c 1980 - Meglos [510]
On the planet Tigella, the fourth Doctor, Romana and K9 prevented Meglos, the last Zolfa-Thuran, from recovering the Dodecahedron - the power source that would let him use the Screens of Zolfa-Thura to destroy planets. The Screens, the Dodecahedron and Meglos himself were destroyed. The Doctor returned home an Earthling that a band of Gaztaks had kidnapped as a host body for Meglos.
@ c 1980 (winter) - Father Time [511]
Rumours of mysterious lights and flying saucers drew UFO spotters to the Derbyshire village of Greyfrith. This had been caused by the arrival of a Klade saucer from the far, far future. The Klade Prefect Zevron and his deputy, Sallak, were hunting down the ten-year-old Miranda - the last survivor of the Imperial Family, brought to Earth by her nanny.
Aided by the Hunters Rum and Thelash, plus the giant robot Mr Gibson, Zevron tracked Miranda down. The eighth Doctor was staying just outside the village, and with the help of Miranda’s teacher, Debbie Castle, he defeated Zevron and his henchmen. Zevron died, but Sallak survived and was arrested. Debbie’s husband Barry was rendered mindless. The Doctor pledged to protect Miranda, who - like him - had two hearts.
After the Doctor officially adopted Miranda, they moved south to a large house. The Doctor worked as a business consultant, very quickly becoming a millionaire as he solved economic problems that confounded everyone else.
Following a remark from the Doctor, the barman of the Dragon pub in Greyfrith started selling bottled water. Within five years, he was making twenty million pounds a year from sales of Dragonwater.
In November 1980, Prey for a Miracle was released. It was a movie version of the “gods hoax” of 1965, starring Peter Cushing as the Doctor. [512] Shortly before he died, John Lennon told the Doctor, “Talent borrows, genius steals”. [513] John Lennon was murdered on 8th December, 1980, by Mark Chapman. Huitzilin fed off the trauma of the event. [514]
Professor Edward Travers CBE died on Christmas Day the same year. [515]
1981
The Union of Traken now stretched over five or six planets in one solar system. [516] All diseases had been eradicated on Traken by this time. [517] Lisa Hallett of Torchwood London was born. [518]
c 1981 - The Keeper of Traken [519]
Traken was a peaceful planet in Mettula Orionsis. Two of the consuls of Traken - Tremas and Kassia - married.
Kassia had tended to the Melkur, a creature of evil that had calcified in Traken’s serene environment, since she was a child. But now the Melkur had begun to move again. Hypnotically controlling Kassia, the Melkur - in reality the Master - attempted to take control of the Source, the power of the Keeper of Traken. The Master was at the end of his regeneration cycle, and was desperate to obtain the power necessary to gain a new body. Kassia was killed, but the fourth Doctor and Adric prevented the Master from acquiring the Source, and Consul Luvic became the new Keeper. The Master escaped, and took the body of Tremas as his new form.
Survivors from Traken would found the colony of Serenity, a verdant world of peace and isolation. [520] The Doctor visited Terminal Three of Heathrow Airport around this time. [521]
1981 (28th February) - Logopolis [522]
The fourth Doctor and Adric landed on Earth and took the measurements of a genuine police box to help repairs to the TARDIS’ chameleon circuit. The Doctor had previously visited the planet Logopolis, hoping they could help him with their mathematical expertise and mastery of block transfer computation. Tegan Jovanka, an airline stewardess, found herself aboard the TARDIS after the Master murdered her Aunt Vanessa.
The Doctor learnt from the Monitor of Logopolis that the universe had already passed the natural point of heat death. All closed systems succumb to heat death, and the universe was such a closed system. Or rather it used to be: the Logopolitans had opened up CVEs into other universes, such as E-Space. When the Master learnt of this, he recognised a chance to blackmail the entire universe. The Master’s interference halted Logopolis’ operations, which caused the CVEs to collapse. Entropy began to accumulate and destroyed a vast region of space, including Logopolis and Traken.
The Watcher observed these events, and brought Nyssa of Traken to Logopolis to join the Doctor.
