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| State of Decay |
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 Name: Vampires
Format:
Television show, Audio, Comic and Book.
Time of Origin: Unconfirmed, but variations of vampires have appeared in eras ranging from the distant past to the far future.
Appearances: "World
Game", "State
of Decay", "Zaltys", "Goth
Opera", "Project:
Twilight", "Project:
Lazarus", "Twilight's End", "Blood
Harvest", "An Alien Werewolf in London", "The
Eight Doctors" and "Vampire
Science", "Situation Vacant", "The Love Vampire", "Monstrous Beauty" and "All Flesh is Grass", "Regeneration Impossible"; a projection featuring ancient vampires featured in "Zagreus"; Captain Jack Harkness faced vampires in "The Lives of Captain Jack Volume 3: Mighty and Despair"; Professor Litefoot and Henry Gordon Jago faced vampires in "Litefoot & Saunders", and "The Ruthven Inheritance".
Doctors: Second
Doctor, Fourth
Doctor, Fifth
Doctor, Sixth
Doctor, Seventh
Doctor, Eighth
Doctor, Ninth Doctor, Eleventh Doctor and Twelfth Doctor; unrecorded encounter with the Third
Doctor; the Tenth Doctor had peripheral encounters with vampires during the Kotturuh crisis.
Companions: Serena, K9, 2nd
Romana, Adric,
Tegan
Jovanka, Nyssa, Evelyn
Smythe, Ace, Bernice
Summerfield, Mags, Samantha
Jones, Tamsin Drewe , Liv Chenka, Helen Sinclair and Rose Tyler; unrecorded encounter with Jo Grant; Charley Pollard once experienced a holographic projection featuring ancient vampires that used the appearances of Peri Brown and Melanie Bush as part of the illusion; George Litefoot, Henry Gordon Jago and Captain Jack Harkness faced vampires without The Doctor.
History: According to The Doctor, every inhabited planet in existence has some variation of the vampire legend in their history. According to most sources, vampires are undead beings, who become that way when bitten by another vampire. They require constant blood-drinking to stay alive, but their weaknesses can vary across various myths; some vampires are vulnerable to silver, others can only be directly killed by a wooden stake through the heart, Earth vampires can be warded off by crucifixes, and many vampires are vulnerable to sunlight to some degree. However, the original vampires in The Doctor's universe were a race of giants, just
one of them being capable of draining the life force of an entire
planet, that were unleashed by the Time Lords during early time travel
experiments that opened a door into the vampire's Universe (A secret
that was only revealed to The Doctor in "The
Pit", when he met the Time Lord general who had led the
war against the Vampires, the Time Lords concealing the truth because
they didn’t want to believe that they had fought pure Evil
in the war). The Time Lords battled them in a terrible war that,
it was said, was so long and bloody, that every Time Lord was sickened
of violence forever. The vampires were defeated via the use of bowships,
massive metal ships that could plunge straight into a vampire's heart
and kill them. However, after the vampires were defeated in a final
great battle, when the Time Lords counted the bodies, they discovered
that one vampire was missing - the Great Vampire, the lord and master
of them all. When that was discovered, Rassilon,
the first President of Gallifrey, made a proclamation that any and
all Time Lords who encounter the Great Vampire must make every effort
to defeat this monster, even at the cost of their own lives…
The Doctor’s first encounter with vampires
took place in his second incarnation, when he was captured by the
Time Lords ("The
War Games") and was forced to perform
various missions for them that they wanted to officially distance
themselves from in exchange for a commuted sentence. On his first
mission for them ("World
Game"), The Doctor - accompanied by Time Lady Serenadellatrova -
was investigating The Players’ attempts
to alter the outcome of the Napoleonic wars, little knowing that
a Time Lord was working with the Players at the same time. Attempting
to stop The Doctor from interfering with the Players’ actions,
their Time Lord ally used the Timescoop - forbidden technology that
took a subject from one location in time and space and moved them
to another - to send a vampire from the Death Zone on Gallifrey after
The Doctor, but due to him having recently eaten garlic bread at
a party, The Doctor was able to drive the vampire back long enough
to stake it with a convenient branch.
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The E-Space Trilogy
DVD Box Set
|
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Rassilon’s proclamation about the Great
Vampire was eventually
fulfilled when the Fourth
Doctor, the Second
Romana, and K9 passed through a CVE -
A Charged Vacuum Emboitment - into E-Space, a Universe not unlike
our own N-Space, but smaller, and with negative instead of positive
co-ordinates.
Following a battle on the planet Alzarius, The Doctor, Romana and
K9 departed, unaware that a young Alzarian boy called Adric had
stowed away on the TARDIS.
