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| The Valeyard |
|
 Name: The
Valeyard; has also been known as ‘the Ripper’; another variation
of him manifested itself as the ‘Dream Lord’
Format:
Television show and Book.
Time
of Origin: Gallifrey, far future.
Appearances: "The
Trial of a Time Lord", "Matrix",
and, in a sense, "Millennial
Rites" and "Head
Games"", a variation of him appeared in "Amy's Choice".
Doctors: Sixth
Doctor and Seventh
Doctor, the Eleventh Doctor confronted a new variation on him in the
form of the Dream Lord.
Companions: Melanie
Bush, Ace,
Bernice
Summerfield,
Roslyn
Forrester and Chris Cwej were involved in adventures featuring the
Valeyard without confronting him directly; Amy Pond and
Rory Williams confronted the ‘Dream Lord’ variation of the
Valeyard.
History: The
Valeyard literally gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'You are your
own worst enemy.' The Valeyard is really none other than the darkest sides
of The Doctor's nature, created by the rouge High Council that was set
up after the Fifth
Doctor's rapid departure as President in "The
Five Doctors". He originates from sometime between the time of the Twelfth
Doctor and the Thirteenth Doctor, probably at the moment of the regeneration
of the Twelfth Doctor. The popular theory is that he somewhat of a transitional
stage between The Doctor's last two lives, rather like the Watcher in "Logpolis".
He is quite literally The Doctor's equal in intelligence and cunning, and
knows everything that has ever happened to The Doctor, and everything that
will happen. The Valeyard therefore knows every strategy The Doctor has
ever used, and every strategy he shall ever use. He is also determined
to kill The Doctor, for some deranged reason. (Deranged, because he doesn't
seem to have taken into account that if he kills The Doctor, he'll be creating
a paradox, because if The Doctor dies at The Valeyard's hands, The Valeyard
will never exist to kill him, so The Valeyard will come into existence,
so The Valeyard will kill The Doctor, and so on, and so on…)
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Matrix
(Robert Perry & Mike
Tucker) |
|
The
Valeyard originally appeared in the show in the Sixth
Doctor's trial in "The
Trial of a Time Lord", as the prosecutor at The Doctor's trial, under
charges of conduct unbecoming a Time Lord - in other words, meddling in
the affairs of other species, a charge the Third
Doctor already served
time for during his exile to Earth. The trial doesn't go too well for The
Doctor - when he managed to clear himself of the charge of meddling thanks
to evidence from his own personal future, The Valeyard then accused him
of violating article seven of the Time Lords by committing genocide and
killing the Vervoids, an artificially-engineered intelligent plant life
(A charge that the Eighth Doctor - who arrived just in time to rescue his
past self from an attempted execution set up by The Valeyard - regarded
as ridiculous due to the Vervoids’ artificial nature). Just before
sentence was passed, The Master, not prepared to countenance a rival to
kill The Doctor, sent The Doctor Sabalom Glitz, a petty criminal The Doctor
met when he visited the planet Ravalox (Really an Earth that had been moved
away from its real location in time and space) and Mel, a companion from
The Doctor's future.
Glitz
revealed that Earth was moved by the High Council itself, to cover
up the fact that secrets were stolen from the Matrix by a criminal
gang operating from Earth, The Doctor’s trip to Ravalox creating
the possibility that the truth about the High Council’s failures
would be discovered. The Valeyard had thus been created by the High
Council by methods unknown and had made a deal with them to fake
evidence against The Doctor after his arrival on Ravalox risked discovery
of the Councils actions in exchange for The Doctor's remaining seven
lives. With Mel's help, The Doctor faced The Valeyard, The Master,
and a bribed Glitz in the Matrix, managing to trap The Master and
Glitz in The Master's TARDIS and turn a particle disseminator The
Valeyard had intended to use against him, apparently killing him.
However, being in the Matrix, The Valeyard managed to enter the body
of the Keeper of the Matrix when his own physical form had been destroyed,
and was not killed at all...
