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Sutekh
(Pyramids of Mars) |
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 Name: The Osirans; The Doctor has battled Sutekh,
Nephthys, and Sekhmet
Format:
Television show, Book and Audio
Time of Origin: Phæster Osiris;
a prominent power in the universe centuries in the past, the Osirans were virtually extinct by the twentieth century; The Doctor faced the remnants of the Osiran race on Earth in 1911 and 1992 (as well as some point after the thirtieth century), and on Peladon at an unspecified date in the future.
Appearances: "Pyramids
of Mars", "Kill the Doctor/The Age of Sutekh", "The
Sands of Time", "The
Bride of Peladon", "The Pyramid of Sutekh", "The Vaults of Osiris", "The Eye of Horus", "The Tears of Isis" and "The Legend of Ruby Sunday/Empire of Death".
Doctors: Fourth
Doctor, Fifth
Doctor, Seventh
Doctor and Fifteenth Doctor.
Companions: Sarah
Jane Smith, Leela, Nyssa, Tegan
Jovanka,
Peri Brown, Erimem, Bernice Summerfield, Melanie Bush and Ruby Sunday.
History: An ancient race, the Osirans were one of the most powerful beings ever to evolve, possessing phenomenal psychic powers and an exceptionally long life span measuring thousands of years even without technological assistance. Some of their technology depended on magnetic monopoles, which only work outside the influence of a bipolar magnetic field, resulting in Mars being the only place in the Solar System where some of their equipment would work. They were even capable of time travel, although this was only in the form of time corridors which channelled the energy displaced during temporal transit in various ways; the least damaging and most regular method used was to divert that energy into the Osirans themselves, with the result that the time corridors would cause Osirans to age the time they had travelled without them actually experiencing that time consciously, although the Osiran life span meant that this was less of an issue than it would be for other races.
Centuries
in the past, the Osiran renegades Sutekh and Nephthys mounted a destructive
campaign across the universe, having come to regard life itself as
their enemy before they were defeated on Earth by Sutekh’s
brother Horus, leading his army of 740 Osirans. However, Horus decided
that, instead of killing them, he would imprison them with the means
of their escape just out of reach, forever taunting them with their
inability to be truly free. To this end, he imprisoned Sutekh in
a tomb on Earth while leaving the prison’s power source - a
gem known as the Eye of Horus - in the pyramids of Mars, the Eye
keeping Sutekh immobilised in the tomb while also making it impossible
for him to easily recruit a minion to destroy the Eye. Nephthys,
on the other hand, was separated from her body and her mind subsequently
divided into two parts, her intellect and reasoning being contained
in a canopic jar while her instinct and intuition were trapped in
an unsullied human mind, in the form of the daughter of Horus’s
High Priest Rassul, Rassul being granted immortality so that he could
forever guard Nephthys.
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| Pyramids of Mars |
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The Doctor first encountered the Osirans in
his fourth incarnation, when he and Sarah
Jane Smith were drawn off-course
while returning to UNIT in the 1970s, arriving instead in
1911 in the priory that would eventually be replaced by UNIT
HQ in the future. Investigating
the reason for their unwilling diversion, The Doctor discovered
an Osiran lodestone present in the mansion, subsequently
discovering that the priory
owner, Professor Scarman, had recently picked up a transmission
on his early radio telescope which The Doctor determined
meant ‘Beware
Sutekh’. Recognising Sutekh’s name from history, The
Doctor realised that Sutekh’s tomb had been unearthed by Scarman’s
brother Marcus’s recent expedition to Egypt, giving Sutekh a minion
that he could use to escape after he killed Marcus and reanimated
his body with his power. Although The Doctor was able to
thwart ‘Marcus’s’ efforts
to create a basic rocket that could be fired at the Eye’s location
on Mars by destroying the rocket using explosives stored
at the priory, he was forced to go directly to Sutekh to
distract him from using his
mental powers to contain the explosion. Despite the loss
of the rocket, The Doctor’s presence in his tomb allowed Sutekh
to temporarily take control of The Doctor’s mind, using the Time
Lord to take his minions directly to Mars in the TARDIS so
that they could destroy
the Eye in person.
