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Sabalom Glitz
(1986 - 1987) |
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| Tony Selby |
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Tony Selby was born in February 1938 in Lambeth, London.
He trained at the Italia Conti Stage Academy. He
has been described as a congenial character actor
whose best film roles came in two vastly different
films in 1971 and 1972 - Richard Burton's Villain and Spike Milligan's Adolf
Hitler - My Part in His Downfall.
With his down-to earth, friendly London
voice he was a regular on a number of television
shows
since his debut in No Hiding Place in 1964. These
include during this period: The Avengers, Department
S and Catweazle.
His other film appearances include Alfie (1966), Superman (1978) and, An
Alligator Named Daisy (19??). Further television roles include Get Some
In (1975), a main part in Love Hurts (1992-94)
and more recently in Burnside (2000).
Perhaps his
greatest contribution has been in guest appearances
where his charisma, which can
be menacing when he chooses, has seen him pop
up in varying shows, namely - Minder, Casualty, Lovejoy, Holby City, The
Bill and Eastenders.
He
has appeared three times in Doctor Who as
Sabalom Glitz. Firstly in the first four episodes
of the 1986 Sixth
Doctor story The Trial of a
Time Lord ("The
Mysterious Planet")
before returning in the final two episodes ("The
Ultimate Foe"). He then returned to the
show for a final time in the 1987 Seventh
Doctor story "Dragonfire".
He
was nominated for a 1997 Laurence Olivier
Theatre Award for Best Supporting in a Musical
of 1996 for his role in Paint Your Wagon. He was
voted best actor for his role in "Dragonfire" by Doctor Who Magazine readers. |
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 One of The Doctor’s most morally complex
associates, Sabalom Glitz is a career criminal and thief with
little qualms about selling out even his supposed allies to
secure his own survival and freedom. Despite this, The Doctor
has shown a certain fondness for Glitz when circumstances have
forced them to work together, noting that Glitz is not beyond
redemption, Glitz in return reflecting more than once that The
Doctor isn’t a bad person despite his honesty (A high
praise from Glitz according to his other associates).
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| The Mysterious Planet |
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When Glitz initially met The Doctor,
he was working a couple of million years in his own future
with his ‘apprentice’ Dibber, The Master having
recruited them to assist him in a plan to steal various secrets
from the Time Lord Matrix after three beings known only as
the Sleepers managed to penetrate the Matrix and escape to
Earth. As the Eighth
Doctor later deduced during an inquiry
into recent events on Gallifrey ("The
Eight Doctors"),
after the information was stolen from the Matrix the Celestial
Intervention Agency arranged for a ‘puppet’ President
to be elected so that they could gain the authority to arrange
for a Magnetron to be used to move Earth to another location
in time and space, subsequently causing a fireball that incinerated
almost all life on Earth’s surface to try and destroy
the Andromedean’s base on Earth and thus conceal the
truth about the stolen technical information, even going so
far as to arrange for Earth to be renamed Ravalox to cover
their tracks. While Glitz and Dibber were able to discover
the Sleepers’ base, their theft was indirectly complicated
by the presence of the Sixth
Doctor and Peri after they landed
on Ravalox, resulting in Dibber damaging the black light generator
that was keeping the Sleepers alive in stasis in such a manner
that its destruction could potentially destroy the universe.
Fortunately, The Doctor was able to reconfigure the generator
so that the explosion was limited to the underground base
while Glitz distracted the base’s robot guardian, although
the robot’s destruction also damaged the archive that
he and Dibber had recovered.
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| The Ultimate Foe |
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When The Doctor was subsequently put on trial by
a corrupt High Council seeking to discredit The Doctor so
that he couldn’t reveal that the Matrix had been compromised,
The Master dispatched Glitz to serve as a witness in The Doctor’s
trial ("The
Ultimate Foe"), unwilling to allow The
Valeyard - the trial prosecutor and the manifestation of The
Doctor’s dark side - to prevail due to the greater threat
he posed to The Master. With Glitz and The Doctor’s
future companion Mel to serve as witnesses, The Doctor was
able to reveal that the High Council had attempted to set
him up to conceal the truth about the theft from the Matrix,
Glitz’s testimony confirming that the Matrix had been
penetrated while Mel was able to assist The Doctor in tackling
The Master and The Valeyard. Although Glitz briefly betrayed
The Doctor by allowing The Master to hypnotise him and send
him out to act as bait for The Valeyard, subsequently stealing
what he believed to be the Matrix archives, a trap set by
The Valeyard left The Master and Glitz immobilised in The
Master’s TARDIS. With The Valeyard defeated and apparently
killed after he tried to kill the jurors at The Doctor’s
trial, The Doctor asked the High Council to show Glitz leniency
after he was released. Although The Master escaped after killing
the technicians who released them, Glitz was allowed to return
to his own time along with Dibber.
