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The Doctor Trap
(Simon Messingham) |
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 Name: Sebastiene
Format:
Book.
Time of Origin: Planet 1, specific
time unspecified; he once claimed to have been a university student
abducted from Earth in 1973, but given his duplicitous mentality
this is uncertain.
Appearances: "The
Doctor Trap"
Doctor: Tenth
Doctor
Companions: Donna Noble
History: Of all of The Doctor’s foes, Sebastiene
is one of the most interesting ever encountered since he is essentially
The Doctor’s moral opposite, possessing a personality almost
exactly like his rival while being simultaneously completely insane,
possessing a significant intellect and capable of great feats but
completely disinterested in anything but his own amusement and
enjoyment regardless of the costs to others. One of Sebastiene’s
main weaknesses is actually his intelligence; he spends so much
of his own time over-planning everything that he believes that
everything must have a hidden agenda or fallback plan behind the
obvious one, The Doctor once commenting that Sebastiene is now
almost incapable of believing anyone to be what they claim to be.
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| David Tennant |
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Sebastiene’s
precise origins are unknown. According to a tale he told Donna Noble -
although the accuracy of this is questionable given his own nature
- he was originally a Cambridge undergraduate from 1973 who volunteered
to investigate a strange meteorite for an experiment, which resulted
in a blinding flash that somehow teleported him to Planet 1, the
most mysterious planet in the universe, which possessed advanced
technology that could essentially reshape the planet’s environment
simply by using Sebastiene’s thoughts. Quickly growing bored
of his life as a virtually omnipotent entity with no real challenges
or goals left to keep him going, Sebastiene eventually began to hunt
various life forms from across all of time and space. Eventually
reaching a point where he had hunted almost every life form in existence
and beaten them all, Sebastiene resolved to target the ultimate prey;
the last surviving Time Lord, the Tenth
Doctor (Why he targeted this
particular incarnation was never specified; presumably Planet 1,
like Gallifrey and the Guardians, operate along a single fixed timeline
even for time travellers such as The Doctor, with the Tenth Doctor
being The Doctor who existed at ‘present’ from the planet’s
perspective).
To this end, Sebastiene contacted the Society
of Endangered Dangerous Species - the name omitting the fact that
the Society were often the people who had made the species in question
endangered in the first place - offering them the opportunity to
hunt the last Time Lord after luring The Doctor into a trap. In an
attempt to better predict what The Doctor would do, Sebastiene even
hired The Doctor’s ‘number one fan’ - a young man
called Baris who had spent his life ‘wired in’ to telepathic
computers that told him every known fact about The Doctor - and had
him surgically altered to look like The Doctor, offering to allow
him the opportunity to replace The Doctor by ‘giving’ him
the TARDIS and Donna for his own.
 |
The Doctor Trap
(Simon Messingham) |
|
Unfortunately
for Sebastiene, he failed to understand Baris’s mentality,
never realising that Baris would not want to kill his hero
simply because Sebastiene would have desired to do so in his place,
giving Baris a unique chance to save The Doctor. When Baris was sent
to confront and ‘recruit’ The Doctor for the hunt, he
deliberately spent a great deal of time telling The Doctor all about
Sebastiene’s plan, giving The Doctor enough time to reprogram
the teleporter to send the apparently villainous Baris - Baris knew
that The Doctor would never have sent him into danger unless certain
that Baris was a genuine enemy - into the hunt in his place, simultaneously
hypnotising Baris to think that he genuinely was The Doctor
(Along with a hypnotic loop that would cause Baris to focus on finding
the kidnapped Donna if his real personality tried to assert itself).
The Doctor subsequently teleported back to the main complex
of Planet 1 while posing as Baris to try and recover Donna and the
TARDIS - Donna having been left in a hotel created by Planet 1 while
the hunt took place - also manipulating events in the hunts to ensure
Baris’s own continued survival. Even when Sebastiene realised
that The Doctor was manipulating events from inside his complex,
he simply concluded that The Doctor was actually a brainwashed Baris
who was acting as The Doctor’s agent, his belief in developing
contingency plans for even his contingency plans preventing Sebastiene
from taking anything at face value even when The Doctor admitted
his true identity. Taking advantage of this misconception, The Doctor
was able to keep Sebastiene occupied by claiming that The Doctor’s
death would activate the ‘Doctor Trap’ - without actually
saying what The Doctor Trap would do - leaving Sebastiene attempting
to question Donna before sending The Doctor - still believing him
to be Baris - to try and question her about The Doctor Trap.
Now reunited with Donna - subsequently finding Baris and breaking
his conditioning - The Doctor realised that someone else had been
helping him in his attempts to keep Baris alive, as various overrides
had been left in the computer for him to use. Tracking the members
of the Society of Endangered Dangerous Species to the zone where
he and Donna had first arrived on Planet 1, The Doctor was able to
trick them into defeating each other by unleashing a beast that had
been hiding in the zone before confronting Sebastiene. Using Sebastiene’s
constant need to find hidden agendas in everything, The Doctor informed
Sebastiene that he was actually a robot created by Planet 1 that
thought he was Sebastiene, simultaneously realising that the true ‘trap’ was
actually Planet 1 itself, which wanted The Doctor to eliminate Sebastiene
and then take over running it (Much like The Master of the Land of Fiction had wanted the Second and Seventh Doctors to take his place
("The
Mind Robber", "Conundrum")). Refusing to
allow the planet to replace him, Sebastiene helped The Doctor and
Donna regain the TARDIS and depart, subsequently remaining with Baris
to regain control of Planet 1 (Although The Doctor admitted as he
and Donna departed that he might have been lying about Sebastiene
being a robot, the truth was apparently too complicated). |
