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| The Celestial Toymaker |
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 Name: The Toymaker
Format:
Television show, Book, Comic and Audio.
Time of Origin: Unknown, he comes from another
Universe.
Appearances: "The Celestial Toymaker", "Matryoshka", "Divided Loyalties", "The Nightmare Fair", "The Magic Mousetrap", "Solitaire", "End Game", "Relative Dimensions" and "The Giggle".
Doctors: First Doctor, Fourth Doctor, Fifth Doctor, Sixth Doctor, Seventh Doctor, Eighth Doctor, Twelfth Doctor, Fourteenth Doctor and Fifteenth Doctor.
Companions: Steven Taylor, Dodo, Harry Sullivan, Naomi Cross, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan Jovanka, Peri, Ace, Hex, Charley Pollard, Izzy Sinclair, Clara Oswald, Donna Noble and Melanie Bush.
History: The Toymaker has a rather interesting history. According to some sources, he is completely alone in this Universe, cast out from his own by some unimaginable catastrophe. Since he is not from this Universe, The Toymaker obeys a different set of physical laws, giving him unbelievable powers and abilities, and since the two Universes are receding from each other, the laws of relativity dictate that his own life span is increasing. The Toymaker is already millions of years old, and he will live for millions more, The Doctor speculating that the isolation and loneliness have driven him mad; he long ago abandoned the empty thrills of creation and destruction, and now seeks distraction in the random hazards of gameplay. Upon arrival in this Universe, he apparently joined the Council of Guardians, and became the Crystal Guardian of Dreams. Assuming he is telling the truth, this contributes to his reasons for his games; where The Black Guardian and The White Guardian create chaos and conflict to justify their existence, he creates games and illusions to justify his. The Fifteenth Doctor described The Toymaker as the personification of games the way other entities he faced in this incarnation personified music and death. In some ways, this focus on games represents his only true weakness; while The Toymaker is a skilled player who can omit certain rules when competing against The Doctor, or make the rules particularly challenging, once the rules have been established he cannot actively cheat by going against them, and he also cannot explicitly reject a challenge once one has been issued.
The Doctor's first encounter with The Toymaker particularly significant on several levels, as The Toymaker The Doctor's first ever opponent, meeting The Doctor while the future traveller was still at school. At this time, The Doctor was the member of a Time Lord elite known as the Deca, the best of their year at school. Its members were The Doctor, Koschei, (Later to become The Master) Ushas, (Later to become The Rani) Mortimus, (Later to become The Meddling Monk) Magnus, (Later to become the War Chief) Vansell, (Later to become a Coordinator for the CIA, as revealed in 'Sirens of Time') Jelpax, and lovers Rallon and Millenia. With The Doctor feeling rebellious against Kithriarch Quences of the House of Lungbarrow ("Lungbarrow"), a subsequent suspension from the Academy drove The Doctor to prove to other Time Lords that things could change, encouraging Mortimus to hack into the Time Lords' secret files and find something of interest that he could investigate. Once Mortimus identified The Toymakers - listed as possibly beings rather than an individual - The Doctor set off to investigate with Rallon and Millennia, Magnus having helped them steal a TARDIS. Upon entering the realm of The Toymaker, however, Rallon was consumed and possessed by the spirit of The Toymaker, which used Rallon's physical form to force The Doctor to play its games while imprisoning Millenia. The Doctor won a game of Capture the Flag against a tin soldier by setting a trap on the muddy battlefield, and The Toymaker, impressed by The Doctor's skill, decided to release him in order to let him mature, anticipating that he would prove a worthy opponent later in life. The Doctor was forced to return to Gallifrey in disgrace, having led Rallon to his death and Millennia to a worse fate, trapped forever as one of The Toymaker's living dolls, leading to The Doctor being expelled from the Academy until he obtained his doctorate in his spare time while working in records and traffic control.
