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Destroy the Infinite
(Nicholas Briggs) |
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 Name: The Eminence; eventually revealed to have originated as a twisted combination of the Dalek Time Controller and Professor Markus Schriver.
Format:
Audio
Time of Origin: The Eminence went to war with the Earth Empire in the far future.
Appearances: "Destroy the Infinite", "The Seeds of War", "Dark Eyes 2: Time's Horizon", "Dark Eyes 2: Eyes of The Master", "Dark Eyes 3: The Death of Hope", "Dark Eyes 3: The Reviled", "Dark Eyes 3: Masterplan", "Dark Eyes 3: Rule of the Eminence" and "Dark Eyes 4: Eye of Darkness".
Doctors: Fourth Doctor, Sixth Doctor and Eighth Doctor
Companions: Leela, Melanie Bush, Molly O'Sullivan and Liv Chenka
History: For some time, the Eminence was one of the most powerful and mysterious entities that The Doctor has ever encountered. Not only did he spend several lives unaware of even what the Eminence was beyond an essentially incorporeal entity capable of corrupting humans to make them part of itself, but in its first encounter with him the Eminence nearly corrupted The Doctor himself into its 'service' and retained a degree of influence over him for his next few lives. The scale of threat posed by the Eminence can be best measured by the fact that The Doctor actually had to make a deal with the Daleks to help him stop the Eminence from becoming a bigger threat at a key moment. During his own campaign against the Eminence, the Eighth Doctor was eventually pushed so far that he attempted to go back in time and prevent the Eminence from being created in the first place, although this plan ultimately failed.
Although the Eminence had no body of its own, it was portrayed as a powerful and evil entity from the moment The Doctor first became aware of it. The Eminence commonly relied on slave armies to fight for it, but certain warriors were 'rewarded' for exceptional service by being transformed into 'Infinite Warriors' as they were made to take the Breath of Forever, a part of the Eminence sent out via teleportation caskets. Those transformed into Infinite Warriors were left with burning orange eyes and a near-hatred of their past identities, to the extent that they would react violently if referred to by their original names. The Infinite Warriors were completely devoted to their service to the Eminence, referring to its 'Divine Will' and basically regarding it as a god, further reflecting the sheer ego of the Eminence itself. On a physical level, the Infinite Warriors were basically indestructible, with their bodies essentially the living dead and therefore being very hard to kill in a direct confrontation. The Master once obtained incendiary weapons that allowed him to kill Infinite Warriors with just one shot, but it is unclear if these were available on a large scale. The only other recorded case of an Infinite Warrior being killed without specialised weapons featured a Warrior being located at the heart of an explosion capable of destroying a building. The presence of retro-genitor particles in a human body could prevent a person becoming an Infinite Warrior, but such particles were very rare and it was difficult to arrange for people to be contaminated with sufficient particles to prevent infection and mutation.
From The Doctor's perspective, he first confronted the Eminence when the Fourth Doctor attempted to take Leela to visit Delafoss, a prosperous colony world, only to discover that Delafoss had been enslaved by the Eminence's armies. The Doctor and Leela encountered a pair of spies sent by the Earth Empire to investigate what was happening on Delafoss, which included the construction of a vast spaceship that would serve as the flagship of the Eminence's fleet. When the Eminence's solders detected their presence, Leela was able to escape to alert the Earth Empire to the current situation, but one of the spies was killed during the escape and another was shot when she was captured along with The Doctor and deemed surplus to requirements. Meanwhile, The Doctor was confronted by a teleportation casket and forced to take the Breath of Forever, turning him into an Infinite Warrior who would command the ship. The Earth Empire forces determined that the Eminence's spaceship, the Infinite, was intended as a deterrent as it would be loaded with various prisoners of war, the Eminence reasoning that humanity wouldn't outright destroy the ship as the attackers hoped to save the innocents.
Although Leela was unable to stop the Empire forces attacking the Infinite anyway, she was able to convince them to focus on targeting key areas of the ship to deactivate the Infinite without outright destroying it. Meanwhile, back on the ship itself, The Doctor eventually revealed that he had managed to escape being fully converted into an Infinite Warrior by trapping most of the Breath of Forever in his respiratory bypass system, allowing him to communicate with the Eminence even after he threw off its initial conditioning. He was then able to expel the Breath of Forever and repel the Eminence from him and other Infinite Warriors, allowing the Infinite to be evacuated of its slaves before it was destroyed.
