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Timewyrm: Genesys
(John
Peel) |
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 Name: Timewyrm
Format:
Book.
Time of Origin: Mesopotamia, 2700 B.C. (In a
sense).
Appearances: "Timewyrm:
Genesys", "Timewyrm:
Exodus", "Timewyrm:
Apocalypse", "Timewyrm:
Revelation" and "Happy
Endings".
Doctors: Seventh
Doctor; hid briefly
in the mind of the Second
Doctor;
The Doctor’s last confrontation
with it required the aid of the mental manifestations of his First,
Third, Fourth and Fifth incarnations.
Companions: Ace, Bernice
Summerfield, Roslyn
Forrester, Chris Cwej and
The
Brigadier.
History: The Timewyrm is a mythical
terror among the Time Lords, being a living time machine that can
not only alter history on its proverbial coffee break, but also
capable
of launching blasts of temporal energy that can do pretty much anything.
According to legend, the Timeywrm's feeding shall disrupt the laws
of casualty and bring the Unvierse to a premature end. The Fourth
Doctor originally discovered about the Timewyrm while he was
connected to the Matrix on Gallifrey, during the Vardan/Sontaran invasion
in "The
Invasion of Time", but safeguards in the Matrix erased
his memory.
However, just before the process was completed, The Doctor made a
recorded message and planted it into the TARDIS,
the warning programmed to activate when the time came for him to
face the Timewyrm in his future so that he would be prepared to confront
it.
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Timewyrm: Exodus
(Terrance
Dicks) |
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The
recording was eventually found by the Seventh
Doctor, who was then taken
by the TARDIS to a temporal anomaly that could conceivably end all of human
history. Arriving in ancient Mesopotamia, The Doctor and Ace discovered
the presence of a being claiming to be Ishtar, the goddess of love and
war, who had developed a means of controlling others via cybernetic implants.
While The Doctor confronted Ishtar directly, Ace - based on a song about
Ishtar’s history - tracked down a spaceship that had crashed in the
nearby mountains, learning from the inhabitants that Ishtar’s real
name was Qataka, an insane cybernetics expert whose desire to escape death
had driven her to steal the brain tissue of her people, culminating in
her destroying her entire planet in revenge for her near-execution while
she transferred herself into a cybernetic implant and escaped; the ship
was crewed by the last survivors of her world, the ship’s captain
Utnapishtim revealing that he had developed a computer virus that could
infect Qataka’s systems.
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Timewyrm: Apocalypse
(Nigel
Robinson) |
|
Having learned that The Doctor was a Time Lord, Qataka
attempted to use one of her implants to acquire the secrets of immortality
from him, but Ace was able to rescue him while infecting Qataka with the
virus. Unfortunately, Qataka had also developed a cobalt bomb wired to
her brainwaves which would destroy Earth if she died, forcing The Doctor
to use the TARDIS telepathic circuits to summon his third incarnation’s
personality out to use his technical expertise to gain time to disarm the
bomb by transferring the implant containing Qataka’s mind into the
telepathic circuits. Although Qataka managed to fight off the virus and
infect the TARDIS, The Doctor tricked her into going into the secondary
control room and ejecting it, subsequently providing Utnapishtim’s
people with the resources necessary to repair their ship and depart. Unfortunately,
as he and Ace left, The Doctor learned the reason for his fourth self’s
warning about the Timewyrm; Qataka had merged with the ejected control
room to become the Timewyrm, and The Doctor had created this nightmare
himself, leaving The Doctor resolved to find and destroy her.
Their first stop in their pursuit of the Timewyrm was
in the Festival of Britain in 1951, in an alternate timeline
where the Nazis won World War II, The Doctor eventually
tracing the main divergence
to 1940, where the Nazis annihilated the British at Dunkirk
rather than let them escape. Having determined the point
where history changed despite
the efforts of the psychotic Nazi Lieutenant Hemmings,
The Doctor and Ace travelled back to 1923, The Doctor encouraging
a young Hitler not to give
up his efforts before travelling onwards to 1939, thus establishing
a contact within the Nazi party despite the suspicions of
the mysterious deformed
Doctor Kriegsleiter (Later revealed to be The Doctor’s old foe the
War
Chief, seeking to use the Nazis as new soldiers for
the War Lords, although this plan was rapidly defeated).
Noting Hitler’s
unusually compelling speeches - although he talked about
Germany being in danger,
Hitler never identified any specific policies to deal with
that danger, and yet his speeches were so compelling that
even Ace was affected -, The
Doctor realised that the Timewyrm had attempted to possess
and use Hitler, only be caught up in Hitler’s madness and trapped
within his mind. Hitler had managed to control the Timewyrm,
using it to focus his strength
of will, The Doctor managed to trick Hitler into driving
it out of him by convincing him that it didn’t help him, subsequently
using a psychic lantern to enhance the Timewyrm’s power to such an
extent that she was blasted into the Time Vortex, disintegrating
into a swarm of anger,
although The Doctor knew that she would eventually put herself
back together.
