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| Barber-Surgeon |
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 Name: The Barber-Surgeon; real name unknown
Format:
Audio
Time of Origin: Active during the Time War
Appearances: "He Who Fights With Monsters: The Mission", "He Who Fights With Monsters: The Abyss" and "He Who Fights With Monsters: The Horror"
Doctors: War Doctor
Companions: None; Leela offered her support for The Doctor’s campaign against the Barber-Surgeon but didn’t confront him directly.
History: With the escalating horror of the Time War driving both Time Lords and Daleks to desperate measures, it was almost inevitable that the war would give rise to individuals like the Barber-Surgeon, whose weapons would prove a devastating potential asset to both sides in the conflict. While originally a Time Lord, the Barber-Surgeon’s efforts escalated to a level where he threatened both sides as part of his goal to end the war.
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| The
War Doctor |
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The most notable thing about the Barber-Surgeon is that even he didn’t seem to know many details of his pre-war history. It was strongly implied that he was some temporally warped counterpart to The Doctor, such as expressing a recollection of strangling a companion on the floor of his TARDIS - much like how the Sixth Doctor attacked Peri Brown ("The Twin Dilemma") - or claiming that he named a pet Dalek ‘D9’ out of nostalgia in a manner that suggested memories of K9 ("The Invisible Enemy"). He even claimed to have encountered an alternate version of The Doctor who met Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright on a country road rather than in a junkyard and immediately went to Skaro rather than the past. At one point he was referred to by his associates as ‘the Foreman’, likely a nod to Foreman’s Yard where the TARDIS had initially materialised on Earth ("An Unearthly Child"). However, the Barber-Surgeon appeared certain that he had never gone by ‘The Doctor’, explicitly stating that he was sure he had always been a surgeon, although he warned The Doctor of the dangers of The Doctor becoming like the Barber-Surgeon if he went down the wrong path.
Regardless of the mystery of his origin, it is nevertheless certain that the Barber-Surgeon was originally a Time Lord weapons expert, until he essentially went rogue and set up a third front in the war. Creating a factory in a pocket dimension, the Barber-Surgeon took creatures that existed in the Time Vortex and turned them into beings regarded as abominations by both sides. How long he maintained this third front is unknown, but his existence first became more than a theory when the recursive inversions at Lakertya ended in a Time Lord loss even though the Daleks suffered greater casualties. His existence became officially known during the quantum siege of Zanak, and by the time the Barber-Surgeon’s forces attacked the Daleks on Kembel ("The Daleks' Master Plan"), he had become so formidable that a Dalek survivor referred to the Barber-Surgeon as 'death'.
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He Who Fights With Monsters
(Robert Valentine) |
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When his attacks endangered the time locks on Gallifrey and Skaro, both sides decided that the Barber-Surgeon was too dangerous to be left unchecked. The War Council dispatched the War Master and two handlers to assassinate him, but the Barber-Surgeon killed The Master and took the handlers to his dimension, giving them new personas as ‘the Constable’ and ‘the Companion’. At one point he captured a Dalek, who he named ‘9’ and kept as a pet as he kept working on his ultimate weapon, a temporal obliterator known as ‘the Unforgiving Minute’, which could erase the Daleks and the Time Lords from history at once. However, the Barber-Surgeon realised that he was dying of unspecified health issues and would be unable to finish the weapon, prompting him to take steps to lure The Doctor into his dimension. By this point, The Doctor had regenerated into the incarnation known as ‘The War Doctor’ ("The Night of The Doctor"), an incarnation specifically intended to fight in the War, who believed that he had lost the ‘right’ to be known by his original name.
Following clues left by the Barber-Surgeon, such as vague transmissions to both sides, the War Doctor made his way to the Barber-Surgeon’s planet, where he discovered The Master’s corpse, arranged in a manner that would help The Doctor find the portal to the Barber Surgeon’s pocket dimension. Having passed through this portal, the War Doctor was subject to tests by the Companion and the Constable, with his response to their actions affirming to the Barber-Surgeon that the War Doctor was still The Doctor where it truly counted. Where the Barber-Surgeon solely sought to end the war even if that meant destroying everything, the War Doctor still ultimately tried to find alternatives where possible, giving the Barber-Surgeon faith that he would do the right thing. The test complete, the Barber-Surgeon gave The Doctor a time ring to escape his dimension after activating the prototype Unforgiving Minute, erasing the Barber-Surgeon and his factory from existence along with the Daleks that had attempted to follow The Doctor into the pocket dimension. This meant that the Time War would continue, but The Doctor mused that those people killed by the Barber-Surgeon (including The Master) would now be restored to life, giving them a new chance at life.
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