Love Doctor

Valentine's Day is bearing down on us once again! Last year I looked at the worst companion romances in Doctor Who history because I'm a cynical single bastard. I'm still a cynical single bastard, but I'm going to take a slightly happier tack this year. Enough with the companions, let's take a look at the many, many loves of the Doctor himself! Let's start with the obvious, and work backwards, shall we?

River Song

River, as you probably already know if you're reading this blog, first encountered the Tenth Doctor in Silence in the Library. First from his point of view, at least; last, from hers. There's a strong implication right from the start that their relationship is romantic; River knows the Doctor's name, and the Doctor says there's only one time in his life he could share that with someone - his wedding? His death? His series finale? We're not told, but when River resurfaces in the life of the Eleventh Doctor the sparks really start to fly, and by Day of the Moon she's tasting Time Lord tonsils. She may or may not have married him in The Wedding of River Song - she technically married a robot, but he was inside it, after all. Whether that was the happy day or not, all signs point to River Song, at some point in their knotted timelines, becoming the Doctor's wife. Speaking of...

The TARDIS

Men and their toys, huh? The Doctor's relationship with his TARDIS has always been intimate, but the story The Doctor's Wife took that to extremes. There had been intimations that the TARDIS was in some way or another sentient since all the way back in the third story ever, 1964's The Edge of Destruction, but this story finally made it explicit. All that console-stroking pays off when the spirit of the TARDIS is sucked out of the police box and put into the body of Idris, an attractive young woman. Idris may not literally be the Doctor's wife, but it becomes clear that the bond between the two is stronger than any romantic relationship the Doctor could ever develop.

Marilyn Monroe

The Doctor met Norma Jeane off-screen during the events of A Christmas Carol, and although he claimed to have only accidentally accepted her marriage proposal, he went through with it quick enough when he couldn't drag his companions Kazran and Abigail away from their own romantic festivities. He must have gotten cold feet, though - when she called the TARDIS looking for him, he claimed the marriage was invalid. She rebounded pretty well - their quickie wedding happened in 1952, meaning she consoled herself by jumping into the arms of Joltin' Joe DiMaggio.

Of course, if the Doctor really did marry Marilyn, that would have made him a bigamist when he got hitched to River. Or maybe a trigamist, thanks to...

Queen Elizabeth I

The Doctor has had multiple encounters with Queen Elizabeth I across multiple media, most of which are referred to only obliquely without actually being shown. In The Chase, the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki spy on good Queen Bess with their new Time-Space Visualizer, as she apocryphally instructs William Shakespeare to write a play about Falstaff in love.

A sequential string of Doctors spend some time with the Virgin Queen, according to various licensed novels and audio plays - the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn pay her a visit, the Seventh Doctor makes her acquaintance, and the Eighth Doctor takes his companions Samson and Gemma to court. Whether Elizabeth knows all these Doctors are one and the same man is unknown, but for some reason she decides to elope with the Tenth Doctor in an untold but probably highly disturbing adventure. He implies that the sobriquet "Virgin Queen" is no longer accurate - look at those pictures above, think of David Tennant, and consider that for a moment.

Joan Redfern

The Tenth Doctor's already looking like a bit of a man-whore, and we haven't even gotten to the biggies yet. The Doctor and Martha met Joan Redfern while hiding from the Family of Blood in Human Nature. The Doctor had wiped his own memory and turned himself human in what seems, by the end of the two-parter, to be a vast overreaction to the situation. Joan was a nurse at the school where "John Smith" was teaching, and the two fell in love. To stop the Family, John turned back into the Doctor, and Joan viewed the man she loved as having died. Of course, you either know all this, or I've just spoiled one of the best Doctor Who stories ever, but you know what you're getting into when you read a list like this on the internet.

Human Nature was based on the book of the same name, which starred the then-current Seventh Doctor and his companion Benny. At the end of the book, Joan gives the Doctor her cat, Wolsey, who travels in the TARDIS for a time. After the Seventh Doctor regenerates into the Eighth, he seeks out Benny (who had since moved on) and gives Wolsey to her. Regeneration always causes personality changes major and minor in the Doctor - the Eighth Doctor was less dark, less mysterious, more straight-forward, more open with his companions, even open to romance in a way he hadn't been before. But it still must have been odd for him to suddenly realize that he didn't want his cat anymore.

