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"Fred" was the name eventually chosen by a time traveller (PROSE: Cyber-Hunt) who was a potential future of the Seventh Doctor. When he met the Seventh Doctor at Bonjaxx's birthday party on Maruthea, travelling with Ria, he openly called himself the Doctor. (COMIC: Party Animals)
However, the same man ultimately made a deal with a mysterious man in black to restore his homeworld after it was destroyed. The price he paid was to be separated from his past completely, with his former name taken from him and a different individual being brought into existence to fill the void he'd left. He continued travelling in time and space, now exclusively under the name of Fred, though as a side-effect of the process he was prone to amnesia about his former life. (PROSE: Cyber-Hunt)
Biography
As the Doctor
The bald time-traveller was originally an incarnation of the Doctor. Accompanied by his companion Ria, this version of the Doctor bumped into his seventh incarnation and Ace at Maruthea during Bonjaxx's birthday celebration. (COMIC: Party Animals) When Hob viewed over the events of this party, he briefly saw an image of the two Doctors and Death's Head. (COMIC: The Incomplete Death's Head) The two Doctors reminisced over their graduation party, involving "the Rani and her giant mouse". The Seventh Doctor also asked his future self "if they ever repealed the First Law of Time", with him answering that they hadn't done so yet, at least in his time. (COMIC: Party Animals)
The time traveller who would become "Fred" also travelled with Truman Crouch for a time. (PROSE: Cyber-Hunt)
Eventually, at a point prior to Fred's deal with the man in black, his homeworld was destroyed in traumatic circumstances. (PROSE: Cyber-Hunt)
As Fred
The time-traveller made his way to Carson's Planet, where he met with the man in black. The two brokered an agreement, with the man in black pledging to restore his homeworld if the time-traveller successfully held back the Cyberons' technological development. After the man in black left him to his own devices, he met a damaged Cyberon unit and made the mistake of repairing him. He managed to evade the creature by hiding in a bomb creature, but did get shot, whereupon the man in black reappeared to put him into a hypnotic sleep to help him recover.
He was found in a half-delirious state by Olivia, whom he briefly confused for Ria, having gained a temporary amnesia from the trauma of the wound and hypnosis. When he told her that he did not even remember her name, she decided to dub him "Fred", after her old goldfish who likewise kept forgetting who he was. Now well enough to walk, Fred joined Olivia and the military group she was following around as "embedded journalist", Captain Halloran's, in their further explorations of the planet. They found an abandoned Cyberon laboratory where the Cyberons were developing nanites that could convert any humanoids by entering any wound in their body, however small, with no need for the cumbersome surgical process on which the Cyberons had previously relied to expand their numbers.
After the group managed to reprogram the nanite cloud to destroy cybernetics instead of converting flesh, thus turning it into a powerful weapon against the Cyberons themselves, (PROSE: Cyber-Hunt) which put an effective end to the Cyberon War, (PROSE: The Blue Scream of Death) they escaped the planet in a Cyberon escape pod. Olivia put in a good word for him with Galactic Net News to give him the opportunity to get a new job as a reporter himself, although he was hesitant to take the offer.
