Alan Kistler’s Profile On: DOCTOR WHO (Seventh Doctor-Part 2)

So we’ve seen what happened to him in the TV series. But what about AFTERWARDS?

This is continued from Part 1 of the SEVENTH DOCTOR PROFILE.

THE BOOK CONTINUATION

When novels were written about the first six Doctors, they were deliberately inserted into specific areas of TV continuity. But with the Seventh Doctor, since his career never finished, the book writers were allowed to do "The New Doctor Who Adventures."
The Scheming Doctor
Although the canonicity of some of these novels is in question if you consider the later audio shows and the second TV series, several of them still work. Most of the novels continued the adventures of the Doctor and Ace after “Survival.” IT began with the “Timewyrm Saga”, which lasted four books. The Doctor was gradually becoming darker and more cunning. In one scene of “Timewyrm: Revelations”, Ace entered the Doctor’s mind and saw his former incarnations (with the exception of the Sixth) acting as archetypes of his personality. The Fifth represented mercy and was imprisoned. Ace freed him and as a result, the Seventh found his old guilt and mercy returning.

The Seventh Doctor then met a woman who’d become a big part of the his life. Introduced in Paul Cornell’s "Love and War" in 1992, Bernice Surprise Summerfield (or just plain "Benny") was from the 26th century and would become one of the Doctor’s most popular companions, despite never being in the old or new TV series. Her father had been a high ranking officer of Spacefleet, like the First Doctor’s old companion Sara Kingdom, and her mother had been killed by a Dalek invasion of their homeworld Beta Carisis, an Earth colony. She was a hard-drinking, headstrong archeologist who called herself a "professor", even though it would be years before she officially achieved that title. While some companions were known to run when they saw a monster, Benny was more like Ace in that her first impulse was to grab a gun or just mouth off to the thing.
Prof. Bernice Summerfield
In the novels, we learned that there were certain beings who seemed to be incarnations of abstract concepts (the Doctor was never fully sure about their true nature). It was said by some that the Doctor was Time’s Champion, chosen by Time itself, and that this was why he was more than just a Time Lord (though it seemed it was not until his seventh incarnation that he was chosen for this role or chose to accept it full force). In the novels, starting with “Love and War”, a being that seemed to be an incarnation of Death encountered the Doctor directly, claiming him to be her enemy. In that first book, Ace had a dream in which the Seventh Doctor and Death were speaking and implied that the Doctor had given up his sixth life, deliberately piloting into the Rani’s teleportation beam and causing his own death/regeneration, as payment to Death for some deal they made.

During “Love and War”, Ace met a man named Jan. The two felt an immediate attraction to each other but the Doctor warned Ace she would only get hurt. Angry that she was being treated as a child who didn’t know better, Ace ignored this. Battles ensued and the Doctor wound up encountering the Draconians (aliens he’d met before during the TV series) and a race called the Hoothi. Jan was killed and his spirit became part of the Hoothi hive-mind. Then, the Doctor re-awakened Jan’s consciousness and manipulated it into causing the Hoothi to destroy itself. He saved the galaxy by killing the man Ace thought she could love and he’d been counting on it.

Despite his apologies and explanations, Ace stormed off, convinced the Doctor had used Jan not because there was no other way but because he was jealous the man would take Ace away from him. Feeling horribly guilty, the Doctor began to consider that he’d become too manipulative in his seventh life. He left in the TARDIS, but was not alone. Benny joined him, becoming his new companion, hoping to remind him who he was and why he fought evil. Bernice and the Seventh Doctor traveled together for several novels. In their next adventure "Transit", they met Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, the descendant of Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart. In "Deceit", Ace returned to the TARDIS after spending three years in "Spacefleet", training and fighting as a professional Dalek hunter. She found the Doctor in a state of bewilderment and amnesia. After she helped restore his memories, the Seventh Doctor revealed that he had intended to upset Ace during their last conversation so that she would leave him, knowing that in the future these events would lead to him becoming amnesiac and thatAce’s return would occur at the proper moment to resote his memories. Angered that she had been manipulated again, Ace rejoined the TARDIS crew but remained suspicious of her former mentor for many adventures.

And so it went, with the Doctor continuing his dark machinations and manipulative scheming and Ace being emphasized as more of a warrior now. In the novel "Blood Harvest", (only through Amazon UK) the Doctor and Ace went to 1930s Chicago and mingled among Al Capone and his contemporaries. Chicago mobsters quickly learned that the woman called Ace was a lady who looked like an attractive dancer but could shoot you between the eyes in a heartbeat. In that same book, Benny went into E-Space and brought Romana back to our reality. And many vampires were fought! Remember those vampires the Fourth Doctor fought in "State of Decay"? Turns out they weren’t completely dead!
Ace McShane – Dalek Hunter!
Later on, Ace revealed that she had finally manipulated the Doctor herself. Part of the reason she rejoined was because she was on a mission to get the Doctor to take her to the Lucifer system and discover the truth behind a mystery there. After the Doctor helped her with this, she still remained with the TARDIS.