Madame de Pompadour

The Doctor, Rose and Mickey met Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson aka Reinette aka Madame de Pompadour while on board a 51st Century spaceship with very user-unfriendly time-travel capabilities. The Doctor's clearly in love with Reinette, and while the whole thing is very romantic it's also stone cold mean towards Rose. Seriously, am I the only one who thought that? I'll get to Rose two entries from now, but so much of their relationship is spent dancing around the whole "I love you but I can't love you because you're a human and I'm a Time Lord" thing, and then he just flat out invites Reinette to move in with them. If I were Rose, I would have thrown Madam la Pomplamoose right back in his face when I was on that beach in Norway. 

Jabe Ceth Ceth Jafe

Jabe was a representative of the Forest of Cheem and a descendant of Earth's rain forests encountered by the Ninth Doctor and Rose at The End of the World.  The romance factor here is minimal - the Doctor and Jabe didn't get beyond some light flirting before she went up in smoke (only Who can prevent forest fires, and he was busy). But their relationship, coming as it did in the second episode of the new series, was the audience's first inclination that this new Doctor might not be as asexual as many of his previous incarnations. Which was no doubt a comfort to...

Rose Tyler

Rose, of course, was the first companion of the revived series, and traveled with both the Ninth and Tenth Doctors. Rose had a profound influence on the Ninth Doctor, and his next regeneration seemed tyler-made for Rose (see what I did there?). Rose's relationship with the Ninth Doctor was intense but not particularly romantic - she was still on-and-off with boyfriend Mickey, and had minor flirtations with secondary companions Adam and Jack. But her relationship with the Tenth Doctor quickly deepened into something more. The Doctor can never quite admit to the full depths of his feeling for Rose, but he does give her his human clone as a lovely parting gift, which...is a happy ending...I guess? He still looks like David Tennant, so I guess I'd settle for that too.

Emma

For all you obsessive Whovians, or those of you who aspire to be, let me be clear right off the bat - Emma doesn't count. Emma was the companion of an alternate version of the Ninth Doctor, played by Mr. Bean's Rowan Atkinson, in the 1999 charity comedy special The Curse of Fatal Death. The Doctor and Emma had fallen in love, and the Doctor was planning to retire so they could get married. After an encounter with the Master and the Daleks caused the Doctor to regenerate into Joanna Lumley, Emma broke things off, an inexplicably poor decision even by this gay man's standards. The Curse of Fatal Death was written by somebody named Steven Moffat, who was never heard from again and whose crazy ideas about the Doctor getting married would certainly never be taken seriously outside of a comedy special.

Iris Wildthyme

Iris Wildthyme is an eccentric Time Lady whose TARDIS is smaller on the inside than it is on the outside. Her origins are shrouded in mystery - even to herself - but in most of her recent appearances she seems to hail from a planet in a parallel universe which may or may not be a version of Gallifrey depending on whether the Doctor has been licensed from the BBC for use in that particular adventure or not. The Doctor tends to find her infuriating although he will reluctantly admit to a fondness for her; she claims that he's madly in love with her, and occasionally hints at a prior torrid affair. Iris has appeared in various spin-off novels and audio plays, although her first encounter with the Doctor is unrecorded. The earliest Doctor we've seen her with is the Third; the fact that her current incarnation (the Sixth Iris, as it were) is played by Katy Manning, the same actress who played his companion Jo Grant, lends a whole new metatextual level to Jo's goodbye scene that I'd rather not think about.

