He Jests at Scars... (audio story)

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He Jests at Scars... was the fourth Doctor Who Unbound audio story produced by Big Finish Productions. This was the first story not to feature an alternate Doctor, instead featuring Michael Jayston reprising his role as the Valeyard, whom he had last played in 1986's The Ultimate Foe. Bonnie Langford also reprised her role of Melanie Bush. However, like other characters in the Unbound series, these reprisals were of alternate versions of their characters, changed by the scenario presented in the story. The events shown here touch upon what might have happened if the Valeyard had won his trial against the Sixth Doctor and then stole his remaining regenerations.

Publisher's summary

What if... the Valeyard had won?

The thing about meddling with time is that one moment something is real, the next, it's been erased. Probability becomes just a possibility. Established truth becomes a theoretical falsehood. Like dominoes, as one timeline falls, the others come cascading down around it. You can engineer new timelines, new possibilities, but before long, the distinction between what is, what was, what might be and what never can be becomes blurred.

Out of this grow myths, lies and legends. The Doctor was one such legend, but no one knows whether he truly ever existed. Well, not now they don't. The Mighty One, ruling the multiverses from the eternal city of Chronopolis, has made sure of that.

Plot

The TARDIS materialises on the planet Pakha. The Valeyard sends his companion, Ellie Martin, to collect the fabled Ancient Diadem, a thing of vast and terrible power. He makes it very clear that he will leave Ellie in this place if she doesn't get the Diadem.

Investigating the breach into the sacred cavern, a Pakhar is astonished by the sight of Ellie and the Valeyard attempting to take the Diadem. The fact that the aliens have come in a TARDIS is a further shock. Taking advantage of the creature's surprise, the Valeyard offers an explanation to calm his nerves before snapping his neck. Ellie is unphased by the death, but is shocked that the "legendary Doctor" could be so brutal. The Valeyard rebukes her shock by remarking that he is not the Doctor himself.

On the Space Station Zenobia, Coordinator Vansell and the new President-Elect are conversing with Mel. The High Council has fallen, and the Earth has been shifted back to its previous place in the cosmos. The Valeyard and the Doctor were caught in the Matrix as it collapsed around them. Nobody is entirely certain of what happened to the Doctor after that, nor are they sure if they want to save him. While a Time Lord, at the point of regeneration, has previously been visited by a Watcher, a Watcher has never had its own independent and fully actualized existence. According to Vansell, the Valeyard's victory would make for an interesting subject of research as he might have access to all his past, present, and future experiences and memories.

Horrified, Mel notes that the Valeyard they were familiar with was a combination of the darker sides of the Doctor's nature. What would he do if left alone and unrestrained by the Doctor's moral scruples? Luckily, the Doctor and the Valeyard are still inside of the Matrix and thus the trio can view potential future projections. To access the projection of the Vervoid adventure, the trio used the Seventh Doctor to enter the Matrix.

The trio use the Seventh Door to enter the Matrix and examine the projected variation of the Vervoid adventure. They discover that, in this projection, the Valeyard and Ellie were passengers aboard the Hyperion III and every person onboard the ship died because he didn't think to use the vionesium against the Vervoids until it was too late. The only survivors were the Valeyard and Ellie, who made the decision to take their chances and flee.

Noting Mel's absence, Vansell examines the Matrix data and discovers that Mel had never left Earth with the Doctor at all. Instead, she stayed in Brighton and passed away from a brain tumour. The Valeyard had begun to change his own past, arranging things so that Mel never met the Sixth Doctor, helping the Thals wipe out the Daleks, repairing the alarm on a Silurian bunker in the Galapagos Islands so they will awake on time, and more. While the Doctor refused to change time when asked by the Time Lords, the Valeyard was willing to change the flow of history. After all, he could always go back and return things to the way they were should the need arise.

