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Players
(Terrance
Dicks) |
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 Name: Players
Format:
Book.
Time of Origin: Even they don't know
anymore.
Appearances: "World
Game", "Players"
and "Endgame".
Doctors:
Second
Doctor, Sixth
Doctor and Eighth
Doctor.
Companions: Serena and Peri.
History: The
Players like to view themselves as The Masters of Time, but the Sixth
Doctor called them vandals, children who throw bricks onto the lines of history
just to hear the train passengers scream, and the Second regarded them
as utterly evil, causing chaos and unrest on the whole of Earth simply
to keep themselves amused. The Players lives by strict Rules, which have
never been completely revealed in their appearances, but we do know their
cred, as shown below;
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Winning is everything - and nothing.
Losing is nothing - and everything.
All that matters is the Game. |
To
date, we aren't even clear on the nature of The Player's time travelling
abilities; the most logical conclusion would be that they come from the
future and meddle in the past, but there are hints that they live time
contemporarily with Earth's present although their long lives mean it has
little effect on them. However, since The Players of "World
Game" -
when manipulating the events of the Napoleonic Wars - still made reference
to the events of ‘The Game of Hitler and Churchill’, it seems
likely that most theories are accurate; while The Players generally observe
the future while ‘living’ on Earth in the present, they can
also travel back in time to manipulate past events. Despite this, The Players
apparently cannot travel forward to see the futures that will result from
their actions, and they also evidently lack the Time Lords’ ability
to know when history has been changed as one Player was clearly ignorant
that the Second
Doctor once defeated their plans by travelling forward
to a time after they had succeeded and subsequently going back into the
past after learning what they would do. It is, however, known for a fact
that The Players are generally transdimensional beings, assuming a human
and mortal form while on Earth to make the Games more interesting when
they take direct part in their schemes. Another fact about The Players
is that they hold the Game even above their own lives, willing to accept
the risks of mortal death in order to avoid revealing their role in events
to others. The exact amount of Players in existence are unknown, but it
is likely not a large number, as the death of even two Players was considered
proof that a Game had gone against them, and The Doctor’s most regular
adversary among The Players, the enigmatic Countess, appears to have a
significant reputation among her people.
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World
Game
(Terrance Dicks) |
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The
Doctor first encountered The Players in the aftermath of "The
War Games", when his sentence of execution for interference in the affairs
of the universe was changed to exile after the Time Lords detected The
Players’ involvement in the Napoleonic Wars, concluding that The
Doctor was the best candidate to attend to this problem without violating
Time Lord policy, offering him a relaxed sentence of regeneration and
exile in exchange for his help. However, before carrying out their assignment,
The Doctor insisted on confirming that the War Games had ended, with
the Time Lords sending him to France in 1915 so that he could meet two
friends from the Games, Lieutenant Jeremy Carstairs and Lady Jennifer
Buckingham, and confirm that they had no memory of their previous meeting.
Although he had intended to simply talk with them and depart, their plans
were changed when they encountered Major Winston
Churchill - having rejoined
the army after a failed military campaign -, saving him from an ambush
that The Players had arranged. Although they were subsequently caught
by the mysterious Count and Countess while resting in a nearby house
- the two intended to send Churchill and the others to Berlin, unconcerned
about whether the Kaiser would kill him or claim that he had defected
-, but the Countess betrayed the Count and gave Churchill a gun on a
whim after taking a shine to him, allowing The Doctor to hold the Count
and Countess down while his friends escaped in the plane that would have
taken them to Berlin, then using the Time Ring given to him by the Time
Lords to escape before he was shot.
Following
this, The Doctor, along with his new companion Serenadellatrovella, began
to track The Players throughout the course of another elaborate scheme.
While his earlier encounter with The Players, and his meetings with them
in his sixth incarnation, featured The Doctor getting involved in The
Players' 'Game of Churchill and Hitler', featuring The Players attempting
to alter the events of the Second World War, in this encounter, The Doctor
found himself fighting in the 'Game of Napoleon and Wellington', as the
Countess masterminded a particularly ambitious scheme to alter the course
of the battle of Waterloo. Although The Doctor and Serena were able to
thwart The Players’ attempt to kill Lord Nelson and Arthur Wellesley
- the future Duke of Wellington - by leaving a bomb in a meeting room
in 10 Downing Street during the pair’s only coincidental meeting
in 1794, followed by The Doctor sabotaging the Countess’s attempt
to perfect an early submarine for Napoleon’s use prior to Trafalgar
by sabotaging the power supply for the propeller to explode (The submarine’s
main failure being its slow speed), The Doctor’s lack of knowledge
about the Countess’s plans for Waterloo forced him to choose a
more complicated course of action.
