The War Master (audio story)

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The War Master was the second story in three parts of the Dark Gallifrey audio series, released in 2024, in celebration of the 25th anniversary of Big Finish Productions creating Doctor Who audio spin-offs.

Part One was released on 2 July,[1] Part Two was released on 23 August[2] and Part Three was released on 25 September.[3]

Publisher's summary

Part One

Many have sought the legendary Dark Gallifrey over the millennia... but most have been lucky enough to fail. There is another who has his eyes on that glittering prize, however; one who knows how such power could be wielded - the Master himself!

Intrigued by rumours of a hidden Gallifrey - the Dark Gallifrey of Time Lord myth - Bernice Summerfield resolves to find it.

But as the Doctor points out, some things should never be found, and some doors should never be opened. Especially ones that want to be...

Part Two

Amid the dreaming spires of Braxiatel University, Benny is dividing her time between her lectures, her cats, and managing the romantic advances of one of her students, John.

The new Provost - such a nice old man - doesn't approve of their dalliance, and advises her not to get involved. For John wants to know about Dark Gallifrey, which is something Benny has done her best to forget, and thinks he can help her find it again.

The funny thing is, the dear old Provost wants to find it first...

Part Three

The Master and Captain John are trapped amid the ruins of Dark Gallifrey, where familiar faces and infinite impossibilities gather.

With his dream of the ultimate weapon almost within his grasp, the Master revels in the chaos. But all roads lead... to the Imbomination.

Plot

Part One

Benny and the Doctor escape from Dark Gallifrey, which disappears shortly after, in the TARDIS and decide to remove any trace of it to ensure that nobody will ever find it as Benny did. The two of them have just gone up against the Imbomination, whom they gave life and from whom they left to die. Before the Imbomination found them, they had been hiding inside the Panopticon's robing chamber where the Doctor admonished Benny for storing the temporal paradox of the Imbomination inside the timelines of all the multiverse's Doctors, keeping the Imbomination from leaving the planet at the cost of damaging the Doctor's lives.

Before telling the Doctor what she had done to his timeline, Benny was angry at him for exploiting her desire for recognition to get her to locate this Gallifrey. She had travelled there in a talking TARDIS, who came to stop her from falling through her own time stream as he believed it would be helpful for the future. Falling through her time stream because of the Imbomination, she had seen the deaths of Jason, Peter and various versions of Ace and made an unsuccessful attempt to save her mother from dying in a Dalek bombardment despite an incorporeal Doctor telling her not to. She had previously assured her younger self that her mother's death was not her fault.

The Doctor had been in the Panopticon with the Imbomination, whom he realised was created from paradoxes to bind all paradoxes together and who wanted someone to take her place. To his surprise, she wanted Benny to take her place and not him despite him being from another universe. She had transported Benny onto the weakening dome around the Capitol and frozen time as she fell down towards the Doctor in the Panopticon, feeding on the energy of her potential death and then sending her through her own timeline. When Benny had been with the Doctor, he had become aware that events were happening in the wrong order and Benny had regretted releasing the Imbomination from a cell beneath the Capitol.

Prior to finding the chained Imbomination, Benny had encountered the ghost of a President haunting the cellars, which she had gone to from a library in search of a door. She had been writing notes on a book when she fell asleep and dreamt about freeing the Imbomination to fight Morbius, followed by a dream about being President Bernicesummerfieldtrelundar and using time torpedoes against Gallifrey's enemies. The book was Bernice Summerfield: A Life of Surprises, which she found whilst looking around the autobiography section to see if the Doctor had one. She and the Doctor had arrived in the cloisters shortly before, having tracked down Dark Gallifrey drifting through space and passed through its protective bubble.

A version of Gallifrey manipulating events across the multiverse, the Doctor claimed that Dark Gallifrey was not real to encourage Benny to find it. She had managed to do so by finding where various zones of instability overlapped, having been intrigued by mentions of the planet in several of the Doctor's books.

Part Two

Whilst teaching at Braxiatel University, Benny meets student John Hart, who claims to be her biggest fan and flatters her with flowers and fancy dinners. She asks the Provost for advice, unaware that he is actually the War Master, and is warned of the possibility that John is trying to get information from her which she might have gained during her travels. When she gives John the opportunity to ask any questions he would like, however, he declines and she does not hear from him again for some time. She later finds him reading an unauthorised book of her discoveries and he claims that he only wants her friendship, but he does ask about Dark Gallifrey and later shows her a corkboard with evidence which has led him to believe that the planet is hidden between the Fifth Galaxy and Alpha Centauri.

John visits the Master, whom Benny has informed of his theories and the fact that she knows them to be accurate, and they fight with a displacer and a laser scalpel respectively, setting off the fire alarm and causing an evacuation. John then injects the Master with a grenade which will kill him if John dies and they form an alliance. After putting together the Bernice Summerfield Exhibit to display Benny's finds, John gets on bended knee and asks her to join him in looking for Dark Gallifrey. She is offended by the request as she expected him to propose and she complains about it to the Master, who attempts to hypnotise her to gain the information for himself and reveals his true identity. John interrupts, however, and Benny locks them in the room together before fleeing home to collect her cats, whom she leaves with the shuttle service.

