The Fourth incarnation of the Time Lord was played by Tom Baker, for seven consecutive years, which is the longest living incarnation in the Doctor Who history.
The Fourth Doctor brought an eccentric style to the role, with his trademark scarf and a fondness for Jelly Babies, which captured the publics imagination. This incarnation is still regarded as the most recoginsable and most popular.
The Fourth Doctor begins his time by attempting to distance himself from UNIT and to a lesser extent, Earth. The Time Lords still send him on occasional missions as he travels with Sara Jane Smith. During this time he meets his new Arch Enemy, Davros.
The Doctor travels with Sara Jane until he recieves an urgent telepathic summons from Gallifrey, and must go there alone as humans are not allowed on the planet. The summons is a trap set by the Master, having used all his regenerations and is now little more than a withered husk.
The Master then frames the Doctor for the assassination of the President of the High Council of Time Lords. In order to avoid execution the Doctor invokes an obscure law and declares himself a candidate for the office, giving himself the time he needs to defeat the Master.
The Fourth Doctor is a wonderer, thrilled by adventure and discovery, unpredictible and always five steps ahead of everyone else with an off-beat humour and light hearted mood.
His time ends as he travels through an alternate Universe called E-Space, revealed to be a Charged Vacuum Emboitment (CVE) which has been created by the mathematicians of Logopolis as part of a system to allow the Universe to continue on past its point of heat death.
As the Fourth Doctor investigates this, he begins experiencing ominous feelings and spots a white-clad entity, The Watcher, observing him. After succeeding in stopping the Master from disrupting the CVEs and destroying the universe, the Fourth Doctor is mortally wounded when he falls from the Pharos Project radio telescope control tower.
As he falls he utters his last words: "It's the end -- but the moment has been prepared for." The Watcher is revealed as a manifestation of the Doctor's future incarnation. Before the eyes of the Doctor's companions, the Watcher merges with the Fourth Doctor, regenerating him into the Fifth Doctor.
reviews in the series
Festival of Death
by Jonathan Morris
The Beautiful Death. The ultimate theme-park ride. For twenty galactic credits, you can find out what it's like to be dead.
But something has gone wrong. Visitors expecting a sightseeing tour of the afterlife have been transformed into mindless zombies, set on a killing rampage.
Eye of Heaven
by Jim Mortimore
1842 and an eminent archaeologist by the name of Horace Stockwood steals a stone tablet on Easter Island from the islanders. Escaping to open sea, the huge and ancient monoliths watch him go...
Thirty years on and Horace is desperate to return to the island, having studied the stone ...
Evolution
by John Peel
Sarah Jane really wants to meet the journalist Rudyard Kipling, so the Doctor sets the co-ordinates in the TARDIS. Not materialising in quite the right place, the are pursued across the Devon Moorland by a massive feral hound.
Meanwhile something strange is going on, children going...
Drift
by Simon A. Forward
Drift is a Doctor Who novel featuring the fourth Doctor as he and Leela arive in New Hampshire as thanksgiving approaches, and with it an unnaturally strong Blizzard.
The local community is in the grip of something far more sinister than a harsh winter. Like young Amber Mailloux, v...
A Device of Death
by Christopher Bulis
In A Device of Death, the crew of the TARDIS have been scattered to different planets with Sarah marooned on a slave world where the only escape is death. Harry is in the middle of an interplanetary invasion and the Doctor is on a planet that is so secret it doesn't even have a name.
Corpse Marker
by Chris Boucher
A long time ago, the Doctor and his companion faced the Robots of death, however to a society totally dependant on Robots, news that this could happen, that robots could turn violent would cause mass panic and hysteria. For this reason it was all kept a secret.
There are only three...
Asylum
by Peter Darvill-Evans
1728, Oxford appears to be a haven of quiet tranquility, under the warm sun of summer, merchants, students and clerics go about their daily, unhurried tasks. The proctor of the Franciscan friary, Alfric has only two small problems, one of the friars has gone missing, and there's a traveling showm...