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The Celestial Toymaker
(Gerry Davis and Alison Bingeman) |
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Once The Doctor had graduated and fled Gallifrey ("Lungbarrow" and "An Unearthly Child"), he was 'captured' by The Toymaker once again, the TARDIS drawn into The Toymaker's realm while The Doctor was rendered invisible and mostly inaudible. The Toymaker's challenge on this occasion forced The Doctor to play Trilogic, a complex game where The Doctor had to move different sized pieces from one corner to another on a triangular board, rearranging them perfectly from the A corner to the C corner in only 1023 moves. If he made one mistake he would lose, and become a doll of The Toymaker, but even if The Doctor won his game, he had to win it after his companions Steven Taylor and Dodo had won theirs, and if he finished his game first, they would become The Toymaker's dolls anyway. The Toymaker made the game more challenging by taking away The Doctor's voice and making him intangible apart from one hand, leaving him unable to warn his companions and only able to focus on playing his game. As if it wasn't hard enough already, whenever The Doctor began to slow down, The Toymaker moved him forward a certain number of moves, bringing him ever closer to his 1023rd move before his companions would win theirs.
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| The Celestial Toymaker |
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The first game for Steven and Dodo was a game of blind man's buff against two clowns, in which one person had to wear a blindfold and be guided by their partner through an obstacle course. Steven and Dodo lost, but they discovered that the clowns cheated by using a transparent blindfold, allowing them to play a rematch that they subsequently won. The second game consisted of seven chairs, six of which would kill however sat in them, the companions playing against the King, Queen, Joker and Knave of Hearts, using a series of four dolls only. Despite Dodo briefly sitting in a chair designed to freeze her to death, both she and Steven survived while the Knave and Joker left the game and the King and Queen were killed by a melting chair. Steven and Dodo then narrowly won a game of hunt the thimble, and managed to outmanoeuvre some dancing dolls to get to the next game, 'TARDIS hopscotch' against the 'innocent' schoolboy Cyril. With numbered triangles at odd angles on the floor and a police box on a raised platform at the end, each player started at triangle 1, took a die and rolled it. The number thrown would appear on a pole-shaped dice indicator - allegedly to prevent cheating - and the player would then move the number thrown, with the first to reach triangle 14 and the police box being the winner. The only catch was that they could only jump - the area between the triangles was electric, and they'd be killed! Cyril tried to get rid of Steven and Dodo by coating triangle 12 with a slippery substance, but he accidentally walked on it himself and was killed. The Doctor, by then, had managed to join his companions, now restored to his regular self and with access to the TARDIS restored, but he could only take the ship away from The Toymaker's realm once he had made his last move... and since he had to be right next to the game board to make that move, once the game was over The Toymaker's realm would collapse. However, The Doctor managed to win the game by disguising his voice as The Toymaker's, allowing him to command the game to make the final move from a distance and departing in the TARDIS as the realm collapsed.
From this point onwards, the chronology of The Doctor's encounters with The Toymaker becomes particularly complex, with events being seemingly out of sequence based on factors such as the Tormaker's current state and the challenge he was posing to The Doctor. The Toymaker himself has claimed to have manipulated The Doctor's timeline on some occasions, suggesting that even he may not be aware of when he encountered certain Doctors at specific times, particularly given occasions where The Doctor had to 'reboot' the universe such as The Master's manipulation of the Cult of the Heretic ("The Two Masters"), the Eleventh Doctor's resolution to the threat of the Pandorica ("The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang") and the devastating Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks. Since some of The Doctor's victories over The Toymaker occurred while The Toymaker was outside of Time, and at least one victory basically depended on the nature of the universe remaining constant, it creates the possibility that certain occasions saw The Toymaker escape his more permanent defeats by using these 'resets' to change the rules at the cost of altering or outright eliminating these encounters from history.
