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Dying in the Sun
(Jon DeBurgh Miller) |
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 Name: The
Selyoids; their name for themselves was approximately translated
as ‘the
Children’.
Format:
Book.
Time of Origin: Originated
from a distant, unnamed world; were discovered in Alaska in 1945; confronted
The Doctor in Los Angeles in 1947.
Appearances: "Dying
in the Sun"
Doctors:
Second
Doctor
Companions:
Polly
Wright and
Ben
Jackson
History: As
a species, the Selyoids are some of the more morally complex enemies The
Doctor ever fought, as their fundamental intentions appeared to be to encourage
humanity to reach their full physical potential at the cost of becoming
virtual slaves to the Selyoids, the lives of those who fell under the Selyoid
influence focused more on working to better the Selyoids at the cost of
their own development as a species.
Initially,
the Selyoids were beings of light on their home planet, where they were
apparently known as the Children - in as much as they could be said to
have a name of their own -, with scientists considered outcasts in their
primarily artistic race, but a devastating climate change cut them off
from the sunlight they needed to survive, forcing them to turn to the scientists
for survival. To this end, the scientists devised a physical form for them
in the form of a primordial soup capable of travelling through space on
an asteroid, their few survivors leaving their planet to eventually arrive
on Earth. Whether Earth was their original destination or a lucky chance
was never specified, but the scientists among the Children concluded that
they could survive in symbiosis with the local population, directing them
to create a new form for the Children to survive in on their own.
Landing
in Alaska, the Children were discovered by mediocre film
director Leonard De Sande of Star Light Productions while
planning the location work for his next film, De Sande merging
with one of them - naming them ‘Selyoids’ as
a joke due to their lack of a name - and becoming physically
enhanced to the peak of physical human beauty due to the
Selyoids altering posture, skin quality, body language,
and pheromone production. Their presence in the host also
granted a degree of enhanced healing, although particularly
severe injuries would still kill them, and Selyoid chemicals
could also have a very hypnotic effect on the human mind
(The Doctor was apparently immune, but it was never specified
whether this was a natural immunity due to his status as
a Time Lord or if the Selyoids had just been ‘programmed’ to
focus on humans and were thus incapable of influencing The
Doctor in the first place). Traditionally, the Selyoids
were subject to the will of a living person’s mind
when they took a host, although certain Selyoids chose to
communicate directly with the world by possessing corpses,
allowing them to take complete control.
Concluding
that the Selyoids’ purpose was to help humanity better
themselves, De Sande had them brought back to America, where
he used the influence and charisma granted to him by the
Selyoids to form a group known officially as the Friends
of the Community of Los Angeles, but secretly operating
as a semi-religious group preaching the Way of Light, a
set of moral guidelines to encourage people to reach their
full potential, while also ‘distributing’ the
Selyoids to the group’s members. De Sande was even
able to win over Captain Charles Wallis, head of the LAPD,
to the Selyoid cause, Wallis regarding the Selyoids as the
perfect means to end communism due to the obvious inequality
created between the physically perfect Selyoid hosts and
normal human beings.
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| Patrick Troughton |
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The
Selyoids eventually came to The Doctor’s attention when the Second
Doctor, accompanied by Ben and Polly, decided to take a few weeks’ holiday
in Los Angeles in 1947, The Doctor becoming suspicious when an old friend
from a previous visit, movie producer Harold Reitman, was murdered, with
the evidence suggesting that drug dealer Robert Chate - Wallis’s
estranged adopted son - was the killer. During a shooting when police tried
to arrest Wallis at a restaurant, The Doctor helped save the life of actor
Caleb Rochfort, the star of De Sande’s latest movie Dying in
the Sun, resulting in De Sande meeting The Doctor and offering him free tickets
to the movie premiere, allegedly to see how a film sceptic like The Doctor
reacted to his film. After watching the film - a tale of a man who saw
monsters which he later learned were the manifestations of his own guilt
while he was in Hell, which possessed surprisingly advanced special effects
for 1947 -, The Doctor, suspicious at the fact that everyone else claimed
to have been deeply affected by the film when he found the story-telling
to be rather mediocre, stealing a roll of film to study it in more depth.
