdated gender roles and Unfortunate Implications very quickly (it also tends to make the companion look rather useless and come off as rather irritating). Consequently, this means that more modern roles for the companion have made them more:
Capable. Although they are usually still not as competent as the Doctor, the companion is expected to look after herself. You don't have to make the companion Ellen Ripley (although you could do worse), but modern audiences will find the timid, screaming, near-useless cliche of the Doctor Who companion unacceptable these days.
In the past, the companion's relationship with the Doctor has tended be more a close friendship or a teacher / student-style connection, with little over romantic tension. The new series companions have generally introduced more romantic subtext between the Doctor and the companion. This also impacts on the male companion / female companion dynamic as well; the male companions in these cases are often the female companion's 'everyman' boyfriend, and is less than pleased at both the female companion's obvious interest in the daring, charismatic and heroic Doctor, which often expresses itself in hostility towards the Doctor.
Choices, Choices
Two main choices to make - setting and genre. Doctor Who is a very versatile format and continuity has never been strictly observed. The setting can be pure space fantasy with Crystal Spires and Togas, Twenty Minutes into the Future, ancient Rome, Victorian Cardiff, Space Opera - or, of course, contemporary London. (His sojourns in places outside of Europe are quite rare by comparison.)
Doctor Who can fit into any genre, from Gothic Horror to Film Noir to Political Allegory to straight Action Adventure. Pick one you'd like to write, and go with it.
Pitfalls
The main pitfall is in writing something that your effects budget can't create (leading to Special Effects Failure), or a story too big to fit into the time allowed. Steven Moffat once observed that Who monsters tend to work best right up until the moment they're revealed. Judicious use of Nothing Is Scarier can really stretch an anemic budget.
The other pitfall many writers seem to fall into is over-use of the Villain Ball (so many villains were only caught because they pointlessly murdered people) — or the Idiot Ball (companions wandering off and into trouble ... again...)
The 2005 reboot has also been frequently accused of over-relying on the Reset Button and / or the Deus ex Machina as a means of resolving the plot. To be fair, this isn't entirely limited to the new series, as the old series also had numerous moments where things built up to someone pressing the right button at the right time, which conveniently resolved the plot for them.
Techno Babble can also be a bit of an issue. In fairness, Doctor Who has always generally hovered around the 'soft' side of the 'hard' science fiction / 'soft' science fiction scale, but the over-use of technobabble can easily switch an audience off.
Some of the show's longer stories, particularly in the 'serial' format of the classic series, also tended to run out of steam by the third episode or thereabouts, generally relying on a lot of Padding wherein the Doctor and friends would get captured, locked up, threatened with death, escape, run around the villain's base a bit, and then get cornered again just in time for the end of episode cliffhanger (lather, rinse, repeat, depending on how many more episodes were left in the story). The new series, with a shorter running time, has generally avoided the problem of padding, but instead can seem to go the opposite route, resulting in a lot of frantic running around, shouting and waving of arms in the last fifteen minutes or so to effect a hurried (and not necessarily coherent) conclusion to events.
A note also about the fan-base: as might be expected with a series that has being going strong in some form for almost fifty years in a wide variety of styles, formats and approaches, Doctor Who has a huge fan-base. And this fan-base is incredibly varied, intensely committed and, so it sometimes seems, unable to agree on anything. Some like the new series not the old series, some like the old series not the new series, some like parts of the old / new series and absolutely nothing else, and so on. As such, no matter what you do, the fans will be split roughly between those who think you're the best thing to happen to the series and who worship everything you've ever written, and those who believe you're a soulless demon sent from Hell by Satan himself to spite them personally by ruining the show. Take this into account when you're reading the reactions of both groups.
Potential Subversions
Try taking one of the Aesops mentioned below and turning it on its head is always a good place to start. Maybe sometimes there are problems that no one can overcome, no matter how determined they are, or how great a team they have with them. Maybe there can be Happiness in Slavery. Maybe we would be happier if we were all the same.
Of course, keep in mind that a Long Runner like Doctor Who has probably already explored many of these themes in some form or another.
Suggested Themes and Aesops
Probably the biggest theme of Doctor Who is that one man can make a difference and that it's always a worthy thing to try to help people. Even in the stories where the Doctor fails miserably and almost everybody dies, there's at least one person left who is better off for having met him, or some malignant entity who's worse off (and deservedly so) for having opposed him.
Another major theme is freedom. The Doctor is beholden to no one, goes where the wind takes him and on the few occasions he finds himself having to bend to the whims of authority he resents it with a passion. Those authority figures who aren't evil are usually well meaning, but incompetent, or at least woefully unequipped to deal with whatever predicament has come up this week.
Paradoxically, the importance of teamwork is also a major force in many stories, with the Doctor and his companions, or UNIT and/or others putting their heads together to solve the problem. It's even been suggested a few times the the Doctor would be happier if he could find a place to belong, but this is usually dismissed fairly quickly.
The Doctor values self-actualization and the realization of hidden potential as much as he values freedom: "there's no such thing as an ordinary human".
Then there's the importance of diversity. The Doctor travels to many different places and touches the lives of many different people; generally, the only ones who are portrayed as irredeemable are those bent on trying to take away the freedom and/or individuality of others. This is best exemplified by his two greatest foes, the Daleks, who wish to EX-TER-MIN-ATE all other forms of life, and the Cybermen, relentless collectivists who believe the universe will be a much happier place when everyone else is turned into a faceless machine like them.
Similarly, the new series has taken criticism for the prevalence of the Heroic Sacrifice as a means of resolving a plot.
In either case, write whatever you want to write, but it does pay to be aware of form, and if the audience feel a particular device has been overused of late it may be wise to avoid it.
Potential Motifs
Motifs for the entire series include the police box form of the TARDIS; although initially just a way of cutting the budget by making the Doctor's time machine something cheap and easy to recognize and place in different locations, it's become an icon of the series. It's also quite tempting to view it at least partially as part of the Doctor's overall character; like the best police officers, he protects and defends the innocent.
Being an obvious symbol of time (and hence time travel), clocks are also a potential; they were quite a motif in the 1996 telemovie, and it's worth mentioning that the new series has had plenty of shots of Big Ben (which formed a central part of the plot of at least one of them).
The new series has opened several episodes with a long zoom shot from Earth in orbit to an aerial view of London.
Suggested Plots
There has been a preponderance of plots in the new series about plots to destroy/take over the entire Earth, or the entire galaxy/universe. Or even just plots where destruction would be an unfortunate side-effect.
The season finales to the past few series notwithstanding, not every plot that puts the Doctor and his companions in danger, and makes for intriguing viewing, has to imperil a planet (or an entire race, or the universe...) Smaller stories were done plenty of times within the original run of the series: take "The Caves of Androzani", mentioned below. The Doctor and his companion find themselves caught in the middle of a drug war and spend the entire story just trying to get back to the TARDIS - it's widely regarded as one of the best stories in the show's history.
In addition to the old standby of "plop the Doctor in the middle of (or run-up to) some famous historical event that he must prevent (or not prevent)", plenty of events in Earth's history are kinda weird, even if we know what happened and there's a perfectly logical, natural explanation. Take one, and tell us what really happened.
Here are some archaeological anomalies. We're sure you can provide the real story.
The Doctor would feel honor-bound to topple any society in the Help, Help, This Index Is Being Repressed! index.
A Busman's Holiday is another frequently used device to get the Doctor and his companions planetside. Basically, if the Doctor steps out of the TARDIS promising "Nothing bad ever happens on Halcyon VII!", then the Daleks are on their way.