  

Charlotte Pollard

Charlotte "Charley" Pollard was a companion of the Eighth Doctor in a series of original audio plays from Big Finish Productions. The Doctor saved Charley from the doomed airship R101 in the year 1931 and the two became travelling companions and the best of friends. Charley fell in love with the Doctor, and the Doctor showed signs of possibly reciprocating. They worked out their relationship issues in the excruciatingly boring story Scherzo, in which the Doctor was angry with her for following him into exile in a parallel universe because he had sacrificed his freedom for her but then he acknowledged his feelings and they almost had sex but then something happened and there was a monster that I think symbolized their potential child or something and I guess they decided to just stay friends? I couldn't tell what was happening when I listened to it the first time, I'm certainly not putting myself through that again just for a lousy blog post. Charley is a great companion and actress India Fischer is marvelous, but her storyline is completely incomprehensible. After leaving the Eighth Doctor's company, she winds up anachronistically travelling with the Sixth Doctor, towards whom she is, for some reason, much less romantically inclined.

Professor Bernice Summerfield

Benny Summerfield is Doctor Who's original time-travelling archaeologist. She first appeared in the novel Love and War where she replaced Ace as the Seventh Doctor's companion. After Virgin Publishing lost the rights to Doctor Who, they continued the range with original adventures devoted to Benny. Big Finish Productions began producing original audio plays with Benny stories before gaining the rights to Who, and they continue to produce stand-alone Bernice Summerfield adventures as well as the occasional Doctor Who crossover, all starring Lisa Bowerman as the Professor. Benny is a fantastic character, and Lisa Bowerman is brilliant, and she deserves multiple blog posts all her own. She's in this one due to the novel The Dying Days (and not just because it's where he gives her his ex-girlfriend's cat - see above). She had parted ways with the Seventh Doctor some time back, but he showed up on her doorstep shortly after regenerating into the Eighth. As he's saying good-bye after a shared adventure with the Ice Warriors, she grabs him, throws him onto her bed, and, well...the Doctor dances. The scene ends discretely, of course, but it's still the first depiction of the Doctor having sex. (Well, the first officially licensed by the BBC. Your Fifth Doctor/Turlough fan-fiction doesn't count.) It's a little odd, given their close but completely platonic friendship up to that point, but I suppose if my good friend Sylvestor McCoy suddenly changed into my new friend Paul McGann, I'd be tempted too.

Doctor Grace Holloway

Nowadays, the Doctor is pretty much expected to kiss all his companions at some point - I'm surprised Mickey got away without a lip-lock. But back in 1996, when the newly regenerated Eighth Doctor planted one on his new friend Doctor Grace Holloway in the made-for-TV movie Doctor Who, fandom was outraged in a way that only fandoms can be. It's fairly tame by the new show's standards - he first kisses her impulsively in a moment of happiness. She later makes her feelings for him explicit, shouting the excruciatingly awful line "I finally meet the right guy and he's from another planet" in response to absolutely nothing while riding on the back of a motorcycle, possibly just because the writers thought it would sound good in a commercial but probably just because this movie is terrible. They share a more clearly romantic kiss in the final moments of the film, when he invites her to travel with him in the TARDIS and she declines for no reason whatsoever. This is another example of Grace's motivations being unclear to me. If the Doctor showed up on my door in one of his better-looking bodies and was all, "Would you like to travel with me in my TARDIS and have adventures and also crazy space sex?", my response would not be, "Nah, I'm good. I've gotta work in the morning." I doubt yours would be either. Although this would be the only TV outing for either character, Paul McGann continues to play the Eighth Doctor in original audio adventures from Big Finish, whereas rights issues have kept Grace from appearing anywhere but a couple of comic strip appearances in Doctor Who Magazine. No big loss.

The Second Romana

The real romance here was an off-screen one. Tom Baker, who played the Fourth Doctor, and Lalla Ward, who played the Second Romana, were married shortly after she left the show, and legend has it that the romance bloomed while the two were on location in Paris filming City of Death. Whether that romance bled into their characters' relationship is open for debate...

... but the two do spend an awful lot of the story skipping through the streets of Paris holding hands for no discernible reason.

The First Romana

Whether you think there was anything going on between Romana's first incarnation and the Doctor rather depends on whether you consider this little Christmas sketch, filmed as part of an in-house Christmas present for BBC staff, canonical or not...

 I like to think so.

Cameca

In the first season story The Aztecs, the First Doctor, Barbara, Ian and Susan arrive in 15th Century Mexico. After Barbara is mistaken for a goddess (long story, long brilliant story), the Doctor is taken to the Garden of Peace, where he meets Cameca, an elderly Aztec widow. The pair are instantly taken with each other. Seriously, look at his face as he watches her walk away.

