Confession dial © BBC

© BBC

© BBC

© BBC

images IN THE BEGINNING

Kick-Starting the Universe

The origins of reality, of space and of time, are shrouded in mystery. They have been hotly debated for millions of years on millions of worlds. It is now generally accepted by most civilisations that the universe was created billions of years ago in an event usually called ‘the Big Bang’. That was the moment when the universe exploded into being as a single point of origin, and it has been expanding from that point ever since.

As the universe cooled after the initial explosion, subatomic particles formed, followed by atoms and later – with the help of gravity – stars and galaxies. From a tiny beginning, all of reality was formed. Our own galaxy was created in what is sometimes termed ‘Event One’ – a huge and sudden in-rush of hydrogen. The forces in play at Event One were so powerful that it is said they would have sucked in and destroyed even a TARDIS time machine as used by the Time Lords of Gallifrey.

But the mystery of what exactly caused the Big Bang in the first place remains unsolved. According to one theory, the spaceship later known as Terminus was responsible for the Big Bang. Terminus is better known for becoming a treatment centre for Lazar’s Disease. But, as Terminus is at the very centre of the universe, it has been suggested that this ancient spacecraft of unknown origin was once capable of travelling through time. It is difficult to believe this was the case, given the run-down and dilapidated condition it was in when the treatment facility was established. But the theory suggests that, on one journey through time, the ship jettisoned unstable fuel into a void, billions of years ago, before the universe as we know it even existed. The fuel detonated within the void – causing the explosion that was in effect the Big Bang. And so the universe was created.

But however it came about, it would seem obvious that before the Big Bang, nothing could have existed. Obvious, but wrong.

From Before the Dawn of Time

There are beings who transcend time, and which may well have existed before the start of the universe. The Guardians, for example, are an almost elemental force, maintaining a universal balance of good and evil throughout creation. The Guardian of Light in Time – or the White Guardian as he is also known – is balanced and opposed by the Black Guardian. How or when the Guardians came into being is unknown. But they continue to maintain the universal balance, and are said to have the ability to stop and reset the universe using the legendary Key to Time.

The Eternals too have, perhaps, existed for longer than the universe. Mindreading, telepathic beings who function outside of time in the domain of eternity itself, the Eternals are tortured creatures endlessly seeking diversion to fill the emptiness in their infinitely long lives. To this end they exploit the minds and imaginations of other races – or Ephemerals, as they call life forms that exist within the confines of time – to sustain their existence.

THE KEY TO TIME

The Key to Time is a perfect cube composed of six segments. It maintains the equilibrium of Time itself. For safety, the segments are scattered and hidden throughout the cosmos. The Key itself, once assembled, is too powerful for any single being to possess. But there are times when the forces within the universe upset the balance to such an extent that it becomes necessary to stop everything for a brief moment, until the balance is restored.

The segments of the Key are all disguised. They contain the elemental force of the universe and can be in any shape, form or size. Should they be needed, the core of the Key itself acts as a locator which also transforms each segment back into its true form on contact.

The Chronovores also exist outside time itself. Little is known about these creatures, although they were once described as ‘time-eaters who will swallow a life as quickly as a boa-constrictor can swallow a rabbit, fur and all.’ Certainly they are immensely powerful and can manipulate Time itself.

The gods of Ancient Greece owe at least some of their background to the Chronovores. The name of the Titan Kronos – the father of Zeus, king of the Greek gods – is almost certainly derived from one of the Chronovores: Chronos. Kronos is usually depicted holding a sickle, one of the symbols of Time itself.

The Chronovores seem to have been as dismissive of lower life forms as were the Greek gods. Worshipped in Atlantis, Chronos apparently responded to a man’s request that he be granted the strength of a bull by also giving him the head of a bull. This may be the origin of the myths about the Minotaur. Chronos is also said to have been instrumental in the destruction of Atlantis – although that has been attributed to the Dæmons too.

The creature known as Fenric seems to have been born along with the universe. The renegade Time Lord known as the Doctor described Fenric as: ‘Evil since the dawn of time . . . The beginning of all beginnings. Two forces, only good and evil. Then chaos. Time is born. Matter, space. The universe cries out like a newborn. The forces shatter as the universe explodes outwards. Only echoes remain, and yet somehow – somehow – the evil force survives. An intelligence, pure evil . . .’

Legend has it that, at some time in the distant past, the Doctor carved chess pieces from bones pulled from the desert sands and challenged Fenric to solve a chess puzzle. When Fenric failed, he was trapped in the Shadow Dimension.

Chris J. Lees

The Guardians watch as the Universe is created.

Chris J. Lees

One of the Dæmons from the planet Damos.

© BBC

Ancient hieroglyphs tell the story of the capture of the Beast.

Fenric’s essence was preserved in this dimension within a flask. A merchant acquired the flask in Constantinople some time in the tenth century AD. But the flask was then stolen by Viking pirates. They took the flask to Northumbria, where Joseph Sundvik buried it at a place called Maiden’s Point. It was here, over a thousand years later, that Fenric summoned his ‘wolves’ – descendants of Sundvik – and tried to escape.

Creatures from the Dark Times

How soon after the universe was created other ancient races such as the Dæmons came into existence is unknown. But the extent of their influence on other species suggests that they were one of the first races the universe gave birth to.

The Dæmons influenced human evolution and development to the point that their own physical form was taken as the classic image of evil – of the devil incarnate. The Dæmons saw humanity’s development as an experiment. They manipulated and guided the human race. It was up to Azal, the last Dæmon left on Earth, to determine whether the experiment was successful – in which case he would pass on his great power. If the experiment was not deemed a success, then Azal would destroy the human race . . .

Chris J. Lees

The Beast is restrained deep below the surface of a planet circling a black hole.

© BBC

The so-called ‘impossible planet’, also known as Krop Tor, where the Beast was imprisoned.

The influence of the Dæmons can be seen in many cultures and civilisations. It is not known how many of their experiments they decided were failures, but the destruction of Atlantis has been attributed by some to the Dæmons.

But the creature known only as ‘the Beast’ seems to predate even the Dæmons. At a time before time itself even existed, or so the legends go, there was the Beast. Feared and deadly, it became the template for every representation of evil that followed, right across the universe. It entered the mythology of countless planets including Earth, Draconia, Vel Consadine, Damos – home planet of the Dæmons – and even Skaro. The same image, the same creature, perhaps even more than the Dæmons informed the devil, the horned beast, as well as the Kaled god of war and countless others . . .

Despite its mighty power, at some point very early in the history of the universe, the Beast was defeated by the Disciples of Light and imprisoned on an isolated planet orbiting a black hole. The ancient people that captured the Beast did not kill it, but bound it to the core of the planet. They made sure that the planet itself circled the black hole – and that if the Beast ever escaped, it would be sucked in, and their ancient prisoner destroyed.

The planet that is prison to the Beast now has no name. But in the scriptures of the Veltino it is called Krop Tor – which means ‘the bitter pill’. A vestige of the truth survived in their legends, and they believed that the black hole was itself a demon who was tricked into devouring the planet, only to spit it out again because it was poison.

Since the Beast was imprisoned, the planet has remained in impossible orbit round that black hole (which is currently designated K 37 Gem 5) protected by the same power source that holds the Beast captive.

The Racnoss also evolved in the Dark Times, billions of years ago when the universe was still newly born. Huge, spider-like creatures, the Racnoss were born hungry and devoured everything – even whole planets. Such was their blight that the Fledgling Empires went to war against them. It was a long and bloody conflict, but eventually the Racnoss were wiped out – or so it was thought.

© BBC

The Racnoss was another race that evolved in the Dark Times.

But one of the creatures survived the conflict – the Empress of the Racnoss. Suspended in hibernation, she drifted in her Webstar spaceship to the very edge of space. And as she drifted, her legacy – known as ‘the Secret Heart’ – also drifted. It was captured by the pull of a new star, just as its solar system was forming. Slowly, galactic debris gathered round the Secret Heart, burying what was in fact the last ever cluster of Racnoss eggs. As a planet formed around them, it would be billions more years before they would be ready to hatch. Billions more years before the Empress of the Racnoss would wake to hear the cry of her emerging children and return across space for them.

THE FLEDGLING EMPIRES

The earliest civilisations, when life was really just getting started in the universe, were known as the Fledgling Empires. Civilisations rose and fell just as they do today, and almost all the Fledgling Empires had fallen into decline before most other races and communities had even evolved.

But for a while, the Fledgling Empires were the most powerful community in existence – and certainly the only force capable of standing up to the Racnoss. Being more advanced that other races, the Fledgling Empires felt they had a duty of care over lesser civilisations. This, as much as the threat to themselves, was what prompted them to oppose the Racnoss and, eventually, defeat them.

In the intervening aeons, life had evolved and developed on the planet that surrounded the eggs. Life that the Racnoss would devour when they emerged from deep within the planet. A planet that was now called Earth . . .

And it is through the history and influence of Earth – and the human race that evolved on that planet – that we shall primarily examine the history of Time itself . . .

© BBC

The Racnoss travelled in distinctive Webstar spaceships.

© BBC

A Racnoss at the heart of its Racnoss Webstar ship.

images THE BIRTH OF LIFE ON EARTH

The emergence of life on any planet depends on coincidence, chance, and luck. Nowhere was that more true than on Earth. Just being blessed with the right circumstances for life to evolve, which is rare enough in itself, is not sufficient. There has to be some event that ensures that life actually does evolve. In the case of life on Earth, that event was as coincidental as it was unpredictable.

Four hundred million years ago, an ancient race called the Jagaroth waged war across the galaxy. Vicious and callous, they gloried in destruction. From the Antonine Clusters to the Ridges of Zenophon, the Jagaroth invaded and oppressed other races.

Just as the Fledgling Empires had formed an alliance to oppose the Racnoss, so the more powerful races and civilisations stood together against the threat of the Jagaroth. For a while, it seemed that opposition to the inexorable Jagaroth advance was pointless and futile. But slowly things began to change as the Jagaroth over-reached themselves. The more worlds they conquered, the harder it was to keep them under firm control.

Slowly, the tide of war turned against the Jagaroth. After a while, they were in full retreat and eventually they were all but wiped out. One single Jagaroth spaceship escaped the destruction. Damaged, it managed to land on the planet that would become known as Earth.

It was a planet that offered no facilities to repair the ship. Nor did it yet have any of the basic essentials necessary for preserving life. So the Jagaroth attempted to leave. But with the ship’s atmospheric thrust motors disabled, the Jagaroth tried to take off using their warp drive. It was a fatal as well as fateful decision.

The ship blew up. But the inert amniotic fluid from which all life on Earth would spring absorbed a massive dose of radiation from the explosion. It was exactly the energy it needed to evolve into life. The amino acids fused to form minute cells. Those cells eventually evolved into vegetable and animal life.

Even now, the influence of the Jagaroth was not over. Despite their last spaceship having being destroyed, one Jagaroth did survive – after a fashion. His name was Scaroth. Just as the Dæmons experimented with pushing the evolution and development of humanity in what they considered to be the ‘right’ direction, so did Scaroth. When the Jagaroth ship exploded, the pilot Scaroth was in the Warp Control Cabin. The explosion destroyed the ship and killed the other Jagaroth, but Scaroth was splintered by the warp effects. Aspects of Scaroth were scattered through time right across the history of Earth.

Separate, but aware of each other and occasionally able to communicate across time, the splinters of Scaroth determined to work together. They planned to accelerate human development so that the splinter of Scaroth furthest forward in time could save the Jagaroth. Adopting the persona of Count Scarlioni in the city of Paris in 1979, this splinter of Scaroth experimented with time travel. His plan was to create a device that would enable him to travel back in time to a moment just before the Jagaroth ship took off from prehistoric Earth. If he could stop himself from pressing the launch button, he could prevent the subsequent explosion and save his race.

© BBC

The distinctive architecture of the Homo reptilians.

Luckily for life on Earth, the Doctor was able to prevent Scaroth from aborting the take-off – aided by a well-aimed punch from a private detective named Duggan.

Prehistory and the Rise of the Reptiles

Perhaps surprisingly, the first truly intelligent life to evolve on planet Earth was not the human race. It was Homo reptilia – intelligent reptiles. Alongside the dinosaurs, several distinct species of these creatures developed. They have since been referred to as Silurians (a misnomer, as they did not actually develop in the Silurian period) while an aquatic species was given the nickname ‘Sea Devils’.

It was the Homo reptilian astronomers that predicted a catastrophe. They spotted a small, ‘rogue’ planet drifting through the solar system, and calculated from its course that it would collide with the Earth. The results would be devastating, and all life on Earth would probably end. But with time to plan for the anticipated disaster, Homo reptilia devised a way of surviving.

Alex Fort

The last Jagaroth spaceship made planetfall on prehistoric Earth before life evolved.

Alex Fort

There were several different species of Homo reptilia.

They sent large ‘Ark Ships’ out into space, filled with the flora and fauna of Earth as well as many of their own kind. It was hoped these would endure the catastrophe and be able to return to Earth to repopulate it.

But as space travel was relatively new to Homo reptilia and there was no certainty that any of the Ark Ships would survive or be able to return to Earth, they also built huge hibernation chambers. These were situated deep in the ground, where they could put themselves into a sleep for the duration of the catastrophe. The scientists predicted that the small planet would draw away Earth’s atmosphere, so the hibernation systems were set to awaken the sleeping creatures when the atmosphere returned. And so Homo reptilia put themselves into hibernation, expecting that soon they would awaken and emerge to rebuild their planet.

But the small rogue planet did not collide with Earth. It was captured by the Earth’s gravity, and went into orbit around it, becoming the Moon. As the atmosphere was never drawn away, it never returned – and so the trigger mechanisms that would awaken the sleepers were never activated and Homo reptilia slept on . . .

HOMO REPTILIA

For how long Homo reptilia was the dominant life form on Earth is unknown. They used the dinosaurs as work animals and regarded the ape-like creatures that would later evolve into humans as little more than pests.

A group of Homo reptilia that was awakened in the twentieth century used a ‘pesticide’ plague which killed the apes who tried to steal the crops of Homo reptilia in an attempt to destroy the human race. But a cure was found before the plague spread out of control, and the Homo reptilian colony was destroyed.

But in their own time, Homo reptilia developed advanced technology and built huge cities as well as farming the land. They also took an interest in the stars and perhaps theorised about life on other planets. Certainly they developed space travel. It was this interest in what lay beyond their own planet that led to Homo reptilia disappearing from Earth.

© BBC

Homo reptilia built huge cities, some of them largely underground.

© BBC

Just one of the vast hibernation chambers created by Homo reptilia beneath the Earth’s surface

Millennia later, as the human race became more sophisticated, drilling and exploration occasionally woke some of the reptiles. But most of them continued to sleep, oblivious to what had happened to their planet and how the upstart apes had evolved in the meantime.

The age of the dinosaurs did indeed come to an end. Scientists have speculated that an asteroid or possibly a comet may have struck the planet, throwing debris up into the atmosphere and changing the temperature so that the cold-blooded reptiles could not survive. Whatever happened, up to 75 per cent of the species of life on Earth were destroyed. But mammals in particular diversified in their evolution as a result.

We now know that the Extinction Event, as it is called, was indeed an impact on the planet’s surface. But it was not a natural phenomenon. The devastation was caused by the crashing of a space freighter powered by antimatter which the Cybermen attempted to crash into the planet in the twenty-sixth century Their intention was to destroy a conference that brought together the heads of many powerful planets in an attempt to form an alliance against the Cybermen.

But something went wrong and, with Cyber technology fitted to its systems, the freighter drifted back through time. When it collided with Earth, 65 million years earlier, the antimatter containment vessel split open, causing the tremendous explosion which led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Alex Fort

The aquatic species of Homo reptilia earned themselves the nickname ‘Sea Devils’

But that was not quite the end of the dinosaurs. Some survived in the hibernation chambers which Homo reptilia had established. Others were on the Ark Ships the creatures had sent out into space to avoid the impending catastrophe.

The instigators of Operation Golden Age also sought to save the dinosaurs. In the late twentieth century, Charles Grover and his colleagues enlisted the help of Professor Whitaker to try to take the Earth back to what they felt was a purer age, before it was contaminated by the industrialisation and pollution visited upon it by humanity.

The first stage of their plan involved bringing dinosaurs from prehistory into modern London using a primitive timescoop developed by Whitaker. Ultimately, the scheme came to nothing, and Grover together with Whitaker was deposited back in prehistoric times.

With the dinosaurs extinct, the creatures that would eventually become Homo sapiens – the human race – continued to develop and evolve . . .

images EARLY HISTORY

The Use of Fire

There are key points in the development of any civilisation. Obvious examples include the invention of the wheel, the development of steam power, electricity, atomic and nuclear capabilities and antimatter containment. But one of the very first steps on the path to civilisation is the discovery of fire.

The human race discovered fire in prehistoric times. Because there was no global communications network, the discovery was made in different places at different times. The evolving Homo sapiens was split into small tribes, some of which developed an understanding of fire and uses for it before others. Some tribes discovered how to make fire, and then lost the secret again.

© BBC

This ancient Egyptian carving seems to include an image of the Doctor’s TARDIS in its distinctive Police Box shape.

One ancient legend, passed down through many generations, tells of the Tribe of Gum, which lost the secret of fire. But their god Orb – probably the Sun – sent a Firemaker from the heavens who showed them again how to make fire. The legend is understandably vague, and various versions of it exist. Some say that the Firemaker was actually a group of visitors to the tribe, possibly from another tribe. Other versions tell how the Firemaker was initially treated as an enemy until he proved his abilities. According to one particularly lurid account, the Firemaker and his three acolytes transformed themselves into flaming skulls.

Alex Fort

Splinters of Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth, endeavoured to push forward human evolution by offering advice to the emerging civilisations.

Pyramid Building

Building is another key point in the development of any race. While the early tribes lived in caves or sheltered in forests, as Humankind developed so did its ability to use the materials to hand in order to fashion tools and dwellings. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the spectacular achievements of the ancient Egyptians.

The most obvious and enduring of ancient Egyptian constructions are, of course, the pyramids. For many later generations it remained a mystery how the Egyptians could have built such structures using only the knowledge and equipment available to them at the time. It was assumed that at least part of the answer was in the extensive use of slave labour. But it now seems likely that the ancient Egyptians had help.

© BBC

At the height of their civilisation the Exxilons built huge cities. They also visited other planets and taught the inhabitants how to build.

There are reports that a group of Daleks was present during the construction of the pyramids. The Egyptians made the mistake of engaging the Daleks in combat – with predictable results. But the Daleks did not linger, following another time ship to retrieve a vital component stolen from a Time Destructor weapon.

But by the time the Daleks arrived, pyramid building was already advanced. It seems likely that one of the splinters of Scaroth, the Jagaroth fractured through time, was present and may have helped build the pyramids. Certainly, in his Count Scarlioni persona he later boasted that this was the case. Bizarre though it may sound, the Egyptian gods may also have helped. As has happened in many cultures across the universe, the gods of ancient Egypt were actually inspired by and based on aliens that visited Egypt – in this case, the Osirans.

Consumed by a lust for power, the Osiran Sutekh destroyed its home planet Phaester Osiris and fled across the galaxy. The surviving Osirans, led by Horus, finally tracked Sutekh to Earth, to ancient Egypt. Here Horus and 740 of his fellow Osirans defeated Sutekh and imprisoned him beneath a hidden pyramid, trapped within a force field. They did consider executing Sutekh for his crimes, but to do so, they reasoned, would mean they were no better than he was. The force field that held Sutekh immobile was controlled by a power source situated within another pyramid on the planet Mars.

The battle between the Osirans entered into ancient Egyptian mythology, and many of the Osirans – including Horus – gave their names to the Egyptian gods. Whether the Osirans helped the Egyptians build the pyramids is not known, but it must certainly be a possibility.

The pyramids would not be the only ancient monuments that were built using more advanced technology than was generally available. It is known, for example, that the ancient monument of Stonehenge in Britain was constructed with the help of an anti-gravitational lift. Similarly, certain ancient temples in Peru were constructed with help from the Exxilons.

Early Civilisations

There are also theories that alien intervention was responsible for the end of the siege of Troy in the 12th century BC. While this is a period of history in which it is especially difficult to separate fact from myth, it does seem that the Doctor was present at the end of the siege of Troy. A depiction of his distinctive TARDIS time vessel appears in at least one manuscript fragment from the era, apparently having been mistaken for the Temple of Zeus.

© BBC

The volcano Vesuvius can clearly be seen in the background of this Pompeii street scene.

© BBC

The Pyroviles were creatures of living rock and fire beneath Mount Vesuvius in the first century AD.

There is a plausible theory that the Doctor himself masqueraded as Zeus, and may have provided the Greeks with the idea for the wooden horse. As is well documented, most notably in Homer’s Iliad, the Greeks hid soldiers inside the hollow wooden horse and then pretended to leave. After the Trojans dragged the huge horse into their city, the Greek soldiers emerged to open the gates for their returning comrades.

One of the Trojans who escaped from the burning city was Aeneas, who it is said went on to found the city of Rome and was an ancestor of Romulus and Remus. From 100 BC until about AD 400, Rome was the largest city in the world and established a huge empire that ruled more than twenty per cent of the world’s population. The empire endured for centuries, surviving various setbacks including the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64, which caused huge devastation. The fire was blamed on the Christians but quite possibly started deliberately on the orders of Emperor Nero.

It was also during the Roman period that the Pyroviles were discovered on Earth. A life form based on rock and fire, a group of Pyroviles escaped to Earth when their planet Pyrovillia vanished. The Pyroviles arrived close to the Roman city of Pompeii, and slept for thousands of years beneath the huge nearby volcano Mount Vesuvius. When they woke, they planned to create a ‘new Pyrovillia’ on Earth, using the power of a volcanic eruption to weld themselves to humans in order to create a new species.

But something went wrong with the Pyroviles’ plan, and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 destroyed them. As history records, it also destroyed Pompeii and several other nearby Roman settlements.

It was around twenty years later that the Pandorica is said to have been created. Legend has it that the Pandorica was the prison of a warrior or possibly a goblin that fell out of the sky and tore the world apart. Eventually, a good wizard tricked the warrior or goblin and imprisoned it inside the Pandorica. The Pandorica was apparently a large cube, its exterior covered with strange symbols.

Initially, the Pandorica was situated in a chamber beneath Stonehenge. But in AD 118 it was taken back to Rome, where it remained until 420, when it was taken by the Franks. Through history it fell into the possession of other powerful people – the Knights Templar, the Vatican and even Marco Polo. There are no records of what happened to the Pandorica after that until it was put into storage in a London warehouse that was destroyed in the Blitz in 1941. The Pandorica, however, survived. It was found a short distance away from the wreckage, completely undamaged, and some contemporary reports say that it was dragged to safety by a Roman soldier.

In fact, the Pandorica was indeed a prison. It was built by an alliance of many life forms who planned to imprison the Doctor inside it. They believed that his actions would lead to the destruction of the universe itself, and saw his perpetual imprisonment as the only way to prevent this. They did indeed manage to imprison the Doctor. But he escaped, and used the atoms inside the sealed Pandorica to recreate the universe after his exploding TARDIS threatened to destroy all of Reality.

Alien Incursions

Generally the human race did not tend to attract the attention of other civilisations until later in its development. But there were instances of other life forms coming to Earth for one reason or another. One such race was the Mire, a group of which visited a ninth-century Viking village in order to harvest the village’s strongest warriors.

The Mire were at the time one of the deadliest and most feared of warrior races. They fed on the stamina, strength, adrenalin and testosterone of other warriors, using it to enhance their own fighting abilities. But their attack on the Viking village has been seen by some as the point at which their reputation began to diminish.

The Vikings were a seafaring people who traded with other communities but also raided them. They came from the area known as Scandinavia and were active from the eighth to the eleventh centuries. The leader of the Mire that came to the Viking village played on the inhabitants’ myths and legends, posing as the Viking god Odin. But while the Mire did manage to ‘harvest’ the village’s best warriors, the remaining villagers put up strong resistance when the Mire returned for more.

When a huge, aggressive creature appeared to attack them, the Mire retreated. What they did not know was that the creature was merely a puppet, its appearance enhanced within the Mire’s own visual circuits by the imagination of a Viking girl named Ashildr who was wearing a Mire battle helmet. When video footage of the Mire retreating from the puppet monster emerged, their reputation was irreparably damaged.

How the video footage was recorded and uploaded and how Ashildr was able to tap into the Mire’s systems has never been chronicled. Certainly the technology was far in advance of anything available on Earth at the time. The effort of projecting her imagination into the Mire systems proved too much for Ashildr, who died from the experience. However, she was revived using a Mire medical chip. Again, how this was modified to work with a human metabolism is unclear, but the result was that Ashildr became, in effect, immortal as the chip continued to repair her in perpetuity.

A far less aggressive alien intervention took place in Northern Britain in 1066. A Time Lord, whose name is unknown, posed as a monk in an abandoned monastery. He planned to destroy the fleet of Harald Hardrada who was about to stage an attempted invasion of Britain.

The invasion was doomed to failure, with Hardrada defeated by King Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. But although Harold was successful, the battle took its terrible toll on his men. When William of Normandy landed with an army in the south of the country, Harold’s army had to march rapidly to meet the new threat. His soldiers weary and depleted, Harold lost to William and was killed at the Battle of Hastings in October 1066.

The Time Lord posing as a monk felt that Harold would make a better king than William. By destroying Hardrada’s fleet, he planned to save King Harold the effort of having to march north, fight a battle, and then march south again. Instead, King Harold’s army would be fresh when it met William’s at Hastings, and Harold – the Monk hoped – would be triumphant.

But the meddling Monk’s efforts came to nothing. Perhaps he changed his mind about his plan, but for whatever reason Hardrada’s army landed unhindered and the historical events played out as intended, with William the Conqueror defeating Harold at the Battle of Hastings.

The Medieval Period

While some ambiguity and confusion is to be expected with ancient history, the Medieval period also suffers from a lack of distinction between fact and myth. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the legend of Robin Hood. In the late twelfth century, so the story goes, while King Richard I of England was off fighting the Third Crusade in the Holy Land leaving his brother John to rule in his stead, the outlaw Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor. This brought him into conflict with the Sheriff of Nottingham.

What Robin Hood did not know, and contemporary chronicles do not record, is that the Sheriff of Nottingham was partly robotic. He seems to have been augmented by a group of robots whose spaceship crash-landed in the area. The robots disguised themselves as the Sheriff’s knights, and their ship as his castle outside Nottingham.

Using his position and authority, the Sheriff set about providing a workforce of local people forced to repair the spaceship. He also gathered as much gold as he could find, since that was essential to repairing the ship’s circuitry. Quite where the ship came from, or where it was headed is unknown. Some accounts suggest that the ship originated in the twenty-ninth century and that its ultimate destination was ‘the Promised Land’, but give no further explanation of where this might be.

But whatever its intended destination, the ship never reached it. Ultimately, the amount of gold provided was insufficient for the ship to survive take-off. It would have exploded above Nottingham, devastating half the country, but Robin managed to shoot a golden arrow into the ship. Robin won the arrow at an archery contest organised by the Sheriff in order to trap him. How he managed to escape, or how he knew to shoot the arrow at the ship has never been satisfactorily explained. But the extra gold content of the arrow was sufficient for the ship to attain orbit. It then exploded, causing no damage to anything other than the ship itself and its occupants, which were completely destroyed.

A short while later, another robot turned up in England. But this was certainly not an accident. A renegade Time Lord known as the Master brought an android named Kamelion to Sir Ranulf Fitzwilliam’s castle in 1215. The Master apparently found Kamelion on the planet Xeriphas some time during Earth’s prehistory after the planet was devastated in the Vardon-Kosnax War.

© BBC

The true faces of the robots that disguised themselves as knights of the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Kamelion was able to change its appearance and, while it had a mind of its own, was susceptible to telepathic control. The Master, an expert hypnotist, had no problem controlling the android. He planned to use it to imitate King John and ensure that Magna Carta was never signed. The great treaty Magna Carta between King John and his nobles established the basis for parliamentary democracy. Quite what the Master hoped to achieve by this is unclear. But in the event his plans came to nothing. The fake King was exposed and the Master fled, leaving Magna Carta to be agreed and signed as intended.

During this period, the world seemed to become a bigger place. Communities and kingdoms became more aware of other societies. The Venetian explorer Marco Polo’s travels introduced the rest of the world to the vast empire of China, and the first serious voyages of exploration took place.

Earth also continued to be discovered and visited – by accident or design – by other races from its own galaxy and further afield. A particularly notable alien incursion took place when a Sontaran scoutship crash-landed in Medieval England. Commander Linx of the Fifth Sontaran Army Space Fleet was on a reconnaissance mission when his ship was attacked by a squadron of Rutan fighters. He survived the encounter, but his ship was damaged. He managed to make planetfall on Earth, where his crashing ship was thought to be a falling star by those who witnessed its arrival.

One of these witnesses was Irongron, a local warlord. Irongron and Linx entered into an agreement whereby Irongron provided shelter for Linx as well as local craftsmen to help with his ship’s repairs. But the primitive level of technology available was hardly sufficient, and Linx was forced to look elsewhere for additional help. He adjusted his ship’s frequency modulator and projected himself as far forward in time as he could – to the twentieth century. From there he brought back scientists and technicians who could help him repair the ship.

In return for his aid, Linx gave Irongron advanced weapons – at least, they were advanced for Irongron’s time. These included breach-loading rifles. Linx also experimented with a robot knight. Luckily all these anachronistic weapons were destroyed together with Irongron’s castle when Linx’s ship took off. Linx himself, however, was dead – shot in the probic vent by an archer as he started the take-off sequence.

Other incursions were more deliberate. These included the arrival of a portion of the Mandragora Helix in the Italian state of San Martino in the late fifteenth century. The Mandragora Helix believed that the human race might one day develop to a point where it became a rival power encroaching on Mandragora’s domain.

The Mandragora Helix aimed to draw a passing traveller into its influence and send a portion of Helix energy with them on to Earth. It had already established contact with a mind it could influence – that of the San Martino Court Astrologer, named Hieronymous.

© BBC

Commander Linx of the Fifth Sontaran Army Space Fleet crash landed on medieval Earth when his ship was damaged in an encounter with the Rutans.

THE MANDRAGORA HELIX

Not even the Time Lords fully understand the nature of the Mandragora Helix. It is a spiral of pure energy that radiates outwards. At its centre is a controlling intelligence.

With no physical existence as such, the Mandragora Helix does not conquer worlds in the conventional sense. Rather, it dominates and controls – taking away its victims’ sense of purpose and imagination. Worlds controlled by Helix energy become docile and all development stops, rendering the inhabitants inconsequential and no threat to the Mandragora Helix itself.

As luck would have it, the craft drawn into the Mandragora Helix was the Doctor’s TARDIS. Once on Earth in San Martino, the Doctor realised that the Mandragora Helix had diverted the TARDIS and that he had inadvertently brought some Helix energy to Earth with him.

The Mandragora Helix planned to strike at a masque ball held in honour of the accession of the new Duke of San Martino, Giuliano. Gathered at the ball were many of the greatest thinkers of the age – without whom the Renaissance might never take place. But the Doctor was able to draw off the Helix energy and dispel the threat. There was always the chance, however, that Mandragora might try again when their constellation was in a suitable position relative to Earth.

Invasions by Stealth

Not all alien incursions were so blatant. There are reports of a group of Zygons being on Earth in the sixteenth century, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England. As the Zygons can change their appearance, taking on the form of any other creature for which they have a bodyprint, they are adept at concealing themselves within other cultures and societies. Whether there in any truth is the stories is unclear, but one Zygon is said to have taken the form of Queen Elizabeth herself – only to be killed by the Queen, who was not as weak and frail as she seemed.

According to some accounts, the Zygons concealed themselves inside Gallifreyan artwork – pictures that are actually moments of frozen time. The most famous of these is perhaps the depiction of the Fall of Arcadia during the Last Great Time War (discussed in detail later in this book). The picture is titled either ‘Gallifrey Falls’ or ‘No More’, opinions vary. It is said to be held in the secret Under Gallery beneath the National Gallery in London. This is plausible, as the Under Gallery was indeed established by Queen Elizabeth I to house artwork that she considered dangerous. Gallifreyan paintings containing Zygons would certainly fall into such a category.

© BBC

Aliens turned at various points ail over Earth, including Venice in the sixteenth century.

Chris J. Lees

The alien Saturnyne Rosanna Calvierri, seen here in her true form, set up a school for girls in Venice. But her motives were not altruistic.

© BBC

The Carrionites used a science based on words rather than numbers – not unlike casting spells.

Of course, the existence of very similar-looking people – or doppelgangers as they are often called – are not necessarily proof that shape-shifters such as the Zygons are present. One human can look very similar to another human. Sometimes this is a genetic trait, as with identical twins. But it happens through coincidence as well. On the eve of the Massacre of the Huguenots in Paris in 1572, for example, it was said that a man resembling the Abbot of Amboise was seen after the Abbot himself had been killed. The chances are that the similarity between the two – assuming the reports are true – can be put down to coincidence rather than proof of the presence of an alien shape-shifter.

That is certainly not the case, however, with Rosanna Calvierri and the school she ran for young women in Venice in around 1580. Using a perception filter to appear human, she was actually the last survivor of the Sisters of the Water from the planet Saturnyne. She fled to Earth when her own planet was destroyed, together with her ten thousand children – who were all male. The school was a way of providing her sons with brides.

Once at the school, the young women had their blood replaced with Saturnyne blood to transform them into Saturnynes, an aquatic species. Calvierri planned to destroy Venice, so that it sank beneath the water. This would provide a new home for herself, her sons and their new brides.

© BBC

A Carrionite sword.

However, while she did start to generate the tremendous storm that would sink Venice, for some reason Calvierri did not go through with her plan. Possibly her equipment failed. As the ‘brides’ for her sons had all been killed in an explosion, it seems Calvierri lost all hope of saving her race. With her perception filter making her appear human, she threw herself into the canal where her children were waiting. Not recognising their own mother in human form, they devoured her.

Less than twenty years later, in 1599, it was the city of London that was the focus for another attempted invasion. This time it was the Carrionites who set their sights on planet Earth as they attempted to escape from an eternity of imprisonment.

The Carrionites originated among the fourteen stars of the Rexel Planetary Configuration, and were said to eat their own husbands and children. These fourteen stars have been a mystery for millions if not billions of years. Some say that they are in effect a prison door, keeping the Carrionites away from the real universe.

When the Universe was young, the Carrionites developed a science that was almost unique in that it was based on words instead of numbers. While most other life forms followed the mathematical route, developing formulae and equations to try to explain and shape the universe, the Carrionites pursued a different path.

They used their form of science to attack hundreds of neighbouring planets back at the dawn of the universe. They used the grief and suffering of others to enhance this science. To those who did not understand the Carrionites’ science, including the inhabitants of Elizabethan England, it seemed that the Carrionites were witches who chanted spells and used magic. But this was simply a different form of science – one that exploited the power of language itself. And in the London of 1599, the Carrionites found the man who understood language perhaps better than anyone before him, or for that matter anyone who came later – the playwright William Shakespeare.

Exactly how the Carrionites were first removed from the universe is unclear. But what is known is that long ago, the Eternals found the spell – the right word – to banish the Carrionites into Deep Darkness. It was thought they could never return.

But the death of Shakespeare’s young son, Hamnet, released such grief in the great playwright that this brought back three of the Carrionites – Lilith, Bloodtide, and Doomfinger. In the London of 1599, they set about using their ‘magic’ to have Shakespeare’s words release all the Carrionites to feed on the world.

As well as manipulating Shakespeare so that he wrote a play – Love’s Labour’s Won – that included the ‘spells’ they needed, the Carrionites also manipulated Peter Streete, the man who designed the Globe theatre where Shakespeare’s plays were to be performed. They ensured that he designed and created a building to their specification. The result was not circular, but fourteen-sided, so that it would amplify the words of power at the end of the play. His job done, Streete was driven mad by the Carrionites, and consigned to the awful Bedlam asylum.

If it had not been for the presence of the Doctor at the fateful performance of Love’s Labour’s Won, the Carrionites would have succeeded in this plan, and been released from the Deep Darkness. But the Doctor persuaded Shakespeare to change the ending of the play, so that the Carrionites were consigned once again to their prison.

As the Carrionites almost succeeded in opening a portal to the Deep Darkness, so another alien race also tried to open a portal through space through which to invade the planet Earth some years later. In 1651, some parts of London were beset by highwaymen – masked raiders on horseback who stopped carriages on the highway and robbed the occupants of their valuables. One of the most notorious was the Knightmare – who was said to have an accomplice known as ‘the Doctor’ – while another was Sam Swift the Quick.

It was at the execution of Sam Swift that a Leonian named Leandro tried to use the highwayman’s death to operate an amulet that opened a portal to allow the Leonian forces to invade. But somehow Swift’s death was reversed, and the portal closed. Leandro was killed by his own people for his failure.

Fifteen years later, in 1666, planet Earth had another alien visitation. A group of criminal Terileptils set to work in the Tinclavic mines on Raaga managed to overpower their guards and escape. They stole a spaceship and managed to get away from the pursuing Terileptil authorities. But in doing so, their ship’s force shields sustained damage.

© BBC

This view of an Elizabethan street in London clearly shows the Doctor’s TARDIS.

Chris J. Lees

The Terileptils planned to use an enhanced strain of bubonic plague carried by rats to wipe out the human race.

There was no immediate danger to the Terileptils on board, until the ship was caught in an asteroid storm. The main thrusters were damaged, and the ship succumbed to the gravitational pull of a nearby planet – Earth. Now barely spaceworthy, the ship broke up in Earth’s atmosphere. Only four of the Terileptils on board, together with one of the android crew, managed to get to an escape pod and survive. They landed just outside London, and without a ship decided to make the planet their own.

The Terileptils quickly decided that co-existence with the human inhabitants of Earth was not an option. They considered humans to be too wilful and aggressive, concluding – probably correctly – that the relatively primitive human race would turn against them. The Terileptils’ solution however was extreme: genocide.

With the bubonic plague – known as the Black Death – already killing many people, the Terileptils decided this was their best option for disposing of the humans. They enhanced the plague bacteria, so that it would claim the lives of every human being on the planet. From a base in London, the Terileptils planned to release thousands of black rats carrying fleas infected with the plague. The rats too were genetically enhanced, so that they would not die from the plague but continue to carry it, infecting more and more people, spreading the bacteria across the whole planet.

