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Apr. 21st, 2018 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
windsrising•Tasked with bringing the remains of his mortal enemy (The Master) back to Gallifrey, the Doctor - then in his seventh incarnation - runs into a spot of trouble and is forced to make an emergency landing on Earth. In the ensuing chaos, the last remnants of the Master's essence (in the form of an ectoplasmic snake - yes, it's weird, no it's never explained) manage to slip away, while the Doctor himself steps out of the TARDIS and promptly gets shot.
•While his injuries aren't fatal, the (botched) exploratory surgery to look into what the hospital techs think is a heart fibrillation (in actuality an echoed heartbeat on account of him having two hearts) proves unfortunately fatal; possibly as a result of the anesthesia, the Doctor doesn't regenerate until some time later, in the hospital morgue.
•The newly regenerated Eighth Doctor wakes up on ice, completely amnesiac, and is immediately thrown into dealing with not only a crisis that threatens the Earth itself but also the problem of the Master as well as trying to convince his only apparent ally that he is who he says he is. Thankfully, he succeeds on all counts - due in large part to him regaining his memory some three quarters of the way through the adventure - and sets out to once again travel the universe.
•Some unspecified amount of time later, the Doctor's adventures see him arriving on board the ill-fated R-101. While there he meets Charlotte Pollard (she prefers 'Charley') who's managed to sneak on board in the disguise of one of crew.
•At the end of the adventure, the Doctor - unwilling to consign a traveling companion to an unlovely death - rescues Charley before the R-101 crashes. Thus, she becomes the only survivor of the crash - a single oddity, to stand against the weight of history. Which says that there were no survivors of the R-101 (at least in the Whoniverse version of history, anyway).
•As it turns out, traveling with someone who's a living paradox is not best of ideas.
•Especially not time-traveling - forced to continuously deal with the paradox of Charley's existence, the web of time itself is soon stretched to the breaking point and beyond, letting anti-time to start to leak through.
•With all of time threatened, the Celestial Intervention Agency takes matters into their own hands, and captures Charley with the intention of taking her before the High President of Gallifrey. The Doctor, unwilling to let this sort of thing stand, follows after her.
•As it turns it, the damage to the web of time has let not just anti-time leak through but also "never-people" - the remnants of people who have been literally erased by time by one of the CIA's previously-held policies. Needless to say, they also have a massive (and understandable) grudge against the Time Lords, and mean to destroy the whole of time itself.
•However they also have a gift for the Time Lords! The casket of the founder of their society itself, stranded in the anti-time universe after fighting the great beast Zagreus at the beginning of their history.
•Or so they claim. The Doctor has his doubts - he's seen the real casket, which is perfectly safe and sound in the real universe. As it turns out the 'casket' is nothing more than a anti-time bomb; the never-people mean to explode it at the very heart of Gallifrey; the last safe bastion of real time, forever destroying time itself.
•With the bomb on its way and the countdown to the destruction of time itself too close to zero to stop the ship it's on the Doctor takes a desperate gamble to save all of time itself - he materializes his TARDIS around the ship carrying the bomb; when it explodes the TARDIS itself shields time from the blast. And since the Web of Time now owes its existence to Charley, indeed, couldn't exist without her, the paradox of her existence resolves. Or at least, becomes part of the Web of Time itself, which sees to the end of the trouble she'd been causing.
•Back with the Doctor, however, things are not going so well. Trapped in the TARDIS at the heart of the anti-time explosion, the anti-time has infected him, leaving not the Doctor but Zagreus, the very antithesis of everything the Doctor had been. And Charley, who had returned to the TARDIS to see if the Doctor had been alright is now trapped inside the TARDIS as well.
•With the Doctor half-mad, torn between his own personality and that of Zagreus, the TARDIS herself takes matters into her own hands, distracting the Doctor/Zagreus and - in the form of one of the Doctor's oldest friends - reveals to Charley that when Rassilon, founder of the race of Time Lords, created time travel he also seeded the Gallifreyan body type across the cosmos "in order to promote healthy bipedal species" (here read: Rassilon was dick and a xenophobe). In so doing, he also created the Divergence - a race of beings who Rassilon quietly locked away in a mobius-strip universe away from the rest of reality.
•Things only get more complicated when Rassilon himself (or rather the mental imprint of him saved in the Matrix, which is a sort of Gallifreyan bio-computer) shows up, whereupon the TARDIS (who, as it turns out, has also been partially infected by anti-time) promptly quits, jettisoning not just a large collection of Eight's belongings but also Charley herself out into the void. The Doctor, still possessed by the anti-time infection that is Zagreus and still a danger to all of time itself, is forced to helplessly watch - to leave the TARDIS to save Charley would be to threaten all of reality.
•(Charley ends up in what appears to be the Death Zone of Rassilon, comparatively unharmed and with the company of three of the Doctor's previous regenerations, but Eight isn't aware of this)
•With Rassilon now arrived on the scene and the Doctor/Zagreus contained with the Foundry of Rassilon (...look, it's a theme), Rassilon gives the TARDIS a new body and melts down the empty shell that had previously been the TARDIS; the shock of seeing his home - his friend - burned away to nothingness allow Zagreus to take over completely.
•Which as it turns out was Rassilon's plan all along. Zagreus, he explains, isn't a product of anti-time, but its master and with the Vorpal Sword (made out of the remnants of the TARDIS) that Rassilon sets Zagreus to making, Zagreus can go to the Divergent Universe and slaughter the Divergent, keeping them from ever usurping the Time Lords' position of power.
•Zagreus, however, is having none of this and instead rises up against Rassilon, throwing him into the Divergent universe to be torn apart by the inhabitants thereof.
•It's at this point that Charley arrives, accompanied by Romana (the current High President of Gallifrey) and the three earlier incarnations of the Doctor she'd met in Death Zone. All of whom promptly end up being cut down by Rassilon, using Zagreus' Vorpal Sword.
•However, their deaths allow the Doctor's personality to rise ascendant over Zagreus' again; knowing that doesn't have long before the Zagreus side of himself surfaces again, the Doctor begs Charley to kill him, before he's lost to Zagreus forever. With no other option, and after a slightly anguished declaration of love on both ends, Charley plunges the Vorpal Sword into the Doctor's chest.
•...And the Doctor doesn't regenerate. For one brief moment, he'd genuinely wanted to die. And that's all that matters.
•But the Doctor is also Zagreus. And Zagreus is anti-time, which means that if the Doctor gives in to that side of him he can undo the moment of his own death.
•And Zagreus rises, turning on Charley and Romana. Only for the TARDIS - now free of the anti-time infection - to arrive to save the day, bringing the Doctor back to himself with a fragment of zero matter. But although the Doctor's personality is stable again, the anti-time infection that had been Zagreus is still a part of him, and as much as he'd like to continue his travels, he can't, not without putting all of time at risk. Instead he voluntarily goes into exile into the Divergent Universe, to live out the rest of his natural life in a world without time.
•As for Charley, he means to leave her on Gallifrey, to find her own life. But Charley is having none of that, and unbeknowst to the Doctor manages to sneak back onto the TARDIS.
•Unfortunately, Charley and the Doctor arrive to find that Divergent Universe is not precisely the sort of warm welcome one might have expected. Without time, the Doctor's time senses are being rendered painfully useless, he's still dealing with the aftermath of having been host to Zagreus, and worst of all shadows are eating away at the TARDIS itself and before too long only the control room itself is all that's left. What's outside, however, might be worse: a blinding white light and an incessant high pitched noise.
•With the Doctor crippled by pain and indecision, Charley is the one to finally make a decision and hand in hand they step out into the blinding light, the TARDIS vanishing behind them.
•Without sight to guide them and the only the sound of each other's voice to comfort them, they walk on for what turns out to be hours - hours that only feel like minutes, thanks to even their senses of hunger and tiredness being dulled. And there's something with them. Something that echoes their voices back to them, stringing their words into meaningless phrases.
•They walk on.
•In time, they come to realize that they're trapped inside a glass tube of some variety, and with no way to break out of it, their only hope is to find the end, even if it should mean walking forever. The only breaks they have is when they come across the dead creatures that serve them as food - creatures that have been slowly moving up the evolutionary ladder - but those same breaks also leave them vulnerable to attack from the creature that's been echoing their words. Still, their only hope is to walk on, and so they do.
•It's at this point that things start to get a little body horror, as Charley and the Doctor realize that they too have evolved - their joined hands have fused making them one single entity. And more importantly, the glass tube they're in is a circle. The creature they'd been eating had always been the same creature, and with no other way out, Charley and the Doctor take drastic action. In order to not be out-evolved themselves, and to stand a chance against the sound creature (which hadn't been attacking them but coming to feed itself) they need to need to take their own evolution further and they slowly push themselves together until they become one gestalt creature, and when the sound creature finally admits its defeat, the glass wall that had previously been their prison falls easily to their combined strength.
•However, despite the Doctor's idle thoughts of pushing their evolution still further, neither of them can really bear to live as one single entity any longer, and with great effort they manage to pull apart, becoming two separate people once again. And hand in hand they step out into the strange new world they've found themselves in.
•After a brief (and unintentional) detour through a sort of planetary neutral zone - where they're mentally accosted by someone calling himself Kro'ka - their adventures begin anew. That said, there are definitely certain oddities to the Divergent Universe. First of all, there's an awful lot of bipeds around for somewhere that was supposed to be where Rassilon dumped all lifeforms that didn't conform to that specific body shape. Secondly, no one seems to understand the idea of "time" despite the fact that it's clearly passing.
•Also, the TARDIS is still missing, but apart from that the adventure continues on, and in short order, Charley and the Doctor acquire a new traveling companion: C'rizz, a Eutermesan monk from the first biome they pass through, and a native to the Divergent Universe.
•(There's also fact that the Doctor is hoping to find Rassilon, but he doesn't really tell either of his companions this, even when he starts to expect that the whole of the planet they're stuck on is a series of experiments running in parallel.)
•And then, while they're passing through one of the planetary neutral zones, the Doctor suddenly comes down with a bout of time sickness. Which should be impossible, given that time doesn't exist in the Divergent Universe. Which means that it must be coming from something not native to the Divergent Universe and one failed mind probe later, Kro'ka confirms that what the Doctor is sensing is the TARDIS.
•Using the unorthodox tactic of navigating by how sick the Doctor feels, Charley, C'rizz and the Doctor manage to find the right way out of the planetary neutral zone and onto the planet where TARDIS is. Only for the Doctor to end up split into three upon arrival, each representing an aspect of is personality.
•Which turns out to have been engineered by the TARDIS herself. If she hadn't split the Doctor into three, he'd never have been able to successfully navigate the labyrinth that she'd been at the heart of; once the three of him step foot inside the TARDIS they all recombine, and while the TARDIS is just as cut off from time as the Doctor himself, this does mean they can at least travel in space.
•Naturally, this means that before too long the TARDIS ends up crashing. Or rather, ends up being pulled down towards a planet; when the Doctor tries to bypass the inevitable crash by simply landing on the planet, the TARDIS straight up refuses, for all appearances burning up in re-entry instead.
•Battered, shaken up, and marooned, the Doctor finds himself rescued by Guidance (the leader of C'rizz's religious order), an inexplicably French game hunter by the name of Keep, and Keep's wife Perfection (no really, that's her name). C'rizz and Charley, however are nowhere to be found.
•...Because they've been hooked into in dream machines by Kro'ka on the orders of Rassilon and made to relieve their worst memories. Charley manages to break free in short order, but C'rizz does not, whereupon several lingering plot threads are explained in short order. To wit: the Church of the Foundation - to which C'rizz belongs - is really more of a cult than any sort of religious order, the Foundation 'saves' people by killing them, and that before he left the order, C'rizz was one of their most adept assassins. Also Eutermesans are by natural physically and socially chameleonic; his travels with the Doctor and Charley have left him slowly becoming the perfect companion to them in their travels... at the expense of who he might have been before.
