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| Whatever Happened to Sarah
Jane? |
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 Name: The Trickster
Format: Television show
Time of Origin: Present
Appearances: Confronted The Doctor
in "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith"; previously
fought Sarah Jane Smith on her own in "Whatever Happened
to Sarah Jane Smith?" and "The Temptation of
Sarah Jane Smith"; an agent of the Trickster’s
Brigade appeared in "Turn Left", "Immortal
Sins".
Doctors: Tenth
Doctor
Companions: Sarah
Jane Smith, K9; Donna Noble was attacked by a member
of the Trickster’s Brigade before the resulting
alternate timeline was ended by Rose Tyler, Captain Jack Harkness.
History: Although the Trickster is unquestionably
a powerful enemy, he and The Doctor have only faced each
other once, the Trickster tending to focus his attention
on The Doctor’s old companion Sarah
Jane Smith rather
than The Doctor, apparently unable to use his powers to directly
attack a Time Lord.
The
Trickster’s full history is unknown, but it would appear
that The Doctor has heard tales of the Trickster since his
first incarnation’s youth, although he never believed
they would actually meet. The Trickster is a member of the
Pantheon of Discord - the name and purpose suggest that the
Trickster is connected to The Doctor’s old foe the
Black
Guardian, but no definitive link between the two has
been established -, powerful beings who were banished from
the universe long ago, the Trickster frequently coming to
Earth to make bargains that will result in chaotic changes
to history, the Trickster drawing on that power to grow stronger.
However, like the Black Guardian, the Trickster is unable
to use his power directly for unspecified reasons, his attempts
to make deals thus focusing on people who are about to die
so that they would be more inclined to accept his terms.
Although he is capable of such powers as independent time
travel and manipulation of time - such as being able to create
a time loop -, the Trickster is not completely invulnerable,
The Doctor commenting that the Trickster is vulnerable to
the artron energy that powers the TARDIS.
The Trickster’s first recorded appearance
on Earth occurred when he went to 1964, visiting an accident
where Sarah Jane Smith witnessed the death of her best friend
Andrea Yates when both were teenagers ("Whatever Happened
to Sarah Jane?"). In the original course of events,
Andrea died when she fell off a pier after wandering into
an out-of-bounds area, her death having a keen impact on
the young Sarah Jane, but thanks to the Trickster’s
interference, a desperate Andrea agreed to a deal that saved
her life at the cost of Sarah dying in her place. Although
the Trickster prevented the alien invasions that Sarah would
have averted on her own, this was only in order for him to
draw on the power he would gain when meteorite K67 struck
Earth, the random nature of the incident granting him more
power than an intentional invasion of Earth.
Fortunately,
Sarah Jane’s friend Maria Jackson was able to retain
her memories of Sarah thanks to an alien puzzle box Sarah
had given her, allowing her and her father to confront Andrea
about what she had done. Accepting that she had to die -
either on the pier as a child or when the meteor hit Earth
in the present -, the adult Andrea ended her deal with the
Trickster, restoring Sarah to existence and allowing her
to use the supercomputer Mr Smith to divert the meteorite.
Despite this failure, it was clear that the Trickster would
try to attack again, particularly after he revealed the full
extent of his plans to Sarah while she was trapped in limbo;
by erasing her from existence, the Trickster hoped to draw
the attention of The Doctor, causing untold amounts of chaos
by erasing the Time Lord from existence ("Whatever Happened
to Sarah Jane Smith?").
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| The Temptation of Sarah Jane
Smith |
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The Trickster returned to Sarah’s life when, seeking
revenge for her previous defeat of him, he created
a time portal that sent Sarah and her adopted son
Luke back to 1951, giving Sarah a unique chance to
meet her parents, who had died when she was an infant.
Despite her best intentions, Sarah gave into temptation
and deactivated her father’s car, preventing
the accident that killed her parents by changing
a fixed event in history. As the village where the
accident took place was built on a fault in time,
Sarah’s actions opened this fault and gave
the Trickster enough power to physically manifest
on Earth creating an alternate time line where he
drained Earth of its natural resources with the aid
of his Graske minion, Krislok - Krislok forced to
serve the Trickster after his own deal with the powerful
being -, forcing the remaining humans to mine for
minerals to give the Trickster power to escape into
space and enslave other planets. Fortunately, Luke’s
friends Clyde Langer and Rani Chandra were able to
escape the changes in history thanks to the puzzle
box, subsequently making a deal with Krislok to open
the time portal in exchange for the box, allowing
Krislok to escape from the Trickster while Rani travelled
back to tell Sarah what had happened. Forced to confess
the truth to her parents, Sarah bade them a tearful
farewell before they drove off, deliberately sacrificing
themselves to save the future ("The Temptation
of Sarah Jane Smith").