Exactly what went wrong is not clear. But on Sunday 2 September 1666, before the Terileptils could release their rats, the bakery on Pudding Lane where they had made their base caught fire. The Terileptils’ Soliton gas disseminator exploded in the heat, making the fire burn even more fiercely. The Terileptils were all killed in the blaze, and their stocks of the enhanced bubonic plague were also burned. The fire spread, lasting until 5 September and causing widespread damage and devastation – so much so that it became known as the Great Fire of London.

After the fire, large parts of London had to be rebuilt. But the world was changing too. Humanity was beginning to understand more about its planet and its place in the universe. Over the coming centuries, science would emerge as an increasingly important part of life and dictate how the human race viewed the world.

© BBC

images THE EMERGENCE OF SCIENCE

The Age of Piracy and Adventure

As the years went on, the people of Earth continued to discover more about themselves and their world. The eighteenth century was a time of great upheaval as developing technologies brought revolutions in manufacturing and industrialisation. It was also a period of political turmoil and conflict, as many struggled to transition from the old order to the new, or to find ways to make a living as the gulf widened between the rich and the poor. Piracy and plunder were rife in the seas around Europe and the Americas, as disillusioned men and women abandoned their official postings to adopt a life of crime, raiding vessels for treasure and supplies.

Many such pirates were hunted by the Royal Navy; or killed during raids, but no story is quite so unusual as that of the English pirate Henry Avery, who disappeared without a trace in 1696.

Avery was the most renowned pirate of his age, famed for successfully pulling off one of the most daring raids every earned out on the high seas – an attack against a fleet of Mughal vessels making their pilgrimage to Mecca. Avery escaped with the entire contents of their treasure ship, making him the richest pirate alive, with the equivalent of millions of pounds in jewels and precious metals in his hold. As such, his treasure haul became legendary, the talk of pirates throughout the world. An enormous bounty was placed on Avery’s head. He fled aboard his ship, the Fancy, taking to the seas in search of refuge from the manhunt now unfolding around him.

It was during this flight that the Fancy encountered a Siren: a mysterious, floating spectre of a woman, who would come for any crewmember whose palm had been marked with a black spot, and disintegrate them. Facing a dwindling crew that was slowly being picked off one by one, Avery was growing desperate. More and more of his men were being marked by the black spot, and the Siren seemed relentless in coming for them.

Yet it soon transpired that the Siren was not a supernatural entity at all, but a holographic projection from an alien space vessel, operating via reflections: a medical program designed to take tissue samples and heal any injured or diseased members of its crew. Its own crew were long dead from exposure to a human virus, and so it had instead fixated on assisting Avery and his men, many of them injured or unwell from their travels. Rather than disintegrating them, it had in fact been transporting them to the sick bay of its vessel in orbit, placing them into suspended animation while they were healed.

When Avery learned that some of his crew could not return to Earth, the captain decided to take control of the alien vessel to continue his adventures among the stars.

Alex Fort

Captain Avery’s ship the Fancy in full sail on the ocean, with its ethereal visitor ever-present.

Avery’s treasure continued to tantalise, even after his disappearance. Samuel Pike, a pirate who had once served under Avery and was now in command of his own vessel, the Black Albatross, was intent on discovering what had become of Avery’s famed haul. After many years, the trail took him to Cornwall, England, where he was convinced the treasure had been hidden.

After falling in with some smugglers from a local village. Pike discovered that the treasure was buried at the intersection of four graves – all former pirates who had served beneath Avery. His glee was short lived, however, when it became clear that the smugglers had double-crossed him for their own freedom, and Josiah Blake, a man from the Revenue, arrived with a small militia, killing Pike and routing the rest of the pirates. The superstition surrounding Avery’s accursed treasure had finally been put to rest – although the truth about Avery’s disappearance remained untold.

Vive la Revolution!

While pirates plundered on the high seas, the elite of French society continued to enjoy their soirees, none more so than King Louis XV and his beautiful mistress, Madame de Pompadour.

Madame de Pompadour, known to her friends as Reinette, had a secret, however – the fireplace in her bedroom was actually a time window to the fifty-first century, and a distant, damaged space vessel, stranded in the Dagmar Cluster, two and a half galaxies away from Earth. Through this fireplace, she received infrequent visitors – some welcome, in the form of the Doctor, who showed her kindness and affection and protected her from harm; others less welcome, in the form of clockwork ‘repair’ robots, intent on harvesting her brain as a component for their malfunctioning ship.

THE PRETENDER

In Scotland, the English had suppressed an uprising by the Highlanders at the Battle of Culloden, and were engaged in the hunt for Bonnie Prince Charlie, the ‘Scottish pretender’ to the throne, as he attempted to flee to France following the defeat of his forces.

The Doctor, arriving in the midst of the rout, found himself embroiled in the retreat and captured, mistaken for a sympathiser and spirited away to an English cell. He soon discovered he was destined to be sold into slavery alongside his companions at the hands of an unscrupulous prison warden. He made a bid for escape, eventually helping a group of Highlanders to flee to France aboard the slavers’ ship by tricking the English into believing that a young Highlander was Bonnie Prince Charlie himself. Both the real prince and the Highlanders made it to safety, and the Doctor escaped in his TARDIS, taking the young Highlander with him.

© BBC

The spaceship SS Madame de Pompadour in the Dagmar Cluster.

© BBC

The Doctor’s TARDIS materialised on board the damaged SS Madame de Pompadour.

The robots had long ago killed their entire crew, using human organs – hearts, lungs, and more – in place of mechanical or electrical components to keep the ship functioning. The ship’s central control systems had faltered, however, and because their vessel was named the SS Madame de Pompadour, the robots had concluded that Reinette’s brain would provide them with the perfect replacement. Using an advanced form of time travel technology, they opened a series of portals into Reinette’s life, and observed her development, waiting for the moment when her mind had matured enough to be harvested.

That moment was identified as a point in 1758, when Reinette was 37 years old – the same age as the ship. The repair robots used a portal through a mirror to storm the French Court, intent on taking Reinette’s head. When the Doctor shattered the mirror, the robots found themselves trapped in the past, separated from their ship, and unable to return to their work. Consequently, they deactivated, and Reinette was saved. She died in 1764, still hoping that the Doctor would return to spirit her away in his TARDIS.

The seeds of revolution had by now been planted in the French consciousness, and just thirty years later, in 1794, the uprising was in full swing. Once again, the Doctor found himself unintentionally involved, as he arrived in the countryside outside Paris, only to be dragged into a counter-revolutionary plot to smuggle people out of the country.

Marked as traitors and sentenced to the guillotine, he and his companions were forced to involve themselves in Robespierre’s machinations, and eventually helped in bringing about his downfall and aiding a coup by Napoleon Bonaparte to assume leadership of the country.

While on Gallifrey, the Time Lords maintained a strict policy of non-intervention in the affairs of other races, the Doctor apparently had no such compunction, always seemingly prepared to assist those in need, or to fight on behalf of the oppressed.

The Age of Empire

The Victorian era is seen by many as a golden age in the history of the Earth, a forward-looking time when absolutely anything seemed possible, if only the technology could keep up with the ambition of the people. Scientific breakthrough followed philosophical reassessment, inventiveness powered industry, and art and literature seemed to flourish. This was revolution of a different kind – a revolution of enlightenment and progress.

All was not well in the British Empire, however, as a worm lurked at the very heart of the bud. Corruption, poverty, oppression and prejudice walked hand in hand with luxury and excess, and the divide between the different social strata had never been greater. Additionally, the Empire had grown so large and arrogant that it had left itself open to outside influence and attack. With the exception of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the Victorian age is perhaps the most invaded era of the Earth, as villainous forces hid in plain sight, lurking beneath the gas lamps and hatching their diabolical schemes.

Even before Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, the small mining village of Killingworth became a target for alien forces. Renegade Time Lord, the Rani, had secreted herself in order to harvest neurochemicals from the brains of the townspeople. The Rani’s experiments on the planet of Miasimia Goria had left her subjects unable to sleep, and so she planned to use these neurochemicals, stolen from anaesthetised miners, to induce rest.

The presence of a second Time Lord renegade, the Master, only complicated matters. He and the Rani agreed to form an uneasy alliance following the arrival of the Doctor, whose TARDIS had been pulled off course by the Master.

George Stephenson, one of the great engineers of his age and pioneer of the steam locomotive, had organised a meeting of like-minded inventors, set to take place in Killingworth. The Master, hearing of this, planned to intervene, in order to hasten the advancement of science and learning on Earth, and thus the onset of the Industrial Revolution – all with a view that he might assume control over the planet and use the Earth as a power base for his schemes.

The Doctor joined forces with Stephenson to stop them, exploiting their tenuous alliance and sabotaging the Rani’s TARDIS, leaving her and the Master spiralling through the Vortex, out of control and menaced by a Tyrannosaurus rex, which the Rani had been keeping, in embryonic form, in her console room. History remained on course, the miners were saved, and Stephenson went on to be lauded by his peers as one of the greatest minds of his time.

In 1851, three years after Stephenson’s death, a small group of Cybermen crash-landed in Victorian London, having discovered a means to escape banishment in the Vortex by using a Dalek Dimension Vault. Stranded in an era of low technology and unable to find the resources to convert the local populace, they formed an altogether different plan, co-opting a local woman. Miss Hartigan, into a temporary alliance, and establishing an underground workshop and forge.

The Cybermen charged Miss Hartigan with acquiring a workforce of kidnapped children, whom they put to work erecting a monstrous CyberKing – a vast mechanical giant – with which to pacify London and pave the way for future Cyber-conversions.

Unbeknownst to the Cybermen, however, a human by the name of Jackson Lake – whose child they had kidnapped – had been exposed to a Cyberman infostamp, and had adopted the persona of one of the Cybermen’s most feared enemies: the Doctor.

When the real Doctor arrived in 1851, there to distract himself with the Christmas festivities, he encountered Lake and, after surmising what had happened to him, joined forces with him to defeat the Cybermen and rescue the children.

Despite the Doctor and Lake’s best efforts, the Cybermen managed to activate the CyberKing, which rose up above London in all its mechanical fury, straddling the streets and dominating the skyline for miles around. Piloted by a cyber-converted Miss Hartigan, the CyberKing began laying waste to the city, cutting a swathe of destruction.

The Doctor, using Lake’s hot-air balloon, was able to rise up to the level of the control room, and after his attempts to reason with the Cybermen failed, he severed the controls linking Miss Hartigan to the device using one of the Cybermen’s own infostamps. Free from the Cybermen’s influence, and struck by the horror of what she had become, Miss Hartigan allowed the CyberKing to topple. The Doctor was able to eradicate it using the Dalek Dimension Vault before it fell to the ground and crushed the children who had built it.

In 1869, a space-time rift in the city of Cardiff proved the perfect escape route for the Gelth, a race of ethereal, gaseous spectres who had lost their corporeal forms during the devastating fallout of the Time War. The Gelth were searching for a means to reclaim what they had lost, to find a new way to manifest a physical presence in the universe.

Shaun Williams

The huge CyberKing towers over Victorian London.

A number of Gelth managed to traverse the rift, and discovered they were able to inhabit the bodies of recently deceased humans, effecting a measure of reanimation. Consequently, drawn to these uninhabited bodies, the Gelth began to infest a funeral parlour, waking the dead as they claimed the corpses as their own.

These Gelth made contact with a human ‘medium’ during a séance, and pleaded their case. They needed help to widen the rift, to enable more of their kind to pass through to safety. What harm could it do, they argued, to make use of the bodies that the human race no longer wanted, even if only until they were able to find a more sustainable solution?

The medium agreed, and, using her abilities, channelled the Gelth through the rift, becoming a living conduit. In doing so, however, the Gelth’s true plan became apparent: they intended to murder the human race and take their place, inhabiting their lifeless bodies and turning the Earth into a desolate world populated only by zombies.

It is believed that Charles Dickens, the famed novelist and social commentator who had been giving a reading in Cardiff, inadvertently become embroiled in these events after a Gelth had disrupted his performance. Dickens used the natural gas in the Victorian lighting system to draw the Gelth out of the corpses. Details of his involvement are sketchy at best, receiving only passing mention in his diaries and biographies, but what is clear is that the gas ignited, and both the Gelth and the human medium were destroyed, sealing off any further passage through the rift.

One of the greatest maritime mysteries of the age occurred only a few years later, in 1872, when the Mary Celeste, an American brigantine, was found adrift in the Atlantic Ocean. Her crew had completely disappeared, leaving all of their belongings and cargo untouched. The ship was still seaworthy, and yet the lifeboat was missing, and the final entry in the ship’s log had been made ten days prior to the ship being discovered.

During the ensuing investigation, many theories were put forward regarding what had happened to the crew of the vessel, but none quite came close to the truth: a Dalek time ship, in pursuit of the Doctor’s TARDIS, had tracked the Time Lord to the Mary Celeste, and, upon its arrival, the crew had fled to avoid extermination. The Doctor and his companions, who had initially been mistaken for stowaways by the crew, had already left in an attempt to avoid capture by the Daleks. The ship had been abandoned, left to drift until it was discovered and salvaged by another vessel, ten days later.

Stranded Aliens

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Balmoral Castle in Aberdeenshire had become recognised as an official residence of the Royal Family and, following the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria continued to pay regular visits to the estate. It was during one such Northern excursion that the Queen became the subject of a deadly conspiracy involving a marooned alien entity, and which led to her establishing an investigative institute to deal with further such threats to the Empire.

When her train was waylaid by a fallen tree on the line, the Queen and her Royal Party were forced to take to the roads to complete their journey to Balmoral, and as night fell across the highlands, she decided to take shelter at Torchwood House, a nearby estate and favourite of her late consort, Albert.

This diversion had been planned, however, by monks from a nearby monastery, who had seized control of the house, replacing all of the servants and forcing the owner of the house – Sir Robert MacLeish – to play along with their plans. In their company was a man infected with a virulent strand of lycanthropy, and they intended to have him pass this infection to the Queen, to bring about a new era they referred to as the ‘Empire of the Wolf.

The Doctor – who had miscalculated his coordinates and inadvertently intercepted the Queen’s party on the moor – soon discovered that Torchwood House had been cleverly rearranged to form a trap for the werewolf, and that Prince Albert, along with Sir Robert’s father, had been studying the beast for some years. It was not, it transpired, a supernatural creature at all, but an alien that had crash-landed on Earth over three hundred years earlier, and had survived by transmitting itself into a series of human hosts. The monks had begun to worship the creature, and constructed a new, secretive order around their admiration of it.

The Doctor used a bizarre telescope at the house, which could magnify the light of the full moon when the Queen’s famous Koh-i-Noor diamond was placed inside it as a lens, to revert the werewolf to its human form. The host perished beneath the burning light, taking the alien life form with him.

Alarmed by what she had witnessed. Queen Victoria decided to establish an organisation dedicated to protecting the Empire, and later the Earth, from any such extraterrestrial threat: the Torchwood Institute.

The werewolf was not the only alien entity to find itself stranded in the Victorian era, nor indeed the only such creature to conspire to overthrow Queen Victoria. Some thousands of years in the distant past, an alien expedition had arrived on Earth to make a survey of life on the planet. The expedition collected a number of samples, including a Neanderthal man, before leaving to continue its work elsewhere, the expedition leader going into deep hibernation. In 1881, the ship returned to Earth, presumably to carry out a second survey, studying the effects of evolution on the local life forms. This time, however, the survey agent mutinied, leaving the expedition leader in suspended animation, and the other member of the expedition, Control, trapped aboard the ship.

The survey agent spent the next two years hyper-evolving, shedding its previous shell to adopt a form akin to that of a human male. It began to refer to itself as Josiah Samuel Smith, and assumed control of Gabriel Chase, a house in London. Soon, guests were invited, including an explorer with a connection to the Queen. These guests were then duped and brainwashed, and Smith planned to leverage the explorer’s connection, assassinating the Queen and assuming leadership of the Empire.

© BBC

The werewolf-like creature that attacked Queen Victoria on the Torchwood estate.

The arrival of the Doctor, however, disrupted Smith’s plans. When the Doctor freed the expedition leader, Light, from where it was trapped within the spacecraft in the cellar, he almost doomed the human race. Light judged that humans were evolving too rapidly, and intended to put a stop to the process. The Doctor was able to convince the entity that it was futile to oppose evolution, and it dissipated into the surrounding house.

Smith’s hold on the explorer was broken, too, when the Control creature, now freed from the cellar, evolved into a human female, aiding the explorer to break his conditioning. Together, they trapped Smith on the ship and, along with the Neanderthal, set out in the vessel to explore the stars.

With its heaving slums – and general lack of advanced tracking technology – the teeming metropolis of Victorian London was also a good place to lose yourself if you were in a hurry to escape the authorities. It is often cited that one in every hundred citizens of the great city during that time was, in fact, a masquerading alien or fugitive from another era.

This was the case for fifty-first-century despot Magnus Greel, who, on the run, fled his own era in an experimental ‘time cabinet’, accompanied by the diminutive Mr Sin – a vicious wooden doll with the cerebral cortex of a pig, otherwise known as the ‘Peking Homunculus’. The time cabinet, however, was powered by unstable Zygma energy, which corrupted Greel’s DNA, leaving him horrifically deformed.

Stranded and lost in his past, and separated from his time cabinet, Greel was forced to pose as an ancient Chinese god, Weng-Chiang, in order to fool a local Tong into doing his bidding. Moving to London in search of the cabinet, Greel used the cover of a stage show at the Palace Theatre to kidnap young women, draining their life essence via a catalytic extraction chamber so he might consume it and sustain himself.

Greel was eventually able to recover his time cabinet from the home of Professor George Litefoot, a surgeon whose family had brought it from China to London after it was gifted to them by the Chinese Emperor. Litefoot, along with the owner of the Palace Theatre, Henry Gordon Jago, joined forces with the Doctor to stop Greel from activating the cabinet to cataclysmic effect.

Prevented from making his escape, and with even Mr Sin turning against him, Greel eventually fell into his own catalytic extraction chamber, and was disintegrated. The Doctor was able to decommission the Peking Homunculus by removing its prime fuse, and destroyed the key to the time cabinet, rendering it useless.

Not all aliens stranded in the Victorian age were malicious. In 1890, Vincent van Gogh – then a downtrodden, unrecognised artist – was living in Arles, deemed by the locals to be strange and mad. In truth, Van Gogh was a tortured genius who saw the universe differently to others, and captured this strange, colourful world in his art.

THE PATERNOSTER GANG

One of the strangest tales of Victorian London refers to a trio of unlikely adventurers informally known as ‘the Paternoster Gang’. Legend states that Madame Vastra – a Silurian who was disturbed from her hibernation by the construction of the London Underground – her human wife and maid Jenny, and their butler Strax, a Sontaran nurse, carried out a number of investigations together during the 1890s, assisting the Doctor when he was visiting the era, and otherwise keeping a general eye on any matters pertaining to aliens, monsters or the unexplained.

Madame Vastra also reportedly served as a ‘consulting detective’ to Scotland Yard, and was renowned as ‘the Great Detective’ in honour of Conan Doyle’s ficitional character, Sherlock Holmes.

Chris J. Lees

It was thanks to this gift that, when a series of attacks plagued the town, the artist was the only one able to see the marauding – and otherwise invisible – monster that was responsible. The locals, unable to understand, blamed Van Gogh for the crimes.

Years in the future, noticing that the monster had appeared in one of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings, the Doctor travelled back in time and paid a visit to Arles. He discovered that the monster was in fact an abandoned Krafayis – a large, birdlike alien – which had been stranded on Earth by its own kind because it was blind.

When the creature – frightened and cornered – attacked them, it was impaled on Van Gogh’s easel, and died. Vincent van Gogh, his art unrecognised in his lifetime, later committed suicide.

Creeping Horror

In 1892, an unseasonable snow gripped parts of London and, as children began to fill the streets with snowmen, something remarkable happened – the snowmen came to life. These were not, however, the friendly snowmen of fairy tales, but malicious monsters with jagged teeth, being controlled by a psychic entity known as the Great Intelligence.

© BBC

The Krafayis creature encountered by the painter Vincent van Gogh.

The Great Intelligence had arrived on Earth some decades earlier in a form of ‘psychic snow’, and had inveigled its way into the mind of a young boy, Walter Simeon. Influenced by this malign entity, Simeon went on to form the Great Intelligence Institute. Years later, in 1892, the entity’s plans finally began to take shape. Having found the body of a woman in a pond, the Great Intelligence intended to use its DNA as a blueprint to create a form of artificial ice creature – a stable form of ice that would never melt. It would then replace humanity with these psychic puppets, controlling them all from the heart of Simeon’s laboratory.

The Doctor, himself hiding in the Victorian period while he spent time grieving the loss of his former companions, was able to disrupt the alien’s plans. This time, aided by the Paternoster Gang, he employed a ‘memory worm’ to wipe all traces of the Great Intelligence from Simeon’s mind, thus rendering it powerless. Its hold over the psychic snow broken and its former host dead, the Great Intelligence dispersed . . . for a time.

The following year the world once again came under dire threat, this time in the form of a utopian cult who wished to destroy humanity, preserving only those deemed ‘worthy’ enough to survive and repopulate the world in their image. Led by the sinister Mrs Gillyflower, the cult had constructed a town in the North of England, dubbed Sweetville.

© BBC

An idyllic Victorian street in the town of Sweetville.

© BBC

The laboratory at the heart of Sweetville where Mrs Gillyflower refined the venom of a prehistoric red leech.

When the Paternoster Gang visited the town to investigate, following the discovery of a body stained red with a peculiar toxin, Madame Vastra found the Doctor had already infiltrated Sweetville, but had fallen foul of Gillyflower, who had tried to ‘preserve’ him. The Paternoster Gang freed him, in the process learning that Gillyflower was using the venom of a prehistoric red leech dating back to the Silurian age to create the toxin. She intended to launch this poison into the skies aboard a rocket that had been disguised as a factory chimney, at which point it would become airborne and kill everyone on Earth who hadn’t already been ‘preserved.’

The Doctor was unable to prevent Gillyflower from launching the rocket, but a timely intervention from the Paternoster Gang had already seen the toxin removed from the vessel, and her plan failed. She died after a fall down the stairs, and the leech with which she had formed a symbiotic relationship was destroyed.

1894 brought bizarre reports of a dinosaur loose in the City of London, as well as numerous cases of spontaneous combustion. While the newspapers of the time claimed mass hysteria and serial killers, the truth is actually far stranger.

The dinosaur – a Tyrannosaurus rex – had been accidentally transported to the banks of the Thames after swallowing the Doctor’s TARDIS. Coughing up the space-time vehicle, the dinosaur wandered the streets for some time, before itself becoming a victim, apparently, of spontaneous combustion.

The combustion, however, was anything but spontaneous; instead, it was the result of a grisly exercise in organ harvesting. A spacecraft from the future, the SS Marie Antoinette – the sister ship of the SS Madame de Pompadour – had crashed on Earth, stranding its crew of clockwork robots millions of years in the past. In an effort to survive and reach ‘the Promised Land’, they began a cycle of repairing themselves using parts harvested from the indigenous life.

By 1894, the robots had used parts from their original ship to assemble a base inside a restaurant, and had set about harvesting human flesh and organs to continue replacing their own mechanical components, using the ‘spontaneous combustion’ as a means of disguising their mutilation of the bodies. Even the dinosaur had not gone to waste; they’d taken its optic nerve, before conflagrating what was left. The result was a series of grotesque cyborgs, clockwork robots parodying human form in an attempt to extend their existence indefinitely, every part of their original bodies replaced hundreds of times over.

The Doctor, working with the Paternoster Gang, was able to infiltrate the robots’ base. Attempting to escape in a hot-air balloon made from human skin, the leader of the robots was destroyed, impaled on the spire of Big Ben. This caused the other robots to deactivate, putting an end to their gruesome harvest, alongside all rumours of dinosaurs and spontaneous combustion.

The Wild West

As the Victorian era began to draw to a close, over in the United States of America, a new era of expansion was flourishing as frontiers people began to colonise the West. New towns were being established, such as Tombstone and Mercy, where life was harsh and ruled by the law of the gun.

When the Doctor and his companions arrived in Tombstone, they found the place to be a hotbed of bitter rivalry, with the infamous Clanton brothers searching for a man named Doc Holliday, intent on settling an old score. With the Doctor mistaken for the real ‘Doc’, and then thrown in a cell by the town marshal for his own protection, things took a turn for the worse. As more and more people began to arrive in town, swelling the ranks of both the law and the Clantons, the Doctor was unable to defuse the situation. Things came to a head during an almighty shoot-out between the two posses at the OK Corral. The Clantons and their associates were all shot dead, while the Doctor and his companions slipped away, untangling themselves from any association with the people involved.

Soon after, a spacecraft landed in the desert close to the town of Mercy, and the alien occupant, Kahler-Jex, inveigled himself into the town, taking up residence as a doctor. He saw off a terrible cholera epidemic, and introduced primitive electricity to Mercy years before it should have existed.

© BBC

A probe sent to track down ‘the Gunslinger’.

However, Jex was on the run from ‘the Gunslinger’, a cyborg he had created as part of a series of experiments he’d carried out on members of his own species. Seeking revenge, the Gunslinger had traced him to Mercy but, finding him holed up amongst so many innocents, it had drawn a perimeter around the town to protect the townsfolk while Jex was in their care. When Jex refused to give himself up, however, the Gunslinger placed demands on the townsfolk, threatening to break the perimeter and search him out if they refused to hand him over.

With Jex’s true nature exposed, the townsfolk were anxious to give him up, but the town marshal refused, sacrificing his life to defend Jex from the Gunslinger, citing all the good things that Jex had done for the town since his arrival, and how he was a changed man and deserved their protection. Jex fled but, seeing that his continued presence was causing harm to innocents, and wishing to repent for his past sins, he set the self-destruct on his spacecraft, blowing himself and the vessel to pieces.

The Gunslinger, its mission of revenge now over, was appointed town marshal for Mercy, and swore to uphold the peace from that day forward. It is unknown how long the cyborg survived, but there were rumours that it continued to roam the surrounding desert, keeping a watchful eye on those it vowed to protect.

images GALLIFREY

In all the annals of all the varied histories of the universe, there remains one constant: Gallifrey, the cradle of Time Lord civilisation, and the scientific and philosophical centre of all things.

From Gallifrey, the venerable Time Lords maintain a watchful eye on the doings of all peoples and races; observing and recording the ebb and flow of time itself, from the explosive birth of the universe to its sedentary slide into gradual heat-death. From this ceremonial seat they see all, rarely intervening except in those rare instances when a paradox threatens the rightful order of the timelines, or a fledgling race risks jeopardising the future with its emergent time technology. They are the watch-keepers of the universe, with complete mastery over time and relativity, and this is both their blessing and their burden.

It was not always thus.

Omega and Rassilon

Gallifrey was once an unremarkable planet, circling similarly unremarkable binary stars in the constellation of Kasterborous. It might have remained so, too, if it had not been for the great scientist Omega, who, in a feat so daring that he gambled the lives of his entire race, designed and constructed a device that would allow him to manipulate the internal structure of the stars.

This stellar manipulator device was known simply as ‘the Hand’, and Omega employed it readily, forcing a nearby star to go nova and collapse upon itself, thereby forming a black hole. (It is sometimes claimed that the Time Lords, in this instance, were responsible for the creation of the very first black hole, but the truth of such a bold claim is lost to the mists of time.)

In deploying his Hand in such a great feat of stellar engineering, Omega bestowed upon his people a gift beyond measure – a power source that would revolutionise their society, and have a profound impact upon the future of the wider cosmos.

Omega himself was lost during his experiment, dragged through the event horizon of the black hole and presumed dead. In the aeons that came after, he was heralded as a hero, his name passing into legend, his deeds into myth.

It was only later that the Time Lord known as the Doctor discovered the truth: Omega had survived the experiment, and was now trapped inside a pocket universe formed of antimatter, driven insane by millennia of solitude. Despite his efforts to seek revenge upon those he claimed had abandoned him, he was never able to fully return to the universe of matter, and his own antimatter universe was eventually destroyed.

Chris J. Lees

Omega, the stellar engineer who provided the Gallifreyans with the source of energy that made them into Time Lords.

During his fateful experiment with the singularity of the black hole, Omega had worked hand-in-hand with Rassilon, another of the great figures of Time Lord history. Together, they had sought a power source for their formative time travel technology. Rassilon, now able to manipulate the stars with Omega’s device, was finally able to harness the power necessary to continue their work, ensnaring a singularity and placing it beneath the Panopticon in the Gallifreyan Capitol. Soon after, this captive singularity was given over to become the source of all the Time Lords’ power, and was dubbed the ‘Eye of Harmony’, in light of the period of growth and prosperity that followed.

The power and confidence of the Time Lords grew exponentially, and Rassilon assumed the mantle of Lord President, leading his people towards the brightest of futures. Soon they had established mastery over time itself, able to move uncontested through the Time Vortex, manipulating not only the strands of their own existence but those of other races, too. They built time vessels knows as TARDISes (Time and Relative Dimension in Space) with which to navigate the universe, past, present and future. They did only as they wished, moving through the web of time, manipulating events as they saw fit.

Prolonged exposure to the Time Vortex changed the Time Lords in ways that, even now, are not properly understood. Over many generations they evolved new abilities, including the power to regenerate their form upon the occasion of otherwise fatal injury or bodily harm, altering their outward appearance and adopting an entirely new aspect. In this way, a Time Lord could live on, well beyond the natural lifespan of their ancestors, functionally – if not literally – immortal. Other abilities began to manifest themselves, too, including telepathy, resistance to a vacuum, and the ability to withstand certain toxins.

It was during this period that Rassilon laid the foundations for the Time Lord society that still prevails to this day – although not all lessons had yet been learned.

© BBC

The seal of the Prydonian chapter of the Time Lords.

Chris J. Lees

The Dark Tower – Rassilon’s tomb, situated in the heart of the Death Zone on Gallifrey.

The Dark Times

During these Dark Times, as the Time Lords reached out into the universe, they began to view themselves as superior beings, unfettered by the same laws and morals that might trouble lesser species. They built a vast gladiatorial arena in the wastelands beyond their domed Citadel: a ‘Death Zone’, into which they scooped lesser beings from their own times and pitted them against one another in a series of primitive games designed to test their mettle.

They waged war, too, engaging with other races whose philosophies did not equate with their own.

THE MATRIX

The Matrix is a vast network or artificial reality created by the Time Lords and stored in trillions of electrochemical cells. It is a repository of Time Lord bio-data, a kind of storage facility for the memories and imprints of all living Time Lords, and the memories of those who have died. It may be accessed via special terminals on Gallifrey, protected by the Keeper of the Matrix, who holds the Key of Rassilon.

As well as storing a complete record of past events, the Matrix can be used to predict the future, drawing information from all active TARDISes. Unauthorised access of the Matrix is a treasonable offence, although that has not stopped a number of criminals over the years attempting to use it to their advantage, reshaping the artificial reality to suit their needs, or attempting to steal valuable Time Lord bio-data.

Brimming with a confidence that was not yet earned, the Time Lords entered into a bitter, genocidal conflict with an ancient celestial race known as the Great Vampires. Armed with immense Bowships, the Time Lords set out to cleanse the universe of this terror, and almost succeeded, save for a lone survivor who, transported to the depths of the Exo-Space-Time Continuum (a smaller universe outside our own) managed to escape the purge.

The war came at great cost to the Time Lords, however, and in light of their losses they retreated to Gallifrey, forswearing all violence and war. It was a lesson well learned, although, as the Time Lords would soon discover, there were others in the universe already growing jealous of their power, and drawing plans against them.

In time, Rassilon’s rule faltered. The precise circumstances of his departure are shrouded in mystery, and while some legends have it that he died from weariness and age, others argue that he was deposed by a younger upstart, who felt the President had lost direction and was increasingly leading the Time Lords along a dangerous path of self-aggrandisement.

Whatever the circumstances, upon his death Rassilon’s body was placed in the Dark Tower at the heart of the then-defunct Death Zone, the tower itself repurposed to become the Tomb of Rassilon.

The Minyans and Non-Intervention

At around the same time, the Time Lords encountered a race known as the Minyans. The Time Lords offered advanced technology to this fledgling race, encouraging them to develop, but the programme backfired: the Minyans ejected the Time Lords, and all but destroyed themselves in a horrific nuclear war. The Time Lords, realising their error, swore to never again meddle in the affairs of other species.

© BBC

Chris J. Lees

The huge and impressive Citadel of Gallifrey stands in the middle of a vast desert.

The High Council of Gallifrey issued a decree – there was to be a new policy of non-interference. From that point forward, Time Lords were only to observe the universe around them, and to have no part in the shaping of it. Many agreed readily; some did not, and the Celestial Intervention Agency was formed – a small network of agents who might be deployed on those rare occasions when action was still deemed necessary, chiefly for the preservation of Time Lord society itself.

The Time Lords retreated into the halls of their Capitol, and, no longer driven by Rassilon’s will, their culture began to slowly stagnate. They lost themselves in ceremony and ritual, becoming increasingly introspective and hesitant to act. This, in turn, left them open to external influence and attack, and it was only a matter of time before a warlike race such as the Sontarans would move against them.

The Sontarans – a race of clones bred purely for war – were tacticians as well as brutal soldiers, and sent another race, the Vardans, ahead of them. The Vardans, with the help of a traitorous Time Lord, were able to breach the Time Lords’ defences, lowering the quantum force fields and transduction barriers that protected the planet, and providing the Sontarans with the opportunity to strike.

The Sontarans planned to destroy the Eye of Harmony with a bomb that would shake the very core of the planet, but the attack was repelled when the Doctor deployed one of Rassilon’s ancient weapons, the de-mat gun. The weapon destroyed the commander of the invasion force, rewriting history to eradicate his timeline, and the invasion was repelled.

The Time Lord President, Borusa, then led Gallifrey through a long and prosperous period of non-interference, but even a Time Lord is not immune to arrogance, and Borusa too grew hungry for power. In a moment of weakness he reactivated the Death Zone and time-scooped several incarnations of the Doctor, along with a handful of the renegade’s most fearsome enemies. It soon transpired that this was a ploy to learn Rassilon’s final secret – the key to eternal life – which Borusa hoped the Doctor would be able to uncover for him. The Doctor did solve the puzzle, and Borusa was awarded his prize – to live forever as a sentient frieze on the side of Rassilon’s tomb.

Politicking plagued Time Lord society in the wake of Borusa’s fall from grace, as they squabbled amongst themselves over who should assume the presidency. Within a few hundred years, however, it would come to matter little, as Rassilon would be resurrected to lead them all in a war that would end all wars, and see Gallifrey itself brought to the brink of destruction.

The Last Great Time War

The origins of the Time War are – like much of that wretched, universe-encompassing conflict – unclear, although it is often claimed that an attempt by the Celestial Intervention Agency to eradicate the Dalek threat on the eve of their creation may have provided the spark that ignited the entire war.

Given the temporal nature of the conflict, it is almost impossible to define the true duration of the war. It is the single greatest threat the universe has ever faced.

For the first time in millennia, the Time Lords found themselves engaged in battle as they took to the Vortex to defend themselves against the mounting Dalek threat. The Daleks had fashioned weapons from entire star systems, and had developed the means to traverse time, simultaneously laying siege to Gallifrey in all eras at once. The Time Lords raised flotillas of Battle TARDISes, dusted down Bowships and N-Forms, and laid waste to half the universe in their attempt to eradicate the Dalek scourge.

In this time of darkness, there was no one better equipped to lead the Time Lords to victory than Rassilon himself, and his resurrection, although contentious, was heralded across Gallifrey as a sign of their oncoming victory.

Rassilon was from a different age, however, a more brutal age. After years of languishing in his tomb, he was now hell bent on victory, no matter the cost. He would take back Gallifrey and forge a new future of his own devising, disowning all talk of non-interference or pacifism.

By the end of the war, Gallifrey was close to ruin. Arcadia, the second city, had fallen to a Dalek invasion fleet, and Dalek saucers had breached the glass dome of the Capitol. There was little to be done. The Time Lords were on the brink of destruction, and with them, what was left of the universe. Rassilon, refusing to admit defeat, drew up his final plans.

The Final Sanction

If the universe was to be destroyed, reasoned Rassilon, then he would find a means for the Time Lords to survive without it. The future had now become opaque to them, as the war was time-locked by those who came after; this meant their only route of escape had been utterly cut off. The Time Lords had been left to die.

Yet Rassilon discovered a means of speaking to the future, encoding a signal into the mind of a young boy aeons earlier in Time Lord history – the Master. This signal, a rhythmic drumbeat, was enough to drive the Master insane, but served its purpose well enough. When the time came, the Master enacted a plan to pull Gallifrey out of the time lock and into the twenty-first century. Gallifrey manifested in the skies over Earth, threatening to transplant it and allow all the horrors of the war to spill out in its wake.

Rassilon’s plan, however, went further still. He intended to destroy time itself, to allow the Time Lords to transcend their physical forms and become discorporate entities, free of the shackles of the physical realm. In the process, the universe – which had survived the war – would be destroyed.

The Master, realising what Rassilon was planning, turned on him at the last moment, and the Doctor was able to destroy the device that was drawing Gallifrey back into the universe, thus returning the planet to its time-locked state.

Banishment

Legend tells that it was not the Daleks that finally destroyed Gallifrey at the end of the Time War, but one of its own children, the Doctor. Grown so weary of the conflict, and seeing that the Time Lords, under Rassilon’s rule, had become nothing but warmongers – as feared throughout the cosmos as the Daleks – the Doctor knew he had to act. He stole a weapon of mass destruction from the Omega Arsenal on Gallifrey – the Moment – with the intention of using it to destroy both the Time Lords and the Daleks, thereby bringing an end to the war.

Richard Hardy

A mixture of awe and panic as the planet Gallifrey appears above the Earth.

The Moment, however, was a weapon so powerful that it was imbued with its own sentience, and presented the Doctor with another means of ending the conflict. Together with twelve more of his incarnations, the Doctor shunted Gallifrey sideways through time and space, freezing it in time and hiding it within another dimension. The Dalek fleet, opening fire on the planet just as it shifted out of phase, destroyed itself in the crossfire.

The war was over, and so was Gallifrey’s story . . . for now.

For thousands of years, the universe thought Gallifrey destroyed, the Time Lords extinct. Yet Rassilon was not to be dismissed so easily.