•Meanwhile, once C'rizz and Charley both wake up out of the dream machines, Rassilon explains that the Doctor need not have stayed in the Divergent Universe at all - once he set foot inside, that part of him was stripped away. He also tries to imply that the Doctor knew this all along; Charley, having met Rassilon previously doesn't entirely believe it, but C'rizz is a little more susceptible to Rassilon's propaganda. He and Charley discuss matters, and eventually come to the conclusion that the best way to find out the truth is to talk to the Doctor himself.
•Naturally, the two of them get split up in short order; Charley ends up running into Keep while C'rizz runs into Guidance. Who as it turns out, is his father.
•The Doctor and Perfection, meanwhile, have gotten themselves into a spot of trouble and have ended up the target of a man hunt.
•Eventually the multiple and varied timelines manage to converge. As it turns out, the planet they're on is the very heart of the Foundation. Only "Foundation" is a corruption - the name is actually Foundry. As in the Foundry of Rassilon. And when the planets align, and the end of the cycle rolls around, Rassilon can use his Foundry to escape from the Divergent Universe. Provided, of course, that he has the plot coupon that C'rizz has been wearing around his neck - the cult of Foundation was simply a method to get the plot coupon to the Foundry in the first place.
•Meanwhile, it turns out Perfection is Zagreus (hijacking Perfection's body after she'd committed suicide), while Keep is the food-creature from way back in Charley and the Doctor's first adventure in the Divergent Universe. Also Zagreus would like to repopulate the universe with the Doctor, so there's that. Still, C'rizz has been more than than a little broken by recent events and is perfectly willing to side with Rassilon - a perfect ending, or so Rassilon thinks. Until Keep tells Rassilon that this same approximate sequence of events has already played out 83 times.
•And then things start to get really complicated. In the end however, keep ends up kidnapping Zagreus to... somewhere, Rassilon get thrown to the beginning of the cycle and ends up in the test tube Charley and the Doctor had arrived to, and the Doctor and his companions manage to escape back into the real universe!
•...and run smack dab into an army of Daleks. Good news: they're unmistakably in the right universe! Bad news: the Daleks have taken over Earth and turned most of it's population into Daleks. Also Davros - who happens to be along for the ride this time around - is dying; in a bid to stay alive longer he's fused himself to the Dalek Emperor which isn't really working out so well for him. (Here read: the Dalek side of his consciousness is taking over.)
•Conveniently, Davros had the foresight to prepare a clone body beforehand. All he needs to do is to transfer himself over to it, and he means for the Doctor to first help him do so and then witness the total destruction of Earth, as punishment for the Doctor's misdeeds against the Daleks. And as safeguard against the Doctor opting to simply kill Davros instead, Davros explains that his death will release a virus that will kill literally everything on Earth.
•Meanwhile, the Daleks - who are yet again rebelling against Davros - decide C'rizz would make for an excellent Emperor. C'rizz is naturally not thrilled about this, but even he can't fight all the Daleks.
•Back over with Davros and the Doctor, it's eventually revealed that before the Doctor started traveling with Charley, he'd traveled with a pair of siblings - Samson and Gemma - both of whom are now Dalek agents; one serving as a spy, while the other became the carrier of the mutagenic virus that turned humanity into Daleks. Also Davros had been inside the TARDIS, and had fitted her with a tracking device that had let him observe the Doctor's adventures before wiping the Doctor's memory of ever having traveling with the pair.
•Needless to say, the Doctor is more than a little pissed, and after defeating Davros (and giving him over to the Daleks) and rescuing C'rizz from his soon to be untimely fate, he manages to convince the Daleks to leave Earth. Humanity might be battered and beaten after the recent invasion, but it'll recover well enough in time. And while Samsomn and Gemma remain behind on Earth, at least the Doctor remembers them, now. And so all's well that ends well.
•(Although there is the fact that C'rizz carries the spiritual remnant of everyone he's "saved" with him, although neither Charley or the Doctor are aware of that particular revelation.)
•Of course, all good things must come to in end, and in this case, the end begins when Charley opens a small box in C'rizz's room (which he calls an Absolver). Almost immediately, this proves to have been A Bad Idea as Charley gets dragged into a mindscape that can best be described as screaming terror. Fortunately, C'rizz is able to help her out. Unfortunely the TARDIS herself is pulled across some sort of barrier and start violently rearranging herself as the screams of the dead start to echo in everyone's mind. It only gets worse when C'rizz is dragged through a crack in the floor of the TARDIS and the central column of the TARDIS starts filling with blood.
•Realizing that the last, at least, is the TARDIS' way of saying that she needs a) a break and b) some time to repair herself, he and Charley set out to see just where they are - and perhaps see if they can find C'rizz.
•C'rizz, as it turns out, has met a sort of doomsday prophet on the planet - C'rizz, he claims, will be their grand messiah and sacrifice himself to the "great beast, Borarus". Which also involves learning to be a reality warper, and in short order C'rizz has learned to manipulate the world around him.
•Meanwhile, the Doctor and Charley uncover some very interesting facts about the the people of the world, and the monsters outside the barrier that surrounds the Citadel. Namely, that the monsters are nothing more than heavily mutated people - people of the same species as those who leave inside the Citadel. And in the middle of the ensuing BSODs that result, the great beast Borarus arrives.
•As it turns out, Borarus is a composite of all the souls of the people C'rizz had "saved" - unbeknowst to him (or, indeed, anyone), C'rizz had been created as sort of living phylactery for his entire race. Needless to say, this revelation doesn't go over terribly well, and rather than let yet another person control his life, C'rizz exerts his free will for the first and only time of his life... and essentially comments suicide in order to stop Borarus, turning to dust in Charley's hands.
•And the Doctor, long since used to both seeing companions die and ignoring the feelings surrounding the same simply moves on. But Charley, who is quite entirely unused to this, is genuinely appalled by his apparent lack of care, and tells him in no uncertain terms that he can drop her off on Earth: she has no desire to travel with someone quite that heartless.
•For once, the Doctor doesn't argue either, taking her to Singapore in 1931 - the place she'd been heading when she set out on the R101. Or at least, that's where he aims for. And he does actually manage to make it to Singapore! It's just that he misses the when by several decades and the TARDIS lands in 2008 instead.
•Entirely unamused with the Doctor not managing to bring her back to her proper timeline, Charley storms off, and - after leaving a letter for the Doctor at a nearby hotel - takes up with the first gentleman adventurer she happens to find. Who... turns out to be a less stellar individual, and mostly just interested in salvaging some gold from an abandoned war evacuation ship. Never one to be left out of an adventure, the Doctor promptly attaches himself to the expedition, and the three of them set out to see what they can find.
•As soon as they get there, however, they start finding oddities. Starting with the fact that for an abandoned ship - and one that had been presumed lost - there seems to be rather an absence of bodies. In fact, there's generally an absence of anything, and it's only when the Doctor falls down a hole caused by what he calls 'time corrosion' that things start to get underway - when Charley goes back to the TARDIS to fetch some rope the HADS kicks in and the TARDIS vworps away with her still inside. Namely, to the same ship but in the past - 1948 to be precise, where she meets the crew of the ship. Which also includes Byron, for some inexplicable reason. Also, there are Cybermen.
•Meanwhile, back in 2018, the Doctor gets introduced to the rest of Byron's salvage crew... which includes an older woman who looks oddly familiar by the name of Charley Pollard, who Byron introduces as his mother. Unfortunately, she can't remember a thing about her travels with the Doctor - she was found shipwrecked in 1942 and was adopted by Byron's family. Still, the Doctor is more than willing to travel with her all the same, from then on (just as soon as they finish this adventure, anyway).
•Back in the other time zone, Charley discovers a young stowaway by the name of Madeleine who's about her age and has also snuck aboard For Adventure. Also, there are Cybermen. Who are up to their usual tricks in short order. Worse still, they mean to make Charley into their Cyberleader.
•Meanwhile, over with the Doctor, he eventually figures out that the older Charley is, in fact, Madeleine, who'd been found shipwrecked with severe amnesia. Since there were no other survivors, he's forced to assume that Charley died in 1942. But since there is still the matter of the Cybermen to deal with (who have some time travel capability of their own) he manages to make his way back to deal with the problem at the source.
•Unfortunately, he's too late to entirely keep Charley from being Cyber-converted, and he's forced to erase her memory in order to de-convert her. It doesn't stick though, as she manages to regain her memory through what is implied to be the ~power of love~... just in time to see the Doctor get partially converted himself. Fortunately, he's able to slip into a healing coma to deal with it. Less fortunately, this has the side effect of making it look like he's dead; though she's understandable heartbroken, Charley manages to take advantage of the confusion to defeat the Cybermen (by implanting her personality into them remotely... which explains how Madeleine, who had been partially converted, had thought herself to be Charley) and the rest of the crew attempt to swim to shore (unsuccessfully).
•The Doctor, meanwhile, wakes up from his healing coma without any memory of the whole Cyberman affair. Assuming that he and Charley have only just arrived in Singapore he hurries off to the hotel she'd stopped by at the beginning of their adventure only to be met with her letter - which stated in no unclear terms that while she'd had fun she was off to have her own adventures, and requesting that he not come after her. And with nothing else to go on, and no idea as to where to even look for her he returns to the TARDIS and vworps away.
•Of course, nothing in the Doctor's life can be easy, and before too long he finds himself with what amounts to stowaway, when a snarky (and slightly amnesiac) young woman by the name of Lucie Miller is abruptly teleported onto the TARDIS, with no further explanation. Naturally, the Doctor promptly tries to take her home, only to bounce off a sort of barrier in the Time Vortex and end up on a planet alliteratively named Red Rockets Rising, sometime in the future.
•As it turns out, Red Rockets Rising is slowly dying, thanks to a global impact winter.
•Fortunately, they've just had a message from a group of individuals who promise to help! It's... the Daleks, in a shocking departure from their usual tactics.
•While Lucie and the Doctor work on figuring out what the heck is going on with Daleks, it turns out that a local mad scientist (by the name of Martez) had made something of a name for himself by stealing dead (and dying) bodies for some sort of experiments, only he died shortly before ever making it to trial.
•Meanwhile the local president has been making nice with the Daleks - who, as it turns out are weakened and on the verge of dying, hence the uncustomary guile - and eventually the Daleks ask the president to help them destroy the greatest criminal in (their) history with the blood of millions (of Daleks) on his hands: the Doctor.
•Also it turns out that Martez is not dead, having bodyjacked his assistant instead, and has also been making Daleks out of the corpses and soon-to-be corpses he'd been stealing. Unsurprisingly, the new Daleks promptly start a war with the old Daleks (and kill Martez in the process). Facing down the potential of having two races of Daleks in the universe instead of just the one, the Doctor sides with the old Daleks, after a not inconsiderable amount of mental debate.
•With the Daleks vanquished, the president finally owns up to her own actions, and, as Lucie and the Doctor leave, she promises to not be so trusting of helpful aliens in the future.
•After a couple of more attempts at get Lucie home - all of which fail spectacularly - life for the two of them settles into something of a routine. Albeit one slightly marred by the fact that they seem to be being followed by a mercenary who seems to be out to kill Lucie. And then, and the end of an otherwise typical adventure, Lucie gets kidnapped by said mercenary.
•Cut to: Lucie's first day of work at her new office. Given that she'd just been on an interstellar adventure, she's understandably confused by this turn of events. The mercenary who'd spirited her away (usually referred to as the Headhunter) explains that this is normal, and gets on her way. All the same, Lucie can't quite shake the feeling that things are off, somehow.
•The Doctor, meanwhile, finds himself host to a (not entirely welcome) visitor from Gallifrey, who has a proposal for him. If he rescues Lucie from the bizarre situation she's in, they'll fix his TARDIS so it can actually get to Lucie's native time period. The Doctor counters with a suggestion that they fix his TARDIS and then he can rescue Lucie. His visitor disagrees, and gives him a Time Ring instead (which the Doctor is not thrilled about.)
•After some various digging about, Lucie managing to somehow get fired, a strategy meeting that sounds an awful lot like it's talking about war strategy, and the revelations that the building is quite literally a giant mech (with guns!) and that that people at the office are being brainwashed, it turns out that the villain of the day is... the Cybermen! Who are up to their usual tricks, to no one's surprise.
