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The Adventuress of Henrietta Street
(Lawrence Miles) |
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 Name: Sabbath, real name unknown
Format:
Book.
Time of Origin: London,
1783.
Appearances: "The
Adventuress of Henrietta Street", "Anachrophobia",
"History
101" to "The
Domino Effect", "The
Last Resort", "Timeless"
and "Sometime
Never...".
Doctor: Eighth
Doctor.
Companions: Fitz Kreiner, Anji Kapoor, Trix MacMillan, and
technically Jo
Grant, Sarah
Jane Smith, Harry
Sullivan, Mel Bush, Ace, and Samantha
Jones (All captured or possibly killed by Sabbath's superiors).
History: Sabbath was, in many ways, one of the
few adversaries The Doctor ever had who was his equal, possessing
an innate cunning for dealing with problems in time and space.
However, in other ways, Sabbath was The Doctor's opposite, attempting
to seduce at least three women before The Doctor and he met and
possessing little remorse about committing murder to further his
ends. In practical terms, he actually bore more resemblance to
the Seventh
Doctor than the Eighth, having concluded that he was
better suited to coming up with plans and manipulating others rather
than taking action himself (Although it should be noted that, unlike
the Seventh Doctor, he was rather overweight, having concluded
that physical appearance was unimportant in his ‘line of
work’). However, at heart, Sabbath was little more than a
puppet, much of his knowledge acquired second-hand from his mysterious
superiors, even his own time travelling abilities technically stolen
from The Doctor, the realisation of his true nature driving him
to oppose his former masters and aid The Doctor in their last confrontation.
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Anachrophobia
(Jonathan Morris) |
|
At
their first encounter, in London of 1783 ("The
Adventuress of Henrietta Street"), The Doctor, currently suffering from memory
loss after his final encounter with Faction
Paradox - and having
somehow become trapped on Earth without access to the TARDIS - was
attempting to organise a defence on Earth against a species from
another dimension that had taken on the physical appearance of apes;
formerly, Time was stabilised by a race of Elementals (The Time Lords),
but, with the destruction of the Elementals ("The
Ancestor Cell"),
their knowledge had passed on to others, and now The Doctor had to
organise some of the inheritors of that knowledge to protect humanity
from the apes, really personifications of mankind’s ignorance
emerging from another dimension to attack Earth as it emerged into
a new age of reason and a new way of thinking. Due to the loss of
Gallifrey, The Doctor felt he lacked the authority to truly interfere
with Earth on this scale, and so, to turn The Doctor into an Elemental
of the Earth, a wedding was being arranged between The Doctor and
the innocent young Juliette that would symbolically bind The Doctor
to Earth and allowing him to participate in its affairs. However,
at the same time, Sabbath was attempting to gain true time travelling
abilities; some years back, Sabbath had been an agent of the British
Secret Service of the present, but, during a test where he was put
in an inescapable situation (Chained up and thrown into the Thames)
he had, according to myth, encountered a Leviathan that taught him
a secret word that let him travel through Time and Space.
During the course of the crisis, Sabbath constructed
a ship, the Jonah, to allow him to travel through time with greater
ease, even summoning and binding some of the apes to his service,
but was unable to travel more than a certain distance from Earth;
it was as though it no longer acknowledged him if he was a certain
distance away from it. Although the two men were operating towards
the same end of saving humanity from the apes, Sabbath believed that
The Doctor’s side lacked the skills to deal with a crisis on
this scale, particularly after The Doctor’s people had already
failed one. Eventually, Sabbath realised how he could overcome his
difficulty in penetrating ‘deep time’; The Doctor was
currently dying of a kind of heart failure, his second heart pumping
poison into him as it tried to link him to the now non-existent Gallifrey.
Despite having nearly ruined The Doctor's plans to become Earth's
Elemental Champion by taking Juliette away, Sabbath still decided
to save The Doctor's life, somehow removing the heart before it could
kill The Doctor. Now married to Scarlette, the woman who had helped
The Doctor gather his forces against the apes, The Doctor was able
to battle them on his terms, decapitating the head ape with the sonic
screwdriver (It representing a power they couldn't understand). However,
as The Doctor departed, Scarlette apparently dead - although it was
implied that she had merely faked her death, knowing how The Doctor
felt about her and aware that he had a greater duty to the universe
that she could not aid him in - he was unaware of the fate of his
second heart; Sabbath, wishing to gain the biological advantages
of the Time Lords, had inserted the heart into his own chest, and
was now determined to take the place of the Time Lords as Time's
protector...
