The Doctor (Doctor Who)

The Doctor is a canon character from the long-running TV show Doctor Who. He has so far been portrayed by eleven different actors: William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann (briefly), Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, and Matt Smith.

Canon History
The Doctor is a thousand-year-old Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. Something of a rebel compared with others Time Lords, he stole a time-traveling spaceship to go explore the universe and never looked back. He spends a lot of time on Earth, and has grown rather fond of it and its people.

He likes to take traveling companions with him on his journeys, and most of them have been human (one notable exception is Romana, a fellow Time Lady). Together, they have adventures through time and space and save humanity from being destroyed or enslaved at least twice a year. The companions can only take so much of this, so there's a fairly regular turnover rate. Some of them are lucky enough to simply say "Okay, that's enough, thanks," and retire; others have suffered a variety of more or less unpleasant fates, leading to spells where the Doctor swears off adventuring and declares himself a lone wolf. To date, this has never stuck.

The Doctor has many enemies as well as friends. Some of his more famous foes are the Master, the Daleks (the most iconic of them all), the Cybermen, and the Weeping Angels.

In Badfic
Despite all Doctors having quite distinct personality characteristics and a unique sense of style, it is not always possible to tell from the story which Doctor the story is about. With one exception:

Classic Who
Doctors One through Eight have not much to suffer from Suethors, both because they are not as well-known to young fans and because they are not as young and attractive as the latest two Doctors. However, since Doctor Five drastically subverts this typical image by being a rather handsome young blond man, he often features in slash stories with his companion Turlough, or three-in-a-bed romps with his female companions Nyssa and Tegan. Doctor Eight was also more attractive than average and, in the gap between his single adventure and the new series, had plenty of badfic about him.

New Who
The same cannot be said of Doctors Nine and Ten.

The Ninth
Despite a face apparently made of rubber, until recently Nine featured in many badslash stories, paired with Captain Jack Harkness. He also appears in saccharine depictions of mundane domesticity, although these usually, though not exclusively, gestate Nine's precocious brats within Rose Tyler rather than Captain Jack.

The Tenth
The pretty one &mdash; if you go for the skin over bone type of guy &mdash; is often paired with his companion Rose. Many fanbrats believe that she is his Twu Wuv, easily forgetting, or perhaps not even knowing, that the Doctor has had many incarnations before RTD pumped new life into him, and consequently many companions. However, since the two of them failed to get together or knocked up prior to the events of "Doomsday," authors have been forced to either simply ignore the events of the Season Two finale, or else come up with a plothole-riddled explanation of how Rose returned from Pete's World to settle down and have the aforementioned precocious babies. Whatever the circumstances, however, Doctor/Rose ships often involve heavily Sueified canon characters. These fics have increased in number since the BBC announced that Rose will be returning to English screens in Series Four.

There are also stories where the Doctor for some reason does not have a companion and meets a girl (typical age range: 13 to 16 Earth years) who is in desperate need of being rescued. He helps her out and she becomes his companion. This companion is almost invariably a Mary Sue.

The Eleventh
He's had two seasons, he's adorkable, and he's pretty. The fic will come. The fic will come.

The Doctor's Daughter
Hints in the new series that the Doctor was once a father have spawned many fics involving the Doctor's daughter, who miraculously survives the Time War with little or no explanation. Despite being a Time Lady, she typically has the demeanor and interests of an Earth teenager and none of the Time Lords' sexual restraint. She often attracts the romantic interests of male canon characters such as Captain Jack Harkness and the Master (who will of course be turned good by the power of twu wuv).

Given that the first companion of the First Doctor (Susan Foreman) was referred to, both in the scripts and in the publicity material, as his "granddaughter," the idea that the Doctor has a child of some sort is perhaps not that farfetched.

The Doctor and the PPC
During the 2013 Blackout, the Doctor's TARDIS was forced into an unstable plothole, causing it to crash into HQ. Tracing the source of the power outage, the Doctor went into the Cafeteria, where the creature Slorp was imprisoned in an inexpertly made holding field that drained the power from the rest of HQ. When Morgan inadvertently released Slorp into the hallways, the Doctor teamed up with her, Christianne Shieh, Eledhwen Elerossiel, Sergio Turbo, and Nikki Cherryflower to defeat Slorp and lure it into a Reality Room where it could be destroyed.

Following the return of HQ's power supply, the Doctor was neuralyzed and returned to his home continuum.