•As it turns out the office building/robot is being powered by a probability drive, which the Doctor manages to convince the Cybermen to steal. ...And promptly uses against them, because it doesn't so much arrange the odds in the favor of whoever happens to be holding it as it does in favor of the office-robot (and anyone aligned with same). And with the Cybermen defeated and Lucie rescued, the Time Lords finally uphold their end of the bargain as well, returning the TARDIS to full functionality.
•Naturally, this means that the first time they actually get back to (approximately) Lucie's time period is several adventures later and completely by accident. In fact, they drop in more or less on the doorstep of Lucie's Aunt Pat. And her husband, Trevor, which strikes Lucie as odd, because her aunt has never mentioned him before, to say nothing of the fact that her aunt's life seems to be a lot more interesting than it will be in the future (which is Lucie's past). Also there's a giant monster in the lake.
•Before too long, the Doctor figures out that Trevor is a Zygon; the real Trevor is stuck somewhere in a body copying machine. On the other hand, he seems to have gone more or less native, and Pat is fully aware of the fact that her husband is, in fact, an alien. The creepy businessmen who have been hanging around are also Zygons, and have come to the (erroneous) conclusion that Trevor must be deluding himself into thinking he feel this weird human emotion called "love."
•Also it turns out that Lucie has been kidnapped by the Zygons and stuck into a body-copying machine herself. And the Zygons have come to take back the necklace Trevor gave to Pat, which is both apparently vital to the Zygon plans... and somewhat unfortunately fused to her.
•The Zygons, it turns out, want to use global warming to make Earth suitable as a new home planet for themselves. To that end, they've kicked off the rock music craze of the 80s (and thus, the popularity of both hairspray and CDs, among other things). Trevor, however, is having absolutely none of this and commits (what appears to be) a heroic sacrifice in order to destroy the other Zygons and their ship... but not before Pat dies of the injuries inflicted when the other Zygons removed her necklace by force.
•Fortunately the Doctor is able to rescue Lucie in time. Less fortunately, she's missed the entire adventure on account of having been stuck in the body-copying machine. Worse still, Lucie has begun to suspect something might have happened to her Aunt Pat - and the Doctor's explanation that the sort of life Lucie remembers her aunt having lived is something the Web of Time could just sort of skip over doesn't exactly win him any points. Unsurprisingly, she heads off in a bit of a huff, intending to spend the night mourning (and making sure the customers at her aunt's hotel are taken care of).
•Once she leaves, the Doctor calls Trevor out of the bushes where he's been hiding. He's understandably devastated by the loss, but by tapping into a previously unmentioned aspect of Zygon biology and concentrating really hard, he manages to... transform into Pat forever, in what is one of the most bizarre forms of honoring the dead. He even manages to talk the Doctor into not telling Lucie - a plan that surely can't go disastrously wrong.
•Either way, Lucie comes back the next day and further adventures ensue. Including one where the Doctor spends nearly 600 years going native on a planet full of sentient jellyfish.
•And then the Doctor decides to take Lucie to Blackpool for Christmas. Not long after they arrive, they run into an unsavory character at a local diner, a bum who seems to think he's Santa... and the Zygon who's still living as Lucie's Aunt Pat.
•Also they've arrived a year before Lucie left with the Doctor, "Pat"'s body has aged even though it shouldn't have, and Lucie gets hit by a car, which lands her in a coma. Only for the unsavory character from earlier to turn up in her dreams.
•As it turns out the unsavory character turns out to bea Zygon a Zynog, condemned forever to a life of body-jacking as punishment for breaking Zygon law. And when Lucie manages to resist surprisingly well, Pat makes a noble sacrifice, luring the Zynog into her mind and keeping him there as her body finally succumbs to old age.
•Unfortunately, Lucie manage to overhear Pat and the Doctor talking, and is none too pleased that they'd both kept the fact that her Aunt Pat had been a alien from them; she tells the Doctor that she needs to rethink things. And some time to travel on her own - she's not sure she can bear to keep on being the Doctor's friend just at the moment.
•(As for the bum who thought he was Santa, he turns out to be an average guy who'd lost his job. And his Christmas turns out pretty well: he ends up charming the heck out of the hospital staff and gets a job offer as a porter out of it.)
•And now, for someone completely different: the Doctor's granddaughter, Susan! Who he'd left on Earth way back in his first incarnation, in the aftermath of a (foiled) Dalek invasion. Which may or may not have been because she'd fallen in love. But in any case, it's been some twenty years since the Dalek invasion was stopped, and Susan's life has been generally a happy one.
•However, the attempted invasion has left humanity more than a little xenophobic, and when her son, Alex, starts to fall in with the wrong (here read: super-xenophobic) crowd, she sends out an intergalactic distress call, which is answered by the Doctor... and an alien race called the Guldreasi. Who promptly manage to throw a wrench into what would have been a happy reunion, if only because Susan is promptly held accountable for their meddling.
•Also the Guldreasi turn out to be interstellar slave traders, and while the Doctor is dealing with that problem, they manage to expose Susan as being an alien.
•Still, things work out will enough. The Doctor's learned that he has a family, Alex comes to terms with being part alien, and the Guldreasi are defeated. Admittedly, the Doctor does offer to take Susan and Alex with him on his travels, but Alex storms out (possibly because the Doctor had started to plan Alex's future without actually bothering to consult him first), and Susan declines as well, instead going after her son. As much as she'd liked traveling with her grandfather, that life just isn't for her anymore.
•Some nebulous amount of time passes. Left without a companion in Lucie's absence, the Doctor receives several applicants to the position at a local hotel and quickly comes to the conclusion that none of them are adequate. One is straight up not suited to it, one is a hacker who accidentally caused the global recession, one is an angry alien with a broken teleporter (which the Doctor fixes in no time flat), and the last is basically a space vampire. Also the Doctor didn't put up the ad they're all responding to and has no idea who did.
•Things only get further complicated when the first applicant gets involved in the situation with the fourth, which, it turns out, the Doctor genuinely had under control beforehand. In the end, he's forced to offer his blood to the space vampire to get things back under control again. However with that done and the space vampire summarily thrown back out of the TARDIS, the Doctor finds that he's actually genuinely impressed with the ennui and worldweariness of the first applicant - whose name is Tamsin - and decides to take her with him. (Admittedly it also helps that what she'd shown the doctor during her interview had largely been a persona, a fact that she readily admits to.)
•And then, not long into this new partnership, the TARDIS is pulled off-course, making a landing in 11th century Ireland, not too far from the monastery that houses the Book of Kells (shortly before it's due to be stolen and returned in an unfortunately damaged state).
•After a slightly failed attempt at improv on Tamsin's part, they find out that the monastery is (apparently) haunted, that there's a dead vortisaur just kind of hanging out in a barn, and that there are definitely a couple of monks who aren't acting terribly monk-like.
•Cue the Meddling Monk, who cheerfully admits to hanging around primarily to accelerate relationships between Ireland and Norway (and just generally mess with history, as is his wont). The TARDIS simply happened to caught up in the Monk's time scoop; he intends to use her for spare parts.
•Naturally, the Doctor is having absolutely none of that, and he and Tamsin manage to neatly foil the Monk's plans, although the Book of Kells is unfortunately damaged in the process.
•(Also it turns out that the Monk's own companion is none other than Lucie! Who... managed to completely miss the Doctor.)
•This is, however, not the end of their interactions with the Monk. Not that this is immediately apparent, when they arrive at a museum on Deimos. Specifically, a museum dedicated to the Ice Warriors, who had formerly made Mars their home and are now extinct.
•...Naturally, this means they're promptly resurrected by unknown forces, leaving some 600 tourists and the Doctor in rather dire straits. Especially since the Ice Warriors are understandably pissed at him for having defeated them the last time. But eventually the Doctor manages to cram all the tourists into a ship that's not meant to hold nearly that many people and come up with a way to defeat the Ice Warriors.
•And then he gets a call from Lucie. Who's smack bang in the middle of the battle, leaving the Doctor with a choice: defeat the Ice Warriors again, or save his friend.
•...He chooses the latter, opting to let the Ice Warriors roam free for the time being, which gets him a giant chorus of "what even"s from everyone on the ship. Including Tamsin, who promptly storms off.
•And into the (metaphoric) arms of the Monk, who explains that she really should have been his companion - he'd been the one who'd set the ad, only for the Doctor to snipe her first. Instead, he'd been travelling with Lucie, who it turns out had also answered his ad (thinking it had been placed by the Doctor).
•Unsurprisingly, Lucie also chews the Doctor out what good for saving her instead of all the rest of the tourists. He explains, in short order, that he had set up a few things previously that he was pretty sure were going to mean that everyone was going to live anyway. And also that even if it hadn't Lucie's life isn't his to sacrifice; only his is. If that means he's got a nasty double standard thing going on, it's something he's learned to live with.
•And indeed, he does manage to defeat the Ice Warriors, although in the process he arranges things such that the Ice Warriors don't get their planet back, and instead go on to conquer another planet instead. Which he and the Monk get into something of an argument about (during which the Doctor is called out hard on indirectly causing the destruction of said other planet and the Monk admits to having resurrected the Ice Warriors in the first place), the end result of which is that Tamsin decides that she's had Enough and leaves with the Monk instead. Lucie, likewise, has also had Enough and asks to be taken back home, to which the Doctor complies.
•However, ever the one for grand gestures, he insists on giving her a goodbye party. One last Christmas, to make up for the one she didn't get the last time he took her home. He also invites Susan and Alex, since a party wouldn't be a party with just two people.
•Naturally, adventure ensues, courtesy of giant time traveling fish that had somehow gotten stuck in the TARDIS, but it manages to resolve easily enough, and apart from that a relatively good time is had by all. Also it turns out that Alex is only a little bit Time Lord, and is neither telepathic nor has the ability to regenerate. He and Lucie even strike up a friendship; they decide to be explore 22nd century Earth together, and everyone agrees to meet up for Christmas dinner again in a year, leaving the Doctor once again alone in the TARDIS.
•Traveling alone, however, may not exactly have been best idea as he promptly ends up imprisoned in a sun. Or rather, in the research center that's at the core of an unstable sun. His task is, essentially, to keep it from blowing up and killing some 2 billion people. Also his robot assistant sounds (and acts) like Lucie, as did the one before her (which tried to kill him in the cold open).
•Of course, given that his life can never be simple or easy, his attempts to deal with the problem are promptly interrupted by, variously, the employees of the people who brought the Doctor there in the first place, the local resistance, the traitors within the local resistance, his current robot assistant, and his previous robot assistant. All of whom have their own agendas and are also lying about their intentions, each other's intentions, and what the world outside is like. Also somewhere in the ensuing confusion the self-destruct mechanism is triggered.
•Eventually, the Doctor manages to get his hands on the TARDIS again, and using the TARDIS (and three weeks of his relative time) he manages to set the sun stabilizing system to automatic, thus conveniently dealing with both the problem at hand and the thing that had been keeping him prisoner.
•...And then he gets a call from Lucie Miller (thank to a bit of space-time tech he'd slipped into her luggage before she left last time): humanity is dying.
•Naturally, the Doctor immediately heads for Earth... and for once in his life arrives too late. The plague that had struck the Earth has already taken its toll, as has the ensuing Dalek invasion. And just like last time the Daleks had attempted to invade the Earth they're digging a giant mine - presumably with the intention to turn the Earth into what amounts to a giant spaceship.
•The Doctor, however, is entirely unaware of any of this. Instead he finds the Dalek Time Controller (who he last ran into in his sixth incarnation) alive and well, and in completely the wrong era of history.
•Lucie, meanwhile, who managed to survive the plague, but lost the use of her legs and one of her eyes, has teamed up with the local resistance (along with Susan and Alex); in a last ditch attempt to put up a fight, they take their last remaining weaponry and fire on the main Dalek ship. Which the Doctor happens to be on.
•Fortunately, the Doctor survives the ensuing crash, although badly injured. Better still, Lucie, Susan, and Alex manage to get him back to the TARDIS, where they get him patched up again. And also deal with the various explanations that need to happen.
