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Alien Bodies
(Lawrence
Miles) |
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 Name: Faction Paradox
Format:
Book.
Time of Origin: Earth, 3rd - 14th September
1752.
Appearances: "Alien
Bodies", "Unnatural
History", "Interference
Book One", "Interference
Book Two" and "The
Ancestor Cell".
Doctors: Third
Doctor, Eighth
Doctor and possibly the Fourth
Doctor.
Companions:
Sarah
Jane Smith,
Samantha
Jones,
Fitz Kreiner,
Compassion and 3rd
Romana.
History: Faction Paradox has a long and rather
complicated history with The Doctor, beginning allegedly
before they ever met
him while being simultaneously apparently dependent on him
for them to be created in the first place. The Faction is
a cult of time-travelling voodooists that worship time paradoxes
- essentially dedicating themselves to changing their own
histories - that apparently seceded from the House of Lungbarrow
(The Doctor’s own House back on Gallifrey ("Lungbarrow"))
some centuries ago, their adoption of the title ‘Grandfather’ for
the head of House being intended to mock the Time Lords as much as their perversion of Time due to Time Lord sterility;
they even displayed a recurring death fetishism to reflect
their mockery to Time Lords’ pretensions to immortality.
Due to their constant boundary pushing, such as recruiting
members from ‘lesser species’, House Paradox
was stripped of their rights as a House and reformed as
the Faction. After the Time Lords annihilated the Faction’s
homeworld after learning about the Faction’s peddling
of time travel technology - despite the Faction’s
belief that their blood rites would protect them -, the
Faction was reduced to various small groups, continuing
to share advanced technology with the natives of various
colonies while building up smaller cults throughout the
universe. Around this time, the Grandfather managed to found
the Eleven-Day Empire - situated in the eleven days that
were lost from the calendar in September 1752, when England
changed from the Julian calendar system to the Georgian
one; essentially, since everyone felt they were ‘losing’ those
eleven days, the Faction were perfectly willing to step
in and claim them for themselves -, but he was arrested
and apparently imprisoned on Shada before House Paradox
Loomed its first generation. They stand for everything that
the Time Lords are against, so it's no surprise that The
Doctor has battled them.
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Unnatural History
(Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman) |
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Although The Doctor was aware of their existence since his
fourth incarnation, their relatively limited numbers meant
that he rarely encountered them for most of his lives, with
his first truly significant encounter occurring when the
Eighth
Doctor and Sam attended the auction of the Relic,
regarded by those powers attending the auction - including
the Krotons, Time Lords from The Doctor’s future,
and Faction Paradox - as potentially be the greatest weapon
imaginable if its unique biodata codes are unleashed properly.
As The Doctor discovered, however, The Relic was none other
than the body of a certain individual with a very colourful
reputation; it was the body of The Doctor’s own thirteenth
incarnation, killed on the planet Drornid in the first major
battle of the Future War between the Time Lords and an as-yet-unknown
Enemy, which then crashed onto Earth and remained hidden
until it was found by a man named Qixotl and taken to the
auction. Despite the best efforts of the Faction to enforce
their own demands for the Relic, The Doctor was able to
use the Faction’s shrine - a primitive TARDIS that
relied on the sacrifice of flesh in voodoo-esque rituals
to operate - to defeat the Krotons before he departed with
the Relic, having tricked the bidders into thinking that
the Relic was a temporal paradox and therefore of no use
to them. However, even as he ensured the destruction of
his future corpse, The Doctor was left puzzled when the
shrine’s attempt to attack Sam revealed that something
that interfered with her history, the evidence suggesting
that someone had artificially manipulated her biodata to
create a Sam who would meet him as opposed to a darker-haired,
more self-destructive Sam who would have never met The Doctor
and never been as effective a companion as Sam was in her
current state...