 |
Millennial Rites
(Craig
Hinton) |
|
Following
this, for The Doctor at least, The Valeyard returned in
"Millennial
Rites",
during a complex incident at New Years Eve, 1999. At that
point, The Doctor met his second incarnation's old friend,
Dame Anne Travers, who believed
that a man she knew, millionaire Ashley Chapel, was trying
to summon The
Great Intelligence, or Yog-Sothoth, a being
from the previous Universe,
to Earth. He was actually attempting to summon Saraquazel,
a being from the next universe, and when Anne tried to counter
his apparent summoning
of Yog-Sothoth while he tried to summon Saraquazel, the
three competing laws of physics that were called upon formed
a three-sided Great Kingdom,
each corner ruled by a different group. The Ziggarut is
ruled by the Technomancer Melaphyre (Really Mel altered
by the destabilisation of reality) and her
cybrid army, the Labyrinth is ruled by the Hierophant Anastasia
(Anne) and her thaumaturges, and the Tower of Abraxas is
the home of Archmage Ashmel (Chapel) and his auriks. Their god, due to
the summoning
going wrong,
was Saraquazel and Yog-Sothoth fused together into one insane
entity, and due to the instabilities of the competing laws
of physics, the Kingdom
caused The Doctor’s fears of becoming The Valeyard to manifest enough
for The Valeyard’s dormant potential within The Doctor to combine
the Kingdom’s unique physical properties with The Doctor’s
ability to regenerate, reshaping his body to turn him into
The Valeyard. Initially The Valeyard aided Ashmel in his
attempts to rule the Kingdom,
but fortunately, thanks to both the TARDIS and his nearly
murdering an innocent child, The Doctor managed to hold
back The Valeyard long enough
to get to the heart of the Kingdom, where a chain was being
formed that would link the Kingdoms and restore London by
shorting out the connection
between the three universes, but which would kill the person
at the front of the chain. It would have been Mel, but Anne
took her place, accepting
responsibility for her actions, and Yog-Sothoth and Saraquazel
were separated. Saraquazel, really a benevolent entity that
only wanted to go home, altered
things so that only a few people remained dead when London
returned to normal, and The Doctor and Mel departed, although
The Doctor was left uncomfortable
at The Valeyard’s comments that his current incarnation’s innate
hubris left him more susceptible to becoming his dark future
self.
However,
The Valeyard's next encounter with The Doctor was his deadliest ever, threatening
not only The Doctor, but the very Web of Time. The Valeyard, using his
identity as the Keeper of the Matrix, manage dot discover the secret of
the Dark Matrix, where the most twisted, evil, perverse thoughts of all
dead Time Lords was stored, and, taking it to Earth in his own twisted
TARDIS, arrived in London in 1888, where he became Jack the Ripper, killing
young women and feeding them to the Dark Matrix to satisfy its own dark
urges in the belief that he could ‘tame’ it. And, in an even
more twisted move, he had created golems - men of clay - and, to power
them, he had tracked down all thirteen Doctors, and had reverted them to
their basic, evil natures. Some, like the Fifth Doctor, had managed to
resist The Valeyard’s influence for some time, the Fifth Doctor only
surrendering at the moment of regeneration when he drank the bat’s
milk that he had originally given to Peri to save her life ("The
Caves of Androzani"), while others had succumbed fairly quickly, the Fourth
Doctor destroying the Daleks at their beginning ("Genesis
of the Daleks")
and the First murdering other Time Lords in order to leave Gallifrey in
the first place. Once he had acquired all The Doctors, proving once and
for all that the darkness was superior to The Doctors’ goodness,
The Valeyard was going to control the energies of the Dark Matrix to give
his own existence true form and substance beyond the shade that was all
he was at present before leaving Earth in his distorted TARDIS - now disguised
as The Doctor’s own tomb; it is unclear whether this meant he had
repaired the chameleon circuit or if he had simply forcibly reprogrammed
it into this disguise - unaware or unconcerned that his actions would corrupt
human history to a nightmarish degree as the Dark Matrix continued to haunt
the planet.
However,
there was still one fragile hope for reality; the Seventh
Doctor, attempting
to get Ace to safety, had discovered about the crisis when he arrived in
the alternate 1963 that The Valeyard’s actions would create - a London
stalked by life-draining zombies, the First Doctor being absent from Foreman’s
Yard and Ian
Chesterton and Barbara
Wright showing no knowledge of The Doctor or Susan, Barbara
helping the Seventh Doctor isolate the point where history diverged from
what he knew - and, having arrived in 1888, had sealed away his conscious
mind in the telepathic circuits to keep himself free from the influence
of the Dark Matrix when it tried to drive him to kill Ace. While Ace was
forced to work as a kitchen maid (And then was imprisoned in a freak show
by a man called Malacroix after the Dark Matrix triggered her transformation
into a Cheetah person), the amnesic Doctor earned a reputation as a card
trickster called Johnny, while the telepathic circuits and the TARDIS remained
in the possession of Malacroix. However, Johnny eventually managed to regain
the telepathic circuits after he was briefly suspected of being the Ripper
himself, tracking The Valeyard to the nearby church where he had made his
base… and where Ace was being held captive, The Valeyard - now calling
himself ‘the Ripper’ as he felt it more appropriate - intending
for her to be the final murder to activate the Dark Matrix. While the circus
freaks held off the wraiths of the other twelve Doctors, the Seventh confronted
the Dark Matrix with the truth about The Valeyard’s imprisonment
of it, provoking it to try and escape its confinement within the Ripper’s
TARDIS. As the Dark Matrix’s attempts to escape pushed the already-corrupted
TARDIS to breaking point, the ship began to collapse in on itself, forcing
The Doctor and the Ripper to flee to the church roof to continue their
battle. As the TARDIS collapsed, the Ripper was struck by lightning from
the ship, reflecting as he died that maybe he and the Dark Matrix would
now finally find freedom from their own darkness. With the destruction
of the Dark Matrix and the death of the Ripper, history was restored, although
The Doctor and Ace were left haunted at the vision of their own dark natures
that they had experienced during this adventure.