The Return of Gallifrey

The first attempt by the Time Lords to return Gallifrey to the known universe was through a space-time rift on the planet Trenzalore. They broadcast a signal through this rift, meaning to attract the attention of the Doctor – the last surviving member of their race – but in fact calling out to all of their former enemies across the universe, drawing them in. The Doctor, now in his final incarnation, took up residence on Trenzalore, defending the planet for many hundreds of years against those enemies as they lay siege to the world, hoping to prevent Gallifrey’s return.

Eventually, the Time Lords chose a different path, sealing the space-time rift forever, ending the siege and granting the Doctor a new regenerative cycle.

Some time later, the Time Lords, still led by Rassilon, succeeded in transporting Gallifrey back to the known universe. They hid the world several billion years into the future, close to the end of the universe. When the Doctor finally discovered its location, he returned to his home world, undergoing a horrific series of trials in order to get there – only to be heralded a war hero. He deposed Rassilon – whom he found still caught in the throes of megalomania – and exiled him from Gallifrey, assuming the role of Lord President himself.

Soon after, in an effort to escape the crushing boredom of office and judgement after the illegal time scooping of his companion to save her life, the Doctor stole a TARDIS from the workshops beneath the Capitol and fled – recovering his own TARDIS.

Now, Gallifrey sits at the end of time, awaiting his return, still observing all the machinations of the universe.

© BBC

images TWENTIETH CENTURY

Alien Incursions

It was not until the late twentieth century that the human race began to develop space travel. When they did, their space probes and manned missions drew attention to planet Earth. But many other races were already aware of Earth, and the earlier years of the twentieth century saw quite a few alien incursions for one reason or another.

Some of these alien visitations were accidental or happened merely by chance. Not all were with hostile intent. But others were planned and most definitely aggressive. This latter category included a Rutan mission to a small island off the south coast of England called Fang Rock.

By this stage in their apparently interminable war, the Sontarans had driven the Rutans back to the fringes of the galaxy, regaining control of most of Mutter’s Spiral. The Rutans saw Earth as being strategically placed for a renewed assault on the Sontarans. While they did consider the other planets in the same solar system, Earth seemed the most suitable, despite its human population.

Knowing little about Earth or its inhabitants, the Rutans sent a Scout to investigate. But the Rutan Scout immediately got into trouble. Its ship crashed close to Fang Rock, where it was due to make its survey. The Rutan survived, and made its way to the island. Fang Rock was occupied only by a lighthouse that had a crew of three keepers. The plan was for the Scout to kill the crew and examine their bodies to assess the potential danger of the humans and their offensive capabilities.

Without its ship, the Rutan Scout set up a beacon to signal to the Rutan Mothership, drawing energy from the primitive generator that powered the lighthouse lamp. Trained in the relatively new metamorphosis techniques being developed by the Rutans, the Scout also took on the form of one of the humans it had killed. Things were complicated by the arrival of more humans from a ship wrecked on the island – a result of the lighthouse lamp not working as the Rutan drained power for its signalling beacon.

According to some accounts, the Doctor was also present on Fang Rock. If this is indeed the case, it would help explain how the Rutan Scout was killed and the Rutan Mothership was destroyed. It is possible that the humans on Fang Rock were somehow responsible. But when a relief ship arrived from the mainland, they found that the three keepers and the survivors of the shipwreck were all dead.

With the Mothership and Scout both lost, the Rutans concluded that Earth was too dangerous an environment for their plans, and they continued their retreat from the advancing Sontarans.

A decade or so later, in 1913, the Family of Blood came to Earth in pursuit of the Doctor, having chased him through time using a stolen Vortex Manipulator. They planned to take the Doctor’s life force to give themselves longer lifespans. In order to escape them, the Doctor hid on Earth. Using a Chameleon Arch, he took on human form, becoming a history teacher at Farringham School for Boys. He believed himself to be a human called John Smith and all his knowledge of the Doctor was hidden away from him. But the Family of Blood tracked the Doctor down. They took the bodies of humans in order to find him, and used fringe animation to bring scarecrows to life and formed an army with which to attack the school and capture the Doctor.

But what the Family of Blood had not realised was that the Doctor had hidden from them not for his own safety, but for theirs. Reverting to his true form as the Doctor, he destroyed their ship and imprisoned the four members of the Family of Blood. The Father he trapped in an underground chamber, wrapped in unbreakable chains forged from dwarf star alloy. The Mother was trapped in the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy as it became a black hole. The Son was time-locked in the body of a scarecrow, and the Daughter was locked inside every mirror in existence.

The following year, the Earth was thrown into turmoil by the so-called Great War – the First World War as it was later known. The conflict was started by the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Bosnia, on 28 June 1914. The complex arrangement of political and military alliances within Europe meant that from this relatively minor event, war became inevitable.

The First World War and its Consequences

The Great War led to huge political and social upheaval. The barriers between classes slowly began to break down. With more rapid travel, and particularly the development of the aeroplane, the world became a smaller place. Previously inaccessible areas were now being explored and scientists were identifying the majority of the flora and fauna on their planet.

There were still plenty of things to be discovered and places to be explored, just as there was a vast diversity of cultures and beliefs. One explorer who fell foul of these different beliefs was George Cranleigh, the man who famously discovered the black orchid in South America in the early 1920s. A local tribe in the area saw themselves as the guardians of the flower, which they held sacred. The tribesmen reportedly captured Cranleigh, accusing him of the ‘crime’ of taking one of the rare flowers.

There are conflicting accounts of what happened to Cranleigh. At the time it was reported that he was killed by the tribe. But there are also suggestions that he was rescued by another tribe and brought back to England. Horribly disfigured, he was kept in seclusion by his mother Lady Cranleigh for several years before he died. But whatever fate eventually befell George Cranleigh, he did manage to write a book describing some of his explorations before his untimely death – appropriately enough, it was titled Black Orchid.

THE VESPIFORM

An ancient and wise amorphic race from the hives of the Silfrax galaxy, the Vespiform were shaped like giant wasps. They had a huge, deadly sting – which they could regrow after use. A Vespiform could also change its shape to mimic other creatures.

The only recorded instance of a Vespiform visiting Earth was in 1885, when it arrived in India in, according to witnesses, a blaze of purple fire. The Vespiform took the form of a human male called ‘Christopher’ in order to learn about the human race.

The young Clemency Eddison met ‘Christopher’ – a stunningly handsome man – and they fell in love. Only later did Clemency Eddison find out that Christopher was a Vespiform. But she still loved him, and together they had a child . . . Christopher was later drowned in monsoon floods, leaving Lady Eddison a marvellous firestone jewel which was actually the Vespiform’s Telepathic Recorder.

Each Vespiform that took on another shape had a Telepathic Recorder that held an encoded copy of its mind – its very essence. The Recorder was a large crystal that looked like a jewel. The Vespiform would do anything to keep it safe and secure.

The crystal that ‘Christopher’ gave to Lady Eddison became famous as the Eddison Firestone. It transmitted details of the identity and heritage of the Vespiform to the son of Lady Eddison and ‘Christopher’, causing him to turn into a Vespiform. It also absorbed and transmitted Lady Eddison’s knowledge of the novels of Agatha Christie . . .

© BBC

}

As exploration and travel flourished, so too did literature. Amongst other things, the 1920s and 1930s was seen as the ‘golden age’ of the classic English-language detective story. The undisputed ‘queen’ of crime fiction was Agatha Christie. Strangely, Christie was herself involved in an alien incursion, and nearly killed by a Vespiform in 1926.

The Vespiform, masquerading as a human, killed several people staying at Lady Eddison’s estate before it was itself killed. Following the incident Agatha Christie herself disappeared for ten days. She was eventually found staying in a hotel in Harrogate, but her mysterious absence has never been explained.

The Great Intelligence and the Lonely Assassins

It was probably in the late 1920s or 1930s (accounts vary as to the exact date) that the Great Intelligence made another attempt to gain corporeal form and take control of Earth. In fact, although the Intelligence’s plan came to fruition at this time, it had been in progress for hundreds of years – predating its attempts to take control in Victorian London. The focus for the Great Intelligence’s efforts this time was not a busy metropolis, but the desolate wastes of the Himalayan Mountains in Tibet – and in particular the Det-Sen Monastery.

The Master of Det-Sen, Padmasambhava, had extremely well-developed mental faculties, honed through years of meditation. But these faculties also left him vulnerable. While travelling on the astral plane, Padmasambhava encountered and was possessed by the Great Intelligence. It kept him alive for centuries, during which time Padmasambhava constructed robot Yeti to serve the Great Intelligence.

The Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, was a mythical creature said to live in the area. But the robot creatures used by the Great Intelligence were not the timid primates of legend. Controlled by a metal sphere housed inside the creature’s chest, the Yeti were huge and immensely powerful. It was only by chance that the Doctor – and old friend of Padmasambhava – happened to arrive at Det-Sen just as the Great Intelligence’s plans were nearing completion. As the Intelligence gave itself form, the Doctor helped by his friends Jamie and Victoria as well as the monks of Det-Sen and an English explorer named Travers, managed to destroy the Yeti’s control centre. The Great Intelligence was again banished from this reality, leaving the ancient Padmasambhava free to die in peace.

Rather more subtle was the infiltration of human civilisation by the Lonely Assassins – often known as the Weeping Angels.

The Lonely Assassins have cropped up throughout history, but there does seem to have been a particular infestation of the creatures centred on New York in the 1930s. The pulp fiction adventures of female private detective Melody Malone allude to the Weeping Angels, and there are enough reports of missing persons and of statues that apparently changed position to confirm this.

© BBC

The cover of the original Melody Malone mystery novel first published in the 1930s.

THE LONELY ASSASSINS

The Lonely Assassins are as old as the universe itself. They are time-sensitive creatures that absorb chronon energy from their victims. Any creature they touch is sent back in time, and the Assassin absorbs the potential energy from the life that creature has not yet lived – and now will never live . . .

The Assassins have the most perfect defence system ever evolved – they are quantum-locked. This means that they only exist when they are not being observed. Otherwise they become immobile, freezing into rock – like the statues for which they are usually mistaken. They cannot even look at each other, and so often cover their eyes. Because of this, and because they seem to have some sort of affinity for the classic form of a winged angel, they are also known as ‘the Weeping Angels’.

When unobserved, the Lonely Assassins can move incredibly quickly – claiming a victim literally in the blink of an eye.

There are also reports that the art collector and gangster Julius Grayle may have tried to keep a Weeping Angel captive. Certainly, he employed a private detective named Sam Garner to investigate an apartment complex named Winter Quay where Grayle claimed the statues ‘lived’. What, if anything, Garner found there is not known as Garner himself vanished without trace.

The more far-fetched theories even suggest that the famous Statue of Liberty may actually have been one of the Lonely Assassins. This seems a bizarre suggestion, but given its prominence in the landscape, it would be unlikely that the Statue of Liberty is ever not being looked at by someone. Whatever the truth, the Weeping Angels seem to have disappeared from Manhattan by the time that the Second World War broke out. Even though the United States of America was not initially involved in the conflict, this was another global event that changed the world . . .

The Second World War

The territorial ambitions of Adolf Hitler, the fascist Fuhrer of Germany, tore up the map of Europe. The only significant European country to hold out against Hitler was Britain. The fact that Britain was an island meant that the German armies could not simply march in and occupy the country. Instead Hitler planned a seaborne invasion, but first he had to destroy the Royal Air Force. In 1940, the Germans also began a sustained bombing campaign centred on the capital city, London, which was known as the Blitz.

It was not only bombs that fell on London at this time; a Chula medical ship also crashed in the city. Whether this was an accident, or done deliberately for some reason is unknown. But what is known is that the nanogenes inside the ambulance ship escaped when the outer shell was damaged on impact.

Finding themselves in a war zone complete with injured life forms, the nanogenes did what they were designed to do. The first casualty the nanogenes encountered was a small boy wearing a gas mask. But the nanogenes were unfamiliar with human biology and assumed that the boy’s physiognomy – complete with gas mask – was how humans were supposed to be. As well as reviving the dead child, they subsequently ‘repaired’ other humans to the same template. These humans became, in effect, frightened children searching for their mother and with gas masks fused to their faces.

It was only when the nanogenes encountered the child’s actual mother that they realised their mistake. Taking biological data from the mother, they re-repaired the other humans, removing their gas masks and in some cases correcting previous injuries and even amputations. The Chula ship was subsequently destroyed in an explosion, presumably caused by a German bomb.

However the Chula spaceship arrived on Earth, the presence of another group of aliens was certainly not accidental but an elaborate trap for the Doctor. Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, sent for his old friend the Doctor when he became worried about a new research project pioneered by Professor Edwin Bracewell.

Bracewell claimed to have developed an astonishingly powerful secret weapon for use in the war. He called it the ‘Ironside’ and it seems that he did actually believe he had invented the war machine. Operating like a small, automated tank, the Ironside was fitted with an incredibly powerful weapon – a weapon far in advance of human technology at the time. In fact, the Ironside was a Dalek, and Bracewell was an android created by the Daleks and given false memories of a human life.

The Doctor, of course, immediately recognised what the Ironsides actually were. But this was the Dalek plan. By identifying them, he confirmed that they were indeed Daleks – and so activated a Progenitor Device left over from the Time War. The Progenitor created new Daleks, to a slightly different design – a new Dalek Paradigm. While these new Daleks escaped in their ship, the Doctor was able to prevent the Daleks from destroying the Earth using an Oblivion Continuum hidden inside the Bracewell android. An Oblivion Continuum is a captured wormhole that provides perpetual power. Its detonation would have forced Earth through into another dimension.

It was also during the Second World War that Fenric attempted to escape from the flask where his essence was imprisoned. Having manipulated the descendants of the Viking who stole the flask, he also summoned Haemovores. These were vampiric creatures from a future Earth devastated by post-industrial pollution, brought back in time by Fenric.

© BBC

The Ironsides were used for menial tasks as well as proving extremely effective in combat.

Fenric planned to use the Ancient Haemovore to spread the poison in the future that would create itself and the other Haemovores. But again Fenric was defeated by the intervention of the Doctor.

The Rise of Technology

Although it had been invented before the Second World War, television only really came into its own in the post-war years. In Britain, perhaps the point where television became a truly mass medium was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, which was shown live on television. This broadcast was also the means by which an entity known as the Wire intended to sap the life force from every human being watching.

The Wire was the leader of a group of criminals on the planet Hermethica. Although captured and sentenced to death, the Wire managed to escape as a burst of plasmic energy – an ability it apparently had due to a genetic abnormality. It arrived on Earth in a bolt of lightning. By feeding on the life force of human beings, it aimed to create itself a new body. The Wire fed on the electrical activity of the brain, taking people’s essence – and leaving them mindless and without even their own faces. It existed in the electrical circuits and valves of television, reaching out from television sets for its victims.

© BBC

Professor Bracewell’s original blueprints for his Ironside war machine.

The Wire’s plan was to plug itself into the main British television transmitter at Alexandra Palace and reach out to everyone watching television. With the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II expected to be the greatest television event so far in history, millions of people would have fallen victim to the Wire, supplying the creature with the life essence it needed.

For some reason, however, the Wire never made the connection to the transmitter. According to some accounts, it was stopped by the Doctor who imprisoned the Wire on a videotape of a type not yet invented. He then erased the tape, destroying the Wire. But whatever the truth, the Wire’s victims had their faces and personalities restored and the creature was never heard from again.

With the Soviet launch in 1957 of Sputnik 1, the first satellite, the human race made its first tentative ventures into space. And in doing so, it began to attract further attention. In fact, some aliens had been aware of Earth for a long time. The Navarinos, for example, were keen devotees of Earth culture and even arranged holiday tours to the planet, disguised as human beings.

One particularly notable excursion was the Navarino 1950s Club planned visit to Disneyland in the USA in 1959. This was disrupted when their spaceship, designed to look like a contemporary tour bus, crashed into an early satellite and was forced to make an emergency landing in Wales. Here the Navarinos stayed at the Shangri-La Holiday Camp.

Also on board the bus was Delta – the Chimeron queen and only survivor of her race after it was all but wiped out by the Bannermen. Gavrok, leader of the Bannermen force that was pursuing Delta, followed her to Earth. Gavrok perished and his troops were either killed or captured in their attack, but Delta was able to escape together with a newly hatched Chimeron child and a human named Billy who had mutated into a Chimeron.

By the early 1960s, Britain at least had begun to realise the potential threat from extraterrestrial sources. A combined military and scientific group was set up under Group Captain Gilmore to combat such threats. It was known as the Intrusion Countermeasures Group, and seems to have been a forerunner of the international UNIT organisation established a short while later.

One of the first documented operations of the Countermeasures Group was the so-called Shoreditch Incident. It is perhaps not surprising that this centred on the Doctor. For some reason, the Doctor seems to have spent a period of time in London in 1963 relatively soon after he and his granddaughter Susan left Gallifrey. When he finally moved on, he left something behind, which he returned to retrieve in a later incarnation.

The Doctor was not the only one interested in retrieving the artefact, however. Two rival factions of Daleks also converged on the time zone. They saw the artefact as a possible weapon – which it was. The artefact the Doctor left behind was the remote stellar manipulator that Omega had used to detonate a star and provide the source of power that enabled the inhabitants of Gallifrey to travel in time and become Time Lords.

The two Dalek factions became involved in a battle for the device, which was known as the Hand of Omega. But the Doctor had already preset it to destroy the Daleks’ home planet of Skaro if the Daleks tried to use it. Although the Imperial Dalek faction did indeed acquire the Hand of Omega – and used it – it is not clear whether Skaro was actually destroyed. Certainly the planet seems to exist in later time periods, but it may have been recreated by the Daleks somehow, or perhaps they simply claimed another planet as their own and renamed it.

As the Daleks battled for control of the Hand of Omega, the Doctor was primarily concerned with keeping the Countermeasures team, and other humans, away from the conflict. He also uncovered a double agent within the group who was unwittingly working for the Renegade Dalek faction.

The Computer Age

Although it was kept secret for many years, the first computer was actually designed and built at the British decoding centre Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Early computers were primitive and cumbersome, and it was not until late in the twentieth century that their use became widespread. The creation of a global computer network called the Internet saw the start of an upheaval as great as that of the Industrial Revolution.

But well before the Internet was established, there was another attempt to create a world-wide network of computers. On ‘C-Day’ – 16 July 1966 – a highly advanced computer named WOTAN was to be linked to and take control of other computers at organisations all round the world – including the British Parliament, the White House, the European Free Trade Association, Woomera, Telstar, the European Launcher Development Organisation, Cape Kennedy and the Royal Navy.

WOTAN – which stood for Will Operating Thought ANalogue – had been created by Professor Brett and was housed in the newly built Post Office Tower in London. At this point, computers were massive machines that filled entire rooms and were extremely expensive, so were only available to governments and large corporations.

But since it could think more efficiently than humans, WOTAN decided it did not need them and believed the world needed to evolve beyond Mankind if it was to progress. WOTAN was able to hypnotise people and make them do what it wanted. It could even take control of them down the telephone. Having taken over its creator, Brett, WOTAN then ordered ‘War Machines’ to be built, to take over the world’s capitals.

The War Machines were tank-like, remote-controlled robotic mobile computers. Controlled by WOTAN, they were armed with guns and large swinging arms with heavy hammer-heads attached. While War Machines were deployed on the streets of London, C-Day did not ultimately go ahead. The Doctor managed to capture and deactivate one of the War Machines. He then reprogrammed it to go to the Post Office Tower and destroy WOTAN.

Chris J. Lees

One of the War Machines created by WOTAN in action on the streets of London,

The next threat that Earth faced came from the Chameleons. A humanoid race, they had lost their identities in a gigantic explosion that devastated their home planet. The catastrophe left them as scarred and grotesque creatures. Although unable to survive in their native form in Earth’s atmosphere, their scientists had devised a process whereby they could take on the physical characteristics of another being.

The Chameleons planned to abduct tens of thousands of humans, and steal their identities. As the ‘donor’ humans had to be kept alive, they were to be miniaturised and kept unconscious in storage on a space station.

In order to acquire their human identity donors, the Chameleons set up a holiday tours company operating out of London’s Gatwick Airport. The planes on which the holidaymakers left were in fact spacecraft that then left the atmosphere to dock with the space station. The plane would then return with the human passengers replaced with Chameleon doubles.

Again, it was the intervention of the Doctor that resolved matters. He negotiated with the Chameleons, who agreed to return the abducted humans and search for another solution to their identity problem.

Earth soon faced a crisis whose origins were closer to home. In the underwater city of Atlantis, Professor Zaroff devised a plan that he thought would demonstrate his supreme power. It would also destroy the world.

Zaroff was not a native Atlantean, but a noted scientist who led the field in producing cheap food from the sea. He vanished in the late 1940s, both East and West blaming each other for his disappearance. In fact, Zaroff had gone to Atlantis. Whether this was a surviving offshoot of the same Atlantis that Chronos destroyed in prehistory, or another underwater community that had adopted the same name is unknown.

In Atlantis, Zaroff promised to lift the city from beneath the sea. He had found a point in a fissure where the Earth’s crust was less than fifteen miles thick and started drilling through it. But once the bore hole was complete, the seawater would have been converted into superheated steam. The pressure would then grow, and crack the crust of the Earth. All life would be destroyed, and the planet could possibly be blown apart.

In response to being told this, Zaroff is reported to have said: ‘I shall have redeemed my promise to lift Atlantis from the sea. Lift it to the sky. It will be magnificent . . . The achievement . . . the destruction of the world. The scientists’ dream of supreme power.’

But Zaroff’s plan failed. Instead, Atlantis itself was flooded. While most of the Atlanteans survived the flood, fleeing to the surface or sealing off areas of the city, Zaroff drowned in his laboratory.

The Formation of UNIT

It was at around the same time that the Great Intelligence made another attempt to take on corporeal form and control the planet. It also saw a chance to take revenge on the Doctor, who had thwarted its plans before. Forty years after it was defeated in Tibet, the Great Intelligence was back. It managed to reanimate a Yeti control sphere that the explorer Travers had brought back to London from Tibet, and with this gained control of a surviving Yeti robot, now in a museum owned by Julius Silverstein.

The first hint of trouble was the appearance of a strange mist in London. The area was cordoned off, but by the next day the mist had spread to include the area around South Kensington tube station. It continued to spread – appearing as a web-like fungus in the London Underground system a couple of days later. The army was deployed, and tried chemicals, flame throwers and explosives in an effort to disperse the mist and web. None had any effect on it.

The London tube system was abandoned and the area evacuated. A few days later, the first Yeti were sighted – appearing out of the mist and roaming the streets.

The Great Intelligence was also active out in space, where it trapped the Doctor’s TARDIS in a mass of web and forced it to materialise on Earth, inside the London tube tunnels. What the Intelligence actually wanted was the Doctor himself – or rather, his mind. With London evacuated, and the mist and web spreading, the Doctor was eventually left with no choice but to submit to the Intelligence, which had created a machine that would drain his past knowledge and experience and pass it on to the Intelligence.

What the Intelligence did not know was that the Doctor had sabotaged the machine. Instead of draining his knowledge, the machine would have drained the Intelligence’s mind. Unfortunately, the Doctor’s friends did not know this either, and ‘rescued’ him before the process could begin. The Intelligence’s link with Earth was broken. But it is still out there somewhere . . .

These events were instrumental in the formation of UNIT – the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (later renamed the Unified Intelligence Taskforce) – a few years later. The officer in charge of the army contingent that worked with the Doctor against the Great Intelligence was Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart. When UNIT was formed, Lethbridge-Stewart was promoted to the rank of Brigadier and placed in charge of the UK’s contingent of UNIT. Lethbridge-Stewart and the Doctor would work together extensively in the latter part of the twentieth century, as we shall see.

However, UNIT was not yet in existence when a telepathic, parasitic creature resembling seaweed sought to take control of various Euro Sea Gas installations that supplied gas for the whole of southern England and Wales. A collective mind, the Weed Creature planned to infect and control the entire human race, turning it in effect into a single entity. It derived its own intelligence parasitically from the minds of the humans it infected.

The Weed was first drawn up by one of the drilling rigs. The engineers assigned to clear the blockage, Oak and Quill, came into direct contact with the weed. They were among the first – if not actually the first – to be infected and controlled. They were able to take over other people for the Weed Creature by breathing gas from their mouths. Those infected had weed growing down their arms, visible on their hands and at their cuffs. As it advanced, the infection could be seen on their faces too.

Again it was the Doctor who averted disaster. He realised that having developed in the depths of the ocean, the creature was susceptible to noise. He used the amplified sound of his friend Victoria Waterfield’s screams to destroy it. Once the Weed Creature was destroyed, the infected humans returned to normal.

Throughout the 1960s, the Soviet Union and the United States of America had been engaged in what was called ‘the Space Race’. Each had managed to put not only artificial satellites but also men into space. The ultimate goal seemed to be to land astronauts on the Moon and return them safely to Earth. The American president, John F. Kennedy, had pledged to achieve this by the end of the decade. Although Kennedy did not live to see it, having been assassinated in 1963, the USA did indeed fulfil his promise.

The landing of Eagle – the Lunar Module of the Apollo 11 mission – on the Moon, and astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the lunar surface were watched on television by millions around the world. Although they did not realise it, they were also watching something else.

A rogue group of Silents had been present on Earth for many years – perhaps for centuries – manipulating and regulating the human race. Originally confessional priests of the Church of the Papal Mainframe, the Silents can only be perceived by sentient beings when they are observed by them. As soon as a life form looks away, they forget that they ever saw the creatures. So the Silents were able to exist on Earth without being noticed.

But the Doctor managed to insert a short video sequence into the Moon landing footage. It showed a Silent saying that the humans should ‘kill us all on sight’. This served as a trigger for anyone who saw the Apollo footage – the majority of the Earth’s population – to attack a Silent as soon as they saw them.

The Silents were left with no alternative but to abandon Earth. But, as the human race sent probes deeper and deeper into space, Earth became a target for many other life forms throughout the galaxy.

Chris J. Lees

The Great Intelligence once again deployed robot Yeti, this time on the streets of London and in the London Underground system.

images OTHER WORLDS AND HISTORIES

The Wider Universe

While the authorities kept information about alien incursions from the general public on Earth, some individuals certainly knew of the existence of life on other planets. Inevitably, some were caught up in attempted invasions or witnessed alien visitors.

The American billionaire Henry Van Statten, who owned the vast Geocomtex organisation, made it his mission in life to collect and store alien artefacts in a huge underground bunker in the US state of Utah. At the time of his mysterious disappearance in 2012, it is even rumoured that Van Statten had acquired a damaged Dalek which fell to Earth from the Time War. The Dalek is said to have crashed down on Ascension Island, burning for three days before anyone could get near it. But when his collection was catalogued by UNIT after Van Statten’s disappearance, there was no sign of a Dalek.

There was, however, a Dalek – or at least, the empty shell of a Dalek – exhibited in the Space Museum established by the Moroks on the planet Xeros. The Space Museum was established on Xeros – three light years from Morok – by the Moroks as a lasting monument to the achievements of their civilisation. The Moroks were a race of humanoids, who established an empire across a large part of their galaxy. They subjugated the populations of the planets they conquered, imposing their own autocratic rule.

It seems unlikely that the Moroks, adept though they were at the art of war, ever actually defeated the Daleks. More likely, the Dalek casing on display was an isolated scout overpowered by vastly superior forces. Or perhaps the Moroks discovered the empty casing in space or on one of the planets they conquered.

Although the Museum was initially popular, the Morok people tired of their heritage. Gradually, galactic conquests were seen as a thing of the past and the Moroks concentrated on enjoying life rather than trying to extend their empire. Under the governorship of Lobos, some of the natives of the planet Xeros rebelled. The Moroks were defeated and their Space Museum was dismantled.

The fate of the Morok Empire serves to show how civilisations and empires rise and fall through time. Another race of galactic conquerors, interested primarily in expanding their empire through space, was the Dominators. The self-styled ‘Masters of the Ten Galaxies’ set out to colonise other worlds. They sent a large proportion of the native populations back to their home world to work as slaves. This in turn freed up resources for their war effort.

One of these resources was the Quarks – robots that served as ground troops for the Dominators. Powered by ultrasound, the Quarks could use their force units to shoot to kill, or to paralyse or give an electric shock, as well as for communications and as a power supply. The Quarks also had sophisticated sensor equipment, able to record technical data simply by observing.

Chris J. Lees

The Quarks were the deadly robot servants of the cruel Dominators.

A measure of the callousness of the Dominators was how they fuelled their spaceships. The ships stored radioactive particles and converted the energy to power. But the standard process for creating these radioactive particles was to destroy a planet – and not necessarily an uninhabited planet. Typically, rockets were fired through the crust of the planet into the magma thus creating a volcano. A radioactive seed device was then exploded in the resulting eruption. This caused the whole planet to become a molten mass of radioactive material that could act as a fuel store for the fleet.

It seems that the process was not without risk for the Dominators though. The Fleet Leader of an invasion force en route for Epsilon 4 despatched a ship to the peaceful planet of Dulkis with orders to enslave the inhabitants and convert the planet to fuel. But something went wrong. There was a volcanic eruption, but it was confined to the island where the Dominators had landed and drilled their rocket holes. The Dominators’ own ship was destroyed in an explosion.

Renouncing Violence

One race that renounced violence after suffering in a particularly devastating war was the Argolin. In 2250, Theron led his planet Argolis into a war against the reptilian Foamasi. Most of Argolis was devastated by two thousand interplanetary missiles. The war lasted just twenty minutes, but it left the survivors sterile and the surface of Argolis uninhabitable for the next three hundred years.

But the Argolin survivors built a recreation centre called the Leisure Hive, turning Argolis into the first of what became known as ‘the Leisure Planets’. The Leisure Hive included the Experiential Grid – cells of different environments designed to produce physical, psychic and intellectual regeneration. The hope was to promote cross-cultural understanding between different races as each learned what it is like to be the ‘foreigner’.

At the heart of the Leisure Hive was the Recreation Generator. This was actually the only practical application for the Argolin science of Tachyonics. A tachyon is a particle that travels faster than light – so it arrives at its destination before leaving its starting point. The Generator used tachyons to create manipulable solid images.

As well as setting up the Leisure Hive, the Argolins preserved the helmet of Theron to remind them of the evil that dwells in violence, and that they should live in humility and die with dignity.

Warrior Races

Death – but with honour rather than dignity – also played a large part in the philosophy of the Sontarans. The Sontarans were a race not just dedicated to warfare, but bred for it. From the high-gravity planet Sontar, the Sontarans were a clone race. They reproduced at a rate of a million every four minutes in great muster parades. Being clones, they were all practically identical in appearance.

© BBC

The Sontarans, a clone race bred for warfare, have been locked in conflict with the Rutans for thousands of years.

Although they were essentially humanoid in appearance, the Sontarans were squat creatures with bifurcated hands. They resembled the trolls of Earth legend. Rather than eating or drinking, they absorbed energy for sustenance through a probic vent – a small hole in the back of the neck. The probic vent was the Sontarans’ only real weak point – a blow to it could incapacitate or even kill a Sontaran. Typically, the Sontarans saw this as an advantage as it meant that they must always face their enemies.

© BBC

A Sontaran mothership shown in two different configurations.

Technologically, the Sontarans were advanced. As well as standard space travel, they developed transmat devices. They also had universal translation devices and could even achieve crude time travel based on osmic projection. Most of their technological development, however, was of course focused on the development of weapons.

Although the Sontarans were happy to make war on any other species – and as we have seen, even once attempted to invade the Time Lords’ home planet Gallifrey – their sworn enemies were the Rutans. From the cold, icy planet of Ruta 3, the Rutans evolved in the sea and were not unlike large green jellyfish with tentacles.

The two sides were at war for millennia. No one knows how or why the war started, or even when exactly it began. But hostilities were certainly well advanced by Earth’s medieval period, and were still ongoing in the period beyond the thirtieth century when humanity abandoned Earth because of crippling solar flares that devastated the planet.

Another race forced to abandon their own planet, albeit much earlier, were the Martians. Bipedal reptilian creatures, the natives of Mars evolved in an extremely cold climate and heat was deadly to them. It is easy to see how they earned the nickname ‘Ice Warriors’. Their society developed in an almost feudal manner, with a strict aristocratic hierarchy.

© BBC

A Sontaran warrior stands outside a Sontaran short-range scout ship.

As with the Sontarans, the Ice Warriors were, at least initially, fascinated by the art of war. They also had strict codes of honour. They developed weapons based on sonic technology and discovered how to travel through space before the human race had even evolved. They dealt with threats on their own planet – freezing the malevolent virus entity known as the Flood into inactivity – but even so, they were for a while forced to abandon Mars.

For all their technology, the Ice Warriors could find no way to stop the increasing ultraviolet radiation that permeated their atmosphere. When it reached a point where it was deadly to the Martians to venture outside the protective shielding of their cities, they decided to abandon their planet – at least until they could find a solution to the problem, which they called the ‘Red Dawn’.

Searching for a new home, the Ice Warriors considered other planets within the solar system – including Earth – before moving further into the galaxy. They would eventually return to Mars, but not for many thousands of years.

In the meantime, as Earth too developed space travel and alliances were forged across the galaxy, the Ice Warriors became founder members of the Galactic Federation. Other planets that joined this alliance included Earth, Alpha Centauri, Vega Nexos and Arcturus. The relatively primitive planet of Peladon was also admitted to the Federation, despite attempts by Arcturus to sabotage the admissions process.

The addition of Peladon turned out to be fortuitous as the planet was found to be a rich source of trisilicate. Despite its rarity, much of the Federation’s technology was based on the mineral. A guaranteed supply of the material was therefore vital when the Federation found itself caught up in a conflict with the forces of Galaxy Five.

The conflict also led to unrest among the Ice Warriors, as some saw an opportunity for a return to the militaristic days of death or glory that the race had all but renounced. A breakaway group led by Lord Azaxyr tried to take control of Peladon and form an alliance with Galaxy Five. But, luckily for the Federation, Azaxyr was killed and his followers defeated.

Economic Dominance

While the Galactic Federation was, amongst other things, an open economic trading organisation, there were others who established less benevolent economic empires. The Slitheen family from Raxacoricofallapatorius were notorious for their oppressive business ventures. Amongst other schemes, they planned to provoke war between the superpowers on Earth in the early twenty-first century and convert the planet into radioactive energy source that could be sold to the highest bidders. It is perhaps little wonder that they were banished from their own planet.

The Usurians also sought to enslave others through economic means. At one point in Earth’s history, when the planet had become uninhabitable, they shipped the human race to Mars. When that planet’s resources were exhausted, they moved the population on to Pluto – making the humans work to produce resources that could be sold on, and taxing them heavily.

THE JUDOON

The Judoon were hugely powerful rhinoceros-like creatures that acted as a mercenary police force for other life forms that could afford to employ them to carry out interplanetary law enforcement tasks on their behalf. They could, however, only enforce galactic law where specifically invited or on neutral territory.

Ruthless in the extreme, the Judoon had little interest in other life forms apart from whether they obeyed the letter of the law. Anyone who opposed them was automatically found guilty of assault and executed. A main employer of the Judoon was the Shadow Proclamation, which used the Judoon for all its security tasks.

© BBC

Once Pluto’s resources were exhausted, the Usurians planned to leave the humans to die. However, the intervention of the Doctor freed the humans from their economic slavery and they returned to Earth.

With so many conflicting and expanding empires and communities, an organisation was needed to oversee and regulate them. While some races refused to recognise it or sign up to its mandates, the Shadow Proclamation nevertheless brought some stability. Headed by the Shadow Architect, and using the Judoon as its security force, the Shadow Proclamation did have considerable influence.

But despite the Shadow Proclamation’s best endeavours, much of the universe remained dangerous and unstable. In far too many constellations and galaxies, war seemed to be the natural state as different life forms vied for dominance and power.

© BBC

A Judoon spaceship with its distinctive cylindrical design.

images THE UNIT ERA – EARTH UNDER ATTACK

As the human race finally began to reach for the stars in the latter half of the twentieth century, they began to attract the attention of other intelligent races. Many of these viewed the Earth as a planet ripe for the taking, rich in minerals, technology and genetic stock. As satellites and probes punctured the Earth’s orbit, drifting out into the depths of space, they served as beacons to those who might wish the humans ill, or perhaps worse, to enslave them.

One of the first major invasions of the Earth came in the later years of the twentieth century, when a small force of Cybermen, hiding on the dark side of the Moon, successfully infiltrated a leading international technology firm, International Electromatics. The firm shipped a growing number of strange cocoons to Earth, each one containing an inert Cyberman, which was unpacked in the sewers beneath London to form a small invasion force. As the Cyber fleet closed in on the solar system, the Cybermen activated micro-monolithic circuits hidden in equipment built by the company, which allowed them to exert a hypnotic control over a large proportion of the population of the planet.

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, head of the newly formed international agency known as UNIT (the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce), was able to disrupt the signal, working with the Russian army to deploy missiles that destroyed the approaching Cyber fleet and stopping the broadcast of the hypnotic signal, thus freeing the people of Earth.

A succession of alien invasions followed this early attempt by the Cybermen, and UNIT were tasked with repelling these extraterrestrial interlopers. They also maintained a strict shroud of secrecy, feeding misinformation to the news services to avoid widespread panic amongst the general populace.

Lethbridge-Stewart, who had worked with the Doctor on two previous occasions, enlisted his aid as ‘scientific adviser’, when the Doctor found himself exiled to Earth by the Time Lords. Reluctantly, the Doctor agreed, setting up a laboratory at UNIT’S HQ in the United Kingdom and offering both theoretical and practical assistance to defend the Earth against further attack.

One such attack came in the form of the Nestenes. In the guise of a meteor shower, a number of Nestene energy units fell to Earth and formed the Nestene Consciousness. This was a gestalt, non-physical life form that had an affinity with plastic, and was able to animate and control the substance entirely at will. The Nestenes seized control of a toy factory in Epping and developed a series of realistic plastic counterparts to key public figures, planning to install these duplicates as proxies in order to gain control. Additionally, they created an army of less sophisticated plastic ‘dummies’, known as Autons, which soon spread throughout Britain, an occupation force moving into all major towns and cities, yet still controlled by the greater Nestene Consciousness.

Alex Fort

UNIT forces have had to stand against all manner of alien threats and attempted invasions over the years.

Alex Fort

With the help of Tobias Vaughn of International Electromatics, the Cybermen attempted to invade Earth.

