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The Werewolf
(Tooth and Claw) |
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 Name: Werewolves, specifically Emmeline Neuberger,
Illena de Santos, Mags
Format:
Television show, Book and Audio
Time of Origin: Varied; some come from Earth while
others originate from outer space, but there have been recorded
examples of various examples of werewolves from the 16th century to the
future.
Appearances: "Loups-Garoux", "The
Greatest Show in the Galaxy", "Kursaal", "Wolfsbane", "Tooth
and Claw".
Doctors:
Fourth
Doctor,
Fifth
Doctor,
Seventh
Doctor, Eighth
Doctor and
the Tenth
Doctor.
Companions: Sarah
Jane Smith, Harry
Sullivan, Turlough, Ace, Samantha
Jones and Rose Tyler.
History: After confronting vampires on several
occasions, it was only the logical step for The Doctor to be pitted up
against werewolves as well. Another prominent monster from horror fiction,
werewolves are either born with the affliction or created from the bite
of another werewolf, cursed to transform into half-men/half-wolf monsters
on the full moon (Although most stories have them transform on the days
around the full moon itself as well), vulnerable only to silver weapons.
Surprisingly enough for a science fiction series, only two of The Doctor's
encounters with werewolves featured werewolves who definitively came from
another planet; the other werewolves faced by The Doctor either originated
from Earth or were left with their origins unspecified.
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Wolfsbane
(Jacqueline Rayner) |
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The Doctor's first werewolf encounter technically occurred
during his fourth and eighth incarnations simultaneously,
when the Fourth
Doctor's TARDIS 'accidentally'
materialised (Although there are hints that it was drawn
there by its
disabled future self) in 1936 while responding to a distress
signal sent by The
Brigadier, resulting in The Doctor's
companion Harry
Sullivan being left behind when the TARDIS
dematerialised once more. While in 1936, after discovering
the dead body of a woman who had been apparently attacked
by a werewolf, Harry befriended a man called The Doctor,
little realising that the man in question was the amnesic
Eighth
Doctor, having lost all memory of his past, and,
thus, totally failing to recognise Harry despite the time
they'd spent together. While Harry stayed with the local
aristocrats - Hester Stanton and her son George, Hester
being a member of the Leffy family by birth -, nature in
that area suddenly started acting strange as all the plants
and trees in the area sprung into full bloom despite the
fact that it was the end of November. Accompanied by Harry,
The Doctor investigated the strange occurrences, discovering
a young man named Godric from the past - specifically, from
the era of none other than the actual King Arthur, who had
been held prisoner by a dryad until the land 'woke up' again.
As their investigations continued, Harry and The Doctor
eventually learning that the werewolf in question was Emmeline
Neuberger, a German cousin of Hester and George... but,
as was discovered by closer inspection of the body, she
hadn't killed the young woman the previous night; the bite
marks were faked.
Aided by Emmeline and Godric, The Doctor and Harry learned
that Hester and George were convinced that they were the
reincarnations of Mergan LeFay and Mordred, and intended
to 'wake' the land up by having the werewolf Emmeline spill
blood, allowing Hester to work her magic and turn the land
against the people, essentially blackmailing Britain to
make George king. Fortunately, Godric had discovered the
Holy Grail shortly before he was captured by the dryad,
which gave them a weapon to use against Hester; the presence
of the Grail caused Emmeline pain due to her 'unnatural'
nature, so The Doctor concluded that it would have an even
more pronounced affect on a woman wielding the unnatural
power Hester would be wielding as she attempted to turn
nature against humanity. After Godric was injured and The Doctor knocked out after making contact with the Grail (Presumably
due to his actions in "The
Ancestor Cell" when
he was forced to destroy his entire planet, albeit to save
the universe), Harry took the Grail against Hester, sending
her and the Grail falling into the Earth and leaving George
a raving lunatic. Harry was subsequently picked up by the
Fourth Doctor and Sarah, who also took Godric back to his
own time, leaving the Eighth Doctor to unintentionally hand
Emmeline over to a government organisation seeking to create
werewolf soldiers for the upcoming war. Fortunately, the
Fourth Doctor and Sarah
Jane Smith (Having materialised about a month
in the future while trying to get back to where they’d
left Harry the first time) managed to rescue Emmeline from
her captors, The Doctor subsequently using Emmeline's blood
to put the land back to sleep once and for all before she
returned to Germany to try and free her fellow werewolves.
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Loups-Garoux
(Marc Platt) |
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Some time after this, The Doctor encountered werewolves
again during his fifth incarnation, when he and his companion
Turlough visited Rio de Janeiro in 2080 to attend the Carnaval,
despite the fact that the beaches by this point had become
shantytowns for native Indians who had to relocate after
the ecosystem collapsed and the Amazon became a desert.