The Doctor and Glitz met again
- The Doctor now travelling with Frobisher after Mel had been
returned to The Doctor’s future self - when the TARDIS
coincidentally materialised in Glitz’s new ship, The
Doctor currently tracking bounty hunters Sha’ol and
Karthakh after they had managed to infiltrate the TARDIS in
an attempt to kill him. After they landed in a scrapyard where
Glitz had hidden the proceeds of a recent robbery - Glitz
intending to recover the goods and claim them as scrap -,
the quartet were confronted by Nicolo Mandell, the head of
security and intelligence for the local government, who blackmailed
Glitz into getting back in touch with a gang of thieves who
had stolen a Tzun data core from the Veltrochi Council ten
years ago. With Glitz having fenced the stolen item and sold
it to Mandell, Mandell now needed the gang to steal it back
from the government research station where it was currently
stored, thus saving the government from having to publically
admit to the theft and thus avoiding having to deal with other
requests for questionably-acquired items collected by past
administrations. Glitz in particular had an interesting time
on the subsequent mission when Liang, the gang’s only
female member, expressed a more-than-passing potential romantic
interest in him, leaving Glitz appreciating the attention
but uncertain how to reciprocate.
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| Dragonfire |
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Despite the complication of Sha’ol and Karthakh’s
pursuit of The Doctor, he, Frobisher, Glitz and Dibbler were
able to eventually reassemble most of the old team and track
down the core to its new location of the Thor Orbital Facility.
Despite the security around the core - it was located on an
asteroid base in a room protected by time dams shifting the
room an hour into the future and the safe itself was behind
dams that shifted it a day into the past, making it difficult
to break into somewhere that wasn’t there yet and then
ensuring that any thieves would be caught even if they acquired
the core as the security staff would have known about the
theft since yesterday - The Doctor was able to acquire the
core by manipulating the dams to cause the core to materialise
in the present while taking advantage of the asteroid base
being out of phase to send the core to materialise in the
location where the asteroid had been an hour ago, allowing
them to easily recover it in Glitz’s ship by The Doctor
arranging for the ship to take up position in that precise
location while the theft took place.
However, the gang were forced to
flee to the Veltrochni when Mandell attempted to steal the
core for himself to use the information on Tzun technology
to set himself up as an arms dealer, only just escaping when
Sha’ol and Karthakh, now using an Ogron ship, attacked
Mandrell’s forces and ‘rescued’ the gang.
Although Dibber was killed in the ensuing conflict, The Doctor
was able to free Sha’ol and Karthakh from their contract
by using a stolen time generator to temporarily put himself
in temporal stasis long enough for them to scan him and confirm
that he was legally dead, lacking a heartsbeat or brain activity
while temporarily immobilised. Their contract ended, Sha’ol
and Karthakh aided The Doctor, Frobisher, Glitz and the gang
in returning the core to the Veltrochi despite Mandrell’s
attempt to destroy them. Having tricked Mandrell into publically
admitting his recent actions, the gang returned to their new
civilian lives, the Veltrochi keeping the now-wiped data core
in memory of what they did to the Tzun while Glitz - now officially
pardoned for the original theft - decided to spend some time
with Chat before moving on to his next heist.
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| Dragonfire |
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The Doctor and Glitz met again
after The Doctor had met the past version of Mel and accepted
his destiny to travel with her, The Doctor also regenerating
into his seventh incarnation prior to the reunion. While investigating
the Iceworld spaceport and the reported tales of a dragon
in the underground caverns ("Dragonfire"), The Doctor
and Mel met Glitz as he was attempting to search for the treasure
that was supposed to be guarded by the dragon, although he
was also facing financial and personnel trouble after selling
his entire crew and losing the money in a subsequent card
game. Despite their distaste for Glitz’s recent actions,
The Doctor, Mel, and their new friend Ace - a waitress on
Iceworld who had been sent forward in time from 1980s Earth
- joined him in his search for the treasure while trying to
escape from Kane, the mysterious head of Iceworld. Although
Glitz’s ship was lost during the following struggle,
he gained a new ship when it was discovered that the dragon
and the treasure were the same thing, with the dragon being
a bio-mechanoid powered by the Dragonfire that served as Kane’s
jailer, keeping the power source needed to operate Iceworld
out of his reach due to his need for cold temperatures to
exist. Although Kane’s mercenaries were killed when
he forced them to drive Iceworld’s occupants onto Glitz’s
ship before he destroyed it, Kane himself committed suicide
when The Doctor revealed that his home planet had been destroyed
in a supernova centuries ago, depriving him of his chance
for revenge. With Glitz having taken the now-mobile Iceworld
as his new ship, The Doctor departed, taking Ace with him
as his new companion while Mel departed to travel with Glitz,
expressing some hope that she could keep him making further ‘dodgy
deals’.
It was later revealed that Mel’s unusual
decision to leave with Glitz was actually prompted by The
Doctor; recognising that he needed to begin his current incarnation’s
more ruthless role as Time’s Champion - part of a deal
he made with the Eternal Time to avoid becoming The Valeyard
-, he had influenced Mel’s decision to leave him as
he recognised that her morality would hold him back from what ‘needed’ to
be done. After six months travelling with Glitz - including
writing a cipher program that allowed Glitz to monitor interesting
financial transactions in the Galactic Banking Conglomerate
-, Mel set out on her own to try and get back to Earth, only
to be stuck on the virtually desolated planet Avalone until
she was reunited with The Doctor ("Head
Games"). Glitz himself has not been seen since. |
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