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Goth Opera
(Paul
Cornell) |
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 Name: Vampires
Format:
Television show, Audio and Book.
Time of Origin: Unconfirmed, but definitely
some time in the future.
Appearances: "World
Game", "State
of Decay", "Goth
Opera", "Project:
Twilight", "Project:
Lazarus", "Twilight's End", "Blood
Harvest", "The
Eight Doctors" and "Vampire
Science".
Doctors: Second
Doctor, Fourth
Doctor, Fifth
Doctor, Sixth
Doctor, Seventh
Doctor and Eighth
Doctor.
Companions: Serena, K9, 2nd
Romana, Adric,
Tegan
Jovanka, Nyssa, Evelyn
Smythe, Ace, Bernice
Summerfield and Samantha
Jones.
History: For those who don’t know about
vampires, which may not be many, here is their story. In Earth legend,
vampires are undead beings, who become that way when bitten by another
vampire. They require constant blood - drinking to stay alive, can
only be directly killed by a wooden stake through the heart, cannot
approach anyone armed with a crucifix or garlic, are burnt up in
bright sunlight, dissolve like dust when hit by water, and are constant
forms of entertainment in the TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
Angel.
However,
in The Doctor's universe, the vampires were a race of giants, just
one of them being capable of draining the life force of an entire
planet, that were unleashed by the Time Lords during early time travel
experiments that opened a door into the vampire's Universe (A secret
that was only revealed to The Doctor in "The
Pit", when he met the Time Lord general who had led the
war against the Vampires, the Time Lords concealing the truth because
they didn’t want to believe that they had fought pure Evil
in the war). The Time Lords battled them in a terrible war that,
it was said, was so long and bloody, that every Time Lord was sickened
of violence forever. The vampires were defeated via the use of bowships,
massive metal ships that could plunge straight into a vampire's heart
and kill them. However, after the vampires were defeated in a final
great battle, when the Time Lords counted the bodies, they discovered
that one vampire was missing - the Great Vampire, the lord and master
of them all. When that was discovered, Rassilon,
the first President of Gallifrey, made a proclamation that any and
all Time Lords who encounter the Great Vampire must make every effort
to defeat this monster, even at the cost of their own lives…
The Doctor’s first encounter with vampires
took place in his second incarnation, when he was captured by the
Time Lords ("The
War Games") and was forced to perform
various missions for them that they wanted to officially distance
themselves from in exchange for a commuted sentence. On his first
mission for them ("World
Game"), The Doctor - accompanied by Time Lady Serenadellatrova -
was investigating The Players’ attempts
to alter the outcome of the Napoleonic wars, little knowing that
a Time Lord was working with the Players at the same time. Attempting
to stop The Doctor from interfering with the Players’ actions,
their Time Lord ally used the Timescoop - forbidden technology that
took a subject from one location in time and space and moved them
to another - to send a vampire from the Death Zone on Gallifrey after
The Doctor, but due to him having recently eaten garlic bread at
a party, The Doctor was able to drive the vampire back long enough
to stake it with a convenient branch.
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The E-Space Trilogy
DVD Box Set
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Rassilon’s proclamation about the Great
Vampire was eventually
fulfilled when the Fourth
Doctor, the Second
Romana, and K9 passed through a CVE -
A Charged Vacuum Emboitment - into E-Space, a Universe not unlike
our own N-Space, but smaller, and with negative instead of positive
co-ordinates.
Following a battle on the planet Alzarius, The Doctor, Romana and
K9 departed, unaware that a young Alzarian boy called Adric had
stowed away on the TARDIS.
At the next planet in E-Space they arrived on, The Doctor and Romana
discovered that the Three Who Rule- King Zargo, Queen Camilla and
their High Priest, Aukon, were the followers of the Great Vampire,
who had escaped onto their ship, the Hydrax, made them vampires,
and taken them through to E-Space, where he was slowly restored
to full health by their capturing of the villagers they ruled and
feeding them to him as part of a yearly ritual known as ‘the
Gathering’. When The Doctor attempted to investigate the ship,
although he discovered the Lords’ true nature and managed
to escape, Aukon captured Adric and Romana, intending for Adric
to become a new vampire and Romana to be used as a sacrifice to
herald the awakening and restoration of the Great Vampire. Fortunately,
The Doctor and K9 were able to develop a strategy, especially since
the Time Lords had stored information on vampires in the databanks
of every single Type Forty TARDIS - The Doctor's TARDIS. While K9
led an attack by the rebels on the castle, The Doctor used one of
the Hydrax's scout ships to destroy the Great Vampire by staking
it through the heart, and thus destroying the Three Who Rule, who
had only been sustained by the Great Vampire after all their years.
