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| A Slitheen |
|
 Name: The
Slitheen, species name the Raxacoricofallapatorions (The Doctor
has also fought rival Raxacoricofallapatorion crime family
the Blathereen)
Format: Television
show and Book.
Time
of Origin: Raxacoricofallapatorius, have encountered The
Doctor in the present, on the prison planet Justica in the
25th century, and in Greece in 1500BC (These last originating
from around the year 36 000).
Appearances: "Aliens
of London/World War Three", "Boom
Town", "The
Monsters Inside" and "The
Slitheen Excursion".
Doctors: Ninth
Doctor and Tenth
Doctor.
Companions: Rose Tyler and Captain Jack Harkness, Mickey Smith and June; a group
of them encountered Sarah
Jane Smith and K9 while Sarah was operating
on her own.
History: As
a species, there's little to say about the Raxacoricofallapatorions,
except for the fact that The Doctor and his companions normally
think of them as the Slitheen, since that was the name of the
family of Raxacoricofallapatorians the TARDIS crew
encountered in their adventures. Raxacoricofallapatorions also
possess a
heightened sense of smell, allowing them to detect adrenaline
and fear, and females are capable of producing poison if in danger,
either via a dart in the finger or simply through breathing onto
a foe. Due to them being a calcium-based life form Slitheen have
been known to turn to stone if left alone for a significant length
of time - approximately a few centuries - although specialist
technology is required to restore them from this condition. One
of their more interesting pieces of technology is a matter compression
unit worn around the neck that allows them to shrink their rather
sizable bulk into something slightly smaller. The compression
ratio had its limits, however, so the disguises tended to be
that of already big-bodied people. The exchange of gases that
compression entailed also built up within the acquired skin,
causing a condition similar to farting in the form of the release
of a smell remarkably like bad breath.
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| The
Ninth Doctor |
|
The
Slitheen are a galactic crime family, using their technology
to travel to more primitive planets and commit various crimes
of some make or description, such as mining the planet of all
its valuable resources and selling them off, regardless of the
consequences this would have for the planet itself. They have
an almost ritualistic love of hunting, being trained to hunt
and kill from a young age, although their main objective is always
profit. All the family members, even down to their fiancées,
are subject to the death penalty if they set foot on their planet
again.
Eventually,
the Slitheen's criminal activities brought them to the attention
of The Doctor when they arrived on Earth in the year 2006, attempting
to gain control of the planet by replacing certain appropriate
cabinet ministers (e.g. those of a certain weight and over) with
their own people, and then sending a fake alien spaceship to
crash into the Thames after damaging Big Ben. At the time, the
Ninth
Doctor had just arrived with his companion Rose Tyler, and, while
Rose tried to settle down with her family, The Doctor checked
out the 'alien' in the spacecraft... to learn it was only a surgically
altered pig, even if the scale of the surgical enhancements made
it clear that aliens were involved; essentially, aliens had faked
an alien invasion. The government then called in all the top
alien investigators to study the problem (Which, naturally, included
The Doctor), but, after arriving there, The Doctor realised that
there was one obvious reason for the false spaceship; a trap,
to get rid of the alien experts on Earth, the only people with
a real chance of stopping the attack.
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| A Slitheen |
|
The
Slitheen revealed themselves and managed to kill most of the
experts with an electro-shock device, but The Doctor was able
to dispose of his and escape, leaving him, Rose and Harriet Jones
(the MP for Flydale North) trapped in a locked-down cabinet room
while the Slitheen gathered outside. Figuring out their planet
from what was known of them, The Doctor realised that the Slitheen
were vulnerable to vinegar, which Mickey and Jackie (Rose's ex-boyfriend
and mother respectively) were able to use to stop one of them...
but the others were still active, and their plans were in motion.
When
one of the Slitheen claimed that an alien spaceship was above
London preparing to attack, The Doctor realised what the Slitheen
were up to; since the UN had the control codes for the UK's nuclear
defence network, the Slitheen had been forced to engineer this
crisis to get the access codes. With these, they intended to
start a nuclear holocaust that they would sit out in their spaceship...
and, when it was over, they would cut the radioactive cinder
that was left behind into smaller chunks and sell it off as a
power source for spaceships. Outraged at their callousness, The
Doctor had Mickey hack into UNIT's secret website and launch
a missile at Downing Street from a destroyer off the British
coast, annihilating the Slitheen while he, Rose and Harriet waited
out the explosion in the cabinet room.
