Back In Time

So, the BBC has just released a bunch of documents from the very beginning of Doctor Who, including notes on the series' original conception. Here's a pretty good article on the subject, and the documents themselves can be found here. It's interesting stuff. The Doctor apparently was originally imagined as a much more sinister sort of character than he turned out to be, and the characters who evolved into Barbara and Ian read like painfully bad stereotypes, so perhaps we should consider ourselves lucky that not everything went according to plan. Particularly amusing to me are the quickly-discarded insistence that the show have no "bug-eyed monsters"; the speculation that perhaps the Doctor might have been Merlin, a concept that finally made it to the screen 26 years later; and the fact that the Doctor was intended to be amnesiac, which inevitably makes me think of fans' tendency to mock the Eighth Doctor for losing his memory in every medium he appeared in.