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The Seeds of War
(Matt Fitton and Nicholas Briggs) |
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The Doctor encountered the Eminence once again in his sixth incarnation, when an attempt to take Mel to the opening of an exclusive restaurant accidentally led to him materialising in that restaurant after it had been used as an Eminence stronghold during the war. While the Eminence had been apparently defeated by the time of The Doctor's arrival, discovering a non-human individual in the tower prompted Earth's military to take The Doctor prisoner. Questioning Commander Trellak, The Doctor learned that the Eminence had not been 'defeated' in the sense that it had openly lost, but it had instead withdrawn its armies for reasons unknown. Witnessing the devastated state of the worlds the Eminence had left behind after its campaign, The Doctor speculated that this was the Eminence's true plan, to wear down humanity by forcing them to expend their resources in open conflict and then basically starve them out afterwards as they destroyed themselves in the subsequent riots.
Aided by scientist Helgert Treveler and his children Barlow and Sisrella, The Doctor analysed samples taken from the contaminated planets and determined that while the soils could be cleared, the Eminence had contaminated the seeds themselves by detonating ships in the upper atmosphere of the targeted planets, preventing them from growing new crops. When The Doctor travelled to Earth with the Treveler siblings after the death of their father to retrieve seeds from the old seed banks, he was initially apparently unaware that the Eminence was influencing his mind to prompt him on that plan in the first place. Its intention was that it would use The Doctor to contaminate those seeds with aspects of itself to turn all of humanity into Infinite Warriors, managing to send a Casket to the ship to infect Barlow with the Breath of Forever. However, The Doctor was eventually able to throw off the Eminence, manipulating its perception of its control over him so that he had time to move the seeds to safety. While the Infinite Warrior that Barlow had become attempted to attack the seed bank, the chief administrator, Kenneth, trapped the Warrior in an empty vault that was set to self-destruct, leaving The Doctor, Mel and Sisrella to start the reseeding process.
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Dark Eyes 2: Time's Horizon
(Matt Fitton) |
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Some time later, the Eighth Doctor was alerted to the continued existence of the Eminence when he materialised on the Orpheus, a spaceship on the edge of the universe in the far future and found a nebula that contained a fragment of the Eminence's essence, which claimed to have manifested from the end of the universe and been drawn back to this time by a time-traveller's flawed attempt to tap the energy found in the nebula and send it into the future ("Dark Eyes 2: Time's Horizon"). The essence of the Eminence attempted to possess The Doctor once again, but he was able to resist it more thoroughly than his last encounter with it, further proof that he was dealing with a young Eminence that hadn't met him yet. The Doctor was able to defeat the primitive Infinite Warriors by setting the ship to transmit the energies of the Eminence back into the nebula, compressing the Eminence back into the nebula and leaving the ship abandoned. With current companion Molly O'Sullivan and old ally Liv Chenka - Liv had been part of the Orpheus crew and was rescued by The Doctor before the ship destroyed itself - The Doctor subsequently determined that the ship's purpose could be traced back to a scientific research company on Earth in the 1970s. Travelling back to that time period, The Doctor learned that this company was run by The Master and his new associate Doctor Sally Armstrong ("Dark Eyes 2: Eyes of The Master"). Having been resurrected by the Time Lords under initially unspecified circumstances (later revealed to be a partial paradox as The Master was restored by his own future self ("Ravenous 4 - Day of The Master")), The Master had been assigned to investigate means of controlling the Eminence once the Time Lords discovered that it would be the final life-form in existence in a new future. Attempting to take control of the Eminence for the official benefit of the Time Lords, The Master learnt that retro-genitor particles in some way weakened the influence of the Eminence, but the most potent source of these particles was The Doctor's companion Molly O'Sullivan, who had been contaminated with the particles as part of a Dalek and Time Lord plot to erase the other side from existence ("Dark Eyes 1: X and the Daleks").
