 Name: Straxus
Format: Audio
Time of Origin: Gallifrey, the Eighth Doctor’s era
Appearances: "The Light at the End", "Human Resources", " Sisters of the Flame", "The Vengeance of Morbius" and "Dark Eyes 1"
Doctors: Regularly encountered the Eighth Doctor, but met the Sixth Doctor in a timeline that was subsequently erased; was involved in events that led to The Master attacking the first eight Doctors.
Companions: Lucie Miller, Molly O'Sullivan; Leela, Nyssa, Peri, Ace and Charley
Pollard were involved in the crisis caused by Straxus’ deal with the Vess and The Master but never met him.
History: As an agent of the Celestial Intervention Agency, Straxus would appear at a casual glance to be similar to The Doctor in that both are Time Lords who are willing to get involved in the wider universe. However, while The Doctor is guided by his morality and a desire to make things better for the innocent, Straxus is often motivated by loyalty to the Time Lords and a desire to ensure that Gallifrey survives above all else, with the result that he will often resort to more questionable actions than The Doctor would be comfortable with.
Interestingly enough, neither The Doctor or Straxus remember their first meeting as it was erased from history. When Straxus was attempting to make a deal with the ruthless weapons' manufacturers known as the Vess for weapons that would help the Time Lords face their enemies in future conflicts ("The Light at the End"), his actions were discovered by The Master - The Master in question currently in a crippled state following his encounter with the Eighth Doctor and Susan ("Legacy of the Daleks" and "The Deadly Assassin") before he was restored by the Source and Tremas ("The Keeper of Traken") - who blackmailed him and the CIA to by threatening to inform the High Council. In exchange for his silence, Straxus let The Master buy a single weapon from the Vess, guessing that he would use it to attack The Doctor but considering The Doctor's death a small price to pay for his own plans to continue. However, he was shocked when The Master's plan resulted in The Doctor's entire timeline collapsing, with the Dalek conquest of Earth now continuing ("The Dalek Invasion of Earth") and the War Lords spreading out across the universe ("The War Games") without The Doctor to stop them.
As The Master's plan resulted in the Fourth
Doctor, Fifth Doctor and the Eighth Doctor being lost, the First
Doctor, Second Doctor and the Third Doctor were only just able to 'delay' the destruction of their timeline by 'dispersing' the effect across their history; like bailing water out of a sinking ship, they were able to maintain their existence by spreading the dispersal across their timeline rather than letting it spread on its own. As a result, Straxus was able to make contact with the Sixth Doctor - who had already 'lost' his companion Peri due to the attack even if he still existed - and explain what had happened, 'apologising' to The Doctor for trusting The Master even as The Doctor angrily noted that the CIA would have left everything alone if The Master had simply acquired a gun to assassinate him in a more conventional manner. With the danger to reality too great, Straxus was forced to let the Sixth Doctor cannibalise his TARDIS to generate a dimensional stabilisation field in the Vess' pocket dimension, allowing The Doctor to draw in and restore his other selves so that they could learn what The Master had done. After the Fourth and Eighth Doctors tricked The Master into revealing that he had used a 'conceptual bomb' to make random civilian Bob Dovie perceive the TARDIS as impossible and thus erase it from existence, the Fifth Doctor was able to prevent the bomb's use by travelling back to a year before The Master planted the bomb in Dovie's mind, thus introducing him to the TARDIS before the bomb was planted so that he wouldn't proclaim it as impossible later. As a result, The Doctors were able to erase the whole crisis from existence, preserving their timeline, with Straxus and The Doctors not remembering any of these events.
In a different body, Straxus was sent by the High Council to The Doctor's TARDIS, ordering the Eighth Doctor to Lonsis in 2006 to retrieve his new companion Lucie Miller from a temporal blackspot ("Human Resources"). The Doctor agreed on condition that Straxus fix his TARDIS (Currently 'rigged' by the Time Lords so that it would only travel with Lucie on board, Lucie having been sent to The Doctor as part of a 'witness protection program' ("Blood of the Daleks") that the Time Lords hadn't seen fit to elaborate on). Straxus agreed and gave The Doctor a time ring for his mission, even offering to make alternative arrangements for Lucie's future safety given the strained relationship between her and The Doctor so far. On The Doctor's return from his mission, Straxus told The Doctor why Lucie was originally taken out of her own time and sent to The Doctor, as they had calculated that she was 'destined' to become a dictator in Earth's future and needed her to stay with The Doctor while they 'edited' her past.
With The Doctor having discovered an old CIA plan to provide a group of mercenaries with Time Lord technology that had since been co-opted by the Cybermen, Straxus was forced to help The Doctor defeat the Cybermen when he was taken back to Lonsis with The Doctor and Lucie. Although Straxus was injured during the conflict and would probably have to regenerate, The Doctor was able to defeat the Cybermen using a Quantum Crystaliser - a device which altered possible futures to create the best possible outcome for the user - that he had determined was designed to ensure the loss of the Cybermen, turning the Crystaliser up to full power to ensure that the odds of the entire Cyber-army currently attacking suffering multiple systems failures at once increased to a certainty, burning the Crystaliser out due to the impossibility of what it had been asked to do. Before Straxus departed, The Doctor realised that actually one of Lucie's would-be colleagues was the one who would become a dictator - they had each applied for the same job before the Time Lords interfered - and Lucie had been sent to The Doctor by accident, although the Time Lords' alterations to history prevented the dictator rising to power while Lucie decided to stay with The Doctor anyway.
