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Alien Bodies
(Lawrence
Miles) |
|
 Name: Faction Paradox
Format:
Book.
Time of Origin: Earth, 3rd - 14th September
1752.
Appearances: "Alien
Bodies", "Unnatural
History", "Interference
Book One", "Interference
Book Two" and "The
Ancestor Cell".
Doctors: Third
Doctor, Eighth
Doctor and possibly the Fourth
Doctor.
Companions:
Sarah
Jane Smith,
Samantha
Jones,
Fitz Kreiner,
Compassion and 3rd
Romana.
History: Faction Paradox has a long and rather
complicated history with The Doctor, beginning allegedly
before they ever met
him while being simultaneously apparently dependent on him
for them to be created in the first place. The Faction is
a cult of time-travelling voodooists that worship time paradoxes
- essentially dedicating themselves to changing their own
histories - that apparently seceded from the House of Lungbarrow
(The Doctor’s own House back on Gallifrey ("Lungbarrow"))
some centuries ago, their adoption of the title ‘Grandfather’ for
the head of House being intended to mock the Time Lords
as much as their perversion of Time due to Time Lord sterility;
they even displayed a recurring death fetishism to reflect
their mockery to Time Lords’ pretensions to immortality.
Due to their constant boundary pushing, such as recruiting
members from ‘lesser species’, House Paradox
was stripped of their rights as a House and reformed as
the Faction. After the Time Lords annihilated the Faction’s
homeworld after learning about the Faction’s peddling
of time travel technology - despite the Faction’s
belief that their blood rites would protect them -, the
Faction was reduced to various small groups, continuing
to share advanced technology with the natives of various
colonies while building up smaller cults throughout the
universe. Around this time, the Grandfather managed to found
the Eleven-Day Empire - situated in the eleven days that
were lost from the calendar in September 1752, when England
changed from the Julian calendar system to the Georgian
one; essentially, since everyone felt they were ‘losing’ those
eleven days, the Faction were perfectly willing to step
in and claim them for themselves -, but he was arrested
and apparently imprisoned on Shada before House Paradox
Loomed its first generation. They stand for everything that
the Time Lords are against, so it's no surprise that The
Doctor has battled them.
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Unnatural History
(Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman) |
|
Their first appearance in Doctor
Who took place in the book "Alien
Bodies", where the Eighth
Doctor and Sam arrived at
the auction of the Relic, regarded by those powers attending
the auction -
including the Krotons and
Time Lords from the future - as potentially be the greatest
weapon imaginable if its unique
biodata codes are unleashed properly. As The Doctor discovered,
however, The Relic was none other than the body of a certain
individual with a very colourful reputation; it was the
body of The Doctor’s own thirteenth incarnation, killed
on the planet Drornid in the first major battle of the Future
War between the Time Lords and an as-yet-unknown Enemy,
which then crashed onto Earth and remained hidden until
it was found by a man named Qixotl and taken to the auction.
Despite the best efforts of the Faction, The Doctor tricked
the Celestis - Time Lords who literally ‘cut’ themselves
out of Time to escape the War, who wanted the Relic since
The Doctor promised his body to them in the future - into
thinking that the Relic is a temporal paradox by making
them think they had marked him as their agent - something
that they only did for the ‘first’ time when
they met his thirteenth incarnation - when actually they
had marked a being he held in his mind, allowing him to
bury his future self and then destroy the corpse to prevent
it from falling into the wrong hands. During that adventure,
however, The Doctor discovered that the Sam he knew was
not the original Sam Jones, but a different Sam, the other
Sam having dark hair and seeming more ‘real’ than
the other one. This left him with a dilemma - was Sam created
by someone else, or did The Doctor unconsciously reach back
along her timeline and alter it to give himself a companion?