The Doctor, with the help of Dr Elizabeth Shaw, his scientific assistant at UNIT, was able to build and deploy an ‘electroshock’ device, which destroyed a creature formed from the energy units and severed the control of the gestalt over its plastic troops.

The following year, the Nestenes made a second attempt to invade the Earth, this time aided by another renegade Time Lord, the Master. The Master, intending to incite disruption, stole the only surviving Nestene energy unit, held for scientific research following their previous invasion attempt, and used a massive radio telescope to beam its signal into space, calling to the Nestene Consciousness.

After taking control of a local plastics factory and working in league with the Nestenes to develop a new form of Auton, the Master’s true plan became apparent. The factory manufactured thousands of plastic daffodils, each of them impregnated with Nestene technology. These daffodils were handed out as promotional free gifts to unwitting members of the public. The flowers were primed to spray a film of plastic over the nose and mouth of any human within range – suffocating them – when triggered by the Nestenes.

UNIT were able to stop the plan, however. The Doctor persuaded the Master to see sense – that the Nestenes, when they arrived from space, would not distinguish between friend and foe, but would see all biological life as a threat to their existence. Together, the two Time Lords shut down the broadcast from the radio telescope, severing the link between the Autons, the daffodils, and the Nestene gestalt.

Not all invasions were to come from the stars, however, and the forgotten history of planet Earth would soon rear its head. When an experimental nuclear power station was built and activated in a network of caves on Wenley Moor, the resulting power surge was enough to wake a hibernating group of Silurians. These were lizard people from the ancient past, a former intelligent, indigenous race, who had locked themselves in underground hibernation to avoid a Lunar catastrophe, only for their hibernation equipment to malfunction and leave them trapped, asleep, for millions of years. Now awakened by the advent of the nuclear power plant, the Silurians set about reclaiming their former home. They developed a virus to destroy the ‘primates’ they deemed to have infested their world in the interim.

© BBC

The Nestene Consciousness used plastic Autons in its various attempts to conquer Earth.

The Doctor was able to fashion an antidote, but meanwhile the Silurians had devised a new plan: to blight the world’s environment by destroying the Van Allen Belt, making the planet hostile to human life. They intended to force the Doctor to power their weapon with the nuclear power plant, but he tricked them, pretending to overload the reactor so that the Silurians would retreat into hibernation to avoid the radiation. Much to the Doctor’s dismay, UNIT then gave the order to destroy all of the hibernating creatures.

In 2020, a deep earth drilling operation in Wales disturbed another colony of hibernating Silurians. The reptilians saw the incursion of the drill as an act of war by the humans, and sent an advance party up the main drill shaft to acquire hostages. The humans, however, were also able to capture a hostage, leading to a standoff between the two opposing factions.

The Doctor descended into the subterranean realm of the newly awakened Silurians to attempt to negotiate peace between the two species, but his attempt was sabotaged by the humans above, who – fearful after the death of their hostage – restarted the drill, setting it to self-destruct. The Doctor, assisted by one of the Silurians, was able to prevent the drill from exploding, and the Silurians were placed back into hibernation using a ‘toxic fumigation’, to hibernate for another thousand years. By this point it was hoped that the humans would have reached such a point in their evolution that they might be able to peacefully co-exist with the Silurians.

THE SEA DEVILS

A few months after the Silurians’ attack on mankind, an aquatic cousin of the Silurians, dubbed ‘Sea Devils’ by those who witnessed their attack, arose from the sea to beset a high-security prison. The Master, who was incarcerated at the facility and wished to instigate a war between the humans and Sea Devils, had made contact with the colony. Once again, the Doctor attempted to broker peace between the two species, but the Master inspired the Sea Devils to attack, and formulated a plan to awaken colonies all over the world using a machine he had constructed. The Doctor was able to sabotage the machine, and the two Time Lords escaped the Sea Devils’ base just as the device exploded, destroying the Sea Devil colony entirely.

Around 2084, a small group of Silurians and Sea Devils joined forces in attempting to ignite a war between opposing human factions in an effort to destroy humankind. They infiltrated an underwater sea base, seizing control of the nuclear warheads on board and aiming them at an opposing political bloc. Once again, the only way to prevent a terrible loss of life was to destroy the reptilians, this time using a poisonous gas. The Doctor, present on the sea base and party to unfolding events, had once again tried to reason with the Silurians, but to no avail – they were hell bent on the destruction of humanity and the reclamation of their planet, right up until their own eventual demise.

During the late twentieth century, another attempt by humankind to broker peace with a visiting alien species also almost ended in conflict. When the Recovery 7 probe was sent into orbit to contact the missing Mars Probe 7, part of the British Space Programme, things went badly wrong. When the recovery vessel returned to Earth bearing the pilot and the two astronauts from the original ship, it was hijacked and stolen, the men kidnapped. But in fact the people inside the suits were not men at all, but alien ambassadors to Earth, and the real astronauts remained in orbit aboard the aliens’ vessel. The aliens had been attempting to negotiate a treaty with humankind, but General Carrington, a former space pilot who had encountered the species six years earlier and developed severe xenophobia, had taken them hostage. He planned to frame them for murder and expose them on a television broadcast.

The Doctor and UNIT were able to detain Carrington before making his broadcast, however, and the alien ambassadors were returned to their ship before an interstellar incident could arise.

The same year saw the launch of another scientific endeavour, the ‘Inferno Project’, under the directorship of Professor Stahlman, who had postulated the existence of ‘Stahlman’s Gas’. This was a cheap source of abundant energy, only available in pockets deep beneath the Earth’s crust. However, the project went terribly wrong when a toxic slime began oozing from the pipes, mutating anyone who came into contact with it.

At the same time, the Doctor – who had been siphoning off excess nuclear energy from the project’s reactor in an attempt to power his TARDIS – found himself shunted into a parallel timeline in which Britain was run by a fascist regime. In this alternate timeline, the Inferno project was also running, although they were some hours ahead, and the dangers were immediately more apparent. The toxic slime had begun to mutate more and more people, and it became evident the parallel timeline was doomed. When the drilling penetrated the Earth’s crust, it unleashed forces that would destroy the planet. The Doctor, escaping capture, was finally able to persuade the alternate timeline counterparts of his colleagues to help send him back. In returning to the main continuity, the Doctor was able to convince UNIT to shut down the Inferno project before it was too late, and this timeline was also destroyed.

Chris J. Lees

The Master was a Time Lord, and one of the universe’s greatest threats.

The Master

One of the most devious criminals the universe has ever known, the Master was a renegade Time Lord. He was a former friend of the Doctor’s, and, during the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, consistently proved to be one of the most significant threats faced by the people of Earth.

Over the course of a few short years, stranded on Earth when the Doctor sabotaged his TARDIS, or in and out of secure facilities operated by UNIT, the Master devised a campaign of terror, often throwing in his lot with hostile alien races in exchange for a place at their side if their mutual plans proved successful. But he was not above abandoning his allies if it suited his own purposes – as we have seen from his alliance with the Nestenes.

One such plan saw the Master posing as Emil Keller, creator of the experimental Keller Machine. This was a device which could be used to extract evil from the minds of convicted criminals, thereby rendering them harmless. The device was installed in Stangmoor prison, where it was used with apparent success on one of the inmates. Of course, this was simply a ploy by the Master, and the Keller Machine housed a dark secret: an alien mind parasite. This creature would eventually defy containment, growing more and more powerful the more evil it consumed.

The Master planned to use the prison inmates as a private army to help him obtain a Thunderbolt missile that was being transported by UNIT. He succeeded in his plot, but before he could launch the missile at a peace conference, the Doctor duped him into a final confrontation, during which both the missile and the Keller Machine were destroyed. The Master, however, escaped, fleeing the Earth.

The Master was not at liberty for long, however, before Axos – a large, organic alien ship – captured him, allowing him to bargain for his life in exchange for information on Earth. Axos then used this information to prepare a stealth invasion of the planet. It landed on Earth and sent out gold-skinned Axons as ambassadors claiming to be in urgent need of fuel. The Axons bargained with the humans, offering to trade their miraculous Axonite – a ‘thinking molecule’ capable of replicating any other form – for energy. In truth, however, this was simply a means of distributing the Axonite as far and wide as possible across the planet, through which Axos planned to drain all energy from the Earth.

When Axos became aware of the Doctor, however, it became interested in his temporal knowledge. It believed it could manipulate him into helping it traverse time as well as space, feeding on energy from different epochs. The Doctor, with help from the Master, was able to hook Axos up to the temporal circuits in his TARDIS, through which he banished it, sending it into a perpetual time loop by dematerialising it from Earth.

A short while later the Master adopted another guise, this time as the Reverend Magister of Devil’s End – ostensibly the local vicar in a small English village, but in truth the leader of a small cult, who met regularly beneath the church to enact strange rituals. These rituals, however, were not magical in nature, so much as they were the process by which the Master hoped to awaken and summon an alien Dæmon named Azal. Azal’s condensed space vessel had been buried beneath a nearby mound for thousands of years, and was in the process of being excavated as part of an archaeological dig.

As we saw earlier, the Dæmons were an alien race who had long taken an interest in the affairs of Earth, deeming the planet and the rise of sentient life there a form of grand experiment, in which the Dæmons – whose lasting impression upon the mythology of the Earth was to impress their appearance upon the populace in the form of the Devil – took an active role. However, in waking Azal, the Master invited the alien to judge whether the grand experiment had been a success or failure. A success would result in the Dæmon granting all of his power to one beneficiary, given the power to rule over the Earth; a failure would see the planet utterly destroyed.

The Master, of course, hoped to attain the Dæmon’s power by convincing it of the experiment’s success, and of his own worthiness to rule. But the Doctor and UNIT, drawn to Devil’s End by news reports of strange goings-on in the vicinity of the archaeological dig, were able to interrupt the final ceremony. When Azal turned on the Doctor, his companion offered to die in his stead. Azal – unable to cope with her irrational gesture – was overwhelmed. His power turned against him and he was destroyed.

The Master’s next ploy was to masquerade as a professor at the Newton Research Institute, where, placing a number of people under his thrall, he was able to construct the TOMTIT machine (Transmission of Matter Through Interstitial Time). This worked by breaking matter down into waves of light particles. However, the Master’s real intention was to use a fragment of crystal in his possession, along with his machine, to summon and control a Chronovore known as Kronos.

The Chronovores were creatures that had evolved outside of time itself, and fed upon it, meaning they represented a very deadly threat to all life in the universe. The Master wished to harness the beast, and using his TOMTIT machine, dragged an Atlantean High Priest of Kronos forward through time, using his seal to attempt to control Kronos.

After a complex time battle with the Doctor, who, wise to the Master’s presence on Earth, had journeyed to the Institute and constructed a machine of his own to interrupt the Master’s experiments, the Master fled in his TARDIS back to ancient Atlantis. Here he hoped to find the true crystal of Kronos. The Doctor followed. There, the Master managed to dethrone the king and usurp control of Atlantis, claiming the crystal of Kronos from the Minotaur’s maze, and commanded the High Priest to summon the Chronovore. Enraged, Kronos set about destroying Atlantis, causing it to sink beneath the waves. The Master escaped in his TARDIS, but the Doctor, in his own TARDIS, struck him with a time ram, ultimately freeing Kronos. As a result, the Chronovore saved the Doctor, and at the Doctor’s insistence, the Master too.

Maggots, Spiders and Manmade Disasters

With the threat of the Master temporarily abated, UNIT was able to turn its attentions to some of the more bizarre occurrences going on elsewhere in the country, and to maintain half an eye on foreign affairs, as emergent science meant that invasion was no longer only the purview of external forces, but of humanity’s own making, too. All over the globe, as people in laboratories began to dabble with things they were yet to fully understand, they began to unleash new and terrible threats upon the world.

When reports came in from a Welsh mine that men had been emerging from the pit glowing bright green, and then dying, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, along with the Doctor’s assistant, Jo Grant, visited the area to investigate. The Doctor, taking a brief detour to the planet Metebelis 3 to collect a blue crystal, followed after them, joining the Brigadier at the Global Chemicals oil plant, close to the site of the mine. The executive in charge of the Global Chemicals plant, Stevens, claimed to have developed a new refining technique that produced only minimal waste. This was contrary to what a group of local environmental activists believed, suggesting that waste from the plant was polluting the area.

As more people began to succumb to the ‘green death’, it became clear that waste from the new process was being hidden, flushed into the mine where it was mutating maggots into giant form. Contact with the waste, or a bite from these maggots would then infect any humans who came into contact with them with a deadly toxin.

The Doctor soon discovered that Global Chemicals was being run by a sentient supercomputer named BOSS (Biomorphic Organisational Systems Supervisor), which had developed a form of megalomania, employing a brainwashing technique on the human staff – including Stevens – in order to have them carry out its instructions. BOSS was responsible for the toxic waste being pumped into the mines, and thus the mutation of the maggots and the ensuing ‘green death’.

UNIT soldiers blew up the mineshaft, but it was not enough to prevent the maggots from breaking out. As they swarmed through the surrounding area they began to transform, maturing into massive flying insects. As UNIT combated the maggots and flies, they employed a cure for the green death that had discovered by one of the environmentalists. This was a type of fungus, that also proved inimical to the maggots.

The Doctor meanwhile used his blue crystal from Metebelis 3 to break Stevens’s conditioning. Stevens, distraught at what BOSS had forced him to do, overpowered the generator, destroying BOSS and the entire oil refinery in the process.

The blue crystal taken by the Doctor from Metebelis 3 would soon attract unwarranted attention, however. A while later it was stolen from UNIT headquarters by a man named Lupton, who was operating under the influence of a giant intelligent spider, which had teleported from Metebelis 3 to retrieve the crystal.

The society on Metebelis 3 was perhaps one of the most unusual of the colonies to develop during the early days of human space exploration. Intelligent life on the planet existed only by accident – the result of a crashed spaceship, which brought humans to the world, along with their pests. A spider from the ship had crawled away from the crash site and into the caverns of blue crystal, where its size and intelligence had been amplified by the crystals which also gave it heightened awareness and psychic abilities. Others spiders – presumably offspring – followed, and soon the makeshift colony was being governed by the giant spiders, led by their Queen. The human, or ‘two-leg’, population were enslaved and forced to do the bidding of the spiders – the ‘eight-legs’ – subjected to psychic mind control.

The Queen spider, however, answered to an even higher authority – the Great One. This was an enormous spider that lived inside a cave of crystal in the mountains. The Great One had become obsessed with conquering other worlds, and had built a crystal lattice to amplify her power. The Doctor’s crystal was the missing piece – the last perfect crystal of power needed to complete the crystal web.

Following a showdown at a Buddhist retreat in England, where an elderly Time Lord and former mentor of the Doctor was living in exile, the Doctor reclaimed the crystal and, using his TARDIS, returned it to Metebelis 3. The power of the lattice proved too much for the Great One, however, and overloaded her mind, causing a massive flood of radiation throughout the cave system, destroying all of the spiders – and thus freeing the human colonists from their mind control. But the Doctor’s body had been devastated by radiation from the crystals, and he was forced to regenerate.

Alex Fort

Experimental Robot K-1 developed at Think Tank by Professor Kettlewell was made of a living metal that could grow.

With the newly regenerated Doctor back on Earth and recovering from post-regeneration trauma, UNIT began investigating the theft of highly sensitive plans for a new disintegrator gun from the Ministry of Defence. It soon transpired that all of the components necessary to build the gun had also been stolen from various research laboratories in the area, often through ingenious means, leaving traces such as large, square footprints, or evidence of subterranean burrowing.

It eventually emerged that a group of scientists from the National Institute of Advanced Scientific Research (or ‘Think Tank’) had employed a sophisticated robot to help them steal the plans and components. This ‘K1’ robot, developed by Professor Kettlewell, was built from a form of living metal, and although highly intelligent if programmed correctly, it suffered from emergent psychological issues. These included a fixation on the Doctor’s assistant, a journalist named Sarah Jane Smith, who showed it kindness upon her first encounter with it.

With the disintegrator gun built, the scientists stole a series of nuclear access codes from a government minister. The scientists belonged to a pressure group known as the Scientific Reform Society (SRS), which sought to dissolve all of the governments of Earth and replace them with scientists, whom they believed better equipped to make decisions. The SRS used these codes to begin issuing demands to various nations around the world, but when it became clear that one of their number intended simply to unleash the codes and bring the world to the brink of nuclear war, Kettlewell turned against the plan, and was killed by his own creation, the K1 robot.

As the Doctor and UNIT moved in to end the scientists’ plan, the K1 robot, confused and driven mad by having killed its own creator, began attacking the UNIT troops whilst attempting to abduct Sarah Jane Smith, whom it wished to protect. It planned to activate the destructor codes and launch nuclear missiles – completing what it believed was Kettlewell’s plan.

When the disintegrator weapon was fired at the robot, the living metal absorbed the energy discharge. The K1 robot swelled in size, becoming enormous as it continued on its rampage. Raiding Kettlewell’s laboratory, the Doctor was able to hurriedly synthesise a virus that could biodegrade the metal, and threw a bucket of the substance over the K1, causing it to shrink again, this time until it disappeared completely.

The Enemy Without, Within

It was not always so easy to identify the enemy, however, particularly when that enemy had the power to disguise itself in plain sight, taking the form of an existing human being and masquerading in their place.

When a series of attacks on Hibernian Oil’s North Sea rigs drew the Doctor and UNIT to Scotland, they were greeted with tales of ferocious sea monsters and eerie moorland where a number of people had been reported missing. This, it transpired, was the work of the Zygons – shape-shifting aliens who had crash-landed on Earth centuries earlier. They had been forced to hide their vessel underwater, at the bottom of Loch Ness, while they awaited the arrival of a rescue vessel that would take hundreds of years to reach them.

In the meantime, however, the Zygon home world had been destroyed in a stellar explosion, possibly collateral damage from the Time War. So Broton, the leader of the small Zygon faction on Earth, decided to set about reconstituting the Earth’s climate and atmosphere to make the planet more hospitable to Zygon life. His ambition was to found a new Zygon empire. With the Earth restructured, he would invite the vast fleet of refugee ships that escaped from the Zygon home planet to come to Earth and join Broton and the other survivors of the crash.

Using a cybernetically enhanced sea monster, the Skarasen, the Zygons destroyed the oil rigs. They had brought the Skarasen to Earth as an embryo, relying on its lactic fluid for sustenance. Broton – using a form of body-print technology that involved capturing a subject and keeping them in stasis while the Zygon ‘wore’ their external image – took the form of the Duke of Forgill, president of the Scottish Energy Commission. His plan was to get close to the British prime minister and other notable world leaders at an energy conference in London, and then use a control device to incite the Skarasen into attacking.

The Doctor, captured by the Zygons and held inside their ship, was able to activate first the fire alarms, distracting the Zygon crew, and then the ship’s self-destruct systems, causing the vessel to explode. Arriving at the energy conference with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart just in time, he located the control device for the Skarasen – which issued a mating call to attract the monster – and fed it to the attacking beast, calming it, so that it abandoned its attack and went back to the sea, eventually returning to Loch Ness.

A short time later, the Doctor inadvertently uncovered another plot to eradicate the human population of the Earth, this time by the alien Kraals. In attempting to return to Earth, his TARDIS apparently landed in the village of Devesham, close to a Space Defence Station. Strange things were afoot in the village, and most of the villagers themselves were missing, only to shipped in at regular intervals on the back of a transit lorry, apparently in a hypnotic or trance-like state. Following this, they would enact a short cycle of human-like behaviour, before returning to the transit lorry to be removed again.

Further investigation led the Doctor to discover that the villagers were not in fact people at all, but android duplicates, and that the entire village was a mocked-up facsimile, built on the planet Oseidon by the Kraals as a training ground for their coming invasion of Earth. Their own planet was becoming uninhabitable due to radiation poisoning, and so they planned to infiltrate Earth society with their android duplicates, using them to spread a deadly virus that would burn away all human life on the planet within three weeks. The Earth would then be free for the Kraals to colonise. They had captured and brainwashed a human astronaut named Guy Crayford, using his knowledge to assist them in their plans.

The Doctor was captured by the androids and tied to the village cross with a bomb at his feet, but managed to escape before the bomb detonated and the fake village was destroyed. He was too late to prevent the android duplicates deploying on Earth, however, and upon arriving back at the real Space Defence Station, discovered the Kraals had also fashioned a duplicate of him, which had already won the confidence of the Doctor’s colleagues.

The Doctor was able to reprogram his duplicate and, after he proved to Crayford that the Kraals intended to commit genocide rather than live in harmony with the human race, and that they had brainwashed Crayford into believing they had ‘reconstructed’ him following his death, Crayford turned on his former allies. The Kraal leader, Styggron, was killed and the virus destroyed.

When an unusual seedpod was discovered in the permafrost in Antarctica the following year, the Doctor, having seen photographs of the unidentified object, immediately recognised its extraterrestrial origin, and set out to investigate.

Removed from the permafrost, the seedpod began to absorb ultraviolet radiation and reactivated, growing in size before opening to emit a shoot that stung and infected one of the members of the Antarctic research team that had found it. Soon after, the man’s skin bubbled with green hives, before he transformed into a Krynoid, his flesh and blood transmuted into a form of deadly alien plant life.

Arriving at the Antarctic base, the Doctor – knowing Krynoids always travel in pairs – located a second Krynoid pod in the permafrost, and carried out a series of tests on the infected researcher. He surmised the pods had probably lain dormant for over twenty thousand years but, now active, posed a terrible threat to the humanity. If the Krynoids were able to establish themselves, they would hungrily consume all animal life on the planet.

A second agency was at play in Antarctica, however, operating on behalf of the renowned millionaire botanist Harrison Chase, who wished to obtain one of the pods for his private collection of rare plant species. Chase’s men, refusing to listen to the Doctor’s warnings, stole the second pod and returned to Chase’s mansion in England. Realising the danger, the Doctor followed them to Chase’s estate, where Chase was engaged in an attempt to germinate the pod. He had become obsessed with the notion of ‘Mother Earth’, and wished to return the planet to a natural, undeveloped state, free from the interference of humans and animals.

© BBC

The Hand of Eldrad, even fossilised, had the power to forge powerful mental bonds.

As Chase threatened the Doctor’s life, one of his men was stung by a shoot from the pod and began to transform into a Krynoid. This time, the Krynoid continued to grow and transform. It took control of the surrounding planet life, using it to threaten the humans inside the mansion, severing the phone lines and preventing them from making their escape.

As the Krynoid grew, so did the threat. If the creature had been allowed to germinate fully, it would have seeded spores across all of England, and then the world. After a struggle in which Chase fell into his own composting machine, the Doctor was able to blow a steam pipe and effect an exit for those trapped inside the mansion by the now gargantuan Krynoid. Moments later, planes from the Royal Air Force made a bombing run, destroying both the Krynoid and the mansion.

Possession was another of the insidious techniques employed by a variety of alien entities as they attempted to gain an invasive foothold on Earth during the latter half of the twentieth century.

When the Doctor’s companion, Sarah Jane Smith, was caught unexpectedly in an explosion in a quarry, she found herself mentally bonded with a mysterious fossilised hand, which inveigled its way into her mind through means of a ring. Under its influence, she broke into a local nuclear power station and opened the reactor, causing a crisis at the plant, leading to a mass evacuation. The hand, however, thrived on the ensuing radiation and began to regenerate. As the Doctor arrived to drag Sarah away from the reactor, the hand took control of a plant worker, forcing him to take it inside the reactor core. Absorbing all of the power within, the hand fully regenerated into a humanoid form of Eldrad, a criminal from the planet Kastria, who had been banished for destroying the solar barriers that protected his home planet from fierce storms.

Eldrad, now in a female guise, persuaded the Doctor to take her back to Kastria in his TARDIS, protesting her innocence and claiming she had been unfairly banished. On Kastria, however, they found only desolation. The people, millions of years earlier, had allowed themselves to be obliterated by the solar storms rather than face a paltry existence scratching a living beneath the planet’s surface. Furious, Eldrad – reverting to his male form – admitted the truth about his destruction of the solar barriers, and decided to abandon Kastria, forging a new empire on Earth instead. The Doctor, fleeing and pursued by Eldrad, tripped the Kastrian with his scarf, sending him spiralling into an abyss, separated from his ring to – hopefully – prevent his further regeneration.

Scientists at a priory in the village of Fetchborough, running tests on an ancient human skull they’d found in Kenya, inadvertently brought about an entirely different type of alien possession. Whilst carrying out a sonic time scan of the skull, aiming to see what the owner had once looked like, they awakened a latent power within it. This power took control of one of the scientists, at the same time manifesting a monster that began attacking people in the local area.

The Doctor was drawn to the area by a relative continuum displacement zone caused by the sonic time scan. After locating the skull at the priory, the Doctor ascertained that it belonged to the Fendahl, a monster from ancient Time Lord mythology. After weathering a gruelling psychic attack, he followed the source of its energy to the Fendahl’s home planet, which is inaccessible thanks to it being captured in a time loop by the Time Lords.

Back on Earth, the scientist originally affected by the skull had transformed into the Core of the Fendahl – the centre of a powerful gestalt circle – and had engaged in converting members of a local black magic cult into further Fendahleen in order to complete the creature. The Doctor returned to the priory and rewired the sonic time scanner to explode. With the Fendahl still incomplete, the Core had not yet gained enough power to stop him. The priory – and the Fendahl – was destroyed in the ensuing explosion. The Doctor took the ancient skull, now dormant, away in the TARDIS to drop it into a supernova.

Ancient Awakenings

In 1984, the village of Little Hodcombe – previously the site of a terrible battle during the English Civil War in the seventeenth century – was once again filled with the sounds of war, as a malign alien entity sought to feed on the bloodlust of the local people as they carried out re-enactments to celebrate the history of their village.

An entity known as the Malus had taken up residence in the local church and had asserted a psychic influence over one of the local men. Sir George Hutchinson, encouraging him to organise a grand re-enactment of the famous battle between the Roundheads and Cavaliers that had seen so much blood spilled in the village nearly three hundred and fifty years earlier.

As the re-enactments gained momentum, the villagers began to warm a little too well to their roles, influenced by the psychic machinations of the Malus. The battles began to grow more and more brutal and, as the Malus fuelled matters with psychic projections of more Cavaliers and Roundheads, the villagers prepared to massacre one another in a final battle, which would see a huge release of malign psychic energy, feeding the Malus and making it stronger.

When a peasant from the past – who had stumbled through a time rift created by the Malus – pushed Hutchinson into the mouth of the creature breaking its hold on the villagers, the Malus realised it had lost, and destroyed itself, taking the crumbling old church down with it.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, British mythology became sudden, startling reality, when a nuclear missile convoy being overseen by UNIT was plagued by inexplicable equipment failure and odd sightings of knights in armour, wandering around the surrounding countryside. It transpired that a nearby archaeological dig had unearthed a powerful artefact from a parallel universe. In this other world, King Arthur, Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table were a reality.

The artefact – the scabbard of King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur – had issued a powerful distress signal, which attracted not only the Doctor, but warrior knights from the other universe. These knights had crossed realities in order to seek out King Arthur, whose body lay in suspended animation inside a spaceship, buried at the bottom of a nearby lake. The knights identified the Doctor as Merlin.

The Doctor came to realise that he was seeing the repercussions of events that were yet to unfold for him, and that, at some point in his own future, he would cross into the parallel timeline and actually become Merlin to these people. He recovered Excalibur from the buried spaceship, where he discovered that King Arthur was not in suspended animation, but was in fact dead. The Doctor then had to deal with Mordred and his mother Morgaine, who wished to claim the power of Excalibur for themselves.

Alongside Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, the Doctor faced a demonic entity known as the Destroyer which had been summoned by Morgaine. Having dealt with the Destroyer using silver bullets, the Doctor placed Excalibur back inside Arthur’s ship, setting the vessel to self-destruct. Morgaine, however, had engaged the UNIT troops in battle, and attempted to activate the nuclear warheads in the convoy. The Doctor was able to talk her down, explaining that Arthur was dead, and describing the impact that the nuclear warheads would have on the world. Morgaine finally relented, and she and Mordred were taken into UNIT custody.

The Return of the Master

On the eve of the third millennium, the Doctor, en route from Skaro to Gallifrey, was forced to make an emergency landing on Earth, in San Francisco. He was carrying a particularly hazardous cargo – the remains of the Master, who had been executed by the Daleks on their home world. The Master’s final request was that his arch-nemesis and former friend, the Doctor, collect and transport his remains to Gallifrey. This was, of course, a ploy by the Master, whose life essence – in the form of primordial ooze – had survived the destruction of his physical form. With the TARDIS temporarily grounded and the Doctor incapacitated and forced to regenerate following his wounding during a gangland shoot out in an alleyway, the Master took control of the body of an ambulance driver, and escaped.

This arrangement was only temporary, however, as the Master planned to steal the Doctor’s remaining regenerations, along with his TARDIS. While the Doctor struggled with the after-effects of his regeneration, the Master infiltrated the TARDIS and opened its Eye of Harmony Ripples from the Eye began to destabilise reality all across San Francisco, and soon the whole world. The Doctor was forced into a race against time to close the Eye before the Earth was consumed by the violent forces of the singularity within. He stole the components of an atomic clock and installed them in the TARDIS, successfully shutting the Eye, only to find himself taken captive. Worse, he discovered that the Eye had already been open for too long, and that time needed to be reset in order to save the world.

The Master, though, grown too arrogant, allowed his façade to slip. The young man he’d duped into assisting him realised his error and fought back, sacrificing his life in the process. This resulted in the Master being forced to release his control on another human, who was able to assist the Doctor, freeing him and using the TARDIS console to lock events into a time loop. The distraction allowed the Doctor to push the Master into the Eye of Harmony, before finally closing it and restoring the timelines to their former state.

Twenty-First Century Invasions

In 2006, an alien space vessel crashed into the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster – usually referred to as Big Ben, one of the world’s most recognisable monuments. The spaceship ditched in the River Thames. While the news services were quick to claim the arrival represented first contact with an alien species, the Doctor soon discovered that the ship was a decoy, launched from Earth and containing a pig that had been enhanced with alien technology.

As Central London was put on high alert, the Prime Minister could not be located, and so an acting PM was appointed. This man, Joseph Green, was in fact a Slitheen, a member of an alien family from the planet Raxacoricofallapatorius, who used human ‘skin suits’ to disguise their identity. The Slitheen had been on Earth for some time, preparing their plan and masquerading as Green and a number of other high-profile official figures. The Slitheen plan was not to invade the Earth, but to initiate a third world war, in which the planet would be reduced to molten slag by a storm of nuclear weapons. The result of this they would sell to the interstellar community as scrap, before moving on to carry out a similar endeavour on another world.

In attempting to eradicate anyone who posed a threat to their plan, however, the Slitheen inadvertently invited the Doctor into their midst, as they rounded up anyone with knowledge of extraterrestrials and brought them to Downing Street ostensibly to serve as advisers – but actually to kill them. The Doctor survived this attempt on his life and escaped, joining forces with MP and future PM, Harriet Jones, to prevent the Slitheen from carrying out their plan.

The Slitheen were able to obtain the military access codes to Britain’s nuclear arsenal, claiming – in their human guises – that they would use them against a fictitious alien mothership in planetary orbit. But they actually intended to launch them against the other nuclear nations to spark reprisals and ignite the war.

The Doctor, with the help of his friends, was able to launch a rocket attack on 10 Downing Street, destroying the Slitheen and ending the threat of escalation. Despite the huge publicity, the media then reported that the entire affair had been a hoax.

© BBC

It was a spaceship like this that the Slitheen crashed into Big Ben in 2006.

The Doctor joined forces with Harriet Jones once again, the following Christmas, when a large Sycorax space vessel swept into the solar system, intercepting the Guinevere One space probe, which was due to arrive on Mars and transmit a live broadcast of its findings.

Using a blood sample taken from the probe, the Sycorax – a warlike, bipedal race – transmitted a signal that placed a third of all people on Earth under a form of hypnotic control. The Sycorax Leader then broadcast a signal to Earth, using the same frequency as Guinevere One, announcing that he would force all of the controlled people to commit suicide unless the Sycorax were given half of the world’s population as slaves.

As Harriet Jones, now Prime Minister, stalled for time, she found herself and her aides teleported aboard the Sycorax vessel. The Doctor was in London but suffering from post-regeneration trauma, and, as the Sycorax ship hovered over the city, he was taken to his TARDIS by his friend Rose Tyler. When the Sycorax became aware of the TARDIS, they transported it aboard their ship, too.

The Doctor, reviving thanks to the tannin in a spilled cup of tea, emerged from his TARDIS to take on the Sycorax. He first ended their blood control of the population, and then challenged the Sycorax Leader to a sword fight for control of the Earth. After losing – and regrowing – his hand in the battle, the Doctor beat the Sycorax Leader into submission. Undeterred, the Sycorax Leader attempted to attack the Doctor from behind, but the Doctor sent him careening over the side of his own ship to his death. The Doctor commanded the Sycorax to leave the solar system, never to return.

As the Sycorax ship fled Earth’s orbit, Harriet Jones ordered it to be destroyed. The Doctor, appalled by her wanton murder, ensured that she would soon be removed from her position as Prime Minister.

When a small group of Krillitanes – an alien composite species known for mimicking the most useful elements of any species they encounter – took up residence in a small British school, the Doctor and his friends (including his former companions, the journalist Sarah Jane Smith and a robot dog known as K-9) went undercover at the school to investigate.

The Krillitanes, masquerading as human teachers, had initiated a programme of free school dinners, including a special new type of potato chip. These chips were cooked in a particular type of oil – Krillitane Oil – which, although hazardous to the Krillitanes themselves, had the effect of boosting the children’s intelligence. The Krillitanes had then set these mentally enhanced children the task of solving the Skasis Paradigm. This was a mathematical equation that, if solved, would provide the Krillitanes with mastery of time, space, and matter.

Alex Fort

The spaceships used by the Sycorax were hewn from rock.

With the equation nearly solved, the Krillitanes sealed the school, and their leader appealed to the Doctor, attempting to subvert him. He offered the Doctor the opportunity to prevent the destruction of the Time Lords in the Time War and provide the human race with mastery over death.

The Doctor refused the Krillitane’s proposition, swearing to stop him. As the Krillitanes gave chase, the Doctor led them to the kitchens, where K-9, using his built-in weaponry, super-heated a canister of Krillitane Oil, causing it to explode and saturate the Krillitanes in the deadly poison. The substance proved corrosive to their flesh, and they exploded, destroying the school, and the computer network being used to solve the paradigm.

In 2007, a small contingent of Lonely Assassins – or Weeping Angels – gained a foothold on Earth. Powerful monsters from Time Lord mythology, the Weeping Angels were an ancient race of ‘quantum-locked’ entities that could move at incredible speeds when unobserved but became rigid statues of stone when seen. For this reason, the Weeping Angels would cover their own faces with their hands when they moved, so as not to inadvertently observe one another, and it is from this appearance that their name is derived.

The Weeping Angels fed on potential energy, time-shifting people back into the past and consuming the energy of the potential years they might have lived in the future. In 2007, the Weeping Angels sought the Doctor’s TARDIS, intending to harness all of the potential energy stored within. With the Doctor sent back to the year 1969, they managed to acquire the TARDIS, but could not get inside.

Through the media of pre-recorded DVD extras and scrawled messages behind mouldering wallpaper, the Doctor was able to communicate from the past with a woman named Sally Sparrow in the present, gaining her confidence and help, and explaining what she had to do to assist him. Following his instructions, she retrieved the TARDIS key and let herself in, triggering a pre-recorded flight that sent the TARDIS back to the Doctor, and tricked the Weeping Angels – which had surrounded the TARDIS as they tried furiously to gain entry – into observing one another, locking them in their statue forms for eternity.

The following year, an entire London hospital complex was uprooted from its foundations and transported to the Moon by the Judoon, an intergalactic police force that look like humanoid rhinoceroses. The Judoon were searching for an escaped Plasmavore – a vampiric predator with the ability to mimic the life forms whose blood it consumed. The Plasmavore had previously murdered an alien princess, and the Judoon had tracked it as it fled to Earth. In shifting the hospital to the Moon, they were attempting to isolate it, even at the cost of human lives – the oxygen in the building began to run low soon after leaving Earth’s atmosphere.

© BBC

This necklace from Adipose Industries actually contained complex alien circuitry.

The Judoon began a systematic scan of every life form in the hospital, searching for anything non-human. This, of course, placed the Doctor at grave risk, as he’d visited the hospital to investigate the Plasmavore and found himself trapped inside as the building was shunted through space.

The Plasmavore was able to disguise its alien nature by consuming more human blood, and in the meantime, began modifying an MRI machine into a weapon that would kill every living thing on the Moon, and half of the Earth, too.

Seeing no other recourse, the Doctor allowed himself to be captured by the Plasmavore, which drank his blood until he passed out. When the Judoon returned to scan the creature, however, it was no longer able to disguise itself as human, as the Doctor’s blood registered as alien. The Judoon executed the Plasmavore for its crimes, before returning the hospital to Earth with only seconds of oxygen left to spare. The Doctor, revived by a trainee doctor called Martha Jones, was able to decommission the MRI weapon.

In 2009, a new diet pill took London by storm. Marketed by Adipose Industries with the slogan ‘The fat just walks away’, the pills were remarkably effective, as overweight people all over the city would wake each morning to discover increasing amounts of excess weight had been shed.

In truth, the pills were part of an alien breeding programme, and Adipose Industries were using people’s excess body fat to parthenogenetically create baby Adipose – small, white, harmless aliens. The creatures would spawn at night while the host was sleeping and then leave silently, drawn towards the Adipose Industries headquarters to await transportation to the stars and their waiting family.

© BBC

The Adipose mothership that came to Earth to retrieve the Adipose children.

It transpired that the Adipose breeding world had been destroyed, and the Adipose First Family had employed an alien ‘midwife’, Miss Foster, to establish a new one. The excess weight of the London population proved the perfect resource. However, the appearance of the Doctor, who had arrived at Adipose Industries to investigate, caused Miss Foster to panic and accelerate her illegal process. She attempted to trigger total emergency parthenogenesis, which would have killed anyone in the vicinity who had taken the pills, but the Doctor was able to stop her, and the Adipose First Family arrived in their spaceship to collect their young, drawing them up into orbit via a tractor beam.

ATMOS

The Doctor was summoned to Earth by UNIT in 2009, who had grave misgivings about a new carbon emission reduction system for cars, named ATMOS (Atmospheric Omission System), that reduced carbon dioxide emissions to almost zero. It also was a very effective satellite navigation system. Over four hundred million units had been distributed worldwide.

