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The Sentinels of the New Dawn
(Paul Finch) |
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 Name: Sentinels of the New Dawn
Format:
Audio
Time of Origin: Active on Earth by 2013 in two different timelines, but the last of their legacy ended by the twenty-fifth century.
Appearances: "The Sentinels of the New Dawn"; responsible for the events of "Leviathan".
Doctors: The Third Doctor and the Sixth Doctor dealt with their legacy.
Companions: Liz Shaw and Peri Brown dealt with their legacy.
History:
While a potentially dangerous group, the Sentinels of the New Dawn were basically a political movement with dangerous ideas rather than the usual kind of threat The Doctor would face, only coming into conflict with the Time Lord through very specific circumstances.
From a public perspective, New Dawn presented itself as a pseudo political group somewhere on the right. By the time of the early twenty-first century, their influence had allowed them to form some overseas connections with pariah states, but they apparently had only limited local support in Britain itself. They were connected enough to have at least a couple of members infiltrate UNIT at one point, but the scale of their influence is uncertain as the only known source was posing as a UNIT operative and may have deliberately understated the extent of the organisation’s influence.
The original idea behind the Sentinels was based on the concept of establishing an idealised feudal society that would essentially consist of happy peasants that served the lords, even though other historians observed that this particular policy was based on an idealised view of the time period rather than the reality. The idea failed when put into practice because Lucius Bearegarde, the historian who originally conceived the notion became increasingly senile, allowing his son Richard to take control and enforce the idea of the Sentinels being the lords even if that meant that the peasant class were oppressed. On an interesting note, the Sentinels had a particular interest in the medieval mythology of Britain, which led to them creating artificial versions of monsters from those tales to reinforce their power in at least one possible timeline.
Part of the Sentinels’ initial efforts involved using a time portal developed by Professor Teri Billington back in the 1970s to become wealthy using future knowledge, this portal involving atom smasher technology to create windows to the future by expending a great deal of power. While Billington’s portal would only allow the Sentinels to view the future by essentially linking the portal to its own future self, this was enough to pass on key data, such as the future members holding up letters or newspapers to tell their past selves what stocks to invest in, suggestions regarding who would be agreeable to their methods, or even notes to confirm if particular plans were worth pursuing. The Doctor’s old colleague Liz Shaw was working with Professor Billington at Cambridge, but while examining the initial portal she invited the Third Doctor to take a look at it. During The Doctor’s visit, he and Liz were dragged through the portal into a version of 2014 where the Sentinels had taken power on a global scale after deliberately causing an outbreak of the ebola virus. The Sentinels had brought Liz and The Doctor into the future to question them about the nature of the time portal, but they made a mistake from the beginning as they assumed that The Doctor was Professor Billington (obviously The Doctor was likely just as qualified to help them as Billington would have been, but he was also more capable of refusing such an offer).
The Doctor and Liz initially bluffed their way through the encounter, but soon realised the extent of the Sentinels’ corruption, particularly when they found themselves being hunted by the Sentinels’ version of the helodrome, a gigantic bird-monster based on a British myth. The Sentinels’ helodrome could be programmed to hunt anyone whose DNA was inserted into the module located in its forehead, and they had acquired a hair from The Doctor’s suite before he learned the extent of the Sentinels’ agenda. Fortunately, with the aid of Stanhope, a scientist who objected to the scale of New Dawn’s plans, The Doctor was able to ground the helodrome long enough to switch the sample in the module with a hair he had found in his temporary bedroom. The group were able to carry out further investigations into the Sentinels’ activities, revealing that the Sentinels had provided medical aid to the third world just to retrieve samples of the Ebola virus to use for their later schemes. Although Stanhope was killed during their escape, The Doctor was able to essentially trick the Sentinels into sending the helodrome after Richard Bearegarde, as they didn’t check to confirm that the helodrome’s programming hadn’t been altered. Thanks to Stanhope’s sacrifice, The Doctor and Liz were able to return to their own time and destroyed the portal in the past, even though this ruined Liz’s friendship with Teri Billington who assumed that Liz had destroyed the portal out of professional jealousy.