He is admiring himself some fine Aztec booty. The Doctor inadvertently proposes to Cameca (he misunderstood a local ritual), and although he's a bit thrown by how quickly things have gotten serious, there's the feeling that it's more because he knows he can't stay with her than that he's actually disturbed by the prospect of marrying her. Cameca helps her beloved escape into the tomb in which the TARDIS has been sealed, even though she knows it means saying goodbye.

She says farewell, giving him a brooch to remember him by. He's not happy about the situation - here he is after she departs.

Romana subtext aside, this is the only real on-screen romance for the Doctor in the classic series, and William Hartnell makes the most of it. He clearly has genuine feelings for Cameca, but knows that a relationship is impossible. If he didn't have a granddaughter and two humans to cart around, I suspect he would have been quite content to spend the rest of Cameca's life with her before resuming his wanderings. I wonder if the Eleventh Doctor still has that brooch?

Cameca is the first on-screen romance for the Doctor - but she's not the last entry in this list.

Patience

We know the Doctor had a family. The very first episode introduced his granddaughter Susan; the Second Doctor mentioned a family, long lost, to Victoria; and the modern series has had him mention being a father and a husband (in tones somewhat too serious to suggest he's talking about any of the ladies above). So the question has always remained - who was the Doctor's first wife? Who was the mother of his children? Who was Susan's grandmother?

The TV series has never answered this question, but the licensed original novels have. Sort of. Pay attention, this gets complicated. Way back in the ancient days of Gallifrey, there was a ruling triumvirate of legendary Time Lords - Rassilon (recently resurrected in the person of Timothy Dalton), Omega (from The Three Doctors) and the Other (don't bother, he's never mentioned on the TV show).

The Time Lords were cursed by the sisterhood of witches known as the Pythia to be forever barren - no more children would be born. Rassilon invented "Looms", great machines which would weave fully grown Time Lords from genetic material, as a way to perpetuate the species.  All Time Lords since then were born from these Looms with the bodies of adults but the minds of children - the Doctor, the Master, Romana, everybody.

When the Doctor first stole his TARDIS and fled from Gallifrey, he had no family in the conventional sense - no wife, no children, no grandchildren, just a House of cousins woven from the same Loom. His first trip in his new ship took him to Gallifrey's ancient past - something expressly forbidden by the Time Lords' laws. He landed in a time of great civil unrest, and rescued a young girl named Susan. Susan was the last child born on Gallifrey, and, although they had never met, she insisted that the Doctor was her grandfather. He didn't understand why, but sensed a connection between them, and fled with her in his stolen TARDIS.

A couple of regenerations later, the Fifth Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa and Adric, in the novel Cold Fusion, encountered an injured Time Lady in an ancient TARDIS. Not knowing her name, they called her Patience. Turns out Patience was the wife of the Other and the grandmother of Susan. In this and other novels, we gradually learn that the Other, in order to escape the persecution of Rassilon's reign, hurled himself into a Loom, where he was ripped apart, his genetic material eventually being reconstituted as the Doctor. Patience recognized her husband, just as Susan had recognized her grandfather so long ago, even if he had no memory of his prior life.

Or...maybe not. The tie-in novels written in the time between the classic and new series are confusing, to say the least. The writers were trying to bring a sense of mystery back to the Doctor's origins, so everything was ambiguous, nothing was stated conclusively. The account of Patient's origin I've given here is the most common interpretation, but by no means the only one. And the new series has most definitely put paid to the idea of the Looms - we've seen a child version of the Master, and a fully-grown newborn Doctor would have had a pretty hard time fitting into that crib from A Good Man Goes to War.

So the Doctor's first love remains a mystery, but our favorite Gallifreyan heartbreaker has had no shortage of potential partners since then. Happy Valentine's Day, and may both your hearts be filled with love! Sexy, sexy Time Lord love!

Doctor BOO!

