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| The Krotons VHS Cover |
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 Name: The Krotons
Format: Television
show, Book and Audio
Time of Origin: Future, exact time
unspecified.
Appearances: "The
Krotons", "Return
of the Krotons", "Alien
Bodies"
Doctors: Second
Doctor, Sixth
Doctor and Eighth
Doctor
Companions: Jamie McCrimmon, Zoe Heriot, Charley
Pollard and Samantha
Jones
History: The Krotons were easily one of the most
interesting races The Doctor has ever encountered. Evolving from
predatory quasi-organic tellurium-based crystals, the Krotons
developed the ability to mimic the movements of their prey, eventually
achieving some degree of sentience after mimicking a human Servo-Robot,
developing a dependence on the mental vibrations of other beings
to sustain themselves. Their weapons are also highly developed,
to the extent that a Kroton gun could be capable of damaging
the TARDIS itself
(Only for the TARDIS to activate the HADS and relocate to another
area when the Krotons attempted to fire on it).
The
Doctor first met the Krotons in his second incarnation,
when he arrived on a planet inhabited by the Gonds, who provided
their unseen masters, the Krotons, with their brightest intelligences
to act as ‘companions’, the Krotons having decimated
the Gonds’ world centuries ago and subsequently keeping
their knowledge of areas such as chemistry limited. Having rescued
one of the latest companions after the death of the other shortly
after their arrival, The Doctor was able to convince the Gonds
to help him rebel against the Krotons’ malign influence.
Having failed in a direct attack on the Krotons’ Teaching
Machines - the means via which the Krotons selected their companions
- The Doctor and his companion Zoe accessed
the Teaching Machines and became the Krotons’ new companions,
subsequently being subjected to a mental attack in the Dynatrope
to allow the Krotons to draw on their mental energy and create
new Krotons.
Fortunately, The Doctor’s arrival had
stirred up rebellion among the Gonds in the form of Eelek and
Axus, two formerly loyal councillors, but their arrogance blinded
them to more subtle means of victory. Selris, the former leader
before he was deposed in the rebellion, was able to attack the
Krotons’ headquarters by attacking their foundations, recognising
the futility of a frontal assault, only to be captured by Eelek
before he could carry out his plan. Although Eelek attempted
to negotiate with the Krotons, promising to give them The Doctor
and Zoe if they left the planet, Selris sacrificed himself to
give The Doctor a phial of acid that he was able to add to the
Kroton vats while Jamie and the Gond scientist Beta attacked
the outside of the ship with sulphuric acid. As a result of this
simultaneous assault, the tellurium-based Krotons were destroyed,
the Dyantrope collapsing as the Gonds were freed at last, The
Doctor and his companions departing after Thara, Selris’s
son, was appointed leader.
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Return of the Krotons
(Nicholas Briggs) |
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The
Doctor encountered the Krotons once again during his sixth incarnation,
currently accompanied by new companion Charley
Pollard (Although their relationship was complicated
by the fact that Charley had previously travelled with
the Eighth
Doctor and was thus now constantly trying to avoid
revealing her knowledge of The Doctor’s future
to him). Arriving on the colony world Onyakis, shortly
after the solar flares that devastated Earth in the thirtieth
century ("The
Ark in Space"), The Doctor and Charley discovered
that a group of colony ships had landed on the planet
on the commander’s insistence despite its relatively
inhospitable environment, experimenting with some kind
of teaching machine and the crystal power source K-7,
which colony leader Cobden claimed could help them survive
but so far had turned up no signs of having any practical
purpose. Discovering a spaceship during a ‘cave-in’ -
really a demolition planned to conceal evidence - The
Doctor entered the ship and recognised it as Kroton manufacture,
albeit more advanced than they had possessed during his
previous encounter with them, and realised that ‘K-7’ was
actually dormant Krotons.
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Alien Bodies
(Lawrence Miles) |
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Although too late to stop Cobden from activating the
Krotons - who now intended to use The Doctor to supervise the
mental processing of the humans - The Doctor gained a lucky break
when the exposure of service technician Romilly to the Krotons
in their protoplasmic state resulted in the one-in-a-million
creation of a human/Kroton hybrid, Romilly subsequently using
his computer expertise to create a programme that would cause
the atmosphere generators to build a super-dense atmosphere bubble
throughout the tunnels, failing to realise due to his insanity
that this would destroy everyone on the planet rather than just
the Krotons. As Romilly clashed with the other Krotons as the
programme was activated, The Doctor managed to reach the atmosphere
generator and reprogram it to generate a high-pressure atmosphere
while filtering out the oxygen, thus giving all the humans hypoxia.
With lack of oxygen making the humans overconfident and stupid,
the resulting fluctuating energy spikes caused the Krotons to
overload and collapse, leaving The Doctor - whose respiratory
bypass system left him better able to cope with the lack of oxygen
- to reset the generators to normal.
The Krotons’ last encounter with The Doctor was
particularly personal, not only because they arrived in a stolen
Dalek ship, but because they were attending an auction for a
valuable Relic which was later revealed to be the body of none
other than The Doctor’s own thirteenth incarnation, killed
in a war with a mysterious enemy whom the Time Lords would confront
in the future. Having recently suffered their defeat at the hands
of the Sixth Doctor, and with their recent capture of a Time
Lord agent, the Krotons sought an advantage over the Time Lords,
infiltrating the auction to make their own bid for the Relic.
With tensions among the bidders at the auction already strained
- the biodata of the Thirteenth Doctor could tip the scales of
the war due to it being the only remaining physical trace of
a Time Lord president, hence meaning that whoever controlled
it could access lost Gallifreyian secrets and weapons - matters
became worse when the Shift - a being of pure concept and an
agent of the Time Lords’ Enemy - infiltrated the mind of
E-Kobalt, the Kroton commander, driving the Krotons to attack
the auction and forcing the other bidders to flee by using E-Kobalt’s
anger at the other bidders’ dismissal of the Krotons’ efforts.
Using a Faction Paradox shrine - a primitive TARDIS controlled
by voodooesque rituals - The Doctor materialised around the Kroton
Warspear of six ships that had been dispatched to enforce their
demands for the Relic. When E-Kobalt ordered the Warspear to
attack, the shrine’s indestructible interior caused the
weapons to rebound and destroy their source. The Doctor subsequently
used the Shift to trick the bidders into giving him the Relic,
destroying it to prevent anyone from using his biodata. |
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| The Krotons |
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| Jamie is Attacked |
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| A Kroton |
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| A Kroton Disintegrates |
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