Death (mythology)
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Death (disambiguation)for other, similarly-named pages.
Death was an Eternal and a Menti Celesti, one of the goddesses of Gallifrey. As such, she represented and embodied death itself.
Biography
Origins
Death was not the oldest of the Menti Celesti; Pain was. However, she was older than Time. (PROSE: Set Piece)
According to a Gallifreyan fairy tale, Death was born while the gods were drunk, and they accidentally gave her name to someone else. Since nobody remembered her name or who it had been given to, Death lamented, "Everything and everyone has a name, except for me." As a result, Death began to take away the names of mortal beings. (PROSE: Return of the Living Dad) She herself once claimed that her kind were "the dreams of Time Lords", and that they "leak out across the universe", only occasionally being given physical form by entities such as the Timewyrm. (PROSE: Human Nature)
Unbeknownst to most, the particularly incarnation of Death known to the Seventh Doctor came into being as the child of Jasmine Surprise Cwej-Hutchings and Ricky McIlveen, (PROSE: Happy Endings) although the hooded skeleton aspect he met on the Moon (PROSE: Timewyrm: Revelation) had been granted her shape by the Timewyrm herself. (PROSE: Human Nature)
Influence on Gallifrey
During the Old Time on Gallifrey, Death sent a messenger to Slothe. The Messenger killed the inhabitants of Slothe, until one day Presus rose up and fought the creature, killing it. (PROSE: Blind Fury)
During the Doctor's youth, he killed Torvic. Rather than becoming Death's Champion, the Doctor made a deal with Death so she would choose another Time Lord, later known as the Master. The Doctor would later forget about this encounter, (AUDIO: Master) although he remembered seeing Death on a Gallifreyan hillside. (PROSE: Set Piece)
Dealings with the Seventh Doctor
The Seventh Doctor met Death for the first time on the Moon, when she was summoned by the Timewyrm as a robed skeleton. (PROSE: Timewyrm: Revelation)
Death briefly spoke to the Travellers in Puterspace stating that three quarters of them would die, but would not state which of them. (PROSE: Love and War) The Doctor made another deal with Death to save Ace and offered himself in her place. (PROSE: Love and War) Death later took the life of Doctor John Smith. (PROSE: Human Nature)
On several occasions, the Doctor said he was "friends" with Death. (AUDIO: The Death Collectors, Spider's Shadow) He once won a bet with Death. (PROSE: Sleepy)
Death picked Mortimus to be her champion as a means of revenge upon the Doctor. Mortimus did not fully grasp the cosmic significance of the deal he had bartered. (PROSE: No Future)
When the Doctor suffered a one-sided heart attack at Roz Forrester's funeral, he had a vision of Death taunting him about taking the life of one of his companions, and that some day soon, she will take him, when he is alone and friendless, without warning and without meaning. (PROSE: So Vile a Sin)
Death appeared to the Doctor when he returned to the House of Lungbarrow. (PROSE: Lungbarrow)
Death, along with Time and Pain, attended Bernice Summerfield and Jason Kane's wedding in Cheldon Bonniface on 24 April 2010. (PROSE: Happy Endings)
At some point, the Doctor made a deal with Death to give the Master a new start in life as a good and honest man for ten years, feeling guilty for how he turned out. However, after the ten years, it was agreed he would have to kill the Master.
When the ten years expired, Death sent the Doctor to Perfugium, where "John Smith" was living. Taking on the identity of John Smith's maid, Jade, Death tormented the Doctor, John Smith and his friends. This led to one of his friends, Victor Schaeffer, killing his own wife, and John's love, Jacqueline. When the Doctor couldn't go through with killing John, he realised his significance in creating the Master, and how he had turned him into Death's Champion, by making his original deal with Death.
He constructed a new deal with Death, so that he wouldn't have to kill John, but would instead have to kill an innocent person in the place of an assassin (who was just a disguise of Death again), but couldn't go through with that deal either. Death also made a deal with John Smith that to remain as John Smith, he had to decide whether he would make the Doctor Death's Champion, or if he would kill Victor so that Jacqueline would be reborn, but become the Master again. It is still unknown what his decision was. (AUDIO: Master)
Death stalked the Seventh Doctor for some time. The Doctor ended up making a deal with Death so that he could save the life of a tramp, unaware that his death would have had repercussions in the Web of Time. (PROSE: The Tramp's Story)
At one point, Death took the name "LaMort" and moved to Sydney in the 19th century, interested in the novelty of colonial Australia. Two hundred years later, she had become bored with all the ways and places that death took place. She intended to commit suicide by overdosing on pills. However, the Doctor, Benny, and Ace visited her, and the Doctor made Benny describe all the planets that humans had brought death to in her time. With the promise of all these new virgin worlds, Death resolved not to commit suicide, and she dropped her pills; they transformed into souls and melted away. (PROSE: Virgin Lands)
Later activities
In a junkyard on Ha'olam, a black Persian cat and two other strays attacked Sam Jones' cat, who was Life, for invading their territory. (PROSE: Seeing I)
Though Death's sisters Life, Time, and Fate fled the Spiral Politic at first foresight of the War in Heaven, Death stayed behind and watched them leave. (PROSE: Hark! The Herald Angels Sing) In the post-War universe, Sabbath followed the Eighth Doctor on a trip into Death's abode. Despite her history with the Doctor prior to the War, she did not recognise him. (PROSE: Camera Obscura)
Appearance
As an intelligent concept, Death was only occasionally given physical forms. Her avatars included a black Persian cat, (PROSE: Seeing I) a hooded skeleton, (PROSE: Timewyrm: Revelation) whose image was known in Earth's culture as the Grim Reaper, (TV: Dead Man Walking, The Visitation) a beautiful woman with flowing fair hair, (PROSE: Prelude Love and War) and "a girl, about fourteen, dressed in black, with dark hair cascading down her pale features". (PROSE: Happy Endings)
Behind the scenes
In Happy Endings
Death's appearance in Happy Endings conflates her with Death as depicted in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comics (being most identifiable by her self-description as the one whose job it will be "to turn off the lights once everybody’s gone".
Gaiman's Death was depicted as one of "the Endless," a line-up of cosmic embodiments of concepts. Gaiman's Endless, who debuted in 1989, had notable similarity to the Menti Celesti, down to the words "Endless" and "Eternal" being synonymous, thus facilitating the identification. The original run of Sandman comics was almost exactly contemporary with the Virgin New Adventures, making the crossover allusion doubly significant. However, the canonical line-up of siblings in The Sandman differs from the one used in DWU medi: there is no Endless of Time, a male Destiny instead of the female Fate, and a male Destruction instead of Pain. Additionally, Destiny is described as the oldest of the Endless, whereas Pain is the oldest of the Menti Celesti.
Although according to Paul Scoones, Paul Cornell himseld confirmed the allusion to The Sandman in Death's description in Happy Endings[1] Neil Penswick disputed this notion in the fanzine Broadsword. Though acknowledging that she "had appeared in other works", he denied that this was in fact Gaiman's Death, also stating that the section of Happy Endings in which she appeared was his work.[2]
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