This
question was later resolved in "Unnatural
History", when the
Eighth Doctor, Sam, and new companion Fitz Kreiner arrived in San Francisco
after the events of The Doctor's last regeneration. After preventing Earth's
destruction when the Eye of Harmony was opened by The Master,
The Doctor left without checking that reality had stabilised out, and the
damage has
become critical in 2002, creating a reality scar in the
alley where the TARDIS had originally materialised, the scar not only trapping
Sam and
the TARDIS - while simultaneously ‘summoning’ the dark-haired
Sam that The Doctor and Sam had been having ‘visions’ of into
existence -, but also has pulled in and trapped several creatures from
the higher dimensions in our reality, as well as attracting the attention
of Faction Paradox. While trying to stabilise the scar before time ran
out - simultaneously being hunted by a knife-wielding ten-year-old boy
whom The Doctor quickly identified as an agent of the Faction, the boy
expressing an interest in Sam -, The Doctor determined that Griffin, a
naturalist from the higher dimensions, was experimenting with his biodata,
traces of which were now spread throughout the city as a result of the
scar, his experiments giving Griffin the power to potentially manipulate
The Doctor’s timeline until he had ‘defined’ it to his
satisfaction. Although The Doctor was able to recover the TARDIS despite
the Faction agent’s attempt to make The Doctor doubt even Gallifrey’s
history, the scar remained, leaving dark Sam with no other option but to
enter the scar herself when The Doctor was in danger and she herself had
no idea how to help him, merging with The Doctor’s biodata and turning
into blonde Sam in order to restore a companion who knew how to help The
Doctor. In essence, blonde Sam’s entire existence was a paradox;
blonde Sam was created when dark Sam threw herself in amongst The Doctor’s
biodata in the scar, but she was only able to do so because The Doctor
brought her to the scar he’d created, and he only brought her there
because he’d already met blonde Sam. As The Doctor departed, the
boy appeared to taunt The Doctor about his paradoxical role in Sam’s
life, drawing The Doctor’s attention to the fact that, like the agents
of the Faction, as a result of the paradox he had just created, he now
had no shadow…
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Interference Book One
(Lawrence
Miles) |
|
During a later return to Earth ("Interference"),
The Doctor, Sam and Fitz were asked by one of The Doctor’s United
Nations contacts to look into a deal with the mysterious organisation known
as the Remote - represented by Guest, Compassion, and the strangely-familiar
Kode -, who were offering Earth advanced weapons. While looking into the
matter, Sam encountered The Doctor’s former companion Sarah Jane
Smith in time to witness a demonstration of the Remote’s weapon the
Cold, which seemingly erased its target from the universe, but the two
were captured by the Remote, who connected Sam up to their network so that
the Remote could develop their own principles rather than their current
decisions being influenced by local media signals. With The Doctor having
been captured by another group by accident, Fitz was attacked with the
Cold and sent into the future, where he was recruited by Faction Paradox
- the true masters of the Remote - and sent into a colony in the past...
where, as The Doctor later realised, he would eventually become Kode; the
Remote were sterile, but retained their population by using manipulated
biomass to ‘remember’ the deceased back into existence, Kode
being a version of Fitz shaped by peoples’ distorted memories of
Fitz over the centuries it had taken the Remote to reach Earth.
Now
aware of the Remote’s connection to the Faction, The Doctor deduced
their purpose; Earth was one of many planets that the Time
Lords had created to contain the evil that had been released
by their early time-travel experiments
tearing holes in reality, and the Remote had been selling
the Cold to Earth to attract the Time Lords’ attention by changing
history so that they could steal a TARDIS and access the
true Cold, which they believed
to be one of the Faction’s spirits. Although Sam was forced by Guest
to provide the Remote with access to her principles to keep
them focused on their goal - the Remote connecting her to
a transmitter and putting
her in various situations where she and The Doctor had to
make difficult decisions to stop an alien invasion -, this
also resulted in individual
members of the Remote adopting their own philosophies, such
as Compassion being reluctant to take action that would
endanger her own life. Although
Kode forced The Doctor to take him to the Cold after he
helped Sarah rescue The Doctor from his captivity, The Doctor
was able to ‘recognise’ him
as Fitz based on his body language, subsequently using Sam’s experience
with the Remote to tell Guest that the Cold was actually
a validium-based weapon created by the Time Lords that would
simply destroy Earth if it
was released. While Sam remained with Sarah, The Doctor
departed with Compassion and Kode - neither of whom fit
in with the rest of the Remote after their
contact with The Doctor and the TARDIS’s signals -, Kode being re-re-remembered
back to Fitz based on the TARDIS’s recollections of him ("Interference
- Book One" and "Interference
- Book Two").