This
question was later resolved in "Unnatural
History", when the Eighth Doctor, Sam, and new companion Fitz Kreiner arrived in San Francisco
after the events of The Doctor's last regeneration. After
preventing Earth's destruction when the Eye of Harmony was
opened by The Master,
The Doctor left without checking that reality had stabilised
out, and the damage has
become critical in 2002, creating a reality scar in the
alley where the
TARDIS had
originally materialised, the scar not only trapping Sam
and the TARDIS - while simultaneously ‘summoning’ the dark-haired
Sam that The Doctor and Sam had been having ‘visions’ of into
existence -, but also has pulled in and trapped several
creatures from the higher dimensions in our reality. While
trying to stabilise the scar
before time ran out, The Doctor determined that a naturalist
from the higher dimensions was experimenting with his biodata,
traces of which were now
spread throughout the city as a result of the scar. Although
The Doctor was able to recover the TARDIS, the scar remained,
leaving dark Sam with
no other option but to enter the scar herself when The Doctor
was in danger and she herself had no idea how to help him,
subsequently merging with
The Doctor’s biodata and turning into blonde Sam in order to restore
a companion who knew how to help The Doctor. In essence,
blonde Sam’s
entire existence was a paradox; blonde Sam was created when
dark Sam threw herself in amongst The Doctor’s biodata in the scar,
but she was only able to do so because The Doctor brought
her to the scar he’d
created, and he only brought her there because he’d already met blonde
Sam. As The Doctor departed, he realised that not only was
Sam going to leave soon, but also, like the agents of the
Faction, as a result of the
paradox he had just created, he now had no shadow…
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Interference Book One
(Lawrence
Miles) |
|
In the later novel, "Interference", The Doctor,
Fitz and Sam were summoned to Earth in an attempt to prevent the Faction
acquiring an ancient evil called the Cold that was sealed away by Rassilon.
In the process, Fitz and Sam were captured by the Faction group known as
the Remote, a group of Faction followers who based their decisions around
the signals they received from local media transmissions, as well as ‘replacing’ their
old members by reconstituting them via raw biomass based on the memories
the other members possess of the original person. While Sam was used to
provide the Remote with a greater understanding of human morality, Fitz
was abducted to a colony in the distant past and made a member of the Remote,
eventually resigning himself to his life in the Faction after it was made
clear that The Doctor wouldn’t rescue him. The original Fitz eventually
rose to become a Father among the Faction, but The Doctor met up with a
copy of Fitz created by the Remote, which he managed to make into the equivalent
of the real thing with the aid of the TARDIS’s recollection of Fitz
- believing that the original Fitz was dead, The Doctor reasoned that a
man was the sum of his memories and the ‘clone’ would still
be the real Fitz in every way that mattered - and acquire a new companion
to replace Sam - Compassion,, an ex-member of the Remote. The Cold itself
wasn't easy to stop; the Faction worshipped it as a spirit, but it was
actually a validium-based weapon created by Rassilon long ago that would
destroy the Earth. Not understanding what the Cold truly was, regarding
it as simply one of the loa spirits that were worshipped by the Faction,
the Remote had released fragments of the Cold in an attempt to change history
and prompt the Time Lords to investigate, allowing the Remote to acquire
a TARDIS and unleash the Cold. With Sam's help - as she had spent time
with the Remote and thus understood how to transmit signals they would
understand - The Doctor stopped the Cold by persuading the Remote of the
dangers if it was awakened, subsequently departing with Fitz and Compassion.
For a time, he was left pondering the worth of any of his actions if Faction
Paradox were able to influence his past, but eventually recognised that
he still had free will whatever the Faction did to his timeline, unaware
that they had already made a significant change to his history, partly
because of his own actions.
While
The Doctor had been briefly imprisoned during his investigation
into the Cold, he had begun to write out temporal equations
in his own blood to
try and work out a means of allowing Sam to have a life
after leaving him (Given that she had been created to be
his companion, The Doctor was anxious
about how Sam would exist after she stopped travelling with
him). Whether it was due to the Faction’s manipulation or an error
in the Eighth Doctor’s calculations, he unintentionally created a
door to his TARDIS during the Third
Doctor’s era, accidentally altering his own timeline
by alerting the Third Doctor to the Faction's existence,
as it didn't happen until his fourth incarnation. The Third
Doctor then landed on the dead
planet Dust, which was as far into space as humanity got
before it gave up, where he met up with a man named I.M.