Doctor Who may be a science-fiction show at its core, but it's had its dalliances with the supernatural on more than one occasion. In honor of Halloween, let's put aside the Daleks and the Sontarans and take a look at some of the more more traditionally spooky monsters to vex the Doctor and his friends...

Ghosts

Ghosts in Doctor Who are generally waved away as either some kind of alien trick or psychic residue left over from a traumatic event. The people of Earth believed they were being visited by the spirits of their deceased loved ones in Army of Ghosts, but the Tenth Doctor, Rose, Mickey and Jackie proved that they were just Cybermen. So the next time you visit a medium and she tells you your dead aunt Tillie wants you to live life to the fullest, ask her if she's SURE she's not really talking to a killer cyborg from a parallel universe.

In The Sarah Jane Adventures story The Eternity Trap, Sarah Jane and her friends Clyde and Rani investigate an apparently haunted house - Ashen Hill Manor seems to be haunted by the ghost of its original owner, Lord Marchwood, and his two children. In truth, they and others who have disappeared over the years have been trapped "between dimensions" by a hostile alien's technology. Sarah Jane defeats the alien, allowing the Marchwoods, centuries after their apparent deaths, to finally move on - but not before bidding Sarah Jane a ghostly goodbye from the window.

Well, that's what the show is suggesting. I took it to mean that Sarah Jane failed and the Marchwoods are still trapped in a nightmare hellscape between dimensions, but that's just me. So have there been any clear-cut ghosts in Doctor Who at all? Actual spirits of the formerly living? No. Well, yes. Well, sort of.

In the Torchwood episode Random Shoes, Captain Jack and the gang faced the loss of Eugene Jones, the team's friendly stalker who died after being hit by a car. After death, Eugene was surprised to find himself up and about, unperceived by those around him, able to watch but not help as Torchwood team member Gwen Cooper investigated his death. Turns out Eugene's spirit walked the earth due to his having swallowed an alien artifact called a Dogon Sixth Eye. So sure, this is the world of Doctor Who, there needs to be some handwave of a sci-fi explanation, but Eugene died and then his spirit got up and walked around. Sounds like a ghost to me.

When Gwen's life was threatened by a speeding car, Eugene was able to make himself corporeal long enough to shove her to safety. Gwen was stunned to see the ghost of Eugene, but her pleas for him to stay weren't enough to stop him from moving on. It's actually quite a sweet ending, if you forget that Torchwood has already established that the afterlife consists of unending darkness where you can't see or hear anything but can sense the presence of unspeakable creatures coming to get you. Good luck, Eugene!

Werewolves

The Tenth Doctor and Rose saved Queen Victoria from a werewolf in Tooth and Claw. Once again, the origin of the beast was alien, not magic - it wasn't a werewolf, it was a lupine wavelength haemovariform.

Still, in every other way this is a traditional werewolf tale, and worth a watch in a Halloween marathon. There are kung-fu monks in it too, so you could watch it again during your Martial Arts marathon. You watch a lot of TV.

In The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, the Seventh Doctor and Ace meet Mags, a werewolf from the planet Vulpana who has no control over her transformations and lives in fear of hurting those she loves. It's never made clear if everyone on Vulpana is a werewolf or if Mags is an alien/supernatural mutt.

The spin-off media stop worrying so much about explaining the lycanthropes' origins away with some kind of sci-fi alien background, and just get on with having the Doctor fight werewolves without worrying so much about where they came from. The Fifth Doctor and Turlough encountered an entire pack of werewolves in the audio adventure Loups-Garoux, and Turlough fell for one and got his heart broken. The Fourth Doctor's companion Harry teamed up with an amnesiac Eighth Doctor and encountered werewolves in the novel Wolfsbane. Sadly, Harry was killed by a werewolf at the end. Or possibly got bitten and spent the rest of his life transforming at each full moon. Or possibly got bitten, transformed in the TARDIS and ripped Sarah Jane to pieces. The novels were very confusing before the TV series came back and simplified things. Also, kind of depressing.

Zombies

Zombies are reanimated corpses, the living dead, and the Ninth Doctor and Rose had a close encounter with them in The Unquiet Dead.

