Great Black Eye
The Great Black Eye, (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, The Domino Effect, The Gallifrey Chronicles) also known as the sun-god of the Babewyn and called the Opposition by Sabbath Dei, (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street) was a powerful and fearful force which watched the post-War universe from somewhere outside of time. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, The Gallifrey Chronicles)
Sources differed on the Eye's identity, suggesting it may have been a decayed version of the Eye of Harmony, (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street) the eye of a Dalek, (PROSE: Sometime Never...) or a god-like form of the Master. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)
Appearance
The Great Black Eye resembled a blazing star of pure darkness, (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street) "like a hole in space, sucking light from eternity." (PROSE: The Domino Effect) It also gave off the impression of being "an eye made out of pupils," (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street) although one account indicates it was a "spherical black eye, its iris a white disk." (PROSE: Sometime Never...)
Sightings of the Eye
The Time Lords first noticed the Great Black Eye in the generation of Ulysses and Marnal. They saw that it watched them from overtime, written over past, present, future, dreams, and the entirety of their history. They saw that it ruled an alternity, the post-War universe, where Gallifrey was gone and their "primate shadows" ruled the space between moments. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)
During the Eighth Doctor and the Master's duel for mastery of the Glory, the Master gave the Doctor a glimpse of the way in which he intended to reshape reality if he won control of the Glory. As he did so, the Doctor found himself chained before the Master on a rocky outgrowth, with a black sun with a white halo and pupil overlooking them. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)
The Rivera Manuscript described a version of the beginning of the War in which the Enemy attacked the Homeworld's noosphere using "supercharged chunks of the causal nexus itself" that resembled black fireballs. After a sickness mutated the breeding-engines, the planet's power source was "neutralized". (PROSE: The Book of the War) The primate Mal'akh who lived within the ruins of the Capitol in the Kingdom of Beasts under the gaze of the Black Eye, (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street) were thought to be a post-War corruption of the Great Houses after being defeated by the Enemy. (PROSE: The Book of the War, Cobweb and Ivory)
In the late 18th century, the Kingdom of Beasts intersected with the human noosphere, leading to several sightings of the Black Eye. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street)
At the end of the conflict between tigers and humans on Hitchemus, a hole briefly appeared in the clouds which "looked like an eye in reverse, blue pupil and black iris," staring down at the climactic events. (PROSE: The Year of Intelligent Tigers) In a mirroring of Pablo Picasso's Guernica, a blazing eye watched over the destruction of the System, illuminating the chaos as the System blackened and fell to greyness. (PROSE: History 101)
The Oracle witnessed the Great Black Eye as one of the terrifying creatures outside of reality, and believed this Eye was what was forcing many powerful forces, such as the Oracle, (PROSE: The Domino Effect) Time Wraiths, (PROSE: The Slow Empire) and Clock-People, (PROSE: Anachrophobia) to flee the Time Vortex. It believed that the collapse of the multiverse and the vortex would fracture the barriers which normally kept the Black Eye from interacting with normal reality. When the Oracle met the Eighth Doctor, it knew that he had seen the Eye before and tried to make him remember the horrific nature of the Eye so that he would support its plan. (PROSE: The Domino Effect)
Possible identities
Corrupted Eye of Harmony
By several accounts, the Black Eye was speculated to be a corrupted version of the Eye of Harmony, the heart and power source of the Time Lord Homeworld of Gallifrey. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, The Gallifrey Chronicles) The Eighth Doctor's second heart was "the organ through which he was watched by his home's Great Eye, by which the powers of the elemental world were passed to him", but with Gallifrey gone the Doctor's second heart nearly killed him from pumping his body full of the disease and darkness of the Kingdom of Beasts. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street)
The Master
According to one account, however, the Eighth Doctor later believed that his illness had been caused simply because his heart hadn't been linked to anything, and that the only Eye of Harmony still in existence was the independent power source of his own TARDIS. When the casing of the TARDIS' Eye was cracked open by an atomic explosion, the Doctor found himself being watched by the great Black Eye of the Master, who watched over the universe with god-like power from within the heart of the TARDIS. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles)
The echo of the Master in the heart of the TARDIS was linked to the version who remained adrift in the Time Vortex until he was plucked by Esterath and given a new body. During the Eighth Doctor and this Master's duel for mastery of the Glory, the Master, temporarily gaining the upper hand, used the powers the two Time Lords wielded inside the Omniversal Spectrum to give him a glimpse of the way in which he intended to reshape reality if he won control of the Glory. He described it a vision which "[would] soon exist across every aspect of creation", in which "[the Doctor] and [his] ilk would have no place". As he explained all this, the Doctor found himself chained before the Master on a rocky outgrowth, with a black sun with a white halo and pupil overlooking them. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)
Daleks lying in wait
By another account, the black eye belonged to a Dalek which watched, waited, and planned somewhere beyond the Time Vortex and the multiverse, monitoring reality for what seemed like forever. (PROSE: Sometime Never...) In the post-War universe, the Eighth Doctor had several glimpses of Daleks at the edges of his adventures. (PROSE: Father Time, The Last Resort) After the destruction of the Council of Eight, the Dalek began tracking Soul and Zezanne as they fled with the star-killer and became stranded in London 1963. (PROSE: Sometime Never...) The equivalents of Soul and Zezanne in the prior main timeline notably attracted Daleks to London 1963 when they brought the a star-killing weapon there. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks)
Behind the scenes
- As clarified in an interview with Justin Richards, the original intention of the recurring Black Eye was that it would be the pupilled eye of a Dalek. While the Dalek storyline and reveal did not come to fruition [1] the brief cameo by a Dalek at the end of Sometime Never... confirms this connection in-universe.
- The black sun was an image in 16th century alchemy which represented the dissolution of the body, informing the Black Eye's appearance in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. The alchemical glyph for "sun" resembles the pupilled variation of the Dalek eye which first appeared in The Evil of the Daleks and was the norm for televised Daleks from Day of the Daleks to Remembrance of the Daleks.