These,
however, weren't the only vampires on the planet, as The Doctor discovered
during his time on the planet, resulting in a rather interesting
encounter involving both his Fourth and Eighth
incarnations. Following "State
of Decay", the Fourth
Doctor, Romana, Adric and K9 stayed around for a brief while to ensure
things
went well, but in the process The Doctor and Romana were tricked
into
going to the House of Zarn, where Zarn, another vampire, attempted
to make The Doctor and Romana the new King and Queen. However, the
vampires here for some reason took longer to change a subject than
the others encountered - vampirism for this type of vampires taking
the form of forced mutation after feeding on them over a prolonged
period, the success of the process varying depending on the strength
of spirit of the subject - so although The Doctor was captured, Romana
managed to escape and would have more time to try to warn the villagers.
Thankfully, since she probably didn't have much time anyway, Romana
met up with the amnesiac Eighth Doctor, currently visiting his past
selves to regain his lost memories after falling victim to a trap
set by The Master ("The
Eight Doctors"). The Eighth Doctor
and Romana saved the Fourth Doctor from Zarn's house, and the rebels,
who'd discovered their absence, bought the Eighth Doctor and Romana
time to get to the Eighth Doctor's TARDIS and take the Fourth Doctor
to the rebel's base, where the Eighth Doctor saved the Fourth Doctor
by giving him a blood transfusion, since the vampires had overdone
it when drinking from the Fourth Doctor.
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Blood Harvest
(Terrance
Dicks) |
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Later on, on Gallifrey, a Time Lady named
Ruath, who The Doctor had planned to leave Gallifrey with, became
convinced that the Time Lords were destined to become a vampiric race,
due to apparent evidence that Rassilon became a vampire near the end
of his life. She managed to force Romana, now back on Gallifrey after
being taken there by the Seventh
Doctor, to take her to the Timescoop,
and then attempted to give the vampires the blood of a Doctor. She
rejected both the Thirteenth Doctor and the Seventh Doctor, both being
too devious for her to easily trick, and decided on the more vulnerable
Fifth
Doctor. She sent a baby vampire to attack The Doctor while his
companion Tegan
Jovanka tried to recover from her possession by the Mara,
("Snakedance") but the vampire, known simply as the Child,
made a mistake and attacked Nyssa instead. Due to her being unable
to use The Doctor’s blood for her purpose, Ruath fed her blood
to the vampire lord Yarven, stuck on Earth some while ago and then
buried alive for fifty years, and was then made Yarven's vampire
consort. While The Doctor and Tegan investigated reports of vampire
attacks in Manchester, Nyssa was captured by Yarven, but thankfully
only fed on animal's blood - if she drank human blood, she would
become a vampire for good.
Ruath
also managed to develop a vaporised form of vampire DNA, that would turn
anyone who came in contact with it into a vampire, but those protected
by faith or garlic would spontaneously combust. Having discovered Ruath’s
plans, The Doctor was forced to let Ruath bite him - at least partly motivated
by a desire to save Tegan - while Ruath triggered a Time Freeze that trapped
the western hemisphere of Earth in permanent night. However, Ruath had
stolen the Ring of Rassilon, an artefact that let her control Time Lord
technology, and Romana had sent The Doctor a telepathic message that told
him what to do to control it. Taking control of the Ring with a code word,
The Doctor was able to command Ruath’s TARDIS to dematerialise, ending
the Time Freeze and destroying all of the vampires in Manchester as the
sun rose, subsequently taking Ruath’s TARDIS to a planet with two
suns and destroying Yarven’s hoards. Ruath escaped and got into The
Doctor's TARDIS, but Nyssa managed to eject Ruath out into the Time Vortex,
thus curing The Doctor of his minor vampirism. However, it wasn't for some
while that The Doctor found out how Yarven got to Earth…
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Project: Twilight
(Cavan Scott & Mark Wright) |
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Some
time after that, the Sixth
Doctor and his companion Evelyn
Smythe were eating a meal from a Chinese takeaway called the
Slow Boat when they stumbled accross a mass of murdered - and eaten
- animals. As The Doctor and Evelyn were confronted with further
deaths in the alleyway as they witnessed a man get shot with a crossbow
and the blood subsequently boiling around the wound, it wasn't long
before their investigation lead them to some strange goings on at
a nearby casino called "The Dusk", which they investigated
with the aid of a young waitress called Cassie, who was being forced
to act as a spy for the sake of her mother and young son. Meeting
the mysterious Nimrod, The Doctor realized he was dealing with vampires
again, seeking to resurrect an ancient government project from the
First World War called Project: Twilight, a project that had sought
to create a superior soldier class for the war using genetic engineering.