During the Trickster’s third appearance, he attempted
to trick Sarah into giving up her life of defending Earth
by saving the life of lawyer Peter Dalton after the accident
that killed him, claiming to be an ‘angel’ who
would give Dalton the love he had never had. After meeting
Dalton while researching a story, Sarah and he quickly fell
for each other, Sarah accepting his proposal after only a
few months of dating, only for the wedding to be interrupted
when the Tenth
Doctor charged into the room just after the
request for objections to the marriage (He had learnt of
the Trickster’s role in events earlier but the Trickster
had blocked his attempts to materialise in that time earlier).
Attempting to prevent interference, the Trickster was able
to initiate a temporal trap, taking the hotel where the wedding
was taking place into limbo and subsequently trapping Sarah
and Dalton in one second while leaving The Doctor, K9, Luke,
Clyde and Rani stuck in another second so that they couldn’t
help Sarah.
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| The Wedding of Sarah Jane
Smith |
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Although The Doctor had a plan to attack the Trickster using
the artron energy of the TARDIS - which was attempting to ‘home
in’ on its pilot after the time trap had separated
the two -, the TARDIS was unable to break completely into
the loop, The Doctor only just managing to get inside the
ship before the TARDIS vanished again. Fortunately, Clyde
became temporarily charged with artron energy when he ran
into the TARDIS as he was trying to get inside it, giving
him the idea to provoke the Trickster into manifesting in
their second - claiming that he wished to share a secret
with the Trickster -, allowing him to attack the Trickster.
With Clyde’s attack weakening the Trickster’s
influence long enough for The Doctor to make contact with
Sarah and reveal how to stop their foe, Dalton willingly
revoked his deal, informing the Trickster that Sarah’s
love for him had given him a strength he’d never known
before ("The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith"). During
this confrontation with The Doctor, the Trickster commented
that this ‘historic’ first meeting between the
last of the Time Lords and the Pantheon of Discord - stating
that he ‘embodied multitudes’, suggesting that
the Pantheon consists primarily of mere aspects of the Trickster
rather than independent entities in their own right - created
ripples that reverberated back through Time itself, also
showing a degree of foreknowledge of The Doctor’s upcoming
regeneration when he commented that ‘the Gate’ was
waiting for The Doctor (A reference to the ‘Immortality
Gate’ that The Master would use to turn the entire
human race into duplicates of him in "The End of Time").
Although the Trickster himself did not appear directly, the
Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble encountered a Time Beetle
- a giant beetle that could change a key event in a person’s
past - that The Doctor described as a member of the ‘Trickster’s
Brigade’ in "Turn Left", the
Brigade apparently normally making small ‘tweaks’ to
the universe by changing a person’s life (It was unspecified
if the Brigade is just another name for the Pantheon). When
Donna had her fortune told during a holiday on the planet
Shan Shen, the fortune-teller - a member of the Trickster’s
Brigade - was able to plant a Time Beetle on her, the Beetle
influencing Donna to change her past by taking a permanent
job at an office rather than the temping job that would have
resulted in her meeting The Doctor ("The
Runaway Bride").
As a result of the scale of this change, an alternate timeline
was created where The Doctor was killed in the confrontation
with the Racnoss, Martha Jones and Sarah Jane Smith suffocated
while preventing the Plasmavore setting off an explosion
that would have destroyed half the Earth ("Smith
and Jones"), and Torchwood - led by Captain Jack Harkness - was decimated during the Sontaran invasion
of Earth ("The
Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky") without The
Doctor there to assist them. Aided by UNIT and the returned Rose Tyler - who had witnessed reality
beginning to collapse due to some unknown future catastrophe,
her team’s analysis of the timelines confirming that
the timelines were converging on Donna as a key player in
events to come -, the alternate Donna was able to go back
in time and divert her past self to take the job that would
lead to her meeting The Doctor (Albeit by sacrificing herself),
allowing Donna to play her part in thwarting the Dalek theft
of Earth ("The Stolen Earth/Journey's
End").
On
another occasion, during his century-plus ‘exile’ on
Earth as he worked for Torchwood while waiting for The Doctor,
Jack Harkness and his ‘companion’/lover Angelo
were able to trick a group of mobsters who had been ‘recruited’ by
the Trickster’s Brigade into using them to move a parasitic
life-form from its current storage facility, Jack destroying
the parasite before it could be used to infect Franklin Delanore
Roosevelt with one of its young (The parasite’s growth
in Roosevelt would have caused him to make gradually irrational
decisions until it reached a point where Roosevelt’s
condition would delay American involvement in the Second
World War and allow the Nazis to prevail, obviously creating
further chaos for the Trickster to feed on) ("Immortal
Sins"), |