At the next planet in E-Space they arrived on, The Doctor and Romana
discovered that the Three Who Rule- King Zargo, Queen Camilla and
their High Priest, Aukon, were the followers of the Great Vampire,
who had escaped onto their ship, the Hydrax, made them vampires,
and taken them through to E-Space, where he was slowly restored
to full health by their capturing of the villagers they ruled and
feeding them to him as part of a yearly ritual known as ‘the
Gathering’. When The Doctor attempted to investigate the ship,
although he discovered the Lords’ true nature and managed
to escape, Aukon captured Adric and Romana, intending for Adric
to become a new vampire and Romana to be used as a sacrifice to
herald the awakening and restoration of the Great Vampire. Fortunately,
The Doctor and K9 were able to develop a strategy, especially since
the Time Lords had stored information on vampires in the databanks
of every single Type Forty TARDIS - The Doctor's TARDIS. While K9
led an attack by the rebels on the castle, The Doctor used one of
the Hydrax's scout ships to destroy the Great Vampire by staking
it through the heart, and thus destroying the Three Who Rule, who
had only been sustained by the Great Vampire after all their years.
These,
however, weren't the only vampires on the planet, as The Doctor discovered
during his time on the planet, resulting in a rather interesting
encounter involving both his Fourth and Eighth
incarnations. Following "State
of Decay", the Fourth
Doctor, Romana, Adric and K9 stayed around for a brief while to ensure
things
went well, but in the process The Doctor and Romana were tricked
into
going to the House of Zarn, where Zarn, another vampire, attempted
to make The Doctor and Romana the new King and Queen. However, the
vampires here for some reason took longer to change a subject than
the others encountered - vampirism for this type of vampires taking
the form of forced mutation after feeding on them over a prolonged
period, the success of the process varying depending on the strength
of spirit of the subject - so although The Doctor was captured, Romana
managed to escape and would have more time to try to warn the villagers.
Thankfully, since she probably didn't have much time anyway, Romana
met up with the amnesiac Eighth
Doctor, currently visiting his past
selves to regain his lost memories after falling victim to a trap
set by The Master ("The
Eight Doctors"). The Eighth Doctor
and Romana saved the Fourth Doctor from Zarn's house, and the rebels,
who'd discovered their absence, bought the Eighth Doctor and Romana
time to get to the Eighth Doctor's TARDIS and take the Fourth Doctor
to the rebel's base, where the Eighth Doctor saved the Fourth Doctor
by giving him a blood transfusion after the vampires' feeding nearly killed the younger Doctor.
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Zaltys
(Matthew J Elliott) |
|
After the TARDIS had returned to N-Space and The Doctor had regenerated ("Castrovalva"), Adric's attempt to pilot the TARDIS resulted in the ship being unwittingly caught in the middle of a telepathic transmission, with Adric and Tegan being caught in the transmission and sent to the destination and source of the transmission ("Zaltys"). As The Doctor and Nyssa tried to track them down, the TARDIS materialised on Zaltys, a notoriously reclusive planet whose entire population had recently disappeared, with Adric finding himself in one of Zaltys's apparently abandoned underground cities while Tegan was on a darkened spaceship. While The Doctor learned that the population of Zaltys had gone into cryogenic suspension to escape an approaching asteroid, Tegan was swiftly contacted by Clarimonde, the ship's commander, who declared that her people had a blood feud against The Doctor, although she initially assumed that Tegan was Jo Grant as The Doctor had been travelling with Jo during their initial encounter. Based on the lack of lighting in the ship, Tegan soon realised that Clarimonde was a vampire, while The Doctor realised that the 'asteroid' heading for Zaltys was actually a spaceship, which he soon identified as the Exemplar, a ship of necrobiologicals - apparently another breed of vampire - that he had driven away from the planet Sekhmet seven hundred years prior to this date, back in his third incarnation. The Exemplar had remained in hiding on a planet whose unique position in a solar system meant that it had permanent daylight, the necrobiologicals using spacesuits configured to protect themselves from sunlight to occasionally hunt so that they could draw out their food supplies. They eventually made contact with Perrault, Zaltys's ambassador to other worlds, who also possessed a degree of telepathic abilities; while his role primarily consisted of reaffirming that Zaltys had no interest in trade or further contact with other cultures, Perrault had a great interest in travel himself. As a result, Perrault and Clarimonde made a deal where Perrault would essentially give Clarimonde the rest of his people as a food source and Clarimonde would turn Perrault so that he could travel for all eternity. Perrault also gained an 'ally' in the form of Gevaudan, a Vulupine, a species of telepaths who essentially resembled werewolves, whose mate and crew had been killed in a raid before he was discovered by Perrault, with Perrault's telepathy allowing him to hide his true agenda from Gevaudan. When the Exemplar landed on Zaltys, the necrobiologicals emerged from the ship wearing their modified spacesuits, but Tegan managed to escape the ship with the aid of a fish-like alien who had been trapped on the Exemplar when they dived into the sea after the ship entered the atmosphere. As the necrobiologicals prepared to attack Zaltys, Perrault was killed when one of the other Zaltyns woke up and shot him after he had exposed his agenda, and the necrobiologicals themselves were subsequently caught off-guard when Gevaudan attacked them telepathically. Using Nyssa's own psychic powers, coupled with the necrobiologicals draining the blood of his people and thus drawing on the bond he still shared with his mate and his fellows, Gevaudan was able to establish a psychic link with the entire necrobiological crew and convince them to take their helmets off to fully claim the planet for themselves, although the subsequent psychic backlash of the necrobiologicals' deaths killed Gevaudan in the process even if he was able to protect Nyssa from the same fate.
