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The Space Age
(Steve Lyons) |
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 Name: The Maker
Format:
Book
Time of Origin: Appeared on Earth in
1965; took a group of humans to a distant asteroid in the 30th century.
Appearances: "The
Space Age"
Doctors: Eighth
Doctor
Companions: Fitz Kreiner and Compassion
History: While the Maker was not an enemy of The
Doctor in itself, its actions resulted in The Doctor facing a particularly
complicated threat during his travels, as its lack of understanding
of Time caused it to threaten and ruin the lives of several innocent
humans.
In
its natural state, the Maker existed in the higher dimensions of
reality, at a point beyond what even Time Lords are aware of, capable
of reshaping matter around them and perceiving the other dimensions
of existence, although unspecified circumstances can cause it to
enter our level of reality. It initially appeared in our reality
when a ship carrying a Maker somehow ‘crashed’ on a beach
in 1965 near a young couple called Alec and Sandra, Sandra wondering
if the rocker Alec actually loved her or if he was just rebelling
against her mod brothers. Despite their doubts about the relationship,
they were able to put aside their differences for a few hours to
try and help the creature recover until it was able to assemble a
new ship from the sand around it and return to its dimension.
Grateful to Alec and Sandra for their attempts
to help it even if they couldn’t understand what it needed, the
Maker - in an action that was later compared to humans thanking dolphins
for helping them - attempted to give them the future they wanted rather
than the futures that it perceived they would live. As a result, during
the next rumble between Alec’s gang of rockers and Sandra’s
mod brothers, the Maker returned to Earth and took Alec, Sandra, Sandra’s
brothers - including Rick, allegedly her youngest brother but actually
Sandra’s own son -, their respective gangs, and a few random passers-by
who were present during the rocker-VS-mod rumble into the distant future,
depositing them on an asteroid in 3012 where it had created a vast white
technological city based on the 1960s perception of what the future would
look like, including food in pill form, tunnels that took people rapidly
around the city, and anti-gravity beds.
Lacking
any knowledge of the Maker’s true nature or their real location
- the Maker having even altered the view of the night sky from the
asteroid so that it appeared to show the constellations that had
been visible on Earth in the 1960s -, the two gangs assumed that
they had been taken into the future after some kind of devastating
war had rendered Earth uninhabitable, arbitrarily deciding that they
would consider the date of their arrival as 1st January 2000 to give
themselves some kind of dating reference. Although they were initially
able to work together to ‘rebuild Earth’, the lack of
anything else to do in the city resulted in the mods and rockers
eventually turning on each other once again to give themselves something
to do with their lives, a fight during Alec and Sandra’s wedding
- her last attempt to bring peace to the groups - resulting in the
deaths of her brothers. During the following decades, each group
engaged in various minor ‘rumbles’ with each other while
avoiding damaging the city’s central Brain - the controlling
computer -, some individuals attempting to break off from the main
group and live outside the city, only to be forced to remain within
range of the construct due to the lack of oxygen on the asteroid.
However, the damage to the city that resulted from their
battles eventually drew the Maker back to the city, allowing Rick
- who had now become the leader of the mod group, although his personality
was essentially that of a dangerous child given to abrupt mood swings
and furious rages when he didn’t get his own way as he had
never had anyone to impose limits on him - to capture the creature
and make it give him new weapons. Lacking any knowledge of individuals,
the Maker began to take back its ‘gifts’ as it saw all
humans as equally culpable for Rick’s actions against it, resulting
in the city itself beginning to decay as time went on and the conflict
continued, the Maker providing Rick with weapons just so that the
humans could destroy themselves faster.
Fortunately, the distortion in the higher dimensions
caused by the Maker’s presence drew in the Eighth
Doctor, Fitz Kreiner, and the new Type-102 TARDIS Compassion, Compassion’s
new nature allowing her to ‘perceive’ the Maker on the
higher planes and communicate with it. While she temporarily shut
off her awareness of the physical realm to concentrate on the Maker,
The Doctor and Fitz set off to explore the city, only to be captured
by the rockers and mods respectively. When Rick revealed the presence
of the Maker to Fitz, Compassion - who had tracked the Maker to Rick’s
headquarters - was able to act as a filter that allowed the Maker
to communicate with Fitz without the Maker’s pan-dimensional
nature overwhelming Fitz’s mind, helping Fitz realise what
was happening to the city. At the same time, The Doctor was able
to make an impression on the rockers by developing a device that
could send those within its vicinity to sleep, allowing him to knock
out the next mod attack without any death, although Alec still insisted
that he try to analyse and duplicate the ray guns that the mods had
acquired recently despite The Doctor’s distaste at being caught
up in an arms race.
With Rick and Alec becoming increasingly irrational,
their gangs began to fall apart, Sandra finally leaving Alec as she
accepted that he would never grow up while Gillian, the rockers’ technician,
accompanied The Doctor during his investigation of the Brain. Although
The Doctor tried to buy time by turning the Brain off to focus on
conserving the city’s remaining life-support, Alec’s
attempt to force The Doctor to turn the Brain back on so that they
could use it against the mods only caused further damage, matters
becoming worse when the frustrated Sandra revealed the truth about
their relationship to Rick. Devastated and enraged, Rick asked the
Maker to create an ‘ultimate weapon’ for him in the form
of a massive drill, the resulting battle drawing in further Makers
to ‘punish’ the humans until The Doctor and Compassion
were able to make contact with the Makers and help them understand
the damage they had done to the humans’ lives.
With The Doctor helping them understand the dangers of
the paradox that they had unleashed on the humans’ lives, the
Makers agreed to give the survivors a choice between remaining in
the present and being inserted into human society in the year 3012
or returning to Earth in 1965, although those sent back to Earth
would lose all memory of their time in the city. Although Alec took
the offer to return, Sandra and Gillian decided to remain, not wanting
to lose the people that they had become, Sandra also resolving to
take care of the now-traumatised Rick after the Makers’ last
attempt to communicate with him nearly shattered his mind. With the
crisis resolved, The Doctor and Fitz departed in Compassion, Compassion
having concluded that she belonged with them despite the possibilities
presented to her by the Makers. |
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