The research team had somehow come into possession of vampire DNA
- Nimrod was the doctor originally in charge of the experiments who
transformed himself after his test subjects nearly killed him, subsequently
being cybernetically augmented as he hunted his own creations - but
although they won The Doctor’s support by claiming that they
sought a cure for their condition, their true plan was to allow them
to turn others into vampires using the nanobots that transformed
them. Fortunately The Doctor managed to escape with the aid of Nimrod,
subsequently destroying Amelia - the vampire responsible for the
work on the nanobots - by dragging her into the river, apparently
drowning her. The Doctor and Evelyn departed, but were unable at
the time to help Cassie - who had been turned by Nimrod, although
she still wasn't a killer at heart - intead leaving her in a Norwegian
forest in order to ensure she wasn't a danger to anyone else. What
was more, Nimrod had survived, and, although unable to find Amelia's
body, he knew that Cassie survived, and his superiors ordered him
to bring her back... alive.
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Project: Lazarus
(Cavan Scott Wright
and Mark Wright) |
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A
few months after the events of "Project:
Twilight", The
Doctor and Evelyn returned to track down Cassie, The Doctor having
developed a cure for the Twilight virus. Unfortunately, the TARDIS
forced them to dematerialise several years after they'd left Cassie
in the forest, rather than the mere seconds The Doctor was aiming
for, and discovered that Cassie had been forced to flee Nimrod and
the Forge for decades... or so it seemed. In reality, Cassie, now
known as 'Artemis', had been working for the Forge for ages, having
found a real sense of home and family there; indeed, the Forge as
a whole seemed better than before, now dedicated to studying alien
technology for the benefit of humanity rather than the genetic experiments
it had performed before. However, Nimrod wanted The Doctor there
for a simple reason; to take a blood sample and force The Doctor
to regenerate so Nimrod could learn how to harness the ability for
himself. Fortunately, Evelyn managed to reveal the truth to Cassie
- Nimrod had brainwashed her into joining the Forge to act as bait
for The Doctor - and, in the end, Cassie not only saved The Doctor
from the Forge's experiments, but also sacrificed herself to give
The Doctor and Evelyn time to escape (Her son, Thomas Hector ‘Hex’ Schofield,
would go on to travel with the Seventh Doctor for a time, although
The Doctor’s initial meeting with Hex was nothing but a coincidence).
When The Doctor finally discovered how Yarven
got to Earth, The Doctor was in his seventh incarnation, and had
sent his companion Bernice
Summerfield off to E-Space to investigate recent uprisings
between the peasants and the human Lords on the vampire planet, while,
based on an anonymous tip, The Doctor and Ace opened up an illegal
bar called 'Doc's Place' during Prohibition to create a neutral area
for the gang lords to meet, The Doctor seeking the evil Agonal, who
intervened throughout history to make bad situations even worse.
While trying to avert the gang war that Agonal sought to trigger,
the two of them befriended Private Eye Tom Dekker (Who would meet
the Sixth Doctor in his future and The Doctor’s past during
the events of "Players", although Dekker was never aware
of the Sixth’s connection to the Seventh), initially sent by
Al Capone to investigate The Doctor. Trying to calm the riots on
the vampire planet, Benny and Romana discovered that Agonal had managed
to resurrect Zargo, Camilla, and Aukon while stirring up the conflict
between the locals, and would soon do the same to the Great Vampire.
