The Clockwise War (comic story)

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The Clockwise War was a comic story published in Doctor Who Magazine in 2018. It was the final Doctor Who Magazine comic story to star the Twelfth Doctor.

A younger version of the War Doctor appears on the final page of part three and throughout part four of the story. However, unlike in multi-Doctor stories such as The Day of the Doctor, he is shown entirely in flashback through narration by the then-incumbent Twelfth Doctor, and is never met by the Twelfth Doctor.

Summary

Part one

In the tower of Silent Memory upon the desert of High Remorse on Gallifrey, the Time Lord Bellator ascends, followed by General Kenossium, to prepare for a ritual that will lead him to his final regeneration. Telling the Time Lords to hurry up because "I've heard this malarkey eleven times already", Bellator begins to regenerate, but something goes badly wrong. Part-way through the process, he ends up twisted and elongated, and collapses to the floor, dead, before dissolving in an orange puddle on the ground. A Gallifreyan soldier arrives to inform Kenossium that all six regenerations that have taken place in the last hour have failed and led to the deaths of the people involved.

In the TARDIS, the Twelfth Doctor is in a great rush, even missing Alan Turing and Ranesh's wedding, but for a reason he will not tell Bill. Before he can elaborate, the TARDIS hits a massive energy field, an 'entropy bubble', encompassing a huge variety of destroyed space craft floating in zero gravity, as the TARDIS is drained of its power. Realising they can breathe in the field, the Doctor and Bill leave to try and prevent the TARDIS being "sucked dry", before someone shoots the TARDIS. It is revealed to be Gol Clutha and her band of mercenaries, and they drag the Doctor and Bill to the dead remains of a colony ship, the Rangiroa. Gol seems surprised that the Doctor does not know who she is working for this time and believes the state of the ship is his fault, but he has no idea what she means. Gol shows the Doctor the other inhabitants of Rangiroa - lots of people who used to be celebrities and geniuses on their own worlds, now stranded and homeless on the ship. Wanting revenge, Gol prepares to shoot the Doctor but is distracted by something.

Led outside, the Doctor realises that as Gol is a temporal mercenary, the ships stranded in the energy field are actually time machines, not spaceships. He eventually comes face to face with the leader of the Rangiroa - Count Jodafra. Like Gol, Jodafra also believes that the Doctor has set them up and has come to gloat, having made Fey Truscott-Sade work for him, but the Doctor still does not understand why he thinks this. Suddenly, before they can go any further, they are interrupted by a sight that shocks even Gol - the return of the Clockwise Men.

Part two

On the banks of Westminster in London, Hugo Wilding walks alone along the River Thames. He is quickly identified by a very confident ex-colleague of his, Alexander Truscott, who confirms to a begrudging Hugo that he is soon due to be appointed as head of the Ministry of Defence. Alexander mentions that Hugo's 'side operation' of sending British agents to space to help defend from attacks is a secret that is safe with him, but Hugo quickly shouts at him for discussing it in public, and denies it exists. Apologising, Alexander quickly takes off.

On the Rangiroa, the sight of the Clockwise Men advancing on the group causes everyone to panic, and Gol and her group start attacking them. However, their shots go straight through them, and a simple touch from the Clockwise Men is enough to age the attackers to death. The Doctor, having removed his handcuffs, narrowly rescues Bill from the Clockwise Men and finally convinces Gol and Jodafra that the attack is nothing to do with him. The four escape into Jodafra's golden time machine, the Salvation, and it materialises next to the TARDIS so that the TARDIS can be powered up enough to break out of the entropy bubble. The Doctor and Jodafra get to work as Bill and Gol head outside to attack the Clockwise Men. However, Gol's proton cannon has no effect either, and a second Clockwise Man appears, attacking Gol and ageing her to death. When the Doctor and Jodafra finish their preparations, Jodafra reveals he was betraying the Doctor by swapping the settings to power up the Salvation instead of the TARDIS, but the Doctor shows how he swapped the settings first in anticipation.