For a time, The Doctor was left pondering the worth of any
of his actions if Faction Paradox were able to influence
his past, given their evidently growing
power, but eventually recognised that he still had free
will whatever the Faction did to his timeline ("The
Shadows of Avalon"),
unaware that they had already made a significant change
to his history, partly
because of his own actions...
While The Doctor had been briefly imprisoned
during his investigation into the Cold, he had begun to write out temporal
equations in his own blood to try and work out a means of allowing Sam
to have a life after leaving him (Given that she had been created to be
his companion, The Doctor was anxious about how Sam would exist after she
stopped travelling with him, eventually working out a means of influencing
her past development to give her a new purpose after leaving him). Whether
it was due to the Faction’s manipulation or an error in the Eighth
Doctor’s calculations, he unintentionally created a door in his cell
that led to the Third
Doctor’s TARDIS, accidentally altering his
own timeline by alerting the Third Doctor to the Faction's existence, when
he had previously only become aware of them in his fourth incarnation.
The Third Doctor then landed on the dead planet Dust - a world that marked
the point where humanity stopped progressing further into space -, where
he met up with a man named I.M. Foreman who ran a travelling caravan that
had arrived out of nowhere. While speaking with Foreman, The Doctor and
Sarah
Jane Smith learned that Foreman was a priest from Old Gallifrey,
who travelled the Universe in a travelling show intended to encourage the
universe to think about their full genetic potential from the range of
forms of the people who inhabit it. Essentially a primitive early TARDIS,
the show took on various forms that it prepared before it lands, one such
form being the junkyard where the First
Doctor and Susan had originally
materialised in their first visit on Earth ("An
Unearthly Child"),
shed by Foreman’s ship when it moved on to its next location. The
other twelve members of the show were actually Foreman's twelve future
incarnations, whom he found while wandering Old Gallifrey. Due to the relatively
primitive nature of regeneration at his time, the DNA of anything a Time
Lord ate or came in contact with could get caught in the regeneration process,
which resulted in his future selves mutating to various extremes, such
as his fifth incarnation being part lizard and his eighth being part machine.
Most worrying, however, were his final three selves; eleventh, known as
the If, literally breathed raw time to show people their pasts, presents
and possible futures, the twelfth, AKA, constantly shifted forms, and the
thirteenth, known as Number Thirteen, was simply a raw force of nature,
willing to devour everything to be everyone.
Confronted by a division of the Remote that sought to claim
both the travelling show and the TARDIS for themselves - this group of
the faction led by the ‘original’ Fitz Krienier, now over two
thousand years old and near-insane with rage at The Doctor -, The Doctor
and I.M. Foreman were forced to release Number Thirteen to devour the Faction
forces facing them. With Number Thirteen released, The Doctor then sent
the first twelve incarnations of I.M. Foreman back to Old Gallifrey in
I.M. Foreman’s show to resolve the last paradox, their subsequent
crash on the planet causing all of Foreman’s incarnations to regenerate
into the next one while losing their memories due to the trauma of the
incident. That paradox resolved, The Doctor subsequently convinced Number
Thirteen to merge itself with Dust's biosphere to continue Foreman’s
goal of expanding his potential, transforming Dust into a new, vibrant
world. However, just as he was about to leave, a villager who blamed The
Doctor for bringing the Faction to Dust shot him in the chest. As Sarah
Jane Smith dragged him back to the TARDIS, the Third Doctor began to regenerate,
only briefly aware that there was something fundamentally wrong about this
regeneration before he died for good. However, the new regeneration posed
more problems than an altered history. The Faction, trying to set up a
homeworld for themselves, had launched a biodata pod that had been intended
to target one of I.M. Foreman's incarnations and infect them at their regeneration,
resulting in the newly-created ‘Foreman’s World’ - knowing
that Foreman’s mentality would culminate in his final transformation
- becoming the Faction’s homeworld, but their plans failed when the
virus actually infected the Third Doctor, subsequently gaining access to
his body when his immune system was ‘occupied’ with his regeneration.
Although his immune systems would fight off the infection, and at the least
the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Doctor's would be the same as before, either
the Seventh or the Eighth Doctor would eventually succumb to the virus,
and become one of the Faction...