In the book "Set Piece", the Doctor, Benny and Ace were sent flip-flopping through time, fighting an organic ship and once again meeting Kadiatu-Lethbridge Stewart. At the end of the adventure, Ace chose to stay in Paris 1878 to join in some fights that were happening at the time. Although sad to see her leave him, the Doctor said that he knew when Ace would leave him before she even joined his company and wished her well. She would still make a few more appearances in other New Adventure novels.

NOT QUITE HUMAN …

The Doctor continued on with Bernice for a few adventures. During "Death and Diplomacy", Benny fell in love with a knight named Guy de Carnac, but he was killed not long afterwards. The Doctor understood her grief but realized he couldn’t connect to it. Concerned he had lost touch with having sympathy for humans and the emotions they had (and perhaps terrified that he was becoming like the Time Lords), the Doctor fixed upon an interesting experiment to understand humanity. In "Human Nature", the Doctor used the TARDIS data banks to create a fictional persona of one "Dr. John Smith", an English professor of history. He then used pre-programmed nannites to alter his DNA, changing him into a human being as it stored his Time Lord bio-data into a pod. Arriving in the English village of Farringham in 1914, Dr. John Smith joined the faculty of the Hulton Academy. Bernice took on the identity of his niece.

As he turned himself into a human being, the Doctor left the following list for Benny:

Things Not To Let Me Do

1. Commit suicide, if for some reason I want to.
2. Do physical harm to anyone, if you’re aware of it.
3. Eat meat, if you can.
4. Eat pears. I hate pears, I don’t want to wake up and taste that.
5. Leave the area, or you, behind.
6. Get involved in big sociopolitical events.
7. Hurt animals, especially owls.
8. Develop an addiction.
9. Anything impossible.

The reference to not eating meat was because the 6th and 7th Doctors were vegetarians (for the most part, anyway). The 6th Doctor made this decision at the end of “The Two Doctors.”

The Doctor spent a couple of months living as the human being John Smith. Though he believed himself to be human, occasionally his alien mannerisms and alien attitudes would peek through. He also worked on a "children’s book" at night about a doctor who traveled in a magic police box. Dr. John Smith found a joy in teaching children and also grew to have romantic feelings towards his fellow teacher Joan Redfern. He even proposed marriage, giving her the same blue ring the First Doctor used to wear. Of course, trouble followed the Doctor and after over two months of peaceful existence, aliens came to Farringham. In the end, "John Smith" realized the best what to protect his friends was to "kill" himself and become this "Doctor" that Benny spoke about. In doing this, he fulfilled his contract with Death he’d made during "Love and War", that he would willing give up "a life" to her one day. The Doctor, once again a Time Lord in mind and body, left then with Benny still at his side. Though he no longer had the exact same personality as "John Smith" and wasn’t about to marry Joan, he did have the memories of his human life and what it had meant to him. Knowing her love was gone, Joan gave the Doctor her cat Wolsey as a memento. The effects of "Human Nature" would be brought up again after the Fox TV-movie came out a year later.

In “Original Sin”, the Doctor and Benny came across two Adjudicators named Roz and Chris (Adjudicators were introduced in the Third Doctor TV adventure “Colony In Space” as being interstellar law enforcement). Roz and Chris joined up with the Doctor and Benny for several novels. Roz would later die in the story “So Vile A Sin” and the Doctor was visited afterwards by Death once more, who warned him that she would come for him one day at a random moment, when he was alone and without companions and least expected an attack. This seemed to be retroactive foreshadowing of what would happen in the Fox TV-movie.

HEAD GAMES

During one adventure with Roz and Chris, the Doctor was reunited with Melanie Bush. In “Head Games”, the TARDIS crew and Melanie journeyed into the Land of Fiction, originally visited by the Second Doctor in “The Mind Robber.” During the story, Melanie discovered that when she’d left at the end of “Dragonfire”, the Seventh Doctor had used his telepathy and hypnosis to implant into her head the idea that she had to leave. The reason for this was because after accepting the role of Time’s Champion, he was going to find it difficult to do some of his manipulations and schemes with the highly moralist woman around. This was an interesting, if rather dark, way of explaining Mel’s rather abrupt departure. Ace, on the other hand, was fine to stay on as a companion during that same TV adventure becuase she was young enough that the Doctor could train and mold her into a more suitable assistant. Mel was appalled at this revelation, sickened at how different the Seventh Doctor was from the Sixth, who had been arrogant and wrathful at times but was always fair-minded and honest.

