Dr. Who's Time Tales (DWM 39 comic story)
The ninth story in the Dr. Who's Time Tales series was printed in Doctor Who Weekly #39.
It followed the format of the series: short tales depicting strange events in the Doctor Who universe, narrated by the Fourth Doctor himself, similar to DWM backup comic stories, created by adding the Fourth Doctor framing device to a preexisting Marvel comic story, in this case A Thousand Years Later…, first published in 1962 in Strange Tales #90.
Plot
The Fourth Doctor tells the time tale of a human scientist who manages to create a serum that will multiply the lifespan of whoever consumes it tenfold, potentially allowing a human being to live a thousand years. When he announces his discovery to a closed council of fellow scientists, they advise him to destroy the formula because it isn't possible to create sufficient amounts for the whole population, and people fighting over the handful of small doses would cause untold upheaval; thus, better that the single dose currently in existence be destroyed, unused. The scientist feigns agreement, but cannot bring himself to throw away his life's work, and ends up drinking it himself on impulse.
Over the following decades, he becomes estranged from his colleagues, finding the sight of them aging while he stays the same painful. He eventually leaves town, and spends his first few centuries years as a near-immortal moving from place to place, never letting himself be tied down enough to feel grief. As he reaches the age of 600, he begins to hear about an overpopulation crisis; with people living longer and longer (though the scientist's longevity remains unmatched) after the eradication of war and diseases, housing is becoming a concern. Two hundred years later, a solution comes in the form of the discovery via space probe of "a fertile planet five hundred times bigger than Earth", expected to offer sufficient room for "the next thousand generations".
Human activity turns to building and placing themselves in a huge fleet of rocket-ships, and the great cities and other products of civilisation begin to be swallowed back into the wildernes. When he turns 930, the scientist begins to age again at a normal rate, just as the mass exodus of the human race to the new planet is beginning. Unwilling to leave the planet he has lived on for so many centuries just as he is returning to a biologically "normal" existence, the scientist finds that only one other person on Earth, a woman, has elected to stay, thinking it is wrong of humanity to abandon its homeworld entirely.
After watching the last of the ships leaving the Earth behind, the two agree to consider themselves married, and decide that they will endeavour to be the start of a new humanity, starting from scratch on the deserted Earth. The Fourth Doctor impishly reveals that their names were Adam and Eve, and that the story has not been taking place in the "distant future" as his audience may have assumed, but rather in "the dim past".
Characters
References
Notes
to be written
Continuity
- Adam and Eve expect that their descendants will remember them as the start of the human race, but know nothing of the millions who lived before them only to leave the planet. Indeed, knowledge of "Adam and Eve" subsisted in later eras of Earth's history. (TV: The Empty Planet, New Earth, AUDIO: The Cars That Ate London!)