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| End Game (Alan Barnes and Scott Gray) |
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To keep things in the most potentially straightforward manner possible, it would appear that, from The Toymaker's perspective, his 'next' encounter with The Doctor occurred when the Eighth Doctor arrived in what appeared to be Shoreditch, a village The Doctor had become fond of during previous visits. However, on this occasion everyone in the village had been replaced by living dolls apart from The Doctor's old friend Maxwell Edison and Max's young friend Izzy Sinclair ("End Game"). Realising that they were currently in a toy Stockbridge created by The Toymaker while the original village was frozen in time, The Doctor was able to use the technology that created the doll duplicates to create a duplicate of The Toymaker himself. The two Toymakers were thus left locked in stalemate while The Doctor escaped with the Stockbridge residents, returning them to Earth before he left with Izzy as his new companion.
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Solitaire
(John Dorney) |
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While The Toymaker was presumably able to defeat his duplicate, he experienced a different kind of setback when he managed to recapture the Eighth Doctor, this time in the company of Charley Pollard, The Toymaker trapping them in a new game that he had just received. Although The Toymaker was able to trap The Doctor in the form of a ventriloquist dummy while playing against Charley in a version of the Toyroom that shrank every time she failed to work out the goal of the game, Charley realised that the nature of this game, which meant the player forgot when they had started playing, meant that The Toymaker was the one playing rather than Charley or The Doctor, as he had been unable to resist testing the game himself before using it on anyone else. This revelation left The Toymaker trapped in his own shrinking Toyroom while Charley retrieved the dummy-Doctor and left in the TARDIS, The Doctor (using Charley's voice) assuring her that he would resume his human form once they left the Toyroom. The Toymaker expressed certainty that he would be able to return to his usual form after the Toyroom had collapsed and the game 'reset'.
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| Relative Dimensions |
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Following this new attack on the Toyroom, The Toymaker's home dimension began to break down, creating the risk that it would be lost for good rather than just the usual 'reboot' of a loss that The Toymaker could accept as part of his usual games. Not wanting to lose his 'home' The Toymaker lured in the Twelfth Doctor's TARDIS with the goal of using the ship to hold the Toyroom together ("Relative Dimensions"). He attempted to distract The Doctor and Clara with toy replicas of The Doctor's old companions, but The Toymaker's weakening power allowed The Doctor to take control of some of the toys and turn them against The Toymaker. After a straight conflict between The Doctor and The Toymaker proved pointless, a game of Truth or Dare led to The Doctor learning of The Toymaker's concerns about the Toyroom's future. When The Toymaker dared The Doctor to give him the TARDIS, The Doctor found a loophole by materialising the TARDIS around the Toyroom and then leaving the other dimension in the Zero Room ("Castrovalva"), ejecting the Zero Room and the Toyroom from the ship while he and Clara continued their travels.
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The Magic Mousetrap
(Matthew Sweet) |
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With this solution apparently successful in allowing The Toymaker to retain the Toyroom, The Toymaker's apparent next encounter with The Doctor occurred during the Time Lord's seventh incarnation, when The Toymaker had brought the inhabitants of the Hahlbrook Sanatorium into his realm to play a new series of games. Under unspecified circumstances, The Doctor was able to rally The Toymaker's current players to compete against The Toymaker in various games all at once, resulting in The Toymaker being defeated and his power becoming fractured among the subconscious minds of the players, The Toymaker being reduced to a ventriloquist's doll. Attempting to defeat The Toymaker for good, The Doctor transferred everyone back to the Sanatorium, arranging for his current companions Ace and Hex to monitor the rest of the players - himself included - making sure that they didn't remember their confrontation with The Toymaker, knowing that the fragments of The Toymaker's power in their minds would eventually 'die' due to The Toymaker being cut off from his realm. Unfortunately, The Doctor's plan nearly failed when his investigations into his lack of memory resulted in him discovering the doll-Toymaker, which also led to him realising that they were still trapped in The Toymaker's realm rather than back in reality. Having regained some power from this discovery, The Toymaker was able to challenge the inhabitants to individual games to regain his parts once again. Despite this, he was eventually defeated when Doctor Ludovic 'Ludo' Comfort, The Toymaker's last opponent and now possessing an equal amount of The Toymaker's power, confronted The Toymaker in a game of chess, Ludo using his borrowed power to send the other players back to Earth. Ludo subsequently resolved to never make his next move in the chess game, thus leaving The Toymaker locked in an apparently permanent stalemate and unable to regain his original powers.