During “Head Games”, the Doctor had a dream where a being resembling his Sixth incarnation confronted him and swore vengeance. This being claimed that the Doctor had commited suicide during his sixth incarnation by deliberately flying into the Rani’s transporter beam which resulted in the crash landing that forced him to regenerate (as revealed in “Love and War”). The Seventh Doctor claimed he’d committed suicide becuase he had been afraid (either consciously or subconsciously) that the personality he’d possessed during his sixth incarnation could become corrupt and take on the traits of the Valeyard, that dark twin he had fought during his second lengthy trial. It’s also possible that the Sixth Doctor had known (either through his own means or through the deal with Death) that his next incarnation would be craftier and more manipulative and thus he forced his regeneration to happen earlier because he believed he needed such a persona to better act as Time’s Champion.

This being that resembled the Sixth Doctor and shouted accusations was not literally the sixth incarnation, nor was it meant to imply that each personality of the Doctor’s was a seperate entity living in the same mind. They are all the same person. This being was the Doctor’s own feelings of self-loathing and regret, collected and given physical form due to the energies of the land of fiction. Thus, this story does not contradict “Zagreus” where we see the Sixth Doctor’s personality still living with the others, fine and uncorrupted, in the Doctor’s subconscious.

The Seventh Doctor battled this dark creation and finally imprisoned it behind a mental barrier. Images of the Doctor’s previous incarnations (visual representations of subconscious blocks) stood guard then. Moments later, the being within shifted in appearance so that it no longer looked like the Sixth Doctor but rather like the man the Seventh Doctor recognized as the Valeyard. This being swore that it would be free from the Doctor’s mind one day and find a way to exist as a corporeal being in the real world. One day, when the Doctor was at his mental and physical weakest, it would attempt to escape its mental prison. And so, readers learned the origin of the Valeyard from “Trial of a Time Lord”, whom the Master had said was a physical incarnation of the Doctor’s dark side that had somehow emerged in a possible future when the Doctor had undergone his final regeneration.

Concerning the appearance of previous Doctors in the Doctor’s mind, we must remember it’s not literally that there are different personalities hanging out in this one place. In the audio play “Shadow of the Scourge” (starring Sylvester McCoy back in the role), the Seventh Doctor entered his own subconscious with Benny. Looking around, Benny saw the previous incarnations as seperate people who were watching them from afar. The Doctor explained that they were not seperate entities really, but more akin to Jungian archetypes, representing pieces of his mind and personality. While they seemed alive in their own way, they could not diretly influence the Doctor’s mind or actions, only observe. And although there seemed to be an entity there that was the Eighth Doctor (yet to be born), he seemed even more of a ghost than the other incarnations. The 9th-13th Doctors were not seen at all, which says to me that while the Doctor’s very next BODY may be predetermined by nature, the personality that incarnation isn’t, nor can one be certain what the Doctor will look like further down the line until another regeneration happens.

There’s another possibility of what the Doctor might have meant about ending his sixth life early. Let’s go back to the book “Spiral Scratch” by Gary Russell, featuring the last adventure of the Sixth Doctor. There, the Sixth got involved in the events that led to his death only after he was advised to do so by a future incarnation. Maybe that future incarnation was the Seventh, making a trip backwards in his own timeline to ensure his own regeneration happened, perhaps because he’d seen an alternate timeline where his sixth life lasted longer and eventually that incarnation started acting more and more like the Valeyard.

That’s the beauty of DOCTOR WHO. The possibilities.

HAPPY ENDINGS (IF BY “HAPPY” YOU MEAN “BIZARRE AND CAMPY”)

Eventually, Benny herself left the TARDIS and got married in "Happy Endings." The book celebrated the anniversary of the New Adventures series and had a HUGE list of cameos. It was a fun book, but for me went a bit too far into the realm of camp and general silliness. Ace showed up again, calling herself only Dorothee McShane now and traveling via a motorcyle that had been jury-rigged to jump through time (?!). Also, the Master tried to use the Loom of Rassilon’s Mouse to generate a new body for himself. Part of his scheme involved ruining Benny’s wedding, so he made a clone of her fiancee Jason who went to go sleep with Ace so that jealousies could arise and chaos could ensue. Oh, and the Brigadier arrived to announce he was dying and only had days left, only to be blasted with time energies at the end of the adventure which cured him and reverted him to his prime.