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Goth Opera
(Paul
Cornell) |
|
Some time later, Ruath, a Time Lady that The Doctor had initially planned to leave Gallifrey with, became convinced that the Time Lords were destined to become a vampiric race,
due to apparent evidence that Rassilon became a vampire near the end
of his life. She managed to force Romana, now back on Gallifrey after
being taken there by the Seventh
Doctor, to take her to the Timescoop,
and then attempted to give the vampires the blood of a Doctor. She
rejected both the Thirteenth Doctor and the Seventh Doctor, both being
too devious for her to easily trick, and decided on the more vulnerable
Fifth
Doctor. She sent a baby vampire to attack The Doctor while his
companion Tegan
Jovanka tried to recover from her possession by the Mara,
("Snakedance") but the vampire, known simply as the Child,
made a mistake and attacked Nyssa instead. Due to her being unable
to use The Doctor’s blood for her purpose, Ruath fed her blood
to the vampire lord Yarven, stuck on Earth some while ago and then
buried alive for fifty years, and was then made Yarven's vampire
consort. While The Doctor and Tegan investigated reports of vampire
attacks in Manchester, Nyssa was captured by Yarven, but thankfully
only fed on animal's blood - if she drank human blood, she would
become a vampire for good.
Ruath
also managed to develop a vaporised form of vampire DNA, that would turn
anyone who came in contact with it into a vampire, but those protected
by faith or garlic would spontaneously combust. Having discovered Ruath’s
plans, The Doctor was forced to let Ruath bite him - at least partly motivated
by a desire to save Tegan - while Ruath triggered a Time Freeze that trapped
the western hemisphere of Earth in permanent night. However, Ruath had
stolen the Ring of Rassilon, an artefact that let her control Time Lord
technology, and Romana had sent The Doctor a telepathic message that told
him what to do to control it. Taking control of the Ring with a code word,
The Doctor was able to command Ruath’s TARDIS to dematerialise, ending
the Time Freeze and destroying all of the vampires in Manchester as the
sun rose, subsequently taking Ruath’s TARDIS to a planet with two
suns and destroying Yarven’s hoards. Ruath escaped and got into The
Doctor's TARDIS, but Nyssa managed to eject Ruath out into the Time Vortex,
thus curing The Doctor of his minor vampirism. However, it wasn't for some
while that The Doctor found out how Yarven got to Earth…
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Project: Twilight
(Cavan Scott & Mark Wright) |
|
Some
time after that, the Sixth
Doctor and his companion Evelyn
Smythe were eating a meal from a Chinese takeaway called the
Slow Boat when they stumbled accross a mass of murdered - and eaten
- animals. As The Doctor and Evelyn were confronted with further
deaths in the alleyway as they witnessed a man get shot with a crossbow
and the blood subsequently boiling around the wound, it wasn't long
before their investigation lead them to some strange goings on at
a nearby casino called "The Dusk", which they investigated
with the aid of a young waitress called Cassie, who was being forced
to act as a spy for the sake of her mother and young son. Meeting
the mysterious Nimrod, The Doctor realized he was dealing with vampires
again, seeking to resurrect an ancient government project from the
First World War called Project: Twilight, a project that had sought
to create a superior soldier class for the war using genetic engineering.
The research team had somehow come into possession of vampire DNA
- Nimrod was the doctor originally in charge of the experiments who
transformed himself after his test subjects nearly killed him, subsequently
being cybernetically augmented as he hunted his own creations - but
although they won The Doctor’s support by claiming that they
sought a cure for their condition, their true plan was to allow them
to turn others into vampires using the nanobots that transformed
them. Fortunately The Doctor managed to escape with the aid of Nimrod,
subsequently destroying Amelia - the vampire responsible for the
work on the nanobots - by dragging her into the river, apparently
drowning her. The Doctor and Evelyn departed, but were unable at
the time to help Cassie - who had been turned by Nimrod, although
she still wasn't a killer at heart - intead leaving her in a Norwegian
forest in order to ensure she wasn't a danger to anyone else. What
was more, Nimrod had survived, and, although unable to find Amelia's
body, he knew that Cassie survived, and his superiors ordered him
to bring her back... alive.
