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Sutekh
(Pyramids of Mars) |
|
 Name: The Osirans; The Doctor has battled Sutekh,
Nephthys, and Sekhmet
Format:
Television show, Book and Audio.
Time of Origin: Phæster Osiris;
a prominent power in the universe centuries in the past, the Osirans
were virtually extinct by the twentieth century; The Doctor facing
the remnants of the Osiran race on Earth in 1911 and 1992 on Earth,
and on Peladon at an unspecified date in the future.
Appearances: "Pyramids
of Mars", "The
Sands of Time", and "The
Bride of Peladon"
Doctors: Fourth
Doctor and Fifth
Doctor
Companions: Sarah
Jane Smith, Nyssa, Tegan
Jovanka,
Peri Brown and Erimem
History: An ancient race, the Osirans were one
of the most powerful beings ever to evolve, possessing phenomenal
psychic powers and an exceptionally long life span measuring thousands
of years even without technological assistance. Some of their technology
depended on magnetic monopoles, which only work outside the influence
of a bipolar magnetic field, resulting in Mars being the only place
in the Solar System where some of their equipment would work. They
were even capable of time travel, although this was only in the form
of time corridors which essentially allowed the person to travel
from one point in time to another while nevertheless aging the amount
of time they had travelled - for example, a trip seventy years into
the future using Osiran time corridors would age the user seventy
years without them actually experiencing that time consciously -,
although the Osiran life span meant that this was less of an issue
than it would be for other races.
Centuries
in the past, the Osiran renegades Sutekh and Nephthys mounted a destructive
campaign across the universe, having come to regard life itself as
their enemy before they were defeated on Earth by Sutekh’s
brother Horus, leading his army of 740 Osirans. However, Horus decided
that, instead of killing them, he would imprison them with the means
of their escape just out of reach, forever taunting them with their
inability to be truly free. To this end, he imprisoned Sutekh in
a tomb on Earth while leaving the prison’s power source - a
gem known as the Eye of Horus - in the pyramids of Mars, the Eye
keeping Sutekh immobilised in the tomb while also making it impossible
for him to easily recruit a minion to destroy the Eye. Nephthys,
on the other hand, was separated from her body and her mind subsequently
divided into two parts, her intellect and reasoning being contained
in a canopic jar while her instinct and intuition were trapped in
an unsullied human mind, in the form of the daughter of Horus’s
High Priest Rassul, Rassul being granted immortality so that he could
forever guard Nephthys.
The Doctor first encountered the Osirans in
his fourth incarnation, when he and Sarah
Jane Smith were drawn off-course
while returning to UNIT in the 1970s, arriving instead in
1911 in the priory that would eventually be replaced by UNIT
HQ in the future. Investigating
the reason for their unwilling diversion, The Doctor discovered
an Osiran lodestone present in the mansion, subsequently
discovering that the priory
owner, Professor Scarman, had recently picked up a transmission
on his early radio telescope which The Doctor determined
meant ‘Beware
Sutekh’. Recognising Sutekh’s name from history, The
Doctor realised that Sutekh’s tomb had been unearthed by Scarman’s
brother Marcus’s recent expedition to Egypt, giving Sutekh a minion
that he could use to escape after he killed Marcus and reanimated
his body with his power. Although The Doctor was able to
thwart ‘Marcus’s’ efforts
to create a basic rocket that could be fired at the Eye’s location
on Mars by destroying the rocket using explosives stored
at the priory, he was forced to go directly to Sutekh to
distract him from using his
mental powers to contain the explosion. Despite the loss
of the rocket, The Doctor’s presence in his tomb allowed Sutekh
to temporarily take control of The Doctor’s mind, using the Time
Lord to take his minions directly to Mars in the TARDIS so
that they could destroy
the Eye in person.
Although
The Doctor was able to escape Sutekh’s control after faking his
death with the aid of his respiratory bypass system - thus prompting
Sutekh’s minions to leave him behind while they entered the temple
where the Eye was located -, The Doctor and Sarah were unable to catch
up with ‘Marcus’ in time to stop him from destroying the
Eye and freeing Sutekh. At the last minute, The Doctor realised that
he still had one chance to stop Sutekh; due to the two-minute time-lag
of any radio transmissions between Earth and Mars - meaning that the
Eye of Horus would technically still be holding Sutekh for two minutes
after it was broken as the signals had been broadcast before it had been
shattered and had yet to reach his prison -, he and Sarah had enough
time left to them to return to the priory and reprogram Sutekh’s
time corridor using the time control from the TARDIS, extending the time
corridor Sutekh was using to depart his prison into the far future before
he could use it to reach Earth. Although Sutekh pleaded with The Doctor
to release him, offering to spare Earth and give it to The Doctor as
a plaything, The Doctor coldly rejected his offer, saying that the time
of the Osirans was long past, simply watching as Sutekh was forced to
the end of the corridor, literally aging to death as it sent him so far
into the future that he could never reach the end.
