#Eighth Doctor: Time War

[pers-books]

Scribe Award Nominees

We're proud to announce four nominations in the Audio Drama category of the 2023 Scribe Awards. 

Peake Season by LM Myles  (from Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor Adventures: Series 11B: The Nine)

Albie's Angels by Roy Gill (from Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures: Connections)

Previously, Next Time Parts 1 and 2 by James Moran (from Doctor Who: Time War 5: Cass)

He Who Fights With Monsters by Robert Valentine  (Doctor Who: The War Doctor Begins)

Related bundles:

Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor Adventures Series 11 (CD)

Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor Adventures Series 11 (Download)

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor: Time War 5-6 (CD)

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor: Time War 5-6 (Download)

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Bundle 2022 (CD)

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Bundle 2022 (Download)

Doctor Who: The War Doctor Begins 1-4 (CD)

Doctor Who: The War Doctor Begins 1-4 (Download)

The above offers expire at 23:59 (UK time) on 23 July 2023.

[claraoswalds]

THE DOCTOR + first words

[macbethz]

[clowns0cks]

I had a vision

[dimestoretajic]

"Oh, hey, a bunch of new Doctor Who spoilers dropped! I bet they're all whimsical and well-drawn! Ooh, here comes the Edwardian dandy himself, the Eighth Doct-"

"OH COME ON, THAT WAS ONE TIME!"

[truebluewhocanoe]

[intuitive-revelations]

FLUXES [Celestis: Engineered Participants / Technologies] Example: "DOCTOR, The"

[Image description, courtesy of @quailfence: a series of pictures of text, alternated with screencaps and gifs from Doctor Who.

1: Text: Fluxes: [Celestis: Engineered Participants/Technology] Individuals transposed backwards in time but not too far in space, using a very high chaotic limiter setting and tied to their home period by a thread of biodata

2: The Eleventh Doctor stands in the future corpse of his TARDIS, looking and a pulsing stream of light that has replaced the console. He says, "That is the scar tissue of my journey through the universe. My path through time and space."

3: Text: He raised a finger. 'Look. There.

Now she could just make out the thread in the moonlight. It was just a faint reflection, maybe a foot or two long, about a metre off the ground. A taut strand of spiderweb hanging in the air, not attached to anything.

'What is it?' Fitz asked.

'It's only partially rotated into three dimensions,' he said. He pushed his finger right through the glimmering line, without affecting it. 'That's why it looks one- or two-dimensional. The rest is still perpendicular to what we can see - woven into higher space, or the time vortex…'

'Yes,' said Fitz, 'but what is it?' 'It's what your friend mistook for a ley line.' The Doctor was scuttling around the silver thread, peering at it from every angle, getting more and more agitated. 'It's part of the fabric of space-time itself. What DNA is to your genetic code, this stuff is to biodata. And it's all just exposed here now. Personality, history, memory, perception, all vulnerable…'

'I'm going to have to ask you again, aren't I?' said Fitz.

The Doctor said, 'It's me.'

4: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth doctors in the TARDIS. 14: "But you're fine?" 15: "I'm fine, because you fixed yourself. We're Time Lords, we're doing rehab out of order."

5: Text: The subject is turned loose in his or her own history, and the limiter setting allows tiny actions taken by the future version to have considerable effects on the past version. The biodata link then transfers these changes to the future version, which alters it, and thus alters the changes made to the past version. Therefore, the individual's history is kept constantly in flux.

6: The Fugitive Doctor says, "Let me take it from the top: Hello, I'm the Doctor."

7: Text: Let me finish. Think back to that time when you went to see your previous selves.

8: Ten, Eleven, and War talk to each other. Ten: "You're not actually suggesting that we change our own personal history?" Eleven: "We change history all the time. I'm suggesting far worse."

9: Text: 'Maybe there's no one home on Gallifrey,' said the boy softly. There was just the one of him.

The Doctor looked at him, cupping the small white cube in his hands. The boy said, Maybe they all left. Or maybe the whole planet's being destroyed, and undestroyed, and destroyed, and you just caught them at the wrong moment.

10: The TARDIS by the ruins of Gallifrey

11: Text: 'It's impossible,' said the Doctor. 'It's impossible for my people. Our past is unreachable. What's written can't be unwritten.'

'Who said your history can't change?'

Another boy answered, 'Someone from his history.'

And another: 'Maybe it's the second-biggest lie in Time Lord history.'

12: Dhawan!Master tells Thirteen, "You are the Timeless Child."

13: Thitreen stares at a ruined house. Swarm whispers in her ear and tells her, "All the memories you've lost, all the people you've been. It's all in there, contained within that house."