On Earth, the Doctor and the Master worked to re-open a CVE in Cassiopeia at co-ordinates 3C461-3044. The Master threatened to close off even this CVE, and broadcast a message to the entire universe:
“Peoples of the universe please attend carefully, the message that follows is vital to the future of you all. The choice for you all is simple: a continued existence under my guidance, or total annihilation. At the time of speaking, the fate of the universe lies in the balance at the fulcrum point, the Pharos Project on Earth...”
The Doctor prevented the Master from closing the CVE, but fell to his death. As he regenerated, the Watcher merged with him...
1981 - Castrovalva [523]
... the newly-regenerated fifth Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan returned to the TARDIS. The Master kidnapped Adric.
1981 (28th February) - Four to Doomsday [524]
The fifth Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa and Adric defeated Monarch’s plans to travel back to the creation of the universe. Monarch’s android crew opted to find a habitable world and settle on it.
A formless race of explorers sent seeds the size of acorns into space. Each of these would land on a planet, analyse the environment and grow a creature that could survive there. One such seed bank, later named the Juniper Tree, was adopted into a UK military programme that hoped to develop disposable soldiers. The first child grown from it, Sebastian, was born on 3rd March, 1981, and met Jack Harkness of Torchwood a few days later. [525]
Cassandra Hope Schofield, the future mother of the Doctor’s companion Hex, was born on 7th April, 1981. [526]
(=) 1981 (28th August) - Nuclear Time [527]
The US military’s obliteration of Appletown, Colorado, and the killer androids gathered there, resulted in the deaths of Amy Pond, Rory Williams, and Albert Gilroy... and triggered a full-fledged war between the US and the Soviet Union.
The explosion caused the eleventh Doctor to experience time backward, and he altered history. The energy of the bomb’s detonation was dispersed over a ninety-minute window, generating radiation but not a full-fledged mushroom cloud. The android Isley developed feelings for Gilroy, her creator, and they went into hiding together.
In 1981, UNIT encountered the Zygons in the Kalahari Desert and the Ice Warriors in Northampton. [528] The Jex arrived on Earth on 4th December, 1981, and took shelter in California. [529]
@ Even with the help of character references from people such as Graham Greene and Lawrence Olivier, the eighth Doctor needed nearly a year to formally adopt Miranda. Shortly after that, he defeated the Great Provider’s plan to use evil mobile telephones to take over the world. [530]
c 1981 - The Hollows of Time [531]
The sixth Doctor and Peri detected gravitational anomalies in the English village of Hollowdean, and paid a visit to the Doctor’s old friend, the Reverend Foxwell. The villainous Professor Stream attempted to engineer a Quantum Gravity Engine: a device that would make Stream become all of space and time. Stream incorporated eleven Tractators into the Engine, and used the Doctor’s TARDIS to retrieve most important Tractator - the Gravis - from the future. The Gravis and his Tractators turned on Stream, making him swell up like a balloon and explode.
1981 (18th-22nd December) - K9 and Company: A Girl’s Best Friend [532]
In September, a hailstorm lasting thirteen seconds destroyed Commander Pollock’s crop. He was renting the East Wing of Lavinia Smith’s house at the time. On 6th December, Lavinia Smith left for America, phoning her ward Brendan Richards on the 10th to tell him that he would be spending Christmas with her niece, Sarah Jane. The next day, Brendan’s term ended and he began waiting for Sarah to pick him up, but she had spent the first two weeks of December working abroad for Reuters.
Sarah Jane found a crate waiting for her at Moreton Ha
rwood. It contained K9 Mk III, sent as a gift from the Doctor. Working together, Sarah, Brendan and K9 exposed a local coven of witches who conducted human sacrifices. On 29th December, the cultists appeared in court on an attempted murder charge.
1981 (23rd December) - Blue Box [533]
Eridani agents on Earth had recovered three of the five computer components that went missing circa 1966. The sixth Doctor allied with the Eridani to recover the last two, fearing they could affect Earth’s development. However, he discovered that the components, part of a system named “the Savant”, could usurp control of the human brain’s “hardware/software”, and had been dispatched to the Eridani colony to mentally dominate it.