•As it turns out, the Daleks are being helped by the Monk - upon being thrown back into time, the Dalek Time Controller sent out a distress call, hoping to lure the Doctor in. The Monk answered instead, and promptly told the Daleks their future while he was at it, and then helped them set about changing that future. Tamsin, meanwhile, who had been blissfully unaware of this until Lucie forces the Monk to confess at gunpoint, is thoroughly horrified. The Daleks exterminate her mere moments later, since she'd no longer been necessary to their operations. The Monk, naturally, is not particularly thrilled, but life continues on.
•And then Alex gets exterminated, sacrificing himself so the others might have a chance to see their plans come to fruition.
•Needless to say, the loss of one of his few living family members does not sit well with the Doctor, and he promptly decides that the laws of time can go hang. To the point that he's quite willing to essentially drag a nuke through time itself and destroy the Daleks themselves at the beginning of their history and never mind the utter mess it would make of time, history, and his own rules.
•Before he can, however, Lucie takes matters into her own hands, using the bomb to blow up the mineshaft - and the time warp engine the Daleks had been building - instead. However, this also costs her her life, which does absolutely nothing for the Doctor's mood. Nor does the Monk's admission that he'd been the one responsible for the Doctor showing up two years too late. To the point that he's again willing to break the laws of time, to snatch Lucie out of jaws of the explosion just in time; it takes Susan talking him down before he agrees to leave Lucie to her fate and beats a hasty retreat back to the TARDIS.
•Deeply traumatized by the double-whammy of the deaths of his great-grandson and one of his best friends, and entirely out of hope, the Doctor attempts to steer the TARDIS to the end of the universe itself, in an attempt to look back at the whole of time and maybe find some small glimmer of hope. And when the TARDIS proves to not quite have enough power for the journey, he takes an axe to the console in the hopes of triggering a power surge that might get him the rest of the way there.
•Before he can get take this ill-advised plan too far however, he's interrupted by an agent of the CIA (Celestial Intervention Agency) who introduces himself as Straxus. The CIA have a mission for him, and while the Doctor is understandably less than thrilled about being used as the CIA's errand boy, it is still something to do and he agrees. For his troubles, the Doctor is promptly dropped off squarely in the middle of No Man's Land in the trenches of WW1, where he very shortly walks into a mustard gas attack.
•Luckily, he survives! Possibly due to his Time Lord biology, although the nurse he's placed in the care of (one Molly O'Sullivan) is understandable less than inclined to deal with a strange out-of-place man calling himself 'The Doctor', wounded or otherwise. On the other hand, when someone claiming to be a doctor attempts to give him a blood transfusion that will absolutely kill him (on account of the Doctor not being human in the first place), she intervenes to save his life. And to try and get him away from the inexplicably glowing mustard gas cloud that shows up more or less out of nowhere.
•They are, however, interrupted. By... yep, the Daleks. Again.
•Unsurprisingly, he and Molly manage to get away, although they end up needing to steal a plane to do it. However, once they manage to get the TARDIS, Molly remarks that she's been there before. Which should be impossible, given that the Doctor doesn't remember having met her before. Worse still, no matter where Molly and the Doctor go the Daleks manage to follow them. And when still another person gets exterminated by the Daleks in front of the Doctor (one Sally Armstrong, who had been working on a project for the Doctor - which he doesn't remember having ordered) something in the Doctor simply snaps as all that survivor's guilt comes crashing down on him hard. In the end, it's Molly who pulls him out of it quite literally, as she knocks him out and drags him back to the TARDIS rather than let essentially commit suicide-by-Dalek.
•When he finally comes to, he decides to deal with his guilt and trauma by... staging a hot springs episode, basically. Which the Daleks naturally crash, and Molly and the Doctor only barely escape in time.
•(Somewhere else, someone named Kotris is working with the Dalek Time Controller, plotting against Gallifrey.)
•(Still somewhere else, Straxus visits a planet called Strangor and attempts to commit suicide, only for it to not take. Something - or someone - has installed drones on the planet to prevent that exact thing.)
•Before their adventures continue on, the Doctor takes it into his mind to figure out why Molly has perfect control of the TARDIS. Which should be impossible.
•With the help of his telepathy, the Doctor and Molly trace her memories back to her second birthday, where she was briefly kidnapped and brought into a TARDIS... by someone who, according to the Doctor, definitely doesn't feel like a Time Lord. When they attempt to return from their jaunt to the past, however, the TARDIS is abruptly time-clamped, leaving it essentially stuck in the Vortex. And during the ensuing conversation, the Doctor hears a strange noise and abruptly collapses.
•When he comes to, Molly has brought him to another world... which shouldn't have been possible. More importantly however, the Daleks are still after them, and since they can't seem to get back into the TARDIS, they flee, eventually finding themselves trapped in a cave. And when the Daleks indicate that they want to save Molly and the Doctor, the Doctor hears the noise from earlier and collapses again.
•...And wakes up on Skaro, ancient home of the Daleks. Which is apparently inhabited by reformed Daleks, the only ones left after a great war that wiped out all the Time Lords and almost all of the Daleks. The Daleks that have survived have given up their goals of world domination and are slowly re-engineering themselves back into Kaleds.
•The Doctor, quite reasonably, suspects a rat, for all that what he's being faced with is his greatest hope. And he's right to, too. He and Molly have both been trapped in a lotus eater machine; they're rescued by Straxus who materializes his TARDIS around the two of them and bring them back to the Doctor's.
•(Straxus' TARDIS is later attacked by the Daleks as he returns to Gallifrey to make his report to the High President of Gallifrey. While he manages to make it back, the President is less than thrilled than how things are going.)
•With Straxus gone, the Doctor promptly ignores the coordinates that Straxus had programmed into TARDIS - they end up on Strangor instead. And happen upon Straxus' assistant, who happens to be dying. But before he succumbs to death, he reveals that for ~reasons~ involving a radiation mishap, Time Lords can't regenerate on Strangor.
•(Back on Gallifrey, Straxus reveals that the Doctor ignoring the pre-programmed coordinates is exactly what the Time Lords had expected - he's exactly where the CIA want him.)
•Also, it turns out that the Daleks are there too, and Molly promptly stumbles straight into their headquarters and is captured. The Doctor, meanwhile, comes across a local by the name of Nadeyan, who lost his entire family to the Daleks.
•Back in the Dalek headquarters, meanwhile, Kotris realizes that Molly happens to be full ofmacguffin particles retrogenitor particles that will be implanted into her in his future and Molly's past. This, in turn, would allow Kotris to essentially unevolve the Time Lords, effectively erasing them existence. And since he himself is a Time Lord, he had himself genetically altered to be something closer to Daleks than to to Time Lords.
•Straxus, meanwhile, is busy rewritting the timeline. Namely, altering the retrogenitor particles so that they'd unevolve the Daleks rather than the Time Lords; when Kotris attempts to trigger off the retrogenitor particles he gets a nasty shock.
•At this point, things proceed to get Rather Complicated. Kotris, as it turns out, is a future incarnation of Straxus (and been behind the drones that set up Straxus' suicide attempt earlier, which the Lord President had asked Straxus to commit in order to prevent this future). All of which becomes entirely moot when the Dalek Time Controller simply up and exterminates Straxus. Since he never has the chance to regenerate into Kotris, the whole timeline of events unravels; the Daleks never showed up in the middle of WWI, Molly was never implanted with the retrogenitor particles, and most importantly, Molly's friend - who she'd followed into the war - never died. Accordingly, she asks the Doctor to return her to where he'd found her, and he complies willingly for a change.
•And now forsomething somewhere else. Namely, Nixyce VII, currently under Dalek occupation. And when there's a collapse in the mines, Medtech Liv Chenka is called in to deal with the casualties. Along the way she runs into two members of the resistance, the leader of the resistance (who had been badly injured in the collapse), and... the Doctor, who's pretending to be a roboman in order to infiltrate the Dalek base.
•Eventually, it's revealed that the collapse was intentional - the resistance had planted bombs in the mine shaft, some of which didn't go off. And if they can just recover the trigger device (which was unfortunately lost in the initial collapse), maybe the Daleks can be defeated! Or at least seriously inconvenienced.
•While they are able to stabilize the leader of the resistance and recover the trigger device - and even to clear the mine shaft of all the human workers besides - the Daleks catch on to what they're up to. And order all the workers back into the mines, a fact they reveal during the inevitable confrontation that follows.
•...And the Doctor, unwilling to kill millions even if it's to save billions, gives the Daleks the code to deactivate the bombs.
•Cut to: 1918! The Doctor, seemingly on a whim, drops by the house he'd acquired back in his fifth incarnation, only to find that Molly O'Sullivan is more or less squatting there, along with a young man who'd deserted from the army. Also Molly is showing signs of once again holding retrogenitor particles in her, which shouldn't even be so much as possible given that whole timeline had been unraveled.
•Things only get stranger when the deserter she'd been sheltering starts to both fade away and exhibits the ability to jump himself - and anyone in his immediate vicinity - backwards in time by a few seconds. Naturally, somewhere in the middle of this revelation, the Doctor and Molly end up getting separated.
•On the other hand, given they both have a similar idea of where to go to figure things out, it's not long at all before their paths cross. Even if Molly does get captured and the Doctor thrown into a plague well in the process.
•As it turns out, this time it's not the Daleks. Instead, it's the Viyrans; the plagues they've been researching have, in essence, been brought by the Viyrans to that point in the past. And with the TARDIS the only thing keeping the temporally activated virus active, once the Doctor has managed to spark a fight between the two Viyrans present, it's simple enough for him - and Molly, who'd like to know just why the retrogenitor particles are back - to head off to other adventures.
•And promptly land aboard a spaceship on a one-way trip to the end of the universe. Which would be largely uneventful were it not for the fact that Liv Chenka is also on board. And is not thrilled with the Doctor for his actions back on Nixyce VII.
•Which the Doctor doesn't actually remember - those events haven't happened yet for him.
•Meanwhile, the ship, is attacked by the Eminence while in the process of exploring a sort of strange energy at the end of the universe that really shouldn't be there. And in short order most of the crew are either dead, or have been turned into the Infinite Warriors of the Eminence. Or both. The Eminence isn't terribly picky.
•Also it turns out that Liv is being partially controlled by a spy from the energy companies back at the other end of this particular journey (who want to control the anomalous energy source). And while Liv managed to survive the aftermath of the Doctor's poorly thought out decision with regards to the Daleks, she's now dying as a result of radiation exposure. Even worse, there's a strange surge of energy coming from with in the anomalous cloud of energy, one that is more than enough to destroy the ship.
•With a bit of work, and some luck, however, the Doctor manages to reverse the energy surge, get Liv uncontrolled, and - at least temporarily - defeat the Eminence before they make their way back to see just what thy can learn about the company that had been responsible for that particular trip (and Liv's brief encounter with being almost-possessed): the Ides Scientific Institute.
•(Meanwhile, back in the 1970s, Sally Armstrong is saved from being hit by a car by someone calling himself Harcourt De'ath.)
•Since the Ides Scientific Institute began sometime in the in the 70s, that's where Molly, Liv, and the Doctor arrive. Not that anything immediately seems to be out of the ordinary, and it's only when Molly - who'd taken a detour to visit the Doctor's house, just to see it once again - is kidnapped that things take a sharp turn. And even more so when a small horde of what seems to almost be zombies attack Liv and the Doctor.
•As it turns out, "Harcourt De'ath" is the Master, who has been trying to figure out why some people have a natural immunity to the Eminence's influence. Largely so that he could then eliminate it and keep the Daleks from exploiting that same immunity. He's also behind the zombies - in order to keep an eye on things he'd managed to get a hold of a fragment of the Eminence and, after wiring it into his TARDIS had been essentially replacing people's eyes (by virtue of posing to be an eye doctor) with false ones that had been linked up to the Eminence fragment allowing him to see what they were seeing. And also to control them; this is the Master we're talking about.