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Dark Eyes 2: Eyes of the Master
(Matt Fitton) |
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Having discovered an Eminence fleet, The Master had stolen a Casket of Forever and infected it with a modified version of the gas that the Eminence used to create its Infinite Warriors, with this gas at least potentially able to allow The Master to take control of the Eminence's forces for himself. Since the retro-genitor particles manifested in humans in the form of unusually dark eyes, The Master and Sally were working as opticians, literally extracting the eyes of key patients to replace them with cybernetic implants while using the retro-genitor-tainted eyes as part of their experiments. Although The Master identified Molly as the source of the particles, The Doctor was able to disrupt The Master's plan by using the part of the Eminence in his mind to give the Eminence fragment The Master had already captured access to his knowledge of how to operate the TARDIS, resulting in the Eminence trying to go back to the fleet where The Master had originally stolen it from. This not only forced The Master to expel the Eminence from his TARDIS, but also seemingly burnt out The Doctor's own residual ties to the Eminence, leaving him with enough of a mental link for the Eminence to sense but not enough for it to actually control him. Based on Liv's encounter with what she had now realised was a future version of him, The Doctor was forced to travel to the planet Nixyce VII and assist the Daleks in thwarting a rebellion against them so that the Daleks stationed there would be able to stop the Eminence fleet, thus ensuring that The Master's hi-jacked Casket wouldn't reach the prime Eminence.
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Dark Eyes 3: The Death of Hope
(Matt Fitton) |
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Keeping up his usual tradition of cheating death, The Master was able to expel the Eminence from his TARDIS by dumping the TARDIS core, leaving only a small fragment of the Eminence in his own mind that he could use to exert his own influence as part of his subsequent plan, retrieving the core once the Eminence energies had been expelled. Having been released by the Dalek Time Controller to fight the Eminence, The Doctor travelled during the Eminence's campaign to make small contributions to the wider conflict, unable to ignore the Eminence's efforts even as he refused to actually help the Daleks change history by stopping the Eminence before the time when he knew it would pull back. Eventually The Doctor was contacted by Narvin, an operative of the Celestial Intervention Agency, who revealed that The Master had subtly hypnotised Molly to help him and Sally continue their experiments ("Dark Eyes 3 - The Death of Hope"). Visiting an isolated human colony, The Master, Sally and Molly presented themselves as offering aid to the few remaining survivors of the colony after the Eminence destroyed the rest of the population, with their real goal being to expose the remaining colonists to the retro-genitor particles within Molly to see how this apparent immunity to the Eminence might be adjusted to create Infinite Warriors loyal to The Master. While most of the colony were simply immune to the Breath of Forever after contact with Molly, one colonist, who had avoided direct contact with Molly but still been exposed to the particles by proximity, became a Warrior loyal to The Master rather than the Eminence, allowing The Master to command that Warrior to kill the prime Eminence Warrior before further exposure to Molly's particles turned The Master's Warrior to normal.
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Dark Eyes 3: Masterplan
(Matt Fitton) |
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Agreeing to track the progress of The Master's plans, The Doctor reunited with Liv and found his way to the planet Ramosa, where human refugees were essentially kept prisoner by the scorpion-like natives ("Dark Eyes 3 - The Reviled"). Realising that the Time Lords were trying to manipulate events to kill the humans, such as providing Liv with tainted vaccinations that would kill those who used them, The Doctor and Liv tried to find a way to keep the humans safe and free. Unfortunately, when the Eminence's forces attacked, The Master was able to trick The Doctor and Liv into sending the humans into his own ship so that he could spread the refugees out across space. Having already ensured that theses humans were 'contaminated' by the modified retro-genitor particles, The Master intended to let them spread among the human colonies in this sector of space so that they could pass on their taint, allowing The Master to at least theoretically take control of some of the Eminence's army at some future date. Outraged at the scale of damage caused by the Eminence, The Doctor tried to trace it back to its origin, eventually determining that it was created by the experiments of Professor Markus Schriver ("Dark Eyes 3 - Masterplan"), whose original goal was to allow astronauts to control their ships using their minds. By re-engineering memetic particles at the molecular level, Schriver could create a neural compound that mimicked the human brain, converting this form into a gaseous state that would allow minds to be extracted from their bodies and pilot ships through a form of telepathy.
