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The Sirens of Time
(Nicholas Briggs)
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 Name: The
Sirens of Time
Format:
Audio
Time of Origin: Everywhere
and nowhere; they exist outside of Time
Appearances: "The Sirens of Time".
Doctors:
Fifth
Doctor,
Sixth
Doctor and Seventh
Doctor
Companions:
None
History: The
Sirens are rather similar to their Greek namesakes in that
they 'sing' people into danger; however, while the Sirens
of Greek mythology did this to lure sailors to dangerous
rocks so that they could then eat the sailors, the Sirens
of Time 'sing' time travellers, or people in general, into
locations where they can change history, thus providing
energy for the Sirens to feed on from the distortions in
history.
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| Sylvester McCoy |
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They
eventually struck The Doctor in three times simultaneously,
the Sirens luring three incarnations of The Doctor - the
Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors
specifically - to three different locations in history; the Fifth
Doctor found himself on a British merchant ship,
which was sunk by a German
U-boat, the Sixth found himself on the starship Edifice,
orbiting a gaseous spacial anomaly called the Kurgon Wonder,
and the Seventh found himself
on a planet designed to act as a prison planet for the war
criminal Sancroff, now just a crippled old man who acknowledged
that what he'd done was wrong.
Under the manipulation of the Sirens, who prevented The Doctors from leaving before they made any changes by locking
them out of their TARDISes,
The Doctors each made subtle changes to history.
Thanks
to the Seventh Doctor's intervention, Sancroff never died,
and the Knights of Velyshaa - a race of lethal warriors, of which he had
once been a member
- were able to rescue him to lead their second campaign
of conquest. The Fifth Doctor's attempt to return to the TARDIS forced
the U-boat off course
and prevented it from sinking the Lusitania; although the course
of the First World War remained largely unchanged, a petty criminal who
otherwise
would have died on the Lusitania went on to kill Alexander Fleming
in a botched robbery attempt before the discovery of penicillin,
thus leaving the Earth ravaged by new strains of pneumonia and meningitis
in 1956, and
the survivors never discovered space travel and never defeated
the Second Velyshaan Empire. And the Sixth
Doctor, by freeing the Temperon - a legendary
time beast that had escaped attempts to control it by freezing
the moment of its own death - also freed the Knights who had been trapped
with it,
enabling them to complete their experiment, acquire the
power of time travel and thus conquer Gallifrey.
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| Peter Davison |
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However,
in its few brief moments of total freedom after the Sixth Doctor freed
it, the Temperon was able to collect the three Doctors from their respective
locations and deposit them on the now-conquered Gallifrey, where they realised
that a woman they'd met in the course of their adventures - Elenya, Helen,
and Ellie - was the same person; the manifestation of the Sirens of Time,
although they didn't know it at the time. They managed to escape the Knights
of Velyshaa, but the Fifth Doctor was captured when he injured his leg
in the escape, and the other two were forced to join him and confront Knight
Commander Lyena (Another manifestation of the Sirens), who revealed the
changes they'd made to history and begged them to correct it; the Knight's
attempts to use the Temperon for time travel had left them with a mutation
in the gene pool that was killing them slowly, even with them now leeching
off the Time Lord's life energies via speciall-designed extractor suits.
At least in the old history, the Knights had been able to go down with
a bang...
However,
this wasn't as easy as it seemed; for one thing, the only
working TARDIS on Gallifrey had a burned out time core.
The Sixth and Seventh Doctors decided to free the Temperon
to use it, but Lyena, terrified at that option, captured
the Fifth Doctor and hooked him up to a life extraction
unit... unfortuantely for her, not in time for the Temperon
to be prevented from revealing the truth about the Sirens
to The Doctors. The Sixth and Seventh Doctors were left
with a terrible conundrum; if they did what Lyena asked
of them, they would have responded to the Siren's call twice
(Evidently it didn't control them after their regenerations)
and would become the Sirens' eternal slaves, going all over
time causing chaos, but if they refused, Lyena would kill
the Fifth Doctor, thus erasing the Sixth and Seventh from
history and causing even more chaos for the Sirens to feed
on.
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| Colin Baker |
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There
was only one chance; by freeing the Temperon, The Doctors
would give the Temperon the chance to stop the Sirens, but
only by condeming it, and the Sirens, to eternal struggle.
Lyena was sure that The Doctor's innate compassion would
force him to seek another solution, but she made a crucial
mistake by bringing three Doctors together; each time The Doctor regenerated, certain aspects of his personality come
into greater prominence than in other incarnations, and
while the Fifth Doctor may personify The Doctor's compassion
more than others, and the Seventh his knowledge, the Sixth
was far more... pragmatic than his other selves. He thus
destroyed the restraint field machinery, setting the Temperon
free to correct history.
In
the restored history, everything turned out as it should
have done; Sancroff died, the Lusitania was sunk, Gallifrey
was restored, and The Doctors found themselves on the prison
planet where the Seventh Doctor had been drawn to by the
Sirens. As The Doctors set off back to the TARDIS, where
the Seventh Doctor intended to open an interface and return
his previous incarnations to their relative time streams,
Elenya's cries drifted out across Time, pleading for somebody,
anybody, to help her...
Did
someone else answer the call? Nobody knows... |
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