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Palace of the Red Sun
(Christopher Bulis) |
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 Name: Protector Glavis Judd
Format:
Audio
Time of Origin: Originated on Earth
colony Zalcrossar around the 30th century; was imprisoned in an asylum
on Esselven five centuries afterwards.
Appearances: "Palace
of the Red Sun"
Doctors: Sixth
Doctor
Companions: Peri Brown
History: Although it could be argued that Glavis
Judd was not actually The Doctor’s enemy as the two men never
even met, reports of his past actions left The Doctor resolved to
defeat him, Judd operating in a highly ruthless manner on a scale
that would make The Doctor automatically opposed to him.
Possessing
a high opinion of himself from his youth - to the point that he sometimes
wondered how his parents had him -, Judd’s intellect earned
him a place in the accelerated learning scheme in junior school.
Although physically short, an encounter with a bully inspired Judd
to train in hand-to-hand combat, his later victory over the bully
in a rematch increasing his high opinion of himself. By the time
he graduated, Judd was already convinced that Zalcassor’s rulers
were his intellectual inferiors, and, certain that he would never
achieve his ‘destiny’ by working up the corporate ladder,
he enrolled in the military after studying past leaders despite the
current period of peace. Quickly making an impression on his training
instructor when he defeated the other man in a long fight, Judd passed
basic training at the top of his muster, gaining rapid promotion
due to the comparatively laid-back military officers currently active
while subtly blackmailing upper-class soldiers serving because it
was expected of them as he gathered the more capable officers to
him.
Judd eventually gained the opportunity to
make himself a public figure when a colony on Deltor 5, a habitable moon
on a gas giant in Zalcassor’s system, deposed its ruler and declared
independence. With Judd having made a significant impression due to his
habit of leading from the front and retaining his control in combat,
he was the obvious choice to lead the army to regain control, simultaneously
falsifying documents to suggest that the rebels had been more dangerous
than they were. Winning the subsequent election to the post of World
President by standing as the Military Party candidate, Judd set up a
highly efficient anti-crime campaign that allowed him to divert more
funding into the military, dismissing the multi-party system as inefficient
after his second election while modifying the educational system to encourage
his own views on the universe around him. With their lives slightly lacking
in some freedoms but otherwise more secure than they had been, the people
were increasingly willing to accept Judd, his reputation increasing when
he provided himself with an enemy by manipulating the present social
situation so that the rebellious elements on Gadron - a nearby planet
with no strong ties to anyone else - appeared to be gaining strength
while the general population suffered, beginning Judd’s efforts
to bring the universe together under his ‘Protectorate’.
Perceiving
his Protectorate as a means to bring justice where there had been
misrule, Judd continued his expansionist efforts to subtly create
problems in other worlds that he could ‘solve’ over the
next few years. Judd gained a particularly interesting ‘ally’ when
he made contact with Dexel Dynes, a tabloid journalist whose reputation
was ruined during a treasure hunt where he briefly met the Fifth
Doctor and Peri ("The
Ultimate Treasure"), Dynes being
unconcerned about Judd’s true motives so long as he got a good
story with a charismatic central character. For Judd’s part,
Dynes provided Judd with an unaffiliated press officer he could use
to gain insight into how others perceived him - as well as obviously
shaping the public perception of the Protectorate - while also giving
him valuable insight into Dynes’s corner of the galaxy when
the time came for him to conquer them as well. While observed by
Dynes, Judd’s expansion was forcibly put on hold when he attempted
to 'liberate' the planet of Esselven and the rulers departed before
he could capture them, leaving him facing the problem of a safe containing
all of the information necessary to successfully run the planet,
such as computer codes and trading agreements; the safe was genetically
encoded so that it would only open to members of the royal family,
and would explode if subjected to any attempts to force it open.
