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Doom Coalition - The Eleven
(Matt Fitton) |
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 Name: Padrac
Format:
Audio
Time of Origin: Gallifrey, a contemporary of The Doctor's.
Appearances: "Doom Coalition"; specifically appeared in "The Eleven", "The Satanic Mill", "The Crucible of Souls", "Songs of Love" and "Stop the Clock"
Doctors: Eighth Doctor; knew the First Doctor at school and was at least acquainted with the Seventh Doctor.
Companions: Liv Chenka, Helen Sinclair, and River Song; may have known other companions.
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| Eighth Doctor |
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History:
On the surface, Padrac could easily be taken as just another renegade Time Lord, but he has several points that distinguish him from other renegades. Where 'traditional' Time Lord renegades leave Gallifrey and seek power outside their home planet, Padrac was never shown to go anywhere other than various Time Lord installations, and in contrast to The Master, The Rani, The Monk and the War Chief's efforts to impose their views on the universe in the name of personal power, Padrac fundamentally sought only to save Gallifrey, albeit at the cost of everything else in the universe.
Back when The Doctor was at the Academy, he and Padrac were on the same zero-grav hyperball team, but did not apparently interact that much for purely social reasons, The Doctor regarding Padrac as a bit superior and self-satisfied even if they got along well enough. Around this time, Padrac joined a cabal of Time Lords who set themselves up as defenders of Gallifrey, anticipating potential threats and taking action to prevent them, albeit with limited obvious intervention and likely using more ruthless methods than The Doctor would approve of. However, after Padrac rose to the position of Lord Cardinal on the High Council, he used his position to access some of the Matrix's predictions of the future, and discovered that Gallifrey would be destroyed in almost every projection of the future. Based on this, Padrac devised a plan to save Gallifrey by ensuring that it would be the only planet left in the universe, gathering his old cabal together to ensure that this plan would succeed.
To this end, Padrac took steps to assemble the necessary equipment for his plan to succeed, occasionally reaching back in time to manipulate events to ensure the appropriate outcome. One of these steps was to plant the necessary tricks and subtle traps to allow for the escape of the Time Lord criminal known as the Eleven - the latest incarnation of The Collective, a Time Lord who suffered from a condition known as regenerative dissonance that allowed all of his past incarnations to remain active at once - after he was captured by the Seventh Doctor. Another important step of Padrac's plan was to manipulate the Time Lady Caleera, who had been identified as possessing exceptional telepathic abilities; while Caleera had ambitions to help her people, Padrac ensured that her teachers and potential employers dismissed her telepathic abilities as dangerous, claiming that they had to be supressed by various medications. Having created a scenario where Caleera would see the world as persecuting her, Padrac approached her himself, going so far as to give her the impression that he was in love with her, convincing her to assist in his plans even when they required her to be trapped in a complex temporal station in the Time Vortex that prevented her from moving.
Eventually, when the Lord President was away from Gallifrey negotiating with the Monan Host, Padrac decided to put his plan into action, subtly arranging for the Eleven to escape while he was being interviewed by a Gallifreyan student doing an assessment of their criminal justice system. While Padrac called in the Eighth Doctor and current companion Liv Chenka to assist in the investigation due to The Doctor's own experience with the Eleven, the Eleven was still able to escape by stealing a TARDIS, leaving The Doctor and Liv to pursue him. In the course of their pursuit of the Eleven, The Doctor and Liv met their new companion Helen Sinclair, a librarian and archivist in 1963 ("The Red Lady"), and prevented the Eleven activating a prototype stellar manipulator that would have destroyed the Sol system in the sixteenth century ("The Satanic Mill").
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Doom Coalition - Crucible of Souls
(John Dorney) |
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While following the Eleven's trail across time and space, The Doctor, Liv and Helen further assisted Padrac's plan by releasing Caleera from the temporal station in the Time Vortex ("Scenes from Her Life") and tracking the components of the 'Doomsday Chronometer', a mysterious clock created by the Time Lord known as the 'Clocksmith' from the metal created when Caleera's powers destroyed a planet. However, Padrac's plans ran into an unexpected anomaly when The Doctor, Liv and Helen encountered two unexpected figures in their search for the Chronometer, in the form of River Song - the future 'wife' of the Eleventh Doctor ("The Wedding of River Song") - and the Eight, the only incarnation of the Eleven who tried to be a good man. After River and the Eight assisted The Doctor in stopping the Clocksmith, The Doctor and River departed in the Clocksmith's TARDIS to follow his trail and find out who he was working with while the Eight stumbled into The Doctor's TARDIS and regenerated, the Nine managing to trick Liv and Helen into thinking that he was The Doctor. Using the TARDIS, the Nine attempted to conduct a raid on the Gallifreyan archives, during which he left Liv behind as he realised that she was getting suspicious, but Liv was retrieved by Padrac who helped her track the TARDIS to the location the Nine had found in the archives, in the form of a space station known as the 'Crucible of Souls'.