The book is fun. And in several points, it’s funny. But in others, it just seems really odd to me and very much like a Doctor Who parody. I don’t like the idea of a time-traveling motorcycle. The Doctor has an armored TARDIS to navigate the vortex, but Ace can do it with a helmet and leather jacket? There’s a cameo of Neil Gaiman’s version of Death from his famous SANDMAN series, which is cute but which confused me when I’d gotten used to seeing the Seventh Doctor at odds with a much darker version of Death (and yes, I’m aware there are ways to explain it, that doesn’t make it feel more right with me though). And I found the idea of the Master trying to ruin a wedding by convincing the bride her groom was cheating on her a bit … bizarre. More so when the book ended with Ace actually getting together with the clone of Jason and going back to France with him, while Benny went off to have her honeymoon with her new husband. Just odd, as it seems to me it was basically Ace’s way of telling Benny “If you weren’t around, I’d be trying to get with him.” But it’s funny and it has many fans, so to each their own.

The last book was “Lungbarrow” by Marc Platt, who took his original ideas from “Ghost Light” where was going to base the thing on Gallifrey and reveal a lot about the Doctor’s “secret past.” As stated before, the continuity of this book is nil at this point due to its major focus on Gallifreyans being asexual beings and on Susan not actually being the Doctor’s literal granddaughter, when the new TV series has stated quite plainly that the Doctor was indeed a father at one point. It was also a bit overcomplicated with continuity ties. It’s not a bad book and I enjoy Marc Platt’s writing. I just wasn’t a fan of this story and prefer the TV series confirmation of the Doctor being a sexual being even if he’s not as driven by it as humans. One thing I did enjoy was that Marc Platt revisted the idea Cartmel had had during the last few seasons of the TV series, where he intended that Ace would eventually go to Gallifrey and become a Time Lord. In “Lungbarrow”, the Doctor says this was his original intention, but then he and Ace agree that would have been wrong for her. Cute.

Virgin books wanted to continue the New Adventures series but did not have their license renewed by the BBC, they went ahead and created a spin-off series starring Bernice Summerfield instead. Those adventures will be discussed in the Doctor Who Spin-Offs Article.. But enough of the books. Let’s talk about the audio adventures.

THE RETURN OF SYLVESTER McCOY

When BIG FINISH PRODUCTIONS began doing their audio plays, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred were happy to step back into their roles as the Seventh Doctor and Ace. These new adventures not only gave fans a chance to hear the actors play their parts again, they also plugged up some holes in continuity between the last episode of the TV series and the introduction of the Eighth Doctor. Some adventures have involved Bernice Summerfield, introducing her to a wider audience of Whovians. Benny is played by Lisa Bowerman, who does a wonderful job in the role.
Lisa Bowerman as Bernice Summerfield
Some adventures starred the Seventh Doctor and Mel, such as "Unregenerate!" where mere days after beginning his seventh life, the Doctor somehow winds up in an alien scientific research lab, having seemingly lost his mind. It’s an interesting story with new insights onto how Time Lords think and operate.

In the first BIG FINISH Doctor Who audio adventure “The Sirens of Time“, the story teamed up the Seventh Doctor (nearing the end of his seventh life) with the Fifth Doctor (during a time he was with Teegan and Turlough) and the Sixth Doctor (soon after his trial, when he was alone). Each had a separate battle (Part 1-Seventh Doctor, Part 2-Fifth Doctor, Part 3-Sixth Doctor) before finally joining forces in the end as they fought to protect Gallifrey. It was a great joy for these three actors who were all friends as well as being fellow Doctors.
One Man, Three Personalities
Many of these audio adventures have been quite entertaining and interesting, in that some of seemed to show events that would lead to certain events in some of the books. In "Colditz" (taking place after the Timewyrm novels but before “Love and War”), the Doctor and Ace found themselves prisoners in a Nazi P.O.W. camp. After a harrowing adventure and escape, Ace said she wanted to be called simply McShane for a while and fans took this to be the beginning of her transformation into the warrior seen in the novels.

Some of these audios continued to show a Doctor who was manipulative, yes, but who was also beginning to realize he was too much of a pragmatic schemer at times. Like the last few episodes of the TV series, Sylvester McCoy once again brought us a character who would laugh at danger with a sarcastic quip but who would also reflect sadly on his purpose in life when given a moment’s pause. Along these lines, there was a scene in “Shadow of the Scourge” where the Seventh Doctor confronted why he was so manipulative even to his own companions.

THE SCOURGE: “In your world you are an attention-seeking child striving to gain attention. You tell everyone you are a rebel but you crave love so much that you are lost when you’re alone!”
THE DOCTOR: “And I am forever testing my companions, forcing them away from me to see if they’ll do what I always expect them to do and leave. I know that!”