14: Text: And it was like the Doctor's home. As if his ship understood the loss of the House and had compensated to fill the emptiness. Shadowy corridors, alcoves and stairways, a secret at every turn. Like being in the Doctor's head. Like his life, for that matter, the details of which were strewn like flotsam across the floor.

15: Text: 'Sweet,' said the little boy. 'That's my favourite of your origin stories, too.'

The Doctor opened his eyes. He had been laughing, he realised, he felt that lightness in himself. The boys had all moved away, behind him, leaving him facing the empty dark of the warehouse.

'What do you mean?' he asked. His voice sounded very small.

'Is this the version where they banned all mention of his name, and yours, for consorting with aliens? Or the one where he got every record of himself deleted from the files?'

'Feel free to believe either of them,' snapped the Doctor, 'or both of them, or neither of them. If you're curious about my past, I want there to be as many wrong answers as possible.'

16: The Eighth Doctor tells someone, "I'm half human. On my mother's side."

17: Text: 'Well he's a hybrid, you know that. A Gallifreyan not born of Gallifreyan, the one who unites the two races and brings good old human niceness into their alien society. Aliens need that, y'know.'

'A human hybrid? She saw the contempt in his curling lip. 'Pseudoscientific nonsense. There's no evidence,' he repeated.

'He's allowed to be different. He's got a prophecy and everything.'

18: Lady Me says, "By your own reasoning, why couldn't the Hybrid be half Time Lord, half human?"

19: Text: Someone giggled. 'Let's play pin the tale on the donkey.'

'Maybe you didn't use to have a father.'

'Maybe you're living in the middle of a time war. Maybe there's an Enemy out there -'

The Doctor shouted, 'I'm not listening!'

'- who's rewriting you when you're not looking!'

'Maybe you weren't always half human.'

'But now you've become always half human.' 'Maybe you weren't always a Time Lord.'

But now you've always been a Time Lord.'

'Maybe you originally came from some planet in the forty-ninth century. Fleeing from the Enemy who'd overrun your home -'

'I said I'm not listening! Laa laa laa laa laa -'

'- and you've just been written and rewritten and overwritten, ever since.'

'Pin the tale!'

'How d'you know it's not true?'

'How could you know it's not true?'

The voices crowded in. 'How would you know, huh?'

'How would you know?'

'How would 'How would you 'How 'How would you know? you know? you know? know?'

'Why would I care?' shouted the Doctor.

The boy fell silent.

20: Lady Me asks, "Am I right? Is it true?" Twelve replies, "Does it matter?"

21: Text: However, the one group from the Homeworld which has excelled at flux-engineering is the Celestis.

22: Two asks the Time Lords, "Now then… what about me?"

23: Tecteun tells Thirteen, "Which is ehy we engineered the Fluyx: Shut the universe down and you within it."

24: Text: Even Mictlan itself can be considered a kind of enormous flux, an endlessly-shifting realm so cortosive to the rest of history that its heartland has to be kept on the outer skin of the universe

24: The Fourteenth Doctor tells Donna, "I invoked a supersition, at the edge of the universe, where the walls are thin and everything is possible."

25: The space station from Wild Blue Yonder

26: Text: There are suggestions of a stable middle-ground between the two fates, in which the physical matter of the flux is lost but the meaning of the subject/ victim is retained, a series of memetic connections with no flesh to support it. Yet this entity exists only on a purely theoretical level, relying on the perceptions of others to survive at all.

27: The Twelfth Doctor walks up to the TARDIS console. He says, "Can't wait to hear what I say." Glancing at the viewer, he adds, "I'm noting without an audience."

28: Text: You know what Sam represents. If a tree falls in a forest and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound? Stop me if I'm getting too abstract here, but if a Time Lord saves the world and nobody witnesses him doing it, does history care? She's your witness. The thing you need to make you whole.

29: The First Doctor looks at the viewer and says, "Incidentally, a Happy Christmas to all of you at home!" End description.]

[Plain text: Fluxes [Celestis: Engineered Participants / Technologies] Example: "Doctor, The". End plain text.]

@dw-described

[silverfoxstole]

Paul and India, from this month’s Vortex.

[shiveringfrogspawn]

We’ve seen the Doctor appear different ages (physically) throughout their life, and I want to know what the rules are for the age Time Lords appear when they regenerate into a new form. Like, can you be five years old, have a tragic accident at kindergarten, and then suddenly look fifty?