•The Doctor, however, manages to throw a wrench into this plan by reopening the link to the Eminence in his mind - which had been lurking quietly ever since the Fourth Doctor had an encounter with them - and showing the Eminence fragment in the Master's TARDIS all the ins and out of how a TARDIS works; with this new knowledge, it promptly takes control of the Master's TARDIS.
•And in order to keep this from making things any more pear-shaped then they already are, the Doctor promptly takes off for Nixyce VII, in order to essentially point the Daleks at the Eminence, knowing that the Daleks will be less than inclined to tolerate a force that might be their equal to live. Of course, the Daleks being the Daleks, they promptly leave him behind in a cell when the pull up roots and leave; it isn't until some time later that someone lets him out, and once they do, he promptly steps into the TARDIS and vanishes again.
•While his injuries aren't fatal, the (botched) exploratory surgery to look into what the hospital techs think is a heart fibrillation (in actuality an echoed heartbeat on account of him having two hearts) proves unfortunately fatal; possibly as a result of the anesthesia, the Doctor doesn't regenerate until some time later, in the hospital morgue.
•The newly regenerated Eighth Doctor wakes up on ice, completely amnesiac, and is immediately thrown into dealing with not only a crisis that threatens the Earth itself but also the problem of the Master as well as trying to convince his only apparent ally that he is who he says he is. Thankfully, he succeeds on all counts - due in large part to him regaining his memory some three quarters of the way through the adventure - and sets out to once again travel the universe.
•Some unspecified amount of time later, the Doctor's adventures see him arriving on board the ill-fated R-101. While there he meets Charlotte Pollard (she prefers 'Charley') who's managed to sneak on board in the disguise of one of crew.
•At the end of the adventure, the Doctor - unwilling to consign a traveling companion to an unlovely death - rescues Charley before the R-101 crashes. Thus, she becomes the only survivor of the crash - a single oddity, to stand against the weight of history. Which says that there were no survivors of the R-101 (at least in the Whoniverse version of history, anyway).
•As it turns out, traveling with someone who's a living paradox is not best of ideas.
•Especially not time-traveling - forced to continuously deal with the paradox of Charley's existence, the web of time itself is soon stretched to the breaking point and beyond, letting anti-time to start to leak through.
•With all of time threatened, the Celestial Intervention Agency takes matters into their own hands, and captures Charley with the intention of taking her before the High President of Gallifrey. The Doctor, unwilling to let this sort of thing stand, follows after her.
•As it turns it, the damage to the web of time has let not just anti-time leak through but also "never-people" - the remnants of people who have been literally erased by time by one of the CIA's previously-held policies. Needless to say, they also have a massive (and understandable) grudge against the Time Lords, and mean to destroy the whole of time itself.
•However they also have a gift for the Time Lords! The casket of the founder of their society itself, stranded in the anti-time universe after fighting the great beast Zagreus at the beginning of their history.
•Or so they claim. The Doctor has his doubts - he's seen the real casket, which is perfectly safe and sound in the real universe. As it turns out the 'casket' is nothing more than a anti-time bomb; the never-people mean to explode it at the very heart of Gallifrey; the last safe bastion of real time, forever destroying time itself.
•With the bomb on its way and the countdown to the destruction of time itself too close to zero to stop the ship it's on the Doctor takes a desperate gamble to save all of time itself - he materializes his TARDIS around the ship carrying the bomb; when it explodes the TARDIS itself shields time from the blast. And since the Web of Time now owes its existence to Charley, indeed, couldn't exist without her, the paradox of her existence resolves. Or at least, becomes part of the Web of Time itself, which sees to the end of the trouble she'd been causing.
•Back with the Doctor, however, things are not going so well. Trapped in the TARDIS at the heart of the anti-time explosion, the anti-time has infected him, leaving not the Doctor but Zagreus, the very antithesis of everything the Doctor had been. And Charley, who had returned to the TARDIS to see if the Doctor had been alright is now trapped inside the TARDIS as well.
•With the Doctor half-mad, torn between his own personality and that of Zagreus, the TARDIS herself takes matters into her own hands, distracting the Doctor/Zagreus and - in the form of one of the Doctor's oldest friends - reveals to Charley that when Rassilon, founder of the race of Time Lords, created time travel he also seeded the Gallifreyan body type across the cosmos "in order to promote healthy bipedal species" (here read: Rassilon was dick and a xenophobe). In so doing, he also created the Divergence - a race of beings who Rassilon quietly locked away in a mobius-strip universe away from the rest of reality.
•Things only get more complicated when Rassilon himself (or rather the mental imprint of him saved in the Matrix, which is a sort of Gallifreyan bio-computer) shows up, whereupon the TARDIS (who, as it turns out, has also been partially infected by anti-time) promptly quits, jettisoning not just a large collection of Eight's belongings but also Charley herself out into the void. The Doctor, still possessed by the anti-time infection that is Zagreus and still a danger to all of time itself, is forced to helplessly watch - to leave the TARDIS to save Charley would be to threaten all of reality.
•(Charley ends up in what appears to be the Death Zone of Rassilon, comparatively unharmed and with the company of three of the Doctor's previous regenerations, but Eight isn't aware of this)
•With Rassilon now arrived on the scene and the Doctor/Zagreus contained with the Foundry of Rassilon (...look, it's a theme), Rassilon gives the TARDIS a new body and melts down the empty shell that had previously been the TARDIS; the shock of seeing his home - his friend - burned away to nothingness allow Zagreus to take over completely.
•Which as it turns out was Rassilon's plan all along. Zagreus, he explains, isn't a product of anti-time, but its master and with the Vorpal Sword (made out of the remnants of the TARDIS) that Rassilon sets Zagreus to making, Zagreus can go to the Divergent Universe and slaughter the Divergent, keeping them from ever usurping the Time Lords' position of power.
•Zagreus, however, is having none of this and instead rises up against Rassilon, throwing him into the Divergent universe to be torn apart by the inhabitants thereof.
•It's at this point that Charley arrives, accompanied by Romana (the current High President of Gallifrey) and the three earlier incarnations of the Doctor she'd met in Death Zone. All of whom promptly end up being cut down by Rassilon, using Zagreus' Vorpal Sword.
•However, their deaths allow the Doctor's personality to rise ascendant over Zagreus' again; knowing that doesn't have long before the Zagreus side of himself surfaces again, the Doctor begs Charley to kill him, before he's lost to Zagreus forever. With no other option, and after a slightly anguished declaration of love on both ends, Charley plunges the Vorpal Sword into the Doctor's chest.
•...And the Doctor doesn't regenerate. For one brief moment, he'd genuinely wanted to die. And that's all that matters.
•But the Doctor is also Zagreus. And Zagreus is anti-time, which means that if the Doctor gives in to that side of him he can undo the moment of his own death.
•And Zagreus rises, turning on Charley and Romana. Only for the TARDIS - now free of the anti-time infection - to arrive to save the day, bringing the Doctor back to himself with a fragment of zero matter. But although the Doctor's personality is stable again, the anti-time infection that had been Zagreus is still a part of him, and as much as he'd like to continue his travels, he can't, not without putting all of time at risk. Instead he voluntarily goes into exile into the Divergent Universe, to live out the rest of his natural life in a world without time.
•As for Charley, he means to leave her on Gallifrey, to find her own life. But Charley is having none of that, and unbeknowst to the Doctor manages to sneak back onto the TARDIS.
•Unfortunately, Charley and the Doctor arrive to find that Divergent Universe is not precisely the sort of warm welcome one might have expected. Without time, the Doctor's time senses are being rendered painfully useless, he's still dealing with the aftermath of having been host to Zagreus, and worst of all shadows are eating away at the TARDIS itself and before too long only the control room itself is all that's left. What's outside, however, might be worse: a blinding white light and an incessant high pitched noise.
•With the Doctor crippled by pain and indecision, Charley is the one to finally make a decision and hand in hand they step out into the blinding light, the TARDIS vanishing behind them.
•Without sight to guide them and the only the sound of each other's voice to comfort them, they walk on for what turns out to be hours - hours that only feel like minutes, thanks to even their senses of hunger and tiredness being dulled. And there's something with them. Something that echoes their voices back to them, stringing their words into meaningless phrases.
•They walk on.
•In time, they come to realize that they're trapped inside a glass tube of some variety, and with no way to break out of it, their only hope is to find the end, even if it should mean walking forever. The only breaks they have is when they come across the dead creatures that serve them as food - creatures that have been slowly moving up the evolutionary ladder - but those same breaks also leave them vulnerable to attack from the creature that's been echoing their words. Still, their only hope is to walk on, and so they do.
•It's at this point that things start to get a little body horror, as Charley and the Doctor realize that they too have evolved - their joined hands have fused making them one single entity. And more importantly, the glass tube they're in is a circle. The creature they'd been eating had always been the same creature, and with no other way out, Charley and the Doctor take drastic action. In order to not be out-evolved themselves, and to stand a chance against the sound creature (which hadn't been attacking them but coming to feed itself) they need to need to take their own evolution further and they slowly push themselves together until they become one gestalt creature, and when the sound creature finally admits its defeat, the glass wall that had previously been their prison falls easily to their combined strength.
•However, despite the Doctor's idle thoughts of pushing their evolution still further, neither of them can really bear to live as one single entity any longer, and with great effort they manage to pull apart, becoming two separate people once again. And hand in hand they step out into the strange new world they've found themselves in.
•After a brief (and unintentional) detour through a sort of planetary neutral zone - where they're mentally accosted by someone calling himself Kro'ka - their adventures begin anew. That said, there are definitely certain oddities to the Divergent Universe. First of all, there's an awful lot of bipeds around for somewhere that was supposed to be where Rassilon dumped all lifeforms that didn't conform to that specific body shape. Secondly, no one seems to understand the idea of "time" despite the fact that it's clearly passing.
•Also, the TARDIS is still missing, but apart from that the adventure continues on, and in short order, Charley and the Doctor acquire a new traveling companion: C'rizz, a Eutermesan monk from the first biome they pass through, and a native to the Divergent Universe.
•(There's also fact that the Doctor is hoping to find Rassilon, but he doesn't really tell either of his companions this, even when he starts to expect that the whole of the planet they're stuck on is a series of experiments running in parallel.)
•And then, while they're passing through one of the planetary neutral zones, the Doctor suddenly comes down with a bout of time sickness. Which should be impossible, given that time doesn't exist in the Divergent Universe. Which means that it must be coming from something not native to the Divergent Universe and one failed mind probe later, Kro'ka confirms that what the Doctor is sensing is the TARDIS.
•Using the unorthodox tactic of navigating by how sick the Doctor feels, Charley, C'rizz and the Doctor manage to find the right way out of the planetary neutral zone and onto the planet where TARDIS is. Only for the Doctor to end up split into three upon arrival, each representing an aspect of is personality.
•Which turns out to have been engineered by the TARDIS herself. If she hadn't split the Doctor into three, he'd never have been able to successfully navigate the labyrinth that she'd been at the heart of; once the three of him step foot inside the TARDIS they all recombine, and while the TARDIS is just as cut off from time as the Doctor himself, this does mean they can at least travel in space.
•Naturally, this means that before too long the TARDIS ends up crashing. Or rather, ends up being pulled down towards a planet; when the Doctor tries to bypass the inevitable crash by simply landing on the planet, the TARDIS straight up refuses, for all appearances burning up in re-entry instead.
•Battered, shaken up, and marooned, the Doctor finds himself rescued by Guidance (the leader of C'rizz's religious order), an inexplicably French game hunter by the name of Keep, and Keep's wife Perfection (no really, that's her name). C'rizz and Charley, however are nowhere to be found.
•...Because they've been hooked into in dream machines by Kro'ka on the orders of Rassilon and made to relieve their worst memories. Charley manages to break free in short order, but C'rizz does not, whereupon several lingering plot threads are explained in short order. To wit: the Church of the Foundation - to which C'rizz belongs - is really more of a cult than any sort of religious order, the Foundation 'saves' people by killing them, and that before he left the order, C'rizz was one of their most adept assassins. Also Eutermesans are by natural physically and socially chameleonic; his travels with the Doctor and Charley have left him slowly becoming the perfect companion to them in their travels... at the expense of who he might have been before.