The Doctor and the Eridani retrieved the last two components from the formidable hacker Sarah Swan and her friend Luis Perez. However, the Savant had mentally dominated Swan and Perez, who were left near-catatonic. By late 1982, Swan was reportedly in the Bainbridge Hospital, a facility where the American government kept persons with dangerous information. Perez’s family cared for him in Mexico.
The journalist Charles “Chick” Peters later wrote Blue Box, a chronicle of these events.
In 1982, a Betamax recorder fell into the Rift. [534] The parents of Simon, a future companion of Iris Wildthyme, died in a plane crash while on “the trip of a lifetime” that they’d won on a game show. [535]
c 1982 - Time-Flight [536]
Following the disappearance of Speedbird Concorde 192 down a time contour, the fifth Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa arrived at Heathrow Airport. At the insistence of Sir John Sudbury at C19, the Doctor and his friends were allowed to take a second Concorde into the contour, and travelled back one hundred and forty million years. Upon their return, the fifth Doctor and Nyssa had to leave Heathrow in such a hurry, Tegan was left behind.
The Master’s TARDIS was propelled to Xeraphas, where he discovered Kamelion, a tool of a previous invader of that planet. [537] Tegan Jovanka resumed being an air stewardess, but was sacked shortly afterwards. [538]
During the Falklands War, the chemical gas weapon Gravonax was tested on one of the small Hebrides Islands in Scotland. All wildlife on the isle - which was dubbed Gravonax Island - died, and nobody wanted to live there even after it was decontaminated. Major Dickens and a female military chaplain, a.k.a. “the Deacon”, left the British army after “a bit of an incident”. The secluded Gravonax Island was perfect for Dickens’ scientific research, and he took up residence there. [539]
A Cyber-Leader, potentially the last of its kind, arrived from the far future in a Gallifreyan time-ship. The Cyber-Leader was greatly weakened by exposure to Vortex energy, but continued its scheme to trap the Doctor. [540]
1982 (April) - Relative Dementias [541]
Joyce Brunner, a former UNIT physicist, came to suspect abnormal activity at the Graystairs nursing home. She alerted her old colleague the Doctor (who was now in his seventh incarnation), who arrived with Ace to investigate. The head of Graystairs - the Annarene named Sooal - restored the Tulk war council’s memories, then murdered the group upon obtaining the command codes to the Tulk stasis chamber. Two renegade Annarene arrived and killed Sooal, desiring the advanced weaponry within the stasis chamber to return their people to war. The Doctor tricked the Annarene into transmatting into the stasis chamber before it was opened, freezing them in time. He then destroyed the Tulk spaceship.
The ninth Doctor had a number of blind spots in his historical knowledge, the events of May 1982 among them. [542]
@ After two years of the eighth Doctor attempting to interrogate him, the imprisoned alien Sallak got a legal injunction preventing the Doctor from making any other contact. [543] Isaac Summerfield met Hamlet Macbeth in 1982, and was given a copy of his book The Shoreditch Incident. [544]
1982 (11th July) - Living Legend [545]
Two agents of the aggressive Threllip race constructed an interdimensional portal in Ferrara, Italy, as a means for their people to invade Earth. The eighth Doctor and Charley squashed the plan, and used the portal to strand the agents on the seventeenth moon of Mordalius Prime.
The Doctor spent time with Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment at Robbin Island. [546] Melanie Bush left school after getting five A-Levels. She backpacked around Europe before getting a job at a Scottish nature reserve. Around the same time, SenéNet was buying up European computer firms and other youth market companies. Their executives were converted into drones. [547]
Peri Brown attended a Slayer concert. [548] In Baltimore, Peri was friends throughout her school years with the Chambers family. The father, Anthony Chambers, kept Peri and his children amused by letting them use a telescope. Peri briefly dated Nate Chambers, and became best friends with his sister Kathy. [549]
Ronald Turvey resented that children grew to become adults and, motivated by the Tinghus within him, schemed to kill all adults with Cuddlesomes: fluffy toys akin to pink vampire hamsters, but equipped with an extra-terrestrial poison. Cuddlesomes were the toy to get in the 1980s, and three million were produced. The radio signal intended to release the poison was never sent, as Turvey was arrested for tax fraud and imprisoned for two decades. [550]
The Doctor in Stockbridge
Around 1983, the fifth Doctor settled in the Gloucestershire village of Stockbridge for a time, a guest at the Green Dragon Inn. He had volunteered to investigate time warps on behalf of the Time Lords. After a number of interruptions, he learned that the time warps had been triggered by the Meddling Monk. [551]
The Doctor was head of the Stockbridge Chess Society. [552]
(=) c 1983 - “The Tides of Time” [553]
The Prime Mover produced the ordered vibrations of the universe on a vast biomechanical device known as the Event Synthesiser. For the first time in centuries, he fumbled a note, introducing a note of discord. Time warps occurred. The fifth Doctor had been staying in Stockbridge for some time, and was playing a cricket match on the village green when he was bowled a hand grenade instead of a cricket ball. Shortly afterwards, a Roman soldier was shot in nearby woods, only to vanish. The Doctor quickly learned the disturbances were worldwide.