The bodies are in fact being animated by the Gelth, an incorporeal alien species looking for a new home. They're baddies, but they don't go around feasting on the flesh of the living, so The Unquiet Dead doesn't quite make it as a zombie story, as good as it is otherwise.

Torchwood is always a good place to look for some real horror. Torchwood team member Suzie Costello got brought back from the dead in They Keep Killing Suzie.

This was more of a resurrection along the lines of Captain Jack's life/death boomeranging, so isn't quite satisfying for our purposes either. Owen Harper, although brought back to life in the episode Dead Man Walking in the same manner as Suzie was, stuck around a lot longer and had to deal with all the unpleasant consequences of being a walking corpse.

Despite all his angst about not being able to eat or sleep or have sex or heal from injuries, Owen steadfastly refused to feast on the flesh of the living. Spoilsport. For that, we'll have to look to the Torchwood novel Bay of the Dead. 

A horde of zombies invade Cardiff, eating Welsh people and converting them into the undead while Jack, Gwen and Ianto try to stop them without getting eaten themselves. Sure, it's got an alien explanation, but if you want a real zombie story set in the world of Doctor Who, this is pretty good.

Frankenstein's Monster

Frankenstein's Monster seems like a perfect fit for Doctor Who, as far as classic spooky monsters go - while it's generally considered part of the genre of supernatural monsters like vampires and werewolves (thanks, Universal Studios!), its origins are scientific, not supernatural. And indeed, the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane encountered a monster much like Dr. Frankenstein's carb-loading fiend on the planet Karn in The Brain of Morbius.

Morbius was a renegade Time Lord believed executed by his people, but whose brain was actually spirited away by the mad scientist Solon. Solon constructs a new body for his master out of bits and pieces of the various aliens who have crash landed on the planet. He plans to use the Doctor's head to finish off his creation, but when he's unable to acquire it, he goes with this instead...

A reasonable facsimile. I believe it's the head of the Capital City Goofball from The Simpsons. Six of one.

The Doctor has had more direct contact with the historical Frankenstein, in the person of his creator, Mary Shelley, who travelled in the TARDIS for a time as one of the Eighth Doctor's companions, beginning in the audio story The Company of Friends: Mary's Story. He probably told her about his adventure with Morbius and she just took out the alien bits. Unoriginal hack.

The First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki met what seemed to the real Monster of Frankenstein in The Chase.

They also encountered a ghost and Dracula. Fleeing the Daleks, the travelers left in the TARDIS before figuring out what was going on - the Doctor surmised that they had landed inside the human imagination. Turns out they were in a haunted house, and the monsters were all robots. Sometimes the simplest explanations are best, Doctor. The haunted house was part of the Festival of Ghana in the year 1996. Remember that? Man, that was fantastic, Ghana was the place to be in 1996 what with their economy soaring thanks to their booming robot industry. I went to the Festival of Ghana, as a matter of fact. I was twenty-four years old, I got trashed and made out with a Creature from the Black Lagoon robot. Best week of my life.

Witches

Sarah Jane and K9 met some real-life witches in the one and only episode of Doctor Who's first spin-off, K9 and Company. I say real-life witches in the sense that there's nothing remotely supernatural or even alien about them, but they're TV's version of real-life witches - a bunch of rural villagers committing human sacrifice in order to ensure a healthy crop, or some crap like that. I don't mean like that girl in your Intro to Philosophy class who carried a pocket cauldron around with her and would say "Goddess bless you" when you sneezed. K9 and Company is pretty dreadful despite Sarah Jane's presence, but it does get pretty funny when K9 starts blasting the hell out of all the coven members.

The Tenth Doctor and Martha fought off witches of a more traditional sort in The Shakespeare Code.

The witches are an alien race called Carrionites, and the Doctor tries to explain that their apparent use of magic is really a variant type of mathematics using words instead of numbers, but really - speaking words aloud to alter reality? Sounds like magic to me. This story is about as close as televised Doctor Who gets to just giving up on the sci-fi pretense and acknowledging that the menace is supernatural.

If you like your Doctor Who REALLY crazy, look no further than the original comic strips from the pages of TV Comic. In the comic strip The Witches, the Second Doctor, John and Gillian were threatened by the titular crones on the planet Vargo.