The Doctor heads out of the ship and grabs Bill to return to the TARDIS, with a very angry Jodafra in hot pursuit. However, before he can attack the Doctor, his wrist is grabbed by Fey Truscott-Sade, appearing out of nowhere. Telling the Doctor he should just keep running as he always does, Fey throws Jodafra into the Clockwise Men, killing him as well. This leads to a chain reaction as the Rangiroa collapses in on itself, also killing everyone on board. As the Doctor begs Fey to stop, she refuses, and disappears. Running back to the TARDIS, the Doctor and Bill just barely escape the collapsing entropy bubble.

On a ruined castle floating in an area of red space, Fey approaches a robed figure she calls the Absence, telling it that everything went as expected. The Absence watches the death of Bellator through a portal, pleased at what it sees, and confirms it had sent the Phantom Piper to steal a complete map of the space/time vortex from Chiyoko. Fey states that with that information on their side, the Doctor has lost.

Part three

In the Indian Territory of America, 1882, Totika gets a surprise visit from a familiar face - the Marshal Bass Reeves. Being two years after their incident with the Stikini, she wonders why he came to visit, and he responds that he knows the feeling of being an outsider like her, and while he does not agree with what she did, he understands her anger and believes she deserves a second chance. However, they are interrupted by the sound of a TARDIS landing nearby. It is not the Doctor that emerges, though, but Kenossium, wishing to recruit Reeves for some reason.

Having escaped the entropy bubble, the Doctor and Bill head back to Cornucopia as the Doctor rushes ahead to meet with someone. Before he can do so, however, Bill grabs his wrist and shouts at him for not being open with her about his plans or who Fey really is, and the two walk off together. They enter a fancy office and the Doctor is immediately shouted at by a certain Miss Ghost for breaking in and taking his companion with him. As she reveals her true form as Annabel Lake, the Doctor explains he needs to access a very old file from her archives.

Annabel takes back the form of Miss Ghost, blindfolds the Doctor and Bill, and drives them to her secret Wonderland headquarters, but the Doctor quickly has to take the wheel as their car is intercepted by an air-truck, being ridden by a defiant Fey. Annabel jumps off and begins exchanging fire with Fey, but Fey aims at the car being ridden by the Doctor and Bill instead. When Annabel attempts to punch Fey, she turns intangible. Realising she must become tangible for even a split second when shooting, Annabel kicks her and uses her sonic screwdriver to divert the air-truck into the ground, where it explodes on contact, and she barely escapes with the Doctor. However, Fey emerges from the flames, unharmed.

At Wonderland HQ, the Doctor and Annabel meet up with Patrick Lake about the Doctor's request as Bill quietly recovers with a drink, feeling somewhat shaken for being the target of a shooting for once. Eventually, data about Fey reaches the Lakes, revealing her to be believed to have been killed in action in 1944. The Doctor explains how she used to be a good friend of his - travelling with him and eventually bonding with the Gallifreyan secret agent Shayde. Finally, the Doctor promises to explain all to Bill about what happened to her. The event did not take place in his current incarnation, however. Instead, it happened on "the worst day of the Time War."

Part four

The Twelfth Doctor narrates his experiences of the Time War, with the action moving in flashback to the Dorian Nexus. As explosions rained down, Ohila and the Sisterhood of Karn recited an incantation, and two people rushed around a large weapon - Fey and a much younger War Doctor. The Doctor had recruited Fey from her own war, where she eventually became renowned for her efforts, gaining a large variety of names. However, just as the Doctor had allies in the Sisterhood, so did the Daleks, in the form of the Morlontoa of the Seventh Sky, a multidimensional unreality form that could turn objects and living things into their opposites, as well as wipe out whole planets. The War Doctor explained how he was creating a Quantum-Intrinsic Field Projector, used to bounce the Morlontoa's unreality wave back at it. The Sisterhood eventually finished chanting the Hythala Invocation, firing "living symbols of strength and hope", assisting the Doctor at great mental strain to themselves.