While Vansell is comfortable with the Valeyard's actions, Mel and the President-elect are appalled. Their debate is cut short, as Vansell's investigation reveals that Gallifrey and the Space Station Zenobia have both been destroyed; the Matrix is deteriorating and will be completely gone in 60 years. Vansell discovers that the Valeyard managed to shoot his way past the Primitives protecting the Doomsday Weapon and turned it on the constellation of Kasterborous in the year 1471, where he finds the planet Uxarius as the source. Free of the meddlesome Time Lords, the Valeyard now has control of the ultimate weapon.

Vansell has learned his folly too late. While they were watching projections of the possible future, the Valeyard defeated the Doctor and took on the Doctor’s future incarnations as his own. Now only the Valeyard is left, and with Gallifrey gone, Vansell doesn’t have the power to go back in time and change the outcome of their fight. Mel, convinced that the Doctor’s spirit survives somewhere within the man he’s become, offers to try to reason with him. The President reluctantly offers up his personal Time Ring, and Vansell provides Mel with a staser gun and sends her on her way. She is Gallifrey’s last hope; if she can’t defeat the Valeyard, then the Time Lords will never have existed.

In the dungeons of Chronopolis, Nula tells Mel that all of the prisoners were time sensitives and the the Valeyard had wiped out the rest of the inhabitants of her home planet Archetryx. Mel had wiped off an entire species by killing Gerrof, the last of the Tharils, in order to prove a point. She is saddened to realise how little she cares; this mission has made her capable of horrible things. Nula was under the impression that Mel was a Time Lord agent, but Mel confesses that the Time Lords were wiped out by the Valeyard. When the Morak guards arrive to hand out the prisoners' rations, Mel guns them down and Nula accompanies her in her escape.

A build-up of temporal distortion stops the Valeyard's TARDIS from materialising correctly as he attempts to rescue himself by going back in time and telling his earlier self not to visit Logopolis. Due to the temporal distortion, he tries to yell a warning to his previous self, but only hears a portion of it. The mention of Logopolis, however, is what first motivates him to go there. Frustrated, the Valeyard leaves his TARDIS and heads back to Ellie, telling her that she is also in jeopardy since the web of Time is trying to undo the harm he has done by deleting him from history. If that occurs, she will never meet him and face the repercussions. Realising his mistake, the Valeyard chooses to go even further back in time and destroy Logopolis before the Fourth Doctor can meet the Tremas Master and, consequently, fall off of the Pharos Project. The Valeyard destroys Logopolis with the Doomsday Weapon and returns to Uxarius as a result, but just as he starts to unwind, he gets sick once more.

Although Valeyard appears to stabilise once he is outside the spacetime continuum, he discovers that there are now gaps in his memory. Ellie assists in getting the unstable Valeyard back inside the TARDIS. In an effort to discover proof for her idea and potentially a solution before she and the Valeyard totally vanish, Ellie begins looking for one of the Doctor's diaries.

On a ship with Nula and Geroff, Mel has recently been taken prisoner after seeking an audience with the Valeyard. Here, Mel recognizes that the city of Chronopolis signifies that the Valeyard is still the man she always knew. Despite it's empty and crystalline appearance, it's a spitting image of Brighton.

In one of the Doctor’s old diaries, Ellie finds the entry she’s looking for; it seems that the First Doctor, Steven and Dodo visited Logopolis shortly after leaving the city of Kiev in the 13th century. The Valeyard must find a way to stop the First Doctor from visiting Logopolis, but as he tries to come up with a plan, Mel materialises inside the TARDIS, direct from the remains of the Matrix. She tries to speak to the man she knows as the Doctor, but he rebuffs her, insisting that the Doctor no longer exists.

Ellie locates the entry she is seeking in the Doctor's old diary; it appears that the First Doctor had travelled to Logopolis in the past. The Valeyard is trying to prevent the First Doctor from going to Logopolis when Mel appears inside the TARDIS, coming straight from the ruins of the Matrix. While Mel insists that he is the Doctor, the Valeyard refuses and maintains that the Doctor she knew is long dead. He is a new man. A man that will use the powers and tools that his predecessor rebuked and use them to establish a new realm of his own design from which he alone will rule. However, since he is more concerned about the present, he plans to return to Kiev and murder Dodo in order to stop his predecessor from travelling to Logopolis. Mel refuses to believe the Doctor is capable of such a thing, so the Valeyard murders Ellie and expels Mel from his TARDIS. He snatches the Time Ring from her, destroys it, and leaves her to spin aimlessly in the Time Vortex.

