Player Info ››
Name: Tara
Age: 36
Time Zone: PST (-8 UTC)
Contact Information: Journal: stories_in_time Plurk: stormwolf10 Email: stormwolf10(at)gmail.com
Other Characters Played: None

Character Info ››
Name: The Doctor (8th)
Canon: Doctor Who (TV and audio canon only. It's crazy enough without adding the novels and comics to it.)
Age: I'm not sure even he knows for sure anymore. Eight goes back and forth from saying "several hundred" to saying "over a thousand". However, since Nine declares himself to be 900, I'll say somewhere in the late 800's. This shouldn't be right, based on the 600 years he spent on the planet Orbis alone, but...wibbly wobbly, timey wimey, I guess. Let's go with "old as balls".
Appearance:


Canon Point: At the end of the audio series "Dark Eyes".

History: The Doctor in general | Eight specifically (excluding everything marked (PROSE) or (COMIC) since I'm ignoring those mediums)

Personality: The Doctor is not at all your standard hero. He's not a superhero or an action movie good guy. He is a scientist, a wanderer, and an eternal joy-rider. He doesn't go out searching for baddies to fight. It just sort of happens that way. His main goal in life is actually quite simple: to see the wonders of the universe. Unfortunately those wonders tend to come hand-in-hand with nasty people out to kill or conquer, and while his intent is never to fight the bad guys, his conscience will simply not let him ignore the suffering of others. This is true of pretty much every incarnation of the Doctor.

And then...there is Eight. He, I believe, is the incarnation to go through the most evolution in his lifetime, save perhaps Ten. Maybe.

Eight started out as an open, bubbly, joyful man who takes enjoyment in even the most mundane of things, like the feel of the new shoes Grace gave him, and the amusing way the Ray-Ban sunglasses he handed out to Charley and C'rizz in Light City would bounce back after being "squished". He has an exceptional fondness for books, even having a library's worth of books along the walls of his console room. He's also one of the worst offenders of all the incarnations at name-dropping. Within moments of meeting Charley, he had mentioned not only being acquainted with Geronimo, but also Lenin and "the Czarina" (he doesn't mention which one). In fact, on the day he was "born", he started rattling off a story about helping Puccini with Madame Butterfly.

Another thing that sets him apart from his fellow Doctors is just how much he keeps his hearts on his sleeve. If it weren't for being an alien with two hearts and an encyclopedic knowledge of all of time and space, he would fit in quite well in some romantic Victorian novel. He was the first incarnation to kiss a companion, and so far the only incarnation (discounting the half-human Ten) to actually say the words, "I love you." Eight is like the Doctor as written by, say, Charlotte Bronte or Elizabeth Gaskell. Genteel, mannerly and deeply, deeply romantic in every sense of the word.

He seems to be a direct reaction to his previous self, who was dark and manipulative and who would intentionally try to mold even his own companion into the kind of person he wanted her to be. Instead, Eight is spontaneous and machination-free and is much more inclined to show his companions a good time and share the wonders of the universe with them.

This has the unfortunate side-effect of completely blindsiding him with the full consequences of his sometimes careless actions. He damaged the Web of Time when he saved Charley Pollard when she was supposed to die in the crash of the R101 airship, and tried to just completely run away from the effects by simply going on as if nothing had happened. Even when the Time Lords finally caught up with him to "deal" with the situation, he tried to run, and then tried to hide Charley from them by sending her off to a party on the other side of the universe. He lied to her and claimed it was a birthday present, trying to shelter her from whatever the Time Lords had in store for her.

In the end, it was his love for Charley and his inability to let her die that would condemn him and his TARDIS to being infected by a force known as Anti-Time. This drove him absolutely mad for a time and splintered some of his past selves out of his mind. They were eventually returned to him and he was cured of the madness, but the Anti-Time infection remained. He ended up having to exile himself to a universe without Time, which, to a Time Lord, meant a disorienting and frightening blindness in the extra senses every Time Lord has for sensing Time. This was the first time his personality began to evolve.

When he is forced to leave this universe for another without Time, it affects him deeply, turning him colder and more bitter. Though, wouldn't you be in the first few months of losing one of your senses? Being unable to feel the flow or even existence of Time in the Divergent Universe was much like suddenly being struck blind. It's likely that anyone would be inclined towards feeling a bit put upon by Fate for a while. Unfortunately, this feeling is also combined with the feeling of failure when he discovers that instead of being safe, Charley has thrown herself back into danger by following him into the new, timeless universe. Charley ends up being a target of his venting, both from his feelings of betrayal and by sheer proximity. Despite being bitter, he is actually still open (though his openness now feels more like an open wound than his usual friendliness) and vents all his feelings on her. That includes his love for her. In the heat of the moment, though, he throws his love at her like a weapon and then despondently admits that he thinks he might wish that he'd never met her.

Thankfully, once he becomes more and more used to the Divergent Universe and accepts that Charley is there with him no matter what, he softens considerably, almost back to his usual sweet and cheerful nature. Unfortunately, it was during this time in the timeless Divergent universe that his relationship with Charley began to break down, especially after they picked up a second companion named C'rizz.

While having an extremely strong moral code, (even stronger than many of his other selves) he is not above admitting to having moments of wanting to utterly obliterate that code. When he finds out that Excelsior murdered Charley and then watches her shoot C'rizz, (before he found out that the world would just reset itself and they'd come back to life) he admits to hating her and feeling like he should kill her in revenge for their deaths. He doesn't, of course, but he is open and honest enough with himself that he quite freely admits to having the urge.

