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Warmonger
(Terrance Dicks) |
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 Name: Borusa
Format:
Television show and Book
Time of Origin: Gallifrey, the same
time as The Doctor
Appearances: "The
Deadly Assassin", "The
Invasion of Time", "Arc
of Infinity", "The
Five Doctors", "Warmonger", "Blood
Harvest", "The
Eight Doctors" and "Engines of War"
Doctors: Fought the First
Doctor,
Second
Doctor,
Third
Doctor and
Fifth
Doctor;
worked with the Fourth
Doctor,
Seventh
Doctor and Eighth
Doctor and the War Doctor.
Companions: Acted against Susan, The
Brigadier, Sarah
Jane Smith,
Tegan
Jovanka, Turlough; worked with Leela, K9, Nyssa, Peri, Ace, Bernice
Summerfield and Cinder.
History: One of The Doctor’s teachers at
the Prydonian academy, The Doctor was one of the few teachers The
Doctor liked and respected, despite his typically rebellious attitude
towards any form of authority. Although he was typically rather stern
towards The Doctor, claiming that The Doctor would never amount to
anything in the universe while he retained his “propensity
for vulgar facetiousness”, and even being responsible for the
decision to expel The Doctor after his first encounter with The
Celestial Toymaker ("Divided
Loyalties"), Borusa nevertheless appeared
to reciprocate this affection for his student, commonly giving The
Doctor ‘marks’ during their later meetings at times of
some crisis or another. Unlike The Doctor, whose personality varied
as much as his body in each incarnation, Borusa’s various regenerations
typically remained a politically-minded Time Lord, set in his ways
but willing to allow for The Doctor’s rather independent attitude,
and it was only in the incarnation he possessed in his last adventure
that his personality went through any significant changes.
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Blood Harvest
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During
his first reunion with The Doctor, Borusa was attending the retirement
ceremony of the current President of Gallifrey, only for the Fourth
Doctor -
summoned there by a telepathic call - to be framed for the assassination
of the President. Putting himself forward as a candidate
for the presidency to give himself the chance to investigate, The
Doctor discovered that The Master, now a crippled, withered old husk,
was responsible for the President’s death, attempting to get
his ally Chancellor Goth instated as President so that he could drain
the energy of the central Eye of Harmony and revitalise his body
with a new set of regenerations. After The Doctor had thwarted The
Master and Goth’s scheme, Borusa reminded The Doctor of his
comment about The Doctor’s “propensity for vulgar facetiousness”,
but, as his old student departed, he gave The Doctor’s efforts
nine out of ten for saving them all.
In their next meeting - Borusa having regenerated
in the meantime, although The Doctor remained in his fourth incarnation
- The Doctor had taken on the role of President of the High Council;
since no other candidate had come forward following Goth’s death,
he had technically become President by default. Having his walls lined
with lead, The Doctor appeared to be allowing a race of telepathic beings
called the Vardans to
invade Gallifrey, but, as he revealed to Borusa in his room - the lead
preventing the Vardans from reading their thoughts inside - it was really
all a trick to prevent the Vardans recruiting a less scrupulous Time
Lord into their plan; he had managed to deceive them because his thoughts
were so random that it was practically impossible for the Vardans to
pick up on his central plan, but Borusa had to stay in the room because
he was too one-track-minded to not think about The Doctor’s
scheme. Aided by K9, The Doctor managed to time loop the Vardan
homeworld by opening a hole in the transduction barriers and allowing
them to materialise on Gallifrey. However, as he later learned, the Vardans
had merely been the advance force for the true invaders; his old enemies,
the Sontarans, who used the brief hole in the barriers to land on Gallifrey.
The Doctor managed to end the threat by trapping the Sontaran leader
in the TARDIS and
killing him with a forbidden Time Lord weapon - the De-Mat Gun, which
erased the target from Time itself -, although his memory of later events
was wiped in the process.
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| The Invasion of Time |
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Following
their next subsequent regenerations, Borusa and the Fifth
Doctor once again met, The Doctor now being stalked by a being from the
anti-matter universe that sought to take on his form. Although Borusa
was willing to allow The Doctor to be executed to stop the creature
from escaping to our world, he nevertheless aided The Doctor when
they discovered that the being in question was Omega, who had formed
an alliance with a rogue Time Lord called Hedin. Aided by a technician
called Damon, an old friend of The Doctor’s, The Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan
Jovanka managed to expose Hedin’s scheme - despite his attempts
to frame Borusa for his crimes -, but they arrived too late to stop
Omega from acquiring a new body based on The Doctor’s biodata.
However, the transfer was unstable, and, as Omega left, The Doctor
and his companions raced to find him with the matter converter gun;
the only means of stopping Omega before he reverted to anti-matter.
Eventually, they cornered Omega at the end of a pier as he began
to decompose, but Omega, not wishing to return to the living death
of the anti-matter universe, accelerated the decay of his shielding,
determined to take the Earth with him, and The Doctor had no choice
but to shoot Omega with the matter converter gun, destroying Omega
before he fully reverted to anti-matter.
After this, however, Borusa’s role in The Doctor’s
life changed significantly, due in no small part to his next regeneration.
Following this regeneration, Borusa’s mind became warped by
the stress of the regeneration, leaving him believing that only he
was capable of ruling Gallifrey, but, to achieve this, he required
more than the traditional twelve regenerations; he needed true immortality.