Years later, Liz was contacted by a man posing as a UNIT operative who asked her for information about her encounter with New Dawn, having discovered a vague reference to it in a UNIT file. Liz explained that the full details had been kept off the record on The Doctor’s advice to avoid interfering in history, but now that she had basically ‘caught up’ with the time she had been sent to, she felt that it was safe to admit to some details (she privately speculated that Billington had tried to destroy her portal technology in the original history because she objected to the Sentinels’ use of her technology and had been killed as a result of her defiance). However, Liz was unaware that the soldier she was talking to was actually an agent of New Dawn, who wanted to find out what Liz knew in case it could be useful to their plans, but apart from identifying Stanhope as a possible weak link she knew nothing that New Dawn could use for themselves.
Exactly what happened to the Sentinels after this is unclear, but it would appear that despite their apparent infiltration of UNIT their actual plans met with limited success. According to the Sixth Doctor, while the Sentinels’ efforts to achieve power led to them making connections in areas ranging from espionage to terrorism, they never achieved the same level of influence his third self and Liz witnessed in the alternate future of their first encounter. By the early twenty-second century, the Sentinels were in such a desperate situation that they vanished from Earth, wiping all records so thoroughly that for a while even the Time Lords didn’t know what had happened to them.
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Leviathan
(Brian Finch (adapted by Paul Finch) |
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It was eventually discovered that the surviving Sentinels of this time had managed to commandeer one of the Leviathan spaceships, a vast generational ship intended to travel at near-lightspeed to another solar system, abandoning Earth as a whole. The Leviathans were fitted with a vast artificial environment, which was intended to allow the crew to experience a semi-natural area as they travelled. However, The Doctor speculated that the Sentinels decided to use the environment as a means of preparing others for the society they intended to create, as he found the environment in a state comparable to a medieval village. While the ship generated a vast number of clones to farm the land, the society was maintained by a few key android workers, including a biomechanoid enforcer based on the horned god Herne, The Doctor guessing that the Sentinels were intending to become the true lords once the new colony was established. The most twisted part of this society was that the clones would be killed as they approached a certain age, the intent being to eliminate the clones before they became old enough to start questioning the anomalies in their society, while their older guardians were androids programmed to enforce the existing system.
‘Unfortunately’ for the Sentinels, with about fifty light-years to go before they reached their destination, their ship was struck by a meteor shower that damaged various systems, including the engines and the life support for the Sentinels’ stasis chambers. The society created on the ship still continued its original routine because it obviously didn’t know that anything had changed, but the Sentinels themselves were all dead, leaving the ship’s computer Zenon and the android Baron to keep everything under control. When the Sixth Doctor and Peri arrived on the ship, they made contact with the local resistance and soon established that they were on a ship rather than dealing with interference in Earth’s past, The Doctor realising that New Dawn were behind this when he saw their logo on a tapestry. Despite some complications when another ship tried to claim the Leviathan for ‘salvage rights’, while included hacking Zeron to make it destroy all the clones, The Doctor was able to deactivate the androids and Zeron, encouraging the current generation of clones to abandon their old traditions and form a new life on some other planet.
With the immediate threat dealt with, The Doctor was able to explore the Leviathan properly, while led to him finding the stasis pods holding the long-dead Sentinels. Talking with Peri about this discovery, The Doctor mused that while he didn’t like to say that some people deserved death, the Sentinels dying in their sleep was a far kinder fate than what most of their victims had suffered over the years. The Doctor even noted that the Sentinels’ original choice of a planet to colonise would have been a bad decision as the planet in question was populated by large reptiles who came out during the winter months and ate everything they could find. With New Dawn dealt with for good, The Doctor mused that the tragedy was that the group’s core philosophy hadn’t been bad in itself, but they had corrupted the reality and ruined their objective before they could start.
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