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Divided Loyalties
(Gary
Russell) |
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The best way to reconcile this victory with subsequent events is that The Toymaker was able to find some way to make Ludo make his last move, but this led to The Toymaker somehow damaging his 'link' to The Doctor's old friend Rallon. As a result, The Toymaker could no longer separate from Rallon and take on a new host, creating the risk that when Rallon died he would take The Toymaker with him, his role as the Guardian of Dreams making his death a particularly dangerous prospect. To deal with this potential weakness, The Toymaker once again lured in The Doctor for a new game, this time making contact with the Fifth Doctor ("Divided Loyalties") using a telepathic call from what appeared to be Rallon. The TARDIS materialised on a space station orbiting the planet Dymok, a planet whose permanently comatose inhabitants apparently powered The Toymaker with their psychic abilities. When The Doctor, Tegan Jovanka and Nyssa went down to the planet, Tegan was met by a mysterious figure called the Observer and several Dymova, who hailed her as their Chosen One. Her forthrightness and strength of will were the key to saving the Dymova from The Toymaker, but at the same time The Toymaker was preparing his latest game for The Doctor, having made Nyssa and Adric doubt him by playing on issues such as Adric being permanently 'exiled' from his home universe ("Warrior's Gate") and The Master having stolen the body of Nyssa's father ("The Keeper of Traken"). The Toymaker's latest challenge called for The Doctor to complete a double-sided jigsaw with his face on both sides at the same time as Adric and Nyssa played a game of chess as the white King and Queen, with the station crew as their other players, with the additional twist that The Doctor had to finish the puzzle at the exact same time as his friends finished their game. The Dymovans then attempted an attack on The Toymaker, focussed by Tegan's strength, but it apparently failed, The Toymaker diverting all the power back on Dymok, destroying it.
His victory seemingly assured, The Toymaker summoned the crew of the space station and The Doctor companions to witness his defeat, but despite The Toymaker's attempt to sow discord between them Adric, Nyssa and Tegan refused to let The Doctor sacrifice himself for them, that moment of emotional distraction allowing Rallon to play his final card. In reality, Dymok was an illusion created by Rallon to lay the groundwork for this plan, and the Observer was simply Rallon's Watcher, the wraith of his future selves. Using the distraction created by The Doctor and his companions rejecting The Toymaker's attempts at manipulation, Rallon forced himself through all twelve of his remaining regenerations at once, expelling The Toymaker from his body, Dymok's destruction having channelled all the Dymova's power into Rallon. After a brief farewell to Millenia - really Nyssa pretending to be his lost love to comfort him - Rallon died at last, with the Observer merging with The Toymaker to keep him in check in future, the disorientation of this change allowing the TARDIS travellers and station crew to escape after one of the crew made The Doctor's final move to collapse the Toyroom at the cost of his own life. As The Doctor left, he knew that the Observer 'replacing' Rallon would mean a change for The Toymaker too; much like a traditional regeneration, even if The Toymaker was physically the same, there would be subtle differences to his personality due to these events. While The Doctor took the rest of the station crew home, with The Toymaker and his servant Stefan waiting for the toyshop to repair itself, The Toymaker decided to visit a theme park in Blackpool.