Learning of tales that the secret to immortality had been discovered
by Rassilon, the founder of Time Lord society, who was said to dwell
in his ‘tomb’, the Dark Tower, while waiting for worthy
Time Lords to pass his test and prove their worthiness to achieve
immortality. In an attempt to gain the secret, Borusa used the Timescoop
- a forbidden artefact from the Dark Times - to pull all five of
The Doctor’s current incarnations into the Death Zone, intending
for them to pass the tests in his place. Although the Fourth Doctor
and Romana were trapped in a time eddy - briefly endangering the
Fifth’s existence until the First Doctor’s presence managed
to strengthen his presence - the other four Doctors, aided by Susan, The
Brigadier, Sarah
Jane Smith, Tegan and Turlough, managed to reach the
tower. Using the Coronet of Rassilon, Borusa managed to immobilise
companions, but the four remaining Doctors gathered the strength
to resist him. Rassilon was awakened at this point and, on the advice
of the First Doctor, concluded that Borusa was worthy of immortality;
thanks to a riddle on the tomb, the First had deduced that the whole
immortality story had been a trap by Rassilon to get rid of potentially
dangerous Time Lords. All Borusa got for his trouble was an eternity
trapped as a living statue, Rassilon then freeing the Fourth Doctor
from the Time Eddy before restoring the First, Second and Third to
their proper places in Time.
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| The Five Doctors |
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Still in his fifth incarnation, The Doctor later had
an out-of-sequence encounter with Borusa while dealing with his old
enemy Morbius, a former Time Lord president who now sought to conquer
the galaxy with a vast army (“Warmonger”).
Achieving an official position of ambassador to the planet Sarn -
where Morbius first brought his army together, The Doctor contacted
the Gallifrey of the present and met with the Borusa of the time,
the current Borusa apparently being from a period between the First
Doctor’s departure from Gallifrey (“Lungbarrow”)
and the Second
Doctor’s capture and subsequent trial (“The
War Games”). Conferring with Saran, the current acting
President of Gallifrey, Borusa, and Ratisbon, head of the Celestial
Intervention Agency, The Doctor was convinced to form a multi-species
army to oppose Morbius, gathering Draconians, Sontarans, Cybermen,
Ice
Warriors and Ogrons together against Morbius.
After a year-long campaign, The Doctor’s army managed to defeat
Morbius and he was thus ‘executed’ - although his brain
was secretly removed by one of his followers, to be later destroyed
by the Fourth Doctor - The Doctor subsequently departing despite
the various offers to return to Gallifrey, knowing that all three
Time Lords had their own agendas in wanting him to return.
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The Eight Doctors
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Some time later, however, The Doctor was forced to free
Borusa to seek aid in dealing with a political crisis on Gallifrey.
While the Sixth
Doctor was forced to battle The
Valeyard - his own
dark future self - on a space station in a sham trial, the Eighth
Doctor - having travelled into his past to regain his lost memories
after falling victim to a trap by The Master - contacted Rassilon,
asking for Borusa to be freed as he was the only Time Lord capable
of resolving the problem. Freed from captivity - and reverted to
an older, more sane incarnation, Borusa was able to convince the
High Council to reorganise, but, in the aftermath of the crisis,
he returned to Rassilon, feeling that he did not deserve to be freed
yet.
Eventually, Borusa achieved true freedom when he was
released from captivity by the Committee of Three, an alleged Gallifreyan
security council run by Rath, a staunch supporter of Borusa and the
younger brother of Chancellor Goth (A Time Lord ally of The Master).
Contacting the evil Agonal, who sought to make bad situations worse
throughout history, Rath intended to set Agonal against Rassilon
so they could free Borusa, but Borusa, once free, admitted that he
had seen the error of his ways and helped The Doctor, Rassilon and
Romana crush Agonal. The Three were captured, and Borusa was sent
to a new plane of existence, having finally achieved redemption for
his past actions.
However, Borusa eventually reappeared in The Doctor's life when Rassilon, resurrected by the Time Lords to serve as a leader in the Time War against the Daleks ("The End of Time"), somehow restored Borusa to corporeal existence as a retro -evolved possibility engine, constantly shifting between his various past and possible future incarnations as he witnessed the Time Vortex and all possible futures, trapped on a steel frame with various cables and wires linked to his body, as well as assorted shades of his other selves left wandering around the Death Zone. Although the High Council was disturbed by what they had done, they nevertheless kept Borusa alive, confining him to the Dark Tower where he was often consulted by Rassilon to come up with suitable strategies to ensure victory in the Time War. However, Borusa was eventually destroyed when the War Doctor - technically The Doctor's ninth incarnation, the Eighth Doctor's regeneration having been deliberately influenced to ensure that he would become a warrior who could end the Time War ("Night of The Doctor") - stole him from the Death Zone with the aid of his new companion Cinder and Borusa's various shades to aid in the destruction of the Tantalus Eye, a crucial space-time anomaly that the Daleks sought to use to erase the Time Lords from history. Wishing an end to his tortured existence, Borusa used his access to the higher dimensions to channel the power of the Tantalus Eye and force a new reality on the various planets around the Eye, obliterating the Daleks while leaving the planets' surviving human population alive, with only the destruction left by the Daleks as any sign that they had ever been there ("Engines of War"). |
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