When they managed to return to our universe, it seemed like his personality was going to soften back into what it had been before, but when C'rizz died, Eight reacted as one you might expect from someone who was used to people around him dying or leaving him: he tried to move on, using his escapism to heal. Charley was horrified by this reaction and left him, leaving him once again a bitter man. When the Time Lords dumped a girl named Lucie Miller on him, it was at just about the worst time, and Lucie got the brunt of his anger.

However, Lucie spurred a new change in Eight. Their growing friendship brought him back to himself in many ways. Everything was fun again. That spark of life and boyish excitement grew.

He is arguably the most gentle and most easily emotionally scarred Doctor, again even outpacing Ten. When his great-grandson Alex is gunned down by the Daleks and his companion Lucie sacrifices her life to destroy them, he seems to go into total emotional meltdown. Even his granddaughter, Susan, worries for him and even slightly fears what he might do. And, after all the Daleks have done to him in this incarnation, he declared that he believes his Fourth incarnation made a mistake in sparing the Daleks when he had the chance to eradicate them. By the "present" time, Eight has developed a hard line that, when crossed, leaves him a hard and almost zealous defender of the universe. The two sides to his coin are almost like night and day now. 

He is so distraught, he tries to fly his TARDIS to the end of everything, at the time when the universe ends, claiming to be going to try to get some "perspective" and see how everything turns out in a desperate search for hope. When the Time Lords stop the TARDIS in order to send him on a mission, he becomes so desperate to break free and run from this responsibility that he hacks at the console with a pickaxe to try to free the TARDIS from their control.

His new change in wardrobe from the romantic velvet coat, silk cravat and Byronesque long curls to a much shorter haircut and a blue leather jacket reflects his new, more somber outlook. He is a man desperately searching for hope, and not finding much. However, he has found a little by the end of his mission for the Time Lords. Watching Molly, a woman under his protection, gladly return to the horrors of World War I because even in that hell she had the hope of seeing her friend again, was something of a turning point for him. He may be a bit more hardened, but the laughter comes a bit more easily again, and he's tentatively ready to go on with his life. At his "Canon Point", he may no longer be a walking open wound, but the scar is still fresh and tender.

Abilities/Powers/Skills: (Over the course of 50 years and many, many writers and producers, sometimes the Doctor just picked up abilities that he used once for plot convenience. I'm going to try to just list the main ones that we know are integral to who he is.)

Regeneration - Time Lords can completely renew their cellular makeup to prevent death. This results in a whole new body and a somewhat altered personality (though the "core traits" of the individual stays much the same). It was once said they could only have 13 bodies, but it is uncertain as to whether that "rule" is still in effect now that the Time Lords are nearly extinct.

Telepathy - The ability to sense, relay and manipulate thoughts (and sometimes memories). Time Lords seem to require physical contact when dealing with non-telepathic beings, such as most humans. The ability to wipe memories is something he rarely ever does, and even then only if the safety of the person is at stake.

Time sense - Time Lords have extra senses beyond the Big Five of taste, touch, sight, hearing and taste that allow them to sense Time. Like other senses, it is not always accurate due to the complicated and fluctuating nature of Time, but on the whole, they can sense various possible pasts and futures and, most importantly, when a point in time is a "fixed point" that should not be changed or else the Web of Time would be damaged.

Enhanced senses - On top of having extra senses, Time Lords also possess a higher level of the other senses as well. For example, they can see with greater detail than humans, and can identify the makeup of certain objects by taste.

Higher resistances - Time Lords are more resilient to extremes in temperature, radiation, and poisons. They are by no means immune, and significant levels will kill them, they just do not die as quickly as a human would if similarly exposed.

Weaknesses: Besides the abilities listed, he's pretty much as vulnerable and squishy as a human being. He's a tiny bit more solidly built than, say, Ten or Eleven, but that isn't really saying much.

Most of his specific weaknesses are in his head, both literally and figuratively. Whether it's through bad luck, or his mind is just much more susceptible, the Eighth Doctor suffers from an inordinate amount bouts of amnesia or losing his identity in one way or another. His other weaknesses are more psychological and self-imposed. He has a self-sacrificing streak a mile wide, will puts him in harms way more than even his regular adventures would on their own. Also, he has a problem with "doing the maths", as he calls it; he is simply unwilling to risk the lives of a group of people, even if it means saving a larger group of people. While it's noble to not want to bargain away anyone's life for the "greater good", this does tend to paradoxically leave a lot of bodies in his wake. This makes him pretty easy to manipulate.

Special Items:

The TARDIS - Stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. The Doctor's space and time ship, and the one constant in his entire life. She is a ship of seemingly infinite size on the inside, crammed into an outer shell that looks like a London police box from the 1960's. It can travel anywhere in time and space, even if he doesn't always have control over where and when he lands, because the TARDIS quite literally has a mind of her own. She doesn't usually communicate with the Doctor (except for the one time her consciousness was put inside a human body), but she is sentient and has a habit of pulling the Doctor off-course to a place where he's needed.

The TARDIS also has a chameleon circuit, which is supposed to make the outer shell of the ship to look like whatever would best blend into the environment that she lands in. Unfortunately it has been on the fritz since he first landed in London in 1963, so it remains stuck at a blue police box no matter where it lands. There was a time in his Sixth life when he almost fixed it, but it broke again and she went back to her old police box look.

Sonic Screwdriver - It slices! It dices! It makes julienne fries! ...okay, so it probably hasn't in any medium of the canon, but I bet it could if he found himself needing to win a particularly deadly cooking show. There are so many different ways the sonic has been used in canon, but the Doctor most commonly uses it to open locks, whether they're on doors, windows, boxes, etc. and interacting with computers and other electrical devices. That is, of course, unless the lock is one of those pesky deadlock seals.

RP Sample: Here