Travelling
into the future to witness what the Countess planned to accomplish, The
Doctor learned that, by 1865, Napoleon’s empire had collapsed as
he pushed his forces so far that they lacked the ability to hold on to
their pre-existing territory, resulting in various countries having reverted
to smaller states at war with each other while The Players led the countries
in conflict for their own amusement. Resolving to avert that timeline,
The Doctor and Serena travelled back to a ball that took place the day
before Waterloo, having learned from the Countess in the future that
Wellington had been assassinated during that ball. Although Serena sacrificed
herself to save the Duke by taking the musket-ball in her side - the
shot destroying both her hearts and rendering regeneration impossible
-, The Doctor was still forced to remain with Wellington’s men
to ensure that everything went according to plan. Although the Countess
continued her efforts by preventing the Prussians from coming to Wellington's
aid after sending them a false message, The Doctor, accompanied by Colonel
Grant, was able to deliver the Prussians’ true orders by disguising
himself as Napoleon, the two being superficially similar enough to each
other for The Doctor to fool the average French soldier who had never
seen Napoleon in person close-up. Not only did The Doctor deliver the
Prussians’ true orders, but he was also able to divert some of
Napoleon’s reinforcements to where they'd do the least historical
damage. After the battle, The Doctor was informed by the Countess that
all games had been put on hold out of fear that they had overplayed their
hands, but both The Doctor and the Countess remained certain that they
would meet again.
(AN:
Evidence suggests that this encounter, for The Players, took place some
time after the Sixth Doctor's encounter with them as shown below, given
that they referred to 'The Game of Hitler and Churchill' in the past
tense, suggesting that it had happened some time ago for them)
After
a prolonged period where they somehow managed to avoid ever
coming into contact, The Players and The Doctor found themselves pitted
against each
other again, The Doctor now in his sixth incarnation, and
once again playing the 'Game of Churchill and Hitler'. The time-period
in question
was 1899, and The Players were attempting to shoot the younger
Winston Churchill during the Boer War, which was only barley prevented
by the
Sixth Doctor and Peri when, The Doctor having decided to
give Peri a holiday in Victorian London, the TARDIS hit
the right time, but landed in Africa instead of London. Although their
presence helped to prevent
a Player from shooting Churchill, as well as assisting him
in restarting a temporarily derailed train, The Doctor and Peri were
briefly held captive
with him in a prison camp. However, Churchill managed to
escape with the aid of a Player who was then trying to save him, and
The Doctor and
Peri thanks to a guard telling Peri where the TARDIS was,
allowing them to retreat to the ship while Churchill’s disappearance
distracted the guards.
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The Ancestor Cell
(Peter Anghelides
and Stephen Cole) |
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The
Doctor's next encounter took place for him almost immediately after
his 1899 adventure, but for The Players it was thirty-seven years.
Tracking The Players once again, The Doctor decided that he and Peri
would settle in to London society in 1936, using some money that
he had left in a newly-established bank in 1816 to fund their activities
while posing as his own descendant, also introducing Peri as his
ward. Having hired a house after a Player tried to assassinate them
while staying at a hotel, The Doctor also hired PI Tom Dekker (Who
had coincidentally worked with the Seventh
Doctor in Chicago (Blood
Harvest")) as private security before they attended a garden
party at Buckingham Palace. Meeting Churchill once again, The Doctor
and Peri posed as their own children to explain their lack of aging,
quickly forming a great impression on Churchill as individuals who
could be trusted even before Dekker saved Churchill from another
assassination attempt by The Players. While The Doctor and Dekker
talked with Churchill and Carstairs, now Churchill's chief of staff,
about the apparent conspiracy against Churchill in particular and
Britain in general, Peri attended a dinner with Wallis Simpson, the
King's mistress, Joachim von Ribbentrop of the Third Reich, and the
Count and Countess, being briefly captured after The Players convinced
von Ribbentrop that she was an American agent before The Doctor and
Dekker’s contacts rescued her.