While Judd searched for the Esselven royals - although
he attempted to transfer the blame for the social situation on Esselven
on to them -, they retreated to a pleasure planet that had been created
several years back, and began attempts to reinforce the shielding
that surrounded the world. Unfortunately, the planet was already
an unusually dense planet orbiting a white dwarf star, the intense
gravity already significant distorting time and space in the area,
and their attempts to enhance the shield resulted in time being the
shield flowing five hundred times faster than it did outside. The
strain of this power caused the nuclear reactor in the Winter Palace
to melt down, and although the engineers shut down the Summer Palace’s
reactor in time they were all exposed to massive doses of radiation
in the process. The family retreated to the woods until the radiation
decayed to a safe level, but the damage to the systems had corrupted
their robot servants’ programming, causing them to drive their
masters away when they tried to return. The resulting glitches in
the computer network caused an interactive drama called The Princess
of Aldemaar - a historic romance where characters were portrayed
by holograms - to begin playing in an infinite loop, perpetually
repeating once the story had concluded. Despite the fact that the
characters never even registered the robots - or, indeed, anything
that didn’t connect directly with the story - the robots still
loyally served the illusionary Lords as the real things, while the
actual descendents of Esselven’s royal family eked out a miserable
existence in the woods as ‘Scavengers’.
Eventually, around five hundred years after the original accident
- which translated as being only a year outside the shield - the
Sixth Doctor and Peri materialised on the planet in one of the gardens,
deciding to take advantage of the opportunity to relax while the
TARDIS tried to figure out their location (The temporal distortion
of the field made getting an accurate lock on the planet’s
coordinates difficult). While exploring their surroundings, the two
of them were subsequently separated, Peri being mistaken for a scavenger
while The Doctor had a narrow escape from the robot gardeners. Having
each discovered allies in their attempts to learn the mystery of
the world - Peri rallying a group of scavengers in an escape while
The Doctor befriended a robot called Green-8 who had evolved sentience
due to a malfunctioning self-repair subroutine - The Doctor and Green-8
travelled to the palace to shut down the projection system while
Peri retreated to the scavengers’ village to plan her next
move.
When Judd’s fleet arrived after finally tracking the
Esselven royals to their final destination, he had his ships launch
an all-out assault on the shield, opening a brief hole in the shield
that Dynes managed to slip through in his ship, Dynes gathering some
information about the current situation both through his own research
and an encounter with Peri, Peri exchanging her tale of the scavengers’ oppression
in exchange for Dynes’s information on Judd. With this new
information, Peri subsequently headed off to the palace after disposing
of Dynes’ camera, where she met up with The Doctor and Green-8,
who had deactivated the holodrama and begun to coordinate the robotic
defence of the palace. Researching Judd in the databanks, The Doctor
vowed to end his reign of terror, and, aided by Green-8 and Oralissa
- the title character in The Princess of Aldemaar who had also developed
sentience over the centuries -, The Doctor managed to trick Judd
and Dynes into thinking that the scavengers were also holograms before
he apparently departed. When Judd attempted to analyse the palace
computers to learn how to duplicate the temporal shield they had
created, Oralissa transmitted a false self-destruct message, forcing
Judd’s forces to depart while The Doctor, Peri, Green-8 and
the scavengers returned (The Doctor having merely taken a short hop
forward in the TARDIS).
As Judd and Dynes left the shield, The Doctor quickly
manipulated the shield to bring time back into sync with the rest
of the galaxy, apparently resetting Esselven Minor so that time would
now flow normally for it from then on, leaving Oralissa and Green-8
to help the scavengers re-educate themselves to return home. Judd
and Dynes, on the other hand, found themselves transferred over five
hundred years into the future, where Dynes was shocked to learn that
his reporting style was hopelessly out of date and he was only potentially
useful for his unique insight into the world gone by. Judd, on the
other hand, returned to Esselven only to learn that it was now ruled
by the apparent descendants of the Scavengers - Oralissa serving
as the nanny to the royal family while Green-8 now serving as the
king’s advisor -, and was informed that his Protectorate had
collapsed centuries ago. Although Judd protested that the Protectorate
was an efficient, productive system, King Kell 3rd noted that it
still allowed some authority over others, dismissing it as a cold,
heartless system, and that people needed such idiosyncrasies as royal
authority in their lives even if Judd had never understood that.
As a result, Judd was taken away to a mental asylum to be treated
for his ‘delusions’ that he was Glavis Judd - although
Greeneight and Kel implied that they were aware of his real identity
and simply thought this the easiest way to deal with him -, the novel
ending with Judd beginning to doubt his own identity as he was locked
away. While his fate was harsh, Judd’s arrogance and self-centred
belief that he alone knew what was best for everyone made his final
fate as an anonymous lunatic a fitting punishment for his actions
in life. |
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