The comic strip makes no attempt whatsoever to suggest that these are anything but supernatural witches using magical powers. The Doctor tries and fails to beat them with his own scientific devices. All seems lost until they discover the head witch's spell book. This being the bloodthirsty comic strip Doctor from which this blog gets its name, he uses a spell in the book to slaughter every last one of the witches, turning every witch everywhere in the universe to dust. Yay comics!

Vampires

The Doctor has had numerous encounters with the most famous of all the vampires. As mentioned above, the TARDIS crew meet a robot Dracula in The Chase.

If you're not sure if you should bother watching The Chase, let me say again - the TARDIS crew meet a robot Dracula. A. Robot. Dracula. The whole story is ridiculous. Go watch it.

The Sixth Doctor and Zoe return to the Land of Fiction and team-up with Bram Stoker's Dracula, along with a host of other literary creations, in the audio adventure Legend of the Cybermen. But in the genre of Doctor Who Meets Dracula, the best is the audio story Son of the Dragon. 

The Fifth Doctor, Peri and Erimem travel back to the 15th Century and meet Vlad the Impaler - the historical inspiration for Dracula. This story is a purely historical, there are no supernatural or even science-fiction elements besides the TARDIS itself, and it's brilliant. Well worth a listen if you're curious about Big Finish Production's line of original audio plays.

Ok, so that's Dracula. But what about honest-to-evil bloodsucking creatures of the night? The Eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory encountered what appeared to be traditional vampires in The Vampires of Venice - a bevy of beautiful Hammer horror girls, with fangs, no reflection and an aversion to sunlight.

Sadly, they turned out to be alien fish people called Saturnyns in disguise. No Halloween fun here. It's a shame, since there's no particular reason, story-wise, that they couldn't have been real - after all, the Doctor's met actual vampires before.

In State of Decay, the Fourth Doctor, Romana, Adric and K9 met Zargo, Camilla and Aukin, a trio of genuine bloodsuckers ruling an unnamed planet in the pocket dimension of E-Space.

The trio's resemblance to a deck of playing cards is never explained, but they serve their master, the Great Vampire, a giant monster sleeping under their castle, by feeding him the blood of the local villagers. The Great Vampires were the ancient enemies of the Time Lords and were believed to be extinct until the Doctor and friends stumbled upon him, waiting for the day when he would be strong enough to rise up and take his revenge. Spoilers! The Doctor stops him. State of Decay is a great story, fun and spooky even if the vampires chew the scenery as much as they chew their victims. If you're looking for some Doctor Who to watch this Halloween, look no further.

And really, why would you be doing anything else on Halloween but watching Doctor Who? You've got plenty of suggestions here, so turn on the TV and put a bowl of jelly babies out for the trick-or-treaters. Boo!

Who Loves You!

In honor of Valentine's Day, here's a look at the absolute worst relationships in Doctor Who history. What do you want from me? I'm single.

Leela and Andred

In The Invasion of Time, the Doctor brought Leela home with him to Gallifrey, where he perpetrated an insanely over-complicated plan to foil the invasion of the Time Lords' planet by the Vardans. Assisting the Doctor was Andred, Commander of the Chancellory Guard. Leela spends most of the story in the outlands of Gallifrey rounding up help, while Anded spends most of the story with the Doctor, looking confused. They have no on-screen time alone together, and there doesn't seem to be any time for them to sneak in any off-screen action. And yet, at the end of the episode, Leela declares that she's fallen in love with Andred and will be remaining behind on Gallifrey. Actress Louise Jameson has stated numerous times that she was unhappy with how Leela was written out, and indeed, she plays this final scene as if Leela is mildly embarrassed about the whole situation. Big Finish Productions' audio adventures have continued the story of Leela's life in their Gallifrey series, and they wisely sideline the whole relationship right off the bat.

I've now decided that "to leela" is a verb meaning to suddenly write out a regular character on a TV show by creating an out-of-character romantic entanglement for them with a character with whom they have no previous history or significant interaction. Please spread it around.

