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Festival of Death
(Jonathan Morris) |
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 Name: The Repulsion
Format:
Book.
Time of Origin: Questionable; the Repulsion’s
realm existed outside Time, allowing it to make contact with the universe
in 2815 and 3012 seemingly simultaneously; has apparently been watching
the universe since life began.
Appearances: "Festival
of Death".
Doctors:
Fourth
Doctor.
Companions:
K9 and 2nd
Romana.
History: Although the Repulsion had the potential
to be a powerful threat in its own right, it is mainly remembered for the
fact that The Doctor technically encountered it in reverse; he initially
arrived at the location where he would confront the Repulsion after he
and his allies in that time period had already defeated it in his future,
The Doctor subsequently travelling back in time after tying up a couple
of loose ends that his future self had left behind to fulfil his role in
history.
The
Repulsion described itself as a being of pure death, having existed
outside reality since around the dawn of time in a void between life
and death - possible linked to N-Space ("The Ghosts of N-Space")
-, watching life from the outside and developing a deep hatred of
it. It eventually managed to gain access to this universe via the
Necroport, a device created by Doctor Kole Paddox that allegedly
allowed people to die for half an hour and experience the afterlife,
as part of an attraction known as the ‘Beautiful Death’ located
on board the G-Lock, a vast collection of spaceships that had collided
together when the hyperspace tunnel they were travelling through
unexpectedly closed in 2815, rescue teams that arrived when the tunnel
re-opened discovering no survivors and no bodies. In reality, however,
the true purpose of the Necroport was to draw power from those who
participated in the Beautiful Death, while using a unique plant-like-race
called the Arboreteans to act as a power source. Due to unspecified
circumstances, the Arboreteans had developed a unique link to time;
at the moment of their death, they travelled back to the moment of
their own birth and subsequently lived their lives all over again,
allowing them to constantly improve their lives until they had lived
the ‘path of perfection’.
Having somehow learned about the Arboreteans’ ability,
Paddox had hunted their race to the point of genocide - the Arboreteans
had allowed the genocide to take place as the only alternative was
to destroy everything good about their culture by turning their peaceful
people into a military race -, using the last members of the race
to act as psychotemporal conduits - or mediums - to grant the participants
in the Beautiful Death access to the afterlife - really the Repulsions’ domain,
which they passed through every time they ‘died’ - while
drawing the power into the Necroport. Paddox’s final goal was
to duplicate the Arboreteans’ ability so that he could go back
and prevent a traumatic accident that killed his parents when he
was six years old, unaware of the Repulsion’s existence or
the fact that his experiments into death were giving it an opportunity
to access the living world that it had never possessed before.
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| The Fourth Doctor |
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Arriving on the G-Lock in 3012 after learning of their role
in saving it from destruction during a brief visit to the G-Lock one day
in the
future - although they had been forced to take care to
avoid learning how they had saved it to prevent any time paradoxes occurring
-, the
Fourth
Doctor and Romana were just in time to witness
the largest Beautiful Death to date take place, as 218 people underwent
the process... only
for 217 of the participants to suddenly be revived as
the walking dead. Manually reviving the remaining participant - a drug-addled
lizard-like
alien called Hoopy -, The Doctor learned that, during
his time dead, Hoopy had witnessed a little girl talking about how she
didn’t ‘want’ to
be revived like the others, leaving him with further clues
about what was taking place. However, it was only after Romana was caught
in a temporal
anomaly that sent her back to 2815 after the original
accident, learning that they were down to 218 survivors - with the captain
having ‘forced’ the
Cerberus’s computer ERIC to blame himself for the accident; the
captain had ordered the Cerberus to continue onwards as
the tunnel began to close despite ERIC asking to stop, the captain subsequently
ordering
ERIC to ‘recognise’ that he was responsible as he should
have overridden the captain’s commands, driving ERIC suicidally
insane due to the conflict between what he was being told
he should have done and his programmed limitations preventing
him from taking such an
action - and being hunted by a ruthless genetically-engineered
race called the Arachnopods, that she began to suspect
a connection between the events
on the Cerberus and the events on the G-Lock.
Guided to
the rift after he and his first officer discovered Romana’s
presence, the captain believed that he had made a ‘deal’ with
the Repulsion to send him and the other survivors to the future, his
usual arrogance leaving him unable to accept any point of view but his
own; Romana’s protests that the Repulsion was lying were met with
the response that the Repulsion had told him that she would lie, and
he believed that she had simply ‘admitted the truth’ when
she changed her story. Although unable to stop the crew from vanishing
into the rift without changing history, The Doctor was able to save Romana
from being fed to the Arachnopods, subsequently directing ERIC to alter
the ship’s artificial gravity to drop the Arachnopods into the
rift used to access the Repulsion’s domain - now simply opening
directly into the real space/hyperspace interface after
the Repulsion had removed its influence -, promising ERIC
that he would help ERIC die
later. In the meantime, the Repulsion's actions in luring
people into the rift had allowed it to turn the Cerberus passengers into extensions
of its will, using them to control the participants in
the Beautiful Death and extend its influence into the
world of the living by exploiting
their desire to live (Although Hoopy remained free because
the 'spirit' that would have possessed him - a little
girl called Tarie - didn't want
to go to the future because she wanted to remain with
her mother, who had been killed in the original accident,
the Repulsion's realm manifesting
itself as whatever its inhabitants wanted to see).
Having
returned to the present, The Doctor met with Garella - the last Arboretean
left -, learning the truth about their unique relationship
with time and their connection to Paddox’s experiments, arranging
for Garella to serve as his ‘spirit guide’ in his own Beautiful
Death so that he could make direct contact with the Repulsion’s
realm and recover K9, who had been thrown into the rift leading to the
Repulsion's realm earlier. With The Doctor now directly connected to
the Necroport - although he was dismissive of the Repulsion's realm as
nothing but cliches as he refused to take it seriously -, the Repulsion
intended to use his body as its host, travelling through time and space
and killing all life that it found in its travels. However, having predicted
what the Repulsion would do, Romana was able to disconnect The Doctor
from the Necroport and connect it up to the new-freed K9 instead, resulting
in the Repulsion taking control of K9 and giving Romana the opportunity
to transfer the Repulsion from K9 into ERIC. After The Doctor had been
revived, he was then able to program ERIC to overload, fulfilling the
computer’s death wish and destroying the Repulsion once and for
all, leaving its realm to be inhabited by Tarie and those other spirits
who had chosen to remain there rather than return to their bodies during
their Beautiful Death. Although Paddox was able to connect himself to
the Necroport with Garella as his spirit guide to send himself back to
his birth and undo his past while The Doctor and Romana were busy resolving
the last loose ends, The Doctor knew that it would be for nothing; as
a human being, Paddox existed in time - unlike Time Lords and Arboreteans,
who naturally exist slightly outside of time and are thus able to influence
pre-established events (Presumably time in the TARDIS allows The Doctor’s
companions to acquire a partial existence outside of time themselves,
given such examples as the Ninth
Doctor’s companion Rose Tyler saving her father ("Father's
Day")) -, and thus he was unable
to change his past, permanently doomed to live his life in a loop, witnessing
his pointless genocide without ever being able to change so much as a
single footstep of his past self ’s actions. |
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