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The Sands of Time
(Justin Richards) |
|
Although Sutekh was dead, his legacy returned to torment
the Fifth
Doctor when The Doctor found himself pitted against Sutekh’s
old partner Nephthys when her followers sought to turn his companion Nyssa -
abducted from the British Museum in 1926 and sent back in time
via an Osiran lodestone sarcophagus - into Nephthys’s
host after the jar that had been used to contain her essence was
cracked. Taking advantage of Rassul’s resentment of Horus for
taking away his daughter, Nephthys was able to win him to her service,
Rassul selecting Nyssa as Nephthys’s new ‘prison’ as
she would be easier for Nephthys to escape. Placing Nyssa in a deep
metabolic coma, allowing her to remain unconscious for over four
thousand years without physically aging, she was subsequently left
in a tomb until The Doctor was able to arrange for an expedition
to Egypt to discover Nyssa’s bound body and take it back
to Britain for an unwrapping ceremony in 1926 which he and Tegan
Jovanka would
attend just after Nyssa’s original abduction. Despite The Doctor’s
best efforts, his attempts to awaken Nyssa were only able to prompt
her to wake up seventy years later due to the length of time required
for her metabolism to get back up to speed... and he only realised
afterwards that this was part of Nephthys’s plan to restore
herself. With Rassul having manipulated a geneticist to clone his
daughter and provide Nephthys’s instinctive side with a new,
fresh host, he hoped that the restoration of Nephthys’s mind
when Nyssa fully awakened would allow his daughter’s mind
to be restored as well, unconcerned about the damage Nephthys would
do when she was restored.
With the aid of Lady Ann Cranleigh - Nyssa’s exact
physical double ("Black
Orchid") -, The Doctor was able
to stop Nepythys by replacing the still-sleeping Nyssa with the
temporarily unconscious Lady Ann in 1996, subsequently claiming
that Nyssa had been ‘woken up’ on some level due to
his efforts in 1926, the essence of Nepythys’s consciousness
that had been in her mind evaporating as she ‘awoke’ as
Nyssa herself continued to age while remaining in a coma. With
Nephthys reduced to nothing more than an instinctive level - taking
action in the moment without being able to look back on the past
or forward to the future to consider the consequences of her actions
-, she rapidly travelled back and forth through time via an Osiran
time corridor in an attempt to reclaim her missing mind, going
back to 1926 to gain her mind as it was released - discovering
a Nyssa who still hosted her mind but wouldn’t awake for
seventy years - before returning to 1996 - where a ‘Nyssa’ slept
with no trace of Nephthys’s mind -, going back and forth
in a continuous loop until she finally collapsed into dust, having
aged beyond the lifespan of even an Osiran. With Nephthys destroyed
and her followers having crumbled into dust with her, The Doctor
was able to safely extract what remained of her from Nyssa and
return it to a modified canopic jar, subsequently burying the jar
once again to ensure that Nephthys would never return.
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The Bride of Peladon
(Barnaby Edwards) |
|
Some time after this, the Fifth Doctor again found himself
facing an Osiran enemy in the form of Sekhmet the Avenger, a living
weapon created by the Osiran Ra to smite his enemies when they sought
to slay him as he grew old and weary after so long on Earth. Having
killed Ra’s enemies, Sekhmet found her taste for blood had
grown, turning her against innocents in a killing frenzy until the
other Osirans were able to trap her inside a trisilicate asteroid
and launch her into space after tricking her into drinking a lake
of alcohol that had been dyed red to resemble blood. After drifting
through space for centuries, Sekhmet eventually landed on Peladon,
a distant world with a medieval-like society that had become particularly
dear to The Doctor ever since the Third
Doctor played a vital role
in its history on two separate occasions ("The
Curse of Peladon" and "The
Monster of Peladon"). Trapped underneath Peladon’s surface
for centuries, the trisilicate being made of negatively charged atoms
that sapped her strength, Sekhmet was eventually partly freed when
Peladon’s miners unwittingly cracked open her prison, but the
Osirans had also imprisoned her behind a blood-lock that could only
be opened by the blood of four Royal females.
To this end, Sekhmet was able to transmit a weak telepathic
signal that would lure the required females to her, her first victim
being the mother of Peladon’s current king Pelleas while the
second was Alyxlyr, a princess of the Ice Warriors who had recently
been appointed Peladon’s new ambassador, and the third was
the Earth princess Pandora, sent to Peladon as part of an arranged
marriage to Pelleas to grant Earth access to Peladon’s mineral
riches. Although Sekhmet attempted to use the Fifth Doctor’s
companion Erimem as one of the Royals to break the lock - Erimem
having nearly been appointed pharaoh in ancient Egypt before political
manipulations of the time drove her to depart with The Doctor and
Peri -, Erimem was able to trick Sekhmet by poisoning her own blood
with a distillation of mandrake root, disrupting Sekhmet’s
escape and weakening her enough for Alyxlr’s brother Zixlyr
to set off an explosive device in her tomb, killing himself while
burying Sekhmet once again to avenge his sister’s murder, The
Doctor subsequently curing Erimem with a transfusion of his own blood
(Sekhmet’s attack having weakened him enough to activate the
regenerative palates in his blood without actually triggering a true
regeneration). |