Meanwhile, the Event Synthesiser’s discord had opened a gap in time, and the Demon Melanicus emerged through it. He took control of the Event Synthesizer in order to create universal fear, destruction and unending chaos.
A jousting knight - Sir Justin - initially attacked the Doctor, but came to realise his error and vowed to help fight whoever was behind the time warps. Melanicus removed the Event Synthesizer from time to prevent attack, but was detected by the spirit of Rassilon deep in the Matrix. He vowed to act, despite advice from Morvane and Bedevere to be cautious. Rassilon decided to operate through the Doctor, who arrived on Gallifrey and used his Presidential authority to access the Matrix. The Doctor entered the Matrix to commune with Rassilon, and saw him chairing a meeting of the High Evolutionaries from a number of planets.
The High Evolutionaries tasked the Doctor with locating the Event Synthesizer. Rassilon despatched a mysterious agent named Shayde to help the Doctor. Melanicus’ interference created the maelstrom - a whirlpool in space and time - and sent a mantric bomb against Gallifrey. Shayde protected the Doctor from its effects, but the TARDIS was sucked into Melanicus’ domain: a surreal world where the Doctor and Justin encountered a carnival, a mysterious woman that the Doctor recognised, a demonic fairground ride, barbarian hordes and Dracula.
Emerging from Melanicus’ domain, the Doctor took the TARDIS out of time to help his search. He re-entered time, then encountered a ship from Althrace which took them to their home in an alien dimension - a vast solar system engineered so that the planets were bolted together and set orbiting a white hole. The technology of Althrace was as advanced as that of the Time Lords, and the white hole allowed direct access to the forces of creation, making them one vast, living organism. Using the power of the White Hole, the High Evolutionaries combined their mental force to halt time and discover the co-ordinates of the Event Synt
hesizer. Meanwhile, Melanicus had ushered in the Millenium Wars:
The Millenium Wars
“A thousand worlds in conflict for a thousand years .. with causes lost in the distant past, their fury rages through time and space...”
In the year 375, barbarian hordes from Asia swept into Central Europe... and were wiped out by a division of Nazi tanks... which in turn were wiped out by American F-15 fighters... which in turn were wiped out by advanced space fighters.
“This was the beginning of the Reign of Melanicus as millenium fought millenium... and so what began as a series of small, confused skirmishes soon escalated into a holocaust of conflict, culminating in a far-flung armageddon - the Millenium Wars! A thousand worlds in conflict for a thousand years.”
(=) “The Deal” [554]
The fourth Doctor caused a trooper of the 12th Trouble ’chuters to crash. The trooper set his robot “spider” on him, but the Doctor blocked its psychic attack. A pursuit ship arrived, firing missiles at the TARDIS. The Doctor realised that the trooper was a psychopath and left, abandoning him to death at the hands of another pursuit ship.
(=) “The Tides of Time”
But due to his lack of knowledge, Melanicus had confined himself to a cul-de-sac in time. This was to prove his undoing.
After a thousand years of the Millenium Wars, Earth was ruined and lifeless. Melanicus had based the Synthesizer here, and the fifth Doctor located it. The Doctor and Shayde weakened Melanicus, and Justin pierced the demon with his sword, unleashing vast energies. Justin and Melanicus were killed, and the Prime Mover was restored to his rightful place as user of the Event Synthesizer.
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