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The Triumph of Sutekh
(Guy Adams, Justin Richards, James Goss and Una McCormack) |
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Although
The Doctor was able to escape Sutekh’s control after faking his
death with the aid of his respiratory bypass system - thus prompting
Sutekh’s minions to leave him behind while they entered the temple
where the Eye was located -, The Doctor and Sarah were unable to catch
up with ‘Marcus’ in time to stop him from destroying the
Eye and freeing Sutekh. At the last minute, The Doctor realised that
he still had one chance to stop Sutekh; due to the two-minute time-lag
of any radio transmissions between Earth and Mars - meaning that the
Eye of Horus would technically still be holding Sutekh for two minutes
after it was broken as the signals had been broadcast before it had been
shattered and had yet to reach his prison -, he and Sarah had enough
time left to them to return to the priory and reprogram Sutekh’s
time corridor using the time control from the TARDIS, extending the time
corridor Sutekh was using to depart his prison into the far future before
he could use it to reach Earth. Although Sutekh pleaded with The Doctor
to release him, offering to spare Earth and give it to The Doctor as
a plaything, The Doctor coldly rejected his offer, saying that the time
of the Osirans was long past, simply watching as Sutekh was forced to
the end of the corridor, literally aging to death as it sent him so far
into the future that he could never reach the end.
Even when trapped in the time corridor, Sutekh was not completely isolated from the wider universe. At some later date, he was able to project his conscious mind from the Osiran time corridor in a new body created via an Osiran flesh loom located in a tomb on Mars. Aided by a cult of worshippers, he attempted to ravage Earth in the twenty-first century, destroying his cult once he had arrived on Earth as a full physical entity, but the Seventh Doctor and Bernice Summerfield were able to defeat him by sending him forward to the twenty-ninth century at a time when Earth was ravaged by solar flares ("The Ark in Space"), with the result that Sutekh only destroyed a few small pockets of humanity rather than the entire human race. He attempted to travel back to complete his destruction, but The Doctor and Benny were able to divert him back into the original time corridor, trapping him in a loop where he would constantly repeat his destruction without ever actually achieving it ("The Tears of Isis").
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Kill the Doctor
(Guy Adams) |
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Although physically trapped in another loop, Sutekh was able to escape again by projecting himself to the planet Drummond, a human colony in the far future, where he made mental contact with colonist Rania Chuma, helping her to create Rene.net, essentially a planet-wide wireless network. After Sutekh 'aided' Rania in establishing Rene.net, the TARDIS arrived on Drummond, the Fourth Doctor looking for components to repair the ship's scanner. While Leela was drawn in by the plight of the local homeless, The Doctor realised that Rene.net was linked to something that subliminally ordered the other colonists to kill The Doctor, which was particularly dangerous as the only people who didn't use Rene.net were either the homeless who couldn't afford the equipment or a small group of people who had 'corpse fingers' and were somehow unable to use the devices because the electric fields didn't register their fingers, which only comprised 4% of the overall population. When the Rene.net devices broadcast the signal telling people to kill The Doctor, The Doctor was able to escape with the aid of Officer Joyce of the local police (one of those with 'corpse fingers'), allowing him to confront Rania and confirm her alliance with Sutekh (During their first 'meeting', Sutekh mentioned the time The Doctor trapped him in an ouroboros loop, but The Doctor simply skimmed over that encounter as he recognised that it must occur in his future). Although The Doctor was able to escape Rania's office after Sutekh confirmed his identity, Sutekh subsequently took direct control of the network, using his new link to the power of so many of the minds on the planet to rewrite reality so that Drummond was now a version of Phaester Osiris, recreating his brother's home so that he could destroy it later.
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The Age of Sutekh
(Guy Adams) |
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Fortunately, The Doctor realised that Sutekh was still limited despite his current power as he was relying on the 'slave labour' of the locals to recreate Osiran warships rather than just creating them through his own power, allowing The Doctor to gather those locals still immune to Sutekh's control to confront him directly. Realising the danger The Doctor posed to his plans, Sutekh tried to take direct control of Rania, but after expending so much power rewriting reality to turn Drummond into New Phaester Osiris, he only had enough power to start taking control of her before she was able to force him back into her subconscious. Using this period of control, Rania was able to direct The Doctor and his allies to the main control room for the network (which Sutekh had preserved despite changing everything else in case he needed the interface) while she took Leela to the rooftop garden where the network servers would be once reality asserted itself. The Doctor was able to use the network control system to link the locals' minds into a single telepathic network that would use the memory of what Drummond had been to retake control of the planet's reality from Sutekh, but although Sutekh was able to assert himself enough to take over Rania's body, he was only able to reshape her appearance to match his original form, restricted to hunting Leela through the garden using conventional methods or he would be forced out of Rania's body once again. As The Doctor and his allies restored Drummond to normal, Rania retook control of her body long enough to jump off the roof, killing herself and banishing Sutekh from the universe once again.