What The Doctor didn't know was
that after that battle with the Timewyrm he left it in a weakened state,
in which it could be easily defeated, and it thus broke the laws of Time
and travelled into The Doctor's past, before their "first" meeting,
to shelter in the mind of the Second Doctor while he was still disoriented
by his first regeneration. Without realising what he was doing, the Second
Doctor passed on the infection to the innocent young telepath Lilith, who
has since grown up to become the Grand Matriarch of the Panjistri at the
end of Time itself. Seeking to avert the upcoming Big Crunch - the end
of the universe -, the Panjistri had collected DNA samples from all of
the surviving races in the universe, subsequently combining them on the
distant planet Kirith to create the genetically perfect Kirithons, subsequently
taking particularly skilled members of the race and combining their genetic
material to create the God Machine. Using Ace to provide the aggression
that was the only quality the Kirith lacked, the Panjistri believed that
the God Machine would achieve the Omega Point, having experienced everything
about everything, and thus become a god with the power to save creation… unaware
that the Timewyrm, in Lilith’s body, intended to use that power for
herself. At the last minute, however, Raphael, a Kirithon whom Ace had
befriended, merged with the gestalt in Ace’s place, expelling the
Timewyrm from Lilith and allowing her to die as the innocent child she
had been, although Raphael’s reluctance to kill meant that the Timewyrm
escaped destruction.
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Timewyrm: Revelation
(Paul
Cornell) |
|
The final battle against the Timewyrm took place in a
very unlikely setting - The Doctor's own mind, the Timewyrm
having planted a seed of itself within The Doctor when he
called on the Third
Doctor for
assistance. Using a psychic probe to send Ace into The Doctor’s mind
to break down the walls that the Timewyrm couldn’t access, the Timewyrm
trapped The Doctor and Ace inside his mind, sowing discord
between them by confronting them with illusions of The Doctor’s deceased
companions
Katarina, Sara
Kingdom and Adric.
Further exploration of the mind revealed that the Timewyrm
had also recruited Lieutenant Hemmings - an officer of
the Britischer Friekorps who had given The Doctor and Ace
trouble in the alternate 1951 in "Timewyrm:
Exodus" - as one of its agents,
sending him to take control of the part of The Doctor’s mind ‘inhabited’ by
his memories of his third incarnation, the Third Doctor
having been overcome in a moment of shock after learning
that, in the alternate timeline he
visited in "Inferno",
the fascist dictator of that reality was his own alternate
self. Joining forces, the Third and Seventh Doctors were
able to banish Hemmings from their mind - although they
were forced to encourage him to torture Ace to give them
time to act -, the Fourth
Doctor subsequently
taking the Seventh further into the Mind to confront the
Timewyrm.
Having made contact with the Timewyrm, The Doctor learned
its true plot; to crash the Moon into Earth by channelling
the psychic power of his death, annihilating billions of
alternate timelines and giving
it even more power. Although The Doctor managed to retreat
back into the real world, he was left with a dilemma; while
the Timewyrm was now trapped
in his mind behind his psychic defences, he could not destroy
it without killing Ace. As The Doctor paused, paralysed
by his own guilt and fear
of failure, Ace was encouraged by the ‘ghosts’ to free The
Doctor's conscience, personified in the form of the Fifth
Doctor,
thus allowing The Doctor to make peace with his dead acknowledge
his guilt (Simultaneously
learning that The Doctor’s original plan would have caused him to
resurrect the Timewyrm from his own guilt over killing Ace).
Deciding that he would instead risk it all to find another
way to defeat the Timewyrm,
The Doctor piloted the TARDIS to the interface between imagination
and reality, and faced the Timewyrm in an arena set up within
his own mind. With the Timewyrm now unable to harm him -
it had only been able to injure
The Doctor earlier because he allowed it to do so to convince
it that it was winning -, The Doctor reached past the archetypal
nightmare
of the
Timewyrm to unlock the human essence of Qataka, who was
now tired of the fight and simply sought to go home. As
the Timewyrm settled back into dormancy
within the universe, The Doctor used its power to undo the
death it had caused before transferring Qataka’s life essence into
the body of a genetically-engineered blank infant from the
future - the baby one of
many that were genetically engineered as blank slates for
experimentation purposes -, subsequently giving the baby
to a couple who had aided him
in the struggle, suggesting that they name her Ishtar.
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Happy Endings
(Paul
Cornell) |
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The Timewyrm's last appearance took place in "Happy
Endings", when The Doctor had set up the wedding of his companion
Benny in Cheldon Bonniface, Ishtar actually dating The Doctor’s other
companion Chris, although the relationship was at least partly ‘prompted’ along
by The Master, who hypnotised Chris not to pay any attention to odd goings-on
in the village while he attempted to create a new body for himself using
the stolen Loom of Rassilon’s Mouse. Unfortunately, The
Master’s
equipment reacted poorly with the holographic devices The Doctor was using
to generate the disguises for the alien guests, delaying The Master’s
plans for so long that the biomass he had used to create various clones
while testing the Loom erupted in violent bursts, the resulting ‘blob’ of
biomass consuming The Doctor’s old friend the Brigadier. With no
other option, The Doctor encouraged Ishtar to tap into her repressed memories
of being the Timewyrm, and she was thus able to release a blast of temporal
energy that destroyed the creature and restored the Brigadier to life and
youth, The Master being subsequently captured. After the wedding’s
conclusion and The Doctor’s subsequent departure, Ishtar later revealed
that she pregnant with Chris's child - and that child would have a very
positive attitude on future history (Although the full detail of this was
never revealed) |
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