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Reckless Engineering
(Nick Walters) |
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 Name: Watchlar of the Eternines
Format:
Book
Time of Origin: Originated in another dimension;
Watchlar made contact with Earth in 1831; was technically ‘killed’/erased
in an alternate version of 2003.
Appearances: "Reckless
Engineering"
Doctors: Eighth
Doctor
Companions:
Fitz Kreiner, Anji Kapoor; Trix MacMillan appeared briefly and observed the events taking place in secret,
but did not actually meet Watchlar directly.
History: An interesting detail about Watchlar’s
encounter with The Doctor is that it essentially served as a miniature
version of the more long-term crisis that The Doctor was dealing with when
he confronted him, as Watchlar attempted to manipulate a human agent to
take action that would result in the destruction of his race while saving
Watchlar’s species by posing as a highly-evolved version of humanity
from the future.
When Watchlar first appeared in our universe, he and
two other representatives of his species, the Eternines, were able to make
contact with Earth in 1831, extracting an aspiring poet called Jared Malahyde
and presenting themselves to him as representatives of a highly-evolved
form of mankind from the far future. Claiming that mankind had reached
a point where they would evolve beyond corporeal form, Watchlar and his
associates told Malahyde that they required an agent in the past to ensure
that mankind would evolve to become them, Watchlar transferring himself
into Malahyde’s body so that he could oversee Malahyde’s work.
Under Watchlar’s guidance, Malahyde entered into a partnership with
engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel - Malahyde having briefly met Brunel before
Watchlar contacted him -, the two men working together to develop a new
process for manufacturing steel with greater ease, allowing Brunel to construct
his dream projects several years ahead of schedule, such as the SS
Great Britain and the Clifton Suspension Bridge, while Malahyde constructed the
Utopian Engine, a device that Watchlar claimed would allow the Eternines
to travel into the past on a large scale to assist humanity on the steps
that would lead to humanity evolving into them.
After
twelve long years of work, research and setbacks, the Engine was finally
completed, and Watchlar took full possession of Malahyde to activate it,
but, due to initially-unrevealed circumstances, the Utopian Engine apparently
malfunctioned and caused time to accelerate on Earth’s surface. While
buildings and objects didn’t suffer as they were not subjected to
the treatment of the elements during this time, and plants generally survived
as their seeds were underground, most animals died out as their life spans
were naturally shorter than forty years, and only children under ten were
able to effectively survive the assault due to the health standards of
the time killing older humans due to the violent shock of the sudden aging.
In the subsequent chaos, most of the aged infants died due to their inability
to cope with their new states, while ‘children’ under the age
of five regressed to a cannibalistic, feral state, knowing enough to survive
on a basic level while lacking the ability to fully develop socially. The
rest of the aged children eventually managed to rebuild some kind of society
despite the lack of adults and the obvious shortage of meat, eventually
convincing themselves that the ‘Cleansing’ - as it came to
be known - was God’s will out of an absence of any other explanation
for what had happened to them, with God deciding to ‘purge’ the
human race and start anew in Year Nought, sparing only the innocent children.
Malahyde, by contrast, found himself still alive and
unaged inside his house, proximity to the Utopian Engine having not only
protected him from its effects, but also generating a temporal shield of
an unspecified nature around the house that caused time to pass at a far
slower rate inside the shield than it did outside. The precise ratio of
the time-flow difference was unspecified, but it included four days outside
the shield amounting to an hour and twenty minutes inside, four months
inside the shield equalling ten years outside, and, by the time The Doctor
arrived in this reality in the new year 160 - which would have been the
year 2003 if the Cleansing had not occurred -, Malahyde had only aged five
years. Maintaining a degree of contact with the world outside his house,
Malahyde occasionally hired servants and traded goods to sustain himself,
building a wall to hide the truth from the outside world and allowing his
guards to assume that he was his own son, guarding the Utopian Engine in
the hope that Watchlar would one day return.
This
continued until the year 160 - for Malahyde, five years
since the Cleansing -, when his latest servant Aboetta returned
to her village after receiving
news that her father was dying, encountering the Eighth
Doctor, Fitz Kreiner and Anji Kapoor during her journey; the
three TARDIS travellers were currently investigating recent
damage caused to the walls of reality by
their foe Sabbath ("Time
Zero") that was causing alternate universes to ‘compete’ for
the role of the ‘main’ universe, with the Cleansing reality
the currently-dominant world. Having learned about the Cleansing’s
history from a travelling priest, the five of them returned
to Malahyde’s
house, where The Doctor learned Malahyde’s version of events, only
to be left with further questions as the Utopian Engine
was clearly not the time machine Watchlar had claimed it
was, matters becoming more confusing
when an attempt to examine it sent his companion Anji through
a dimensional rift into what was later revealed to be Watchlar’s
real dimension. Travelling back to the moment when Malahyde
activated the Engine, The Doctor
attempted to stop him - aided by Isambard Kingdom Brunel,
who had coincidentally been visiting Malahyde at the time
he was about to activate the Engine
and ran into The Doctor at the door of Malahyde’s house -, but only
succeeded in turning the Engine off after the Cleansing
had taken place. Attempting to avert this timeline, The
Doctor and Brunel travelled back
to the day when Brunel and Malahyde had first met in the
hope of preventing Malahyde being used by Watchlar in the
first place, but although they were
able to rescue Malahyde’s younger self - simultaneously recovering
Anji from Watchlar’s dimension -, The Doctor returned to Earth in ‘2003’ only
to find that the Cleansing had still taken place.
Returning to Malahyde’s house, The Doctor
determined that the Utopian Engine had been intended to
accelerate some dimensions of time and divert the energy
from the resulting temporal friction into Watchlar’s
dying dimension to save his world while dooming Earth,
but The Doctor’s interference during his trip to
the past had caused the program to abort before it was
finished; while The Doctor had caused the Cleansing, he
had been able to prevent it from causing all life on Earth
to age to death. Although it appeared that it was now
impossible to restore the world that he and his companions
knew, when The Doctor linked the Utopian Engine to the
TARDIS to shut down the temporal shield around the house,
it released Watchlar from the machine and allowed him
to possess Aboetta, revealing that Watchlar had hidden
in the Utopian Engine to generate the temporal shield.
With Watchlar threatening to reactive the Utopian Engine
and complete his original work, The Doctor was forced
to use the link between the TARDIS and the Utopian Enginge
to turn time back to the moment when Watchlar had originally
contacted Malahyde, The Doctor arriving in the timeline
where he had rescued the past Malahyde from Watchlar while
the alternate Brunel died in the future to give them time
to escape. Although this feat had also erased the world
they’d witnessed in the future, The Doctor was solemnly
certain that he had taken the only action available to
him to stop Watchlar and his people from destroying Earth
completely. Precisely what happened to the Eternines is
unknown; given that The Doctor encountered no trace of
them since that encounter, it may be that their attempt
to contact Earth via Malahyde was a last-ditch effort
that deprived them of the last of their power, leaving
them without the necessary energy to attempt such a feat
again and forcing them to simply accept their now-inevitable
extinction.
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