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The Sands of Time
(Justin Richards) |
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Although Sutekh was dead, his legacy returned to torment the Fifth Doctor when The Doctor found himself pitted against Sutekh's old partner Nephthys when her followers sought to turn his companion Nyssa - abducted from the British Museum in 1896 and sent back in time via an Osiran lodestone sarcophagus - into Nephthys's host after the jar that had been used to contain her essence was cracked. Taking advantage of Rassul's resentment of Horus for taking away his daughter, Nephthys was able to win him to her service, Rassul selecting Nyssa as Nephthys's new 'prison' as she would be easier for Nephthys to escape. Placing Nyssa in a deep metabolic coma, allowing her to remain unconscious for over four thousand years without physically aging, she was subsequently left in a tomb until The Doctor was able to arrange for an expedition to Egypt to discover Nyssa's bound body and take it back to Britain for an unwrapping ceremony in 1896 which he and Tegan Jovanka would attend just after Nyssa's original abduction. Despite The Doctor's best efforts, his attempts to awaken Nyssa were only able to prompt her to wake up almost a century later due to the length of time required for her metabolism to get back up to speed (Although he left her in the care of the family who led the expedition until that time)... and he only realised afterwards that this was part of Nephthys's plan to restore herself. With Rassul having manipulated a geneticist to clone his daughter's original body and provide Nephthys's instinctive side with a new, fresh host in 1996, he hoped that the restoration of Nephthys's mind when Nyssa fully awakened would allow his daughter's mind to be restored as well, unconcerned about the damage Nephthys would do when she was restored.
With the aid of Lady Ann Cranleigh - Nyssa's exact physical double ("Black Orchid") - The Doctor was able to stop Nepythys by replacing the still-sleeping Nyssa with the temporarily unconscious Lady Ann in 1996, subsequently claiming that Nyssa had been 'woken up' on some level due to his efforts in the past, the essence of Nepythys's consciousness that had been in her mind evaporating as she 'awoke' in 1926 while Nyssa herself continued to age while remaining in a coma. With
Nephthys reduced to nothing more than an instinctive level - taking
action in the moment without being able to look back on the past
or forward to the future to consider the consequences of her actions
-, she rapidly travelled back and forth through time via an Osiran
time corridor in an attempt to reclaim her missing mind, going
back to 1926 to gain her mind as it was released - discovering
a Nyssa who still hosted her mind but wouldn’t awake for
seventy years - before returning to 1996 - where a ‘Nyssa’ slept
with no trace of Nephthys’s mind -, going back and forth
in a continuous loop until she finally collapsed into dust, having
aged beyond the lifespan of even an Osiran. With Nephthys destroyed
and her followers having crumbled into dust with her, The Doctor
was able to safely extract what remained of her from Nyssa and
return it to a modified canopic jar, subsequently burying the jar
once again to ensure that Nephthys would never return.
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The Bride of Peladon
(Barnaby Edwards) |
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Some time after this, the Fifth Doctor again found himself
facing an Osiran enemy in the form of Sekhmet the Avenger, a living
weapon created by the Osiran Ra to smite his enemies when they sought
to slay him as he grew old and weary after so long on Earth. Having
killed Ra’s enemies, Sekhmet found her taste for blood had
grown, turning her against innocents in a killing frenzy until the
other Osirans were able to trap her inside a trisilicate asteroid
and launch her into space after tricking her into drinking a lake
of alcohol that had been dyed red to resemble blood. After drifting
through space for centuries, Sekhmet eventually landed on Peladon,
a distant world with a medieval-like society that had become particularly
dear to The Doctor ever since the Third
Doctor played a vital role
in its history on two separate occasions ("The
Curse of Peladon" and "The
Monster of Peladon"). Trapped underneath Peladon’s surface
for centuries, the trisilicate being made of negatively charged atoms
that sapped her strength, Sekhmet was eventually partly freed when
Peladon’s miners unwittingly cracked open her prison, but the
Osirans had also imprisoned her behind a blood-lock that could only
be opened by the blood of four Royal females.
