The End of Time (unproduced TV story)
The End of Time was a mooted two-part serial plotted by Randy Lofficier, Jean-Marc Lofficier and Philip Segal in 1994 as the finale of a potential first season of the revived Doctor Who series, in continuity with Robert deLaurentis's pilot script The Time of My Life, which was then under consideration by the head of the Fox Television series dvision, John Matoian. The basic storyline was adapted from a failed pitch by the Lofficiers to the Virgin New Adventures book line. When reproducing the outlines of it and the later The Hand of Omega, Jean-Marc Lofficier stressed that the tw stories "were not commissioned or paid for by the production", unlike many other scripts from the period on the way to the eventually-produced 1996 TV movie, and never got as far as constituting "actual to-be-produced material", having always been intended as "springboards for further discussion and thoughts".
The serial featured references to Kinda [+]Loading...["Kinda (TV story)"], The Time Monster [+]Loading...["The Time Monster (TV story)"], and — via what would have been the first true appearance of the much-namedropped Terrible Zodin — The Five Doctors [+]Loading...["The Five Doctors (TV story)"], as well as reimagining the mythos of the Key to Time and Guardians of Time, with the White and Black Guardians construed as incarnations of Life and Death rather than Order and Chaos or Good and Evil as more commonly proposed.
Most notably, the story was intended to be the venue for one of the prior Doctors to guest star — presumably Sylvester McCoy's Seventh Doctor though Tom Baker was also in consideration. With The Time of My Life having been a much more extensive reboot than the 1996 TV movie, whose main character was in Jean-Marc Lofficier's words "for all intents and purposes (…) an 'alternate' Doctor", their plan was to literalise the reboot in-universe, revealing that the Doctor's universe as viewers knew it had been destroyed using the Key to Time prior to The Time of Your Life, with a new universe created from its ashes.[1]
Despite the coincidence of both involving Rassilon destroying the universe to achieve true godhood as a plot point, the serial otherwise had no relationship to the two-part special of that name which was eventually written by Russell T Davies to close pout David Tennant's tenure as the Tenth Doctor.
Plot
Part 1: The Terrible Zodin
On the planet Deva Loka, the peaceful Kindas are robbed of the fourth segment of the Key to Time by the psychic villainess Zodin, who kills the High Priest to get it. Using the Key, she causes a volcano to erupt, causing mass deaths among the Kinda and vampirically strengthening her own powers, before fleeing to Earth, where she believes the next segment is to be found.
The White Guardian takes control of The Doctor's TARDIS and warns the Doctor about Zodin. This prompts the Doctor to study ancient records from the days of Rassilon to learn more about the Guardian, discovering that he is "the Incarnation of Life, one of the two forces (Death being the other) which make up the Universal Balance". Guided by the Guardian, the Doctor lands in April 1912 in London, where he meets Ann Mansard, a young occultist belonging to the Adepts of Eleusis, headed by the magus Sir Alastair Machen. The Doctor's curiosity is piqued when he fails to translate the Atlantean Scrolls of [[Dalios]} which she came to the British Museum to consult; it is revealed that they hold the secret of the location of the fifth and penultimate section of the Key, for which Zodin ineffectively murders Sir Alastair.
After Zodin and the Doctor cross paths, with her recognising him as a Time Lord, the Doctor realises that Zodin has been chosen by the Black Guardian, "the Incarnation of Death", as his champion, and intends to use the Key to Time to destroy the universe and remake it in her own image. While the Doctor and Ann investigate Machen's death, Zodin fruitlessly murders her way through the ranks of the Adepts of Eleusis. The Doctor and Ann are assisted in their investigations by a surviving Adept, DeVries, but as soon as the Doctor manages to translate the Scrolls and identify the fifth segment's location, he reveals that he has been recruited by Zodin as her agent, and helps Zodin kidnap Ann as leverage against the Doctor as they go to retrieve the segment.
Having acquired it, however, Zodin still needs to cause another mass disaster to have enough psychic power to make another space-time jump. She, DeVries and the captive Ann board the Titanic and deliberately cause its historic sinking (or, alternatively, travel to San Francisco and cause the historic earthquake, in which case the story's events would be pushed back ot 1906), with the Doctor forced to let Zodin go at the last moment lest DeVries kill Ann. Zodin reveals that the Titanic diversion was a ruse to get the Doctor away from the TARDIS, which she needs to steal to complete her plans; taking control of it, she makes for Gallifrey, where the sixth and final segment of the Key is kept.
