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The Sirens of Time
(Nicholas Briggs)
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 Name: The
Sirens of Time
Format:
Audio
Time of Origin: Everywhere
and nowhere; they exist outside of Time
Appearances: "The Sirens of Time", "The Legacy of Time" (appeared directly in "The Avenues of Possibility" and "Collision Course"; had peripheral roles in the events of "Lies in Ruins", "Split Infinitives", "The Sacrifice of Jo Grant" and "Relative Time").
Doctors:
Fifth
Doctor,
Sixth
Doctor and Seventh
Doctor; the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Eighth and Tenth Doctor were peripherally involved in the Sirens’ plans but did not face them directly.
Companions: Charley Pollard, Leela and 2nd
Romana; Jo Grant, Ace, Bernice
Summerfield, River Song, and Jenny were involved in crises caused by the Sirens without facing them directly.
History: The
Sirens are rather similar to their Greek namesakes in that
they 'sing' people into danger; however, while the Sirens
of Greek mythology did this to lure sailors to dangerous
rocks so that they could then eat the sailors, the Sirens
of Time 'sing' time travellers, or people in general, into locations where the diverted individual can change history, thus providing energy for the Sirens to feed on from the distortions in history. When The Doctor initially faced the Sirens, they manifested in four different time periods as identical humanoid women, but during an assault on Earth they appeared as beautiful women with dragon-like wings who floated in the air, and it was never established if they were capable of more sophisticated shapeshifting when disguising themselves. Their exact reproductive cycle is unknown, but at least one person who had aided the Sirens was later shown transformed into another Siren herself. A human was able to kill a Siren with conventional weapons when his superior officer began to transform into a Siren after she had acted as their agent, but it is unclear if this means that any Siren could be killed with conventional weapons or if the soldier just got lucky and killed the new Siren before she reached a point where mortal weapons couldn’t harm her.
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| The Seventh
Doctor |
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They
eventually struck The Doctor in three times simultaneously,
the Sirens luring three incarnations of The Doctor - the
Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors
specifically - to three different locations in history; the Fifth
Doctor found himself on a British merchant ship that was sunk by a German U-boat, the Sixth found himself on the starship Edifice,
orbiting a gaseous spacial anomaly called the Kurgon Wonder,
and the Seventh found himself
on a planet designed to act as a prison planet for the war
criminal Sancroff, now just a crippled old man who acknowledged
that what he'd done was wrong.
Under the manipulation of the Sirens, who prevented The Doctors from leaving before they made any changes by locking
them out of their TARDISes,
The Doctors each made subtle changes to history.
Thanks
to the Seventh Doctor's intervention, Sancroff never died,
and the Knights of Velyshaa - a race of lethal warriors, of which he had
once been a member
- were able to rescue him to lead their second campaign
of conquest. The Fifth Doctor's attempt to return to the TARDIS forced
the U-boat off course
and prevented it from sinking the Lusitania; although the course
of the First World War remained largely unchanged, a petty criminal who
otherwise
would have died on the Lusitania went on to kill Alexander Fleming
in a botched robbery attempt before the discovery of penicillin,
thus leaving the Earth ravaged by new strains of pneumonia and meningitis
in 1956, and
the survivors never discovered space travel and never defeated
the Second Velyshaan Empire. And the Sixth
Doctor, by freeing the Temperon - a legendary
time beast that had escaped attempts to control it by freezing
the moment of its own death - also freed the Knights who had been trapped
with it,
enabling them to complete their experiment, acquire the
power of time travel and thus conquer Gallifrey.
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| The Fifth
Doctor |
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However, in its few brief moments of total freedom after the Sixth Doctor freed it, the Temperon was able to collect the three Doctors from their respective locations and deposit them on the now-conquered Gallifrey, where they realised that a woman they'd met in the course of their adventures - Elenya, Helen, and Ellie - was the same person. When the Knights of Velyshaa revealed their presence on Gallifrey, the Doctors managed to evade capture at first, but the Fifth Doctor was caught after he injured his leg during the escape and the other two were forced to join him to confront Knight Commander Lyena. Lyena explained the nature of the changes the Doctors had unwittingly made to history and asked them to correct it, as the Knight's attempts to use the Temperon for time travel had left them with a mutation in the gene pool that was killing them slowly, even with them now leeching off the Time Lord's life energies via specially-designed extractor suits. With the last TARDIS on Gallifrey inoperable, the Sixth and Seventh Doctors decided to free the Temperon to use it, but Lyena, terrified at that option, captured the Fifth Doctor and hooked him up to a life extraction unit to try and use him as a hostage, but not in time to prevent the Temperon confirming that the women the Doctors had met were all manifestations of the Sirens of TIme and explain their nature to the Doctors. The Sixth and Seventh Doctors were left with a terrible conundrum; if they did what Lyena asked of them, they would have responded to the Siren's call twice (Evidently it didn't control them after their regenerations) and would become the Sirens' eternal slaves, going all over time causing chaos, but if they refused, Lyena would kill the Fifth Doctor, thus erasing the Sixth and Seventh from history and causing even more chaos for the Sirens to feed on.