It is unclear if Schriver's plan would have worked on its own, but ultimately The Master interfered in Schriver's work by adding 'extra ingredients' to Schriver's formula, such as a scoop of residual vortex emissions for energy storage and durability, along with silicon activators to manipulate the logic gates. While the residual vortex emissions just gave those afflicted with the energy an orange glow, the silicon activators served as calcification agents, which would allow the future Eminence to create the Infinite warriors. With Liv having infiltrated Schriver's lab posing as a representative of his financial backers, The Doctor tried to explicitly warn the professor that his work would lead to great harm, but Schriver's sheer ego meant that he ignored The Doctor's warnings, too focused on doing something great to consider the risks. With Liv concerned that Schriver was on the verge of a breakdown as he was so focused on his work he was even forgetting to take breaks, The Doctor decided to try and stop his research by destroying the ship carrying the latest samples of the gas Schriver would use for his research. Unfortunately, while The Doctor was able to trick the crew into evacuating and then set the ship to overload, The Master intercepted The Doctor on board the ship, ejecting The Doctor's TARDIS before The Doctor destroyed The Master's TCE and its attached TARDIS remote control device. As the Time Lords tried to escape, Sally Armstrong exposed Liv's true agenda to Schriver, but the increasingly-deranged scientist decided that he couldn't trust either woman, instead locking them both in two chambers to carry out his mind extraction experiment, the system set to random so that he could abstain from responsibility regarding which one would be killed. The Master attempted to take control of the ship by releasing the fragment of the Eminence within himself, managing to bargain with the Eminence fragment to gain a degree of control over the ship in exchange for promises of future glory. Fortunately, the Eminence was too weak to control the two Time Lords or exert full control of the ship, only able to divert it into a crash-landing near Schriver's base before it would outright explode. The Master was able to escape using a prototype teleportation casket once the ship came in proximity to Schriver's base, leaving The Doctor to seal himself in a pressurised chamber that would protect him from the impact.
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Dark Eyes 3: Rule of the Eminence
(Matt Fitton) |
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With Sally killed by the chamber, The Master took Liv as an additional hostage to help him keep an eye on Molly's health. While Schriver had already left the base and deleted all reference to his work so far, leaving The Master unable to complete his plan to take control of the Eminence from the start, he chose to improvise a new plan. Travelling to Earth after the war against the Eminence ("Dark Eyes 3 - Rule of the Eminence"), The Master used his modified retro-genitor particles to put himself in control, releasing a weakened strain of the Eminence particles across Earth to make all of humanity susceptible to its influence. This was further aided by his use of Walter Vincent, Earth's current administrator, who was in reality a projected illusion based on Molly's memories of her father (The Master did the work at first but used Vincent to reinforce his control). The Master's efforts had also established 'sky generators' to officially purify Earth's air, but in reality they were emitting a subtle level of Eminence gas into the atmosphere that would allow The Master to control them. The Doctor was able to follow The Master to Earth after Narvin retrieved his TARDIS, but he arrived too late to do more than determine The Master's plan even if he couldn't stop it. Once The Master used Vincent's influence to exert control over all of Earth, only Liv and The Doctor remaining immune to his control, but The Doctor's brief contact with Walter Vincent gave him a low-level persuasive ability that allowed him to give people orders and gather resources. While The Doctor noted that he couldn't get away with anything too big, The Master wasn't going to be checking all the orders allegedly placed by Walter Vincent, allowing The Doctor to acquire a boat and some essential supplies while he made a plan.
After The Master had spent a few weeks preparing Earth to mount his new campaign against the universe, The Doctor was able to rescue Liv, sending her to the main broadcast centre while he confronted The Master, Molly and Walter Vincent directly. After The Doctor managed to make contact with the Eminence's controlling intelligence, he convinced the Eminence that The Master was just using it as a tool despite claiming that they would be partners. Once he was facing The Master directly, The Doctor allowed the Eminence to manifest through him after releasing it from one of the caskets The Master had prepared as part of his next campaign to spread the influence of the Eminence. The Doctor initially asked Molly to shoot him so that his subsequent regeneration would supercharge the anti-Eminence retro-genitor particles within him, but when Molly refused to shoot her friend, The Doctor revealed that he had actually anticipated that. In reality, the goal was to provoke an intense emotional reaction in Molly that would serve the same purpose as a regeneration, causing Walter Vincent to lose cohesion and disperse, releasing Molly's tainted retro-genitor particles so that all of humanity was freed form The Master's influence. The Eminence itself still existed, but it was now dispersed across the universe in such a fragmentary state that it would never be able to manifest again, culminating in it existing at the end of the universe in no state to do anything.