Unfortunately for Padrac, while talking with Liv about her recent discoveries he made a comment while travelling with Liv that allowed her to work out that he was aware of the experiments that had been conducted on Caleera. At the same time, The Doctor and River travelled into the future in the Clocksmith's TARDIS and learned that all of reality was destined to be destroyed after a certain date by some devastating attack. Once Padrac arrived at the Crucible, The Doctor was able to learn more details of Padrac's plans by using a 'psychic cloak' provided by River to create the impression that he was the Clocksmith (River using a similar 'psychic wimple' to stop The Doctor seeing her true face before he was destined to meet her for the first time). When these three groups gathered at the Crucible, Helen was able to escape and force the Nine to flee, but Padrac realised the truth and tricked The Doctor, Liv and Helen into entering an incomplete escape pod. Revealing his plans to destroy the universe to save Gallifrey to the three, as well as explaining that the Crucible was intended to absorb the life energy from the dying universe to sustain the remaining Time Lords, Padrac then ejected the pod into the future, where The Doctor, Liv and Helen would drift for the rest of their lives.
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Doom Coalition - Songs of Love
(Matt Fitton) |
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Although The Doctor briefly contemplated giving up as he realised that Padrac had manipulated him for the entirety of their recent quest, coupled with the incomplete ship lacking any means of steering them back, Liv and Helen were able to convince The Doctor to keep trying ("Ship in a Bottle"). Analysing Padrac's psychology based on his plan, The Doctor concluded that Padrac's biggest weakness was that he would never risk himself and was always concerned with saving his own neck, prompting them to destroy the ship so that the explosion would send them back through time. At the same time, River Song managed to infiltrate Padrac's plan by revealing her role in the assassination of a future Doctor, convincing Padrac that she was on his side due to his ignorance of the context of that assassination ("Songs of Love"). While Padrac presented the imminent destruction of the future as a 'natural' event that he could only save Gallifrey from rather than something he had caused himself, River was able to retrieve the TARDIS and retrieve The Doctor, Liv and Helen from the Vortex, sending them to New York in the 1970s while she was 'banished' into the Vortex herself.
Once in New York, The Doctor encountered a group of Time Lords opposed to Padrac's plans, led by Cardinal Ollistra and including the Meddling Monk ("The Time Meddler") as part of a plan to establish an enclave that would gather temporal energy to shield Ollistra's forces and oppose Padrac's followers, but this plan met with condemnation from The Doctor as they were firstly avoiding facing Padrac's forces until after the fact and their plan relied on an 'alliance' with the Weeping Angels ("Blink"). When the Eleven came to New York to oppose Ollistra's forces on Padrac's behalf, he tossed Ollistra off a building and turned the Angels against the other Time Lords, the Angels banishing the Monk into the past before they devoured the enclave that they had created themselves, which had the positive side-effect of restoring history to normal.
The Doctor, Liv and Helen were able to escape to the TARDIS and follow the Eleven back to Gallifrey, now under attack by various alien races that had realised Padrac's plans, but the Eleven was shocked to find that Padrac had decided to maintain the transduction barriers and leave him outside the main enclave as the destruction of the universe became imminent ("Stop the Clock"). With the aid of some of the Time Lords that still opposed Padrac's plans, The Doctor was able to capture the Eleven and help the Eight to take control, reasoning that the Eight would know the plan while being willing to help them. Fighting back his other selves, the Eight explained that Padrac's coalition planned to use Caleera to power a device known as the Resonance Engine to unmake the rest of existence, while the Doomsday Chronometer was needed to calculate the exact moment when the universe would be in the right alignment for the Resonance Engine to destroy everything with one shot.
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Doom Coalition - Stop the Clock
(John Dorney) |
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With this insight, The Doctor managed to penetrate the transduction barriers around Padrac's base, using the psychic cloak to disguise himself as the Eleven, while Liv and another Time Lord tried to disable the transduction barriers. The Doctor's disguise was exposed when the Eleven managed to escape his guards and take Helen hostage, but Padrac still decided to leave the Eleven outside the barriers, seeing no reason to keep the Eleven around when The Doctor's resistance would prove pointless. The Doctor attempted to turn the tables by convincing Caleera to check the Matrix via her link to the Resonance Engine and find out the truth about Padrac's plans for her, reasoning that she could easily laugh at him if he was wrong, but although Caleera learned the truth, Padrac revealed that the Resonance Engine was configured to resist Caleera's powers if she tried to break out of it. However, based on Caleera having bonded with Helen during their previous encounter, Caleera was instead able to transfer a portion of her powers to Helen while sending Liv the knowledge necessary to disable the transduction barriers, allowing Helen to use the Eleven's stolen TARDIS to damage the transduction barriers before Liv shut them down, the energy feedback essentially vaporizing Caleera's body.
With Padrac's plans ruined now that Caleera was gone and the moment to use the Resonance Engine had passed, he was taken into custody, with The Doctor visiting him for one last talk before he was put into stasis. Although Padrac asked The Doctor how he felt about the knowledge that Gallifrey would be destroyed because of him, The Doctor affirmed that he would always fight for the wider universe and greater good rather than decide to place one life or planet above everything else. As Padrac was locked away in stasis, he was 'visited' by the spectral form of the Red Lady, a psychic impression of Caleera that existed across time after her dispersal, the Caleera remnant threatening to torment Padrac for the rest of his existence for his manipulation of her.
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