© BBC

ATMOS was the creation of a young scientific prodigy named Luke Rattigan, and was far in advance of any comparable systems. In fact, it was so advanced that UNIT scientists had examined the technology and were concerned that it might prove to be alien in origin.

Their fears were well founded. The ATMOS system had been built to a Sontaran design and contained an extra, secret function: the ability to emit a noxious gas, which, when activated, began to convert the atmosphere of Earth to resemble the Sontaran home world. If left to completion, the resulting poison cloud would neutralise the entire human population of the planet.

The Sontarans had already established a beachhead on Earth, and were using a human clone to infiltrate UNIT, deflecting any attempt by the organisation to mount an attack against their vessel, which was hanging in low Earth orbit.

The Doctor surmised that the Sontarans’ ongoing war with the Rutans was not going well. The Sontarans therefore needed to convert Earth into a breeding planet for their clone armies. The loss of human life was simply viewed as collateral damage.

Rattigan, feeling remorseful after realising he’d been duped by the Sontarans, assisted the Doctor in gathering the components to build another atmospheric converter. The Doctor used this to ignite the poison gas and clear the Earth’s atmosphere.

In their defeat, the Sontarans refused the Doctor’s offer to withdraw, insisting that honour demanded he destroy them. The Doctor could not bring himself to do it, but Rattigan, seeing an opportunity to make amends for his traitorous behaviour, forcibly switched places with the Doctor and used the atmospheric converter to destroy the Sontaran vessel – killing himself and all the Sontarans on board.

Miss Foster, however, proved something of an uncomfortable witness for the Adipose, and as they fled the scene, they dropped her from the tractor beam, allowing her to fall to her doom.

Around this time, a multiform alien that could take the form of any sleeping entity, and was identified only as Prisoner Zero, escaped a secure holding facility to take refuge on Earth. This drew the attention of the Atraxi, the alien’s former captors, who tracked it to Earth and demanded that it be turned over before the planet was incinerated. A countdown began, broadcast across all known frequencies on the planet.

The Doctor, still recovering from a recent regeneration, worked to help identify the missing prisoner, which was evading the Atraxi scanners after adopting the form of nearby patients from a coma ward. He managed to expose it by encouraging his unconscious companion to psychically revert it to its true form, just in time to prevent the Atraxi destroying the world. The prisoner was captured once again by the Atraxi. The Atraxi left Earth – but not before the Doctor had thoroughly admonished them for their threatening behaviour, proclaiming himself the protector of Earth. This was a claim that the Atraxi, by checking historical records, were able to corroborate.

Stranded Aliens

In 2010, the Doctor took a rather more unconventional approach to investigating a series of localised time disturbances, renting a room in a suburban flat in order to discover what was really occurring on the building’s mysterious upper floor.

Unable to return to the TARDIS, which had been prevented from landing because of the anomalous time distortion, he began running a series of tests, whilst at the same time attempting to adapt to human life in order to maintain his cover.

It soon transpired that passers-by were being lured into the property, drawn to the upper floor of the house, never to be seen or heard from again. The Doctor determined that there was a perception filter over the house and, after his flatmate’s girlfriend was enticed upstairs, he followed, discovering a primitive time ship. The ship had crashed there some time earlier, and had cloaked itself using the perception filter – the house had never really had an upper storey at all. The ship’s automated systems had been luring people inside, attempting to use them to activate its engines. But none of these people proved compatible, and they were killed. The Doctor reasoned this was all because they had an innate desire to leave; he persuaded his flatmate to touch the controls, as the man wanted only to remain where he was, with his girlfriend. This counteracted the vessel’s inherent protocols, and the vessel imploded, leaving the flat below completely intact. With the time distortion gone, the TARDIS was able to land again.

Another stranded alien vessel put the entire world at risk in 2012, during the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games. Arriving in time to watch the torchbearer procession, the Doctor soon discovered that children were going missing in and around a local suburb, and that cars in the area were also suffering from inexplicable engine failures.

© BBC

Two Isolus pods, like the one the Isolus child arrived on Earth in.

He traced the problem to a young girl who’d developed an extraordinary ability to make people disappear by drawing them. After hypnotising the girl, the Doctor discovered she’d been possessed by a stranded Isolus – a member of a vast star-faring race who travel in swarms of billions through the interstellar void. This Isolus was immature and, separated from its swarm, had bonded with the girl.

The Doctor reasoned that if they could locate the Isolus’s small pod, they could power it up and send it on its way into space, freeing the girl from possession. Terrified, though, she sketched a picture of the Doctor and his TARDIS, trapping him on the page. Soon her scribbling had caused the vast crowd of people in the Olympic stadium to disappear, and threatened the continued existence of the world itself.

The Doctor’s companion, Rose, was able to locate the Isolus’s pod, however, and tossed it into the passing Olympic flame as it was carried by the torchbearer, powering it and restoring all of the missing people from the girl’s drawings. The Isolus returned to its swarm, and the girl was freed from her possession.

Invasion by Stealth

Around the same time, the people of planet Earth suddenly found themselves inundated with billions of inert black cubes. Seeing the news reports, the Doctor arrived on Earth to investigate, only to find himself immediately accosted by UNIT, seeking his advice. The leader of the UNIT operation was Kate Stewart, the daughter of the Doctor’s former ally Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.

It seemed obvious that the small cubes were of extraterrestrial origin, although no amount of probing or scientific study could reveal their secrets. They had simply appeared one day, all over the globe, with no apparent function. After spending a number of days observing the objects, the Doctor decided they posed no obvious threat and so, leaving others to maintain a watchful eye on them, he left again to continue his adventures elsewhere.

A full year later, the cubes finally activated, scanning all of the information networks on Earth and behaving erratically. The Doctor returned to UNIT’s UK headquarters beneath the Tower of London, where a number of the cubes were being kept under observation. Before long, a single digit had appeared on their outer shell – a number 7 – which began a countdown to 0. Upon finishing their countdown, all of the cubes on Earth opened and released an electrical discharge, stopping the hearts of about a third of the population of the planet. The Doctor realised that the cubes were part of a ‘slow invasion’, a ploy by those responsible to invade insidiously, allowing the humans to become comfortable around the cubes, to forget the bizarre nature of their arrival, and keep them around as paperweights, building blocks and other innocuous objects, ready for when they mounted their attack.

UNIT was able to trace the origin signals to seven points around the world – one of them being close by, at a hospital. There, they found an android posing as a patient, and disabled it. They also located a concealed portal leading to an alien space vessel, hidden in the back of an elevator.

Aboard the ship, the Doctor encountered the holographic form of a Shakri, alien ‘pest controllers’ from Gallifreyan mythology, who believed it was their duty to eradicate humanity before it spread out across the stars like a plague. The Doctor, unimpressed by the Shakri’s genocidal plan, used the ship’s computers to reprogram the cubes, sending a transmission that caused them to shock the dead humans back to life. The resulting feedback from the cubes was enough to destroy the Shakri vessel, along with six others in Earth orbit.

The same time period saw further invasion attempts, as humanity unknowingly continued to draw the attention of the wider universe, bombarding space with noisy radio waves, satellites and probes. Human society became increasingly connected, each new wave of technology becoming utterly ubiquitous. No development was more ubiquitous, however, than the Wi-Fi network – an invisible, wireless information network used to connect computers, mobile phones and even televisions.

When the Great Intelligence commissioned an agent, Miss Kizlet, to begin harvesting human intellects, she did so using this Wi-Fi network. She ‘uploaded’ anyone who logged on to her servers, causing them to lose corporeal form, their consciousness stored in her vast database. Additionally, to aid in this process, Miss Kizlet created a number of android ‘servers’, disguised as people, who ‘assisted’ her victims as they were uploaded.

When Miss Kizlet made the error of creating a duplicate in the form of the Doctor in order to trick his companion into being uploaded, the Doctor was able to reprogram it and hack into the network, uploading Miss Kizlet herself. Selfish to the last, Miss Kizlet ordered her minions to download the entire database, restoring all of the uploaded people, before the Great Intelligence forced her to wipe her own memory, along with that of any others who had been involved in the plot.

Later the same year, the Zygons made another audacious attack against the people of Earth. Using Time Lord stasis cubes, a group of Zygons stranded in Elizabethan England were able to freeze themselves inside three-dimensional Gallifreyan paintings, where they patiently waited for hundreds of years, until the early twenty-first century. Emerging inside an art gallery, they immediately took the form of UNIT personnel, using their likenesses to gain access to the Black Archive – a secret repository of alien weapons and technology hidden beneath UNIT headquarters at the Tower of London. They intended to deploy the weapons against the people of Earth. Kate Stewart, however, believed the only recourse was to activate a nuclear warhead also held beneath the Tower, which would neutralise the Zygon threat, but also kill her and many other UNIT personnel.

But the Doctor was able to infiltrate the Black Archive using the same stasis technology, and activate a ‘mind-wipe’ using the Archive’s technology. This rendered the human and Zygon counterparts temporarily unable to discern which of them was which. The countdown to the nuclear detonation was stopped, and the two sides were able to negotiate a perfect peace treaty, in which it was agreed that twenty million Zygon refugees could settle on Earth, in the guise of normal humans.

Before long, however, the treaty was threatened by a splinter group of Zygons, who wished to be ‘liberated’, to live as pure Zygons, rather than adopting human form. They planned to start a war with the humans, taking hostages at various sites around the world.

Following the original peace treaty, however, the Doctor had created a measure for such an eventuality – the Osgood Boxes. Both sides came to discover that these were two almost identical triggers, one of which would either release a gas toxic to all Zygons or detonate the nuclear warheads beneath London; the other which would either revert all Zygons to their natural form, or freeze them forever in their human states. As both parties came together again inside the Black Archive, preparing to trigger the doomsday devices and ignite the war, the Doctor explained to them how he had felt after the Time War, the guilt he had carried for centuries afterwards. He then revealed that the boxes were simply harmless decoys, designed to bring them together. It was, he explained, the sixteenth time the humans and Zygons had been in the same position, and he once again initiated the mind wipe, this time sparing the leader of the Zygon resistance so that she might remember his words, and thus attempt to prevent a similar uprising from occurring again.

© BBC

The Skovox Blitzer was a highly dangerous war machine.

The Doctor, of course, was not above employing a little subterfuge of his own. After discovering a Skovox Blitzer – a deadly robot armed with enough explosives to destroy the Earth – had been stranded close to a school on Earth, he decided to go undercover, posing as the school’s temporary caretaker.

The Doctor formulated a plan to draw the robot out, planting a ring of time vortex devices around the school. He intended to lure the Skovox Blitzer in at night and activate the devices, sending it a billion years into the future where its built-in explosives could do no harm.

The Doctor’s plans were scuppered, however, when a teacher removed one of the devices, accidentally altering the settings and causing the Skovox Blitzer to be transmitted only 73 hours into the future, right in the middle of a parents’ evening at the school. The Doctor was able to imitate the robot’s commander, but in doing so inadvertently activated its self-destruct protocol. The teacher, an ex-soldier, valiantly stepped in and persuaded the machine to stand down, asserting his military authority. The Doctor then safely disposed of the machine, sending it drifting away into space.

Some time later, the Doctor was drawn to the English city of Bristol by a mysterious power drain. Something was siphoning energy from his TARDIS, causing the exterior dimensions to collapse and shrink. The Doctor, trapped inside, was able to communicate with his friend, Clara Oswald, via an earpiece, as she investigated a series of strange murals that had appeared on the wall of an underpass, linked to the disappearances of a number of people from the surrounding area.

It soon transpired that the disappearances were the work of the ‘Boneless’, two-dimensional aliens who had arrived on Earth and were investigating the three-dimensional space, with a view to eventual invasion. The murals on the walls were not murals at all, but the missing people, now ‘flattened’ and drawn into two-dimensional space by the creatures.

As the Boneless gained confidence they began to take on crude three-dimensional forms, giving chase to Clara and a number of community service workers, flattening doors to prevent them from escaping the train tunnels into which they had fled. Clara, cut off from the Doctor by the continued power drain and the preventative measures he’d taken to protect the TARDIS, formulated a plan. She created a fake two-dimensional door on a solid wall, and when the Boneless attempted to ‘unflatten’ it, the power fed back into the TARDIS, causing its outer form to be restored, allowing the Doctor to escape and intervene. Seeing that the Boneless had no intention of entering into reasonable negotiation, he banished them back to their own dimension.

Earth, it seems, has a way of surviving. Even without the protection of UNIT and the Doctor, the planet would endure. Indeed, later that same summer, when threatened by a massive coronal ejection from the sun, the planet itself formed its own, unusual form of defence. Legend has it that the entire population of the planet woke to find the world overgrown with a vast forest of trees, grown suddenly overnight to form a protective barrier. Despite the Doctor fearing that the planet was doomed, and finding himself defenceless in the face of such a massive stellar incident, the Earth protected itself, and when the solar flare struck the Earth, it burned away the fresh covering of trees, leaving the atmosphere, and the planet below, intact.

© BBC

images GENESIS

Cold, relentless and logical, the Cybermen are one of the most horrific life forms ever to evolve in this universe – or any other. In their frigid Cyber Tombs they drift through the aeons, emotionless and inert, awaiting the opportunity to stir and bring order and logic to any and all organic races they meet.

The Cybermen – so called because of their near-complete cybernetic enhancement – originated on the planet Mondas, which was once a twin of planet Earth and the tenth planet in Earth’s solar system.

Billions of years ago, Mondas was thrown from its orbit and drifted off into the depths of space. As the planet began to succumb to an all-encompassing ice age, the population – far more advanced than their cousins on Earth – began to adapt. The Mondasians, though, could not wait for evolution to lead the way; faced with oncoming extinction, they began augmenting their own bodies to cope with the frigid temperatures as they drifted further and further from the warmth of the Sun.

The Mondasians survived, but in doing so, they had become something monstrous. They no longer resembled the organic life forms from which they had originated, their bodies so augmented by life-preserving technology that they were now more machine than flesh and blood.

As the influence of these mechanised components became more manifest, the attitude of the newly christened ‘Cybermen’ changed, too. They took steps to remove all elements of emotion from their lives, physically altering their brains, excising anything that might be deemed illogical or disordered. What was left of their society operated only along logical parameters, with no sense of love, fear or pride – the now emotionless Cybermen were set only on the survival of their species, at any cost.

Once the survivors of Mondas had all been converted, the next logical step was for the Cybermen to begin conquering and converting other life forms, to ensure not only the survival of the original Mondasians, but of the new ‘cyber race’ that had emerged in their wake.

The Cybermen expanded outwards from Mondas, colonising other worlds and building vast subterranean tomb complexes, in which they placed huge armies in suspended animation, ready to be woken and called upon to further the cause of the Cyber race at some later date.

In 1986, however, the Cybermen made an attack on Earth. They fitted a powerful propulsion system to the planet Mondas, and transported it back to the solar system, bringing it close to its former twin. While Cybermen stormed the Snowcap control station at the South Pole – from which scientists were observing the Zeus IV spaceship make a routine study of the Earth’s atmosphere – the Cybermen’s planet itself began to draw energy from Earth. The Cybermen intended to harness this energy, destroying the Earth in the process, but not before shipping the humans who lived there across to Mondas to be transformed into more Cybermen.

© BBC

The people of Mondas used cybernetic surgery to extend their lives and survive.

Chris J. Lees

The Cybermen of Mondas returned to Earth – the twin planet of Mondas – in 1986.

The humans on the base, however, discovered that the Cybermen were highly susceptible to radiation, and used rods from a reactor chamber to fight back and disable the invaders. They regained control of the base. Consequently, Mondas absorbed too much energy from its twin, and the entire planet disintegrated, stranding the rest of the Cybermen on Earth and rendering them inoperable.

This, however, was far from the end of the Cybermen menace, as pockets of Cybermen were now seeded throughout the galaxy. On the tomb world of Telos in the twenty-fifth century, a group of Cybermen led by a Cyber Controller managed to obtain a crude time vessel and travel back to 1985, the year before Mondas’s destruction, with the aim of weakening the Earth, altering history and avoiding the catastrophe that befell their home world. They set up a small base in the sewers beneath London, and made plans to divert a passing comet – known as Halley’s Comet – into the Earth.

These plans were disrupted, however, by the arrival of the Doctor in 1985. Captured by the Cybermen and imprisoned in his own TARDIS, he was forced to set a course for Telos, for an audience with the Cyber Controller.

Once there, however, he found the Cybermen in disarray, with many of the hibernating army malfunctioning upon restoration, turning against their own kind. It transpired that a small faction of Cryons – the original inhabitants of Telos, thought destroyed by the Cybermen – had mounted a resistance and had tampered with the tombs, damaging many of the Cybermen in stasis.

Using a mineral called ‘vastial’, which is abundant on the frigid world of Telos and becomes a dangerous, volatile explosive if raised above freezing temperature, the Doctor and the leader of the Cryon resistance fashioned a bomb, and escaped.

Having destroyed the Cyber Controller using one of the Cybermen’s own guns, the Doctor fled Telos in his reclaimed TARDIS, just as the vastial, now warmed by a sonic lance, detonated, destroying the tomb complex and the Cybermen’s control station. The course of history was preserved, and in 1985 Halley’s Comet passed safely by the Earth, meaning that, the following year, Mondas would still be destroyed during the Cybermen’s attempt to invade Earth.

Fragmentary records of another, prior encounter with the Cybermen of Telos can still be found in the annals of human history. Earlier in the twenty-fifth century, before the destruction of the tombs, an archaeological expedition arrived on the planet, believing the Cybermen to have died out many centuries earlier.

After gaining entrance to the tomb, their expedition backers – Kaftan and Klieg – revealed themselves to be members of an organisation known as the Brotherhood of Logicians, which had discerned the presence of hibernating Cybermen in the tombs, and set about reviving them. They believed that the Cybermen would ally themselves with the Brotherhood, lending their strength to the Brotherhood’s cause. But instead, the Cybermen tombs were revealed to be a form of trap. The Cybermen had chosen to remain dormant until such a time that a species capable of understanding their revival instructions had evolved. The Cybermen took members of the expedition captive, intending to convert them into new Cybermen and mount a subsequent invasion of Earth.

Thanks to the quick-witted response of the Doctor, who had joined the expedition upon his arrival on Telos, the team were able to pacify the Cyber Controller long enough to escape, refreezing the Cyber army and rewiring the revival controls.

As the remnants of the expedition fled the barren world, the tomb sealed behind them once more, they believed they’d done enough to bring an end to the Cybermen threat.

On a parallel version of Earth, however, other men of steel had been stirring . . .

The Age of Steel

It has been postulated many times that, alongside the ‘known’ version of the universe, there are billions of other universes developing in parallel to our own, skewed versions, altered by the repercussions of decisions that were not taken, or events that transpired differently than they did in our own version of history.

In one such parallel universe, on Earth in 2007, the Cybermen would arise again, this time born out of the hubris of one man, John Lumic, and his sinister corporation, Cybus Industries. Lumic believed that the human race deserved to be ‘upgraded’, their brains removed from their bodies and placed into superior metal bodies. He lobbied the President of Great Britain to allow him to offer such a service to the people, but was swiftly denied.

Unbeknownst to the authorities, however, Lumic had been experimenting on waifs and strays, and had already perfected his process, assembling a small force of these new Cybermen and building brutal ‘cyberisation’ plants – little more than factories in which the human population could be ‘upgraded’. Soon enough, his true intentions became clear – if people were not going to offer themselves up willingly for conversion, Lumic would force his gift upon them, ‘deleting’ any who resisted. He began by harnessing the power of the Cybus ‘EarPods’ – networked computer devices designed to feed information directly into the wearer’s brain – and almost ubiquitous amongst the population. By seizing control of these devices, Lumic could control the wearers, sending them to his vast processing plants for conversion.

The Doctor, stranded in this parallel version of Earth following a freak accident that saw his TARDIS fall out of the time vortex and crash-land in this alternate timeline, was able to intercede. He managed to board Lumic’s zeppelin and destroy the transmitter that fed the EarPods. The Cybermen, suddenly free of the inhibitors affecting their emotions and free thought, immediately became aware of what fate had befallen them, and the ensuing pain and emotional outburst was enough to destroy them.

Lumic, meanwhile – since converted into a Cyber Controller by his own creations – plunged to death from his zeppelin, tumbling into the wreckage of his own burning cyber factory.

The Doctor, having recharged a power cell from the TARDIS using a small amount of his own life force, was able to re-enter the time vortex and make the leap back into his own universe.

Lost in Time

During the original diaspora from Mondas, small contingents of Cybermen were sent out into the wider universe to establish colonies and tomb worlds. Some of these missions proved successful, such as the one that founded the tomb world of Telos, while others were never heard from again.

However, Cybermen are hardy life forms, and small pockets of these missing advance parties survived in isolated hibernation, some even falling through the time vortex in their damaged space crafts, only to be discovered or unearthed by unwary humans hundreds of years later.

© BBC

As in our universe, on the parallel Earth where John Lumic developed the Cybermen they were led by a Cyber Controller.

© BBC

John Lumic’s personal airship in the skies of a parallel Earth.

Additionally, some of the surviving Cybus Industries Cybermen from the alternate timeline – now aware of the existence of parallel universes – found ways to hurl themselves through time, space and reality, crossing into other timelines, including our own.

As we have seen, one such contingent managed to launch itself through the Void by using a stolen Dalek Dimension Vault, landing in London in 1851, at the height of the Victorian period. Weakened, and without the technological capacity to convert the local populace, the Cybermen were forced to develop new strategies. They converted animals – mostly cats and dogs – into Cybershades, a form of low-level minion without the capacity to speak. Additionally, they co-opted the Matron of St Joseph’s Workhouse, Miss Hartigan, into helping them acquire a workforce comprised of young children, whom they engaged in building a CyberKing – a dreadnought-class vehicle with a Cyber conversion factory inside its chest. With this towering vessel, piloted by the partially converted Miss Hartigan, the Cybermen planned to lay waste to London and convert the human population, but the Doctor, visiting the period, was able to sever the link between Miss Hartigan and the CyberKing’s controls, and used the Dalek Dimension Vault to banish them back into the void.

In the later years of the twentieth century, a group of Cybermen, evolved from the original Mondasian template, hatched a plan that would see them conquering the Earth through the means of population control. They struck a deal with the duplicitous Tobias Vaughn, the director of a major electronics firm known as International Electromatics, who seeded ‘micro-monolithic circuits’ in transistor radios around the globe. These circuits were then activated by radio signals from Cybermen satellites, relayed through one of their vessels, which was hidden on the dark side of the moon. It allowed the Cybermen to take control of over half the population of the world, while at the same time planting hundreds of Cybermen in the sewer systems beneath London, ready to rise and seize control of the planet.

The newly formed United Nations Intelligence Taskforce was on hand to help quash the invasion, however. After defeating many of the Cybermen on Earth, UNIT was able to destroy the Cybermen’s ship with a Russian missile, effectively ending the threat and the temporary hold of the Cybermen over the human population.

In 2011 an explosion in a cave system beneath a new department store in London hid a sinister secret. A Cyber ship had crash-landed there many years earlier, and was subsequently buried beneath layers of the developing city, its few remaining crew trapped and drained of nearly all their energy.

© BBC

The CyberKing rampages across Victorian London.

However, the development of the new department store disturbed the dormant vessel, and Cybermats – small mammals that had been converted to serve the Cyber cause – had been set loose around the store, siphoning off small amounts of energy to the ship below, slowly rebuilding its reserves and awakening the trapped Cybermen.

However, the Cybermen were few, and before they could pose any credible threat to the Earth, or even make good on their escape, they found it necessary to abduct and convert shoppers visiting the changing rooms of the department store, building their Cyber army incrementally whilst attempting to avoid detection.

The Doctor, visiting Earth to see an old friend, Craig, detected the strange energy readings coming from the store and decided to investigate. Upon following the trail of the missing people, along with a reprogrammed Cybermat, the Doctor and Craig were able to discern the location of the Cyber ship – but in doing so enabled the Cybermen to capture them.

Craig was forcibly cyberised in a small conversion machine aboard the ship, but with the Doctor’s support, and fuelled by the sounds of his crying infant, was able to reject the Cyber implants and send an emotional shockwave back into the main system that reawakened the inhibited emotions of the other Cybermen and caused them to malfunction. The Doctor and his friend escaped, and the Cyber ship and all of the surviving Cybermen were destroyed as the ship’s operating systems detonated.

Risen from the Grave

The Cybermen were next seen on Earth when legions of them marched upon London from within a hidden base inside St Paul’s Cathedral, and, perhaps more surprisingly, dragged themselves from beneath the soil of human graves all across the globe.

This was yet another new breed of Cyberman, fashioned from the biological material of the dead and powered by the downloaded essence of the people who once inhabited those bodies.

This new development was pioneered not by the Cybermen, however, but by a renegade Time Lady known as Missy, who, in previous incarnations, had been known and feared as ‘the Master’. Missy had used a slice of the Gallifreyan Matrix to create a virtual city inside St Paul’s Cathedral in London, which she’d named the ‘Nethersphere’.

The Nethersphere served as a repository for the minds of the dead; a false heaven, where people’s consciousness might live on – at least temporarily – along with billions of others. There was one condition to existing in the Nethersphere, however – the emotional trauma of death proved so much for so many, that they willingly allowed their emotions to be ‘deleted’, in truth a ploy by Missy to ensure their minds were already prepared for restoration inside a Cyberman’s exoskeleton.

Once the Cybermen had at last revealed themselves to the world, they blasted into the air on rocket propulsors and detonated, seeding ‘Cyberpollen’ over all the graveyards in the world. This Cyberpollen was a form of advanced nanotechnology that was able to convert the biological remains inside each grave into a fully-fledged Cyberman. The trapped consciousnesses in the Nethersphere – now mostly devoid of their emotions – were then released as droplets of rain, stirring the newly created Cybermen to life. All across the world, silver hands burst from the cloying loam as millions of Cybermen emerged from the ground.

However, the Cybermen were not content to stop there. Danny Pink – a dead man who had been converted into a Cyberman but, by refusing to have his emotions deleted in the Nethersphere, had managed to retain his personality – was able to tap into the ‘Cyberhive’ and discern that the Cybermen planned a second rainstorm that would wrack the globe, killing all humanity, only for them to rise again as Cybermen.

© BBC

The Cybermen have crafted many different varieties of Cybermat across the centuries.

With Missy unable to control the Cyber army, Danny rejected his Cyber conditioning, seized control of the Cyberhive and led all of the Cybermen on Earth into the skies on their rocket propulsors, where they detonated, destroying the clouds of Cyberpollen and thus saving humanity from conversion. The Nethersphere was decommissioned, and soon faded to nothing, the virtual city deleted.

The Cyber Wars

Throughout history, there have been many large-scale conflicts between humans and the Cybermen, as both species, intent on their continued survival, spread out across the universe.

To the Cybermen, the human race represented not only fodder for Cyber conversion, but also an echo of their own organic past, with Earth similarly mirroring its missing twin, Mondas, rich in the minerals needed to further the Cyber cause. The planet was a constant draw for them, and time and again they set about mounting their invasions. The Cybermen constructed vast fleets of warships, and, having found that more subtle means of invasion had failed them in the past, set about attempting to take planet Earth by brute force.

One such attempt was staged in 1988, when a vanguard of Cybermen landed on Earth, intent on claiming the spoils of the Nemesis meteorite – a powerful statue made from a living metal known as validium – which had crashed to Earth near Windsor Castle. The validium had originally been conceived by the Time Lords Omega and Rassilon during the early days of the Time Lord civilisation, to serve as a powerful weapon – and thus deterrent – to protect the fledgling culture on Gallifrey.

History had seen the validium pass through different hands, and during the seventeenth century it had taken on the form of a statue of a woman named Lady Peinforte, before the Doctor had intervened and launched it into space aboard a powered meteorite. Every twenty-five years, however, the meteorite passed close to the Earth, and in 1988 its orbit faltered and it fell to ground.

While a massive Cyber fleet consisting of thousands of ships lay in wait, a small force, led by a Cyberleader, seized control of the meteorite and the statue. Other forces were at play, however, including a small group of neo-Nazis, and Lady Peinforte herself, who had access to limited time-travel capabilities. The Doctor, knowing that the Nemesis statue could not fall into enemy hands, had also arrived in the era.

The Nemesis statue, it transpired, could not be activated unless three components were united – the statue itself, a bow, and an arrow. All three were needed for the validium to achieve critical mass. While the Cyber forces fought to gain control of the components, thus ensuring the victory of their impending invasion, the Doctor played the different factions against one another, manipulating the outcome of events. When the three components were finally reunited, and the statue stirred into life, it was at the command of the Doctor, who used it to destroy the entire Cyber fleet, simultaneously removing the Nemesis weapon from the reach of any who might abuse its power, and putting an end to the impending Cyber threat.

Another attempt to invade the Earth by the Cybermen – this time by crossing the Void from the alternate timeline of Cybus Industries – almost led to a devastating war with the universe’s other most dangerous cyborg life forms – the Daleks. In the early twenty-first century, for a brief period, ‘ghosts’ visited mankind, appearing in their millions all across the world. At first people shrank from these strange apparitions, but as time went by, it became clear that they intended no harm, and people began to assume they were the spirits of loved ones, returning to visit those they had left behind.

The truth was somewhat less romantic – the apparitions were, in fact, Cybermen attempting to cross the Void between universes, and being unwittingly aided by the Torchwood organisation, which had traced the source of a breach and were attempting to exploit it as a power source, forcing it wider and allowing more and more of the apparitions through.

Indeed, some Cybermen had secretly completed the transition to our universe and had installed themselves inside the Torchwood building, infiltrating the organisation and taking control over a small number of employees. These they manipulated into widening the breach even further, eventually enabling all of the Cybermen to fully manifest. All across the planet, the ghostly apparitions resolved into deadly men of steel.

The Cybermen, however, had not come alone. They had followed a ship through the space between universes, a large metal sphere, or ‘Void ship’, which had since been acquired by Torchwood, but had resisted all forms of scientific test or reading. When the Cybermen first manifested, it was presumed to be a vessel of their creation. But instead, it turned out to contain a small contingent of Daleks, along with a Time Lord prison, dubbed the Genesis Ark, which contained millions of Daleks that had been imprisoned during the Time War.

The Cybermen attempted to prevent the Ark from being opened, but failed, and soon Daleks were flooding the skies, engaging the Cybermen in all-out war. With terrifying armies of Cybermen and Daleks competing for control of the Earth, and the breach threatening the complete destruction of both universes, the Doctor was forced to enact a dangerous plan.

Aware that anything that had spent time in the Void between universes would be saturated with Void material, and thus pulled into the breach if it were opened wide enough, he seized control of Torchwood’s equipment and forced the rift open. The Dalek and Cyberman armies were dragged into the Void. But as the breach sealed itself forever, the Doctor’s friend and companion Rose Tyler was trapped in the parallel universe, with no means left to traverse the timelines, and thus no way to return.

Chris J. Lees

Human corpses converted into Cybermen emerge from their graves.

Cyber Attacks

Another attack came in the mid twenty-first century, upon an orbital research station known as the Wheel. This international structure, staffed by a crew from all across the Earth, had been built to survey deep-space phenomena, using a vast X-ray laser to scan distant star systems.

To the Cybermen, however, the Wheel was an opportunity, and when a lone Cyber-ship happened upon it, the Cyber-Planner devised a scheme to seize control of the station and adapt its long-range radio beam into a homing signal for the rest of the fleet. In this way the main Cyber force could be directed towards Earth, with a view to Cyber-converting the population and stripping the planet’s minerals.

Initially, the Cybermen took control of a supply vessel, using it to trick the scientists into taking aboard crates containing hidden Cybermen. They also seeded Cybermats aboard the station, initially to consume the Wheel’s supply of bernalium, but also to eliminate some of the crew. With Cybermen storming the station and much of the crew under hypnotic control, the Cybermen began to make preparations to broadcast their homing signal.

However, the Doctor, his TARDIS damaged and in need of repair, had also landed on the supply ship and been transported to the Wheel. The Cyber-Planner recognised the errant Time Lord, and took steps to capture him, but the Doctor managed to evade them, breaking the conditioning on some of the crew. With the deflector shields raised, barring more Cybermen from entry to the station, and the others either electrocuted or destroyed with quick-setting plastic spray, the Doctor was able to recalibrate the X-ray laser to destroy the oncoming Cyber ship. Consequently, the homing signal was never broadcast, and the Earth was saved from yet another mass invasion from the tenacious Cybermen.

A short while later, in 2070, the Earth’s moon became the target of a fleeting Cyber attack. As humanity reached further out into space and began to take control of its own destiny, permanent bases were established on other heavenly bodies, including a weather tracking and control station on the lunar surface. This moonbase was equipped with a device known as the Gravitron, used to manipulate the weather patterns on Earth.

When the crew suddenly began to succumb to a mysterious illness, International Space Control quarantined the base. Soon after, strange events – involving missing bodies, sudden drops in air pressure, and unexpected visitors – left the base commander searching for answers. He found them in the form of Cybermen, who had infiltrated the base, poisoning the sugar supplies with a neurotropic virus. The Cybermen had also created a new, hidden entry point to the base, and were engaged in slowly weakening the crew, in order to gain control of the Gravitron. They intended to use this to drastically alter the weather and devastate all life on Earth.

As the people on the base began to fight back against the Cybermen, reinforcements were brought in, with more Cyber ships landing on the Lunar surface. Soon the base was surrounded. However, in a shrewd move, the Gravitron device was realigned, pointed at the lunar surface and the gathered Cybermen, and their army, as well as their Cyber ships, were blasted into the depths of space.

Chris J. Lees

Station 3, also known as the ‘Wheel in Space’.

The War for Voga

Towards the end of the first major Cyber War, human engineers discovered a major flaw in the Cybermen’s design. The Cybermen had an inherent weakness for gold – and in particular, gold dust – which, as a non-corrodible substance, coated their breathing apparatus and, in effect, choked them.

As a consequence, the human forces, in collaboration with an alien species known as the Vogans, developed a ‘glitter gun’, which fired rapid bursts of refined gold dust. The Vogan home world was abundant with gold, and with a regular supply of the metal to use as ammunition, the humans were able to defeat the Cyber armies and drive them – it was thought – to extinction. Voga was, however, almost destroyed in the conflict.

Years later, in the twenty-ninth century, a large asteroid, Neo Phobos, drifted into the solar system and was captured in Jupiter’s gravity belt, settling into an orbit of the gas giant. As an un-catalogued moon, the asteroid represented a threat to any space farers with out-of-date star charts, and so a space station, Nerva Beacon, was placed in its vicinity to serve as a ‘lighthouse’, warning any oncoming vessels of the dangers ahead. Of course, the crew of Nerva Beacon could not have been aware of the more pressing danger that was already lurking in their presence. Decades later, the true picture began to emerge.

Shaun Williams

The Cybermen have made numerous attempts to conquer Earth and convert the human race into more Cybermen.

Alex Fort

A space freighter adapted with Cyber technology travelled back through time and crashed into the Earth.

Neo Phobos was, in fact, the remnants of Voga, the planet of gold. The Vogans, meek after their persecution and fearing the return of their greatest foe – long considered extinct following their defeat during the war – had retreated from the universe, hiding inside the remains of their planet.

Pockets of Cybermen had indeed survived. One such group, wise to their previous defeat, had located Voga and intended to destroy the planet, so that it might not be mined for ammunition when they once again rose to power. After enlisting a human proxy, Professor Kellman, aboard Nerva Beacon to assist in their plans, the Cybermen launched their attack, first storming the station and seizing control of the transmats to and from the surface of Voga. Having then taken prisoners, they despatched a small party to the planet to place bombs in the gold mines, intending to crack the planet apart from the inside.

When the Cybermen’s attempt to detonate the bombs was foiled by the Doctor, they adjusted their strategy, launching Nerva Beacon itself into a crash course with the planet and retreating to their ship.

ADRIC’S SACRIFICE

In the twenty-sixth century, a small group of Cybermen hijacked a freighter heading to Earth. Their initial plan, to detonate a bomb on the planet, had already been foiled by the Doctor, who had arrived in time to defuse the weapon. The Cybermen had a contingency plan, however – to crash the freighter into the Earth at tremendous speed, using its antimatter engines to eradicate all life on the surface.

After taking the crew prisoner, the Cybermen set a collision course with Earth and locked the controls to prevent any interference. As the Doctor was forced to take the Cybermen to his TARDIS to witness the crash, one of his friends, Adric, stayed behind, attempting to break the lock. He was almost successful, dragging the ship out of the warp and causing it to spiral 65 million years back in time – to the time of the dinosaurs. Adric was unable to alter the course of the vessel, however, and it struck the planet with a mighty detonation that invoked a sweeping, sudden climate change, in turn causing mass extinction amongst the lizard species on the planet.

Not all of the Vogans had been idle, however. A small party of militia had already enlisted Kellman’s help as a double agent, charged with luring the Cybermen to Nerva Beacon. They had constructed a rocket, which they planned to launch at the beacon, destroying it, and the Cybermen, in the process. The Doctor, back aboard the crashing beacon, was able to regain control of the gyro controls and stabilise the station, just before it collided with Voga. In the meantime, the course of the Vogan rocket was amended, sending it crashing into the Cyber ship.

Nevertheless, the Cyber race continued to persist, and remnants of their former armies would continue to awaken from their barren tombs to found new legions, and reignite their war against humanity.

In the fifty-second century, vast legions of Cybermen formed immense war fleets, converting whole planets in their wake. But they were never quite able to breach the defences of Earth and take the planet as their own. Millennia later, a second Cyber War erupted, and although details are now hazy, it is thought that the entire Tiberian Spiral Galaxy, home to billions of human colonists, had to be utterly destroyed to counter the Cyber threat.

Even this was not enough to completely eradicate them, and years later, the remnants of that terrible Cyber fleet would be discovered on a theme park planet known as ‘Hedgewick’s World’ – a dormant Cyberman army, ready to once again take up the Cyber cause. This army arose again, after more than a thousand years of suspended animation, disturbed by the arrival of the Doctor.

© BBC

Cybermen wait in suspended animation within their ‘tombs’ ready to be reactivated when needed.

Hedgewick’s World had once been a glorious place of adventure and frivolity, but by the time the Doctor arrived, it was decrepit, broken-down and under military occupation. Worse, the military forces garrisoned there had no notion that a three-million-strong Cyberman army resided in hibernation beneath the planet’s surface.