However, the group also had the planet's inhabitants to save - the childlike Loshann, and as Fey commanded a Gallifreyan soldier to get them to a TARDIS, the Doctor's Projector hit the Morlontoa, and he rejoiced... but not for long. The Morlontoa's attacks were still able to get through, distorting and killing most of the Sisterhood and the Ninth Prydonian Guard, in a very similar way to how Bellator died. The worst attack of all, however, came to the children. Turning into hideous monsters, they attacked the Doctor and Fey, forcing Fey, against her wishes, to kill them off one by one to protect the Doctor's machine. Immediately after doing so, the Projector failed anyway, leaving both the Doctor and Fey distraught and the planet essentially doomed. As the Doctor led the group back to his TARDIS, Fey heard the cries of one child who was unaffected, and diverted to rescue them. However, the final seconds she spent doing so were seconds she did not have, leaving her, the child, and the rest of the planet struck by the Morlontoa's unreality wave. Although the Doctor was mortified and wanted to save her, Ohila held him back, as nobody could survive in the unreality wave. With the TARDIS unable to move during the attack, the Doctor had no choice but to watch as Fey died and disintegrated before him. As the TARDIS set off once more, the Doctor refused to be called by that title ever again.

Back in Wonderland HQ, the Twelfth Doctor explains he was too young back then to understand the true reality of war. As Fey is shown, still alive, looking over London, the Doctor says that while he does not know how she is back, she is now the most dangerous human to ever exist, and wants to destroy everything he loves.

Part five

The Doctor, Bill, and Annabel head back to Cornucopia, paying a return visit to Matildus Galathea in the Renath Archive. The Doctor requests a single copy of Peter Pan as part of his plan to track down Fey. Realising that all his recent adventures have revolved around creatures from the Dreamspace, he decides that as Fey used to love the book, he should read it and go to sleep so he can meet up with her in the Dreamspace. The Doctor finishes the book within seconds and falls into a deep sleep.

In the Dreamspace, the Doctor emerges in a wood. After Peter Pan ignores him, Tinkerbell leads him to Fey as a young girl. The two walk through the forest together, with Fey growing up along the way, explaining that she always tried to strive for as much as possible in life, being recruited to British Intelligence, but she quickly realised how harsh the world was. With the Dreamspace changing to the red-skied area with the derelict castle from before, Fey reveals it as the Loshann Temple where she found the child, and leads the Doctor in to show him what is happening on Gallifrey. The Doctor says that she should not target them, only him, but she shoots him down, saying that his kind have been abusing their powers for far too long. The Doctor asks to talk to Shayde, but Fey says he is not around any more, but at least not dead.

Leading the Doctor inside the Temple, she introduces him to the Absence, the one crushing the Time Lords and capturing the other time travellers. Finally, he pulls back his hood to reveal his true identity as the Loshann boy that died with Fey, now fully matured. Fey explains that she pulled the two of them to the Dreamspace in the second before they died, and states that the Daleks sent the Morlontoa to destroy the Loshann because they knew of the sheer power that even one would have when grown up. Throwing the Doctor off a cliff, Fey says it is finally time for him to wake up.

In the real world, the Doctor jolts awake, but reports on finding "no joy". Back at Wonderland HQ, a message comes in from Hugo Wilding. He explains that he has found Alexander Truscott as Fey's nephew and only surviving relative. Hugo and Alexander went to the same private college, where Alexander was the leader of the Clockwise Club. However, he had a huge vicious streak, one that caused Hugo to quit the club. This streak continued in his time in business and later politics, where he is due to become Minister of Defence. Realising the connection to the Clockwise Men, the Doctor assembles a Time Lord Hypercube to contact someone.

On Earth, in dark underground car park, Hugo gets disturbed by the voice of Alexander Truscott, calling for another class reunion - one with the Clockwise Men, that he is not allowed to avoid.

Part six

In London, 2018, Kenossium leads Totika and Reeves through the bustling city streets, and despite none of them being pleased with what they see, Kenossium explains that the Doctor asked to bring them there - Reeves to protect Totika, and Kenossium to help save Gallifrey.

Meanwhile, in Greenwich, the Doctor, Bill, and Annabel hide outside Alexander Truscott's stately home, with a plan to find Hugo Wilding, who has been missing for two days. As the Doctor fails at his attempts to find Shayde, Annabel dons her armour and sneaks in, invisible. Despite finding Wilding, dishevelled and bound to a chair, she is immediately attacked from behind. With Annabel's ten-minute warning elapsed, the Doctor and Bill attempt to go after her, but are intercepted by the Clockwise Men. Inside the house, Truscott introduces himself to the Doctor and finally explains everything, at the Doctor's request.

