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The Fourth Wall
(John Dorney) |
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 Name: The Porcians
Format: Audio
Time of Origin: Homeworld unspecified
Appearances: "The Fourth Wall" and "You Are The Doctor"
Doctors: Sixth Doctor, Seventh Doctor; unrecorded encounters with other Doctors.
Companions: Flip Jackson, Ace; likely met other companions in unrecorded prior encounters with earlier Doctors.
History: As a species, the Porcians are renowned for being the most incompetent would-be planet-conquerors in the universe. According to The Doctor, the Porcians were inspired to try and conquer other worlds to achieve the reputation of such infamous races as the Daleks or the Cybermen, but their efforts constantly fail because they just aren’t that good at it. Their mistakes have included invading a planet where the sun was on the verge of going supernova, trying to invade a planet like Skaro where they would be hopelessly outmatched, or even something as simple as bringing the wrong kind of weapons to their invasion. They also show limited imagination; on one occasion, when trying to find the password to shut down a security shield, they simply attempted ‘Password’ more than once and had no idea what to use instead. On a personal level, their names are also unusual; The Doctor has encountered a Porcian whose native name means ‘Death-bringer, slayer of all, destroyer of worlds’, but in English was pronounced ‘Chimbly’, and Chimbly’s wife is known in her native tongue as ‘She who defiles dreams and stamps on hope’, but in English this is apparently pronounced ‘Keith’.
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| Colin Baker |
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Physically, the Porcians resembled walking pigs in silver bodystockings and cloaks, apparently shorter than the average human female. The Doctor observed that, to their credit, the Porcians never make the same mistake twice, but when one group was shown failing to kill The Doctor because they had forgotten to charge their weapons overnight while confirming that the weapon was set to kill, they clearly make some smaller mistakes on a fairly regular basis. While incompetent as conquerors, The Doctor has observed that this makes the Porcians even more dangerous, as the potential collateral damage caused by their campaigns could be even more devastating than the deaths that would result if they succeeded. Apparently the Porcians once even allied with The Master, but The Master acknowledged that particular alliance was a mistake on his part afterwards ("Dark Eyes 4 - Master of the Daleks"). The Doctor himself has faced the Porcians on a range of occasions, often trying to stop them destroying themselves as much as stop them from destroying other races, but only two of these encounters have been shown to date.The earliest record of The Doctor facing the Porcians was in his sixth incarnation, at a point when he was already familiar to them for having thwarted past invasions, during a period when they were ‘officially’ working as actors on a television show. The show in question used an elaborate form of artificial reality, which projected the storyline into the real world based on a reality generation machine created by the legendary Dreamspinners and adapted by Doctor Helen Shepherd. This technology allowed people to essentially take part in the show as it was taking place, security systems preventing the watchers being actually hurt by the events witnessed. The Doctor was made aware of the system as it was linked to dimensional transcendentalism, so the mere existence of this system disrupted the TARDIS while it was in flight, prompting the Sixth Doctor to travel to the artificial planet Transmission where the technology was being tested.
The initial test of this technology was to broadcast the pilot of the TV show Laser, depicting Jack Laser opposing the ruthless Lord Krarn and his followers, the Warmongers, after they had conquered Earth five years prior, with the Porcians having served as the template for the Warmongers. When The Doctor travelled to Transmission, the other-dimensional nature of the system led to The Doctor’s current companion Flip Jackson being trapped in the system, swiftly realising she was in a show but believing it was just being filmed as she obviously didn’t understand the context of her situation. Back in the real world, The Doctor explained how Flip had become trapped in the system to Doctor Shepherd and show producer Augustus Scullop, just before he realised that the Porcians were present. Hearing The Doctor talk about the potential danger of this technology inspired Scullop to disable the security systems and allow Lord Krarn and a group of Warmongers to enter the real world, taking advantage of the distraction as the Porcians tried to steal copies of the plans for Scullop’s business rival Xander Drexel.
With Laser the only person able to kill the Warmongers due to the rules of his narrative, most of those attending the premiere were killed, including Flip, but The Doctor was able to save a group of Porcians, Doctor Shepherd, and Matthew Holland, the actor who portrayed Krarn in the series. Scullop attempted to ask the ‘real’ Krarn to help him eliminate Drexel, but when Krarn realised the extent of Scullop’s influence on his life, he killed Scullop and used the machine to generate new versions of himself and his army, intending to continue his campaign in the real world. With the Porcians realising they couldn’t stop this new threat, they agreed to help The Doctor use the equipment to film a scene where ‘Krarn’ received a weapon that could be used to destroy all fictional beings that had entered the real world, retroactively inserting it into the original recording. Returning to the pocket dimension to retrieve the new ‘fiction bomb’ from the pocket dimension, The Doctor was also able to insert a scene claiming that the weapon used to kill Flip had a glitch that would just create the illusion of death for an hour; this wouldn’t save anyone who had been killed in the real world, but since Flip’s body had been left in the pocket dimension she could be affected by the reality retcon The Doctor had introduced. The Porcians were forced to depart with nothing for Drexel, but agreed that they had gone too far and decided not to pursue this again.
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You Are the Doctor
(John Dorney) |
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The next time The Doctor faced the Porcians, he was surprised to learn that they had managed to actually conquer a world, this occupation led by Chimbly and his wife Keith ("You Are The Doctor"). When the Seventh Doctor and Ace landed on the planet in question, they swiftly found themselves in a form of time loop where their actions would either lead to their deaths from traps and guards set up by the Porcians or The Doctor and Ace just went along with the order to have psychic implants inserted into their ears. However, The Doctor was able to use this time to talk with the locals and confirm that the local resistance had been defeated because the Porcians could apparently anticipate their every move; the most successful rebel army had actually failed because they ran out of fresh food. Rejecting the idea that the Porcians could have just done everything correctly this one time, The Doctor finally managed to access the Porcians’ central security cache, throwing off the passivity that had been influencing him since he arrived on the planet.
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| Sylvester McCoy |
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Once inside the secure room, The Doctor discovered that the Porcians had captured a Resurrectionist, a legendary pan-dimensional being. The Resurrectionists were able to reverse time for the newly-dead in their vicinity, returning the deceased to life in an earlier part of the timestream and then diverting their lives on to a new path to avoid their previous deaths. However, this act caused the Resurrectionists pain as they felt the agony of those reversed deaths, justifying why they had been unable to save their own species from extinction, and the Porcians had forced the Resurrectionist to kill and resurrect the natives of this world over and over again until the Porcians achieved their victory. The Doctor accused Chimbly of torturing the Resurrectionist to fulfil his own pathetic fantasies, observing that the Resurrectionist had avoided controlling The Doctor’s mind to the extent necessary to stop him completely so that he could be in a position to free it. Chimbly attempted to shoot The Doctor, but realised too late that The Doctor had positioned himself so that he was standing in front of the equipment keeping the Resurrectionist trapped in the first place. With no reset button, the Porcians were forced to flee as their slave force rebelled, Keith criticising Chimbly for keeping The Doctor alive as a slave rather than killing him and leaving it at that.
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