I ask specifically because I can’t stop imagining a Gallifreyan baby in a high chair choking on a peanut and then immediately splitting said high chair in half when the baby is replaced with a middle-aged, accoutant-looking man with a moustache

Or a truck driving over a little girl and when it’s passed over her and kept going you just see a dishevelled and slightly annoyed-looking old man lying on the street

[gallifreyanhotfive]

[riversofmars]

[doccywhomst]

can’t have shit on gallifrey

[hms-lurking-latinist]

For @bird-lord1993 and @vastwinterskies, although it’s not exactly what either of them proposed, I still think they’ll like it: below the cut, Archie Kennedy and the Eighth Doctor

(I strongly suspect I am about the one millionth person to write roughly this exact fic, but hey, one million cakes!)

Horatio had been here a moment ago but now it was Bush. Why was Bush here? He should be free to go—he must be—unless it hadn’t worked—

“Don’t need to wait,” Archie tried to say. “Horatio will wait with me.” But Horatio wasn’t here. They’d taken him away to the court-martial. No, the court-martial was over. And Horatio had waited with him, they’d talked, he’d known that Horatio knew, and he’d heroically refrained from Hamlet and then—

Horatio must have left after that.

Bush leaned over him and said, “Don’t try to talk,” and it wasn’t Bush at all. The face could have been Bush’s brother, but older, and he spoke differently, and it wasn’t him. 

“Thought you had sisters,” he mumbled, only this wasn’t Bush, it was Bush’s brother, presumably a different Bush then, only Bush didn’t have a brother…

He was still feverish, it seemed. Natural enough in a dying man.

He had still to finish dying.

It was turning out to be more work than he had expected.

***

Next time he surfaced to awareness, he had enough presence of mind to realize he wasn’t in the prison infirmary. He could not make any sense of where he was. There was dim light, but—he lifted his head with some difficulty—he couldn’t see a lantern or a window, and it reflected off oddly smooth surfaces—stone? glass? steel?—in uncanny ways. Small colored lights glowed nearer him like unnatural little stars, and there was a buzzing noise, in his head he thought at first, but it seemed in fact to be coming from above him. Also a monotone chirping. The total effect was unpleasantly like a fit coming on and he was glad to close his eyes again.

***

The third time he woke up, the man who wasn’t Bush was there again, doing something across the room. Archie tried to sit up, and then realized he had tried to sit up, and the muscles of his belly and side had moved and nearly obeyed. They were weak and painful still, but—was his wound healing?

He tried to assemble his questions in a useful order. “Who are you?” floated to the top first.

“I’m the Doctor,” he said, and added “Just the Doctor” in the manner of someone who had often received further questions. Archie didn’t care, at least not at the moment; if he wanted to be secretive, let him.

The Doctor was coming over to Archie’s bedside now with what looked like a glass of water. But before he could offer any care Archie said what he had to say: “I’m sorry that you’ve wasted your time.”

He closed his eyes. He could hear the Doctor’s quick, anxious movements, quite characteristic of a certain type of surgeon. “Don’t say that,” said the Doctor. “I have better treatments here than your surgeon had. You’re going to live.”

“It’s not worth it, just to be hanged.” He took another breath—full, deep, almost unhindered, damn this doctor, he was going to live—and added, “The only kindness you can do me now is—decent obscurity.”

He could feel the Doctor hovering over him, so that he more or less had to open his eyes. He was met with bright unnerving blue eyes, so like Bush’s but so different in expression. Uncanny, that was the word.

“I’m sorry to have acted without your permission,” he said, “but you were really in no state to give it. They thought you had died, you know that?”

“Horatio wouldn’t have left till I had.”

“Your tall friend?”

“You’ve seen him?” Archie interrupted. “Is he well?”

“He still hadn’t left when I came and took you away. I was afraid he never would, you know, and I’d miss my chance with you. I can roll back time here, under certain constraints, but I can’t work miracles.” He looked very worn as he said this.

“What have you done?”

“Saved your life to start with. And—I’ve taken the liberty of departing Kingston. We are well outside English jurisdiction. So you see you haven’t got to be executed after all.”

There were bigger questions he would ask in time. He knew better than to quarrel with the surgeon while still confined to his bed. For the moment he would stick with the very practical: “Where are we now?”

“Where? Aboard the TARDIS. My ship,” he explained.

Archie took another look at his surroundings—the level floor, the big square room. “It’s very calm, then,” he said dubiously. “She must be pretty large. What is she, an Indiaman?”

The Doctor laughed, although Archie hadn’t intended it as a joke. “Bigger than that,” he said.

There were more worries there—who crewed her? did they want a fugitive aboard? did he want to be a fugitive, come to that; could he endure it? and what was this captain-surgeon of hers?—but he could feel himself growing faint, coming near the end of his strength for the moment. One more thing he had to ask first.