With
Peri having stolen a list of key individuals who would be sympathetic
to a Nazi coup of Britain, The Doctor and Churchill knew who they
would need to keep an eye on after Churchill revealed that the King
had declared his intentions to abdicate in order to marry Wallis,
The Doctor realising that he was going to instead dismiss the Government
and bring Britain under German rule. Thanks to The Doctor’s
warning, Churchill persuaded the head of the BBC to merely record
Edward’s announcement until they knew for certain what his
intentions were, while Carstairs and his men put the names on von
Ribbentrop’s list under observation. Having prevented Edward
from announcing his intention to dismiss Parliament and establish
a new government with Hitler’s help, The Doctor and Churchill
blackmailed him into going along with his original plans for abdication
or be arrested for treason, von Ribbentrop being left with nothing
but a laundry list that Peri had left him in place of the original
list after she stole it. While preparing to depart, The Doctor and
Peri were confronted by the Count and Countess, who revealed their
true names and agenda to The Doctor, The Doctor dismissing their
claim to be masters of time and denouncing them as nothing but spoiled
children who threw bricks onto the railroad of history to hear the
passengers scream. Although the Count was accidentally shot by the
Countess in the subsequent struggle, the Countess departed leaving
The Doctor a chilling message; they were now fully aware of him,
and, as either a Piece or a Player, he would play the Game again…
In
The Doctor's last encounter with The Players, he was in his eighth
incarnation, and was now about halfway through his forced amnesic ‘exile’ on
Earth, the destruction of Gallifrey ("The
Ancestor Cell")
having left The Doctor with total amnesia and seriously depleting
the TARDIS’s power. By this point, all Players but the Countess
had tired of Earth, with the Countess preferring to see what games
were left to be played while others favoured the idea of leaving
Earth and starting over somewhere else, and had begun to set events
into an Endgame by increasing the intensity of the Cold War. Play
would only end when one side had completely destroyed the other,
even if Earth was destroyed in the crossfire, along with other additional
rules, such as 'points' being gained for eliminating old enemies
such as The Doctor. Unfortunately for the world at this time, the
Eighth Doctor had now given up all hope of ever remembering who he
was after over sixty years living on Earth without aging, spending
his days at the library and his nights in his flat near to the still-regenerating
TARDIS, its exterior still half-finished and the interior smaller
than the outside (His time at the library was constantly frustrating
him, as in most cases reading the books in the library felt like
refreshing his memory rather than learning something new). However,
The Doctor still got unwillingly involved as a Piece in the Endgame
thanks to a Polish agent that he had befriended leaving stolen documents
in his apartment - having concluded that The Doctor was a secret
agent who was so efficient that his supervisors hadn’t even
bothered giving him a cover story to ensure that he couldn’t
be traced -, resulting in The Doctor being sought by both sides.
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Endgame
(Terrance Dicks) |
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He
was eventually caught by Kim Philby, an American agent secretly working
for Russia, who blackmailed The Doctor into helping him by taking
The Doctor’s blue box; Philby was one of the founders of ‘Tightrope’,
a group of spies from both sides working to ensure that the Cold
War remained evenly balanced, but recent subtle events had made them
aware that someone else was working against Tightrope - particularly
after one of their agents mentioned ‘The Players’ before
dying -, a close encounter between The Doctor and an unknown agent
confirming that The Doctor had some history with The Players even
if he couldn’t remember it and forcing The Doctor to help him
deal with various actions to provoke The Players into exposing themselves.
While attempting to get double agent Douglas Maclean out of the country,
The Doctor was attacked by a Player named Axel, who attempted to
increase the hostility by embarrassing British Intelligence by creating
the impression that Maclean and another defector were homosexual
lovers who killed each other during their escape, but The Doctor
managed to overpower him. Although still dissatisfied with his current
role, The Doctor subsequently travelled to America to investigate
recent inexplicable attacks that appeared to be the result of brainwashing,
investigating the possibility that President Truman was about to
fall victim to these attacks, The Doctor managing to expose the experiments
and ensure that Truman remained free. Although The Doctor was reluctant
to go along with Philby’s ‘request’/order for him
to go to Russia to ensure that Stalin wasn’t falling victim
to the same brainwashing, he was left with no choice after Philby
faked evidence that he was a Russian agent.
Arriving
in Russia, The Doctor was able to sneak into Stalin’s quarters
and discovered his old foe the Countess, ‘encouraging’ Stalin’s
paranoia and temper to provoke him into war. Although The Doctor
continued to defend mankind’s right to make it on their own
without the interference of The Players, the Countess sensed that
he lacked an emotional investment in his words, offering to help
him before The Doctor collapsed, screaming that he mustn’t
know what he had forgotten (Most likely an automatic response he
had programmed into himself to prevent his memory being restored
until he was ready ("The
Gallifrey Chronicles")). Recognising
the wisdom of The Doctor’s words, the Countess undid the damage
that she had done to him and Stalin - assuring Stalin that his position
was secure -, subsequently helping The Doctor defeat three Players
who sought to permanently brainwash Truman to provoke war. Philby
subsequently cleared The Doctor’s name and returned the blue
box to him, leaving The Doctor to enjoy his rediscovered appreciation
for the small things after coming so close to death, while the Countess
claimed to the Adjudicator of The Players that the humans had discovered
their presence - thus invalidating the rule that The Players should
never be exposed -, explaining that she had spared the ‘damaged’ Doctor
so that he could recover and be a more interesting opponent in future.
Although The Players presumably remain somewhere, the Adjudicator
having declared the Endgame void, it is possible that a future Doctor
shall deal with them in the end, but whether this confrontation shall
be witnessed remains to be seen. |
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