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The Ancestor Cell
(Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole) |
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This storyline came to a head
when the Eighth Doctor, Fitz and Compassion were attacked
by the Time Lords in "The
Ancestor Cell", and became separated after Compassion
was trapped on a bone-like structure and The Doctor and
Fitz were pulled away by outside sources. Fitz was trapped
with a rouge member of the Faction who summoned Father
Krienier, the original Fitz, trapped in the Vortex ever
since he battled the Third Doctor on Dust. The Doctor,
meanwhile, arrived on Gallifrey, and was forced to investigate
a mysterious structure made, like the Faction's ships,
entirely of bone, shaped like the Gallifreyan Flower of
Remembrance - a symbol of death - at least the same size
as Gallifrey itself, and referred to as the Edifice. Once
on board, The Doctor discovered several giant bone spiders,
and a dust-mote version of the Third Doctor, and realizied
that the Edifice was actually his old TARDIS, thought
destroyed in "The
Shadows of Avalon", which
had grown to that size and developed that structure by
trying to save The Doctor from the infection. Recognising
that the Third Doctor’s regeneration on Dust had
not been meant to happen, the TARDIS had attempted to
save The Doctor by taking the infection onto itself, despite
this meaning it now held two different time lines at once,
along with the 'ghost' of the Third Doctor from the original
timeline, holding on even after its destruction after
being caught in a temporal rift. However, to do so it
had leeched off the energies of the ancestor cells, the
cells that created all life, which were already angry
with the Time Lords for disturbing them by time travel,
and the cells were ready to launch an attack on Gallifrey.
The cells were the Enemy mentioned in "Alien
Bodies", "Interference",
and "The
Taking of Planet 5", and The Doctor
has started the War. Even worse, the Faction - now having
progressed from a group of individualists dedicated to
breaking the laws of time to become dedicated to chaos
and destruction in general (Later information revealed
that the Faction involved in the invasion were from the
future, explaining their progression from death fetishists
to actual killers and their greater power) - had acquired
control of the Matrix, resulting in their God, Grandfather
Paradox, manifesting from mere concept into reality...
and the reality of the Grandfather was that he was the
future version of the Eighth Doctor - albeit bald and
with no right arm, described by Fitz as The Doctor ‘if
he spent twenty years in the navy before becoming a psycho’ -
that would result from the Faction biodata virus infection,
the future Doctor actually creating the Faction himself.
Even in this dark moment as the Faction took control of Gallifrey, with their virus progressing through the Eighth Doctor’s systems, the TARDIS’s sacrifice gave The Doctor a final trump card. The Edifice had grown to that size by making its exterior the same size as its interior, and when The Doctor removed a dimensional stabiliser, all it would take was one action to drain off all the energy holding the Edifice together - specifically, firing the Edifice's ancient War-TARDIS weapon systems. With no energy, the Edifice will be unable to contain both timelines, and collapse, meaning that just one timeline would continue to exist - either The Doctor would stay The Doctor, or he would become the Grandfather. Even with the knowledge that the weapons blast would destroy not only the Faction's fleet, but also Gallifrey, The Doctor fired the weapons despite the Grandfather’s horror, reasoning that it would be better to destroy the Time Lords now rather than allow them to fight a war that would dehumanise them to the point of becoming monsters that all evidence suggested they couldn’t win anyway. Although the Edifice ‘jumped’ his way, eliminating the Faction’s presence from history, the TARDIS was left having shrunk down to a featureless box about an inch big, while The Doctor was left catatonic and his memory completely erased, apparently due to the trauma of what he had done. Having rescued the two of them before Gallifrey was destroyed, Compassion left The Doctor on Earth in 1889 to allow him and the TARDIS to recuperate, subsequently taking Fitz to 2001 to meet The Doctor when he was well enough to travel once again before leaving to make her own path in the universe. The Doctor has since recovered, learning that his memories were lost as a result of him transferring the contents of the Matrix into his subconscious mind in the few minutes between him firing the weapons and Gallifrey’s destruction (The Matrix having been purged of the Faction’s infection after The Doctor erased them from existence). What happened after this is unknown, but the evidence suggests that The Doctor was able to restore Gallifrey using the saved Matrix before restoring his own memories (Only for Gallifrey to be lost once again in the subsequent Time War against the Daleks, when The Doctor was forced to destroy his own people to save the universe from the revived Rassilon's last mad plan to destroy everything to preserve the Time Lords).
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