Great Black Eye
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The Great Black Eye (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, The Domino Effect, The Gallifrey Chronicles) or Black Sun, (PROSE: Interference - Book One, The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy) 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...) a god-like form of the Master, (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles) or something connected to the Enemy. (PROSE: The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy)
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 indicated it was a "spherical black eye, its iris a white disk." (PROSE: Sometime Never...)
Sightings of the Eye
Definite sightings
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)
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) Relatedly, the Rivera Manuscript's account of the Event, one version of the Enemy's first attack on the Homeworld's noosphere, mentioned that after a sickness mutated the breeding-engines, the planet's power source was "neutralized", giving a potential origin to the Kingdom of Beasts and its Black Eye. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
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 forcing many powerful forces – including 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)
Ambiguous sightings
Faction Paradox had some role in establishing a Cult of the Black Sun, one of many cults to whom they had revealed the Time Lords' "nastiest secrets". (PROSE: Interference) A faction known as the "Order of the Black Sun" once travelled back in time to the Time Lords' early history and attempted to interfere with Omega and Rassilon's foundational experiments; (COMIC: 4-D War) comics written by Jim Sheldrake depicted something similar to this conflict, having been influenced to tell some dark truth by the Enemy's sceneshifters. By this account, the Enemy was connected to a Black Sun which invaded Earth from outside reality via manipulation of the zeitgeist, (PROSE: The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy) much as had occurred around the Eighth Doctor's wedding. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street)
When the Carnival Queen began to return reality to the "time before this", a black sun hung over areas of irrationality. (PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet)
Looking in the Gazing-Pool, Ptolemy Muttonchops had a vision of a "Black Sun Rising", from which demons poured out, which he took as an omen of "the end of everything". His vision became realised when the Dalek Hive temporarily collapsed the sentient, engineered sun known as Crivello's Cauldron into an interdimensional black hole that became a gateway into the Omniverse, allowing Great Vampires and spider-like Daleks from another universe to swarm into N-Space. (COMIC: Fire and Brimstone)
During the Eighth Doctor and the Master's duel for mastery of the Glory, the singularity at the heart of the Omniverse, 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 pupils overlooking them. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)
Possible identities
Corrupted Eye of Harmony
The Eye of Harmony was the heart and power source of the Time Lord Homeworld, Gallifrey. (TV: The Deadly Assassin) The 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". (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street) However, following the Eighth Doctor's destruction of Romana III's Gallifrey, (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell) his second heart nearly killed him by instead pumping his body full of the disease and darkness of the Kingdom of Beasts. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street)
In slight contrast, Ptolemy Muttonchops' vision of a Black Sun Rising was realised by the corruption of Crivello's Cauldron, an engineered sun distinct from the Eye but also able to scry the timelines, created by humans in the far future. The Eighth Doctor's biodata was connected to Crivello's Cauldron because he had been present at its creation. (COMIC: Fire and Brimstone)
Interdimensional singularity
Ptolemy Muttonchops' vision of a "Black Sun Rising" in the Gazing-Pool turned out to have predicted the collapsing of the Eye of Harmony-like Crivello's Cauldron, created by posthumanity, into a "swirling maelstrom of unimaginable design" that allowed travel in and out of the universe. This singularity began to bring about "Abaddon", the merging of "all possible universes" into a single hellish apocalypse. (COMIC: Fire and Brimstone)
The glimpse of the Black Sun given to the Eighth Doctor by the Master inside the Omniversal Spectrum was part of a vision which the Master stated "[would] soon exist across every aspect of creation", in which "[the Doctor] and [his] ilk would have no place". (COMIC: The Glorious Dead)
The Master
By one account, 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's 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 this Master's duel with the Eighth Doctor 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 – the First Doctor and Susan Foreman, respectively – notably attracted Daleks to London 1963 when they brought the a star-killing weapon there. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks)
Far into the future, when Miranda Dawkins returned from her time in the 20th century (COMIC: Miranda) with her adoptive father, the Eighth Doctor, (PROSE: Father Time) to become empress of the universe by birthright of being the daughter of the Emperor, a being with a dark eye emerged from its hiding place to receive a report. Upon learning that Miranda had returned and was in the process of uniting the various factions that would become her subjects, the being with the black eye ordered that she be killed. However, the assassination attempt by Klade commander Ferran failed, (COMIC: Miranda) and Miranda ultimately took her place as the ruler of the universe. (PROSE: Sometime Never...)
Aspect of the Enemy
The image of the Black Sun seemed to be associated with the Enemy who fought the Great Houses during the War in Heaven. In Jim Sheldrake's comics, which were partially inspired by the Enemy's sceneshifters, the Enemy was somehow connected to a Black Sun which invaded Earth from outside reality via manipulation of the zeitgeist. (PROSE: The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy)
Alternatively, black suns may have been a weapon of the Enemy: in the Rivera Manuscript's account of the Event which began the War in Heaven, the Enemy attacked the Homeworld's noosphere using "supercharged chunks of the causal nexus itself" that resembled black fireballs. (PROSE: The Book of the War) Black suns were also associated with the world of irrationality whose return the Carnival Queen attempted to initiate (PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet) prior to the actual War. (PROSE: Crimes Against History)
Behind the scenes
The Great Black Eye
The black sun was a symbol 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.
As clarified in an interview with Justin Richards, his intention with regards to the recurring Black Eye motif 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 and 2000 AD =
The villainous Cult of the Black Sun mentioned in Interference by Lawrence Miles, though evidently alluding to the Order of the Black Sun in a Doctor Who context, actually originated in the 2000 AD Grant Morrison series Zenith, which was serialized in a period when 2000 AD and Morrison were formative influences on Lawrence Miles.[2] This Cult was a Nazi sect who worshipped the Lloigor that invade universes via corrupted black suns, sharing several similarities with the Cold of Interference. The Cult's representative Lloigor is the Eater of Souls. In one Zenith storyline, the Cult's Lloigor threaten a multiverse of British comic continuities. This Cult of the Black Sun was later referenced in Caballistics, Inc., a 2000 AD series which indicated itself to exist in the Doctor Who universe.
The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Enemy, in telling a fictional version of Alan Moore and Morrison's careers, inferentially connects Morrison's Cult of the Black Sun with Moore's Order of the Black Sun, indicating that both concepts were blatant glimpses of the Enemy's true form. The Morrison analogue's plot-thread culminates in the author becoming part of the Enemy by entering a sun (à la Morrison's All-Star Superman) and, à la Zenith, corrupting it into a black sun from which he emerges as a many-angled one.
In Miranda
Due to the cancellation of the Miranda, the identity of the being with the black eye was never revealed, but the similarity to the Great Black Eye of the EDAs is obvious. Furthermore, as was supposed to be revealed in the cancelled novel Enemy of the Daleks, the Klade were written to be the life forms the Dalek were destined to evolve into, explaining why a Dalek or a stand in for one would be providing orders to the Klade. No matter the case, PROSE: Sometime Never... implies the Klade plot to kill Miranda failed, as she is noted to have taken on the role of Empress and united the various factions peacefully.
Footnotes
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