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Project: Lazarus
(Cavan Scott Wright
and Mark Wright) |
|
A
few months after the events of "Project:
Twilight", The
Doctor and Evelyn returned to track down Cassie, The Doctor having
developed a cure for the Twilight virus. Unfortunately, the TARDIS
forced them to dematerialise several years after they'd left Cassie
in the forest, rather than the mere seconds The Doctor was aiming
for, and discovered that Cassie had been forced to flee Nimrod and
the Forge for decades... or so it seemed. In reality, Cassie, now
known as 'Artemis', had been working for the Forge for ages, having
found a real sense of home and family there; indeed, the Forge as
a whole seemed better than before, now dedicated to studying alien
technology for the benefit of humanity rather than the genetic experiments
it had performed before. However, Nimrod wanted The Doctor there
for a simple reason; to take a blood sample and force The Doctor
to regenerate so Nimrod could learn how to harness the ability for
himself. Fortunately, Evelyn managed to reveal the truth to Cassie
- Nimrod had brainwashed her into joining the Forge to act as bait
for The Doctor - and, in the end, Cassie not only saved The Doctor
from the Forge's experiments, but also sacrificed herself to give
The Doctor and Evelyn time to escape (Her son, Thomas Hector ‘Hex’ Schofield,
would go on to travel with the Seventh Doctor for a time, although
The Doctor’s initial meeting with Hex was nothing but a coincidence).
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Blood Harvest
(Terrance
Dicks) |
|
When The Doctor finally discovered how Yarven
got to Earth, The Doctor was in his seventh incarnation, and had
sent his companion Bernice
Summerfield off to E-Space to investigate recent uprisings
between the peasants and the human Lords on the vampire planet, while,
based on an anonymous tip, The Doctor and Ace opened up an illegal
bar called 'Doc's Place' during Prohibition to create a neutral area
for the gang lords to meet, The Doctor seeking the evil Agonal, who
intervened throughout history to make bad situations even worse.
While trying to avert the gang war that Agonal sought to trigger,
the two of them befriended Private Eye Tom Dekker (Who would meet
the Sixth Doctor in his future and The Doctor’s past during
the events of "Players", although Dekker was never aware
of the Sixth’s connection to the Seventh), initially sent by
Al Capone to investigate The Doctor. Trying to calm the riots on
the vampire planet, Benny and Romana discovered that Agonal had managed
to resurrect Zargo, Camilla, and Aukon while stirring up the conflict
between the locals, and would soon do the same to the Great Vampire.
As Agonal’s manipulations triggered the St Valentine’s
Day Massacre in Chicago, The Doctor, Ace, and Dekker were forced
to retreat to the TARDIS, pursuing Agonal to E-Space. Just as Agonal
prepared to fully resurrect the Great Vampire, Dekker managed to
kill Zargo, Camilla and Aukon with bullets straight to the heart,
while The Doctor blew up the Hydrax and exposed the newly resurrected
Great Vampire to sunlight, killing it again as well. Although Agonal
was Time-Scooped away before The Doctor could deal with him, The
Doctor tracked Agonal to Gallifrey, where he discovered that Agonal
had been ‘captured’ by the Committee of Three - a security
council made up of three Time Lords whose lives had been ruined thanks
to The Doctor - who had used The Doctor to find Agonal with the intention
of pitting him against Rassilon to save Borusa. Unfortunately for
the Committee, Borusa had seen the error of his ways during his imprisonment,
working with The Doctor, Romana and Rassilon to crush Agonal and
leaving the Three to be captured. Romana remained on Gallifrey, and
The Doctor, Ace and Benny took Dekker back to Chicago, where Dekker
took over Doc's Place (A vampire Lord from E-Space managed to escape
to Earth by hiding in Benny’s archaeological equipment, but
The Doctor was unconcerned about that due to his knowledge of Yarven’s
fate).
The Doctor's next encounter with the vampires was a particularly
strange one - which, given that so far The Doctor and his companions
had to accept the existence of living corpses, was saying a lot.
The Seventh Doctor, travelling alone, arrived in the Forge once again
while investigating a temporal distortion, to encounter not only
Nimrod, but also a very unexpected scientific advisor for the project
- the Sixth Doctor. It appeared that the Sixth Doctor had been forced
to work with the Forge to fight off an invasion by the Huldran -
aliens that had been experimented on by the Forge in their early
days - but The Doctor also been forced to revert the TARDIS to a
normal Police Box to prevent them getting their hands on it, and
now needed the Seventh's help to escape. However, the Seventh realised
that the Sixth was a fake - if nothing else, the Seventh didn't remember
any of these events - and this was only confirmed when the Huldran
practically hacked off the Sixth's arm, as such damage should have
triggered a regeneration. Making telepathic contact with the Sixth
Doctor, the Seventh was able to confirm his suspicions; this Doctor
was in fact a clone created from DNA extracted on The Doctor's last
visit. The process, however, was unstable, and the severed arm was
all it took to send the 'Doctor's' genetic structure over the edge
to oblivion. To the horror of The Doctor and the clone, the clone
was actually only days old; the process was so unstable that the
clones failed after only a few days, and each time DNA was taken
from the clone to create a new one with the original's memories...
while the 'failed' clones (At least ten failures for every 'successful'
one) were kept for tissue experimentation. The clone, mimicking Nimrod's
voice, triggered the destruction of the Forge, leaving The Doctor
only six minutes to escape and release the Huldran captives. He did
so, but was left saddened by the deaths of all the innocent human
lives in the Forge... little suspecting that, elsewhere, the Forge's
beta facility had been activated...
