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The Suns of Caresh
(Paul Saint) |
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 Name: Lord Roche
Format:
Book.
Time of Origin: Gallifrey, approximately
the same era as The Doctor
Appearances: "The
Suns of Caresh"
Doctors: Third
Doctor
Companions: Jo Grant
History: Strictly speaking, Lord Roche is not
The Doctor’s enemy; indeed, another Time Lord once compared
Roche to The Doctor himself, as both of them have been known to seek
to help other planets without authorisation from the Time Lords.
However, given Lord Roche’s demonstrated lack of The Doctor’s
interest in protecting innocents, putting several humans in harm’s
way simply to save himself - albeit in order to ensure that he could
save lives on a larger scale later -, as well as developing a plan
that would sacrifice a relatively primitive civilisation in order
to preserve a more advanced one rather than trying to devise a plan
that would save both, his actions earned him The Doctor’s enmity
regardless of his potential motives.
Like
The Doctor, Roche was known to spend a great deal of time away from
Gallifrey travelling to other worlds, his travels eventually bringing
him to the world of Caresh, a world which existed in the unique position
of being in orbit about a binary star system, alternating between
orbiting the warmer Beacon and the cooler Ember. Learning that a
neutron star was approaching Caresh and threatening to destabilise
its orbit, Roche attempted to devise a plan that would use the star’s
gravity to force Caresh into a permanent orbit around Beacon, inspired
to proceed with this plan due to an unspecified discovery on the
Caresh continent of Fayon involving a civilisation that had yet to
make contact with the more primitive civilisation on the Archipelago.
Although Roche’s experiments were successful in helping him
devise a way to use to the star’s gravity to alter Caresh’s
orbit, he realised after constructing his machinery that he had forgotten
to take the searchlights of radiation emitted from the neutron star’s
poles into account; one of the searchlights would sweep across the
Archipelago - one of Caresh’s major continents - as the neutron
star passed by, wiping out all life in that area, although the Fayoni
- the only thing Roche was really concerned about - would be saved.
Before Roche’s plans could be completed,
he was attacked by the Furies, agents of a race of vortex dwellers known
as the Curia of Nineteen, who claimed that their environment would be
threatened by the neutron star if Roche proceeded with his plan. Rejecting
their claims, Roche attempted to escape the Furies in his TARDIS, unintentionally
accompanied by Troy Game, a native of the Archipelago who had been assisting
him in his research, as he travelled to Earth. With his TARDIS having
made a forced landing, Roche and Troy Game were separated, Troy Game’s
natural ability to understand languages resulting in Roche’s TARDIS
giving her telepathic abilities because it amplified what was already
there while leaving her recent memories confused. While Troy Game was
taken in by sci-fi fan Simon Haldane, who attempted to work out what
was happening to her, Roche was trapped in a mental hospital, hiding
his mind behind the distortions created by a temporal fracture to prevent
the Furies finding him.
The
Doctor was assigned to investigate the temporal fracture that Roche
was using by the Time Lady Solenti - a blind Time Lady with a telepathic
link to her guide dog - that apparently originated at a crashed Spitfire,
The Doctor had investigated in 1972 and would end in 1999. However,
when The Doctor used the navigational device Solenti had given him
to send the TARDIS to the fracture’s point of origin, he and
Jo Grant learned that the fracture actually stretched backwards in time,
resulting in them arriving in 1999 a few hours before the fracture
would start rather than the two days in advance in 1972 that they
were expecting. While Jo checked out the secondary sources of the
fracture - really the Furies - , The Doctor tracked the primary source
to Roche’s petrified TARDIS, along with Zeke Child... a younger
version of the professor The Doctor had encountered at the dig where
the crashed Spitfire was excavated. When one of the Furies tried
to feed on the petrified TARDIS, the resulting temporal explosion
caused Child to be afflicted with Jeapes’ Syndrome, a temporal
disease where he essentially lived his life in reverse.
With the fracture having now ceased, Roche was forced to escape
by swapping ‘mindscents’ with others - essentially causing
anyone looking at Roche to perceive the person he’d mindswapped
with and vice-versa -, also hypnotising Troy Game to recover his
still-active TARDIS (The petrified TARDIS being a future version)
from a hotel room. When caught in a traffic accident while trying
to reach his ship due to his current confusion, Roche was forced
to regenerate, but he retained enough control over the regeneration
to deliberately shape his new body to be an exact duplicate of the
Third Doctor’s appearance (Prompting some confusion when passers-by
who saw Roche after his new appearance was revealed asked if The
Doctor and Roche were twins as The Doctor rejected the idea and Roche
agreed with it, The Doctor forced to cover up the contradiction by
claiming that they were actually triplets who’d never been
able to agree on the right definition for their relationship when
only two of them were present). Although The Doctor attempted to
help Roche by placing him in the TARDIS Zero Room ("Castrovalva")
to give his new incarnation a chance to stabilise, Roche sneaked
out of the TARDIS by disguising himself as Zeke Child using the same
techniques he’d used earlier, subsequently sending his TARDIS
into the past to try and destroy the Furies, creating the petrified
TARDIS The Doctor had discovered earlier.
Trying to work out what Roche had done to have the Furies sent after
him so that he could prevent the fracture from occurring, The Doctor
travelled to Caresh to try and finish Roche’s work in diverting
the neutron star (Although he was unaware of the origin of the Furies
and the existence of the Curia). Unfortunately, The Doctor’s
attempts to save Caresh were jeopardised when Troy Game discovered
Roche’s records about his plan and the consequences for her
civilisation, causing her to assume that The Doctor had been replaced
by Lord Roche. Although Jo almost persuaded Troy Game to recognise
that The Doctor simply hadn’t known about the potential side-effects
of Roche’s plan rather than going through with the plan with
full knowledge of the potential consequences, Troy Game was only
satisfied when she shot The Doctor with Roche’s ‘mercy
gun’ - a gun that stunned the victim on the first shot and
killed on the second, the reasoning being that you deserved to die
if you needed to be shot with it again; Roche had accidentally been
shot with the weapon in the past -, confirming that The Doctor wasn’t
Roche but leaving him unconscious for so long that he missed the
window of opportunity to put the plan into action.
Although
The Doctor was briefly willing to give up as he believed there was
nothing he could do, Jo’s tearful frustration that he would
have found a way if Earth was the planet in peril prompted The Doctor
to realise that Caresh could also be saved by simply nudging it into
a closer orbit around Ember rather than a permanent orbit around
Beacon, managing to make the necessary last-minute modifications
to Roche’s equipment. As a result, the Realm was saved, and
the Curia recalled the Furies moments before Roche could trigger
his trap, sparing Zeke Child his fate and allowing Roche to depart
Earth in peace, The Doctor and Jo leaving Troy Game to make a new
life for herself. |
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