After they returned to Carson's Planet to give the original wounded Cyberon, whose human name had been Lewis, a decent burial, Fred met with the man in black one last time. Acknowledging that Fred had held up his end of the bargain, the man in black used a knife to sever Fred from his past identity, erasing his timeline in the process and therefore restoring his homeworld as promised, while a different individual filled the void of his former identity. As a side-effect, Fred's amnesia became permanent, with him only remembering the broadest of details about his former life. Choosing to take this as a chance for a fresh start, he invited Olivia to travel with him in his ship. (PROSE: Cyber-Hunt)
Legacy
After the Eighth Doctor decided to sacrifice himself to save Gallifrey by throwing himself into the heart of Luther's Watchtower, Fey Truscott-Sade and Izzy Sinclair witnessed him seemingly regenerating into the bald Doctor. (COMIC: The Final Chapter) However, after keeping up the pretence partway through the subsequent adventure, the "new Doctor" revealed that he was actually the shapeshifting construct Shayde, who had switched place with the real Eighth Doctor at the Doctor's suggestion as part of a plot to defeat the Threshold. The Pariah speculated that Shayde pulled a persona imprint from the Matrix in order to impersonate this Doctor so well. (COMIC: Wormwood)
Appearance
This Doctor had short, dark hair and a receding hairline. His outerwear consisted of a dark suit jacket with light-coloured piping along the lapels, and he carried a toothbrush in his outer breast pocket. He also wore a badge shaped like a teapot. (COMIC: Party Animals) As "Fred", he wore a business suit with a floral pattern, with a black shirt underneath. (PROSE: Cyber-Hunt)
Behind the scenes
Origins
"Fred" started out as the so-called "Nth Doctor", an unofficial incarnation of the Doctor portrayed, and modeled after, Nicholas Briggs in the fan Audio Visuals productions that were more-or-less contemporaneous with Party Animals.[1][2]
Bill was worried about getting sued by the BBC, so he wanted to further distance his 'Who Clone' products by casting someone who hadn't been the Doctor (officially)... Me! I was very reluctant, but Bill was relentless and persuasive. [...] He told me to write Doctor Who, but find some clever way of making it lawyer-proof!
Briggs would later portray other unique incarnations of the Doctor in licenced Doctor WHo audios, including in Exile and Seven Keys to Doomsday, with no clear links with this previous character.
After the Audio Visuals
After the Audio Visuals ceased production, Nicholas Briggs resurrected the character in two commercial audio plays that were part of BBV Productions' Audio Adventures in Time & Space, Cyber-Hunt and Vita Signs (the former also notable as the introduction of the Cyberons). Although Briggs freely discussed in interviews the fact that this was a continuation of the Nth Doctor's adventures, the stories used only the aspects of the character created and owned by Briggs, using an amnesia plot point to have him go by a different name, "Fred", and unable to recall much of his past history.[3][4] The two Fred audios were also sold under the series title of The Wanderer, although he never actually used this as a title within the narratives.[5] However, though not fanfiction, these stories did not use the licenses to any concepts which had debuted in licensed DWU sources, and thus still fall outside the scope of this Wiki.
Into the licensed DWU
On the other hand, the character also appeared in the Doctor Who Magazine comic story Party Animals, which confirmed him as an "official" future incarnation of the Doctor, postdating the seventh. He made a cameo in The Incomplete Death's Head (which showed the events of Party Animals from another perspective) and was then impersonated, in a multi-part arc, by Shayde in Wormwood. While Wormwood was being serialised, and prior to the reveal that the Eighth Doctor who had regenerated into this Nth Doctor was not the real one, Doctor Who Magazine briefly acted as though they had indeed perennially regenerated the Eighth Doctor into this official successor incarnation, and would carry on using the Nicholas Briggs Ninth Doctor as their "default" Doctor from now on, as a type of hoax. Briggs recalled that this had been Gary Gillatt's idea.[6]
The Audio Visuals Doctor made a final licensed appearance in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine in 2006, in the Doctor Whoah! strip printed in DWM 376. He appeared as part of a congregation of "not-really-the-Doctor Doctors", alongside the Valeyard, Peter Cushing's Doctor, Rowan Atkinson's Ninth Doctor, Richard Hurndall's First Doctor as seen in The Five Doctors, and the "Shalka Doctor". Standing next to the Atkinson Ninth Doctor, he complained of the smell as Atkinson's Doctor spoke Tersuran.
In 2021, BBV released a novelisation of Cyber-Hunt. Unlike the audio version, it is covered by this Wiki, as it also made use of the license to the planet Aurichall, which had debuted in a DWU story, The Blue Scream of Death. Like the original version, the book took pains to avoid using any BBC-copyrighted elements of the character, going so far as to further distinguish them in-universe: the book reveals that Fred becomes "untethered" from his past identity as part of his deal with a mysterious man in black to undo the destruction of "his homeworld" (Gallifrey, which, in the Audio Visuals continuity, was destroyed by the Daleks in Planet of Lies). This simultaneously explained how the Audio Visuals could coexist with mainstream Doctor Who continuity, and gave an in-universe meaning to the fact that Fred as used in BBV products was "no longer" the same person as the Doctor, but had used to be.