The Doctor’s
history with the Forge came to an end when the Seventh Doctor materialised
inside the Forge’s new headquarters
("Twilight's End"), The Doctor being forced to flee
the security forces sent to kill him by retreating deeper into the
building as doors lured him in that direction. Arriving at the heart
of the Forge, The Doctor discovered the elaborate cyborg computer
system known as the Oracle, and was horrified to recognise it as
the now-barely-alive Nimrod, permanently wired into the machinery
before him. With no other way to help Nimrod, The Doctor left a sample
of the Twilight cure and departed, leaving it up to Nimrod whether
or not he would use it to end his nightmarish existence.
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An Alien Werewolf in London
(Alan Barnes) |
|
While the Seventh Doctor was travelling with Mags, a native of the planet Vulpana who was essentially a werewolf, he was recalled to Earth by a call for help from Ace, who had been contacted by the Australian Rufus after he claimed to have found an alien being in a mansion where he worked as a handyman ("An Alien Werewolf in London"). However, when The Doctor, Ace and Mags tried to rescue the alien, they learned that the situation was far more complicated; the alien was an entity known as a 'sin-eater' and its captors were a 'family' of vampires known as the Ferat (as in 'Nosferatu') who had been using its abilities to suppress their darker natures, allowing them to retain their vampiric immortality without the need to drink blood or their more dramatic abilities. Although The Doctor managed to escape with the Sin-Eater, Ace was captured by the Ferat and Mags was left with amnesia after the Sin-Eater attacked her to copy her appearance, allowing The Doctor and Ace to learn that Rufus was another member of the Ferat who had been exiled to Australia because he wanted to retain their more brutal habits. Having spent decades training himself to resist the sunlight that had kept him trapped, Rufus had set up his own television company, intending to use it to broadcast a signal that would turn a significant percentage of Earth's population into vampires, the Ferats having released traits of the vampire virus over the centuries before the discovery of the Sin-Eater changed their plans. Seeking to atone for their original acts, the Ferats sacrificed themselves to destroy the satellite Rufus would have used to broadcast the signal, which also killed Rufus and caused most of his victims to revert to their human ages due to the link between the Ferats and those they had turned. While The Doctor and Mags departed, the Sin-Eater remained with Ace to explore a normal life, the entity now in a duplicate of Mags' body while Mags' wolf side had been suppressed for a year due to its influence.
During
the events of "Zagreus", when the Eighth Doctor was contaminated
by the forces of anti-time, the TARDIS - currently being manipulated
by Rassilon after it was also contaminated by anti-time - generated
holographic simulations for The Doctor’s current companion
Charley Pollard as it sought information about the race known as
the Divergents, Rassilon seeking to use the anti-time-contaminated
Doctor as an assassin against the Divergents and the TARDIS trying
to decide whether or not to help him. One of these simulations was
set in Gallifrey’s past, where the vampire Lord Tepesh tricked
members of the Sisterhood of Karn ("The
Brain of Morbius")
to help him gain access to Rassilon’s workshop in an attempt
to learn his secrets, culminating in a confrontation with Charley
as she assumed Rassilon’s role in the simulation before the
lab was destroyed as a result of Tepesh’s attempts to access
forbidden information (During this confrontation Tepesh claimed that
the vampires had originally been a peaceful race feeding on genetically-modified
animals before Rassilon found them and concluded that they were too
different to be allowed to live, but Tepesh’s ‘class’ of
vampire may be different to the ones created by the Great Vampire).
The illusionary Tepesh - the physical double of the Sixth Doctor,
granting him access to at least some of The Doctor’s knowledge
- later aided Charley in convincing The Doctor to fight Zagreus’s
influence after Charley was banished to the Matrix along with Tepesh
and two other holograms based on The Doctor’s fifth and seventh
incarnations, these manifestations of his past giving The Doctor
the strength to banish Rassilon to the realm of anti-time and be
subsequently cured of the Zagreus persona.