•Meanwhile, once C'rizz and Charley both wake up out of the dream machines, Rassilon explains that the Doctor need not have stayed in the Divergent Universe at all - once he set foot inside, that part of him was stripped away. He also tries to imply that the Doctor knew this all along; Charley, having met Rassilon previously doesn't entirely believe it, but C'rizz is a little more susceptible to Rassilon's propaganda. He and Charley discuss matters, and eventually come to the conclusion that the best way to find out the truth is to talk to the Doctor himself.
•Naturally, the two of them get split up in short order; Charley ends up running into Keep while C'rizz runs into Guidance. Who as it turns out, is his father.
•The Doctor and Perfection, meanwhile, have gotten themselves into a spot of trouble and have ended up the target of a man hunt.
•Eventually the multiple and varied timelines manage to converge. As it turns out, the planet they're on is the very heart of the Foundation. Only "Foundation" is a corruption - the name is actually Foundry. As in the Foundry of Rassilon. And when the planets align, and the end of the cycle rolls around, Rassilon can use his Foundry to escape from the Divergent Universe. Provided, of course, that he has the plot coupon that C'rizz has been wearing around his neck - the cult of Foundation was simply a method to get the plot coupon to the Foundry in the first place.
•Meanwhile, it turns out Perfection is Zagreus (hijacking Perfection's body after she'd committed suicide), while Keep is the food-creature from way back in Charley and the Doctor's first adventure in the Divergent Universe. Also Zagreus would like to repopulate the universe with the Doctor, so there's that. Still, C'rizz has been more than than a little broken by recent events and is perfectly willing to side with Rassilon - a perfect ending, or so Rassilon thinks. Until Keep tells Rassilon that this same approximate sequence of events has already played out 83 times.
•And then things start to get really complicated. In the end however, keep ends up kidnapping Zagreus to... somewhere, Rassilon get thrown to the beginning of the cycle and ends up in the test tube Charley and the Doctor had arrived to, and the Doctor and his companions manage to escape back into the real universe!
•...and run smack dab into an army of Daleks. Good news: they're unmistakably in the right universe! Bad news: the Daleks have taken over Earth and turned most of it's population into Daleks. Also Davros - who happens to be along for the ride this time around - is dying; in a bid to stay alive longer he's fused himself to the Dalek Emperor which isn't really working out so well for him. (Here read: the Dalek side of his consciousness is taking over.)
•Conveniently, Davros had the foresight to prepare a clone body beforehand. All he needs to do is to transfer himself over to it, and he means for the Doctor to first help him do so and then witness the total destruction of Earth, as punishment for the Doctor's misdeeds against the Daleks. And as safeguard against the Doctor opting to simply kill Davros instead, Davros explains that his death will release a virus that will kill literally everything on Earth.
•Meanwhile, the Daleks - who are yet again rebelling against Davros - decide C'rizz would make for an excellent Emperor. C'rizz is naturally not thrilled about this, but even he can't fight all the Daleks.
•Back over with Davros and the Doctor, it's eventually revealed that before the Doctor started traveling with Charley, he'd traveled with a pair of siblings - Samson and Gemma - both of whom are now Dalek agents; one serving as a spy, while the other became the carrier of the mutagenic virus that turned humanity into Daleks. Also Davros had been inside the TARDIS, and had fitted her with a tracking device that had let him observe the Doctor's adventures before wiping the Doctor's memory of ever having traveling with the pair.
•Needless to say, the Doctor is more than a little pissed, and after defeating Davros (and giving him over to the Daleks) and rescuing C'rizz from his soon to be untimely fate, he manages to convince the Daleks to leave Earth. Humanity might be battered and beaten after the recent invasion, but it'll recover well enough in time. And while Samsomn and Gemma remain behind on Earth, at least the Doctor remembers them, now. And so all's well that ends well.
•(Although there is the fact that C'rizz carries the spiritual remnant of everyone he's "saved" with him, although neither Charley or the Doctor are aware of that particular revelation.)
•Of course, all good things must come to in end, and in this case, the end begins when Charley opens a small box in C'rizz's room (which he calls an Absolver). Almost immediately, this proves to have been A Bad Idea as Charley gets dragged into a mindscape that can best be described as screaming terror. Fortunately, C'rizz is able to help her out. Unfortunely the TARDIS herself is pulled across some sort of barrier and start violently rearranging herself as the screams of the dead start to echo in everyone's mind. It only gets worse when C'rizz is dragged through a crack in the floor of the TARDIS and the central column of the TARDIS starts filling with blood.
•Realizing that the last, at least, is the TARDIS' way of saying that she needs a) a break and b) some time to repair herself, he and Charley set out to see just where they are - and perhaps see if they can find C'rizz.
•C'rizz, as it turns out, has met a sort of doomsday prophet on the planet - C'rizz, he claims, will be their grand messiah and sacrifice himself to the "great beast, Borarus". Which also involves learning to be a reality warper, and in short order C'rizz has learned to manipulate the world around him.
•Meanwhile, the Doctor and Charley uncover some very interesting facts about the the people of the world, and the monsters outside the barrier that surrounds the Citadel. Namely, that the monsters are nothing more than heavily mutated people - people of the same species as those who leave inside the Citadel. And in the middle of the ensuing BSODs that result, the great beast Borarus arrives.
•As it turns out, Borarus is a composite of all the souls of the people C'rizz had "saved" - unbeknowst to him (or, indeed, anyone), C'rizz had been created as sort of living phylactery for his entire race. Needless to say, this revelation doesn't go over terribly well, and rather than let yet another person control his life, C'rizz exerts his free will for the first and only time of his life... and essentially comments suicide in order to stop Borarus, turning to dust in Charley's hands.
•And the Doctor, long since used to both seeing companions die and ignoring the feelings surrounding the same simply moves on. But Charley, who is quite entirely unused to this, is genuinely appalled by his apparent lack of care, and tells him in no uncertain terms that he can drop her off on Earth: she has no desire to travel with someone quite that heartless.
•For once, the Doctor doesn't argue either, taking her to Singapore in 1931 - the place she'd been heading when she set out on the R101. Or at least, that's where he aims for. And he does actually manage to make it to Singapore! It's just that he misses the when by several decades and the TARDIS lands in 2008 instead.
•Entirely unamused with the Doctor not managing to bring her back to her proper timeline, Charley storms off, and - after leaving a letter for the Doctor at a nearby hotel - takes up with the first gentleman adventurer she happens to find. Who... turns out to be a less stellar individual, and mostly just interested in salvaging some gold from an abandoned war evacuation ship. Never one to be left out of an adventure, the Doctor promptly attaches himself to the expedition, and the three of them set out to see what they can find.
•As soon as they get there, however, they start finding oddities. Starting with the fact that for an abandoned ship - and one that had been presumed lost - there seems to be rather an absence of bodies. In fact, there's generally an absence of anything, and it's only when the Doctor falls down a hole caused by what he calls 'time corrosion' that things start to get underway - when Charley goes back to the TARDIS to fetch some rope the HADS kicks in and the TARDIS vworps away with her still inside. Namely, to the same ship but in the past - 1948 to be precise, where she meets the crew of the ship. Which also includes Byron, for some inexplicable reason. Also, there are Cybermen.
•Meanwhile, back in 2018, the Doctor gets introduced to the rest of Byron's salvage crew... which includes an older woman who looks oddly familiar by the name of Charley Pollard, who Byron introduces as his mother. Unfortunately, she can't remember a thing about her travels with the Doctor - she was found shipwrecked in 1942 and was adopted by Byron's family. Still, the Doctor is more than willing to travel with her all the same, from then on (just as soon as they finish this adventure, anyway).
•Back in the other time zone, Charley discovers a young stowaway by the name of Madeleine who's about her age and has also snuck aboard For Adventure. Also, there are Cybermen. Who are up to their usual tricks in short order. Worse still, they mean to make Charley into their Cyberleader.
•Meanwhile, over with the Doctor, he eventually figures out that the older Charley is, in fact, Madeleine, who'd been found shipwrecked with severe amnesia. Since there were no other survivors, he's forced to assume that Charley died in 1942. But since there is still the matter of the Cybermen to deal with (who have some time travel capability of their own) he manages to make his way back to deal with the problem at the source.
•Unfortunately, he's too late to entirely keep Charley from being Cyber-converted, and he's forced to erase her memory in order to de-convert her. It doesn't stick though, as she manages to regain her memory through what is implied to be the ~power of love~... just in time to see the Doctor get partially converted himself. Fortunately, he's able to slip into a healing coma to deal with it. Less fortunately, this has the side effect of making it look like he's dead; though she's understandable heartbroken, Charley manages to take advantage of the confusion to defeat the Cybermen (by implanting her personality into them remotely... which explains how Madeleine, who had been partially converted, had thought herself to be Charley) and the rest of the crew attempt to swim to shore (unsuccessfully).
•The Doctor, meanwhile, wakes up from his healing coma without any memory of the whole Cyberman affair. Assuming that he and Charley have only just arrived in Singapore he hurries off to the hotel she'd stopped by at the beginning of their adventure only to be met with her letter - which stated in no unclear terms that while she'd had fun she was off to have her own adventures, and requesting that he not come after her. And with nothing else to go on, and no idea as to where to even look for her he returns to the TARDIS and vworps away.
•Of course, nothing in the Doctor's life can be easy, and before too long he finds himself with what amounts to stowaway, when a snarky (and slightly amnesiac) young woman by the name of Lucie Miller is abruptly teleported onto the TARDIS, with no further explanation. Naturally, the Doctor promptly tries to take her home, only to bounce off a sort of barrier in the Time Vortex and end up on a planet alliteratively named Red Rockets Rising, sometime in the future.
•As it turns out, Red Rockets Rising is slowly dying, thanks to a global impact winter.
•Fortunately, they've just had a message from a group of individuals who promise to help! It's... the Daleks, in a shocking departure from their usual tactics.
•While Lucie and the Doctor work on figuring out what the heck is going on with Daleks, it turns out that a local mad scientist (by the name of Martez) had made something of a name for himself by stealing dead (and dying) bodies for some sort of experiments, only he died shortly before ever making it to trial.
•Meanwhile the local president has been making nice with the Daleks - who, as it turns out are weakened and on the verge of dying, hence the uncustomary guile - and eventually the Daleks ask the president to help them destroy the greatest criminal in (their) history with the blood of millions (of Daleks) on his hands: the Doctor.
•Also it turns out that Martez is not dead, having bodyjacked his assistant instead, and has also been making Daleks out of the corpses and soon-to-be corpses he'd been stealing. Unsurprisingly, the new Daleks promptly start a war with the old Daleks (and kill Martez in the process). Facing down the potential of having two races of Daleks in the universe instead of just the one, the Doctor sides with the old Daleks, after a not inconsiderable amount of mental debate.
•With the Daleks vanquished, the president finally owns up to her own actions, and, as Lucie and the Doctor leave, she promises to not be so trusting of helpful aliens in the future.
•After a couple of more attempts at get Lucie home - all of which fail spectacularly - life for the two of them settles into something of a routine. Albeit one slightly marred by the fact that they seem to be being followed by a mercenary who seems to be out to kill Lucie. And then, and the end of an otherwise typical adventure, Lucie gets kidnapped by said mercenary.
•Cut to: Lucie's first day of work at her new office. Given that she'd just been on an interstellar adventure, she's understandably confused by this turn of events. The mercenary who'd spirited her away (usually referred to as the Headhunter) explains that this is normal, and gets on her way. All the same, Lucie can't quite shake the feeling that things are off, somehow.
•The Doctor, meanwhile, finds himself host to a (not entirely welcome) visitor from Gallifrey, who has a proposal for him. If he rescues Lucie from the bizarre situation she's in, they'll fix his TARDIS so it can actually get to Lucie's native time period. The Doctor counters with a suggestion that they fix his TARDIS and then he can rescue Lucie. His visitor disagrees, and gives him a Time Ring instead (which the Doctor is not thrilled about.)