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The Nightmare Fair
(Graham
Williams) |
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The Nightmare Fair
(BF Audio Lost Story) |
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However, some time after arriving at the theme park, The Toymaker discovered that the Sixth Doctor and his companion Peri were there as well. The Toymaker tricked the two of them into going to the Space Mountain ride at the park, where he managed to capture The Doctor and then lure Peri to the closed Broken Neck Gap ride, eventually capturing her. The Toymaker than tried to attack The Doctor, stuck in a cell powered by The Toymaker's own mind, with a monstrous crustacean, but The Doctor convinced it that he was an intelligent life form. The Toymaker than locked The Doctor and Peri in a cell in the company of Kevin, a man they'd met earlier searching for his missing brother, intending to force The Doctor to play a video game. While The Doctor dismantled the game to use its circuitry for his next plan, The Toymaker finished his latest plan to design the ultimate video game, depicting a lone player's battle against alien creatures in a blasted urban landscape. In The Toymaker's traditional style, this game included a deadly twist; once the player lost all three of their game lives, a monster stepped out of the screen and killed them in reality.
Pleased with the game, The Toymaker prepared to distribute its blueprints before summoning The Doctor to play the game himself. Fortunately, by this point The Doctor had been able to interconnect the cells and work with the crustacean on a plan to escape, allowing him to distract The Toymaker while his allies completed the plan. As The Doctor played the game and deduced The Toymaker's true nature from the similarities between the game and The Toymaker's past, the crustacean finished the device and attached it to Peri, allowing her to disorientate The Toymaker with a psychic scream so The Doctor could escape the video game monster. While The Toymaker was unconscious, The Doctor rewired the cells so they imprisoned only The Toymaker; since the cells were powered by The Toymaker's mind, The Toymaker would be trapped for the rest of his life, preventing him from playing more dangerous games in future. Kevin met his brother again, captured by The Toymaker, and, on The Doctor's advice, the two of them started their own company thanks to The Toymaker's blueprints for a non-deadly version of the game.
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Matryoshka
(Aurora Fearnley) |
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While unable to get out of the cell himself, The Toymaker was eventually able to learn how to extend a part of himself back into the real universe, allowing him to communicate with others and set up new games even if he couldn't appear himself. With this power, he was able to set a trap for The Doctor by essentially abducting Etta Pearson, the daughter of Edwardian toymaker Sir Charles Pearson, subsequently 'hacking' the TARDIS by laying out the coordinates like a chessboard, as the ship's latest trip had involved playing chess as a key part of how that particular threat had been defeated. While The Doctor spoke with The Toymaker through a local medium, his companions Harry Sullivan and Naomi Cross worked alongside Lord Pearson, forced to play a game with the house as the board to try and find Etta. The Doctor's friends were able to follow the clues to Etta, but ultimately The Doctor was forced to make the final 'move' in the game by touching a probability crystal hidden in a Russian nesting doll. The link formed between The Doctor and the crystal allowed The Toymaker to drain off The Doctor's life energy, with the final goal that The Toymaker could possess The Doctor's body when The Doctor was weakened by his subsequent regeneration. Fortunately, The Doctor was able to buy time by baiting The Toymaker into a game of 'Pass the Parcel' (some of The Toymaker's dolls acting as other players) while Harry and Naomi were able to follow The Doctor's coded instructions to take the TARDIS on a short hop. Once The Doctor had tricked The Toymaker into taking on a physical form so The Toymaker could unwrap the parcel, he was able to trap The Toymaker's essence in another doll, while forming a link to the TARDIS that would compensate for the energy that had been drained by the crystal and allow The Doctor to break his connection to The Toymaker by essentially transferring that link to the TARDIS until he was back to full strength.
The Toymaker remained absent from The Doctor's life for several incarnations and centuries after this, only returning after the Time War between the Daleks and the Time Lords ("The Day of The Doctor") drove several higher beings into exile from the universe. When The Toymaker returned, he claimed that he had defeated God and had trapped The Master's essence in his gold tooth, as well as defeating the Black and White Guardians. The Toymaker also claimed to have made a 'jigsaw' of The Doctor's history, suggesting that he may have contributed to some of the conflicting details of The Doctor's history such as the contrasting details of what happened to Ace to make her leave The Doctor or the Eighth Doctor's complex history. On a more personal note, during their next confrontation The Doctor and The Toymaker agreed that they had each only won one game each, basically ignoring their intervening encounters since the First Doctor's victory over The Toymaker in the Trilogic game. However, this oversight could also be explained as their games in those intervening encounters saw The Doctor basically trap The Toymaker in a draw, either with himself or other players, and thus essentially avoid actually completing the game they were playing. Given The Toymaker's fixation on games, he and The Doctor could make a reasonable argument that those meetings don't 'count' in their contest with each other as neither of them definitively won those games, whereas this encounter saw them directly compete once again.