Investigating a hover-limo that instilled a strange sense
of fear in the crowds, the two soon discovered that the
limo belonged to the de Santos family, a family of werewolves
whose head was the enigmatic Ilena de Santos. Noting a large
grey wolf that was keeping up with the train despite the
train going at over two hundred miles an hour, The Doctor
went to warn Ilena, and learned of her werewolf nature,
as well as her desire to escape the darkness of her curse.
Learning that Ilena’s doctor was attempting to find
a way to ‘cure’ the werewolf gene, and that
Ilena herself was being stalked by a powerful werewolf called
Pieter Stubbe, The Doctor challenged Stubbe, refusing to
allow him to hurt any more people, but equally unwilling
to be a party to the genocide of an ancient culture. As
Stubbe returned to Rio to lead the werewolves in an attack,
The Doctor confronted the werewolves about their dependence
on Stubbe, and, in a confrontation with Stubbe himself,
The Doctor tricked him into entering the TARDIS before taking
it into orbit around Earth; this kind of werewolf was so
tied to Earth that simply going too high would kill them
as they lose contact with the planet. Saying goodbye to
Ilena, The Doctor and Turlough departed, confident that
their new friends and allies would manage.
The Doctor's next couple of encounters with werewolves,
however, were less straightforward than his earlier ones;
for one thing, neither of these encounters were with werewolves
who originated from Earth, but were alien species who shared
many features with the werewolves of Earth. During a trip
to self-proclaimed 'Greatest Show in the Galaxy', the Seventh
Doctor and Ace encountered a woman called Mags, who was
either a human werewolf or a werewolf-like alien (Which
one of these was the case was not unspecified) who was being
forced to serve a space explorer known simply as the Captain.
With The Doctor and Ace trapped in the Psychic Circus -
really an elaborate show created by the ‘Gods of Ragnarok’ to
entertain themselves - the Captain, seeking to control the
power of the gods himself, triggered Mags’ wolf transformation
via artificial moonlight. The Captain intended to use Mags
to entertain the gods and allow himself to make a deal with
them for more power, but Mags turned on the Captain and
killed him after The Doctor convinced her to resist her
feral instincts. With the Circus and the Gods of Ragnarok
destroyed, Mags and Kingpin - the head of the original circus,
and the only other survivor - decided to start a new circus
for themselves, although The Doctor declined the offer to
join them.
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Kursaal
(Peter Anghelides) |
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During his Eighth incarnation, The Doctor and his new
companion Samantha
Jones encountered a different kind of werewolf
during the events of "Kursaal", when they found
themselves on the planet Saturnia Regina prior to its conversion
into the Kursaal theme park; they’d been aiming for
the park itself, but arrived five years too early. Discovering
that a wolf-like species known as the Jax, long thought
extinct, lived under the site of the proposed attractions,
and were attacking the humans there and transforming them
into wolf-like creatures. During the course of his investigation,
The Doctor learned that Jax were not the wolves, but the
virus that caused the transformation itself, controlled
by ancient Jax technology contained within their cathedral.
Sam was briefly injected by the Jax ‘virus’,
almost causing her to transform into the new Jax leader,
but The Doctor, refusing to kill his companion, managed
to knock her out by tricking her into thinking she was exposed
to moonlight when it was only an illusion. Fortunately,
the Jax technology was destroyed in a shuttle crash when
The Doctor was forced to flee in an escape pod due to damage
to the shuttle, and, with the loss of the Jax technology,
Sam’s infection was cured.
The Doctor's last encounter with werewolves occurred
in his tenth incarnation, during a visit to 1879 after The Doctor's attempts to take Rose Tyler to a concert in 1979 failed
when he missed the target date. Joining Queen Victoria on
a trip to the Torchwood Estate, The Doctor learned from
Sir Robert, the owner of the Estate, of a local legend of
a werewolf that haunted the glens, having started after
a meteor fell to Earth almost three hundred years ago, and
was hidden by a group of monks who turned from God to worship
the wolf. In this case, lycanthropy was described as being
very like an ‘infection’, with a young boy being
abducted from his home every generation and bitten to ensure
the wolf’s survival, with The monks now planning to
'infect' Victoria with the wolf's bite, thus creating the
'Empire of the Wolf' and totally changing human history.
Fortunately, although The monks prevented anyone
from leaving the house, The Doctor managed to get Rose,
Victoria and
Sir Robert to the library, which had walls coated with mistletoe
to keep the wolf at bay (Whether the wolf actually had a
problem with mistletoe or The monks had just trained
it that way to control it was unclear). Aided by the books
in Sir Robert's father's library, The Doctor realised that
Sir Robert’s father, aided by Prince Albert, had set
up an elaborate plan to kill the wolf using Sir Robert’s
father’s personally-designed telescope in the attic,
and the Koh-i-Noor, one of the world’s largest diamonds.
By channelling the moonlight through the telescope via the
diamond, The Doctor was able to ‘overfeed’ the
wolf with moonlight; much like humans need water but can
still drown, too much moonlight destroyed the wolf once
and for all (Although evidence suggests that the ‘infection’ may
have been passed on to the royal family, this is speculation
at best). |
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