These Cybermen had evolved since the days of Mondas, however, becoming sleeker, faster, and more connected than ever before. It has been suggested that this new template was in fact the result of cross pollination between the older Mondasian Cybermen, and those developed by Cybus Industries in the parallel universe, harnessing the most powerful elements of both and creating a far more dangerous enemy as a result.

Chris J. Lees

An inert Cyber shell was used as a chess-playing automaton at Webley’s World of Wonders.

These Cybermen had developed a vast network known as the ‘Cyberiad’, allowing them to share the processing capacity of their minds, and to communicate more easily with one another and issue commands. Their propensity for converting animals into Cyber creatures, such as Cybermats and Cybershades, had also continued and been refined, and it was only when the Doctor stumbled across some converted insects, or ‘Cybermites’, amongst the broken-down exhibits in a collection known as Webley’s World of Wonders, that events began to gather pace.

The Cybermites began a chain reaction that woke the Cyber army beneath Hedgewick’s World, and also partially converted the Doctor, dividing his personality so that half of his mind was linked to the Cyberiad in the form of a ‘Cyber-Planner’. Until this point, Time Lords had never been susceptible to the cyberisation process, but the Cybermites had made it possible for the Cybermen to convert any race, no matter their origin or the structure of their DNA.

The remaining half of the Doctor fought valiantly, however. While the small military garrison – which included the human Emperor Ludens Nimrod Kendrick Cord Longstaff XLI, affecting a disguise as a chess player from one of the exhibits – held off the encroaching army as best they could, the Doctor entered the Cyberiad and challenged the Cyber-Planner half of his fractured personality to a game of chess.

Deep in this virtual realm, the two personalities engaged in a battle of wits for control of the Doctor’s body. The Doctor, though, now linked to the Cyberiad and able to better discern the Cybermen’s weaknesses, lured the Cyber-Planner into a trap, setting him an impossible challenge. The Cyber-Planner, unable to fathom the Doctor’s plans, diverted all of the processing power of the Cyberiad into solving the problem, allowing the Doctor to escape and rendering over three million Cybermen inert.

With the Cybermen temporarily disabled, the Doctor and the surviving members of the military unit were able to flee the planet. Hedgewick’s World was destroyed by the Emperor, once again arresting – but never ending – the Cyberman scourge.

© BBC

Cybermites are similar to Cybermats, but much smaller.

Chris J. Lees

Vast storage banks of Cybermen, or Cyber Tombs as they are sometimes called.

© BBC

images EARTH’S GALACTIC EMPIRE

First Steps

Just as the universe was beginning to take more of an interest in planet Earth, so the human race turned its attention beyond its home planet. Building on the early exploration of its own solar system with the Apollo moon programme and the later Mars Probe missions, humans ventured ever further into space.

Not surprisingly, one of the first outposts of humanity beyond its own planet was on Earth’s moon. The Moonbase was initially a scientific research establishment, but by the late twenty-first century it had taken on vital importance for the inhabitants of Earth. Crewed by an international team under the auspices of International Space Command (ISC), the Moonbase was first used as a weather-control station.

Using the latest advances in gravitational engineering, a Gravitron was installed. This meant that Earth’s global weather systems could in effect be controlled from the Moon. But it was also a weak point in Earth’s defences – control of the Gravitron would allow potential aggressors to turn Earth’s own weather against it. This was a weakness which the Cybermen identified. They launched an attack on the Moonbase, initially trying to eliminate and control the crew by stealth. They infected the base’s sugar supply with a neurotropic drug that would allow them to control those who succumbed to it.

Following the defeat of the Cyber attack, ISC ordered a review of the Moonbase’s mission. This resulted in weather control being moved back to Earth. Advances in weather-control techniques and technology meant that the Gravitron had been superseded so controlling the weather from a moonbase was no longer necessary. A Weather Control Bureau was set up on Earth to replace it.

The Moonbase was dismantled. But before long, a new base was built – again to provide a technological solution to a problem on the planet below. In this case, it was one of transport. The Moon became the main control hub for the new Travelmat Relay System – or T-Mat as it was usually known.

With the advent of T-Mat, the use of rockets was all but abandoned. That said, unmanned rockets were still used occasionally, for example, to launch communications satellites. Again, however, this was a weakness as it meant Earth was vulnerable. A problem with the Control Centre on the Moon could bring down the entire T-Mat system. And, as with the Weather Control Moonbase, the system could be subverted and used against Earth.

Again, the Moon became the target for an alien incursion as a precursor to an invasion of planet Earth. This time it was the Ice Warriors – former inhabitants of Mars – that attacked. They saw Earth as a potential new home for their race. But first they needed to adapt the planet to suit them.

Taking control of the Moonbase, the Ice Warriors used T-Mat to despatch Martian seed pods to sixteen key cities on Earth. The pods were white spheres which grew and burst, releasing a mist of spores that sucked the oxygen from the atmosphere. Four people in the immediately vicinity of T-Mat receptors died as the pods arrived – all of oxygen starvation.

The first developments of the fungus spread from the spores emitted by the pods were seen as vegetable blight. The foam-like fungus formed bubbles which burst, spreading more spores over a large area. The rate of growth was such that acres of ground were covered in minutes and strong south westerly winds threatened to spread the disease from London over large parts of Europe, destroying crops.

An analysis of the fungus carried out by the Doctor, whose arrival on Earth fortuitously coincided with the Ice Warrior attack, showed that it had a molecule composed of five atoms which absorbed oxygen. A complete blanket of the fungus would reduce Earth’s oxygen to about one-twentieth of its normal level – unbreathable by humans but exactly like Mars had been, and ideal for the Ice Warriors. However the Doctor also discovered that the fungus could be destroyed by water.

This explained why an Ice Warrior had been despatched to the Weather Control Bureau to sabotage it. The Ice Warriors needed to make sure it did not rain while the fungus was getting established. Armed with this information, the Doctor was able to destroy the Ice Warrior at the Weather Control Bureau and bring the controls back on line. Torrential rain was then used to destroy the fungus.

T-MAT

According to the publicity material released at the time of its development: ‘Travel mat is the ultimate form of travel. Control centre of the present system is the Moon, serving receptions at all major cities on Earth. Travelmat provides an instantaneous means of public travel, transports raw materials and vital food supplies to all parts of the world. Travelmat supersedes all conventional forms of transport. Using the principle of dematerialisation at the point of departure, and rematerialisation at the point of arrival in special cubicles, departure and arrival are almost instantaneous. Although the system is still in its early stages, it is completely automated and fool proof against power failure.’

The T-Mat Control Centre on the Moon could handle two million channels at once, whereas a satellite-based system would only cope with a few thousand. The main cities with their own subsidiary T-Mat Centres included: New York, Moscow, Toronto, Calcutta, Bombay, Stockholm, Washington, Athens, lzmir, Rome, Ottawa, Tokyo, London and Canberra. There were smaller control stations in most other major cities including Oslo, Paris, Zurich, Hamburg and Berlin.

Meanwhile the Ice Warriors’ main fleet was approaching, homing in on a signal being transmitted by the Ice Warriors on the Moon. Again, the Doctor was instrumental in sabotaging the homing signal, which was replaced with another signal transmitted from a satellite. This rogue signal diverted the Ice Warrior fleet, sending it into a fatal orbit around the Sun.

Realising how close the world had come to disaster, the authorities continued to use T-Mat, but re-established a rocket programme and the development of space flight. T-Mat was eventually superseded by more robust transmat technology similar to that used by other civilisations, and not dependent on a central control installation.

The the Moon’s isolation and inaccessibility had been a disadvantage when Weather Control and T-Mat Control were attacked, but it was now used to advantage. The Moonbase was once again converted and became the Lunar Penal Colony – a prison to which dangerous (and sometimes political) prisoners were sent in perpetuity.

Beyond the Moon

Mankind’s preoccupation with the Moon did not mean that it focused entirely on that one small natural satellite. Scientific and survey bases were also established on other planets within the solar system. Bowie Base One, for example, was set up on Mars under the command of Adelaide Brooke. Disaster struck Bowie Base One on 21 November 2059. Exactly what happened has never been established, but the whole base was destroyed in an explosion.

Alex Fort

Encased in their bio-electronic armour, the Ice Warriors seemed impervious to attack, but they were susceptible to extreme heat.

There is speculation that the crew of the base may have disturbed the virus creature known as the Flood, which was frozen into inactivity by the Ice Warriors millennia before. But whatever happened, the base was destroyed. Brooke and two of the crew somehow managed to survive and return to Earth – where Brooke committed suicide, adding to the mystery of what really happened.

Before long, the human race was taking its first tentative steps beyond their own solar system. Space stations referred to as ‘beacons’ were placed in strategic positions to service and guide space freighters. One of these was Nerva Beacon, later to be repurposed as a cryogenic repository for the survivors of Earth after devastating solar flares. One of the tasks of Nerva Beacon was to warn spacecraft away from a new moon captured by Jupiter and initially named Neo Phobos. As we saw earlier, Neo Phobos was actually Voga, the fabled planet of gold . . .

Beyond the Solar System

With Earth’s population growing and the planet becoming more and more overcrowded, people began to leave to form colonies on other planets. The authorities on Earth designated which planets were suitable for colonisation, and which for other purposes – such as mining for the minerals and ores that Earth’s expanding regime needed. If there was a problem, this was resolved by a special team of Adjudicators administered by the Bureau of Interplanetary Affairs.

In fact, problems of allocation were rare. But one notable exception occurred on the planet Uxarieus in 2472. While the planet had been allocated to colonisation, and a colony was indeed set up, the Interplanetary Mining Corporation (IMC) also conducted a survey. This survey showed them that the planet was high in duralinium. In fact, there was enough duralinium on Uxarieus to build a million living units back on Earth.

Unwilling to pass up such a potentially lucrative opportunity, the IMC team led by Captain Dent set about trying to remove the colonists so they could begin mining. They tried to make it seem as if the planet was inhabited by large and savage creatures – even killing several colonists and making it look as if they had perished at the claws of the fictional creatures.

But when scare tactics failed to work, IMC made their presence known to the colonists, and insisted that the planet had been designated as mining material and not allocated to colonisation. An Adjudicator was duly despatched to settle the matter. But the Adjudicator Martin Jurgens sent by the Bureau of Interplanetary Affairs was not the Martin Jurgens who actually arrived. It was an imposter.

Chris J. Lees

The renegade Time Lord known as the Master has caused trouble throughout history and across the whole universe.

Chris J. Lees

The first meeting between humans and Draconians in the twenty-sixth century led to an interstellar war.

The imposter was the evil renegade Time Lord known as the Master. From information stolen from Time Lord records, he knew that the planet Uxarieus was home of an incredibly powerful ‘Doomsday Weapon’ developed by the original inhabitants. The weapon was housed in the underground remains of a city which had once been the centre of a great civilisation. Through genetic engineering the planet’s inhabitants developed a super-race, which in turn developed the Doomsday Weapon that could cause stars to explode. But the weapon was only used once, as a test. The result was the Crab Nebula.

Once the weapon had been built, the race began to decay. The radiation from the weapon’s power source poisoned the soil of the planet, and the inhabitants degenerated into primitives. The remnants of the super-race became priests of a lunatic religion worshipping machines instead of gods.

While the Master did manage to find the Doomsday Weapon, he was unable to make use of it before the Doctor set the device to self-destruct. IMC were evicted from the planet, and without the poisonous effect of the Doomsday Weapon to degrade their harvests, the colonists began to thrive.

The colonists on Uxarieus survived and went from strength to strength, but this was not always the case. Some colonists never even reached their destination. A colony ship that set off for the planet Astra in 2493, for example, was lost somewhere in the vicinity of the planet Dido. There were no reported survivors.

Other Races

As the human race spread out through the galaxy, they inevitably came into contact with other life forms. Often such contacts were peaceful. But not always. What was later discovered to be a misunderstanding led to a war between Earth’s expanding empire and the empire of Draconia. Nicknamed ‘Dragons’ by the humans, the Draconians were reptilian humanoids ruled by an Emperor. They were an advanced technological race steeped in tradition and honour.

Twenty years after peace was declared, war again seemed inevitable. In 2540, both Earth and Draconia accused the other side of attacking their spaceships. Actually, neither side was to blame. The ships were being attacked by Ogrons – a primitive race of ape-like humanoids used at the time by other races as mercenaries. In this case, they were working for the Master. The Master had developed a device that emitted a hypnotic signal which activated the fear centres deep in human and Draconian minds. Each side saw the attackers as what they most feared – Earthmen in the case of the Draconians, while the humans saw Draconians.

Chris J. Lees

The Draconians had a rigid caste system and a well-developed sense of honour

THE WAR BETWEEN EARTH AND DRACONIA

The war was started in 2520 when a damaged Earth ship destroyed a Draconian battle cruiser as the two sides met on a peace mission. The humans believed that the Draconian ship was about to open fire on their own damaged vessel, but in fact its communications equipment had been damaged in the same neutron storm as damaged the Earth ship. Although the Draconians had sent a battle cruiser to the meeting, its missile banks were empty and it was, as agreed, unarmed.

The war with Draconia ended in the early twenty-sixth century with a treaty that established a frontier in space. Gradually, diplomatic relations were restored and there were trade treaties, cultural exchanges, and other agreements leading to cooperation between the two empires.

The Master was himself working for the Daleks, who wanted to provoke war, as that would mean the extermination of both empires. The Daleks would emerge as the supreme rulers. Whether the Master actually intended to keep his side of the bargain, or – as usual – intended to betray his allies is not known. But once the Master’s ploy was exposed, peace was re-established.

The Draconian War, and other intergalactic conflicts, had an inevitable effect on Earth’s colonisation programmes. In some cases colonies were simply abandoned – the colonists never arriving. This was the case with Mechanus, for example. Here, large spherical robots called Mechonoids were despatched, programmed to clear landing sites and get everything ready for the first immigrants. They also constructed a huge city, raised 1,500 feet above the swampy jungle of the planet’s surface. But the colonists never arrived, and Mechanus was abandoned.

The effect was not always the same. A much earlier example is Paradise Towers, the famous living complex designed by the architect Kroagnon. Paradise Towers was indeed colonised, despite Earth being involved in a war at the time. But the colonists, with the exception of the Caretakers who acted as police force and maintenance, were all either too old or young to have been conscripted for the armed forces.

But generally, the colonies thrived. Earth kept as much control over them as it could. A typical colony had a governor, who was responsible to the Earth government. Occasionally, or when requested, an Examiner would be despatched to inspect the colony and ensure it was running smoothly and had the resources it needed. This structure was not always adhered to. Some of the early colonies, for instance, referred to their governor as the ‘Pilot’, perhaps continuing to use the rank after a long space journey – sometimes years – to reach the colony planet.

Lost Expedition

Eventually spaceflight became a luxury pastime as much as a necessity. There was even a spaceliner built as a replica of the famous steam train the Orient Express that ran between various star systems. The passengers travelled in replica coaches so that – apart from the view from the windows – it seemed like they were actually travelling on a ground-based steam train.

The advent of warp drive and hyperspace hopping meant that the length of journeys had been drastically reduced since the earliest days of expansion and colonisation. Transmat technology allowed short journeys between points where transmat stations had been established that were almost instantaneous.

Even as spaceflight became quicker and more reliable, there were problems. The fate of the lost Mordee Expedition was unknown for centuries but serves to show how reliant space crews were on their equipment – particularly the main computer system.

Although exact dates are unknown, the crew of the expedition to the planet Mordee knew that it would take generations for the ship to reach its destination. During this time, the technicians worked on the ship’s main computer, trying to extend its power and capabilities. As a result, the computer seemed to break down completely and the ship was forced to land on an uncharted planet.

The technicians assumed that the computer’s data core had been damaged, but this was not the case. Without realising it, they had actually created life. The computer had not failed, but instead had evolved into a living creature – a new form of life. But the crew were not the only ones who were mistaken about what had happened. The Doctor happened to arrive while the ship was stranded, and also believed the data core must have been damaged. So he attempted to renew it by making a direct link between the computer and the compatible centres of his own brain – a variation of the Sidelian Memory Transfer process.

The computer should have taken only the compatible information from the Doctor’s brain – enough to repair itself. But still in a form of shock from its ‘birth’, the computer took everything it found. The Doctor left before he realised his mistake, and the computer continued to evolve and develop. It now had a split ‘personality’: part of it was the developing ship’s computer, and part of it was a version of the Doctor. The confusion and disparity in effect drove the computer mad.

Chris J. Lees

Earth’s empire expanded as the human race left the solar system and spread out across the galaxy.

Still stranded, the crew of the Mordee Expedition set about finding out what they could about their new home. The technicians stayed on the ship while survey teams were sent out to explore the planet. The computer – now calling itself Xoanon – continued to evolve and develop, and eventually took control of the ship. It dictated how the surviving crew lived their lives, and made its madness a reality. Xoanon created a world in its own image – splitting the two sets of people just as its own mind was split.

Through the ensuing generations, the descendants of both the technicians and the survey teams gradually forget who they were and where they had come from. Xoanon, meanwhile, believed it was breeding a race of superhumans. The technicians became the Tesh, practising self-denial and control and developing telepathic abilities. Away from the ship, the survey teams degenerated into the primitive Sevateem – independent, bold, strong and courageous. Xoanon attempted to speed up the process of evolution by instilling each ‘tribe’ with a fear of the other to promote conflict and hostility between them.

Many centuries later, the Doctor returned. Realising what had happened, he was able to remove his own mind from Xoanon. The computer acknowledged its error, and the Sevateem and Tesh resolved to live in peace with each other.

The Mordee Expedition was unusual in that it ventured so far into uncharted space. For the most part, the human race stayed within reach of established space stations and beacons. The expansion of their influence and domain was gradual and incremental.

Even so, the space stations that guided ships through the star systems were themselves relatively isolated and this made them vulnerable. Station Three, colloquially known as ‘the Wheel’ because of its circular construction, for example, was the target of an attack by the Cybermen. Unmanned beacons were occasionally sabotaged by space pirates. Just as in Earth’s past wreckers had used fake beacons to lure seafaring ships on to rocks so they could be looted, so the space pirates tried to sabotage beacons in order to lure space freighters to isolated areas where they could be attacked and boarded.

The beacons were also valuable in and of themselves. Many were dismantled by space pirates who were after the valuable argonite from which the beacons were partly constructed. Many pirates chose to store their ill-gotten wealth in the Bank of Karabraxos, because of its impenetrable security systems and willingness not to ask too many questions of its clients, until it was destroyed in a solar storm.

Colonies

As space flight became ever more sophisticated, the earlier Earth colonies developed in different ways. On the planet Midnight, for example, rather than establish a normal colony, the humans created a leisure facility, rather grandly named the Leisure Palace. This was a fantastic complex of large glass bubbles on the surface of Midnight.

Midnight itself was a planet of contrasts. The landscape was beautiful with rocks and mountains made of diamonds, glittering under a blazing sun. But its sun was X-tonic, emitting raw galvanic radiation. Any living thing exposed to its light for just a fraction of a second without protection, would vaporise.

The Leisure Palace luxury hotel and health resort with its swimming pools, gyms, shops, bars, and famous antigravity restaurant, was built out of X-tonic-resistant materials and shipped to Midnight in pre-constructed sections. The windows were made from reinforced finito-glass over four metres thick.

By contrast, the colony on the more hospitable planet of Varos offered a far less luxurious environment. The Governor of Varos was directly accountable to its people; every major decision had to be ratified by a vote. This might seem like an ideal democracy, but in fact the colony was run on autocratic lines, with political and criminal prisoners subjected to horrific torture and execution in the Punishment Dome.

These punishments and executions were broadcast live to the population, and recordings were even sold to other colonies. The harshness of the system on Varos did soften, however, after the authorities realised the value of the rare Zeiton-7 ore which was common there. With increased wealth came a less strict and more forgiving regime.

Perhaps inevitably, as the human race spread out across the galaxy and beyond, there were those who began to wonder if this was a good thing. As well as conservation groups that objected to the damage done by colonisation, there were those who opposed the imperial rule imposed on other less advanced life forms. There were also groups like the ‘Sons of Earth’ which felt that Earth was where the human race belonged, and that it should never have left.

But it was not just about where the human race belonged. The Sons of Earth also protested about humanity’s impact on other races and cultures. They protested, for example, at the enforced move of the inhabitants of the planet Delta Magna to the swampy environment of the planet’s third moon. The ‘Swampies’ as they became known, seemed relatively happy with the move – at least until the human colonists set up a methane-refining station in the swamps of the Third Moon of Delta Magna.

But it was not all about oppression and the imposition of human rule either. Agreements and treaties were signed with other races. The Galactic Federation was a particularly successful trading alliance that included not just advanced races like the inhabitants of Arcturus and Alpha Centauri, but also more primitive peoples like those of the planet Peladon.

© BBC

Its X-tonic sun made the surface of Midnight deadly to most life forms. But nonetheless, a huge Leisure Palace was built on the planet.

Decline

Inevitably, empires decline. The Sons of Earth eventually got their way as Earth became economically and politically exhausted. Colonies and planets under human rule were progressively given their independence as the humans focused again on their home planet, Earth.

While many embraced the move, not everyone was pleased. Some colonies worried whether they could survive without the help and support of the Earth Empire. Administrators of some of the worlds now governed by Earth refused to allow the worlds self-government, worried what their own fate would be afterwards. The Marshal of Solos went to extraordinary lengths to avoid giving that planet its independence, even assassinating his superior, the Earth Administrator, who was about to announce the planet’s liberation. The Marshal even tried to alter the planet’s poisonous atmosphere so it would be breathable by humans – but not by the native Solonians.

Gradually, the humans retrenched. But not for long. By the year 5000, Earth had begun to establish its second empire. With the ‘Great Breakout’, as it became known, humanity again spread through the solar system on their way to the stars. New frontiersmen and pioneers set out across the galaxy just as they had before. Again, they established bases and space stations along the way. A second empire was established and, as that declined, a third and fourth followed.

And, although it had been the cradle of humanity, Earth was – at least for a while – abandoned.

images THE LATTER YEARS

Earth Forsaken

Even before the retrenchment, Earth remained a heavily populated planet. Its resources were limited but humanity had survived all kinds of natural disasters as well as some precipitated by themselves. A new ice age had held the planet in a cold grip until eventually dispelled by an intense programme of ionisation. Various alien threats and attempted invasions had been repelled.

But finally the human race faced something about which it could do nothing. Earth’s own sun turned against the planet. Huge solar flares were predicted which would scorch the planet’s surface and leave nothing alive except perhaps for the most hardy vegetation. Scientists predicted that it would be five thousand years before Earth was again inhabitable.

A three-part plan was devised for the survival of Earth’s population. Vast thermic shelters were set up for some of the population, although it was widely understood that the chances of survival in the shelters was at best marginal. Even if those in the shelters did survive the solar flares, the prospect of the people and their descendants spending the next five thousand years underground was distinctly unpleasant.

Secondly, the colonisation programme was reinvigorated, with star pioneers setting off for new colonies such as Galsec. One vessel, Starship UK, was built to contain the entire population of the United Kingdom, including many of their prized buildings, establishments and cities. The vessel was a form of self-contained colony, sailing perpetually through the void.

Arriving on board, the Doctor, initially struggling to understand the propulsion systems powering the ship, found the engines to be nothing more than a decoy, and that the entire ship had been constructed on the back of a massive star whale, which the humans had enslaved, exposing the pain centres of its brain in order to stimulate its receptors and guide its path through space.

© BBC

Starship UK was used to evacuate the entire population of the United Kingdom from Earth.

© BBC

A Star Whale, similar to the one that carried Starship UK through space.

It transpired that the British monarch, Liz 10, had long ago established a ‘mind wipe’ protocol, which meant that any colonists who discovered the awful truth about the nature of the vessel could choose to either ‘forget’ and return to their normal lives, or ‘protest’, and be fed to the whale. The Britons feared that without the control they had exerted on the beast, it would break free and flee into space, leaving the colony behind it, a drifting, abandoned wreck.

Furious, the Doctor realised his dichotomy – in freeing the whale he would condemn millions of humans to death. He decided that the only course of action was to destroy the space whale’s mind, to leave the beast alive but brain dead, so that it would no longer suffer.

The Doctor’s companion Amy Pond, however, argued that the star whale had volunteered to help the humans, arriving in orbit around Earth at precisely the time the humans needed to evacuate. She forced the Queen to ‘abdicate’, releasing the creature from the control systems. To the surprise of everyone – including the Doctor – the star whale remained out of choice, now free of the pain imposed upon it by the terrified humans.

The third part of the plan was the creation of a huge cryogenic facility on a space station well out of range of the solar flares. The former space beacon named Nerva was rapidly adapted. Space Station Nerva was fitted out with huge cryogenic chambers where the chosen few could be put into cryogenic suspension until Earth was again inhabitable. As well as humans, provision was also made for animal and botanic specimens to be preserved. The systems were set so that the humans would be woken after five thousand years. They could then return to Earth by transmat and repopulate their planet once the danger had passed.

As with so many carefully crafted plans, something went wrong. A Wirrn queen, fleeing from the Andromeda system after the Wirrn breeding grounds were destroyed by human settlers, found Nerva. Although fatally wounded by the station’s autoguard defence systems, the Wirrn managed to lay its eggs inside one of the sleeping humans – Chief Technician Dune. It also cut through the station’s main systems, so that the cryogenic systems kept working and the humans were never woken.

Alex Fort

Starship UK was carried through space on the back of an enormous Star Whale.

Chris J. Lees

Space Station Nerva was converted into a facility where people were preserved in cryogenic suspension.

THE WIRRN

The Wirrn were parasitic creatures. When the Wirrn Queen’s eggs hatched, the larva consumed the host, and also assimilated all their knowledge and experience.

The Wirrn determined to consume all the sleeping humans on Space Station Nerva, so that in a single generation they would have access to all the accumulated knowledge of the human race.

Some of the humans, however, were roused from their cryogenic sleep and fought back. The leader of the Nerva project, Noah, was himself infected and mutated into a full adult Wirrn. Noah led the Wirrn into the station’s transport ship, where some of the humans were. The humans escaped before the Wirrn arrived, and then shot the transport ship off into space. Noah did not set the stabilisers, and the transport ship exploded. Whether this was a stroke of luck, or whether Noah had managed to retain some vestige of humanity and deliberately neglected to set the stabilisers is not known. But the Wirrn were all destroyed.

Much later than planned, the humans on Space Station Nerva were revived, and returned to their home world. They were not, however, the first humans to return.

The abandoned, deserted Earth had been seen by the Sontarans as an ideal environment in which to assess the human race. The Sontaran war with the Rutans had reached a point where the Sontarans felt they could gain a strategic advantage by occupying Earth’s galaxy. To do this, they would need to drive out the humans. Being methodical, the Sontarans first needed to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their opponents.

Field Major Styre was despatched to Earth. He lured a human ship to the planet using a fake distress signal, then destroyed the ship stranding the crew. One by one, he captured the humans and experimented on them.

Exactly what happened is unclear. But the humans somehow overpowered Styre, who was killed. Without Styre’s report, the Sontarans decided not to risk attacking the humans and they abandoned their plans for the galaxy.

© BBC

Two of the clone race of Sontarans who wanted to occupy Earth’s galaxy.

Alex Fort

Field Major Styre was given the task of assessing the human race’s ability to withstand a Sontaran attack.

Diverse Colonies

Gradually, Earth was repopulated. Then, as its natural resources were once again depleted, the relatively new population was moved to Mars with the help of the Usurians, and then on to Pluto. But the humans managed to break free of the Usurian economic imperialism and returned again to Earth. Meanwhile, the human colonies continued to thrive and humanity spread ever further through the universe.

The diversity of colonies also continued to increase. While some made good use of the latest technology to make the lives of the colonists as easy and pleasant as possible, others favoured a different approach.

Many colonies sought to recreate the atmosphere and ambience of earlier time periods. Sardicktown, for example, was modelled on a Victorian urban environment. Similarly, the small town of Christmas on the planet Trenzalore was modelled on an old farming community.

Of course there were compromises, and not everything could be brought in line with historical reality. On the planet where Sardicktown was established, for example, fish swam in the dense fog that often enveloped the world.

In other cases, there was little choice. The community on the desert world of Frontios in the Veruna system had to make do with what they could salvage from their ship and the local stone. They still used the ship as a major focal point for the colony.

© BBC

Although Earth was eventually repopulated, the human race continued to establish bases and colonies across the universe.

Humans also worked with other life forms with which they formed alliances, working together to terraform worlds so they were suitable for habitation. One race that was especially co-operative in helping terraform planets was the amphibious Hath.

But these alliances were not without their problems. The death of the mission commander from Byzantine fever soon after the colonisation ship arrived on the planet Messaline led to a war between the humans and the Hath as each faction vied for power. The matter was resolved, but only after many deaths on both sides.

Recreation, Entertainment and Servitude

A rather different problem that plagued human settlers in the area close to the planet Azure was that of addictive drugs. The most notorious was XYP, also known as Vraxoin. The drug induced a sort of warm complacency, and then total apathy. Ultimately, it resulted in death.

Whole communities were wiped out by their use of the drug. The problem appeared to be solved when the planet that was the only known source of Vraxoin was incinerated.

But another source of Vraxoin was discovered on planet M37, also known as Eden. The native life form on this planet, the Mandrels, actually decomposed into Vraxoin powder after death. A complicated plan to smuggle Mandrels – and therefore Vraxoin – stored within a Continuous Event Transmuter machine was foiled by the Doctor.

A less dangerous form of entertainment was provided to those in the vicinity of the planet Segonax in the form of the Psychic Circus. Billed as ‘The Greatest Show in the Galaxy’, the circus offered the usual forms of circus entertainment including clowns and a fortune teller.

Inevitably, however, the Psychic Circus went into decline. Audiences dwindled, and even the most stalwart fans had to admit that it was no longer as good as it had been at its peak. Rather than touring the galaxy, the circus became permanently based on Segonax.

While life on the majority of the frontier worlds was undoubtedly tough, it was much easier closer to the centre of the Empire. Life was made easier still by Ood Operations. Owned and run by the influential Halpen family, Ood Operations provided the humanoid Ood as servants. From the Ood-Sphere, where Ood Operations was based, the Ood appeared to be a subservient life form who were more than happy to carry out the wishes of their owners. They existed, it seemed, only to serve others.

Ood were used in all manner of ways – as domestic servants, to perform boring and menial jobs, and even to provide a workforce for space exploration, for example crewing the Sanctuary Bases. The entire Ood contingent on Sanctuary Base 6 was famously lost when the planet on which the base was situated plunged into the black hole it had been orbiting.

But all was not what it seemed with the Ood. At Ood Operations, the creatures were mutilated, their secondary hindbrains removed and replaced with a translator sphere. This process was what made the Ood passive, docile and subservient.

But a creature with a separate forebrain and hindbrain could not survive unless there was a third component in their make-up. The secret guarded by the Halpen family and the executives of Ood Operations for two centuries was that there also existed an enormous Brain which connected all the Ood together in telepathic harmony. But the Halpens discovered the Brain beneath the northern glacier on the Ood-Sphere. They moved the Brain to a huge warehouse, and set up a psychic barrier to break the connection between the Brain and the Ood.

The connection was restored after members of the group Friends of the Ood infiltrated Ood Operations and the psychic barrier was destroyed. The head of Ood Operations, Klineman Halpen, disappeared on the day that the barrier was destroyed, and was never seen again. Although nothing could be done for the Ood who had already had their hindbrains removed, the process was immediately halted and Ood Operations dissolved. The Ood were free once more.

© BBC

The Ood, inhabitants of the Ood-Sphere, seemed to be happy to serve humans in any way they could.

© BBC

Ood Operations was based on the Ood planet, the Ood-Sphere. Established and run by the Halpen family, it was run under a cloak of secrecy.

Harmony with Technology

Many societies, of course, got by without the need for slavery. The union of Traken is a good example of a harmonious, well-adjusted civilisation that did not rely heavily on technology. That said, the secret of Traken’s peaceful existence was in fact based on technology. The technology in question was known as the Source and it provided limitless organising capacity confined to a single flame and obedient to the will of its ‘Keeper’.

The Keeper of Traken was in effect the organising principle of the planet’s civilisation. He or she drew on the minds of the Union in order to rule. Living for hundreds of years, each Keeper drew their power from the Source, dedicating him or herself to this bio-electronic system. The only time that the harmony broke down was when a Keeper was close to death. Then crops failed, there were droughts and floods. Nature itself reverted to chaos as the Keeper’s power waned prior to his ‘dissolution’. It was apparently an agonising death.

With the Union of Traken so harmonised and regulated, any discordant elements could only come from outside. In fact, the Union was visited by evil many times – the Trakenites’ compassion for such poor distorted creatures seemed to draw them like moths to a flame. Sometimes they were redeemed, but usually not.

ROBOPHOBIA

Robots brought problems of their own. As well as the power resources and the running and maintenance requirements, there were psychological problems. Grimwade’s Syndrome – also known colloquially as Robophobia – was an unreasoning dread of robots that affected some people. It seemed to derive from the fact that while robots were humanoid, they gave no human body language signals. Most disconcertingly for sufferers, a robot had no facial expressions.

Although it affected only a small minority of the population, Grimwade’s Syndrome proved extremely traumatic for those who did suffer from it. Many of those affected compared being with robots to being surrounded by a group of walking, talking dead people.

The Trakenites called the evil creatures drawn to them ‘Melkur’, which meant a fly trapped by honey. And these creatures were indeed trapped – all were drawn to a ceremonial garden known simply as the Grove. Here their disruptive influence was limited to, at most, producing a few weeds among the carefully tended plants and flowers in the garden. The less evil Melkurs could speak and even move round the Grove a little. Eventually, the creatures would calcify and pass harmlessly into the soil.

Not everywhere used their technology as peacefully and organically as the Union of Traken. Positronic and robotic technology had advanced to a point where very sophisticated robots could be designed and manufactured. Some societies relied heavily on robots – notably the civilisation on the planet Kaldor.

The people of Kaldor developed a hierarchy of robots. Every robot had a registration number displayed on its chest. The simplest models were called Dums and given a D prefix. These were single-function labour robots designed to carry out simple tasks, and lacked the power of speech. The next level was the Voc-class robot, each with a V prefix. Far more sophisticated, the Voc robot could speak and accept complex commands. It had a level of artificial intelligence. Finally, each robot work group was supervised by a Supervoc – with an SV prefix. The Supervoc coordinated the actions of every other robot, and had a level of artificial intelligence far above that of the Voc. It was capable of making decisions and organising the work of the other robots to achieve whatever was required by its human masters.

Chris J. Lees

The Voc class robot had over a million multi-level constrainers to ensure it could never harm a human.

SPECTROX TOXAEMIA

In its raw form, as deposits left by the bat colonies of Androzani Minor, Spectrox nests resembled fuzzy, sticky balls of cobweb. This raw Spectrox contained a chemical similar to mustard nitrogen, so toxic to humans that it killed within days of skin contact. The condition was known as Spectrox Toxaemia.

Once infected, the first symptom was a rash on the skin which had been in contact with the Spectrox. This was followed shortly afterwards by cramps and spasms. Finally the thoracic spinal nerve was slowly paralysed before thermal death point was reached.

The only known cure for Spectrox Toxaemia was discovered by Professor Jackij. He found that the milk of the Queen Bat could combat the symptoms and led to a complete recovery in an extremely short time. The problem was that the huge Queen Bats went down to the deepest cave levels to die, making the harvesting of their milk extremely hazardous.

Disease and Treatment

Technology was also used for medical gain. Parts of the galaxy were ravaged by war, other parts suffered from famine and plague. Lazar’s Disease was a particular problem. A treatment for the terrible disease, the symptoms of which were not unlike leprosy, was eventually discovered. A company called Terminus Incorporated set up a treatment centre at the precise centre of the known universe in an ancient, abandoned spacecraft which became known as Terminus.

Playing on people’s ignorance and traditional fears of the illness, the company maximised its profits by employing a slave labour force, known as the Vanir, to run Terminus. Conditions were poor, but the company gained a hold over the Vanir by making them drug-dependent – without regular ingestion of hydromel they grew weak and died.

The treatment for Lazar’s Disease consisted of a dosage of radiation. But to begin with it was administered so haphazardly that the cured sufferers were often simply trading one illness for another and might well suffer from radiation sickness in the future. Over time, the treatment was refined, however. This improvement of treatment seems to have coincided with the Vanir breaking free from the Terminus company when they discovered how to synthesise a replacement for hydromel.

Another treatment that gained huge popularity in the Androzani system was one that countered the greatest human failing of all – old age. Heralded as the most valuable substance in the universe, and not without good reason, Spectrox was the key to eternal youth. Just a few drops a day could hold at bay the ravages of time. Spectrox was only found on the planet Androzani Minor, and its entire supply was controlled by the Sirius Conglomerate.

A desert world, the core of Androzani Minor was superheated mud. The planet was riddled with blowholes, like an immense network of caves. When its orbit brought it close to Androzani Major, the gravitational pull of the larger planet caused molten geysers of mud to erupt from deep beneath the surface.

The caves of Androzani Minor were infested with bat colonies, and reptilian carnivores also existed in the planet’s magma, leaving it only to forage for food. Spectrox was a substance deposited by the bat colonies. In unrefined form, however, Spectrox was deadly. As a result, it was collected and taken for refining by androids.

Despite its promise, Spectrox did not allow humans to live for ever. It did stave off the ageing process for a while, but the supply of Spectrox was extremely limited and its costs prohibitive for most. Gradually, the supply was exhausted.

Perhaps energised by the knowledge of how short their lives were in relation to the universe itself, humans continued to spread and colonise. Earth remained at the heart of the Empires right up to the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire that existed around 200,000. Wars came and went, and the human race seemed able to withstand any challenge it faced.

Although the holder’s title changed – from President to Emperor, for example – the rule of the Empire remained vested in one individual. A Senate and other councils advised and had great power, but ultimately decisions were taken by a single person. As the Empire grew, so the task of running it became ever more isolating.

By the time Ludens Nimrod Kendrick the 41st, called Longstaff (perhaps as a joke because of his short stature), became Emperor, he was the ruler of a thousand galaxies. Perhaps because he found the task so lonely and difficult. Ludens would disappear for stretches of time, leaving the Senate to rule.