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| The Giggle |
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Regardless of what The Doctor and The Toymaker remember of their history, this particular clash revealed that The Toymaker had planted a secret subliminal code in every electronic screen throughout human history by establishing a toyshop in 1926 and selling a ventriloquist dummy to one of the men involved in the invention of the television ("The Giggle"). Through The Toymaker's influence, this dummy, which had served as the subject of the first televised broadcast, now existed as a subliminal message on every electronic screen that everyone on history could see at some point in their existence. The signal provoked every member of the human race to become convinced that they were 'right' to the extent that they would vent about even subconscious prejudices and beliefs that they would never have reacted on otherwise, as well as dangerous actions like pilots landing planes wherever they felt like. The only people immune to the signal were some of The Doctor's past companions, including Donna Noble and Melanie Bush, suggested to be because of their time in the TARDIS (and even that required potentially long-term exposure, as The Brigadier's daughter Kate Stewart was affected by the signal even after taking a short hop or two in the ship). UNIT were able to devise armbands that would keep peoples' emotions in check even if they had never travelled in the TARDIS themselves, but in the current climate mass distribution of that technology was impossible as too many people were suspicious of it. The Doctor, his companions and UNIT were able to identify the source of the signal and trace the origin of it to the puppet, The Doctor invoking his status as President of Earth during a crisis to destroy the satellites before going back in time to the date of the first transmission. Tracking down the shop where the doll had been purchased in 1926, The Doctor quickly identified the shopkeeper as The Toymaker and challenged him to a game to make him stop his current scheme, also confirming that The Toymaker's signal in the future was intended to reflect the 'game' that everyone in the future had an opinion, making everyone right so that they could always win or lose.
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| The Giggle |
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The Doctor lost a subsequent card game, but argued that this left him and The Toymaker in a draw based on him winning their first game, allowing him to provoke The Toymaker into a final confrontation in 2023. Entering UNIT headquarters playing the Spice Girls' song 'Spice Up Your Life', The Toymaker literally danced through UNIT's soldiers, turning a couple of soldiers into balloons and turning any bullets fired at him into rose petals. This concluded with The Toymaker using UNIT's galvanic beam - a weapon capable of shooting satellites out of orbit - to kill The Doctor directly to provoke a regeneration and play the next game with another Doctor. However, this triggered a unique event termed 'bigeneration' (considered a myth even by the Time Lords) where the regenerating Doctor, aided by Mel and Donna, was literally split into two separate people, the Fourteenth Doctor continuing to exist as an independent individual while the Fifteenth Doctor manifested as a separate physical entity alongside his 'predecessor'. The two Doctors used this opportunity to challenge The Toymaker to another game, arguing that The Toymaker had to accept the challenge as he had changed the rules by bringing two Doctors into the equation. The two Doctors and The Toymaker thus engaged in a game of catch, tossing a ball at each other until the two Doctors managed to coordinate and toss the ball over the edge of the tower before The Toymaker could catch it. With that victory, the Fourteenth Doctor declared that his prize would be to banish The Toymaker from existence forever, forcing him back into the jack-in-the-box that had been his toyshop in 1926. The Fifteenth Doctor was subsequently able to use his own 'prize' to create a duplicate TARDIS for himself, allowing the Fourteenth Doctor to basically 'retire' and deal with his own trauma while the Fifteenth Doctor moved on with a fresh perspective on their existence.
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