To this end, Sekhmet was able to transmit a weak telepathic
signal that would lure the required females to her, her first victim
being the mother of Peladon’s current king Pelleas while the
second was Alyxlyr, a princess of the Ice
Warriors who had recently been appointed Peladon’s new ambassador. The third such female was the Earth princess Pandora, sent to Peladon as part of an arranged
marriage to Pelleas to grant Earth access to Peladon’s mineral
riches. Although Sekhmet attempted to use the Fifth Doctor’s
companion Erimem as one of the Royals to break the lock - Erimem
having nearly been appointed pharaoh in ancient Egypt before political
manipulations of the time drove her to depart with The Doctor and
Peri -, Erimem was able to trick Sekhmet by poisoning her own blood
with a distillation of mandrake root. This taint in her blood disrupted Sekhmet’s
escape and weakening her enough for Alyxlr’s brother Zixlyr
to set off an explosive device in her tomb, killing himself while
burying Sekhmet once again to avenge his sister’s murder, The Doctor was then able to cure Erimem with a transfusion of his own blood, Sekhmet’s attack having weakened him enough to activate the regenerative palates in his blood without actually triggering a true regeneration
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| The Legend of Ruby Sunday/Empire of Death |
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Several lifetimes later, the Fifteenth Doctor found himself facing Sutekh once again while investigating the mystery of Susan Triad of S Triad Tech Industries ("The Legend of Ruby Sunday/Empire of Death"). The Doctor initially speculated that Susan Triad might be a new incarnation of his granddaughter Susan ("An Unearthly Child" and "The Dalek Invasion of Earth"), but UNIT tests confirmed that she was apparently only human. While also investigating the mystery of The Doctor’s new companion Ruby Sunday, an attempt to witness the day Ruby’s mother left her at a church on Ruby Road revealed that something was surrounding The Doctor’s TARDIS, this ‘something’ turning a UNIT captain to dust. Realising that a UNIT archivist was actually a harbinger - an entity foreshadowing a god’s emergence into this universe ("The Devil's Chord") - The Doctor also realised that Susan Triad was basically a manifestation of Sutekh. Sutekh explained that the name ‘Susan’ was just chosen to catch The Doctor’s interest and draw him in; after he was trapped in the time corridor, some part of him was able to latch on to the TARDIS, essentially following The Doctor across his subsequent travels. The Doctor realised that Sutekh had then used the TARDIS’s perception filter to generate the woman who would become ‘Susan Triad’ to act as his emissary on the various worlds The Doctor visited. On most occasions these emissaries would just be basic manifestations, such as a painting on a wall ("Rogue"), but The Doctor visited Earth so often that Susan Triad formed her own history and intelligence, even if she was ultimately still Sutekh’s agent. Once The Doctor was drawn in, Susan Triad was ‘activated’ and Sutekh spread his dust of death across the universe, with The Doctor, Ruby, and The Doctor’s old companion Melanie Bush (who had been investigating Susan Triad on UNIT’s behalf) only just escaping by retreating into a ‘memory TARDIS’, a manifestation of the TARDIS created using a UNIT time window and their memories of the original ship.
Realising that Sutekh couldn’t attack Ruby because of the mystery of her unknown mother making her an anomaly, the three travelled to 2046 to access a global DNA databank to find Ruby’s mother, seemingly unaware that Sutekh had claimed Mel as another of his agents. When Sutekh used Mel to take The Doctor and Ruby back to 2024 for a final confrontation, Ruby was apparently willing to give Sutekh her mother’s name, but this was a distraction so that they could clasp an unbreakable rope around Sutekh’s neck, The Doctor having realised that Mel was dead when he noticed that her hand was too cold. The Doctor then reactivated the TARDIS using K9’s old dog whistle ("The Invisible Enemy"), the rope tying Sutekh to the TARDIS exterior as The Doctor set the ship into a rapid flight pattern back across its past journeys. This flight forced Sutekh to bring his ‘gift of death’ to the planets he had already killed, essentially undoing every death he had caused as he ‘brought death to death’. Once the universe had been restored, The Doctor broke the connection between Sutekh and the TARDIS, sending Sutekh to his death once again, this time watching as the Osiran was torn apart by the Time Vortex rather than simply aging to death in the time corridor. Susan Triad remained in existence on Earth, but she was now an independent entity with no ties to Sutekh, to the extent that UNIT were shown considering offering her a job, The Doctor amused at the irony that Sutekh's last act was to create life rather than death. |
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