In the audio adventure "The Harvest”, the Doctor and Ace picked up another companion, a young man named Thomas Hector Schofield or “Hex”, giving us yet another companion we didn’t “know” about before. Soon after they first met Hex, the Doctor discovered his new friend was actually “Tommy”, the son of the vampire Cassandra he had befriended in the audio adventures “Project: Twilight” and “Project: Lazarus” when he was in his sixth incarnation.

In the audio adventures with Hex, Ace was descibed as being a young woman rather than a girl in her late teens. In “The Settling”, Ace mentioned how the Doctor USED to be manipulative but mellowed out. She also mentioned wishing to redecorate the console in a way that evoked images of what fans saw in the Fox TV-movie (she wanted large letters displaying a destination and the like). In the Sixth Doctor audio “Thicker Than Water”, the Seventh Doctor visited his old friend Evelyn soon after he met Hex and spoke about how he’d lost several people recently, which sounds like something the Doctor would say after having Ace leave him twice and Benny leave him and having to suffer Roz’s death. So by all this evidence, we must asssume these adventures with Hex take place sometime after the Doctor has parted company with Benny in the novels. Meaning he somehow reunited with Ace later down the line (which I’m cool with since that means I don’t have to consider “Happy Endings” in continuity). Thus Hex and Ace’s final fate are mysteries to us, still stories waiting to be told.
Hex (played by Philip Olivier)
The audio shows also meant the return of classic villains. In the interesting adventure "Dalek Empire: The Genocide Machine", the Doctor and Ace had to prevent the Daleks from capturing the greatest store of knowledge in the universe. In "Dust Breeding", the Doctor and Ace found that there was something odd and terrible about Edward Munch’s painting "The Scream" and that someone else was also interested in it: The Master.

Anthony Ainley, who had played the Master through most of the TV series, ever since the villain took possession of a man from the planet Traken, did not return to the audio adventures. Sadly, he passed on in 2004. Instead, Geoffrey Beevers, who had played the corpse-like Master in the Fourth Doctor adventure "Keeper of Traken", came back to the role. He has provided incredible voice-work, showing that he truly deserved the part. In the adventure "Dust Breeding", the Master attempted to steal the painting "The Scream" due to its connection with a mental energy force known as the Warp Core. When he tried to steal it, the Warp Core attacked the Master, burning his Traken body and giving him a hideos appearance once again. This was to give the Master a fearsome visage comparable to the one he’d had when Beevers first played him on TV and also to explain away the difference in voice between Ainley and Beevers, as his vocal chords had been damaged.

Some of the audio adventures have depicted stories that take place towards the end of the Doctor’s seventh life, soon before his next regeneration. In the adventure "Excelis Decays" (starring Anthony Stewart Head as an immortal villain that the Fifth and Sixth Doctors had also fought), fans got to find out that it was here that the Doctor finally completley renovated the interior of his TARDIS, explaining its different interior when it was seen in the Fox TV-movie.
The Renovated Console Room
In this adventure, the Doctor was unable to save the lives of people he’d come to think of as allies and at the very end was forced to make a logical but tragic choice. As he left in the TARDIS, he cried out to his machine that he had no choice. He then sighed, thinking perhaps he’d been living this life of adventure for far too long.

After that, the Master appeared again in the aptly-titled audio play “Master.” Here, audiences saw that something had happened to make the Master lose his memory. Finding himself in the city of Perfugiam (apparently an Earth colony in the future), he made a new life for himself. After ten years, he was known to all townspeople as "Doctor John Smith", a horribly scarred but very kind physician who had saved many lives. But things were starting to change. He was having strange thoughts of violence and was beginning to become obsessively interested in the concept of evil.

One dark night, the Seventh Doctor came upon him. Seeing that the Master was using his old alias of "John Smith", the Doctor introduced himself as "Doctor Vaughn Sutton" (which was the alias his enemy Grayvorn had used in "Excelis Decays"). The Master found himself trusting this "stranger", feeling as if he’d known this man all his life. The Master asked if all criminals and villains necessarily needed a motive to commit their crimes. The Doctor said "someone once told me that exposure to evil, even the smallest amount, can corrode the soul." This was a reference to the Fifth Doctor’s audio adventure "Primeval" where he’d been told as much by the people of ancient Traken and had responded that evil was relative, since villains had reasons that made sense to them. But then he added to this.

