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The Visitation
(DVD) |
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 Name: The Terileptils
Format: Television
show and Book
Time of Origin: Originally from Terileptus,
but the Terileptils encountered escaped from the penal colony
of Raaga; arrived on Earth in 1666; their world was destroyed
in 3375.
Appearances: "The
Visitation" and "The
Dark Path". Referenced but not seen in "The Pandorica Opens/The
Big Bang".
Doctors: Fifth
Doctor; the Second
Doctor witnessed the destruction of their home world; they were part
of the Alliance that imprisoned
the Eleventh Doctor.
Companions: Adric, Nyssa, Tegan
Jovanka; Jamie
McCrimmon and
Victoria
Waterfield witnessed
the destruction of their home world; Amy Pond, River Song and Rory
Williams encountered
the Alliance that the Terileptils were a part of but did not
meet them directly.
History: Although an interesting race in their
right, being bipedal reptils with a pronounced aesthetic sense
and a notorious penal system, the Terileptils are mainly remembered
for the fact that they destroyed the sonic screwdriver in the
classical series to satisfy the producers’ concerns that
The Doctor was becoming too reliant on it (An ironic action,
given that the screwdriver of the present series now has a far
wider variety of functions than the one that was destroyed).
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| The Visitation/Black Orchid (VHS) |
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The
Terileptils that The Doctor encountered were escaped prisoners
from the prison planet of Raaga, where criminals toiled in tinclavic
mines for the remainder of their lives, commonly leaving them
with distinctive scarring such a missing eye. An asteroid storm
caused their ship to crash on Earth, leaving only three survivors,
all dependent on a Soliton gas generator to breath comfortably
in Earth’s atmosphere for long periods of time. Using control
bracelets made of polygrite with built in power packs that they
had apparently taken from Raaga, the Terileptils were able to
control human minds, their leader setting up a base close to
their escape pod by wiping out the inhabitants of a nearby house
and establishing a laboratory in the cellar as they planned their
conquest of Earth. To limit the human population to more controllable
numbers, the Terileptils intended to release a plague of rats
with a genetically-engineered and enhanced version of the bubonic
plague. They also created fear in the local population by using
an android - originally one of their guards before they managed
to reprogram it - to pose as the Grim Reaper, the android guarding
the manor and attacking anyone who approached it, their modified
control bracelets allowing them to control some of the local
villagers to act as a slave labour force at the same time.
The Terileptils’ plans continued until
the Fifth
Doctor arrived near the manor where the Terileptils
had established their base - he had been attempting to return
his companion Tegan
Jovanka to Heathrow in the 1980s only to
arrive over three hundred years early while still reaching the
area where Heathrow would be built -, quickly discovering the
crashed Terileptil ship when they met highwayman Richard Mace,
who directed them to the ‘comet’ that had crashed
recently. After an investigation of the manor revealed the presence
of the android while an analysis of the crashed ship confirmed
that there had been survivors as some of the more fragile equipment
in the ship was still intact, but Adric and Tegan were subsequently
captured while investigating the manor, Mace and The Doctor nearly
being killed by the villagers and the android before the Terileptils
concluded that The Doctor could help them.
While
Adric escaped captivity and returned to the TARDIS to
help Nyssa construct a sonic booster that could shut
down the android, The Doctor was taken to confront the
Terileptils, quickly realising that they were escaped
prisoners due to the distinctive wounds that the Terileptil
leader had sustained in prison. Although The Doctor attempted
to offer his services in repairing the crashed Terileptil
ship, arguing that they could establish a colony on an
uninhabited planet and make a new life for themselves
using their available technology, the Terileptils refused,
unwilling to regress to a primitive existence for even
the short time needed for their advanced technology to
help them develop what they needed when they could establish
themselves on Earth and use the humans as slave labour
to save time. Although The Doctor and Mace were left
trapped in a cell with Tegan as she prepared to open
a cage of plague rats while under the control of one
of the slave bracelets, The Doctor was able to release
her from the bracelet’s control in time, although
he was then forced to spend some time trying to escape
the cell as the Terileptils had destroyed his sonic screwdriver.
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The Dark Path
(David A. McIntee) |
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Tracking the Terileptils to London after Nyssa destroyed
the android thanks to Mace recalling a casual comment one of
the Terileptils had made, The Doctor was finally forced to kill
them during a confrontation in a London bakery, when a fire
escalated after a Terileptil gun exploded, destroying the Soliton
generator the Terileptils needed to breathe and leaving them
to suffocate in Earth’s atmosphere. However, the TARDIS
crew were forced to subsequently depart as the fight had unintentionally
started the Great Fire of London, with Mace staying behind to
help fight the fire that would go on to purify the plague-stricken
country by destroying so many of the rats that had caused it.
Another
interesting detail about the Terileptils is that The
Master committed his first major crime against the universe against
them ("The
Dark Path"). While attempting to learn
how to control the Darkheart - an engine created by the race
that would evolve into the Chronovores that could change history
without paradox - to save Alia, his human companion who had
been recently killed, Koschei, the Time Lord who would become
The Master, told Terrell, the human adjudicator who discovered
the Darkheart and had sought to use it to make humanity the
only species in the universe by influencing evolution, how to
use the Darkheart to emit a temporal blast into any location
in time and space. Using Koschei’s advice, Terrell was
able to channel the power of the Darkheart to destroy Terileptus,
the home planet of the Terileptils - he had been using the Darkheart
to influence evolution so that only humans would evolve throughout
the universe, but Terilptus was one of the planets where that
strategy wouldn’t work as Soliton gas was toxic to humans
-, essentially destroying the race as only a few thousand off-world
Terileptils escaped his attack. The Doctor was later able to
use the Darkheart to restore the altered species back to their
original forms, but he couldn’t undo the destruction of
Terileptus, leaving Koschei devastated and enraged when he learned
that Alia was actually a Time Lord who had regenerated after
her ‘death’ and all his efforts to save her were
for nothing.
The Eleventh Doctor had an indirect encounter with the
Terileptils when they joined forces with his other enemies in
a vast Alliance to trap him in the Pandorica - a legendary prison
that had been spoken of in myth, created specifically to hold
The Doctor - after they became convinced that he would be responsible
for a temporal explosion that triggered the creation of cracks
in the universe after the TARDIS exploded, unaware that the
explosion had already taken place when his future companion
River Song was piloting the ship (The Terileptils were never
seen directly but The Doctor identified their ships as part
of the fleet surrounding Stonehenge after he discovered the
Pandorica). With the collapse of history, the various races
in the Alliance were all erased from existence, leaving only
statues of themselves gathered around the Pandorica as ‘after-images’,
Earth the last fragment of time left in the universe thanks
to the exploding TARDIS putting itself in a time loop at the
moment of its destruction to act as a substitute sun for Earth.
With The Doctor having taken the Pandorica into the TARDIS explosion,
using the TARDIS itself as a power source to transmit the remaining
atoms of the true universe stored within the Pandorica across
all of time and space in a second explosion that restored the
history of the universe - compared to cloning a body from a
single cell -, the Alliance was erased and history restored. |
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| The Visitation |
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| The Visitation |
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| The Visitation |
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| The Visitation |
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