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Vampire Science
(Jonathan Blum &
Kate Orman) |
|
The Doctor's
last encounter with the vampires took place some time after the Eighth
Doctor's battle with them when he rescued the Fourth Doctor in "The
Eight Doctors" and he's just picked Sam up after his adventures
with Charley. Carolyn McConnell, a woman The Doctor and Sam met in
1976, called the two of them to her in 1997 when vampires began attacking
a local nightclub and UNIT asked her to act as their unofficial scientific
advisor for the crisis. The Doctor discovered that one vampire, called
Harris, was attempting to develop an artificial food source. The
Doctor and Harris linked themselves to each other via a bloodfasting,
forming a mindlink between them so that any wounds inflicted on one
would affect the other. However, one vampire, Slake, tried to provoke
a war that he felt certain he could win, managed to turn the other
vampires against Harris, since now he only needed to kill either
Harris or The Doctor to dispose of them both. Discovering that Harris
was working with clones to develop an artificial food source, The
Doctor refused to allow the growth of the clones for simple 'vampire
batteries', but was still able to win Harris’s support against
Slake. Although UNIT managed to do some damage, Slake captured Sam
and tried to use her as a hostage against The Doctor. The Doctor,
however, tricked the vampires into feeding off him, and since he'd
recently taken a vampire repellent and injected it into himself,
all the vampires died, and Harris was reverted to a human due to
the bloodfasting with The Doctor, since the repellent only removed
the vampire element from people. The Doctor and Sam departed, leaving
the situation under control save for the presence of the last vampire,
Shackle, who, still unsure about his decision to become a vampire,
never joined the attack on The Doctor, and was now alone and wondering
what to do next...
When the Eighth Doctor investigated an advert claiming that a time traveller was looking for a new companion, one of the candidates was Hugh Bainbridge, an apparently bumbling individual looking for a new opportunity ("Situation Vacant"). After candidate Juliet Walsh was dismissed from the 'audition', Asha Quershi was revealed to be an alien bounty hunter stuck on Earth looking for the man who had actually placed the ad and Theo Lawson turned out to be a cyber-criminal who was trying to escape the authorities after his actions contributed to the financial recession of the early 2000s. Once The Doctor had repaired Asha's equipment so she could return home and Theo had been killed by a rampaging robot he tried to take control of, The Doctor chose Hugh as a companion, impressed by his willingness to put himself at risk to disable a temporal shield being generated by Theo's robots. However, Hugh was swiftly revealed to be a vampire called Drusis who sought control of the TARDIS; his initial impression as a bumbling fool had been a deliberate exaggeration so that he could impress The Doctor later with an apparent heroic act. Once The Doctor allowed him inside the TARDIS, Drusis attempted to drink The Doctor's blood and gain control of the ship, but The Doctor, having already suspected the truth about Hugh, was able to set the TARDIS to materialise on Mercury when it was next used, leaving Drusis trapped on the dark side of the planet where he would be incinerated by the sun if he ever slowed down. The Doctor selected Juliet Walsh- really actress Tamsin Drewe- as his new companion, and the two would later learn that the original advert was placed by The Doctor's old foe The Meddling Monk ("The Time Meddler"), who had rejected those four candidates because he realised their secrets in advance ("The Book of Kells").
 |
The Love Vampires
(James Kettle) |
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The Eighth Doctor's next encounter with vampires pitted him against an unusually distinct breed, as these vampires claimed to essentially feed on emotions such as love rather than being pure blood-drinkers ("The Love Vampires"). Arriving on a space station where the locals were conducting a research project on a dying white dwarf star, The Doctor learned that all but three of the research team had been killed by a kind of vampire that appeared to lack bodies of their own. These vampires first ‘attacked’ by appearing to their victims as hallucinations of the person’s first love, and while it was possible to break them out of these hallucinations, eventually people would give in to their influence and allow their ‘lost love’ to bite them, which would lead to them being changed into a feral kind of vampire who would attack the others; heightened emotion apparently made the meal taste better for vampires, one vampire comparing it to how humans wouldn’t eat raw meat. The Doctor’s companion Helen was ‘seduced’ by a vision of her first great love, Jean, but his other companion Liv was broken out of her own vision of the long-lost Petko by The Doctor, Liv’s continued safety giving The Doctor time to come up with a plan. While talking with a vision of his own past love, a female he knew as ‘the Realist’ who was apparently the mother of his child, The Doctor travelled to the ship’s bridge and instructed one of the crew to expel the station’s volatile fuel source so that it would accelerate the decay of the star. Revealing that ‘the Realist’ was a fake memory he had created to lure in the vampires, The Doctor ensured that he was in the main control room when the fuel was released, the intense burst of light through the ship’s windows destroying the vampires’ essence and curing Helen of her infection before it reached a dangerous stage.