THE DOCTOR: "There was ONE man. [He had no motive] that can be explained … He was a terrible man, responsible for the deaths of a countless number. I used to try and dismiss him as a madman or as … as a monster …"
THE MASTER: "It’s far more comfortable to point a finger and declare someone a devil than to call upon your imagination to try and understand their world. Because your imagination is a reflection of yourself."
THE DOCTOR: "Ah, yes. So, by admitting you understand them then you must be acknowledging a similarity between yourself and the monster."
THE MASTER: "Exactly. But, what if it’s true? What if, say, the man that you’re talking about IS purely evil? What if no amount of analysis or trying to understand would explain WHY he did what he did?"
THE DOCTOR: "He was an old friend of mine. Then, an old foe. He used to call himself the Master."

The two continued speaking on the nature of evil and insanity. The Master then spoke of the strange thoughts he was having that were murderous and evil and yet felt familiar. He wondered if these were clues to his former life and then he further wondered if perhaps his new friend was not actually a very old friend he couldn’t remember. Eventually, the truth came out that "Dr. Sutton" knew who the Master was. Rather than tell him outright, the Seventh Doctor told this story to the Master and to the villain’s two friends Victor Schaeffer (an Adjudicator) and his wife Jacqueline (a social worker).

THE STORY OF THE DOCTOR AND THE MASTER AS CHILDREN

"… Two young boys growing up together … Their world was one of rules, a stuffy class-ridden society … They would run away from their classes, run free through fields and forests. Often, as they tired of running, they would sit by the river and stare up at the stars. They would talk of how one day they would be truly free and how they would wander the stars and see the universe. They were united in their yearnings to escape and be free. They were, however, also united in their suffering at the hands of another.

"Another boy would torment and bully them for he saw them as simply ants. One day, the ants revolted. They’d been playing on the banks of the river Lethy when Torvic, for that was the bully’s name, appeared. He wasn’t evil. He was just another naughty young child trying to break the rules. He found the two boys sat by the river. Without warning, he jumped. He pulled one of them down to the water, grabbed his head and pushed it down into the flowing stream. The child struggled, struggled vainly as the water went up his nose and down his throat. Torvic wasn’t going to drown him, he was merely doing what bullies do … seeking control …

"This is where it all began. Usually when Torvic tormented one of them, the other would sit and wait, helpless. But this time, this time something awoke in the other child. Blind fury and anger. Sick with anger. He charged at Torvic, stopping only to pick up a large stone … Torvic never stood a chance …

"The murderer pulled his friend from the water and they stood there in silence, watched as the blood flowed from Torvic’s shattered skull, watched as the blood flowed into the stream, watched unable to comprehend what one of them had done. The other boy, being of a sounder mind, realized immediately what punishment they would face … One of them had taken a life! They knew that if they were caught they would never realize their hopes for freedom. They would never see the universe.

"They pulled Torvic’s body from the river. They pulled him onto dry land, they covered his body in branches from the trees then together as one they set the funeral pyre alight. And together holding hands they watched as his body burned. They watched as Torvic’s skin bubbled and burned and became smoke. They watched as they sent him back to nature.

"They were never caught. They returned to their homes as if nothing had happened and as the years went by, the boys grew up and apart. They never once spoke again of that dreadful day. Years later, one of them left their home (for reasons too complicated to go into) and he became known as the Doctor. He traveled the universe, always with friends, doing good wherever he could, perhaps in some small way to try and make up for what he had done that day. The other, the one who had smashed Torvic’s head into a bloody pulp, became distant as the guilt and hatred ate away at him, gnawing at his soul. He too left their home. He too traveled the universe, but always alone, doing whatever he could to survive. But something was growing inside of him. Evil. Wherever he traveled, so he brought death. No motives, no reasons. He was the Master … His ridiculous schemes and plans. His plans to control the universe. He had no motive, there was no reason. There was only one certainty with the Master. And that was that he would bring death. He was beyond all doubt evil. … Worlds destroyed and families devastated … Millions had died at his hands. His once accomplice, his oldest friend the Doctor, became his oldest foe."

Eventually, the incarnation of Death appeared, revealing that she had taken away the Master’s memories for the past ten years as part of another deal she’d made with the Doctor. The deal was that for ten years the Master could live a normal human life just as the Doctor had once lived one for months as the history teacher "John Smith" in the book "Human Nature." He believed that his old friend deserved a chance to see that he was not born evil and could be a good man if given the chance. In return for this though, the Doctor was supposed to kill the Master at the end of the ten years. The Doctor refused to do this, especially when he saw that the Master had fallen in love. The Master was glad to have his old friend back, despite the manipulations.