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| The Sixth
Doctor |
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There was only one chance; by freeing the Temperon, The Doctors would give the Temperon the chance to stop the Sirens, but only by condeming it, and the Sirens, to eternal struggle, the Temperon only able to contain the Sirens rather than destroy them. Lyena was sure that The Doctor's innate compassion would force him to seek another solution, but she made a crucial mistake by bringing three Doctors together; each time The Doctor regenerated, certain aspects of his personality come into greater prominence than in other incarnations, and while the Fifth Doctor may personify The Doctor's compassion more than others, and the Seventh his knowledge, the Sixth was far more... pragmatic than his other selves. He thus destroyed the restraint field machinery, setting the Temperon free to correct history. In the restored timeline, everything turned out as it should have done; Sancroff died, the Lusitaniawas sunk, Gallifrey was restored, and The Doctors found themselves on the prison planet where the Seventh Doctor had been drawn to by the Sirens. As The Doctors set off back to the TARDIS, where the Seventh Doctor intended to open an interface and return his previous incarnations to their relative time streams, Elenya's cries drifted out across Time, pleading for anybody to help her.
The Sirens returned to The Doctors' lives (as much as 'returns' is the appropriate term when dealing with their temporally complex nature) when the destruction of a prototype TARDIS created a rift into the other-dimensional prison where the Sirens had been trapped, as well as the temporal explosion creating multiple rifts in Earth's history to the point of almost shattering it completely after the primitive TARDIS crashed in the vicinity of Earth. While the Eighth Doctor dealt with a surviving fragment of the shattered TARDIS ("The Legacy of Time 1 - Lies in Ruins") and the Fifth Doctor was able to repair the worst of the temporal fractures around Earth with the unwilling 'assistance' of the Nine and the unexpected aid of his future daughter Jenny ("The Legacy of Time 4 - Relative Time"), the Seventh Doctor dealt with a group of Rocket Men who had been displaced into the 1960s and 1970s on Earth as a side-effect of the original explosion ("The Legacy of Time 2 - The Split Infinitive") and the Third Doctor in the 1970s witnessed evidence that something was trying to escalate the damage to time when he had to seal a series of temporal rifts with the aid of Kate Stewart and Jo Jones from the 2010s ("The Legacy of Time 3 - The Sacrifice of Jo Grant").
Only able to act through agents rather than take direct action themselves at first, the Sirens attempted to mount an attack on Earth's history by creating a complex temporal paradox where representatives of a timeline where Earth was ruled by a totalitarian British Empire in the 1950s travelled back to 1751 through one of the rifts they had created, allowing the soldiers to create their own history by giving Britain advanced technology ("The Legacy of Time 5 - The Avenues of History"). This allowed the Sirens to enter Earth in 1751, where they began to 'feed' on the soldiers from the alternate 1951 as they represented the paradoxes that gave the Sirens energy, but the rifts in reality became so unstable that the Sixth Doctor, Charley Pollard and DI Patricia Menzies ("The Condemned") were alerted to what was happening and travelled back to 1751 themselves. Realising that the Sirens were targeting paradoxes, Charley, intending to make herself a more potent paradox than the soldiers, told the Sixth Doctor about her past travels with his future self ("Storm Warning" to "The
Girl Who Never Was"). While the plan backfired as Charley giving The Doctor this information made him the more potent paradox rather than her, The Doctor was then able to use himself as bait to lure the Sirens back into the rift before Charley rescued him, with the only side-effect being the loss of his own memories of events since the Sirens emerged into the real universe (which included Charley's confession), although the Sirens' words suggested that they had a wider plan and this attack had just served to give them energy for their later assault.
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The Legacy of Time
(James Goss, Guy Adams, Jonathan Morris, Matt Fitton and John Dorney) |
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As the Sirens began to attack all of history, Gallifrey was only just protected from their influence by its transduction barriers, until The Doctor's former companions Leela and the 2nd
Romana began to assess the situation and traced the disruption to the planet Henlen, which both women remembered travelling to during their time with the Fourth Doctor ("The Legacy of Time 6 - Collision Course"). With Leela recalling a jungle planet where she and The Doctor found an abandoned Gallifreyian research facility guarded by temporal 'ghosts' while Romana remembered a desolate city centred on a complex array created around a machine maintained by a small group of Gallifreyians, the two realised that the Sirens had attacked a prototype TARDIS that had made its flight from Henlen around Earth. Exploiting the potential paradox to its fullest extent, the Sirens had managed to use the prototype TARDIS to escape their prison before they had escaped from it, reaching out and prompting the pilots to divert their course to crash into Earth and cause such a massive paradox that the effects reached across the past and the future.
Having identified the source of the anomalies, Romana had all available power diverted to her TARDIS so that she and Leela could travel to Henlen at the moment of the original flight, allowing them to confront the pilots. With Romana's encouragement, the captain of the prototype TARDIS was able to throw off the Sirens' influence long enough to divert the ship's power into the control consoles, killing all six pilots and himself before the Sirens could divert their flight path. While Romana realised that this left her and Leela with another paradox as it was now impossible for the ship to complete its flight, as it required six Gallifreyan pilots and one captain, Benny Summerfield subsequently arrived with the Sixth Doctor, revealing that Romana would contact Benny for help once the immediate threat was resolved. On Romana's instructions, Benny had travelled through time to recruit the Sixth, Fourth, Seventh, Eighth, Third and Fifth Doctors to act as new pilots for the prototype TARDIS while Romana served as its captain (the First
Doctor, the Second
Doctor and the Tenth Doctor also showed up to assist, but departed once Leela and Benny affirmed that they weren't needed, claiming that they would deal with any residual side-effects of the disruption). Thanks to the six Doctors and Romana acting as a new crew, the prototype TARDIS completed its test-flight safely, erasing the Sirens' release from history as The Doctors departed, Romana leaving a note in the capsule to give the Gallifreyians of the past some key details of what had just happened so that they would know the flight had succeeded even if the pilots were dead. With the test-flight completed, the paradox was resolved and the Sirens remained trapped, leaving it unclear if even they would be aware of their brief escape as The Doctors tied up loose ends across Time.. |
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