However,
contrary to appearances, one Slitheen had survived; Margaret
Blaine, real name Blon Fel Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen, using
a miniature teleportation device in her possession to escape
at the last second before the missile hit (Although it only had
enough power for her to escape). Having become Lord Mayor of
Cardiff, she was constructing a nuclear
power plant over a rip in space/time, intending to trigger a
meltdown that, amplified by the rift, would destroy the Earth
while she got away on a stolen tribophysical waveform macro kinetic
extrapolator - essentially, a pan-dimensional surfboard. The
Doctor, Rose, Mickey, and new companion Captain Jack Harkness decided
to take her back to Raxacoricofallapatorius, but they would have
to wait until the TARDIS had refuelled by absorbing the power
of the rift... and, in the meantime, Margaret tried to convince
The Doctor to let her go, since she would be executed the second
she set foot on Raxacoricofallapatorius. Whether her attempt
to plea for freedom would have worked in unknown, given that
it turned out Margaret had a back-up plan; if she was discovered,
the extrapolator would lock on to a nearby alien energy source
and use it to open the rift... and it had locked on to the TARDIS.
She nearly escaped, but had failed to take one thing into account;
the TARDIS was alive, and knew Margaret was trying to destroy
it. The console opened, exposing Margaret to the power at the
heart of the TARDIS... and it reverted her to an egg, giving
her a second chance at life as The Doctor took her to a new family
on Raxacoricofallapatorius.
 |
The Monsters Inside
(Stephen Cole) |
|
Another
group of Slitheen operatives - now forced to hide as they were
hunted by the Judoon and other rival crime families - were also
encountered on Earth by The Doctor’s past companion Sarah
Jane Smith, now defending Earth independent of The Doctor and
UNIT with the aid of a group of children - one of which was her
adopted son Luke Smith, the result of genetic engineering by
a race called the Bane - when they infiltrated a building company
to try and turn off the sun and drain the world’s energy.
Although Sarah was able to destroy their equipment, all but two
Slitheen managed to escape, the remaining Slitheen using more
advanced compression technology - allowing them to disguise themselves
as people of normal weight - to pose as Luke’s real parents
as part of an elaborate plot by Sarah’s traitorous supercomputer
Mr Smith to use Luke as part of a plan to make the Moon crash
into Earth. This plan was again defeated.
Five
hundred years later, at an earlier point in their lives, The
Doctor and Rose, arriving on a prison colony of Justicia ("The
Monsters Inside"), ran into the descendants of the Slitheen.
By this time, the matter compression units had improved a great
deal, to the extent that not only could the Slitheen impersonate
normal-sized humans, but they would even shrink themselves down
to the size of basketballs, although they released a great deal
of gas in the process. At first The Doctor and Rose were understandably
reluctant to work with the Slitheen to escape, but things changed
when they realised that there were other Raxacoricofallapatorions
on the colony in the form of the Blathereleen, a rival crime
family to the Slitheen who had put the Slitheen out of business
due to them being cheaper. The Doctor discovered that the Blathereleen
had developed warp-gates that would allow the entire solar system
to travel through space, releasing solar flares that would turn
planets to radioactive waste that could be mined by the prisoners
without anyone knowing about it.
 |
The Slitheen Excursion
(Simon Guerrier) |
|
With
the aid of the Slitheen, The Doctor was able to damage the device
and kill the Blathereleen, rerouting the system's power so that
the Blathereen were incinerated when they tried to activate the
warp-gates, although two of the Slitheen apparently died in the
process. However, after The Doctor and Rose had left the colony,
it was revealed that the Slitheen had not died, but simply disguised
themselves as Blathereen to effect an escape. The Slitheen had
their technology back, the Blathereleen - their only real rivals
- were dead.
Some years after his regeneration, the Tenth
Doctor, accompanied
by temporary companion June, discovered a group of Slitheen
in Greece in 1500, the Slitheen in question originating from
the 374th century; they claimed to still be exiled from their
planet, although they were expecting their situation to be
re-assessed in the coming millennium. These Slitheen were running
holidays tours into the past for various alien races, thus
allowing them to witness the ‘barbarity’ of the
human race at its very beginning while also making humanity
so dependent on the futuristic tourism that they never progressed
themselves. While The Doctor tampered with the Slitheen time-travel
technology June incited a revolt by encouraging the tourists
to sympathise with the humans over the Slitheen, forcing the
Slitheen to flee and be captured. Having returned the tourists
to their proper times, The Doctor and June subsequently giving
the people of the time some brief lessons in the essentials
of agriculture and other matters before departing, confident
that history would unfold as it should have done before the
Slitheen became involved (Although they then had to ensure
that the authorities captured the Slitheen in the present before
they finally parted company). |
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| Aliens
of London/World War Three |
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| Aliens of London/World War
Three |
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| Boom Town |
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| Boom Town |
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