As Agonal’s manipulations triggered the St Valentine’s
Day Massacre in Chicago, The Doctor, Ace, and Dekker were forced
to retreat to the TARDIS, pursuing Agonal to E-Space. Just as Agonal
prepared to fully resurrect the Great Vampire, Dekker managed to
kill Zargo, Camilla and Aukon with bullets straight to the heart,
while The Doctor blew up the Hydrax and exposed the newly -resurrected
Great Vampire to sunlight, killing it again as well. Although Agonal
was Time-Scooped away before The Doctor could deal with him, The
Doctor tracked Agonal to Gallifrey, where he discovered that Agonal
had been ‘captured’ by the Committee of Three - a security
council made up of three Time Lords whose lives had been ruined thanks
to The Doctor - who had used The Doctor to find Agonal with the intention
of pitting him against Rassilon to save Borusa. Unfortunately for
the Committee, Borusa had seen the error of his ways during his imprisonment,
working with The Doctor, Romana and Rassilon to crush Agonal and
leaving the Three to be captured. Romana remained on Gallifrey, and
The Doctor, Ace and Benny took Dekker back to Chicago, where Dekker
took over Doc's Place (A vampire Lord from E-Space managed to escape
to Earth by hiding in Benny’s archaeological equipment, but
The Doctor was unconcerned about that due to his knowledge of Yarven’s
fate).
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Vampire Science
(Jonathan Blum &
Kate Orman) |
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The Doctor's next encounter with the vampires was a particularly
strange one - which, given that so far The Doctor and his companions
had to accept the existence of living corpses, was saying a lot.
The Seventh Doctor, travelling alone, arrived in the Forge once again
while investigating a temporal distortion, to encounter not only
Nimrod, but also a very unexpected scientific advisor for the project
- the Sixth Doctor. It appeared that the Sixth Doctor had been forced
to work with the Forge to fight off an invasion by the Huldran -
aliens that had been experimented on by the Forge in their early
days - but The Doctor also been forced to revert the TARDIS to a
normal Police Box to prevent them getting their hands on it, and
now needed the Seventh's help to escape. However, the Seventh realised
that the Sixth was a fake - if nothing else, the Seventh didn't remember
any of these events - and this was only confirmed when the Huldran
practically hacked off the Sixth's arm, as such damage should have
triggered a regeneration. Making telepathic contact with the Sixth
Doctor, the Seventh was able to confirm his suspicions; this Doctor
was in fact a clone created from DNA extracted on The Doctor's last
visit. The process, however, was unstable, and the severed arm was
all it took to send the 'Doctor's' genetic structure over the edge
to oblivion. To the horror of The Doctor and the clone, the clone
was actually only days old; the process was so unstable that the
clones failed after only a few days, and each time DNA was taken
from the clone to create a new one with the original's memories...
while the 'failed' clones (At least ten failures for every 'successful'
one) were kept for tissue experimentation. The clone, mimicking Nimrod's
voice, triggered the destruction of the Forge, leaving The Doctor
only six minutes to escape and release the Huldran captives. He did
so, but was left saddened by the deaths of all the innocent human
lives in the Forge... little suspecting that, elsewhere, the Forge's
beta facility had been activated...
The Doctor’s
history with the Forge came to an end when the Seventh Doctor materialised
inside the Forge’s new headquarters
("Twilight's End"), The Doctor being forced to flee
the security forces sent to kill him by retreating deeper into the
building as doors lured him in that direction. Arriving at the heart
of the Forge, The Doctor discovered the elaborate cyborg computer
system known as the Oracle, and was horrified to recognise it as
the now-barely-alive Nimrod, permanently wired into the machinery
before him. With no other way to help Nimrod, The Doctor left a sample
of the Twilight cure and departed, leaving it up to Nimrod whether
or not he would use it to end his nightmarish existence.
During
the events of "Zagreus", when the Eighth Doctor was contaminated
by the forces of anti-time, the TARDIS - currently being manipulated
by Rassilon after it was also contaminated by anti-time - generated
holographic simulations for The Doctor’s current companion
Charley Pollard as it sought information about the race known as
the Divergents, Rassilon seeking to use the anti-time-contaminated
Doctor as an assassin against the Divergents and the TARDIS trying
to decide whether or not to help him. One of these simulations was
set in Gallifrey’s past, where the vampire Lord Tepesh tricked
members of the Sisterhood of Karn ("The
Brain of Morbius")
to help him gain access to Rassilon’s workshop in an attempt
to learn his secrets, culminating in a confrontation with Charley
as she assumed Rassilon’s role in the simulation before the
lab was destroyed as a result of Tepesh’s attempts to access
forbidden information (During this confrontation Tepesh claimed that
the vampires had originally been a peaceful race feeding on genetically-modified
animals before Rassilon found them and concluded that they were too
different to be allowed to live, but Tepesh’s ‘class’ of
vampire may be different to the ones created by the Great Vampire).