Later in his life, a temporal rift in reality caused the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler to travel back to the Dark Times of the universe, where they became caught up in the war between Gallifrey and the early vampires, the Time Lords currently led by a female incarnation of Rassilon ("Monstrous Beauty"). When The Doctor and Rose were abducted by an early Gallifreyian ship, The Doctor tried to escape when the ship was attacked by Cucurbites, early vampires who could turn into giant bats, but Rose was abducted by the vampire leader Friar Grystck. The Doctor was able to convince Medicius Androkan, an early Gallifreyan scientist, to help him find Rose on Grystck's ship, where slave vampires mined the minerals needed to power their ships with the threat of being deprived of blood if they didn't work. Although The Doctor arrived too late to stop Rose being turned into a vampire, she had already killed the primary rulers on the ship because she was so hungry, leaving the ship vulnerable to attack by the 'Space Lords' that had followed Androkan's ship. While fleeing the ship, Grystck's continued abuse of the lower vampires convinced them to help The Doctor, with Androkan's prior study of Rose's blood allowing The Doctor to create a blood substitute that would help the other vampires survive and also cure Rose of her own vampirism.
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All Flesh is Grass
(Una McCormack) |
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While Rose recovered on a distant planet, The Doctor took a coffin ship to investigate the source of recent anomalies in the Dark Times, and traced them to the planet Mordeela, where he confronted a fleet of mercenaries led by his next incarnation, and also discovered a Dalek Time Squad accompanied by the Eighth Doctor ("The Enemy of My Enemy"). The Tenth Doctor had come to Mordeela to confront the Kotturuh, a mysterious race who brought the 'gift' of death to the universe ("The Knight, The Fool and the Dead"), but his trip to the past was disrupting Time, causing aspects of Kotturuh technology to emerge in the future and the fates of entire planets to be changed. The Ninth Doctor was unable to stop most of his vampire crew feeding on some of the Tenth's mercenaries, but managed to negotiate with his other selves in time for the Tenth's flagship to retreat and the Eighth to warn him that the Daleks were attacking his coffin ship, giving the Ninth the chance to evacuate his crew into the TARDIS. Unfortunately, The Doctors only learned after the evacuation that a Great Vampire had been on board the coffin ship, allowing the Daleks to take DNA samples from it and create a race of immortal, undead Daleks, which they used to mount an attack on early Gallifrey. Managing to make contact with Inyit, the last of the Kotturuh, The Doctors were able to convince her to help them destroy the Dalek/vampire hybrids, the Eighth Doctor forcing the remaining Daleks back into the Time Vortex while Inyit passed on her remaining energy to the Ninth Doctor's vampire ally Illka. As Illka helped her people find a more peaceful life, the Tenth Doctor acknowledged his predecessors' observations that he had gone too far in his original opposition to the Kotturuh, the Ninth and Tenth Doctors subsequently leaving the vampires to form a more peaceful life on an isolated planet ("All Flesh is Grass").
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Regeneration Impossible
(Alfie Shaw) |
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When the Eleventh Doctor went into self-imposed exile in Victorian London ("The Snowmen") after the loss of his companions Amy Pond and Rory Williams ("The Angels Take Manhattan"), he was briefly spurred back into action when he detected a Time Lord in a local morgue. Investigating the signal, The Doctor was shocked to discover that the other Time Lord was actually his own future self, even though the Eleventh Doctor believed he was on his last incarnation already. The Twelfth Doctor was being forced through a series of partial regenerations, releasing energy but keeping his current face while another body in the morgue, although apparently human, changed its appearance each time. The Twelfth explained that he had been drawn to the morgue after one of his students vanished only for a photograph of the student in the morgue to be delivered to The Doctor's office, with the date and address of the morgue on the back. After the Twelfth was captured upon arrival, each subsequent release of regeneration energy changed the body in the morgue to resemble some of the Twelfth Doctor's future students, which helped the Eleventh realise that this situation was explicitly a trap for the Twelfth Doctor, designed to keep him focused on other details rather than finding a way out. When the 'dead' body woke up to confront the two Doctors, they realised that their foe was a vampire who sought to harness the power of regeneration to become a true immortal by removing their traditional weaknesses. However, even before the loss of Gallifrey in the Time War, this vampire could only find Time Lords outside of Gallifrey if they stayed in one place for a prolonged period of time; the two Doctors speculated that the vampire had come to Victorian England because of the Eleventh Doctor's presence but hadn't attacked him as he had no regenerations left, and it had left the Third Doctor alone during his exile ("Spearhead From Space" and "The Three Doctors") because the TARDIS was immobilised, but the Twelfth Doctor's ship was in full working order and he had at least a full set of regenerations ("The Time of The Doctor"). The Eleventh was able to steal the vampire's time ring and take himself and the vampire to the Sahara desert, forcing the vampire to confirm that he had only siphoned off the potential energy of the Twelfth's regenerations rather than stealing them completely. Taking them back to the morgue, the Eleventh was able to use the vampire's equipment to transfer the stolen regenerations back to his future self before the vampire died of sunlight exposure, although the shock of the process knocked the Eleventh Doctor out and erased his memory of recent events, allowing the Twelfth to take his past self, back to the TARDIS before returning to his own time.