After
leaving Earth, Sabbath acquired mysterious associates who wished
to ensure they were the only time-active power in existence. Under
his manipulation The Doctor was tricked into disposing of a race
of Clock-Faced People ("Anachrophobia"), Sabbath manipulating
events so that The Doctor would see the creatures as a hostile threat
rather than the refugees they were in reality as they sought to escape
Sabbath’s masters. Sabbath also tricked The Doctor into helping
him eliminate a vast information-gathering network known simply as
'the System' ("History
101") which apparently contained
information about Sabbath’s initiation that had to be kept
secret. The System was disrupted when its agent’s attempts
to perceive Sabbath’s agent - who was out of sync with the
world it sought to observe - forced it to access the perceptions
of others to analyse the agent, the System’s agent subsequently
being driven mad by the conflicting viewpoints – simultaneously
corrupting the System as the agent’s perceptions were transferred
back to it - until The Doctor managed to help it depart this reality.
Shortly after this, The Doctor and Sabbath faced each
other again in Victorian London ("Camera
Obscura"), having
to work together to deal with a faulty time machine - The Doctor
preferring to work with Sabbath despite his distrust of the other
man rather than doing all the work only to find Sabbath was behind
it all along - in the course of which The Doctor discovered an interesting
side-effect of his heart being in Sabbath's chest; since one of his
hearts was always beating in Sabbath’s chest, even if his chest
was practically crushed, he would still survive without needing to
regenerate (Although it was unclear whether the same would apply
to Sabbath if he was fatally injured). After finding the machine
- which worked by fracturing and reassembling Time to travel through
it, with its improper tuning causing those who used it to be fractured
into multiple versions of themselves - The Doctor's unique relationship
with Time allowed him to overload the machine, but a woman Sabbath
loved died to save him, knowing about their link... and, enraged
at The Doctor for his actions, Sabbath tore out The Doctor's second
heart, allowing The Doctor to grow a new one while apparently retaining
the advantages the heart had given him.
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The Domino Effect
(David Bishop) |
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However,
now The Doctor had a better idea of Sabbath's beliefs, and knew him
to be truly dangerous. Sabbath believed that unauthorised time travel
causes alternate timelines to proliferate, damaging the structure
of the Universe and wearing it down (A view apparently reinforced
by his 'allies' and opposed to The Doctor’s view of Time as
a flowing stream where his presence caused no more damage than ripples
from a thrown stone), and, in their next encounter with Sabbath in
Siberia ("Time
Zero"), Sabbath intended to trigger an explosion
of dark matter energy at the beginning of the universe, thus shaping
all that followed, destroying all alternate histories and leaving
only one possible timeline. However, The Doctor knew that Sabbath
was wrong; every significant event remains indeterminate until the
act of observation forces the Universe to ‘choose’ the
outcome. It does not split unless absolutely necessary, and even
then, under ordinary circumstances it’s impossible - or at
least very, very difficult - to move between alternate timelines,
The Doctor proving that Sabbath’s beliefs were wrong by demonstrating
how the dark matter energies he was using could only have been created
via a temporal paradox as actions in the present resulted in the
subjects travelling back in time to set up the events that would
allow them to go back in the first place. Essentially, if Sabbath's
plans worked, all he'd have achieved would be the loss of free will
itself...
In
a last-ditch effort, The Doctor was able to alter the explosion Sabbath
was trying to create so that it occurred in 1894 rather than prior
to the Big Bang. However, this had another awkward side-effect; rather
than merge all realities into one timeline, it broke down the barriers
between alternate universes, causing all the possibilities to 'compete'
for the position of the true reality, causing the TARDIS to randomly
materialise in alternate versions of Earth’s history every
time it travelled in time. The Doctor tried to solve the problem
by helping a native of the planet Selonart access a godlike power
source known as the Infinity Process - Selonart having been artificially
engineered to allow its inhabitants to become one with the universe
- ("The
Infinity Race"), but, whether or not he managed
to stabilise the situation while simply leaving the ‘wrong’ universe ‘in
charge’, everything went wrong after he arrived in another
alternate universe where the computer was deliberately suppressed
by another version of Sabbath. In this reality, Sabbath, when in
the Thames, was recovered by a being called the Oracle, who claimed
that it had a plan to protect this Earth from the collapse of reality
following the destruction of Gallifrey; after eliminating the people
who had invented or suggested early progenitors of the computer such
as Charles Babbage or Herman Hollerith, he had then had Alan Turing
- the man who inspired the idea of Artificial Intelligence in the
late 1930s - arrested in 1936 on charges of sexual deviancy and imprisoned
in the Tower of London for the past sixty-seven years before The
Doctor’s arrival in this reality.