Despite the Eminence's defeat, The Doctor speculated that it would still be a threat to him in some other form, aware that he still didn't know how it had truly come into existence; Professor Schriver's experiments justified the technology behind the Eminence but didn't explain the existence of the consciousness of the Eminence itself. When the Time Lords sent Molly back to her own time to ensure that nobody could use her retro-genitor particles again, The Doctor and Liv tried to visit her to say goodbye, only to become caught up in a scheme by The Master and the Dalek Time Controller to take control of Earth. Using the weakening of the timelines caused by the paradoxes of Molly's own history, The Master and the Time Controller were able to establish a presence on Earth from 1921 onwards, to the extent that Earth was a Dalek-occupied world by 1961 ("Dark Eyes 4 - The Monster of Monmatre"). When The Doctor and Liv confronted the Time Controller in 1921, The Doctor was forced to leave Liv behind and travel away in the TARDIS, but the Time Controller and The Master had essentially already ensured that their timeline was the only one left, leaving The Doctor trapped in Dalek-occupied Moscow in 1961 while Liv was taken prisoner ("Dark Eyes 4 - Master of the Daleks").
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Dark Eyes 4: Eye of Darkness
(Matt Fitton) |
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Although the disorientated Doctor was rescued by the elderly Molly of this time period, the Dalek Time Controller was able to capture Liv and Molly, taking them away from Earth in The Doctor's TARDIS. However, The Doctor discovered that The Master had managed to help the Time Controller establish its presence on Earth by stealing a Sontaran clone ship and modifying it to generate Dalek mutants. After The Doctor reprogrammed the clone ship to generate Sontarans once again, he left the Daleks and Sontarans to fight while he stole The Master's TARDIS and followed his friends to the Eye of Orion, where the Daleks had established a weapons research facility disguised as a resort, using the visitors as test subjects ("Dark Eyes 4 - Eye of Darkness"). With Professor Markus Schriver having been allowed to continue his work at the result, the Dalek Time Controller, now an outcast to the Daleks, intended to establish itself as a new threat by taking control of Professor Schriver's experiments, transferring its consciousness into the gas that Schriver had named the MNN, a.k.a. Memetic Neural Network. However, since Schriver had already done the same thing before the Dalek Time Controller arrived, this resulted in their minds merging, mixing Schriver's ego with the Time Controller's desire to conquer and enslave.
Fortunately, The Doctor and Liv were able to trap the combined consciousness in the chamber where Schriver had been perfecting the gas, and gained another advantage when Liv revealed that Anya, a survivor of a Dalek attack who had determined the true nature of the resort, had attempted to smuggle a bomb into the facility to destroy it. While the bomb was hidden inside Anya, The Doctor was able to use another prototype cabinet to teleport the bomb out of Anya and send it into the chamber containing the gas, the Time Controller's casing displacing most of the explosion into the Vortex while what was left would disrupt the balance between the two minds. The Time Controller might still have been able to gain control of this dynamic before Molly entered the chamber herself, having realised that her connection to the Time Controller through their retro-genitor particles allowed her to exert some influence over the two. When Molly allowed herself to die, the shock to her link to the Time Controller caused the residual explosion to push the newly-formed Eminence into the Time Vortex, where it would eventually emerge at the very end of the universe until it was drawn back to the Orpheus ("Dark Eyes 2 - Time's Horizon") and start the Eminence on its subsequent campaign all over again. With the Dalek Time Controller essentially destroyed before it could complete its work with The Master, the timeline where they conquered Earth was erased, hopefully leaving at least a version of Molly to have a good life back on Earth away from The Doctor.
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