Thus begins Mel's attempt to track down the Valeyard and reunite with the Doctor, which has led her to her meeting with Nula in Chronopolis. Mel enters the Valeyard's throne room where he slowly comes to recognize her. Mel, however, is no longer the gullible and rather naive woman he once knew. Having seen the destruction he had wrought over space and time, Mel knows that there is no longer any use in trying to argue with him. He isn't the Doctor.

The Valeyard mocks Mel and Nula for holding out hope despite her fears. Mel also thinks that the captives' presence is evidence that the Valeyard still possesses some morals on account of the Doctor's practice of preserving one survivor from each race he has exterminated. As Chronopolis is situated right at the centre of the space/time vortex, The Valeyard scoffs and declares himself to be the ruler of creation and destruction. From here, he may travel across interstitial time and create or destroy at will. He stabs Nula five years in the past, snaps her neck just as she is about to enter the royal room, and then revives her. Mel shoots the Valeyard because she's had enough; she's given the Doctor enough chances to take control but he clearly would not. Before she can fire, however, he goes back in time a few seconds and takes the pistol away from her. The throne room, Nula, and even the Valeyard himself appear to disappear into a void as he chuckles gleefully, but everything else starts to fall apart.

He demonstrates his power by stabbing Nula five years in the past, then snapping her neck seconds before she enters the throne room, and then restoring her to life. Mel has had enough; she’s given the Doctor a chance to assert himself, and it hasn’t happened, so she shoots the Valeyard. But he travels seconds back in time and removed the gun from her hands before she has the chance to shoot. As he laughs triumphantly, however, everything around them begins to disintegrate -- the throne room, Nula, and even the Valeyard himself seem to vanish into a void...

The actual Valeyard is cowering in the corner, physically unable to move, and Mel finds herself standing in the console room of the TARDIS. The TARDIS was spending the last of its energy to create potential projections in order to protect the Valeyard from himself when Chronopolis vanished like the ghost it was. The trembling Valeyard explains that he has been through time several times, meeting his previous and future selves and altering both his own past and the past of the universe so many times that he is unsure of what, if anything, is genuine. The only thing the Valeyard ever desired was to exist in actuality, but when given the chance, he wasted it by willfully obliterating alternative possibilities.

The changes he made cascaded through Time until he could no longer keep track of them himself, and his only choice was to hide away inside the TARDIS, protected by the illusion of an impenetrable fortress which would keep everyone out. Chronopolis only resembled Brighton to Mel because the Valeyard had made it in the image of his home, and when Mel arrived she saw it as her own home.

The Valeyard now fears that any movement he takes would cause ripple effects across the fabric of time and potentially end the universe. Mel realises that the TARDIS has frozen both her and the Valeyard in place with its internal force fields. Since all of Mel's experiences over the previous ten years have been projected, she has never left the TARDIS. The TARDIS can no longer sustain the illusion since it is now out of power. The Universe may need millions of years to heal from the harm the Valeyard caused it. Mel is stranded with the Valeyard since the TARDIS can only carry her so far and her Time Ring is set up to take her just to him. The only thing keeping the TARDIS alive is its symbiotic connection with its user, and the TARDIS is the only thing keeping the Valeyard alive. Mel will now be locked here with the two of them, unable to move for all of eternity.

Cast

Crew

Worldbuilding

Notes

Continuity

External links

v • e
Doctor Who Unbound
Unbound: 1 - 8 Collected
Doctor of War
Genesis
Destiny
v • e
The Valeyard stories
Television
Audio
Prose
Complete list of appearances
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