Colin Baker’s Doctor Who Copycat Series The Stranger Explained

BBC’s Doctor Who is a beloved, long-running sci-fi series about a space and time traveler known as the Doctor – but comparatively few remember its copycat series, The Stranger. With its expansive universe and engaging character, Doctor Who has created several spin-offs and endless fan fiction and theories. One surprising piece of content during the show’s hiatus in the 1990s was The Stranger starring former Doctor Colin Baker, which had more than the lead actor in common. In fact, it takes very little research to discover it was a copycat series.

Colin Baker was the sixth iteration of the Doctor. He starred in the series from 1983 – 1986, only getting 35 episodes in his original run. His iteration of the Doctor was not well-received. Many saw him as too violent, having attempted to strangle his companion in the first episode. Perhaps Baker is best known for his firing and abrupt exit from the show. There was no regeneration scene for Baker’s Doctor Who, instead, Sylvester McCoy simply wore an infamously obvious wig.

The Stranger came after his departure from the show and is essentially a copycat series of Doctor Who that spanned six straight-to-video installments. It stars Colin Baker as “The Stranger”, an unnamed time/space traveler character noticeably similar to the Doctor. However, it wasn’t just a similar main character played by the same actor that made the audience experience deja vu. By his side was Nicola Bryant playing his assistant Miss Brown, similar to her Peri Brown character on Doctor Who. The first episode’s villain is played by Michael Wisher, best known for playing Davros, the original creator of Doctor Who‘s Daleks. In later episodes, Doctor Who alum Sophie Aldred and Peter Miles also appeared. The similar characters and recycling of actors was the first indication that this might be a copycat series.

While the casting and character choices make the parallels between The Stranger and Doctor Who obvious, the connections run much deeper. In the 1980s, fans created several unlicensed audio dramas based on Doctor Who, known as “the audio-visuals”. The stories weren’t just similar to Doctor Who, as producer Gary Russell admitted that they violated copyright laws by using the characters from the show, but got away with it because many of the intellectual properties were owned by the creators, not BBC. This allowed them to take Doctor Who in a new, reinvented direction.

Many of these audio-visual Doctor Who scripts were reworked into other series such as The Stranger, with writers like Nicholas Briggs receiving credit for their work. (Briggs, coincidentally, would go on to voice several monsters in the reboot of Doctor Who.) In essence, The Stranger was born from Doctor Who fan-fiction and was seen as a way to keep the show alive during its long hiatus. Similar to the original series, they filmed in quarries with extremely limited budgets because the joy for them was in the characters and plot. Briggs admitted he never believed he could get Baker to join the project, but was overjoyed.

Doctor Who spin-offs and shared universes are well-known, but The Stranger is something entirely different. While some might claim it’s just an homage to Colin Baker’s time as the Doctor, the reality is the similarities are too numerous to be a coincidence or even an easter egg. It’s very clear that The Stranger is a blatant copy of  Doctor Who, but made by fans who loved the series and wanted to keep its spirit alive.

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