As a result
of Sabbath’s actions, he had created a historical nexus that
hinged on Turing while also creating a world made up of isolated
communities that regarded each other with hostility and fear, Sabbath’s
minions in the Star Chamber - a secret group running the British
Empire - having been manipulated to believe that their actions were
preserving a decent way of life. Following The Doctor’s arrival
on this Earth, Sabbath intended to shoot Turing, thus causing the
focal point of the nexus to collapse, separating the Earth’s
history from the rest of the Universe and protecting it from the
horrors beyond the Vortex… although, as The Doctor swiftly
realised, in reality the Oracle was one of the creatures it had told
Sabbath about, who was using this Sabbath to undo what The Doctor's
version was trying to achieve. Despite The Doctor's protests, Sabbath
- who arrogantly dismissed The Doctor as an anachronism whose obsolete
methods would never accomplish anything - shot Turing, causing the
whole of that Earth's history to collapse and triggering the fall
of all others. The Oracle tried to feed on The Doctor, but the alt-Sabbath
distracted it long enough for him, Fitz and Anji to escape; they
failed to avert that timeline by saving Sabbath before the Oracle
could, but the paradoxical presence of Anji and Fitz, who originated
in another version of reality, softened the blow when the focal point
collapsed, giving The Doctor more time to find a way to restore history.
After
a couple of close calls in some alternate Earths (One where beings
from another dimension tried to destroy our reality to save their
own ("Reckless
Engineering") and another where time travelling
tours were causing history to break down to the extent that it required
the multiple Doctors created by the unstable timelines to come up
with a solution to stabilise the timelines ("The
Last Resort")),
the TARDIS crew found themselves back in their home reality, The
Doctor having travelled back to the Big Bang and tracing his way
forward into their world ("Timeless"). However, they were
then forced into a desperate race against time to stop Sabbath's
allies triggering their final plan. Originally, Sabbath's allies
had claimed to be humans from the future, helping Sabbath to make
humanity inherit the mantle of the Time Lords. With Sabbath's help,
they created a genetic key in a man called Guy that would unlock
the potential contained within mysterious diamonds at the point of
the universe's creation, seeding the fabric of the universe with
this force. Sabbath’s allies had told him that this force would
permeate the universe so that when sentient life evolves the essence
(Described as a genetic directive that will recognise any evolution
deemed unacceptable and modify it along human lines) will be a part
of it, and, ultimately, humanity would rise all across the cosmos,
but in reality, all that the crystals did was imbue the universe
with an alien essence that, as The Doctor later learned, allowed
an unknown species to monitor data from all over time and space.
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Sometime
Never...
(Justin Richards) |
|
Having tracked the species to their base -
a station positioned within the Time Vortex itself ("Sometime
Never...") - and subsequently investigating strange
energy readings that led him to witness a being that kept
on subtly
influencing history without ever apparently being perceived
by humans, The Doctor learned the truth about Sabbath's
employers from Sabbath himself, who had finally concluded
that he had been manipulated by them for their own reasons.
Sabbath's 'masters' were the Council
of Eight, beings made
of living crystal, each one of the Council's eight members
representing one of the existing crystal families (Their
chairman, Octan, representing an eighth family that modern
science doesn't know about), who gained energy by predicting
events in history, and had sought to eliminate The Doctor
- a ‘Rogue Element’ who defied their predictions
even after they collapsed reality into a single timeline
- by introducing Sabbath as a totally predictable ‘counterpart’ to
The Doctor. However, as The Doctor and Sabbath learned in
the final confrontation, Octan had conceived a plan that
would allow his people to do more than merely survive, but
to become the new Time Lords; by destroying Earth's sun
before life could evolve, he would annihilate all of human
history, and the energy from this prediction would increase
their power tremendously. However, he required another prediction
to actually trigger the star-killer... and that prediction
came close to coming to pass when Sabbath came into possession
of a Vortex Gun (A gun that sends the target to eternal
agony in the Time Vortex) and aimed it at both The Doctor
and Octan. If Sabbath shot the person Octan had predicted
Sabbath would shoot, all of history would end, and Octan
would have won.
Fortunately, thanks to a handkerchief stained with Sabbath's
blood, The Doctor was able to trick Octan into thinking that Sabbath
would need to go to the Tower of London in his immediate future,
and Octan ordered one of his henchmen to send Sabbath there after
the shot had been fired; if Octan was still going to be around after
this, why would he need someone else to do the job? The Doctor asked
Sabbath to kill him, but Sabbath knew that it would still count as
a victory for Octan - and besides, now that Octan had predicted that
Sabbath would go to the Tower in his future, Sabbath had an extra
hand to play. In a noble move, Sabbath shot himself, condemning himself
to an eternity of agony in the Time Vortex, and thus bringing Octan's
entire plan crashing down around his ears... along with the Council's
station, as the Schrodinger Cells returned their inhabitants to their
proper times, leaving the Council to restore the possibility to alternate
universes in the hope of creating a reality where they would survive.
As the station collapsed, alternate possibilities were restored,
and The Doctor and his companions departed, The Doctor mourning and
respecting Sabbath’s sacrifice as his former enemy saved the
universe - and even The Doctor - with his last action, redeeming
his past mistakes and proving The Doctor’s belief in free will
over prediction. |