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The Ruthven Inheritance
(Andy Lane) |
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While vampires are a particular adversary of Time Lords, some of The Doctor's companions have found themselves facing the undead without The Doctor's aid on certain occasions. When the ruthless vampire Gabriel Saunders began hunting victims in Victorian London, he was discovered by The Doctor's local allies Professor George Litefoot and Henry Gordon Jago ("The Talons of Weng-Chiang"), Litefoot pretending that Saunders had tricked him into letting Saunders help investigate recent murders when Litefoot was aware that Saunders was the killer. Jago nearly jeopardised Litefoot's trap when he tried to 'save' his friend unaware that Litefoot already knew the truth, but they were apparently able to trap Saunders in a burning barn. They only learned later that Saunders had already attacked and turned their friend, barmaid Ellie Higson, but Ellie was able to resist the urge to hunt and feed, allowing Litefoot to keep her sustained on raw meats while he developed a treatment that involved filtering the infected blood out of her, although the cure was only complete when Saunders was destroyed for good after he tried to lure Jago and Litefoot into another trap after using his connections to ruin their reputations ("The Ruthven Inheritance"). Ellie would regress to her vampire state due to an attack by The Master ("The Deadly Assassin") when he attempted to target The Doctor's friends as part of a new scheme to use The Doctor's energy to restore his own, but Ellie was once again cured after an attack by an elder vampire left her with significant blood loss and required a transfusion. It would later be revealed that Ellie's time as a vampire left her with a naturally extended life-span; when Jago and Litefoot were accidentally left in 1967 after a trip with The Doctor, Ellie was still alive and apparently unaged in that time, helping her old friends find work until they could find a way back to their own time using Magnus Greel's repaired time machine (the same experience apparently led to Ellie being drained of her excess life-force so that she would age normally from then on).
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Mighty and Despair
(Tim Foley) |
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On a wider scale, The Doctor's immortal Captain Jack Harkness, at some unspecified future date, attempted to go into isolation on a planet hidden by a complex spatial anomaly ("Mighty and Despair"), meditating in the Temple of the Veils to try and find a way to experience the afterlife. During this time, he was visited by Carla, a vampire queen who had been deposed by her brother Zyman, along with Carla's mortal handmaiden Persis. Carla and Persis trained to confront Zyman until Persis died of old age, but when Zyman finally tracked Carla to the planet, the former queen killed her brother and then revealed that her method of doing so had killed all of his vampire followers, leaving Jack devastated that he had witnessed more friends die while still unable to experience the afterlife for himself.
As well as the above encounters, the Seventh Doctor and the Tenth
Doctor have
confronted vampire-like entities known as Haemovores and Plasmavores
respectively, each of them resembling vampires while still being
clearly identified as a separate species. The Haemovores ("The
Curse of Fenric") were agents of the powerful evil known as
Fenric, possessing vampire-like abilities but lacking their vulnerability
to sunlight, although strong faith - such as The Doctor’s faith
in his past companions, or a Russian soldier’s belief in the
Russian Revolution - could hold them back and even appeared to cause
them pain. The Plasmavores ("Smith
and Jones") were an
alien race, apparently capable of shape-shifting, who could ‘trick’ alien
sensors to register them as human by drinking human blood; the Tenth
Doctor and his new companion Martha Jones were able to expose a Plasmavore
hiding on Earth by tricking her into drinking The Doctor’s
blood, causing her to register as alien to the sensors of The Judoon policemen tracking her. The Eleventh Doctor encountered what appeared
to be vampires when he visited Venice in 1580 with his companions
Amy Pond and Rory
Williams, but he soon discovered that they were
actually a fish-like alien race called The
Saturnynians, who had escaped
their dying world when cracks in time and space appeared around their
planet and forced them to escape. Although they shared many similarities
to vampires, these were all merely coincidental; their human appearance
was caused by a perception filter that didn’t show their reflections
in mirrors due to the brain’s inability to process what the
filter reflected and causing them to see nothing, their sharp teeth
were exposed when they attacked as the brain’s fear in the
face of danger caused them to break through the filter and see danger,
and their evolution to exist underwater had rendered them vulnerable
to sunlight, with The Doctor holding them back with an ultraviolet
lamp and Amy destroying one by focusing sunlight on one of them with
a pocket mirror. The Saturnynians ‘mother’ was attempting
to transform human girls into mates for her male offspring - the
only offspring to survive the journey from their world to Earth -
by gradually draining the moisture from the girls and replacing it
with their own blood, but this plan was defeated when The Doctor
refused to allow them to sink Venice to make it a suitable environment
for them, the Saturnynians mother committing suicide after The Doctor
defeated her plan rather than listen to his offer to help them another
way. Whether true vampires will ever appear in the series remains
to be seen.
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