Peri and King Yrcanos

Peri's travels with the Doctor ended in the season-long serial The Trial of a Time Lord.  She was about to be killed by having the brain of a dying amphibious alien transplanted into her body; before the Doctor could intervene, he was kidnapped by the Time Lords to be put on trial for interfering in the history of other races (the Time Lords have a thing about that). Peri is apparently killed, but at the end of the trial it is revealed that, in fact, she survived and, since the Doctor apparently never bothered to go back for her, she wound up marrying their ally King Yrcanos. Peri's departure seems totally out of character, and there was no suggestion of any romance brewing between the two of them during the story. Peri was totally leela-ed by the writers. Still, Yrcanos was played by Brian Blessed, and while he doesn't look as good in this story as he did as prince of the Hawkmen in Flash Gordon, he's still not too shabby of a catch.

Vicki and Troilus

There's nothing inherently wrong about Vicki's love for Trojan Troilus; her decision to leave her life in the TARDIS behind to be with him forever as Troy falls around them is actually quite romantic. It's the fact that she takes the name Cressida that suggests that their romance may not meet the happiest of endings.

Fitz and Trix

If you're like the majority of modern Doctor Who fans, you're probably asking yourself, "Who the hell are Fitz and Trix?" Fitz Kreiner and Trix MacMillan were companions of Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor in a series of tie-in novels published by BBC Books between the airing of the 1996 TV movie and the start of the new series in 2005. Fitz traveled with the Doctor for a very long time, and the two became the best of friends. Trix was a con artist who they met while she was working for Sabbath, an enemy of the Doctor's. She left Sabbath's employ and asked to travel with the Doctor - he refused, so she stowed away. She was eventually discovered and accepted (as most stowaways on the TARDIS are), and she and Fitz eventually fell in love. In the final book in the series, The Gallifrey Chronicles, Fitz and Trix resolved to marry and stay behind on Earth as soon as the current adversary was dealt with. Nothing wrong there. It's just that Fitz is one of my favorite companions, and I have a weird fictional character crush on him. There, I said it. Ok, it's irrational and perhaps a little creepy, but I stand behind it. Fitz was a fully-realized character and was awesome, and Trix was under-developed and sucked. There are no pictures of Trix for me to share with you, since she only appeared in the books (and she probably looks like a total whore), but Fitz made one appearance in a Big Finish audio, The Company of Friends, in which he was played by Matt di Angelo. It's a small picture, since he only appears in one little sliver of the CD cover, but isn't he handsome? Maybe we should move on...

Martha and Mickey

Although I haven't been ranking this list, it's safe to say that this is my least favorite Doctor Who romance, even though I really love both of these characters (yes, Mickey too). It's the pure randomness of it that gets to me. Martha and Mickey meet in Journey's End, where they have no interaction whatsoever outside of the big group scenes. The next time we see them, in The End of Time, they're married and happily hunting Sontarans together. Granted, when we saw them at the end of Journey's End they were both walking away with Captain Jack, so who knows what kind of unspeakable depravity might have followed. Still, at the time, Martha was engaged to another man - to Tom Milligan, whom she met (sort of - it's complicated) in Last of the Time Lords. Russell T Davies has said that he married Martha and Mickey because his last name is Smith, and hers is Jones, and Martha's first episode was Smith and Jones, so he thought it would be funny. Ugh. Having read a bit about Davies' writing process, I doubt this was the real reason, but still. It felt to me more like he wanted to make sure Mickey got a cameo like all the other past Tennant companions at the end of The End of Time, but didn't want to spend time on a whole scene just for him so shoehorned him into Martha's. I'm not sure which explanation is worse. For whatever reason, Davies managed to leela two companions at once!

There's also a slight ick factor to their relationship, in that Martha loved the Doctor, and Mickey loved Rose, but the Doctor and Rose were in love with each other. Martha's love for Tom seemed to fulfill the promise of the clean break she was looking for at the end of Last of the Time Lords, but her marriage to Mickey smacks of sublimation on the part of them both. I see marriage counseling in their future.

So happy Valentine's Day to you and yours! Please choose your partner more wisely than most of the Doctor's companions have, and here's hoping you don't get leela-ed!