The Bad Wolf website was launched on 4 June 2005^[1] to coincide with the 2005 series of Doctor Who, one of several websites created at that time. It was written by the BBC webteam. On the same day it launched, the Doctor Who website added a link to the Bad Wolf website, visible as "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" after the site updated to focus on Boom Town,^[1] and this was later changed to just "Bad Wolf" on 14 June after the broadcast of Bad Wolf.^[2]

However, this website broke the mould of the other tie-in websites set at the time: this website featured no in-universe fiction, and instead was an entirely out of universe website that provided clues to the Bad Wolf story arc, as well as potential (although deliberately inaccurate) solutions to said mystery, based in theories and depictions of "Big Bad Wolves" in real world popular culture.

Contents[]

Clues[]

This part of the website had a breakdown of every instance of the Bad Wolf meme within the first series of Doctor Who from The End of the World to Bad Wolf.

• The Bad Wolf scenario in The End of the World
• Gwyneth's sight of the "Big Bad Wolf" when she looked in Rose Tyler's mind in The Unquiet Dead
• The Bad Wolf graffiti in Aliens of London/World War Three
• The Bad Wolf One call sign in Dalek
• Bad WolfTV in The Long Game
• The Bad Wolf "scrawled" on the Energize poster in Father's Day
• The Schlechter Wolf in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances
• Blaidd Drwg in Boom Town
• Bad Wolf Corporation in Bad Wolf

Theories[]

This section of the website provided potential theories to the Bad Wolf story arc.

1. Theory one speculated that the Bad Wolf is a representation of the real world mythological "current" that there is a wolf "lurking outside our normal world", waiting to pounce at the first sign of weakness and destroy everything in its path: therefore, the Bad Wolf could be a "supreme consumer", or a "force of destruction", or a "sign of rebirth at the ebbing of life".
2. Theory two speculated that the Bad Wolf is an allegory for a predator that ends innocence, or a harbinger of "dangerous knowledge of how the world really is".
3. Theory three speculated that the Bad Wolf could be one of the characters from Doctor Who, perhaps the Ninth Doctor, Rose Tyler, Jackie Tyler, Mickey Smith, Jack Harkness, or even Adam Mitchell. Or it could be a new character, such as "an innocent guarding a dangerous secret" or "someone who has been manipulating events from behind the scenes without us even realising".
4. Theory four speculates that instead of a person, the Bad Wolf could be an object, perhaps the TARDIS which is placing clues around the Doctor and Rose, to warn them.

Revelations[]

This portion of the website examined examples of personified wolves in mythology and popular culture.

• Anubis - the Egyptian god (not the Doctor Who Osiran deity) who exists between life and death, leading the dead into the afterlife and raising the dead.
• Fenrir - the Norse god who would participate in Ragnarök.
• Beowulf - the figure in English legend who slayed monsters.
• Music - "Big Bad Wolf" by Brian Diamond & the Cutters, "Bad Wolf" by Urban Shakedown, "Bad Wolf" by John Kincade, and "Big Bad Wolf" by French Chansons.
• Finally, a link to Wikipedia's article on the Big Bad Wolf.

Unsolved[]

This part of the website contained executive producer Russell T Davies's views on the matter, who believed nobody had solved the mystery due to the common theories that the "Bad Wolf" had been already implicitly revealed being incorrect.

Notes[]

• The disclaimer page, a typical inclusion for tie-in websites (especially considering a large legal issue not long prior), did contain an in-joke about Doctor Who: the Internet is owned by Geocomtex.
  • The disclaimer page also mentioned the pseudoscientific principle, neuro-linguistic programming, that may have been used in "an enormous experiment" to "irrevocably alter" the universe, and that if you feel this is the case, to repeat the phrase "The Bad Wolf is not real" to yourself.
• The home page is built in Adobe Flash, and since its discontinuation, it no longer works unless one emulates it.
• If the ALT code for episode thirteen's image is inspected, the sequence of numbers 23 6 801 is revealed.
• James Goss, the website editor, stated that there were only four tie-in websites created in 2005, clearly omitting Bad Wolf.^[3]

External links[]

• badwolf.org.uk via the Wayback Machine

Footnotes[]