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The One Doctor
(Gareth Roberts & Clayton Hickman) |
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 Name: Banto Zame
Format:
Audio
Time of Origin: Osphogus, the vulgar
end of time, millennia in the far future.
Appearances: "The
One Doctor"
Doctors: Sixth
Doctor
Companions: Melanie
Bush
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| Colin Baker |
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History: Banto Zame marks a particularly interesting
adversary for The Doctor, as, while he never acted against The Doctor
directly - barring some minor arguments - his actions nevertheless
earned him The Doctor’s personal enmity even before they met
face-to-face. While the full details of Banto Zame’s past are
unknown, it is known that he was born on the planet Osphogus - described
as being ‘a super-dense mudball’ by The Doctor in the
present, but apparently terraformed five thousand years before Banto’s
birth - in ‘the vulgar end of time’, a point in history
where everything has been discovered and all major conflicts are
over, with people being primarily interested in nothing more than
their own pleasure.
Banto
apparently began a life of crime by stealing a five nim note from
his mother’s purse. While he has said - in passing - that he’s
married, it appears that he hasn’t had contact with his wife
for some time, having spent the past few years running around with
Sally-Anne Stubbins, a fellow con artist. One of their apparently
most regular scams is to pose as The Doctor - knowledge of The Doctor
having become apparently fairly common at this point in history due
to his travels, although many believe him to be merely a legend rather
than a real person - although their con was riddled with minor flaws,
such as Banto possessing a psychic (Rather than sonic) screwdriver,
and their ‘Stardis’ looking like a portaloo rather than
a police box (Based on historical photographs of policemen always
standing around them, Banto and Sally -Anne had assumed that the
image they’d chosen for the Stardis was a police box).
This con continued until Banto and Sally-Anne
arrived in the Generios system, where they faked an invasion by the ‘Skelloids’,
subsequently claiming that the ‘Stardis’ required ‘pluvon
power crystals’ and they would need a hundred million credits to
purchase the crystals. Before their departure, however, they were confronted
by the Sixth Doctor and Mel, who had detected Generios’s distress
call on the TARDIS’s long-range sensors, prompting The Doctor to
investigate Banto’s presence; never having been to Generios in
his past, and unable to sense the presence of a future incarnation, he
naturally knew that Banto’s Doctor wasn’t another incarnation
of himself.
Initially
believing The Doctor and Mel to be simply another couple of con artists
attempting his scam, Banto had them thrown into the cells - dismissing
them to the Generios leaders as excited fans - but the arrival of
a mysterious giant cylinder demanding the three greatest treasures
of the Generios system be delivered to it in three hours ended Banto’s
attempts to escape. Although he initially dismissed it as The Doctor’s
version of the Skelloids - showing his only real trace of morality
as he commented that at least his cons left the people with the impression
that they’d been saved, while the cylinder allowed the new
arrivals to steal the three treasures and scarper with the loot -
when The Doctor and Mel arrived, forcing Banto and Sally-Anne to
take the ‘Stardis’ to the TARDIS, Banto realised that
he was genuinely in the presence of The Doctor, being briefly overcome
with shock (Sally-Anne, on the other hand, quickly appeared to develop
a greater interest in The Doctor after learning his true identity).
Despite The Doctor’s anger at Banto’s attempts
to trade on his reputation - as well as the ‘insult’ of
the ‘Stardis’s’ appearance - he and Mel were forced
to work with Banto and Sally-Anne in order to recover the three treasures;
Unit ZX-419, the ‘Shelves of Infinity’ - a masterful
example of pan-dimensional engineering, the shelves’ components
slid in and out of different dimensions as they were put together
- Mentos - the ultimate source of information, consisting of a holographic
interface with access to another dimension full of research devices
that could travel to any point in existence - and a massive diamond
(According to The Doctor, the largest diamond in all of time and
space). Having gathered the treasures together and returned to Generios
One - despite Banto’s attempt to briefly steal the TARDIS after
Sally-Anne learned that he was already married - they displayed the
treasures to the cylinder, which asked The Doctor to present himself
so that it could give him a reward. As Banto introduced himself as
The Doctor, Mel and Sally-Anne attempted to protest, only for The
Doctor to claim that he was Banto, going so far as to kiss Sally-Anne
to reinforce the bluff.
Although puzzled by The Doctor’s actions, Banto
nevertheless continued to reaffirm that he was The Doctor, only to
be shocked when the cylinder captured him in a tractor beam, revealing
that it had been after The Doctor for its masters, the Sussyurats
of Chalzon; having detected the news reports of The Doctor’s
presence in the system, the cylinder had come to Generios and set
the challenge of the quest for the treasures to positively identify
The Doctor and take him back to its masters for trial. As Banto departed
- The Doctor noting that he hadn’t met the Syssyurats yet but
that he would be certain to really annoy them when he did so - The
Doctor and Mel returned to the TARDIS, leaving Sally-Anne to reap
the rewards of her reputation as The Doctor’s companion; The
Doctor would rescue Banto at some future date, but for the moment,
he felt that the universe was only big enough for the one Doctor. |
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