Back in his college days at the Briarstoke Academy, one day a portal appeared out of nowhere in Truscott's room, and Fey fell out of it. She was delirious, but was slowly nursed back to health. As Truscott learned about the Time Lords and what they could do, he strongly disapproved, and found an opportunity to twist her mind as she healed. Eventually, he discovered how to harness Fey's shadow energies, and used them to transform the other members of the Clockwise Club into the Clockwise Men. Now, with the entire map of space-time in his hands, Truscott announces his plans to wipe out the Time Lords and start a new British Empire in space. Threatening the Doctor with a gun, he is interrupted by Kenossium and Reeves, storming the building and providing an escape. As the group flees, Truscott tells the Clockwise Men to not attack them, but to find Fey instead.

Outside, the Doctor's group reunite with Totika, to the Doctor's pleasure, but are interrupted by Bill noticing that the spherical lens of a nearby CCTV camera is hovering. It begins flying away, joined by countless more, as the Doctor finally realises they are all parts of Shayde. Truscott separated him from Fey, split him into millions of pieces, and hid in plain sight in London for decades. All the black orbs begin to join together, forming a massive sphere around Fey.

From inside, Fey, the Absence and the Clockwise Men address an enormous group of monsters from the Dreamspace, and Fey tells them to finally prepare for war on Gallifrey.

Part seven

On Greenwich Common, a large crowd and news reporters begin to gather around the still-growing black sphere. The Doctor theorises that it is reforming Shayde's consciousness to make him a weapon of the Absence, like Fey, so they should "get inside his head".

With the Doctor's group easily entering the sphere, they discover they are in the Dreamspace, as the Doctor realises that Shayde is being used as a means for a horde of monsters including the Clockwise Men, all of the Time Lords' repressed nightmares, to pass from there to the real world and begin the attack on Gallifrey. To counter them, Kenossium calls in her Obsidian Fleet to attack against the Doctor's wishes, and dozens of TARDISes containing Gallifreyan soldiers appear and launch their assault. Meanwhile, the Doctor and his group attempt to make their way back up to the Loshann Temple, narrowly avoiding being attacked, only to be met by Fey at the entrance. However, Annabel decides to take revenge on Fey to buy the Doctor some time.

Wanting to reveal the truth to Fey, the Doctor approaches her, only to get shot in the leg. Finally, Bill shouts for Fey to stop. She realises that the answer to the question of "What gives you the right?" is the effect of days like this, because the Doctor always tries to do what is right, no matter what happens. The Doctor also realises that Fey was the one who sent the Stikini to target Totika because both Fey and her had lost a child they cared for. Finally talking with Fey, the Doctor makes her realise that she is the one behind all the fighting, and she never saved the Loshann child. The Absence was never real. With her spell broken, Fey collapses to the ground, sobbing, and the sphere of the Dreamspace shatters, dropping the Doctor's group back in the real world.

With Fey unconscious, the Doctor tells everyone that Fey saved them and herself, not him. Promising to return Reeves and Totika to their own era, the Doctor is shocked by the return of Shayde. Shayde admits that he is dying, but has the power to transfer his essence to Fey, keeping her alive at the cost of her remembering nothing after bonding with him. Feeling a sense of relief, Shayde does the job, and finally disintegrates away.

Meanwhile, Alexander Truscott watches the news report of the black sphere, but does not give much thought to what happened to Fey. Musing that "tomorrow is another day", Hugo appears, pointing a gun at him, being glad that it will be a day without Truscott in it.

Finally, Fey jolts awake in hospital at Wonderland in London, back to normal and wondering where the Doctor and Izzy have gone. She is greeted by Hugo and Annabel as the Doctor and Bill walk away without her noticing. Bill asks him why he never said goodbye to her, but the Doctor states that he never says goodbye to the people he wants to see again.

Characters

References

Notes

Original print details

(Publication with page count and closing captions)
  1. DWM 524 (8 pages) Next: The Sacrifice!
  2. DWM 525 (8 pages) Next: Kill Bill!
  3. DWM 526 (8 pages) Next: The Death of the Doctor!
  4. DWM 527 (8 pages) Next: The Lost Boys
  5. DWM 528 (8 pages) Next: The Path to Retribution
  6. DWM 529 (8 pages) Next: The Last Stand
  7. DWM 530 (10 pages) The End

Continuity

to be added

v • e
DWM Twelfth Doctor comic stories
Clara
Solo
Collins family
Bill
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