The Giggle (event)
Taking place between the Meep's attempted destruction of London in November 2023 (PROSE: The Star Beast [+]Loading...["The Star Beast (novelisation)"]) and 1 December 2023, the Giggle was the name given (PROSE: The Church on Ruby Road [+]Loading...{"name":"TCoRR","page":"6, 100, 137","chaptnum":"Two, Thirteen, Eighteen","1":"The Church on Ruby Road (novelisation)"}) to the infection caused by the Toymaker using a sympathy coded into the laugh of Stooky Bill that made every human believe that they were inherently correct, with the enhanced entitlement causing them to overact on their urges. (TV: The Giggle [+]Loading...["The Giggle (TV story)"])
History
Background
After the Fourteenth Doctor called upon the superstition of salt warding off evil to hold back the not-things while at the edge of the universe, where "the walls [were] thin and all things [where] possible", (TV: Wild Blue Yonder [+]Loading...["Wild Blue Yonder (TV story)"]) the fact that he had "played a game" resulted in the Toymaker being "let in" to the Doctor's universe from his domain. After running amok and besting challenges from the Guardians of Time and Space, the dying Spy Master and "God", as well as making "a jigsaw out of [the Doctor's] history" and fleeing "the One Who Waits", the Toymaker made his way to the "ultimate playground" of Earth, settling down in 1925 Soho, with a fraction of his domain taking the form of a toy shop, where he conjured a plan to have the laughter of his Stooky Bill puppet imbedded into every screen so that humanity would turn on each other on a day when every screen became available to them. (TV: The Giggle [+]Loading...["The Giggle (TV story)"])
Enactment
When John Logie Baird needed a puppet to test his new invention of television, the Toymaker persuaded Charles Banerjee to purchase Stooky Bill for the test, which resulted in the puppet bursting into flames, but not without implanting his giggle, which was "a classic arpeggio [of] Middle C an octave higher", into the screen, and Banerjee. The Giggle would haunt Banerjee until he was forced to return to the Toymaker for a game, which he lost, with the Toymaker turning him into a puppet as his prize. Meanwhile, the brief recording of Stooky Bill was left "hiding in every screen ever since" the test, going unnoticed for years.
In 2023, the KOSAT 5 satellite was launched by South Korea to connect everyone "from the highest mountain to the deepest valley on Earth" to the internet, which gave the Giggle the chance to finally spread worldwide, creating a wavelength that increased the humans' sense of entitlement and caused them to enact upon their every urge, becoming more hostile when told they were in the wrong, with the victims of the Giggle adhering that they were "always right". UNIT managed to counter the effects of the Giggle with Zeedexes created by the Vlinx in the London headquarters, but the public would not accept the Zeedexes, with Trinity Wells advocating an "anti-Zeedex" stance by telling her viewers that UNIT were using the devices to "control [them] and monitor [them] and microwave [their] brains." In the resulting chaos from the conflicting opinions, the Toymaker took the the streets of London to revel in the madness by dancing, where he had a chance encounter with the Fourteenth Doctor, who was trying the asset the situation (TV: The Giggle [+]Loading...["The Giggle (TV story)"]) after he and Donna Noble had been told of the crisis by Wilfred Mott upon their return to Camden Market from the edge of the universe. (TV: Wild Blue Yonder [+]Loading...["Wild Blue Yonder (TV story)"])
UNIT quickly arrived to take the Doctor and Donna the the London HQ, where Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, Shirley Bingham and Melanie Bush briefed them on the situation, and helped them track the origins of the Giggle to 1925 Soho. As he left to investigate, the Doctor invoked the Gold Protocol to give Kate the authority to down the KOSAT 5 satellite without causing an international incident, and UNIT quickly shot down satellite with a galvanic beam, terminating the transmission of Stooky Bill and bringing the Giggle to an end.
However, the Doctor and Donna then returned to warn Kate that the crisis was not over, but they were unable to properly mount a defensive when the Toymaker arrived and, after causing a distraction by dancing to "Spice Up Your Life" in the HQ control room, seized the galvanic beam. He announced his intent to remain on Earth to cause more chaos with his games, but he was successfully exiled from the universe by the combined efforts of the Fourteenth Doctor and the Fifteenth Doctor after a sudden bi-generation caused by the Toymaker shooting the Fourteenth Doctor with the galvanic beam. As he was exiled from existence, however, the Toymaker warned the Doctor that his legions were coming. With his banishment, the Giggle was removed from existence entirely, with even Banerjee having been freed from it and his timeline rewrote so that he never played his game with the Toymaker. (TV: The Giggle [+]Loading...["The Giggle (TV story)"])
Legacy
On 1 December 2023, when asked about her life during an interview with Davina McCall on a television programme, Ruby Sunday mentioned the Giggle as one of the events she had recently lived through. The Fifteenth Doctor later inferred that the Goblins were among the legions the Toymaker had warned him about. Indeed, after the Doctor negated the cracked timeline the Goblins created, they faded from view, as though they had been erased from existence, or pulled back into another world. (PROSE: The Church on Ruby Road [+]Loading...{"name":"TCoRR","page":"6, 100, 137","chaptnum":"Two, Thirteen, Eighteen","1":"The Church on Ruby Road (novelisation)"})