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Head Games
(Steve
Lyons) |
|
After
this, The Valeyard has yet to make a real reappearance, although there
was one
instance in "Head
Games" that came pretty close. In it The Doctor
was forced to travel through a power source controlled by
the energies of the Land of Fiction ("The
Mind Robber") and,
in the process was confronted by his guilt manifested in the form of the
Sixth Doctor.
The mental ghost of the Sixth Doctor, ever since his regeneration,
has hated the Seventh for cutting his life short, and had gathered all
the
darker aspects of The Doctor's mind to him; in essence,
he now was The Valeyard. (Ironically, the very action that The Doctor’s
subconscious had sought to avert by triggering his regeneration, the aspect
of The Doctor
that would become his seventh incarnation believing that
the Sixth Doctor was too close to becoming The Valeyard after such actions
as meeting Mel
and the events of "Millennial Rites"). The Doctor was forced
to battle his prior self for a time, but eventually managed
to destroy the energy source and halt the flow of the fictional energy.
However, he
was forced to seal off the memory of the Sixth Doctor in
his mind, knowing that he had to continue to resist the temptation to regenerate
into his
eighth incarnation; that moment of weakness could have given
The Valeyard the chance he needed to break free.
For
a time, The Doctor, fearful of what he would become, walled up the sixth
Doctor's mental ghost with the aid of his other five selves, but all the
time gradually starting to blame himself for the actions he had been forced
to commit in this incarnation, such as destroying the Silurian Earth created
by The
Meddling Monk ("Blood
Heat") or tricking alternate Gallifreyians
known as the Feratu into destroying their universe ("Cold
Fusion").
Although he acknowledged that he had done what he had to do, The Doctor
still came to hate himself for his actions, and believed that, when he
died, his seventh self, like his sixth, must be walled up in a metaphorical
'room with no doors' in his mind, like his previous self. Because of this,
and his knowledge that his next regeneration would be an accident, he intended
that Chris, his current companion, would take over as Time's Champion when
he died, as he would not allow himself to regenerate. However, when he
was hit by an arrow while saving a child, and awoke in his grave after
entering into a death-like coma, The Doctor realised that nobody deserved
to be locked away in solitude for eternity, not even his sixth self. For
all his fears and attempts to disassociate himself from his past and future,
he was the same person in all his incarnations, and he now acknowledged
this and forgave himself his sins, thus removing the guilt that would have
led to the creation of The Valeyard originally; if he hadn't forgiven his
sixth self, his memory of that incarnation would eventually have become
so twisted that, by his twelfth regeneration, that memory would have been
used to create The Valeyard.
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| The Dream Lord |
|
However,
just because that means of creating The Valeyard has been
eliminated, doesn't mean that there aren't other possibilities.
Although other Doctors
have faced their own darker instincts since the Seventh
Doctor made peace with himself - the Eighth Doctor even
nearly being corrupted by the forces
of anti-Time and the Faction
Paradox biodata
virus to become the destructive monster known as ‘Zagreus’ and
the time-manipulating madman Grandfather Paradox respectively
-, the Eleventh Doctor faced a ‘new’ Valeyard
when some specks of psychic pollen that had become trapped
in the TARDIS manifested The Doctor’s dark side in the form of the
mysterious ‘Dream
Lord’, an older man dressed in a near-identical version of The Doctor’s
clothes. Appearing before The Doctor and his current companions,
Amy Pond and Rory Williams, in the TARDIS, the Dream Lord
attempted to convince
them that he had trapped them between a dream world and
a real world, forcing them to ‘choose’ the true reality out
of a world where the TARDIS was hurtling towards a ‘cold star’ that
would freeze them all to death or a world where Amy and
Rory had left The Doctor five
years ago - Amy about to give birth - only for their village
to be overrun by an alien race called the Eknodine that
hid inside peoples’ bodies.
Although the world of the Eknodine was initially assumed
to be the dream, The Doctor, realising the Dream Lord’s true identity - on
the ground that only one person could hate him that much
-, realised that both realities were the dream as the Dream Lord
couldn’t
affect reality, destroying the TARDIS and allowing him,
Amy and Rory to wake up. Although
The Doctor disposed of the psychic pollen into deep space,
he was nevertheless clearly haunted by this new vision of
his dark side, along with the reminder
that, even after so long since his last confrontation, The
Valeyard still lurks underneath, waiting for his chance
to become the dominant personality
of The Doctor as the time for his creation draws ever closer… |
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