•After some various digging about, Lucie managing to somehow get fired, a strategy meeting that sounds an awful lot like it's talking about war strategy, and the revelations that the building is quite literally a giant mech (with guns!) and that that people at the office are being brainwashed, it turns out that the villain of the day is... the Cybermen! Who are up to their usual tricks, to no one's surprise.
•As it turns out the office building/robot is being powered by a probability drive, which the Doctor manages to convince the Cybermen to steal. ...And promptly uses against them, because it doesn't so much arrange the odds in the favor of whoever happens to be holding it as it does in favor of the office-robot (and anyone aligned with same). And with the Cybermen defeated and Lucie rescued, the Time Lords finally uphold their end of the bargain as well, returning the TARDIS to full functionality.
•Naturally, this means that the first time they actually get back to (approximately) Lucie's time period is several adventures later and completely by accident. In fact, they drop in more or less on the doorstep of Lucie's Aunt Pat. And her husband, Trevor, which strikes Lucie as odd, because her aunt has never mentioned him before, to say nothing of the fact that her aunt's life seems to be a lot more interesting than it will be in the future (which is Lucie's past). Also there's a giant monster in the lake.
•Before too long, the Doctor figures out that Trevor is a Zygon; the real Trevor is stuck somewhere in a body copying machine. On the other hand, he seems to have gone more or less native, and Pat is fully aware of the fact that her husband is, in fact, an alien. The creepy businessmen who have been hanging around are also Zygons, and have come to the (erroneous) conclusion that Trevor must be deluding himself into thinking he feel this weird human emotion called "love."
•Also it turns out that Lucie has been kidnapped by the Zygons and stuck into a body-copying machine herself. And the Zygons have come to take back the necklace Trevor gave to Pat, which is both apparently vital to the Zygon plans... and somewhat unfortunately fused to her.
•The Zygons, it turns out, want to use global warming to make Earth suitable as a new home planet for themselves. To that end, they've kicked off the rock music craze of the 80s (and thus, the popularity of both hairspray and CDs, among other things). Trevor, however, is having absolutely none of this and commits (what appears to be) a heroic sacrifice in order to destroy the other Zygons and their ship... but not before Pat dies of the injuries inflicted when the other Zygons removed her necklace by force.
•Fortunately the Doctor is able to rescue Lucie in time. Less fortunately, she's missed the entire adventure on account of having been stuck in the body-copying machine. Worse still, Lucie has begun to suspect something might have happened to her Aunt Pat - and the Doctor's explanation that the sort of life Lucie remembers her aunt having lived is something the Web of Time could just sort of skip over doesn't exactly win him any points. Unsurprisingly, she heads off in a bit of a huff, intending to spend the night mourning (and making sure the customers at her aunt's hotel are taken care of).
•Once she leaves, the Doctor calls Trevor out of the bushes where he's been hiding. He's understandably devastated by the loss, but by tapping into a previously unmentioned aspect of Zygon biology and concentrating really hard, he manages to... transform into Pat forever, in what is one of the most bizarre forms of honoring the dead. He even manages to talk the Doctor into not telling Lucie - a plan that surely can't go disastrously wrong.
•Either way, Lucie comes back the next day and further adventures ensue. Including one where the Doctor spends nearly 600 years going native on a planet full of sentient jellyfish.
•And then the Doctor decides to take Lucie to Blackpool for Christmas. Not long after they arrive, they run into an unsavory character at a local diner, a bum who seems to think he's Santa... and the Zygon who's still living as Lucie's Aunt Pat.
•Also they've arrived a year before Lucie left with the Doctor, "Pat"'s body has aged even though it shouldn't have, and Lucie gets hit by a car, which lands her in a coma. Only for the unsavory character from earlier to turn up in her dreams.
•As it turns out the unsavory character turns out to be
•Unfortunately, Lucie manage to overhear Pat and the Doctor talking, and is none too pleased that they'd both kept the fact that her Aunt Pat had been a alien from them; she tells the Doctor that she needs to rethink things. And some time to travel on her own - she's not sure she can bear to keep on being the Doctor's friend just at the moment.
•(As for the bum who thought he was Santa, he turns out to be an average guy who'd lost his job. And his Christmas turns out pretty well: he ends up charming the heck out of the hospital staff and gets a job offer as a porter out of it.)
•And now, for someone completely different: the Doctor's granddaughter, Susan! Who he'd left on Earth way back in his first incarnation, in the aftermath of a (foiled) Dalek invasion. Which may or may not have been because she'd fallen in love. But in any case, it's been some twenty years since the Dalek invasion was stopped, and Susan's life has been generally a happy one.
•However, the attempted invasion has left humanity more than a little xenophobic, and when her son, Alex, starts to fall in with the wrong (here read: super-xenophobic) crowd, she sends out an intergalactic distress call, which is answered by the Doctor... and an alien race called the Guldreasi. Who promptly manage to throw a wrench into what would have been a happy reunion, if only because Susan is promptly held accountable for their meddling.
•Also the Guldreasi turn out to be interstellar slave traders, and while the Doctor is dealing with that problem, they manage to expose Susan as being an alien.
•Still, things work out will enough. The Doctor's learned that he has a family, Alex comes to terms with being part alien, and the Guldreasi are defeated. Admittedly, the Doctor does offer to take Susan and Alex with him on his travels, but Alex storms out (possibly because the Doctor had started to plan Alex's future without actually bothering to consult him first), and Susan declines as well, instead going after her son. As much as she'd liked traveling with her grandfather, that life just isn't for her anymore.
•Some nebulous amount of time passes. Left without a companion in Lucie's absence, the Doctor receives several applicants to the position at a local hotel and quickly comes to the conclusion that none of them are adequate. One is straight up not suited to it, one is a hacker who accidentally caused the global recession, one is an angry alien with a broken teleporter (which the Doctor fixes in no time flat), and the last is basically a space vampire. Also the Doctor didn't put up the ad they're all responding to and has no idea who did.
•Things only get further complicated when the first applicant gets involved in the situation with the fourth, which, it turns out, the Doctor genuinely had under control beforehand. In the end, he's forced to offer his blood to the space vampire to get things back under control again. However with that done and the space vampire summarily thrown back out of the TARDIS, the Doctor finds that he's actually genuinely impressed with the ennui and worldweariness of the first applicant - whose name is Tamsin - and decides to take her with him. (Admittedly it also helps that what she'd shown the doctor during her interview had largely been a persona, a fact that she readily admits to.)
•And then, not long into this new partnership, the TARDIS is pulled off-course, making a landing in 11th century Ireland, not too far from the monastery that houses the Book of Kells (shortly before it's due to be stolen and returned in an unfortunately damaged state).
•After a slightly failed attempt at improv on Tamsin's part, they find out that the monastery is (apparently) haunted, that there's a dead vortisaur just kind of hanging out in a barn, and that there are definitely a couple of monks who aren't acting terribly monk-like.
•Cue the Meddling Monk, who cheerfully admits to hanging around primarily to accelerate relationships between Ireland and Norway (and just generally mess with history, as is his wont). The TARDIS simply happened to caught up in the Monk's time scoop; he intends to use her for spare parts.
•Naturally, the Doctor is having absolutely none of that, and he and Tamsin manage to neatly foil the Monk's plans, although the Book of Kells is unfortunately damaged in the process.
•(Also it turns out that the Monk's own companion is none other than Lucie! Who... managed to completely miss the Doctor.)
•This is, however, not the end of their interactions with the Monk. Not that this is immediately apparent, when they arrive at a museum on Deimos. Specifically, a museum dedicated to the Ice Warriors, who had formerly made Mars their home and are now extinct.
•...Naturally, this means they're promptly resurrected by unknown forces, leaving some 600 tourists and the Doctor in rather dire straits. Especially since the Ice Warriors are understandably pissed at him for having defeated them the last time. But eventually the Doctor manages to cram all the tourists into a ship that's not meant to hold nearly that many people and come up with a way to defeat the Ice Warriors.
•And then he gets a call from Lucie. Who's smack bang in the middle of the battle, leaving the Doctor with a choice: defeat the Ice Warriors again, or save his friend.
•...He chooses the latter, opting to let the Ice Warriors roam free for the time being, which gets him a giant chorus of "what even"s from everyone on the ship. Including Tamsin, who promptly storms off.
•And into the (metaphoric) arms of the Monk, who explains that she really should have been his companion - he'd been the one who'd set the ad, only for the Doctor to snipe her first. Instead, he'd been travelling with Lucie, who it turns out had also answered his ad (thinking it had been placed by the Doctor).
•Unsurprisingly, Lucie also chews the Doctor out what good for saving her instead of all the rest of the tourists. He explains, in short order, that he had set up a few things previously that he was pretty sure were going to mean that everyone was going to live anyway. And also that even if it hadn't Lucie's life isn't his to sacrifice; only his is. If that means he's got a nasty double standard thing going on, it's something he's learned to live with.
•And indeed, he does manage to defeat the Ice Warriors, although in the process he arranges things such that the Ice Warriors don't get their planet back, and instead go on to conquer another planet instead. Which he and the Monk get into something of an argument about (during which the Doctor is called out hard on indirectly causing the destruction of said other planet and the Monk admits to having resurrected the Ice Warriors in the first place), the end result of which is that Tamsin decides that she's had Enough and leaves with the Monk instead. Lucie, likewise, has also had Enough and asks to be taken back home, to which the Doctor complies.
•However, ever the one for grand gestures, he insists on giving her a goodbye party. One last Christmas, to make up for the one she didn't get the last time he took her home. He also invites Susan and Alex, since a party wouldn't be a party with just two people.
•Naturally, adventure ensues, courtesy of giant time traveling fish that had somehow gotten stuck in the TARDIS, but it manages to resolve easily enough, and apart from that a relatively good time is had by all. Also it turns out that Alex is only a little bit Time Lord, and is neither telepathic nor has the ability to regenerate. He and Lucie even strike up a friendship; they decide to be explore 22nd century Earth together, and everyone agrees to meet up for Christmas dinner again in a year, leaving the Doctor once again alone in the TARDIS.
•Traveling alone, however, may not exactly have been best idea as he promptly ends up imprisoned in a sun. Or rather, in the research center that's at the core of an unstable sun. His task is, essentially, to keep it from blowing up and killing some 2 billion people. Also his robot assistant sounds (and acts) like Lucie, as did the one before her (which tried to kill him in the cold open).
•Of course, given that his life can never be simple or easy, his attempts to deal with the problem are promptly interrupted by, variously, the employees of the people who brought the Doctor there in the first place, the local resistance, the traitors within the local resistance, his current robot assistant, and his previous robot assistant. All of whom have their own agendas and are also lying about their intentions, each other's intentions, and what the world outside is like. Also somewhere in the ensuing confusion the self-destruct mechanism is triggered.
•Eventually, the Doctor manages to get his hands on the TARDIS again, and using the TARDIS (and three weeks of his relative time) he manages to set the sun stabilizing system to automatic, thus conveniently dealing with both the problem at hand and the thing that had been keeping him prisoner.
•...And then he gets a call from Lucie Miller (thank to a bit of space-time tech he'd slipped into her luggage before she left last time): humanity is dying.
•Naturally, the Doctor immediately heads for Earth... and for once in his life arrives too late. The plague that had struck the Earth has already taken its toll, as has the ensuing Dalek invasion. And just like last time the Daleks had attempted to invade the Earth they're digging a giant mine - presumably with the intention to turn the Earth into what amounts to a giant spaceship.
•The Doctor, however, is entirely unaware of any of this. Instead he finds the Dalek Time Controller (who he last ran into in his sixth incarnation) alive and well, and in completely the wrong era of history.
•Lucie, meanwhile, who managed to survive the plague, but lost the use of her legs and one of her eyes, has teamed up with the local resistance (along with Susan and Alex); in a last ditch attempt to put up a fight, they take their last remaining weaponry and fire on the main Dalek ship. Which the Doctor happens to be on.
•Fortunately, the Doctor survives the ensuing crash, although badly injured. Better still, Lucie, Susan, and Alex manage to get him back to the TARDIS, where they get him patched up again. And also deal with the various explanations that need to happen.
