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Illegal Alien
(Mike Tucker & Robert Perry) |
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 Name: George Limb
Format:
Book.
Time of Origin: Earth; encountered The Doctor
in 1941 and 1959, and apparently managed to travel up to 1962 on one occasion.
Appearances: "Illegal
Alien" and "Loving
the Alien".
Doctors:
Seventh
Doctor.
Companions: Ace.
History: In all his travels, The Doctor has never
encountered any human being as unbelievably evil as George Limb, and, out
of all her confrontations with evil in all her travels in the TARDIS, his
companion Ace regards Limb as the enemy she has hated most (Although this
is mainly because she actually liked him at first). The only thing that
can be said to Limb's credit is that he is not actually evil, per se, but
rather, like The Doctor's fellow Time Lord The Rani, has a mind that regards
the world as his own personal chemistry set, regardless of the consequences
for the universe around him as a result of his experiments. Obsessed with
knowledge, information and communication, Limb’s greatest fear was
that he would die without knowing what the future held, driving him to
commit atrocious actions in the name of his continued existence to see
the future.
The
Doctor and Limb eventually met when the Seventh
Doctor, accompanied
by Ace, local private eye Cody McBride, and police inspector Mullen,
was investigating a serial killer who was literally crushing his
victims to death in 1940. Joining McBride to investigate the deaths,
The Doctor and Ace were introduced to George Limb, a former politician
whose career allegedly ended when he took the blame for leaking a
government document to the press to spare Winston
Churchill dealing
with the fallout (It is unknown if this is true or simply another
lie). Discovering evidence of alien involvement when given a contact
card containing a sophisticated tracking device, followed by an attack
by a Cybermat, The Doctor deduced that the serial killer was a flawed
Cybermen seeking human blood to repair the bond between its organic
and cybernetic components.
Despite being hampered by another policeman’s
belief that the Cybermen were merely Nazis in body armour, The Doctor
discovered that the Cyber-Leader had been sent back in time to prepare
an army of sleepers to mount an invasion. Taking advantage of a German
bombing raid, The Doctor, McBride and Mullen turned on all the lights
in the Cyber-conversion factory and escaped before the Germans destroyed
it, leaving The Doctor to confront Limb, who had discovered the Cybermen
and secretly sold their secrets to both sides in the conflict in
order to provoke an arms race which will increase the rate of human
technological progress. Deducing The Doctor’s nature as a time
traveller, Limb attempted to blackmail The Doctor to take him to
the future by threatening Ace, but the situation degenerated when
The Doctor was forced to activate the dormant Cyber-army to fight
off a group of Nazis. Desperate to escape, Limb attempted to use
the Cyber-Leader’s time machine, but it apparently malfunctioned,
scattering Limb across time and space and slowing time in the immediate
vicinity long enough for The Doctor and Ace to escape back to the
TARDIS before the factory exploded.
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| Sylvester McCoy |
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As it was later revealed, however, Limb had not died,
but simply been transported a decade or so into the future.
Although the machine’s range was limited - the furthest into the
future Limb had ever gone was 1962, and that was only once, - it was enough
for
Limb to
travel back and forth multiple times, creating various alternate
realities with each trip… including one where Britain won the Second
World War in 1943 with Cyber-technology, resulting in the
creation of an alternate
Britain where almost the entire population had cybernetic
implants (Another, smaller change featured him saving James
Dean - who subsequently worked
with him using the name ‘Jimmy’ - from dying in a car crash).
However, unable to control his travels, he was eventually
catapulted from the machine, sending him back in time while remaining in
1959… and, despite all the consequences of his actions, Limb was
unable to change one fundamental detail of his future; every future he
saw culminated in him being converted into a Cyberman. He tried to avert
this by triggering a war with Russia by provoking an arms race by selling
them the secrets of the Augmentation project (Based on the Cybermen who’d
remained in the London sewers after "Illegal
Alien"), but when,
a few days before he reached the point where he’d left the machine,
he encountered Ace once again, he lured her into a trap, killed her and
planted clues on her body to lure The Doctor to the present, hoping that
The Doctor could teach him how to change his future and travel safely in
time.
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Loving the Alien
(Mike Tucker & Robert Perry ) |
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Furious, The Doctor told him that time travellers couldn’t
change their own history, and that his meddling had caused
the barriers between realities to break down, pushing the Time Vortex to
the brink of
collapse; not only had a reporter called Rita Hawks accidentally
travelled to the Cyber-Britain reality, but giant ants were already swarming
through
London (Size was apparently not a constant across alternate
dimensions). Even worse, the Cyber-Britain, having discovered the rift
between their
worlds, was attempting to launch an invasion of its counterpart
to cope with the ever-increasing population - with nobody really dying
thanks to
the Cyber-technology, the world was becoming too crowded,
- forcing The Doctor to release an army of augmented apes created by the
Augmentation
project to hold off the alternate timelines’ soldiers while he tried
to find Limb.
Confronting Limb and his counterpart - the
Prime Minister of the other Earth, - The Doctor revealed
that the other Limb was also partly cybernetic, driving Limb to kill his
other self and
flee to his time machine in a desperate attempt to avert
his future once again. In the final confrontation, The Doctor was able
to make Jimmy see
Limb for what he really was, and Jimmy, enraged, drove a
car into Limb’s
time machine, dying in the accident and destroying the machine
once and for all. Accepting that he couldn’t change his destiny,
Limb, gravely injured in the explosion, shot himself in the graveyard where
he’d
left the machine, The Doctor staying with him to ensure
that he didn’t
die alone. With Limb’s death - his existence having apparently been
the central crucible on which the existence of the other
alternate worlds hinged, - reality sorted itself once again, although with
various differences
in the ‘core’ reality from the history that had been before… including
the presence of an Ace from an alternate reality who’d never been
shot. As they celebrated their victory in a local pub, The
Doctor admitted to Limb’s niece - the only person to ever see Limb
as a good person - that he regarded Limb as the strongest, bravest, most
intelligent human
he’d ever met, omitting his negative qualities for her sake. |
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