Benny departs by shuttle just before John can stop her, but she finds the Master inside and John emerges from the hold midway to Dark Gallifrey, which the Master intends to use in the Time War whilst John is simply a crook. Passing through a warp conduit, Benny manages to find the hole left in Dark Gallifrey's shields by the TARDIS and land on the planet, although an attack by the Guardians of Continuity destroys the shuttle. The Master reveals his plan to bring back the worst Time Lords and chokes Benny until John, whom Benny believes has a good side, threatens to detonate the grenade inside him and tells her to run. She heads to the Tempo Cloisters where she is reunited with the Imbomination.

The Imbomination threatens Benny and changes the architecture of the cloisters, separating her, the Master and John and causing the walls to close in on them. Benny is saved by the Doctor, who arrives in his TARDIS just as they had always planned he would if somebody used Benny to find Dark Gallifrey. She asks him to take her home, planning to introduce him to her cats. The Imbomination starts to feed on the complicated lives of the Master and John.

Part Three

The Imbomination rejects the Master's request that it become his weapon and he pushes John into it to protect himself as it advances upon him. John is devoured and spat out into the meadows of Gallifrey prior to the rise of the Time Lords to serve as a battery alongside a memory of Benny, who advises him to run before transforming into an alluring woman and stripping away his memories of his childhood. The Master, meanwhile, searches for a TARDIS and manages to awaken an original model, the talking TARDIS that first took Benny to Dark Gallifrey and which chooses not to help him because of his duplicitous nature. With the power cut, the Master jettisons numerous rooms until the TARDIS gives in and restores power.

When John becomes conscious again, he finds that he is with a memory of the Doctor and they head towards the Capitol when it appears in the distance, walking from the meadow to the plains. John's arm and leg start to become transparent as he gets nearer, although his hand remains visible longer, and the Doctor encourages him to continue with the promise that those at the Capitol will be able to cure him. Almost entirely vanished, John reaches out for the dome as the Doctor orders him to, but he begins to feel a strange feeling and fades in and out, making him realise that he is a TARDIS. He dematerialises.

The Master pilots the TARDIS to the hole through which he arrived on Gallifrey so that he can block the Imbomination from escaping and thus be in a position of power, but the TARDIS jettisons him and he appears before the Eschatological Convocation, a group of remembered Time Lords tasked with ruling Dark Gallifrey, in the Panopticon. He informs them of the Time War and requests their help in harnessing the Imbomination in return for which he will rewrite them into warriors to turn Dark Gallifrey into a battle station, end the war and rebuild infinity. The Imbomination appears and has its creations feed on the Master's body.

John rematerialises in a void inside the Imbomination with the original TARDIS, which explains that it temporarily transformed him into a TARDIS because it sensed that his atoms and chronons were in flux. He flirts with the TARDIS, despite it being in the form of a potted plant, and arranges a date at the end of the universe before dematerialising. Whilst the Master's body is being fed on, his mind is transported to the Dark Tower and the Imbomination gives him the chance to replace Rassilon in his tomb as the founder of Gallifrey so that he might rebuild Dark Gallifrey in his image. He recognises that the Imbomination's true plan is to focus all of its energy into him to detonate him and escape into reality, but lies in the tomb nonetheless.

John, having disguised himself as the tomb of Rassilon, rescues the Master by materialising around him and takes him back to his body in the Panopticon before returning to the Doctor. The Capitol is torn apart by the Imbomination as it searches for the two of them and John starts to become human once again. The Master suggests that they both die to save the universe, but John's invincibility means that they are able to survive as Dark Gallifrey is destroyed, leaving only an asteroid. The memory of the Doctor fades away and the Imbomination prepares to kill the Master and John, but the original TARDIS saves them both when it arrives for its date with John, having helped Benny build her trap and secretly built a backdoor.

The Master is returned to Braxiatel University with the last remnants of Dark Gallifrey's pocket dimension, similar in appearance to a large marble, and bids farewell to Benny. John, unsure as to whether or not he is still a time machine, goes on his date with the TARDIS and they kiss.

Cast

Crew

Worldbuilding

Notes

  • This story was written by James Goss as a coda for the main narrative of Dark Gallifrey, taking place after the other releases and seemingly showing the destruction of Dark Gallifrey in the opening minutes of its first part.[4]
  • This was one of the final performances for David Warner as the Unbound Doctor before his death on 24 July 2022.
  • Details of the story and cast and the cover for Part One were revealed on 3 June 2024.[5]
  • Each part of this story comes with Behind the Scenes Interviews extras.

Continuity

Gallery

  • Part One cover

    Part One cover

  • Part One textless cover

    Part One textless cover

  • Part Two cover

    Part Two cover

  • Part Two textless cover

    Part Two textless cover

  • Part Three cover

    Part Three cover

  • Part Three textless cover

    Part Three textless cover

External links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Benny and the Doctor hunt for Dark Gallifrey
  2. ↑ Master charmer
  3. ↑ The War Master reaches Dark Gallifrey
  4. ↑ BFX: The War Master Part One.
  5. ↑ A unique archaeological team-up seeks Dark Gallifrey
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