More actions
Final Genesis was a 1993 Doctor Who Magazine story that was part of the brief run of comics that were integrated into the Virgin New Adventures continuity. As such it starred the Seventh Doctor and Benny. For the first time in this "mini-series" of comic strips, it also included Ace, albeit a very different Ace than the one DWM featured in the majority of their strips that included Ace. Since what might be called the "DWM Ace" died at more or less her Survival age in Ground Zero, it is difficult to reconcile this story with pre-1993 and most post-1994 DWM stories featuring Ace. The Ace here was the older, more "suspicious-of-the-Doctor" Ace of the New Adventures, and therefore had, amongst other things, a propensity to completely disregard the Doctor's instructions that was inconsistent with the televised/DWM Ace.
The story itself posited the notion of the Doctor watching over a parallel Earth in which a dead, alternative Third Doctor had brokered a successful peace between humans and Earth Reptiles at the end of The Silurians. This story therefore offered a second parallel Earth within the Virgin New Adventures continuity that had to do with a more dominant Silurian race.
Summary
Then: A bomb explodes, killing the Third Doctor and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.
Now: The TARDIS arrives with a rising tone, rather than the usual "vworp, vworp", the first sign for Ace and Benny that something is not quite right. Unable to get a straight answer out of the Seventh Doctor, they find the world itself isn't quite right. They see dinosaurs and are arrested by strangely familiar soldiers working for URIC rather than UNIT. The Doctor ingratiates himself into the URIC command; the late Doctor's assistant is familiar enough with regeneration and time travel to work out that although this is a Doctor, he is not their Doctor.
The Doctor becomes embroiled in the prevailing mystery. People across the globe — humans, Silurians and Sea Devils — have disappeared and unnatural beasts are attacking URIC. After an attack, one is captured and autopsied. It is a gestalt, a combination of the best genetic features of all three dominant species. After capturing a double-agent in URIC, they discover Mortakk, a rogue Silurian scientist and eugenicist, is behind the creation of the hybrid beasts. He has developed a gas he plans to release across London and then the globe. It will kill two-thirds of the infected and mutate the survivors. However, during a URIC attack on his base, an accident releases the gas, killing Mortakk. The Doctor watches coldly, protected by his Time Lord immune system and respiratory-bypass ability.
Before returning to the TARDIS, the Doctor visits his other self's grave, leaving Ace and Benny to muse about their "accidental" arrival and how for the Doctor, his parallel selves could be the closest thing he has to family.
Plot
to be added
Characters
References
- URIC is this universe's UNIT equivalent (standing for United Races Intelligence Command).
- This story's Third Doctor, despite having his exile on Earth lifted, chose to stay on Earth and help cement the peace between humans and Earth reptiles.
- The alternative Third Doctor and Brigadier are assassinated by a bomb placed in Lethbridge-Stewart's country estate.
- The TARDIS console room changes appearance in the middle of the story with no explanation.
Notes
- This story features a parallel Earth that was created by an alternate ending to Doctor Who and the Silurians. It should not, however, be confused with the Silurian Earth of Blood Heat. In The Silurians, the titular species is destroyed. In Blood Heat, the humans are destroyed. This Earth is the middle ground of peaceful co-existence between homo sapiens and homo reptilia that the Third Doctor failed to achieve at the end of The Silurians.
- As the Doctor hooks up Benny into the machine that will link her mind to Kathryn Paris', she says, "No, not the mind-probe!" Indeed, the letterer goes out of her way to put the phrase in quotation marks so that the audience knows she's quoting. The Doctor, for his part, takes it as her making a joke. It's unclear, however, how her character would have come across this quote from The Five Doctors, or, if not that serial, whom she's quoting. Equally, it's uncertain why the Doctor would take it as a joke, since he wasn't present for that scene in The Five Doctors, and likely wouldn't have read his fellow Time Lord's anguish about the mind-probe as particularly funny. Instead, the two characters seem to be having a completely meta-textual joke with the audience, rather than one that makes a great deal of in-universe sense.
Continuity
- The Silurians first appeared in TV: Doctor Who and the Silurians and the Sea Devils in TV: The Sea Devils.
- The Doctor, Ace and Bernice Summerfield travel to another alternate universe where Silurians and Sea Devils are present in PROSE: Blood Heat. In a possible nod to this, Final Genesis states the number of possible futures and divergent timelines from the first Silurians story is near endless.
- As in TV: The Robots of Death, the Doctor's enhanced respiratory system means he is unaffected by airborne chemicals (helium in Robots of Death, here a mutagen that affects all Earth sentients (humans, Silurians and Sea Devils). It mutates them into a gestalt version of the best traits of all three or kills them outright.