Straxus was later sent by the Time Lords to take The Doctor back to Gallifrey, where he was to be quarantined with the rest of the Time Lords in order to prevent the resurrection of Morbius ("The Brain of Morbius") through the actions of the Cult of Morbius ("Sisters of the Flame" and "Vengeance of Morbius"), a cult who worshipped Morbius and now sought to resurrect him using fragments of his destroyed brain infused with Time Lord genes from a fresh source. However, while Straxus failed to find The Doctor in time, The Doctor was 'rescued' by the Sisterhood of the Flame, leaving Straxus to be captured by Cristophe Zarodnix, the leader of the Cult of Morbius, and was forced to surrender his DNA in order to resurrect Morbius. As a result, Straxus was imprisoned for ten years while Morbius fed of Straxus' life energy whenever he became weak, while Morbius went on to mount a new campaign of conquest after the TARDIS slipped forwards in time by a decade when The Doctor and Lucie tried to go back and stop Morbius being resurrected in the first place. Although unable to go back again as Morbius's first act had been to use a stellar manipulator to disrupt Gallifrey's prime Eye of Harmony, forcing the Time Lords to increase Gallifrey's defences and hide on the planet, with the TARDIS's last trip using all but the last dregs of power, The Doctor and Lucie were able to find Straxus, who explained that Morbius's resurrection had been flawed and still relied on regular infusions from him to maintain a 'stable' body even as he continued his campaign of conquest. Switching places with Straxus when he was to be brought up for his next feeding, The Doctor managed to remove Morbius's control unit for the stellar manipulator and hurl himself and Morbius into a canyon, allowing the Time Lords to correct history and restore Straxus to full health, while The Doctor was saved when the Sisterhood teleported him to the planet Orbis mid-fall ("Orbis"), preserving the events of Morbius's defeat while saving his life.
Following another regeneration, Straxus, now Coordinator of the CIA, was ordered by the Lord President of Gallifrey to send The Doctor to France during World War I ("Dark Eyes 1 - The Great War"), hoping to give The Doctor a mission to inspire his interest in life once again after the recent deaths of Lucie, new companion Tamsin Drew, and his own great-grandson Alex Campbell, during a new Dalek invasion of Earth caused by the Meddling Monk ("To the Death"). After The Doctor had spent some time travelling with Molly O'Sullivan - who he had identified as the girl the Time Lords wanted him to save even if he didn't know the reason for their interest in her - Straxus saved The Doctor and Molly from an illusion created by a group of Daleks who were trying to trick The Doctor into thinking that the Daleks would become peaceful once the Time Lords were destroyed, explaining that the Time Lords had become aware of a mysterious individual identified only as 'X' who was working with the Daleks on some unspecified but dangerous project ("Dark Eyes 1 - Tangled Web"). Before The Doctor could convince Straxus to give him more information, they were attacked by Daleks and Straxus was forced to retreat to Gallifrey. Lost for options, The Doctor travelled into Molly's past, and witnessed an occasion when she was lost in the moors near her house when she was two and was rescued by a strange man.
Following a new clue from the Time Lords, The Doctor and Molly travelled to Srangor, where they learned that the Daleks had been working with the strange man who had rescued Molly as a child - the man identifying himself as Kotris - to create a space-time projector that would allow the Daleks to witness all of time and space as part of their new plan ("Dark Eyes 1 - X and the Daleks"). When Molly was captured by the Daleks, The Doctor learned that she had been infused with retro-genitor particles by Kotris when he 'rescued' her during her childhood, with Kotris and the Daleks now intending to use those particles to erase the Time Lords from history. Although Straxus had managed to modify the particles in Molly so that they would erase the Daleks instead, The Doctor and his new acquaintance Nadeyan refused to sacrifice Molly, Nadeyan instead sacrificing himself to destroy the Temporal Chamber.
When Straxus appeared in the subsequent stand-off between The Doctor, Molly, Kotris and the Daleks, he revealed the final shocking secret of Kotris's true identity; Kotris was none other than Straxus's next incarnation. Following his next regeneration, Straxus's subtle self-loathing of the more brutal actions he had committed in the name of the Time Lords would become even more extreme, causing him to turn against his own people, proclaiming that they were worse than even the Daleks through their constant manipulations of time, adopting a new name to escape his association with Straxus and having his own DNA modified so that he would no longer be a Time Lord. Although Straxus protested that he had no interest in regenerating into that lunatic, The Doctor noted that he had made very little effort to deal with the threat of Kotris by simply killing himself; all Straxus had done was travel to Srangor - which was contaminated by retro-genitor radiation that would prevent regeneration - and try to throw himself off a cliff before he was rescued by a temporal drone sent by Kotris to preserve his existence, seeing that as a sign that any attempt to kill himself would be stopped. As The Doctor and Molly fled to the TARDIS, the Daleks threatened to kill Straxus, but when both Kotris and Straxus protested this due to their own 'shared' existence, the Dalek Time Controller mockingly denounced Straxus as a coward, as he proclaimed his hatred of Kotris while refusing to do everything he could to stop him. Disgusted by Straxus, the Daleks exterminated him, thus erasing Kotris and his scheme from existence, although the Dalek Time Controller noted that it would still remember these events despite Kotris' erasure and would find another way to destroy the Time Lords.
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The Light at the End
(Nicholas Briggs) |
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Human Resources - Part 1
(Eddie Robson) |
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Human Resources - Part 2
(Eddie Robson) |
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Sisters of the Flame
(Nicholas Briggs) |
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The Vengeance of Morbius
(Nicholas Briggs) |
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Dark Eyes
(Nicholas Briggs) |
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Dark Eyes - The Great War
(Nicholas Briggs) |
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Dark Eyes - Tangled Web
(Nicholas Briggs) |
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Dark Eyes - X and the Daleks
(Nicholas Briggs) |
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