The illusionary Tepesh - the physical double of the Sixth Doctor,
granting him access to at least some of The Doctor’s knowledge
- later aided Charley in convincing The Doctor to fight Zagreus’s
influence after Charley was banished to the Matrix along with Tepesh
and two other holograms based on The Doctor’s fifth and seventh
incarnations, these manifestations of his past giving The Doctor
the strength to banish Rassilon to the realm of anti-time and be
subsequently cured of the Zagreus persona.
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The Eight Doctors
(Terrance Dicks) |
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The Doctor's
last encounter with the vampires took place some time after the Eighth
Doctor's battle with them when he rescued the Fourth Doctor in "The
Eight Doctors" and he's just picked Sam up after his adventures
with Charley. Carolyn McConnell, a woman The Doctor and Sam met in
1976, called the two of them to her in 1997 when vampires began attacking
a local nightclub and UNIT asked her to act as their unofficial scientific
advisor for the crisis. The Doctor discovered that one vampire, called
Harris, was attempting to develop an artificial food source. The
Doctor and Harris linked themselves to each other via a bloodfasting,
forming a mindlink between them so that any wounds inflicted on one
would affect the other. However, one vampire, Slake, tried to provoke
a war that he felt certain he could win, managed to turn the other
vampires against Harris, since now he only needed to kill either
Harris or The Doctor to dispose of them both. Discovering that Harris
was working with clones to develop an artificial food source, The
Doctor refused to allow the growth of the clones for simple 'vampire
batteries', but was still able to win Harris’s support against
Slake. Although UNIT managed to do some damage, Slake captured Sam
and tried to use her as a hostage against The Doctor. The Doctor,
however, tricked the vampires into feeding off him, and since he'd
recently taken a vampire repellent and injected it into himself,
all the vampires died, and Harris was reverted to a human due to
the bloodfasting with The Doctor, since the repellent only removed
the vampire element from people. The Doctor and Sam departed, leaving
the situation under control save for the presence of the last vampire,
Shackle, who, still unsure about his decision to become a vampire,
never joined the attack on The Doctor, and was now alone and wondering
what to do next…
As well as the above encounters, the Seventh Doctor and the Tenth
Doctor have
confronted vampire-like entities known as Haemovores and Plasmavores
respectively, each of them resembling vampires while still being
clearly identified as a separate species. The Haemovores ("The
Curse of Fenric") were agents of the powerful evil known as
Fenric, possessing vampire-like abilities but lacking their vulnerability
to sunlight, although strong faith - such as The Doctor’s faith
in his past companions, or a Russian soldier’s belief in the
Russian Revolution - could hold them back and even appeared to cause
them pain. The Plasmavores ("Smith
and Jones") were an
alien race, apparently capable of shape-shifting, who could ‘trick’ alien
sensors to register them as human by drinking human blood; the Tenth
Doctor and his new companion Martha Jones were able to expose a Plasmavore
hiding on Earth by tricking her into drinking The Doctor’s
blood, causing her to register as alien to the sensors of the Judoon
policemen tracking her. The Eleventh
Doctor encountered what appeared
to be vampires when he visited Venice in 1580 with his companions
Amy Pond and Rory Williams, but he soon discovered that they were
actually a fish-like alien race called The
Saturnynians, who had escaped
their dying world when cracks in time and space appeared around their
planet and forced them to escape. Although they shared many similarities
to vampires, these were all merely coincidental; their human appearance
was caused by a perception filter that didn’t show their reflections
in mirrors due to the brain’s inability to process what the
filter reflected and causing them to see nothing, their sharp teeth
were exposed when they attacked as the brain’s fear in the
face of danger caused them to break through the filter and see danger,
and their evolution to exist underwater had rendered them vulnerable
to sunlight, with The Doctor holding them back with an ultraviolet
lamp and Amy destroying one by focusing sunlight on one of them with
a pocket mirror. The Saturnynians ‘mother’ was attempting
to transform human girls into mates for her male offspring - the
only offspring to survive the journey from their world to Earth -
by gradually draining the moisture from the girls and replacing it
with their own blood, but this plan was defeated when The Doctor
refused to allow them to sink Venice to make it a suitable environment
for them, the Saturnynians mother committing suicide after The Doctor
defeated her plan rather than listen to his offer to help them another
way. Whether true vampires will ever appear in the series remains
to be seen.
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