•As it turns out, the Daleks are being helped by the Monk - upon being thrown back into time, the Dalek Time Controller sent out a distress call, hoping to lure the Doctor in. The Monk answered instead, and promptly told the Daleks their future while he was at it, and then helped them set about changing that future. Tamsin, meanwhile, who had been blissfully unaware of this until Lucie forces the Monk to confess at gunpoint, is thoroughly horrified. The Daleks exterminate her mere moments later, since she'd no longer been necessary to their operations. The Monk, naturally, is not particularly thrilled, but life continues on.
•And then Alex gets exterminated, sacrificing himself so the others might have a chance to see their plans come to fruition.
•Needless to say, the loss of one of his few living family members does not sit well with the Doctor, and he promptly decides that the laws of time can go hang. To the point that he's quite willing to essentially drag a nuke through time itself and destroy the Daleks themselves at the beginning of their history and never mind the utter mess it would make of time, history, and his own rules.
•Before he can, however, Lucie takes matters into her own hands, using the bomb to blow up the mineshaft - and the time warp engine the Daleks had been building - instead. However, this also costs her her life, which does absolutely nothing for the Doctor's mood. Nor does the Monk's admission that he'd been the one responsible for the Doctor showing up two years too late. To the point that he's again willing to break the laws of time, to snatch Lucie out of jaws of the explosion just in time; it takes Susan talking him down before he agrees to leave Lucie to her fate and beats a hasty retreat back to the TARDIS.
•Deeply traumatized by the double-whammy of the deaths of his great-grandson and one of his best friends, and entirely out of hope, the Doctor attempts to steer the TARDIS to the end of the universe itself, in an attempt to look back at the whole of time and maybe find some small glimmer of hope. And when the TARDIS proves to not quite have enough power for the journey, he takes an axe to the console in the hopes of triggering a power surge that might get him the rest of the way there.
•Before he can get take this ill-advised plan too far however, he's interrupted by an agent of the CIA (Celestial Intervention Agency) who introduces himself as Straxus. The CIA have a mission for him, and while the Doctor is understandably less than thrilled about being used as the CIA's errand boy, it is still something to do and he agrees. For his troubles, the Doctor is promptly dropped off squarely in the middle of No Man's Land in the trenches of WW1, where he very shortly walks into a mustard gas attack.
•Luckily, he survives! Possibly due to his Time Lord biology, although the nurse he's placed in the care of (one Molly O'Sullivan) is understandable less than inclined to deal with a strange out-of-place man calling himself 'The Doctor', wounded or otherwise. On the other hand, when someone claiming to be a doctor attempts to give him a blood transfusion that will absolutely kill him (on account of the Doctor not being human in the first place), she intervenes to save his life. And to try and get him away from the inexplicably glowing mustard gas cloud that shows up more or less out of nowhere.
•They are, however, interrupted. By... yep, the Daleks. Again.
•Unsurprisingly, he and Molly manage to get away, although they end up needing to steal a plane to do it. However, once they manage to get the TARDIS, Molly remarks that she's been there before. Which should be impossible, given that the Doctor doesn't remember having met her before. Worse still, no matter where Molly and the Doctor go the Daleks manage to follow them. And when still another person gets exterminated by the Daleks in front of the Doctor (one Sally Armstrong, who had been working on a project for the Doctor - which he doesn't remember having ordered) something in the Doctor simply snaps as all that survivor's guilt comes crashing down on him hard. In the end, it's Molly who pulls him out of it quite literally, as she knocks him out and drags him back to the TARDIS rather than let essentially commit suicide-by-Dalek.
•When he finally comes to, he decides to deal with his guilt and trauma by... staging a hot springs episode, basically. Which the Daleks naturally crash, and Molly and the Doctor only barely escape in time.
•(Somewhere else, someone named Kotris is working with the Dalek Time Controller, plotting against Gallifrey.)
•(Still somewhere else, Straxus visits a planet called Strangor and attempts to commit suicide, only for it to not take. Something - or someone - has installed drones on the planet to prevent that exact thing.)
•Before their adventures continue on, the Doctor takes it into his mind to figure out why Molly has perfect control of the TARDIS. Which should be impossible.
•With the help of his telepathy, the Doctor and Molly trace her memories back to her second birthday, where she was briefly kidnapped and brought into a TARDIS... by someone who, according to the Doctor, definitely doesn't feel like a Time Lord. When they attempt to return from their jaunt to the past, however, the TARDIS is abruptly time-clamped, leaving it essentially stuck in the Vortex. And during the ensuing conversation, the Doctor hears a strange noise and abruptly collapses.
•When he comes to, Molly has brought him to another world... which shouldn't have been possible. More importantly however, the Daleks are still after them, and since they can't seem to get back into the TARDIS, they flee, eventually finding themselves trapped in a cave. And when the Daleks indicate that they want to save Molly and the Doctor, the Doctor hears the noise from earlier and collapses again.
•...And wakes up on Skaro, ancient home of the Daleks. Which is apparently inhabited by reformed Daleks, the only ones left after a great war that wiped out all the Time Lords and almost all of the Daleks. The Daleks that have survived have given up their goals of world domination and are slowly re-engineering themselves back into Kaleds.
•The Doctor, quite reasonably, suspects a rat, for all that what he's being faced with is his greatest hope. And he's right to, too. He and Molly have both been trapped in a lotus eater machine; they're rescued by Straxus who materializes his TARDIS around the two of them and bring them back to the Doctor's.
•(Straxus' TARDIS is later attacked by the Daleks as he returns to Gallifrey to make his report to the High President of Gallifrey. While he manages to make it back, the President is less than thrilled than how things are going.)
•With Straxus gone, the Doctor promptly ignores the coordinates that Straxus had programmed into TARDIS - they end up on Strangor instead. And happen upon Straxus' assistant, who happens to be dying. But before he succumbs to death, he reveals that for ~reasons~ involving a radiation mishap, Time Lords can't regenerate on Strangor.
•(Back on Gallifrey, Straxus reveals that the Doctor ignoring the pre-programmed coordinates is exactly what the Time Lords had expected - he's exactly where the CIA want him.)
•Also, it turns out that the Daleks are there too, and Molly promptly stumbles straight into their headquarters and is captured. The Doctor, meanwhile, comes across a local by the name of Nadeyan, who lost his entire family to the Daleks.
•Back in the Dalek headquarters, meanwhile, Kotris realizes that Molly happens to be full of
•Straxus, meanwhile, is busy rewritting the timeline. Namely, altering the retrogenitor particles so that they'd unevolve the Daleks rather than the Time Lords; when Kotris attempts to trigger off the retrogenitor particles he gets a nasty shock.
•At this point, things proceed to get Rather Complicated. Kotris, as it turns out, is a future incarnation of Straxus (and been behind the drones that set up Straxus' suicide attempt earlier, which the Lord President had asked Straxus to commit in order to prevent this future). All of which becomes entirely moot when the Dalek Time Controller simply up and exterminates Straxus. Since he never has the chance to regenerate into Kotris, the whole timeline of events unravels; the Daleks never showed up in the middle of WWI, Molly was never implanted with the retrogenitor particles, and most importantly, Molly's friend - who she'd followed into the war - never died. Accordingly, she asks the Doctor to return her to where he'd found her, and he complies willingly for a change.
•And now for
•Eventually, it's revealed that the collapse was intentional - the resistance had planted bombs in the mine shaft, some of which didn't go off. And if they can just recover the trigger device (which was unfortunately lost in the initial collapse), maybe the Daleks can be defeated! Or at least seriously inconvenienced.
•While they are able to stabilize the leader of the resistance and recover the trigger device - and even to clear the mine shaft of all the human workers besides - the Daleks catch on to what they're up to. And order all the workers back into the mines, a fact they reveal during the inevitable confrontation that follows.
•...And the Doctor, unwilling to kill millions even if it's to save billions, gives the Daleks the code to deactivate the bombs.
•Cut to: 1918! The Doctor, seemingly on a whim, drops by the house he'd acquired back in his fifth incarnation, only to find that Molly O'Sullivan is more or less squatting there, along with a young man who'd deserted from the army. Also Molly is showing signs of once again holding retrogenitor particles in her, which shouldn't even be so much as possible given that whole timeline had been unraveled.
•Things only get stranger when the deserter she'd been sheltering starts to both fade away and exhibits the ability to jump himself - and anyone in his immediate vicinity - backwards in time by a few seconds. Naturally, somewhere in the middle of this revelation, the Doctor and Molly end up getting separated.
•On the other hand, given they both have a similar idea of where to go to figure things out, it's not long at all before their paths cross. Even if Molly does get captured and the Doctor thrown into a plague well in the process.
•As it turns out, this time it's not the Daleks. Instead, it's the Viyrans; the plagues they've been researching have, in essence, been brought by the Viyrans to that point in the past. And with the TARDIS the only thing keeping the temporally activated virus active, once the Doctor has managed to spark a fight between the two Viyrans present, it's simple enough for him - and Molly, who'd like to know just why the retrogenitor particles are back - to head off to other adventures.
•And promptly land aboard a spaceship on a one-way trip to the end of the universe. Which would be largely uneventful were it not for the fact that Liv Chenka is also on board. And is not thrilled with the Doctor for his actions back on Nixyce VII.
•Which the Doctor doesn't actually remember - those events haven't happened yet for him.
•Meanwhile, the ship, is attacked by the Eminence while in the process of exploring a sort of strange energy at the end of the universe that really shouldn't be there. And in short order most of the crew are either dead, or have been turned into the Infinite Warriors of the Eminence. Or both. The Eminence isn't terribly picky.
•Also it turns out that Liv is being partially controlled by a spy from the energy companies back at the other end of this particular journey (who want to control the anomalous energy source). And while Liv managed to survive the aftermath of the Doctor's poorly thought out decision with regards to the Daleks, she's now dying as a result of radiation exposure. Even worse, there's a strange surge of energy coming from with in the anomalous cloud of energy, one that is more than enough to destroy the ship.
•With a bit of work, and some luck, however, the Doctor manages to reverse the energy surge, get Liv uncontrolled, and - at least temporarily - defeat the Eminence before they make their way back to see just what thy can learn about the company that had been responsible for that particular trip (and Liv's brief encounter with being almost-possessed): the Ides Scientific Institute.
•(Meanwhile, back in the 1970s, Sally Armstrong is saved from being hit by a car by someone calling himself Harcourt De'ath.)
•Since the Ides Scientific Institute began sometime in the in the 70s, that's where Molly, Liv, and the Doctor arrive. Not that anything immediately seems to be out of the ordinary, and it's only when Molly - who'd taken a detour to visit the Doctor's house, just to see it once again - is kidnapped that things take a sharp turn. And even more so when a small horde of what seems to almost be zombies attack Liv and the Doctor.
•As it turns out, "Harcourt De'ath" is the Master, who has been trying to figure out why some people have a natural immunity to the Eminence's influence. Largely so that he could then eliminate it and keep the Daleks from exploiting that same immunity. He's also behind the zombies - in order to keep an eye on things he'd managed to get a hold of a fragment of the Eminence and, after wiring it into his TARDIS had been essentially replacing people's eyes (by virtue of posing to be an eye doctor) with false ones that had been linked up to the Eminence fragment allowing him to see what they were seeing. And also to control them; this is the Master we're talking about.
•The Doctor, however, manages to throw a wrench into this plan by reopening the link to the Eminence in his mind - which had been lurking quietly ever since the Fourth Doctor had an encounter with them - and showing the Eminence fragment in the Master's TARDIS all the ins and out of how a TARDIS works; with this new knowledge, it promptly takes control of the Master's TARDIS.
•And in order to keep this from making things any more pear-shaped then they already are, the Doctor promptly takes off for Nixyce VII, in order to essentially point the Daleks at the Eminence, knowing that the Daleks will be less than inclined to tolerate a force that might be their equal to live. Of course, the Daleks being the Daleks, they promptly leave him behind in a cell when the pull up roots and leave; it isn't until some time later that someone lets him out, and once they do, he promptly steps into the TARDIS and vanishes again.