THE MASTER: "How many times over the years could you have killed me?"
THE DOCTOR: "I don’t know … Many times …"
THE MASTER: "Yet you neved did … You made the deal with Death. You gave me ten years of LIFE, Doctor … None of us are perfect, Doctor. In life, none of us are good or evil … Think we would have stayed friends if not for Death?"
THE DOCTOR (sad, soft voice): "I can’t think of anyone else I would rather be friends with than you …"

But Death would not be defeated and so she restored the Master’s memories. The Master was enfuriated, saying that the Doctor had tried to nueter him and shackle him with a limited definition of morality. When Death appeared pleased, the Master snarled, "Be silent, woman!" He then refuted any claims that he was "Death’s Champion" just as some said the Doctor was "Time’s Champion", for he served no one. The whole point of his existence was to gain power over all others, to gain control over the unknown and the forbidden. He was the Master, not a servant of Death or anyone else!

What happened in the end is something you should find out for yourself when you listen to this audio. Suffice it to say that the Master got away, naturally, ready to return again when the Doctor least wished it or expected it.

But before Death parted company with the Doctor, she told her own story. As she claimed it, the Gallifreyan boy Torvic had been killed by was the Doctor, not the Master. The Doctor would have become corrupted by the guilt and memory of this, becoming Death’s servant, but "others" had plans for him. And so Death visited the boy in a dream, saying that if he wanted to avoid being Death’s servant, all he had to do was ask and his guilt and memory of the act would be transferred to the best friend he had saved, reversing their fates. She said the boy agreed and thus that boy became the Doctor while the other he had saved, the one who now believed HE had been the killer, eventually became the Master. Death has been known to be deceptive, so it’s not definite that this is the truth. The Doctor himself isn’t sure. But what horrified him was the feeling that it COULD be the truth, that he might have forced his old friend to become a horrible mass murderer in his place. As a strange end-note, Death also remarked that the Seventh Doctor had lost his old whimsy. "You don’t do that anymore, do you, Doctor? Don’t play your spoons. Don’t mix your metaphors. Don’t have fun. Too busy destroying planets, tidying up your previous mistakes." This was pretty true.

At the end of the adventure, the Doctor had much to think about, knowing that Death was going to be directly after him now that he’d cheated on a deal he’d made with her yet again (the first time being when he got out of sacrificing one of his lives in exchange for Ace). He also made a quiet promise to himself that one day he would help his old friend become a good man again.

For the Seventh Doctor, this audio adventure is a perfect end-note, I think, and provides an excellent leaping point into the beginning of the Eighth Doctor. And before some of you ask, I will be discussing the audio adventure “Death Comes to Time” in the DOCTOR WHO SPIN-OFFS piece.

PASSING ON THE TORCH

1996. Fox got the rights to DOCTOR WHO and hoped that the TV-movie would get enough interest to act as a pilot for a new series. I’ll explain the story in greater detail within the Eighth Doctor Profile, but here’s what happened in the beginning that concerned the Seventh Doctor.
“Nearing the end of my seventh life …”
Many years after the television show had ended, the Seventh Doctor was now traveling alone in a severely redecorated TARDIS. He had visibly aged by some years and the narration informed us he was nearing the end of his seventh life. He seemed a calmer man now, content to eat a few jelly babies while reading a copy of H.G. Wells "Time Machine" (he’d actually shared an adventure with Wells in his sixth life and several of the author’s other novels had been referenced during the old TV series).

We found out that the Master had recently been executed by the Daleks (why this happened wasn’t revealed). Before his death, he’d asked the Doctor to take his remains back to Gallifrey. The Seventh Doctor agreed to do so, but had known the Master to cheat death before. So, he locked the Master’s remains (contained within a small urn) into a locked box. The Doctor’s suspicions were correct, though his precautions were not enough. The Master had found a way to survive even though most of his body had been destroyed. His remains transformed into an oozing creature of slime that sabotaged the TARDIS, forcing it to land in San Francisco, 1999, the night before New Year’s Eve. Unfortunately, he arrived in the middle of a shoot-out between rival street gangs. On exiting the TARDIS, one of the gangs assumed he was either an enemy or a potential eye-witness. They shot him down before he could react.

A member of the other gang, Chang Lee, looked over the Doctor, feeling guilty that the old man had been caught in the crossfire. The Seventh Doctor saw the Master’s slime-form oozing out of the TARDIS and tried to warn the young gang member about the danger, but passed out. He was taken to the hospital and doctors removed the bullets. Not understanding that their patient had two hearts (they assumed there was something wrong with their X-ray machine), the surgeons believed that the rapid heartbeat was a form of fibrillation that would be fatal if not attended to at once.