Though all seems lost, as they remain stranded on the sinking Titanic, the Doctor reveals to Ann that he at least managed to substitute the fifth segment for a replica, having suspected DeVries; thus Zodin's Key is flawed and will not work completely even if she gets the sixth segment. It is then that another version of the Doctor's TARDIS abruptly appears on the deck of the sinking ship to save the Doctor and Ann: out steps the Seventh Doctor, whom Ann's Doctor recognises as another version of himself.
Part 2: The Eye of Harmony
Inside the Seventh Doctor's TARDIS, the White Guardian (misleadingly) explains that he pulled the other Doctor from "the infinity of timelines" to assist his other self as a "reward" for having obtained one of the segments of the Key to Time. Landing on Gallifrey, the Doctors and Ann find that it is suffering from a "power blight" affecting both the Time Lords and the TARDISes. Cardinal Borusa eventually explains that the sixth segment of the Key is a "vital control element" of the Eye of Harmony, which "powers the entire Time Lord civilisation, including their bodies, whose regenerative capabilities are triggered by nanomachines powered by the black hole"; in this version of reality the Eye is contained in a moon-sized spacecraft built by Rassilon and which orbits the planet.
As the Seventh Doctor's TARDIS comes from another universe, it is still operational. Using it, the Doctors, Ann, and Borusa's young student Ariel (who "knows the Eye of Harmony and the legends surrounding Rassilon like no one else", the Doctor excepted) travel to the Eye, where they encounter "strange and wondrous robotic Guardians", one of whom wounds Ann. The heroes eventually arrive in "the vast transdimensional machine rooms holding the Black Hole captive behind its controlled event horizon", where they triumph over DeVries, given control of one of the robot guardians by Zodin. However, they are too late to stop Zodin from finally wrenching the sixth segment free of the Eye of Harmony, causing all on Gallifrey to go completely dark.
Zodin's plan halts, however, when she realises the fifth segment in her "assembled" Key is a fake. As the main Doctor confronts her, she defends herself by claiming that she wouldn't be the first to do so — revealing that the universe the current Doctor inhabits was in fact created from the ashes of the classic Doctor Who universe which was destroyed using the Key in exactly this manner. One possible plot reveal at this stage is that Rassilon himself was responsible for this, "when he saw that the Time Lords were waning, and that he himself was dying"; another is that the Seventh Doctor himself was responsible, reluctantly destroying his own universe to prevent it from being taken over by the Black Guardian. In the latter plot configuration, it would be revealed that his spirit was then contained within the Key, able to be summoned as a "guardian" in a time of need by whoever else comes to hold it — and that this is how the Seventh Doctor had come to appear to his other self on the Titanic at the climactic moment.
While the Doctor is reeling from those revelations, Zodin captures Ariel and uses as a hostage to exchange against the real fifth segment, with the Doctor complying. As Zodin assembles the true Key, the two Guardians appear. The Doctor uses this as a distraction in turn, rushing at Zodin and pushing her past the event horizon. However, this makes matters worse, as Zodin is falling while still holding the Key, and if the Key is destroyed, the entire universe will go with it. The Seventh Doctor realises that, being alien to this universe, he can safely cross the event horizon and come back, unlike anyone from the universe. He gets the key back from Zodin, whom he leaves to her fate, and returns safely.
The Seventh Doctor gives the new Doctor the Key, telling him that it's "his universe, his choice". He can choose to use the Key to remake the universe a second time, or he can dismantle it — but the latter action will automatically send the six segments to random corners of the universe once again, which means Gallifrey will be left without a power source and the Time Lords will die. Despite Ariel's protests, and the Black Guardian's Mephistophelean offer of absolute power if he keeps the Key, the Doctor chooses the second option. In reward, the White Guardian imbues the fake fifth segment with some of his own power, which he says will be enough to keep the Time Lords going for a few more "billion years". The Seventh Doctor congratulates the Doctor, and tells him that this universe is in good hands. He steps into his TARDIS and dematerialises.
Footnotes
- ↑ The Nth Doctor, "Appendix".
