Terrible Zodin
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The Terrible Zodin, sometimes referred to as simply Zodin, was encountered by and reminisced about by the Doctor on a number of occasions. He first met her some time prior to or during his second incarnation. Iris Wildthyme also claimed to have met her.
Biography
Origin
The Terrible Zodin was originally a sword-swallower at the Grand Festival of Zymymys Midamor. (PROSE: Lungbarrow [+]Loading...["Lungbarrow (novel)"])
She was the third most wanted criminal in the galaxy, after the Master and the Rani. (AUDIO: Requiem for the Rocket Men [+]Loading...["Requiem for the Rocket Men (audio story)"])
Encounters with the Doctor
Zodin was involved in an adventure in which the Doctor interacted with multiple incarnations of himself. After this she erased their memories of the incident using "mind rubbers", preventing the later Doctors involved from remembering having experienced the events before. (PROSE: Cold Fusion [+]Loading...["Cold Fusion (novel)"])
This did not prevent the Seventh Doctor from remembering enough of the affair to frequently bore people to sleep with long-winded accounts of it, although he was incapable of recalling whether she was assisted in her schemes by mutant kangaroos or by giant grasshoppers. (PROSE: Legacy [+]Loading...["Legacy (novel)"])
Jamie McCrimmon (PROSE: The Colony of Lies [+]Loading...["The Colony of Lies (novel)"]) and Melanie Bush both experienced the incident. (PROSE: Millennial Rites [+]Loading...["Millennial Rites (novel)"])
When the Doctor's second incarnation visited a UNIT reunion in the early-mid 1980s, he described Zodin to Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. (TV: The Five Doctors [+]Loading...["The Five Doctors (TV story)"]) The Brigadier, however, may have assisted Iris Wildthyme against Zodin in a different matter on the planet Mars. (PROSE: Verdigris [+]Loading...["Verdigris (novel)"])
The Third Doctor disputed that ever took place, (PROSE: Verdigris [+]Loading...["Verdigris (novel)"]) although he conceded that accounts of his own conflict with Zodin might not be entirely accurate when confronted with the implausibility of her motives and of grasshoppers jumping eighteen-storey buildings. (PROSE: Legacy [+]Loading...["Legacy (novel)"])
During the early 21st century, the Terrible Zodin hired a planet assassin named Dominicus to destroy Earth. On that occasion, the Sixth Doctor described her as "a devastating diva of dissimulation, the queen of corruption and chicanery." (AUDIO: Power Play [+]Loading...["Power Play (audio story)"])
The Eighth Doctor mentioned having the autograph of the Terrible Zodin. (COMIC: The Glorious Dead [+]Loading...["The Glorious Dead (comic story)"])
The Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones at some point met the Terrible Zodin, a fact which Martha documented on her MySpace blog on 1 July. (PROSE: Martha Jones [+]Loading...["Martha Jones (short story)"])
Other references
Within a timeline that was later aborted, as they tried to figure out who had Time Scooped them to a desolate castle, the various incarnations of the Master briefly considered the Terrible Zodin as a suspect. (AUDIO: Masterful [+]Loading...["Masterful (audio anthology)"])
Skorpios had a photo of him dancing with the Terrible Zodin. (AUDIO: The Doomsday Contract [+]Loading...["The Doomsday Contract (audio story)"])
When he wrote over Sir Percival Addlington's afterword to The Secret Lives of Monsters, the Twelfth Doctor noted many other monsters were not covered in the text, including the Terrible Zodin. (PROSE: The Secret Lives of Monsters [+]Loading...["The Secret Lives of Monsters (novel)"])
Appearance
The Terrible Zodin had claws, or talons. (PROSE: The Colony of Lies [+]Loading...["The Colony of Lies (novel)"])
Personality
The Seventh Doctor once described Zodin as a celebrated sword-swallower at the Grand Festival of Zymymys Midamor and by no means any kind of actual villain. (PROSE: Lungbarrow [+]Loading...["Lungbarrow (novel)"]) However, the Sixth Doctor considered her a villain of rare guile and cunning. He said they didn't make "villains like her any more". At one point, his unstable memory caused him to refer to Peri as "Zodin". (TV: Attack of the Cybermen [+]Loading...["Attack of the Cybermen (TV story)"])
The Sixth Doctor thought that she had egomaniacal and megalomaniac tendencies. (PROSE: Millennial Rites [+]Loading...["Millennial Rites (novel)"])
Behind the scenes
- The first reference to the Terrible Zodin occurs in a scene in The Five Doctors when the Second Doctor mentions her to the Brigadier. Because several variant cuts of The Five Doctors exist and because Patrick Troughton apparently elaborated on the script, the amount of details on her and the details themselves vary from version to version.
- The Terrible Zodin has become something of a running joke in Doctor Who. She is always discussed, but so far has never actually appeared on screen, in an audio or in print - other than a profile and sketch in The Dangerous Book of Monsters, by Justin Richards.