Dr. Grace Halloway was called in to surgery. The Doctor woke up and tried to warn Grace that he wasn’t human and that their attempts to help him might in fact harm him. Thinking the man was panicking, the surgeons increased the anethstetic gas. The Doctor proved far more resistant to this than a normal human, shouting, "Timing malfunction! The Master! He’s out there! … He’s out there …"

Finally, he succumbed to the gas. Dr. Grace Halloway inserted a camera into his chest to take a look at his heart. Since the Doctor had two, she got lost and accidentally caused the camera to damage his internal organs, causing him to die on the table. The Doctor was dead. Due to the high amount of anesthetic involved, the Doctor did not regenerate into his eighth incarnation until a couple hours later when he was already in the morgue. And when he emerged, his brain was more rattled than it had ever been before after a regeneration, as he had almost no clue who or what he was, only that he had two hearts, thirteen lives and had heard Puccini’s "Madame Butterfly" when he last died (Grace had played it during the surgery).

In “So Vile A Sin”, Death had promised the Doctor he would die unexpectedly, when he was alone and had no companions to help him. She reminded the Doctor that she was after him in “Master.” Now it had happened. Alone in an alleyway, he’d been shot down, only to die on an operating table. Had Death been responsible for this, out of revenge for the Doctor not fulfilling his contract when he was supposed to kill the Master? It could explain whe she never appeared to him again in his subsequent lives. Whatever the case, it was done. The Seventh Doctor was gone. The Eighth Doctor was on his way.

Sylvester McCoy hands over the TARDIS key to his friend Paul McGann

Though Sylvester McCoy was sad to only be in the DOCTOR WHO movie (often called "The Enemy Within") for a few minutes, feeling he was now quite comfortable in the role, he has been glad to continue doing voice work for the Seventh Doctor in the BIG FINISH audio plays. The plays are ongoing and you should all check them out. In the audio play “Zagreus“, it was revealed that the past personalities of “dead” Doctors continue to live on in the subconsciousness of the new incarnation. When it seemed that the Eighth Doctor was dead, the Sixth and Seventh both amused fans by saying it was a better and more heroic death than they had each had. The Seventh Doctor thought about his own death and muttered, “Didn’t see THAT coming, did I?”, which personally made he chuckle.

And so we end this piece with some quotes illustrating the Seventh Doctor’s personality.

SEVENTH DOCTOR: “You can always judge a man by the quality of his enemies.”

SEVENTH DOCTOR: “Your species has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by it’s ingenuity when trying to destroy itself.”

SEVENTH DOCTOR: “Typical human, you can always count on them to mess things up.”

SEVENTH DOCTOR: “Weapons. Always useless in the end.”

SEVENTH DOCTOR: “I can hear the sound of empires toppling.”

SEVENTH DOCTOR: “This may qualify as the worst miscalculation since life crawled out of the seas on this sad planet!”

SEVENTH DOCTOR: “Anybody remotely interesting is mad in some way.”

SEVENTH DOCTOR: “Among all the varied wonders of the universe, there’s nothing so firmly clapped shut as the military mind.”

SEVENTH DOCTOR: “I hate burnt toast. I loathe bus stations. Terrible places. Full of lost luggage and lost souls.”

GWENDOLYNE: "I think Mr. Matthews is confused."
SEVENTH DOCTOR: "Never mind, I’ll have him completely bewildered by the time I’m finished."

REV. MATTHEWS: "Now, sir –
SEVENTH DOCTOR: "Yes, let me guess. My theories abhor you, my heresies outrage you, I never answer letters and you don’t like my tie!"

SEVENTH DOCTOR: "A man who kills because of motives can be questioned. A man who kills because he is ill can be certainly helped. A man who kills because … well, because he was born, fated even, to be evil … Well, that is a true tragedy in itself."

SEVENTH DOCTOR: “No matter what people have done, never ever wish them dead. We are NOT vigilantes.”

SEVENTH DOCTOR (growling): “Believe me when I say, I’m not as forgiving as my LAST incarnation!”

SEVENTH DOCTOR: “I am not scared. You see, I set myself up as a slayer of monsters, someone who battles with demons. And to do that, one needs a certain authority. What gives me the right to walk into all of this and juggle with the fates of planets? Who gives me permission to stand up? … My friends do … I’m the Doctor … I am what monsters like you are afraid of. So tell me … are you getting scared yet?”

That’s it. Now join us for THE EIGHTH DOCTOR.

Alan Kistler is a New Yorker in his mid-twenties who has been labeled a "continuity cop" and "comic book historian" in articles of Wikipedia.org and by several of his readers. He enjoys both those titles very much and loves the opportunity of writing these articles for Monitor Duty, run by the ever-patient Michael Hutchison. His fan-fiction blog can be found HERE. He would love to write for DC and Marvel some day (and possibly do a Doctor Who novel). He also wants to time travel.

Other articles by Alan Kistler, including various other Profiles posted on Monitor Duty, can be found HERE.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...