Foreman who ran a travelling
caravan that had arrived out of nowhere. While speaking
with Foreman, The Doctor and Sarah
Jane Smith learned that
Foreman was a priest from Old
Gallifrey, who travelled the Universe in a travelling show
intended to encourage the universe to think about their
full genetic potential from
the range of forms of the people who inhabit it. The show
took on various forms that it prepared before it lands,
one such form being the junkyard
where the First
Doctor and Susan had
originally materialised in their first visit on Earth ("An
Unearthly Child"), shed by Foreman’s
ship when it moved on to its next location. The other twelve
members of the show, as it is revealed, are actually all
of Foreman's future incarnations,
whom he found while wandering Old Gallifrey. Due to the
relatively primitive nature of regeneration at his time,
the DNA of anything a Time Lord ate
or came in contact with could get caught in the regeneration
process, which resulted in his future selves mutating to
various extremes. Although his
first four are relatively normal, his fifth incarnation
has begun to become part lizard, his eighth has machine
parts, and his ninth even has wings.
His eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth incarnations were the
most different of them all - the eleventh, known as the
If, literally breathes raw time
to show people pasts, presents and possible futures, the
twelfth, AKA, constantly shifts forms, and the thirteenth,
known as Number Thirteen,
is simply a raw force of nature that wants to be everyone,
even if it requires Number Thirteen to devour everything
to accomplish that goal.
To stop Number Thirteen and Faction Paradox
- who sought to claim both the travelling show and the TARDIS for themselves
after being drawn there by a Faction agent, this group of the faction led
by the ‘original’ Fitz Krienier, now over two thousand years
old and near-insane with rage at The Doctor - The Doctor and I.M. Foreman
unleashed Number Thirteen on the Faction. With Number Thirteen released,
The Doctor then sent the first twelve incarnations of I.M. Foreman back
to Old Gallifrey in I.M. Foreman’s show to resolve the last paradox,
their subsequent crash on the planet causing all of his incarnations to
regenerate into the next one while losing their memories due to the trauma
of the incident. That paradox resolved, The Doctor subsequently convinced
Number Thirteen to merge itself with Dust's biosphere to continue Foreman’s
goal of expanding his potential, transforming Dust into
a new, vibrant world. However, just as he was about to leave, a villager
who blamed The
Doctor for bringing the Faction to Dust shot him in the
chest. As Sarah Jane Smith dragged him back to the TARDIS, the Third Doctor began to regenerate,
only briefly aware that there was something fundamentally wrong about this
regeneration before he died for good. However, the new regeneration posed
more problems than an altered history. The Faction, trying to set up a
homeworld for themselves, had launched a biodata pod that had been intended
to target one of I.M. Foreman's incarnations and infect them at their regeneration,
resulting in the newly-created ‘Foreman’s World’ - knowing
that Foreman’s mentality would culminate in his final transformation
- becoming the Faction’s homeworld, only for their plans to fall
apart when the virus actually infected the Third Doctor, subsequently gaining
access to his body when his immune system was ‘occupied’ with
his regeneration. Although his immune systems would fight off the infection,
and at the least the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Doctor's would be the same
as before, either the Seventh or the Eighth Doctor would eventually succumb
to the virus, and become one of the Faction.
 |
The Ancestor Cell
(Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole) |
|
This storyline came to a head
when the Eighth Doctor, Fitz and Compassion were attacked
by the Time Lords in "The
Ancestor Cell", and became separated after Compassion
was trapped on a bone-like structure and The Doctor and
Fitz were pulled away by outside sources. Fitz was trapped
with a rouge member of the Faction who summoned Father
Krienier, the original Fitz, trapped in the Vortex ever
since he battled the Third Doctor on Dust. The Doctor,
meanwhile, arrived on Gallifrey, and was forced to investigate
a mysterious structure made, like the Faction's ships,
entirely of bone, shaped like the Gallifreyan Flower of
Remembrance - a symbol of death - at least the same size
as Gallifrey itself, and referred to as the Edifice. Once
on board, The Doctor discovered several giant bone spiders,
and a dust-mote version of the Third Doctor, and realizied
that the Edifice was actually his old TARDIS, thought
destroyed in "The
Shadows of Avalon", which
had grown to that size and developed that structure by
trying to save The Doctor from the infection. Recognising
that the Third Doctor’s regeneration on Dust had
not been meant to happen, the TARDIS had attempted to
save The Doctor by taking the infection onto itself, despite
this meaning it now held two different time lines at once,
along with the 'ghost' of the Third Doctor from the original
timeline, holding on even after its destruction after
being caught in a temporal rift. However, to do so it
had leeched off the energies of the ancestor cells, the
cells that created all life, which were already angry
with the Time Lords for disturbing them by time travel,
and the cells were ready to launch an attack on Gallifrey.