While
trying to find out more about the film - which, when viewed in private,
demonstrated significantly poorer special effects in a time when the film
industry lacked the technology to make those kind of changes post-production
-, The Doctor and Polly questioned Caleb Rochfort for further information,
but when he attempted to use his Selyoid-enhanced charisma to make Polly
shoot The Doctor, she fought against his influence long enough to shoot
Caleb instead, worsening his old wounds to such an extent that even his
Selyoid-enhanced physiology couldn’t heal him, allowing The Doctor
to collect a sample for study. Noting the suspicious new interest in anyone
related to Dying in the Sun, coupled with the fact that Reitman had left
everything to FOCAL, The Doctor, Ben, and police detective Fletcher - the
detective initially assigned to Reitman’s death - discovered a strange
chemical on the film that bore similarities to the substance in Rochfort’s
blood, The Doctor and Ben subsequently following Wallis to a FOCAL meeting
where they learned the truth about the Selyoids.
Unfortunately,
although The Doctor and Ben escaped becoming Selyoid hosts themselves,
they were unable to reveal their new discoveries to Polly before she and
Chate were exposed to the Selyoids themselves - Chate having contacted
an actress he’d had a celebrity crush on for assistance and being
given a Selyoid sample himself, Polly later meeting them at a restaurant
-, the transformation leaving Polly arrogant and dismissive of The Doctor
and Ben’s attempts to ‘hang on’ to her new celebrity
and uninterested in their attempts to stop the film being distributed.
As the film went public, the Selyoids began to gain power by drawing on
the audiences’ belief in the film - even managing to manifest three-dimensional
illusions to attack Ben and The Doctor -, posters subtly influencing the
public to watch the film and then travel to the hills, where they would
receive a ‘demonstration’ of the Selyoids’ power.
However,
things began to go wrong for the Selyoids when Chate learned the truth
about Reitman’s murder; Wallis had killed Reitman so FOCAL would
get his estate, subsequently framing Chate to protect him from De Sande’s
revenge while Chate repressed the memory out of his inability to believe
that his father could do such a thing, Chate only being made a Selyoid
host so that De Sande could take them away from him later and give him
something to actually lose when he died. Rejecting what she had become,
Polly turned against De Sande and escaped with Chate, tracking The Doctor
to Griffith Park, where Wallis and De Sande intended to give a demonstration
of the Selyoids’ power by triggering a police riot and using the
Selyoids to generate projections of movie monsters to attack the police.
In
the subsequent confrontation, Wallis was killed when he accidentally fell
off a cliff during a fight with Chate, and Fletcher, now desperate to become
one with the Selyoids after so much exposure to their influence, attacked
the corpse containing the Selyoid director and absorbed it into himself.
Although the director could no longer control the Selyoids in a living
host, it found that it liked Fletcher’s emotions and decided to stay
with him, driving De Sande to try and absorb the Selyoids from others in
order to overwhelm his own mind and allow the Selyoid within him to take
control and become the new director. Refusing to allow De Sande to escape
and spread the Selyoid influence further, The Doctor used a projector to
send further monster images into De Sande’s private plane after he
took off, the pilot thus losing control and crashing the plane, spreading
the harmonious emotional energies of the Selyoids across the city. With
De Sande and Wallis dead, Chate inherited control of FOCAL, vowing to use
its influence for charitable purposes like it had always claimed to be,
subsequently recalling all reels of Dying in the Sun - now the mediocre
picture it always was with the glamour having been stripped away with the
loss of the Selyoids -, allowing The Doctor and his friends to depart while
Fletcher remained in peaceful symbiosis with the director, the two deciding
to move elsewhere to start afresh. |
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