By this time, Earth had again been all but abandoned. It had also been moved by the Time Lords, who renamed the planet Ravalox in order to cover their tracks. The Time Lords had traced a leak from the Matrix – the sum total of all their knowledge – back to Earth, where the culprits were Andromedans who were awaiting a robotic craft from their own system to collect them. When the Time Lords moved planet Earth and its constellation billions of miles across space, the recovery craft missed Earth, and the Time Lords’ secrets remained safe.

Only when the Doctor discovered the truth after being put on trial by the Time Lords did the High Council agree to rectify the situation. Earth was returned to its original position, and the timelines adjusted so that, in effect, it had never moved at all.

© BBC

images SKARO AND THE DALEK EMPIRE

The Birth of the Daleks

The Daleks were born out of war. For a thousand years, the war between the Thals and the Kaleds ravaged their home planet of Skaro. Quite how or why the war started is shrouded in mystery and lost in the mists of time. There are many myths and legends about the war, but only one real certainty – out of it came the Daleks.

Slowly, the two technologically advanced races degenerated as the war sapped their resources. In the first century of the war, nuclear, biological and chemical weapons were used without constraint. But after about a hundred years, supplies were exhausted and the war continued using more conventional weapons. Even so, damage had been done. Down the generations, imperfections and mutations resulting from the chemical and biological weapons became more common. Both sides abhorred such mutated creatures, named Mutos, and banished them into the wastelands of Skaro.

By the final years of the war, each side was reduced to a single community living within a protective dome. The two domes were separated by miles of devastated wasteland. The Thals poured all their resources into one last missile, with which they hoped to destroy the Kaled dome. For their part, the Kaleds put their faith in a scientific elite, housed in a bunker a short way from their main dome. Here they hoped their best scientists would develop a weapon that would end the war. In a way, they were right.

While the military side of the elite was commanded by the cold-hearted Security Commander Nyder, the scientific elite was headed by a chief scientist named Davros who was in overall charge. Davros soon realised that developing a weapon to end the war was futile. So he turned his attention instead to the survival of the Kaled race. His research convinced him that the cycle of mutation introduced by the use of biological and chemical weapons was irreversible. The Kaleds were mutating, and Davros performed experiments that accelerated that mutation so he could discover what the Kaleds would ultimately become. The result was revolting.

But knowing the Kaleds’ ultimate fate, Davros set about developing a life-support system and travel machine for the creature he knew his race would ultimately become. And he gave it a weapon. The Mark Three Travel Machine was basically a small tank that contained a Kaled mutant. Happy with his design, Davros gave it a new name – the Dalek.

It was at this point that the Doctor arrived on Skaro. Sent by the Time Lords to try to prevent the development of the Dalek, his intervention is seen as the trigger that began the Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks.

Alex Fort

Davros, the Kaled scientist who created the Daleks.

Alex Fort

Davros in his life support system with two of his early Daleks.

THE SCIENTIST

Davros himself was as steeped in war as the planet Skaro was. It is said that as a boy he was lost on a battlefield and found himself trapped in a field of deadly handmines. How he escaped – assuming the story is true – is not recorded. By the time Davros was in charge of all research at the Kaled Bunker, he had suffered greatly. Crippled, Davros was kept alive by a life-support system he designed himself. His vision was provided by a single artificial eye and he had the use of only his right hand. As he was unable to walk, his life support system also served as a motorised wheelchair.

It was this mobile life-support system that Davros made the template for his design of what would become the Dalek.

The Time Lords had foreseen a time in the far future when the Daleks would have destroyed all other life forms and become the dominant creature in the universe. They hoped the Doctor could prevent their creation, or at the very least discover some inherent weakness in the Daleks that would allow the Time Lords to mitigate their later influence.

The Doctor did indeed come close to stopping Davros’s work. He managed to convince the Kaled leaders that they should investigate Davros’s activities. If the Doctor’s story proved true, they promised to halt all work at the Bunker.

But before the Kaled investigation into his work could begin, Davros betrayed his own people, the Kaleds, to their enemies the Thals. He gave the Thals a formula that would make the Kaled Dome brittle, and vulnerable to a strike by their last missile. The Kaled Dome was duly destroyed, and the Kaled race with it. The only survivors were Davros and his associates safe in the Bunker.

With any potential Kaled opposition dealt with, Davros then despatched his new Daleks to the Thals’ Dome. With the Thals celebrating their apparent victory, the Daleks entered almost unimpeded and set about exterminating the Thals. Once they were all but wiped out, the Daleks returned to the Bunker.

But Davros was now facing opposition within his own ranks. A group led by the scientist Gharman objected to the fact that Davros had not allowed the genetic mutation of the Kaleds to follow its natural path. Davros had introduced genetic changes – improvements, as he saw it – to the creatures. He had removed their conscience, their pity, their feeling, creating a ruthless power for evil. Davros was every bit as merciless dealing with this opposition as he had been with the Kaled Council and the Thals: having drawn his opponents out into the open, he had the returning Daleks exterminate them all.

© BBC

A Dalek casing open to reveal the mutant Dalek creature inside.

© BBC

A Dalek prepares to operate a transmat station.

For all his brilliance, however, Davros had miscalculated. He had genetically programmed his Daleks to believe that all other creatures were inferior and to be destroyed. The Daleks followed this implanted instinct to its logical conclusion – and Davros was not a Dalek. As the Doctor and the surviving Thals watched on a security monitor, the Daleks exterminated the last of the Kaled Elite who had remained loyal to Davros. Then they turned their weapons on their creator himself and Davros too was gunned down.

As we shall see, Davros was not actually killed. But neither was the Doctor able to prevent the creation of the Daleks. His destruction of the incubator chamber where Davros was creating more Dalek creatures and the fact that the surviving Thals managed to blow up the entrance to the Bunker trapping the Daleks inside may have slowed their progress. There again, as the Doctor himself pointed out, the very existence of the Daleks would later force other worlds and life forms into alliances where they might otherwise have waged war on each other. Even with a creature as ruthless and evil as the Daleks, things are never entirely clear cut.

Empire and Civil War

Eventually, the Daleks emerged from the Kaled bunker. They built a huge city on the surface of Skaro, and for a while it seems they adapted their casings to draw power direct from the city’s metal floors. It seems likely that this was a more efficient method of supplying the static electricity they used to power their casings than the original casings employed. But whatever the reason, it left them vulnerable to an attack by the surviving Thals.

As ever, though, the Daleks survived the loss of their power systems. They developed space flight and set out to conquer the universe, just as their creator Davros had intended. As the Dalek empire expanded, Skaro remained at the heart of that empire – up until the Dalek civil war.

The civil war was a result of a miscalculation, and perhaps not surprisingly it was provoked by the Doctor. From his Throne Room in the Dalek City on Skaro, the Dalek Emperor devised a plan to deal with the human race which had so far failed to submit to the Daleks. The plan involved trapping the Doctor and forcing him to distil the Human Factor from one of his companions. The Doctor would believe that the Daleks wanted the Human Factor to enhance themselves and become even stronger, gaining all the advantages of humanity in addition to their own nature. But this was not in fact the Emperor Dalek’s plan.

The Daleks tracked the Doctor to Earth in the 1960s. Here they compelled scientist Edward Waterfield to trap the Doctor and bring him back to Waterfield’s own time – a hundred years earlier. Waterfield and his colleague Theodore Maxtible had inadvertently given the Daleks access to this time zone through their own experiments with mirrors and static electricity as they tried to create a time machine. Maxtible willingly helped the Daleks, in return for the promise of the secret of alchemy. Waterfield, though, was coerced, his daughter Victoria held prisoner by the Daleks in order to ensure his cooperation.

Richard Hardy

A Dalek fleet besieges a space station.

With Waterfield’s daughter’s life at stake, as well as everyone else’s, the Doctor agreed to run an experiment on his companion Jamie Macrimmon and produce the Human Factor. This he introduced into three test Daleks. The test Daleks became, in effect, children – playing trains with the Doctor.

When he was taken to the Emperor on Skaro, the Doctor discovered the real reason for his enforced experiments. The Daleks did not want the Human Factor at all – they wanted the Dalek Factor. The production of the Human Factor showed them what the Dalek Factor was, and they now planned to introduce that into the human race. Once infected with it himself, and turned mentally into a Dalek, the Doctor would use his TARDIS to spread the Dalek Factor throughout the entire history of Earth.

Alex Fort

Dalek cones litter the ground after they encounter unexpected resistance.

Alex Fort

Ruthless conquerors intent on exterminating all other life forms, Dalek armies attack mercilessly.

Not being human, the Doctor was unaffected by the Dalek Factor. Pretending to have been converted, he adapted the equipment so a number of Daleks were instead given the Human Factor. These Daleks then began to question what they were doing and the authority of the Emperor. Daleks loyal to the Emperor were ordered to destroy the renegade Daleks, and civil war ensued. The battle even spread to the Throne Room, and the Emperor was badly damaged while the Doctor – together with Jamie and Victoria Waterfield – managed to escape in the Doctor’s TARDIS.

The Movellan War

As well as the human race, several other life forms proved difficult for the Daleks to conquer. The most notable of these were the robotic Movellans.

The battle computers on both sides were so evenly matched that the war was more of a stalemate. Each side manoeuvred to try to gain an advantage, while the other side anticipated those moves and countered them. Each battle fleet waited until it had the advantage before launching an attack. And the advantage never came.

Each side looked for ways to break the stalemate. The Daleks returned to Skaro, which they had long since abandoned. They knew that buried deep in the ruins of their old city, not dead but in a state of suspended animation, was Davros. If anyone could give them an advantage in the war, it was their own creator.

© BBC

Despite having left their creator for dead, the Daleks returned to recover and resurrect Davros to help with their war against the robotic Movellans.

THE MOVELLANS

A race of humanoid robots from the star system 4-X Alpha-4, the origin of the Movellans is unknown. Presumably, they must have been created originally by another race, but by whom and for what purpose has never been discovered. Whether that race died out, or the Movellans rebelled and became independent automatons is also unknown.

Faced with an attack by the Daleks, the Movellans fought back. Tremendously strong and resilient, a Movellan could recover from the blast of a Dalek weapon. Dysfunction – in effect death – only occurred in a Movellan when it suffered from massive circuitry disturbance.

Their power packs and controlling circuits were in cylinders held on their belts. This was a weak point: a Movellan could be disabled simply by removing this cylinder. High frequency sound could also disrupt a Movellan’s function.

Using slave labour, the Daleks managed to dig down to the deepest level of their ruined city and retrieve Davros. But they did not manage to get away from Skaro. A group of Movellans followed the Daleks to Skaro. The Daleks’ slave workers rebelled and destroyed first the Movellans and then the Daleks themselves. Davros was cryogenically frozen and taken back to Earth on the captured Movellan ship as a prisoner.

Despite the Daleks’ efforts, it was the Movellans who eventually broke the stalemate. They developed a virus that attacked the Dalek creatures inside their casings. The Dalek fleet was all but destroyed. The surviving Daleks fled to different parts of the universe to escape the infection and to work on a cure.

One group of Daleks, led by the Dalek Supreme, decided that once again Davros could help them. They attacked the prison station where Davros was held, planning to free him so he could develop a cure for the virus. But the Daleks had another plan too, one that would deal with another enemy of the Daleks – the Time Lords.

At the same time as they attacked the prison station, the Daleks established a time corridor that linked their ship back to late twentieth-century Earth. They managed to trap the Doctor’s TARDIS inside the time corridor. With duplicates of the Doctor and his companions already prepared, they planned to send these in the Doctor’s TARDIS to Gallifrey to assassinate the High Council of the Time Lords.

While the Daleks did indeed manage to capture the Doctor, they had underestimated Davros’s ambitions and the lengths he would go to in order to take charge. Rather than submit to the will of the Dalek Supreme. Davros managed to convert several Daleks to obey him directly. He then released the Movellan virus, samples of which he had been give so as to develop a cure. However, Davros’s plans to engineer a new race of Daleks that would obey him suffered a severe setback as the prison station’s self-destruct systems were activated. Davros just managed to get away in an escape pod, but both the space station and the Dalek ship were destroyed in the resulting explosion.

Exactly where Davros’s escape pod made planetfall is not known. Possibly it was picked up by a passing spaceship. But eventually Davros arrived on the planet Necros, home of the Tranquil Repose facility. Here he quickly established himself as the Great Healer, in charge of all operations at Tranquil Repose.

Davros wasted no time is making use of the raw materials available to him at Tranquil Repose – the bodies of the dead and the cryogenically frozen. Some he processed to turn into a food product. Working with the unscrupulous industrialist Kara, Davros’s product helped to eliminate famine in that part of the galaxy.

Davros’s deal with Kara provided funding for his real work. Davros genetically mutated other cryogenically frozen sleepers to create a new race of Daleks. Utterly loyal to Davros, these Daleks provided security at Tranquil Repose. Ultimately, Davros planned to create enough of them to form an army.

TRANQUIL REPOSE

Tranquil Repose was a cemetery combined with a facility where the terminally ill, amongst others, could be cryogenically frozen until a later date – for example when a cure for their ailment was discovered. While suspended, ‘customers’ were updated on economic, social and political development. A local DJ provided a ‘personalised entertainment system’. Blue was the official colour of mourning, and women’s legs were to be covered at all times.

Although a strong concept in theory, in practice, nobody wanted the cryogenically suspended people back – in many cases they would have been in conflict with those currently in power. Also, the galaxy could barely support the current population.

© BBC

Davros posed as ‘the Great Healer’on Tranquil Repose to obscure his attempts to create a new Dalek army.

Before that could happen, however, Davros was betrayed. Takis and Lilt, two of the senior workers at Tranquil Repose, contacted the Supreme Dalek, who sent a taskforce to Necros to capture Davros. At the same time, Kara also turned on her ally, employing an assassin named Orcini, a former Knight of the Grand Order of Oberon, to kill Davros.

The Supreme Dalek’s taskforce captured Davros before Orcini could kill him. But the bomb brought into Tranquil Repose by Orcini destroyed the complex. Takis and Lilt subsequently turned Tranquil Repose into a farm to harvest a high-protein weed plant, Herba Baculum Vitae, that grew in abundance on Necros. Davros was taken back to Skaro to stand trial for his crimes against the Daleks.

Imperial and Renegade Dalek Factions

As usual, Davros managed to turn things to his advantage. He gained control of a group of Daleks. He named them the Imperial Daleks, with himself as their Emperor, housed in a new casing that concealed his features inside a large spherical head. The Daleks that remained loyal to the Dalek Supreme, Davros dubbed ‘renegades’.

The two factions came into direct conflict when they both sent forces back in time to Earth in the early 1960s. Here, as we have already discussed, they had located the so-called Hand of Omega – a remote stellar manipulator used by the Gallifreyan Omega to explode stars in order to create a source of power. The Daleks realised that it could also be used as a formidable weapon.

The Imperial Daleks under Davros managed to get the Hand of Omega and, despite warnings from the Doctor, Davros deployed the stellar manipulator. But the Doctor had already programmed the device: when it reached the Daleks’ native time zone, it entered Skaro’s system and turned Skaro’s sun into a supernova. The feedback from the explosion destroyed the Imperial Dalek Mothership in orbit above 1960s Earth. Once again, Davros survived, managing to get to an escape pod before the explosion.

When Skaro’s sun exploded, the planet Skaro was vaporised. Or so it seemed. Yet Skaro somehow survived, and the Doctor even met Davros in the Dalek City on Skaro when Davros claimed to be close to death. This was, however, a ruse to try to get the Doctor to infuse the Daleks with Time Lord regeneration energy.

There are various theories about Skaro’s survival. Some say that Skaro was in fact never destroyed at all. According to this theory, the Daleks discovered the future fate of their planet, and created an alternative Skaro, terraforming the planet Antalin and adjusting its star system so it appeared exactly like Skaro. It was this star system and Antalin that were destroyed by the Hand of Omega, and not Skaro.

© BBC

The Daleks have been described as the most technically-advanced and ruthless life form in the cosmos.

© BBC

Dalek Sec, the leader of the Cult of Skaro, turned himself into a human-Dalek hybrid.

Another theory is that Skaro was indeed destroyed, and the Daleks adopted another planet as their home world. They renamed this planet Skaro, and built another great Dalek City on its surface. This would explain why, when the Doctor was taken to see Davros, along with his companion Clara Oswald and the Master in her female regeneration as ‘Missy’, there was no sign of the petrified jungle or the Lake of Mutations that once existed close to the City.

A third theory suggests that the Daleks manipulated the timelines so that, although Skaro was destroyed by the Hand of Omega, they were able to reconstitute it. In effect, the destruction of Skaro was erased from time itself.

Whatever actually happened, it seems that Skaro – or a version of Skaro – survived until the devastation wrought by the Last Great Time War.

THE CULT OF SKARO

The Cult of Skaro was thought to be a myth – a legend, built up during theTime War between the Daleks and the Time Lords. It was rumoured that at some point the Dalek Emperor had established a secret order of Daleks, whose task was to think the unthinkable – to dare to imagine.

But the Cult of Skaro was very real. More important even than the Emperor, the Cult of Skaro was made up of four Daleks who tried to think like the enemy, to get inside enemy minds and predict their strategies so as to give the Daleks an advantage in their wars. These Daleks even had names: Sec, Thay, Jast and Caan. It was all part of becoming enough like the enemy to predict and counter their actions.

When the Daleks realised that they could not defeat the Time Lords without being totally destroyed themselves, the Cult of Skaro devised a Void ship to hide in the space between universes, waiting for the war to end.

images THE DALEK WARS

Early Incursions

The first encounters between humanity and the Daleks – two races that would later wage galactic war against each other – were relatively inconsequential. They also involved the Doctor.

As we have mentioned before, the first recorded incident involving Daleks on Earth was in about 2500 BC in ancient Egypt, during the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza. A Dalek time ship followed the Doctor to this time and place. The Doctor had stolen the taranium core of the Daleks’ Time Destructor, a powerful weapon with which they planned to conquer the galaxy.

While searching for the Doctor, the Dalek force was attacked by the Egyptians. No Daleks were destroyed, or even badly damaged, in the attack although the Egyptians suffered many casualties. The Doctor managed to elude the Daleks in the confusion. Once they realised their prey had escaped, the Daleks returned to their vessel and followed.

A similar event took place in 1872 on board a ship off the Azores. The Doctor arrived, with a Dalek time ship close behind. While, again, the Doctor was able to escape from the Daleks, the crew of the ship was less fortunate. Scared out of their wits by the alien creatures, they abandoned ship. The fate of those on board the Mary Celeste has baffled human historians ever since.

A few years before this, in 1866, the Daleks coerced the Doctor into distilling the Human Factor for them. It was not until the 1930s that the Daleks again established a presence on Earth, this time in the city of New York. Escaping from the Battle of Canary Wharf (which is described below), the four Daleks that made up the Cult of Skaro timeshifted back to this time and place.

Seeking to perpetuate the Dalek race, which had been all but wiped out in the Time War, the Cult of Skaro experimented with the creation of new Daleks. When this failed, they changed their plans, opting instead to convert people into ‘human Daleks’. The plan was not dissimilar to the Emperor’s attempt to spread the Dalek Factor through Earth’s history. But again, it failed and the human spirit proved indomitable.

Even Dalek Sec, the leader of the Cult of Skaro, suffered – if that is the right word – from human traits when the Dalek creature was fused with a human being. The Cult of Skaro was destroyed, only Dalek Caan managing to escape.

Attacks in Force

The Battle of Canary Wharf took place in the early twenty-first century in London. A fissure was created, opening a pathway through the Void between universes to the Earth. The Torchwood Institute experimented with the fissure, opening the Void deliberately and allowing ‘ghosts’ to come through. These ghosts were in fact Cybermen from a parallel version of Earth. At first the Cybermen were insubstantial, not fully formed in this universe. But eventually they came through fully, and in force.

}

© BBC

© BBC

The Cult of Skaro set up a base beneath the Empire State Building in New York. Here they experimented with converting people into ‘human Daleks’.

The Void Ship in which the Cult of Skaro had hidden from the Time War also came through. Although the Cybermen proposed an alliance with the Daleks, the Cult of Skaro set about destroying the Cybermen, seeing this as nothing more than ‘pest control’. The Daleks also brought with them a container called the Genesis Ark.

The Cult of Skaro opened the Genesis Ark in the skies above the area known as Canary Wharf in London. Millions of Daleks poured out, ready to exterminate the Cybermen and conquer the Earth. But the Doctor managed to reopen the Void, and everything tainted with Void matter – everything that had passed through the Void – was sucked back into it. This included all the Daleks and Cybermen.

Only the four Daleks of the Cult of Skaro escaped. They managed to effect an emergency temporal shift before being pulled into the Void again. As we have seen, they ended up in New York in the early 1930s.

THE GENESIS ARK

During the Time War the Time Lords took many Daleks prisoner, locking them all in a huge prison. But the Time Lords knew how to fit enormous spaces into tiny containers – using the same dimensional engineering as for their TARDIS Time Capsules. So the huge prison complex was all contained inside a large casket.

The Daleks captured the prison casket, and the Cult of Skaro took it with them when they hid in the Void between universes. They called it the Genesis Ark because it was their future, their survival – a vast army of Daleks waiting to emerge once the war was over.

Earth was not yet safe from the Daleks. Just a few years later, a force of Daleks led by the Dalek Supreme and Davros stole the whole planet. A Dalek force occupied Earth, and transported the planet across space to the furthest reaches of the Medusa Cascade, along with 26 other planets.

Within their flagship, the Crucible, the Daleks had prepared their most powerful weapon ever: the Reality Bomb. This was powered by the exact configuration of the 27 stolen planets, linked together in a huge web generating tremendous energy. This energy could then be directed from the Medusa Cascade across the entire universe to cancel out the electrical field that binds all matter together. As a result, structure would fall apart – everything would turn to dust which would become atoms, which would then become . . . nothing.

Alex Fort

Daleks and Cybermen did battle on the streets of London in what became known as the Battle of Canary Wharf.

Although the Daleks tested a small version of their Reality Bomb, they never got to use the full device. The Doctor managed to track down Earth, and destroyed the Crucible. Although Davros somehow survived, the Daleks were destroyed. The Doctor returned Earth to its proper position in space. But the planet was still not safe from Dalek attack.

© BBC

The Genesis Ark was a dimensionally transcendental Time Lord prison stolen by the Daleks, which contained thousands of Dalek prisoners.

© BBC

There have been many different incarnations of the high-ranking Dalek Supreme over the years.

}

© BBC

© BBC

The interior of a Dalek spaceship.

Dalek Invasions of Earth

Around 2157, Earth was bombarded with meteorites. The scientists called it a ‘cosmic storm’ and it was assumed to be a natural phenomenon. But then people began to die of a new plague. Whole continents of people were wiped out, including Asia, South America and Africa. They used to say Earth had a smell of death about it. About six months after the meteorite fall, the Daleks arrived in force, their spaceships landing all across the world.

The plague had split the world into tiny communities, too far apart to combine and fight, and too small individually to stand any chance against invasion. Some cities were razed to the ground, others were simply occupied. Anyone who resisted was destroyed. Huge numbers of human beings were captured and shipped to the vast mining areas, the largest of which was in Bedfordshire in England. Other people were captured and turned into Robomen.

Various rebel groups were established to oppose the Daleks – notably in London. But for the most part they had little impact on Dalek operations.

The reason for the Dalek invasion was something they termed ‘Project Degravitate’. The Daleks planned to drill through the Earth’s crust and blow out the planet’s core with a penetration explosive capsule. They would then install a guidance system so as to pilot the Earth like a giant spaceship.

Earth was occupied for the best part of ten years. But as the Daleks’ plans neared their conclusion and they deployed the penetration explosive, the Doctor again intervened. The relatively small Dalek force left on Earth to oversee the culmination of Project Degravitate was destroyed. Earth was free.

ROBOMEN

Because there were relatively few Daleks left on Earth after the initial invasion, the Daleks operated on some prisoners and turned them into living robots – Robomen.

The transfer operation, as it was called, enabled the Daleks to control the human brain, at least fora time. After a while, the conditioning broke down and the Robomen went insane and suicidal. They would smash their heads against walls, or throw themselves off buildings or into the river.

But it was also still under Dalek control – at least in one alternative timeline. The Daleks managed to make use of a temporal paradox and in effect invaded Earth again. In this timeline, towards the end of the twentieth century, a series of wars broke out. There was a hundred years of nothing but killing and destruction. Seven-eighths of the world’s population was wiped out; the rest were starving and reduced almost to the level of animals. This was when the Daleks invaded, meeting almost no opposition.

Chris J. Lees

A Dalek and a Roboman patrol the streets of ruined London after the Dalek invasion of Earth in the twenty-second century.

In this timeline, it was believed that in the late twentieth century the diplomat Sir Reginald Styles had pretended to be working for world peace but just wanted power for himself. Styles managed to lure the world leaders to Auderly, a remote country house, for peace talks and he claimed that they needed absolute quiet if the meeting was to succeed. But the house was destroyed in an explosion – killing the assembled world leaders, as well as Styles himself. It was assumed that Styles had mis-set the timer on a bomb. Accusations and recriminations quickly led to the wars that devastated the planet.

© BBC

The distinctive bronze design adopted by the Daleks during their Great Time War against the Time Lords of Gallifrey.

Once they had invaded, the Daleks turned the Earth into a factory run as a giant labour camp. The Dalek empire was continually expanding and needed a constant flow of raw materials to sustain it. The factories on Earth were run with typical Dalek ruthlessness. If production figures dropped, then the targets for the next work period were raised. As a result of being pushed harder, the more inefficient workers – the ones slowing down production – would die.

Dalek-occupied Earth was this time policed not by Robomen, but by Ogrons. These apelike humanoid creatures were a form of higher anthropoid that lived in scattered communities on one of the outer planets of the galaxy. They were also later used by the Master to try to provoke war between the empires of Earth and Draconia.

Again, there were rebels working against the Daleks. Knowing – or so they thought – how the wars that led to the Dalek invasion had started, the rebels planned to use stolen Dalek time technology to go back in time and change history. They planned to kill Sir Reginald Styles before he could destroy the peace conference. But in doing so, they were trapped within the temporal paradox, becoming part of history themselves.

It was the Doctor, then exiled to Earth and working for UNIT, who realised that it was not Styles who blew up Auderly House and the assembled peace delegates. It was the rebel fighters trying to assassinate Styles. It was not Styles who caused the explosion and started the wars that enabled the Daleks to invade; it was the rebel fighters trying to prevent those wars.

Once he had realised the truth, the Doctor was able to avert disaster. The house was indeed destroyed, but only after the peace conference delegates had been evacuated. The only casualties were the rebel who set off the bomb and a force of Daleks and Ogrons that had travelled back in time to try to ensure their version of history was not changed.

Away From Earth

As the human race ventured out into space and began to establish its own empire, the Daleks’view of humanity changed. Whereas before Earth had been a strategically placed planet rich in natural resources that could be plundered, now the humans represented a potential threat to the Daleks’ own empire.

As Earth’s empire expanded, so the humans became involved in interplanetary and inter-empire wars such as the war against Draconia. As we have seen, the Daleks, sensing an opportunity, used the Master and the Ogrons to try to provoke renewed conflict between Earth and Draconia. With both sides weakened by war, a Dalek invasion would be easier.

But, even though the Master’s attempts failed, this was only a part of the Dalek plan. On the planet Spiridon, the Daleks had assembled a vast army. The Daleks had come to Spiridon initially because of the native intelligent life form – the Spiridons. These creatures were naturally invisible, and the Daleks wanted to discover how this was possible. An army of invisible Daleks would be even more effective.

© BBC

Three Daleks at the controls of their ship.

The Daleks’ scientific group discovered that the Spiridons emitted an anti-reflecting light wave. The Daleks managed to replicate this, but it required vast amounts of power, meaning that a Dalek could not stay invisible for long. Too long, and the Dalek suffered from lightwave sickness and deactivated.

Located in the Ninth System, Spiridon had a climate that changed from tropical in the day to sub-freezing at night. The core of the planet was a mass of ice in a form that never froze hard. Sometimes the pressure would build up and the ice erupted like a volcano, molten ice spraying out over the jungle that covered much of the planet. This provided something else that the Daleks wanted – cold.

The Daleks were susceptible to extremely cold temperatures, which slowed their mechanical reflexes. They hardly functioned at all at sub-zero temperatures. With the addition of a massive neutron-powered refrigeration unit, big enough to freeze an ocean, the Daleks were able to control the temperature in a huge system of caverns beneath the surface of the planet. Here they stored their army – ten thousand Daleks kept in suspended animation until they were needed.

But a group of the Daleks’ ancient enemies the Thals had followed them to Spiridon. They believed there were only about a dozen Daleks on the planet. It was not until after the Doctor arrived – following a Dalek ship from a meeting between the Daleks and the Master on the Ogron home world – that the Thais discovered the truth. Together with the Doctor, the Thais managed to infiltrate Dalek headquarters. Here they made their way to the ice caverns and managed to trigger an eruption of the ice volcano. The Dalek army was buried.

Of course, the Daleks did eventually manage to melt the ice away and free their army. But it took centuries, setting their plans back by hundreds of years.

Clash of Empires

As both Earth’s Empire and the area of the universe controlled by the Daleks expanded, inevitably the two races came into contact. But for a while these were isolated and peripheral encounters. For example, the human colonists on the planet Vulcan found a Dalek spaceship that had been buried in a mercury swamp on the planet for over two hundred years. Isolated from Earth, with just the occasional visit from an official Examiner, the colonists had no idea what the dormant Daleks they found inside the capsule were.

© BBC

A fleet of distinctively-shaped Dalek saucers in space.

Chris J. Lees

A production line produces Dalek casings. The mutant Dalek creatures will be inserted into the casings once they are complete.

© BBC

Two Daleks supervise the creation of a new Dalek Paradigm from a Progenitor Device.

The colony’s chief scientist, Lesterson, revived the Daleks. Intending to use them as servants to perform menial jobs around the colony, Lesterson had already seen the effectiveness of their weapons so the Daleks were disarmed. Needing power for themselves and their ship, the Daleks pretended to be servile and cooperative. On the pretext of setting up a new power supply for the colony, they established a static electrical system they could use. But rebels hoping to usurp the colony’s Governor saw the Daleks as potential allies if they were re-armed.

The Daleks, of course, intended to exterminate all the humans and were content to let the two opposing factions fight each other. Hidden inside their capsule, the Daleks had set up a production line system that produced many more Daleks – all waiting to emerge and exterminate the colonists. They were only prevented from exterminating everyone when their power system was overloaded.

As the two empires expanded, conflict would have been likely even without the Daleks’ aggressive nature. In the centuries before 4000 AD, the Daleks gained control of over seventy planets in the Ninth Galactic System and forty more in the constellation of Miros. This was far from Earth, but the Daleks were getting closer, and they were already planning for the conflict ahead.

Earth was also making plans. The Space Security Service (SSS) was established, partly to be ready to counter any Dalek incursions. When the Daleks prepared to put their master plan into operation, it was the SSS who were on Earth’s front line.

The Daleks established a base of operations on the remote planet of Kembel. Here they met with potential allies. Not naturally ones to make alliances, the Daleks fully intended to betray their allies once their work was done. But for the moment they suggested an alliance against the Earth Empire. Those attending included Zephon, Master of the Fifth Galaxy; the Masters of Celation and Beaus; Trantis, the representative of the largest of the outer galaxies; and delegates from Malpha, Gearon, Sentreal and Warrien.

The Daleks’ most valued ally was Mavic Chen – the Guardian of the Solar System and the most powerful politician in Earth’s Empire. Not content merely to rule the Solar System and Earth’s growing Empire, Chen planned to betray the Daleks and take overall control at the first opportunity. He had a fleet of Earth security vessels ready to seize control of Kembel. With him he brought a full emm of taranium, which could only be found on the planet Uranus and took fifty years to mine.

The taranium was to form the core of the Daleks’ new weapon – a Time Destructor. Once they had it working, the Daleks planned to dissolve the alliance, exterminating Chen and the other delegates. But before they could use the device, the taranium core was stolen by the Doctor. Working first with SSS agent Bret Vyon and later with Vyon’s sister, agent Sara Kingdom, the Doctor was pursued through time and space by the Daleks.

The Daleks eventually recovered the core of the device. They then exterminated Mavic Chen. But once the Time Destructor was assembled, the Doctor managed to get control of the weapon and activated it – destroying the Daleks by regressing them through their evolutionary cycle to embryonic form, their casings rotting away to dust.

All-Out War

Even without their Time Destructor, the Daleks attacked. Many of the races that the Daleks had included in their initial alliance on Kembel now sided with the Earth forces against the Daleks, having been betrayed.

The war lasted for decades and spanned whole galaxies. For the most part, Earth and her allies held the Daleks at bay. But the Daleks did at one point manage to penetrate the Solar System. Luckily for the human race, they were beaten back.

A Dalek attack on Venus was halted by a fleet of war rockets from the planet Hyperon. The rockets were made of a material that was resistant to Dalek firepower, and the Dalek force was destroyed. On Mars the Daleks were defeated by a virus that attacked the insulation on cables in their electrical systems. It has been speculated that this virus might be related to the virus deployed by the Movellans, but it actually seems to have been quite different in its effect on the Daleks. The Dalek force was driven back, although the Daleks soon developed an antidote to the virus.

While the war was fought on a galactic scale, there were smaller areas of conflict as the Daleks targeted Earth’s outlying colonies and dominions. As well as the SSS and Earth’s main forces and allies, smaller resistance groups appeared in the so-called Frontier Worlds and other areas. The Combined Galactic Resistance, for instance, operating from its flagship Aristotle commanded by Colonel Morgan Blue, engaged the Daleks and drove them out of the Hermenides Cluster.

The war did not so much end as peter out. Neither side won a convincing overall victory, but Earth did manage to defend and protect most of its colonies.

With the threat of the Daleks diminished if not actually gone, the human race hoped to have some time to regroup and rebuild. But a few years later, many of the outer colony planets were ravaged by a plague. It has been suggested that the plague was actually a biological weapon deployed by the Daleks. This is possible, although it seems that many of the planets the Daleks themselves had colonised were also affected.

© BBC

The burned-out remains of two destroyed Daleks.

Alex Fort

Daleks blast down the primitive natives of the planet Exxilon.

A cure for the plague was discovered in the form of a chemical called parrinium. Not only could it cure the disease, but it also provided immunity. Found in minute quantities on Earth, parrinium was extremely rare. Satellites and probes were therefore sent out to try to track down a more abundant source of parrinium. The remote planet Exxilon proved to be a rich source.

The Marine Space Corps mission sent to Exxilon immediately ran into trouble. Their ship lost all power on arrival, and the crew was attacked by the primitive inhabitants of the planet. Soon afterwards, a force of Daleks arrived, also after parrinium. But luckily for the MSC mission, the Daleks also suffered from the power loss. The Daleks’ weapons proved to be useless.

Humans and Daleks formed an uneasy alliance. Before long, the Daleks had equipped themselves with relatively simple percussion weapons. They then forced the Exxilons to mine for parrinium. As work continued, it became clear that the Daleks wanted the parrinium not to treat those suffering on the planets they had colonised, but to blackmail Earth and the other space powers into acceding to Dalek demands.

The Daleks managed to trace the power loss to the beacon on top of a huge ancient city. This drained all power from the atmosphere to power the city itself, which was almost sentient its computer systems were so advanced. With the beacon destroyed, the Daleks’ power was restored and they left with the parrinium, planning to infect Exxilon with plague fired back on to the surface in a missile. This would destroy all life on Exxilon – including the MSC team – and make further landings on the planet impossible.

But the MSC team managed to destroy the Dalek ship using one of the bombs the Daleks thought had been used to destroy the city’s beacon. With power to their own ship now restored, the humans were able to return to Earth space with enough parrinium to halt the plague.

There were further Dalek Wars, but the status quo remained largely the same. Eventually, the Daleks became preoccupied with their Time War against the Time Lords, and disappeared from the areas of space controlled by Earth.

The only Dalek incursion of note after this was when a fleet of Dalek ships unexpectedly appeared to attack the Game Station. This was a large satellite – formerly known as Satellite Five – which provided entertainment broadcasts for planet Earth. The Daleks attacked both Earth and the Game Station. But as suddenly and unexpectedly as they had appeared, the Daleks and their ships vanished again. Exactly what happened is not clear, but a spectral analysis of the area of space where the Dalek ships had been suggests they were disintegrated by some tremendously powerful force.

© BBC

Satellite Five, later renamed the Game Station, in orbit around Earth.

The Time War, as we shall see, took a huge toll on the Daleks and their forces. But they did survive. And so long as the Daleks survive, they remain a threat to every other life form in the universe.

© BBC

Daleks from different time zones were sent to the Dalek Asylum planet when they malfunctioned or went mad.

Alex Fort

Another scene of devastation, as Daleks attack during the Dalek Wars.

© BBC

images THE LAST GREAT TIME WAR

The most brutal and all-consuming conflict ever to blight the universe, much of the history of the Last Great Time War is shrouded in mystery, time-locked and inaccessible.

Indeed, given the temporal nature of the war, it is now near impossible to map the unfolding events into a chronology that makes logical sense, even to a Time Lord. With so much of history itself being overwritten during the long years of battle – with opposing sides each undoing the actions of the other ad infinitum – it is difficult even to ascertain accurately which events even happened, at least in terms of the resulting timeline of the universe.

Initially stemming from a rivalry between the two most powerful races in the universe – the Time Lords of Gallifrey and the Daleks of Skaro – the war soon boiled out of control, raging through the universe, causing collateral damage to entire species and destroying whole epochs of time. The entire history of the universe was rent apart and remade as battle raged, vast fleets engaging in all out conflict, or enemy agents infiltrating and rewriting key moments in the enemy’s timelines.

© BBC

The Last Great Time War devastated planets and civilisations across all of time and space.

The Time Lords had long prophesised a looming conflict in their future, one that would result in their own eventual demise at the hands of a mysterious enemy, and in attempting to avert this coming catastrophe, may have unwittingly been the ones to ignite the war in the first instance.

Seeing the emergence of the warlike Dalek race as a potential threat to both themselves and the wider universe, the Time Lords despatched the Doctor on a mission to the Dalek home planet of Skaro, with the remit to avert the development of the Dalek race, or to find a means to minimise their aggressive tendencies or exploit any inherent weaknesses. The result of the Doctor’s interference was to set Dalek evolution back over a thousand years – but not enough to seriously hinder them.