The cells were the Enemy mentioned in "Alien Bodies", "Interference",
and "The
Taking of Planet 5", and The Doctor
has started the War. Even worse, the Faction - now having
progressed from a group of individualists dedicated to
breaking the laws of time to become dedicated to chaos
and destruction in general (Later information revealed
that the Faction involved in the invasion were from the
future, explaining their progression from death fetishists
to actual killers and their greater power) - had acquired
control of the Matrix, resulting in their God, Grandfather
Paradox, manifesting from mere concept into reality...
and the reality of the Grandfather was that he was the
future version of the Eighth Doctor - albeit bald and
with no right arm, described by Fitz as The Doctor ‘if
he spent twenty years in the navy before becoming a psycho’ -
that would result from the Faction biodata virus infection,
the future Doctor actually creating the Faction himself.
Even
in this dark moment as the Faction took control of Gallifrey,
with their virus progressing through the
Eighth Doctor’s systems, the TARDIS’s sacrifice
gave The Doctor a final trump card. The Edifice had grown
to that size by making its exterior the same size as its
interior, and when The Doctor removed a dimensional stabiliser,
all it would take was one action to drain off all the
energy holding the Edifice together - specifically, firing
the Edifice's ancient War-TARDIS weapon systems. With
no energy, the Edifice will be unable to contain both
timelines, and collapse, meaning that just one timeline
would continue to exist - either The Doctor would stay
The Doctor, or he would become the Grandfather. Even with
the knowledge that the weapons blast would destroy not
only the Faction's fleet, but also Gallifrey, The Doctor
fired the weapons despite the Grandfather’s horror,
reasoning that it would be better to destroy the Time
Lords now rather than allow them to fight a war that would
dehumanise them to the point of becoming monsters that
all evidence suggested they couldn’t win anyway.
Although the Edifice ‘jumped’ his way, eliminating
the Faction’s presence from history, the TARDIS
was left having shrunk down to a featureless box about
an inch big, while The Doctor was left catatonic and his
memory completely erased, apparently due to the trauma
of what he had done. Having rescued the two of them before
Gallifrey was destroyed, Compassion left The Doctor on
Earth in 1889 to allow him and the TARDIS to recuperate,
subsequently taking Fitz to 2001 to meet The Doctor when
he was well enough to travel once again before leaving
to make her own path in the universe. The Doctor has since
recovered, learning that his memories were lost as a result
of him transferring the contents of the Matrix into his
subconscious mind in the few minutes between him firing
the weapons and Gallifrey’s destruction (The Matrix
having been purged of the Faction’s infection after
The Doctor erased them from existence). What happened
after this is unknown; the most likely explanation is
that The Doctor downloaded the contents of the Matrix
into an unknown location before restoring his own memories
and regenerating into his ninth incarnation under unknown
circumstances.
(It is uncertain how the destruction of
Gallifrey as a result of the Faction’s attack can be reconciled
with the existence of the Time War against the Daleks revealed by the Ninth
Doctor following his debut. The
most likely theory is that, since the Faction were erased
from history when The Doctor prevented Grandfather Paradox
from coming into existence, history had to’ insert’ someone
else into the timeline to take their place, and the Daleks
were the only candidates. As a result, it was the Daleks
who attacked Gallifrey, and The Doctor was forced to trigger
Gallifrey's destruction in order to destroy the Dalek
fleet before they could conquer time - and, of course,
having figured out some way to restore his memories safely,
the memory of the new timeline overwrote his memory of
the timeline with Faction Paradox, becoming even more
ingrained into his mind after his regeneration).
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