“Why have you done this for me?”

The Doctor got that tired expression again. He didn’t look at Archie. “I didn’t mean to find you at all,” he said. “I came to Kingston quite by accident; looking for someone, avoiding something else; you know how it is.” Archie didn’t, much, but it didn’t seem to matter. “You were the talk of the town, for the moment at least. I heard your surgeon talking, saying it was better to let you die, before…. I’ve known too many people that thought that way. I’m sick of the waste of lives.” He met Archie’s eyes again, with a lopsided smile. “And I can’t resist a challenge.”

The smile was nearly infectious. “I’ve been remiss,” Archie said. “I haven’t yet thanked you. What for, precisely, I’d still like to know…”

“Just rest,” said the Doctor, “let the nanobots do their work—I’ll explain nanobots later—I’ll come back and explain everything. Don’t, whatever you do, don’t wander off,” but Archie had already obeyed his first command and fallen into a deep unfevered sleep.

[thekinglemingle]

It will never not be hilarious to me that in preparation for the return of Doctor Who to the screens, the novels neatly put away their toys. They resolved their years' long Time War storyline in a way that it wouldn't be required for future canon, they un blew up Gallifrey and brought the Time Lords back to life.

And then RTD immediately established that in the time since the show was last on TV, there has been a huge Time War, Gallifrey has been blown up and all the Time Lords were dead.

[roxannepolice]

One of those "one moment you're toying with an idea, next you realise it makes way more sense than the author ever intended" things, but-

Like, between rolling eyes at Fifteen claiming he would recognise Susan everywhere after a score of not recognising the Master when they're right in front of them and Tensimm junkyard sniffing, I think RTD's handling of Time Lord recognition of each other makes a whole lot more sense once we ask ourselves a simple question:

Is the Ainley!Master situation the norm or the anomaly?

Ok, considering his run was the longest, he did in many ways establish the "norm", and that norm is a Santa Claus beard seamlessly fooling three consecutive Doctors. But, if instead we look at earlier interactions things get a bit more complicated.

The Time Meddler may not be very definite on the subject, but One isn't, like, completely and utterly confused at who the Monk is, and the conversation between them flows rather seemlessly, like between two countrymen meeting abroad, and that a good deal before the Doctor sees the Monk's TARDIS. Next, regardless of whether War Chief=Master or not, the point still stands: he and Two recognise each other the second they meet. But it is with Threegado that things get really interesting. For all that Delgado!Master loves dress ups, these are not actually used at the Doctor. Like, correct me if I'm wrong, but there is no scene where the Master shows up in cheap ass plastic Graucho Marx eyebrow-glasses-moustache set and Three starts congratulating him on A Night at the Opera, at least not in the strict tv canon?

What I'm driving at, is that with this established history of Time Lords being able to recognise each other on sight and no direct contradiction in Threegado, Fivey consistently falling for the Master's Halloween aisle catwalk comes off as less to be expected.

But here's the thing: there's a very good explanation for why Ainley!Master would be harder/almost impossible to recognise for the Doctor. His Trakkenite body.

As in, this particular Master has a different biology not only from any of his regenerations, but from any other Time Lord. Add just a bit of psychic shielding, and, like. Cheap rubber masks become much more efficient for a species where visual recognition isn't really an evolutionarily stable solution.

Again, this is me just poking at canon and canon showing little resistance, but this interpretation also sheds a different light on how Three and One interact with the Master in Five Doctors. Three can just tell who this Mephistopheles-Blofeld lovebaby that showed up on Gallifrey is, because it's pretty much the same style he spent so much time with (and not relying mainly on visuals does not mean being completely face blind yk). One, on the other hand? He has no idea who this Trakkenite smelling hottie is.

**

Now, there are two important implications of this non-visual based interpretation: first refers to the Rani dressing up as Mel right after Six regenerates into Seven. Now, this in its own right is an interesting contrast to Five, also in post-regeneration stress, because where Seven at least gets fuzzy impressions something's off about this Mel, Five is just blissfully unaware mr Santa the celery juice bringer might be anything but just that. The second implication regards Eight, who's back on track of recognising the Master - and that a new snatched body Master! - on sight. And well, sorry, this is just where my crack brain kicked in. I'll just share the visions of the Rani rubbing Melanie Bush's sweat all over herself like some musky perfume and Seven breathing in the Master's ashes like Napoleon tobacco to the point Eight can tell the distinct Master smell regardless of biology 🤌🤌

[brighhton]

one thing about me is that i think about the 8th doctor during the time war like at least once a day. i really like imagining what the tardis interior looks like at this point.. probably a mess and just overall reflecting the utter hopelessness