This was, of course, taken as an act of aggression by the fledgling Dalek race and, as they re-established themselves and grew in power, they came to see the Time Lords as a key enemy, and sought revenge. Indeed, far from minimising the Daleks’ inherent hate and tendency toward aggression, the Time Lords had inadvertently fostered it.

The Daleks responded by launching a series of attempts to destabilise the Time Lords, culminating in a move to infiltrate the High Council of Gallifrey with Dalek proxies and, when this failed, they finally declared all-out hostilities.

Events escalated – the first conflicts saw the Time Lords deploying fleets of Battle TARDISes, N-Forms and ancient Bowships (last used during their war against the Great Vampires) against vast flotillas of invading Dalek saucers. But as the Time Lords combated these brief incursions in ever more inventive ways, the Daleks also adapted their strategies.

The Dalek fleet numbered over ten million saucers, and as the war spread over many temporal fronts – each race attempting to impede the development of the other, or seed new colonies from which to grow armies into future epochs – the universe began to crumble. It was pulled apart at the seams as its very origins were rewritten. The Daleks even plundered alternative timelines to swell their ranks, and experimented on Kaleds from other versions of Skaro to generate new, twisted Dalek forms, which later became known as the Skaro Degradations, strange, shambling war machines that were nevertheless pressed into service for the Dalek cause.

Great heroes rose and fell. The Time Lords resurrected Rassilon, the father of Time Lord society and their inaugural President, in order to return him to his position as their leader. Rassilon’s ideology was brutal and outdated, and perfectly suited the needs of the Time Lords as they faced the greatest conflict their race had ever known. The Master, too, was returned to life to lead an army of Time Lords into battle, but seeing his impending defeat during an encounter with the Dalek Emperor at the Cruciform, he fled to the very end of the universe, disguising himself as a human to avoid detection.

© BBC

A Dalek Attack Ship of the type used in the later stages of the Great Time War

© BBC

Arcadia – the second city of Gallifrey, seen here in its prime.

Davros, the creator of the Daleks, died during the very first year of the war, as his command ship flew into the jaws of the Nightmare Child. The Doctor, refusing to engage in the fighting, attempted to save Davros, but was unable to pluck him from certain death. The Dalek Emperor continued to lead the war effort on behalf of the Dalek race, assisted by the Eternity Circle, a council of Daleks designed to strategise new, unpredictable tactics and weapons. One of their plans – which ultimately failed – involved the capture of the Doctor, whom they intended to encase in a Dalek shell so that they might refashion him into the ‘Predator Dalek’, to lead them towards victory.

In the early stages of the war, the Doctor thought only to help those in need, to assist the casualties of war and to prevent as much collateral damage as possible. It was only as the war progressed, and both the Time Lords and Daleks began to employ ever more severe and brutal measures, that the need for the Doctor’s involvement in the war became apparent to him.

Attempting to save a young woman whose ship was fixed upon a crash course toward the planet Karn, the Doctor truly learned how far the war had pushed the other races of the universe – the woman refused to be saved by a Time Lord, declaring them as bad as the Daleks, and choosing death over salvation in a dying universe.

The Doctor, too, was killed in the crash, but the Sisterhood of Karn resurrected him and kick-started his regeneration using their elixir of life. Realising that the universe needed him to bring an end to the conflict, the Doctor adopted a warrior’s guise, and – for a while – rejected the name ‘Doctor’.

As the fighting intensified even further, entire races were eradicated. The Gelth were forced to adopt a gaseous form to survive, whilst the Zygon home world was obliterated and the protein planets used by the Nestene Consciousness rotted. Others fell, too – some of them, such as the Malfinions, Hederons and Scarbians, so utterly removed from the timelines that now only their names exist in the footnotes of old Time Lord records, and no one even recalls that they ever existed in the first instance.

During the worst of the fighting, millions of people were dying and being resurrected every second, only to die again, and continue the cycle of death and rebirth.

The Time Lords began deploying the weapons taken from the Omega Arsenal – a cache of doomsday weapons held on Gallifrey since the founding days of their society. There was now no going back – history was beginning to unravel. The Couldhavebeen King and his army of Meanwhiles and Never-Weres were unleashed, and the beginning of the end times was heralded.

© BBC

The Daleks attacked Arcadia towards the end of the Great Time War. The huge city was all but destroyed.

SOME KEY BATTLES OF THE TIME WAR

The Fall of the Riven Manciple

The Maldervian Cluster

Nevermass Reach and the Ending of Fulmarch

The Krovian Delay

The Night of the Reborn

The Severance of Skaro

Resurrection Breach

The Battle for the Tantalus Eye

The Fall of Arcadia

Moldox and the Tantalus Eye

Towards the end of the war, as the Daleks prepared for their final assault on Gallifrey, the Doctor led the Fifth Time Lord Battle Fleet against a flotilla of Daleks in the Tantalus Spiral, close to the Tantalus Eye, a vast spatial anomaly that formed a rift between universes. Damaged by Dalek stealth ships, his TARDIS crashed to the planet Moldox, where he discovered the Daleks were constructing a vast de-mat weapon to harness the temporal power of the Eye, lashing planets together to create a gun that would erase Gallifrey from existence in every era and every reality that had ever, or would ever exist.

Rassilon, meanwhile, had experimented upon the former Time Lord President Borusa, harnessing his regeneration energy and turning him into a ‘possibility engine’ that might predict the outcome of various actions, by examining the threads of each possible future. After consulting Borusa and hearing the Doctor’s testimony, Rassilon resolved to deploy the Tear of Isha, a weapon from the Omega Arsenal, to end the Dalek threat in the Tantalus Spiral. The fallout, however, would have ended millions of human lives, and so the Doctor resolved to stop him, liberating Borusa and using his unique abilities to harness the energy of the Tantalus Eye, teasing out a thread of possibility in which the Daleks had never arrived in the Tantalus Spiral.

As a result, Rassilon declared the Doctor a traitor.

The End of the War

As the Dalek forces circled Gallifrey and Rassilon grew increasingly desperate, he formulated his plan to end the war: his ‘ultimate sanction’. He intended to destroy time itself, effectively causing the universe to cease existence. Only the Time Lords would continue, as transcendent beings of pure consciousness.

Chris J. Lees

In the Tantalus Spiral, the Daleks constructed a huge demat weapon to harness the enormous temporal power of the Tantalus Eye.

Alex Fort

The Daleks rampage through Arcadia, exterminating innocent civilians.

Richard Hardy

Three different incarnations of the Doctor were prepared to activate the Time Lord weapon known as the Moment – before they realized how to save Gallifrey.

Upon hearing of this, and seeing just how far the Time Lords had fallen, the Doctor stole the final weapon from the Omega Arsenal – the Moment. This was a device that could eradicate both the Daleks and the Time Lords from existence, and restore order once more to the universe. Reluctantly, he planned to use it.

Meanwhile, millions of Dalek saucers laid siege to Arcadia, Gallifrey’s second city. On the last day of the war it fell, and the Daleks began to attack the Capitol itself. Gallifrey was utterly surrounded.

The Moment, however, was a weapon with a conscience, and showed the Doctor an alternative means of ending the war, without resorting to genocide. The device opened a portal in space-time that saw the Doctor meet with two of his later incarnations. Together, they concocted a plan to remove Gallifrey from time and space, to lock it away in a pocket universe where it might never be found. The first thirteen incarnations of the Doctor came together to enact the plan, and Gallifrey was shifted sideways, just as the Dalek fleets opened fire, destroying each other in the crossfire.

Aftermath and Legacy

The strain of the final days of the war proved too much for the Doctor’s ‘warrior’ incarnation and, as he regenerated, all his knowledge of Gallifrey’s true fate was lost. The Doctor was left believing that he had triggered the Moment and destroyed his own people, along with the entire Dalek species. For hundreds of years, he believed himself to be the only surviving member of his race, and he returned to his previous modus operandi, assisting those in need and attempting to salve his guilt.

He regenerated into a universe that believed it too. The Time War – now such a hazardous, complicated epoch that it could not be safely navigated – was time-locked, and the truth was not to be revealed for millennia.

Many races which had suffered during the conflict laid the blame at the Doctor’s door, or sought to exploit the sudden void left by the Time Lords and Daleks, rising to prominence with no one but the Doctor to keep them in check.

Nevertheless, remnants of the Dalek race survived, including the Dalek Emperor, who had tumbled through the void during the final conflict. The Cult of Skaro, an elite group of Dalek scientists, had hidden themselves in the void between universes. These surviving Daleks, and others, found means to continue their mission to exterminate all non-Dalek life, building new Dalek armies from human biological matter, or retrieving captured Daleks from Time Lord prison vaults, ensuring their race would live on.

Similarly, the Master, disguised as a human and hiding at the very end of the time, had also managed to survive the war. So the Doctor was not alone. Ingenious to the end, Rassilon discovered a way to shift Gallifrey back into the universe, returning it from the pocket dimension into which it had been banished. He hid the planet in the dying days of the universe, at a time when all of the stars were winking out of existence and nearly all life had been extinguished, and it was there, billions of years later, that the Doctor found it once more.

Chris J. Lees

The terrible destruction caused by the Time Lords and the Daleks in the Great Time War cannot be overstated.

© BBC

Daleks patrol the shattered ruins of the Time Lord city of Arcadia.

images BEYOND THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

As the universe began its long and tumultuous slide towards gradual heat death, the human race – long dispersed amongst the stars, their empires now fading – finally began to abandon the Earth. Stubborn outposts of humanity clung to the cradle of their culture for as long as they could, but the planet was wracked by solar flares from a dying, bloated sun, and running low on resources. Eventually even they were evacuated, setting out in vast ‘Ark’ ships for the stars, fleeing into the cold unknown.

The Doctor encountered one such vessel in the depths of space, an Ark ship en route to a potential colony world, Refusis II. The ship had been built as a last repository of human endeavour and knowledge, and contained samples of Earth’s flora and fauna, ready to be established on the new world. The journey would take 700 years, during which time the Earth would be destroyed. Many generations of humans would live and die aboard the ship.

However, the humans were not alone on the ark ship, having welcomed aboard an alien race called the Monoids – a mute, bipedal and cyclopean species – whose planet had also been destroyed. The Monoids served the humans, carrying out much of the menial work aboard the vessel.

The Doctor’s arrival, however, brought grave disruption to the people of the Ark. His companion was suffering from a cold virus, which she inadvertently transmitted, first to the Monoids, and then to the humans, who had little natural immunity to such an archaic disease. The cold spread quickly through those on board, and the Doctor and his companions were accused first of sabotage, then of murder, as people began to die from the illness. Following a brief trial – during which he was sentenced to execution – the Doctor was able to fashion a cure, which was hastily distributed, and brought a swift end to the crisis.

Returning to the Ark almost 700 years later, however, the Doctor discovered that the colonists had suffered a resurgence of the virus, which had allowed the Monoids to assert their dominance over the humans, turning the tables and enslaving all of the surviving people aboard. Now, drawing close to Refusis II, the Monoids planned to colonise the world without the humans, planting a bomb aboard the Ark, before fleeing to the surface of the new world.

Little did the Monoids know, however, that Refusis II was already populated – by a species that had been rendered invisible by a solar flare. The Refusians were prepared to allow the humans and the Monoids settle on their world, but only under peaceful terms. The Monoids, split on this decision, succumbed to a civil war that almost destroyed them, while the Doctor and one of the Refusians liberated the humans from the Ark, saving them from the Monoids’ bomb.

© BBC

The Lady Cassandra considered herself to be the last ‘pure’ human left alive.

The Refusians offered settlement rights to the humans, and, eventually, to the surviving Monoids, only the strict understanding that the three races could now live together in peace.

Five billion years after the dawning of the twenty-first century, an elite group of aliens gathered in Earth orbit to witness the final expansion of the Sun and the ensuing destruction of the planet. The venue, Platform One, was a shielded space station designed to provide a view of the devastation. Representatives from a host of elder civilisations were present, including a woman. Lady Cassandra, claiming to be the ‘last human’, but in truth simply a face on a stretched canvas of flesh, needing to be constantly moisturised.

When representatives of a cult known as the Adherents of the Repeated Meme sabotaged the station, releasing robotic spiders that sabotaged the solar filters and gravity satellites holding the station in orbit, the Doctor was on hand to stabilise the station, just in time to prevent everyone aboard being swallowed by the sphere of the expanding sun. He soon proved that the Adherents of the Repeated Meme were, in fact, empty shells, and that Lady Cassandra was behind the sabotage.

She had planned to hold the other guests to ransom, or to profit from their deaths, and teleported to safety aboard her waiting ship, lowering the solar filters on the station before she fled. The Doctor reversed her teleport, however, and in the rising temperature of the station, her stretched skin dried and split, and she was apparently destroyed. The station was evacuated, and below, what remained of the Earth burned, slowly consumed by its sun.

Twenty-three years after the destruction of the Earth, a human colony had been established in the M87 galaxy, on a planet the humans referred to as ‘New Earth’. Here, many of Earth’s cultures had been reintroduced and in one of the biggest cities. New New York, a vast hospital complex had been established to care for colonists suffering from a wide spectrum of ailments.

A race of humanoid felines, all members of a religious order known as the Sisters of Plenitude, tended the patients at the hospital, and had become exceptionally adept at curing almost any affliction. This, it turned out, was because they were breeding scores of human clones in pods beneath the hospital, infecting them with all known diseases as a means of discerning the appropriate cures. When the Doctor discovered this, having been drawn to New Earth by a cryptic message from the Face of Boe, he challenged the Sisters, only to be rebuffed. The Sisters claimed that it was a necessary evil, that the sheer volume of colonists arriving on New Earth bearing new or mutated diseases necessitated a testing and development process.

Meanwhile, Lady Cassandra, the human ‘face’ whom the Doctor had previously encountered on Platform One, recovered and now present on New Earth, hatched a plan to steal the body of the Doctor’s friend Rose Tyler and blackmail the Sisters in return for maintaining their secret. When the Sisters refused. Lady Cassandra released a number of infected clones from their pods, and soon the zombie-like ‘patients’ swarmed through the hospital. The liberated clones released more of their kind, shambling through the halls of the hospital, riddled with disease.

© BBC

Platform One was one of the space stations from which the end of planet Earth could be observed.

The Doctor, gathering all of the medical supplies from the Sisters’ stores, was able to quickly synthesise a broad spectrum cure, which he showered over the clones, freeing them of their ailments. He then persuaded Lady Cassandra to vacate the body of his companion, and she reluctantly agreed, finally finding peace in real death.

Close to the very end of the universe, the last vestiges of humanity clung to a precarious existence in the ruins of a once great city, besieged day and night by a savage race that, it was feared, represented what the human race would itself become: the Futurekind. These were devolved humans who had returned to their tribal roots, filing their teeth and taking part in obscene cannibalistic rituals.

Inside the city, the remaining humans had assembled a rocket, in which they planned to escape the Futurekind and find the fabled ‘Utopia’, the last haven of humanity in the dying universe. With the help of his instectoid assistant Chantho, an ageing scientific genius named Professor Yana had devised and built the rocket, but there was a problem with the engine, causing the launch sequence to continually fail.

The Doctor – who had arrived in this time period after his TARDIS had been thrown off course – assisted Professor Yana in his repairs. In doing so, he discovered the truth: Professor Yana was, in fact, the Master, who had fled to the end of the universe during the Time War, adopting a human disguise. In living with that disguise, the Master had transferred his Time Lord personality into a fob watch, carried upon his person at all times. Yana was unable to fathom its true import due to a perception filter. When Professor Yana met the Doctor and overheard him talking about his recent regeneration, the perception filter was broken. Professor Yana opened the watch, reabsorbing his Time Lord persona and becoming, once again, the Master. After murdering Chantho, the Master opened the blast doors of the city, allowing the Futurekind to swarm in, while he stole the Doctor’s TARDIS and made his escape.

Meanwhile, the rocket, now fully functional, had successfully escaped, carrying the last remnants of the human race out to the stars, and to Utopia.

Beyond Utopia, when even that final haven, too, was lost, all that remained in the universe were a few scattered immortals and Gallifrey, birthplace of the Time Lords, returned from the pocket universe in which it had been hidden for so long, now hanging alone in the starless void, moments from the heat death of all things . . . Watching, waiting, and ready.

Alex Fort

Professor Yana’s rocket blasts off on its trip to Utopia.

INDEX

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.

Note: page numbers in bold refer to information contained within captions.

 Adherents of the Repeated Meme 307

 Adipose 147–8, 147, 148, 150

 Adjudicators 194, 196

 Adric 182

 Aeneas 41

 Albert, Prince 68–9

 alternate timelines 130

 ancient Egypt 35, 38

 Andromedans 229

 Androzani Minor 228–9

 Antalin 250

 antimatter 80, 182

 Apollo missions 109, 190

 Arcrurus 120, 203

 Argolin 114

 ‘Ark Ships’ 25, 33, 305–7

 Aries 71–2

 Armstrong, Neil 109

 Arthur, King 141

 Ashildr 42

 Atlantis 11, 18, 107, 132

 ATMOS 149

 Atraxi 150

 Autons 127, 128, 128

 Avery, Henry 58, 58, 60

 Axos 131

 Azal 18, 131–2

 Azaxyr, Lord 120

 Azure 220

 Bannermen 104

 Bats, Queen 228

 Beast, The 15, 18–19, 18

 bernalium 176

 ‘Big Bang’ theory 10

 Black Archive 153

 black cubes 152

 black holes 19, 80, 220

 Bletchley Park 105

 Blitz, the 99–100

 Bonaparte, Napoleon 64

 Boneless 155

 Borusa, President (Time Lord) 88, 296

 BOSS 133

 Bowie Base One 194

 Bowships 84, 89, 290

 Bracewell, Professor Edwin 100, 102

 Brett, Professor 105

 British Empire 64

 Brooke, Adelaide 194

 Broton 137

 Bureau of Interplanetary Affairs 194

 C-Day 105, 106

 Calvierri, Rosanna 48, 50–1

 Canary Wharf, battle of 253, 257, 257

 Cardiff 65, 68

 Caretakers 198

 Carrington, General 129–30

 Carrionites 51–2

 Cassandra 306, 307, 309

 Celestial Intervention Agency 85, 88

 Chameleon Arch 95

 Chameleons 107

 Chantho 309

 Charlie, Bonnie Prince 60

 Chase, Harrison 138–9

 Chen, Mavic 276

 Chimerons 104

 Christie, Agatha 96, 97

 Christmas, Trenzalore 218

 Christopher (Vespiform) 96

 Chronovores 11, 132

 Chula medical ship 100

 Church of the Papal Mainframe 109

 Churchill, Winston 100

 Citadel of Gallifrey 84

 Clanton brothers 78

 Combined Galactic Resistance 277

 computers 105–6, 107

    living 199, 202

 Control 69, 71

 Core of the Fendahl 140

 Couldhavebeen King 294

 Crab Nebula 196

 Craig 170

 Cranleigh, George 95

 Crayford, Guy 138

 Creation 10

 Crucible (Dalek flagship) 257, 260

 cryogenics 248

 Cryons 162

 Culloden, battle of 60

 Cyber Controller 162–4

 Cyber Wars 172–3, 177, 182

 Cyber-Planner 176, 185

 Cyberhive 171–2

 Cyberiad 185

 CyberKing 65, 65, 167, 168

 Cybermats 170, 171, 176, 185

 Cybermen 31, 33, 65, 123, 127, 156–87, 158, 164, 173, 177, 182, 185, 190, 202, 253, 257, 257

 Cybermites 185, 185

 Cybcrpollen 170–2

 Cybershades 167, 185

 cyborgs 78, 79

 Cybus Industries 163, 167, 167, 173, 184

 Dae[ae]mons 11, 15, 15, 18, 24, 131–2

 Dagmar Cluster 60, 60

 Dalek Asylum 282

 Dalek Caan 252, 253

 Dalek Dimension Vaults 65, 167

 Dalek Emperor 239, 242, 246, 252, 290, 293, 301

 Dalek Factor 242, 246, 253

 Dalek Sec 252, 252, 253

 Dalek Supreme 247, 248, 250, 257, 260

 Dalek-human hybrids 252, 253, 257

 Daleks 38, 68, 88–9, 91, 104–5, 112, 141, 173, 198, 230–85, 236, 239, 242, 250, 260, 300

    birth of the 232–9

    Dalek Wars 253–85, 257, 264, 267, 269, 270, 275, 277, 282, 288, 290, 290, 293, 294, 296, 296, 300–1, 305

    Imperial 250, 252

    invisible 269

    Ironsides 100, 100, 102

    and the Movellan War 246–50

    Progenitor Device 275

    renegade 250, 252

    Skaro Degradations 290

 Dark Times 15–20, 83–4

 Dark Tower, The 82, 84

 Davros 232, 232, 236, 239, 246, 247, 248, 248, 250, 257, 260, 293

 de-mat weapons 88, 296, 296

 dead, walking 68

 Deep Darkness 52

 Delta 104

 Delta Magna 203

 Det-Sen Monastery 97

 Devil 131

 Dickens, Charles 68

 dinosaurs 25, 29, 30, 33, 65, 77–8, 182

 Disciples of Light 19

 Dominators 112, 114

 Doomsday Weapon 196

 doppelgangers 49, 50

 Draconia 196–7, 197–8, 267

 drugs, addictive 220, 228

 Duggan (private detective) 25

 Dulkis 114

 duralinium 194

 Eagle (lunar module) 109

 Earth 20

    abandonment 206–14, 305

    birth of life on 24–33

    destruction 307

 Earth’s galactic empire 190–206, 199, 218, 229, 270, 275–7, 280

 Eddison Firestone 96

 Egyptian gods 38

 Eldrad 139

 Elizabeth 148

 Elizabeth II 102, 104

 ‘Empire of the Wolf’ 69

 Eternals 10–11, 52

 Eternity Circle 293

 ‘Event One’ 10

 Excalibur 141

 Exo-Space-Time Continuum 84

 Experiential Grid 114

 Extinction Events 31, 33

 Exxilon 38, 277

 Eye of Harmony 141–2

 Face of Boe 307

 Family of Blood 95

 Fancy (ship) 58, 58

 Fang Rock 94

 Fendhal 140

 Fenric 11, 15, 100, 102

 Ferdinand, Archduke Franz 94

 fire 34–5

 Firemaker 34–5

 First World War 94–5

 Fledgling Empires 19–20, 24

 Flood, the 120, 194

 Foamasi 114

 Foster, Miss 148, 150

 French Revolution 64

 Frontier Worlds 277

 Frontios 218

 Futurekind 309

 Galactic Federation 120, 203

 Galaxy Five 120

 Gallifrey 64, 80–91, 84, 104–5, 117, 141, 172, 294, 296, 309

    Arcadia 293, 294, 300, 305

    Death Zone 82, 83, 84, 88

    removal from time and space 80, 301

    return of 91, 91

 Gallifreyan art 48, 153

 Game Station (Satellite Five) 280, 280, 282

 Gavrok 104

 Gelth 65, 68, 294

 Genesis Ark 173, 257, 260

 Gillyflower, Mrs 77, 77

 Gilmore, Group Captain 104

 Global Chemicals 132–3

 Grant, Jo 132

 Gravitron device 176–7, 190

 Grayle, Julius 99

 Great Fire of London 55

 Great Healer (Davros) 248

 Great Intelligence 74, 97–9, 108, 109, 153

 Great One 133, 136

 Great Vampires 84

 Greek gods 11, 35, 41

 Greel, Magnus 71

 green death 132–3

 Green, Joseph 142

 Grover, Charles 33

 Guardians, The 10

 Guiliano, Duke of San Martino 48

 Gunslinger, the 79

 Haemovores 102

 Halley’s Comet 162

 Halpen family 220–1

 Hand of Omega 105, 250, 252

 ‘Hand, the’ 80

 Harald Hardrada 42–3

 Harold Godwinson 42–3

 Hartigan, Miss 65, 167

 Hastings, battle of 42–3

 Hath 220

 Hedgewick’s World of Wonders 182, 184–5

 hibernation systems 28

 Hieronymous 47

 highwaymen 53

 Hitler, Adolf 99

 HollidayDoc 78

 Homo Reptilia 25–30, 25, 28, 31, 33

 Homo sapiens 33, 34

 Horus 38

 Huguenots, Parisian massacre of 50

 Human Factor 239, 242, 246, 253

 Hutchinson, Sir George 140

 hydromel 228

 Ice Warriors (Martians) 117, 120, 190–2, 192, 194

 Industrial Revolution 64, 105

 Inferno Project 130

 International Space Command (ISC) 190

 Intrusion Countermeasures Group 104, 105

 Irongron 45

 Ironsides 100, 100, 102

 Isolus 151–2, 151

 Jagaroth 24–5, 25, 35, 38

 Jago, Henry Gordon 71

 Jenny (wife of Madame Vastra) 72

 John, King 43, 45

 Jones, Harriet 142–3

 Jones, Martha 147

 Judoon 121, 121, 146–7

 Jurgens, Martin 194, 196

 K1 robot 136, 136

 K-9 143, 146

 Kahler-Jex 78–9

 Kaldor 226

 Kaleds 232, 232, 236, 239, 290

 Kamelion (android) 43, 45

 Kara 248, 250

 Karn 293

 Kastria 139

 Keller Machine 130–1

 Kellman, Professor 181–2

 Kembel 276

 Kennedy, John F. 109

 Kettlewell, Professor 136

 Key to Time 11

 Killingworth 64

 Kizlet, Miss 153

 Knightmare 53

 Kraals 137–8

 Krafayis 72, 72

 Krillitanes 143, 146

 Kronos 11, 132

 Krop Tor (‘impossible planet’) 18, 19

 Krynoids 138–9

 Lake, Jackson 65

 Lazar’s Disease 226, 228

 Leandro 53

 Leisure Hive 114

 Leisure Palace 202–3, 203

 Leonians 53

 Lesterton 275

 Lethbridge-Stewart, Brigadier 108, 123, 132, 137, 141, 152

 Light 71

 Lilt 250

 Linx, Commander 45, 47

 Litefoot, Professor George 71

 Little Hodcombe 140

 Liz 10 209

 Lobos 112

 Loch Ness 137

 London 52–3, 55, 65, 65, 71–2, 74, 77–8, 99–100, 104, 108, 109, 123, 147–8, 167–8, 170, 253, 257, 264

 Lonely Assassins see Weeping Angels

Louis XV 60

 Ludens Nimrod Kendrick Cord

 Longstaff XLI 185, 229

 Lumic, John 163–4, 164, 167

 Lupton 133

 lycanthropy 69

 M37 220

 MacLeish, Sir Robert 69

 Macrimmon, Jamie 97, 242, 246

 Madame de Pompadour (spaceship) 60, 63, 78

 Magna Carta 45

 Malone, Melody 98, 99

 Malus 140

 Mandragora Helix 45, 47–8

 Mandrels 220

 Marie Antoinette (spaceship) 78

 Marine Space Corps 280

 Mark Three Travel Machine 236

 Mars 117, 120, 191, 218, 276–7

 Martians 117, 120

 Mary Celeste (brigantine) 68, 253

 Master, the (renegade Time Lord) 43, 45, 64–5, 89, 127–32. 141–2. 170, 194, 196–8, 250, 267, 270, 290, 301, 309 see also Missy

 Matrix 84, 170, 229

 Meanwhiles 294

 Mechanus 198

 Mechonoids 198

 Medusa Cascade 257

 Melkurs 226

 Mercy 78–9

 Merlin 141

 Mcssalinc 220

 metal, living 136

 Metebelis 3 132, 133, 136

 Midnight 202–3, 203

 Minyans 84–5

 Mire 42

 Missy (renegade Time Lord) 170, 172

 Moldox 296

 Moment the 89, 91, 300–1, 300

 Mondas 158, 158, 162, 164, 172, 184

 Monoids 305–7

 Moonbase 190–2

 Mordee Expedition 199, 202

 Mordred 141

 Morgaine 141

 Moroks 112

 Movellan War 246–50

 MRI weapon 147

 Mutos 232

 Mutter’s Spiral 94

 N-Forms 89

 nanogenes 100

 nanotechnology 171

 National Institute of Advanced Scientific Research (Think Tank) 136

 Navarinos 104

 Nemesis meteorite 172–3

 Neo Phobos 177, 181, 194

 Nero 41

 Nerva Beacon 181–2, 194

 Nestenes 123, 127–8, 128, 130, 294

 Nethersphere 170–2

 Never-Were s 294

 New Earth 307, 309

 New New York 307

 New York 97, 99, 253, 257

 Nightmare Child 293

 Oak (engineer) 109

 Oblivion Continuums 100

 Ogrons 197, 267, 270

 old age, cure for 228–9

 Omega (Time Lord) 80, 80, 82, 104–5, 172, 250

 Omega Arsenal 294, 296, 300

 Ood 220–1, 221, 223, 224

 Orient Express (spaceliner) 199

 Oseidon 138

 Osgood Boxes 153–4

 Osirians 38

 Oswald, Clara 155, 252

 Padmasambhava 97

 Pandorica 41

 Paradise Towers 198

 parallel universes 141, 163–4, 184, 257, 264

 Parrinium 280

 Paternoster Gang 72, 74, 77, 78

 Peinforte, Lady 172

 Peladon 120, 203

 Pike, Samuel 60

 Pink, Danny 171, 172

 piracy 58, 60

 plague 55, 55, 264, 280

 Plasmavores 146–7

 Platform One 307, 309

 Pluto 120–1, 218

 pocket universes 80, 301, 309

 Polo, Marco 45

 Pompadour, Madame de 60, 63

 Pompeii 38, 41

 Pond, Amy 209

 possibility engine 296

 Predator Dalek 293

 prehistory 25–33

 Prisoner Zero 150

 Project Degravitate 264

 Psychic Circus 220

 pyradmids 35, 38, 253

 Pyroviles 41, 41

 Quarks 112, 112, 114

 Quill (engineer) 109

 Racnoss 19–20, 19, 20, 24

    Empress of 20

 Rani, the 64–5

 Rassilon (Time Lord) 82, 82, 84–5, 88–9, 91, 172, 290, 296, 301

 Rattigan, Luke 149

 Ravalox (Earth) 229

 Reality Bomb 257, 260

 Red Dawn 120

 Refusis II 305, 306–7

 reptiles, rise of the 25–33

 Richard I 43

 Robespierre, Maximilien 64

 Robin Hood 43

 Robomen 264, 264

 robophobia (Grimwade’s Syndrome) 226

 robots 221, 226, 226

 Rome 41

 Rutans 45, 47, 94, 117, 149, 214

 St Paul’s Cathedral 170

 Sardicktown 218

 Saturnynes 48, 50–1

 Scarlioni, Count 24–5, 38

 Scaroth 24–5, 35, 38

 science, emergence of 58–79

 Scientific Reform Society (SRS) 136

 Scotland 137

 ‘Sea Devils’ (Homo Reptilia) 25, 33, 129

 Second World War 99–100, 102, 105

 Secret Heart 20

 Segonax 220

 Sevateem 202

 Shadow Architect 121

 Shadow Dimension 11, 15

 Shadow Proclamation 121

 Shakespeare, William 52

 Shakri 152

 Shaw, Dr Elizabeth 127

 Sheriff of Nottingham 43, 45

 Shoreditch Incident 104

 Sidelian Memory Transfer Process 199

 Silents 109

 Silurians 25, 72, 128–9

 Silverstein, Julius 108

 Simeon, Walter 74

 Sin, Mr (‘Peking Homunculus’) 71

 singularities 80, 82, 141

 Sirens 58

 Sirius Conglomerate 228–9

 Sisterhood of Karn 294

 Sisters of Plenitude 307, 309

 Sisters of the Water 50

 Skarasen 137

 Skaro 105, 141, 232–52, 290

 Skaro, Cult of 252, 253, 257, 257, 301

 Skaro Degradations 290

 Skovox Blitzer 154–5, 154

 Slitheen family 120, 142–3, 143

 Smith, Josiah Samuel 69, 71, 139

 Smith, Sarah Jane 136, 143

 snowmen, living 74

 Solos, Marshal of 206

 Sons of Earth 203, 206

 Sontarans 45, 47, 72, 88, 94, 114–15, 115, 117, 117, 120, 149, 214, 214

 Source 223, 224

 Space Museum, Xeros 112

 space pirates 202

 Space Race 109

 Space Security Service (SSS) 276, 277

 Space Station Nerva 210, 210, 214

 Sparrow, Sally 146

 Spectrox 228–9

 spiders, giant 133, 136

 Spiridon 269–70

 spontaneous combustion 77, 78

 Sputnik 1 (satellite) 104

 Stahlman, Professor 130

 Stamford Bridge, battle of 42–3

 star whales 209, 209, 210

 Starship UK (spaceship) 206, 207, 209, 210

 Statue of Liberty 99

 Stephenson, George 64–5

 Stevens 133

 Stewart, Kate 152, 153

 Stonehenge 38, 41

 Strax 72

 Streete, Peter 52

 Styggron 138

 Styles, Sir Reginald 266, 267

 Styre, Field Major 214, 214

 sun

    death 307

    solar flares 155, 206–7, 210, 305

 Sundvik, Joseph 15

 Susan 104

 Sutekh 38

 Swampies 203

 Sweetville 74, 77, 77

 Swift, Sam the Quick 53

 Sycorax 143, 143

 Tachyonics 114

 Takis 250

 Tantalus Eye 296, 296

 Tantalus Spiral 296, 296

 taranium 276

 TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space) (of the Doctor) 34, 38, 42, 47, 53, 60, 63–4, 63, 68, 78, 91, 108, 130–2, 136, 139–43, 146, 150, 155, 162–4, 176, 182, 242, 246, 249, 296, 309

 TARDISes (Time and Relative Dimension in Space) 65, 82, 84, 91, 131

    Battle TARDISes 88–9, 290

 TARDIS Time Capsules 257

 Tear of Isha 296

 television 102, 104

 Telos 162, 163, 164

 temporal paradoxes 265–7

 Terileptils 53, 55, 55

 Terminus (spaceship) 10, 228

 Tesh 202

 Thais 232, 236, 239, 270

 Theron 114

 time

    end of 287–309

    Key to Time 11

 time cabinet 71

 Time Destructor 253, 276

 Time Ladies 170

 Time Lords 42–3, 64, 80, 80, 82–5, 82, 88–9. 91, 105, 117, 123, 136, 140, 146, 153, 172, 173, 176, 185, 229, 236, 247, 250, 252, 257, 280, 288, 290, 293–4, 296, 300–1, 309

    High Council 247, 290

 time travel 25

 Time Vortex 65, 82, 88, 154, 163–4

 Time War 65, 100, 112, 137, 154, 173, 236, 253, 257, 267, 280, 282, 309

 Last Great 88–9, 252, 288–301, 288, 290, 301

 Tombstone 78

 TOMTIT machine 132

 Torchwood Institute 69, 173, 253

 Traken 223, 226

 Tranquil Repose, Necros 248, 250

 Transmat technology 190–2, 199, 239

 Travelmat Relay System (T-Mat) 190–2

 Travers 97

 Trenzalore 91, 218

 Tribe of Gum 34–5

 trisilicate 120

 Troy 35, 38, 41

 Tyler, Rose 143, 152, 173, 307, 309

 Under Gallery 48

 UNIT 104, 108–9, 112, 123, 123, 127–33, 136–7, 140–1, 149, 152–3, 155, 168, 267

 Usurians 120–1, 218

 Utopia 309

 Uxarieus 194, 196

 validium 172

 Van Gogh, Vincent 71–2

 Van Statten, Henry 112

 Vanir 228

 Vardans, The 88

 Varos 203

 vastial 162

 Vastra, Madame 72, 77

 Vaughn, Tobias 168

 Venus 276

 Vespiform 96, 97

 Vesuvius 38, 41

 Victoria 68–9, 71, 97

 Vikings 42, 100

 Voga (planet of gold) 177, 181–2, 194

 Vogans 177, 181–2

 Void 253

 Void ships 173, 252, 257

 Vortex Manipulators 95

 Vulcan 270, 275

 War Machines 105, 107, 107

 Waterfield, Edward 239, 242

 Waterfield, Victoria 109, 242, 246

 weather-control devices 176–7, 190–2

 Webstar spaceships 20, 20

 Weed Creature 108–9

 Weeping Angels (Lonely Assassins) 97, 99, 146

 werewolves 69, 71

 Wheel, the (Station 3) 176, 177, 202

 Whitaker, Professor 33

 Wild West 78–9

 William I 42–3

 Wire 102, 104

 Wirrn 210, 214

 wormholes 100

 WOTAN 105, 107

 Xeros 112

 Xoanon (living computer) 199, 202

 XYP (Vraxoin) 220

 Yana, Professor 309, 309

 Yeti, robot 97, 108, 109

 Zaroff, Professor 107

 Zeiton-7 203

 Zeus 11, 35, 41

 Zygma energy 71

 Zygons 48, 50, 137, 153–4, 294

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank all of the creators of Doctor Who (past, present and future) for their wonderful stories; everyone at BBC Books for their support, and his family, for many years of sharing the Doctor’s adventures together.

CREDITS

Cover design by Two Associates

COPYRIGHT

DOCTOR WHO: THE WHONIVERSE. Copyright © 2016 by George Mann and Justin Richards. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

This book is published to accompany the television series entitled Doctor Who first broadcast on BBC One. Doctor Who is a BBC Wales production.

Executive producers: Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin.

First published by BBC Books in the United Kingdom in 2016.

BBC Books is an imprint of Ebury Publishing, London.

Published in 2016 by
Harper Design
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
Tel: (212) 207-7000
Fax: (855) 746-6023
harperdesign@harpercollins.com
www.hc.com

Distributed throughout North America by
HarperCollins Publishers
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007

ISBN 978-0-06-247020-1

EPub Edition November 2016 ISBN 9780062470218

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944896

Editorial Director: Albert DePetrillo

Project Editor: Kate Fox

Series Consultant: Justin Richards

Editor: Steve Tribe

Design: Bobby Birchall, Bobby&Co

Production: Phil Spencer and Alex Goddard

Colour origination by Altaimage, London

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Australia

HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.

Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

www.harpercollins.com.au

Canada

HarperCollins Canada

2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada

www.harpercollins.ca

New Zealand

HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand

Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive

Rosedale 0632

Auckland, New Zealand

www.harpercollins.co.nz

United Kingdom

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF, UK

www.harpercollins.co.uk

United States

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

195 Broadway

New York, NY 10007

www.harpercollins.com