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Night of the Humans
(David Llewellyn) |
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 Name: Dirk Slipstream
Format:
Book
Time of Origin: Died in the year 250
339; precise planet of origin unknown.
Appearances: "Night
of the Humans"
Doctors: Eleventh Doctor
Companions: Amy Pond
History: Of all The Doctor’s many enemies,
Dirk Slipstream is unquestionably one that The Doctor will never
bother to remember or think about longer than absolutely necessary,
Slipstream being little more than a pretentious idiot with more ambition
than sense, even if his equal lack of morality made him a threat
that shouldn’t be ignored.
Having
been responsible for the deaths of fifty people simply to steal some
jewels, Slipstream was caught by The Doctor (The precise incarnation
was never specified, but given Slipstream’s knowledge that
The Doctor is the last Time Lord and The Doctor’s thoughts
that it had been ‘years and regenerations’ since he last
saw him, the Ninth
Doctor would be the best candidate) and sentenced
to several thousand years in the ice prison of Volag Noc for his
crimes. With little else to do but read, Slipsteam began to peruse
the prison library, eventually stumbling upon the myth of the Mymon
Key, a powerful object created centuries in the distant past that
could manipulate gravity.
Automatically fascinated by this object, Slipstream
spent most of his time researching it, eventually tracing it to a human
expedition ship that had vanished several thousand years ago, tracking
the ship to the Gyre, a flat planet composed of space junk that met due
to the combined gravity of nearby systems. Aware that the Mymon Key’s
designers had secured it in a box that couldn’t be opened without
knowledge of their language, Slipstream broadcast a phony distress signal
to draw The Doctor in, reasoning that the Time Lord was the best candidate
to crack the code, before setting out to the planet himself.
Unfortunately
for Slipstream, he swiftly learned after arriving on the Gyre that
things were more complicated than he had believed. Not only did he
have to worry about the approaching comet Schuler-Khan, which was
set to crash into the Grye and destroy it a matter of hours after
his arrival, but he also had to deal with the Sittuun - an alien
race who had come to the Gyre to destroy it with a nanobomb that
would reduce it to atoms in a matter of seconds in order to prevent
the impact with the comet causing it to shatter and rain debris across
the twelve planets in the Sittuun system - and the descendents of
the human survivors of the crashed ship, now regressed to a primitive
society that believed the Gyre was Earth and that their ‘God’,
Gobo - really the logo for the company that owned the ship - would
come to take them to ‘El Pasa’ (One of the crew having
brought a great deal of Westerns which had become ‘sacred messages’ to
the descendents). Although Slipstream’s ‘plan’ to ‘recruit’ The
Doctor had worked, matters were complicated when the Eleventh Doctor was captured by the humans as a ‘heretic’ for his attempts
to explain the truth, while his companion Amy Pond was ‘rescued’ by
the Sittuuns.
Arriving on the Gyre in his ship, Slipstream ‘offered’ to
help Amy rescue The Doctor, only to abandon her when they were attacked
by Sollogs - a local life-form that looked like a giant slug with
legs -, Amy only narrowly escaping when one of the Sittuun took Slipstream’s
ship to follow her out of his own guilt at being prepared to abandon
The Doctor. Arriving at the human ship, Slipstream was able to force
The Doctor to take him to the Mymon Key, but The Doctor was able
to dispose of the Key in the swamps of the Gyre - realising that
the Gyre itself had been formed by the Key - as the Sittuun prepared
to escape after setting off the bomb. Refusing to abandon the Key,
Slipstream attempted to shoot his way through the swamps to recover
it, only to be killed by the Sollog. With Slipstream dead, The Doctor,
Amy and the Sittuun were forced to leave the humans as the nanobomb
detonated, The Doctor forced to accept that he couldn’t convince
the humans to depart after their corrupted heritage, although Amy
and the Sittuun assured him that he had done everything he could,
and that he should consider the lives had been saved with the destruction
of the Gyre. |
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