The Pied Piper
The Pied Piper was a mysterious, powerful magical energy being, known in Earth legend for hypnotising all the children of the German town of Hamelin in the Middle Ages and taking them away to his realm. (COMIC: Challenge of the Piper [+]Loading...["Challenge of the Piper (comic story)"], TV: The Day of the Clown [+]Loading...["The Day of the Clown (TV story)"])
Doctor Who, during his first incarnation's travels with John and Gillian, once landed in Hamelin shortly after the infamous events, and managed to rescue the children after beating the seemingly impossible challenges the Piper set him. (COMIC: Challenge of the Piper [+]Loading...["Challenge of the Piper (comic story)"])
A later account suggested that the entity had first manifested after a meteorite brought mysterious energies from a dark nebula known as the Jeggorabax Cluster to Earth. The Pied Piper fed on fear, once claiming that he was the very embodiment of fear itself; he liked to abduct children due to the fear it sparked in parents. After the meteorite was transferred to the Pharos Institute in 2009, the Piper came with it to England, posing as Elijah Spellman and as the monstrous clown Odd Bob in an attempt to abduct all the children of Park Vale.
Sarah Jane Smith and the Bannerman Road gang, then recently joined by Rani Chandra, discovered his activities and managed to starve him of fear until he was unable to resist the pull of the meteorite, with his essence becoming once more imprisoned within it. (TV: The Day of the Clown [+]Loading...["The Day of the Clown (TV story)"]) Mr Smith recorded him in his files as simply the Entity. (TV: SJA 2 [+]Loading...["SJA 2"])
Biography
Origins
During their confrontation, Doctor Who was content to describe the Piper as one of "these magical fellows". (COMIC: Challenge of the Piper [+]Loading...["Challenge of the Piper (comic story)"]) The Piper himself suggested to Sarah Jane Smith that he was "beyond understanding", and later implied to the Bannerman road that he couldn't be destroyed due to being synonymous with fear itself, claiming: "No one can destroy fear. It is part of you all. I am part of you all"; (TV: The Day of the Clown (part 2) [+]Loading...{"part":"2","1":"The Day of the Clown (TV story)"}) He had earlier boasted of being "more" than his various manifestations, claiming that he was "the thing that lives in the darkest corners (…) all that you fear the most". (TV: The Day of the Clown (part 1) [+]Loading...{"part":"1","1":"The Day of the Clown (TV story)"}) He also suggested that he originated in a different world, stating that the realm to which he took the children he captred was "somewhere between this world and another".
Mr Smith identified an energy residue associated with the Pied Piper as matching the energies associated with the Jeggorabax Cluster, a dark nebula "on the cusp" of the Bezita Boudax system. According to him, there were "stories" in this "region" of "entities (…) created by emotions such as fear". Sarah Jane Smith deduced that after "this energy" was brought to the Weserbergland Mountains in Lower Saxony in 1283, the Pied Piper was able to "manifest" thanks to the locals' fear of a then-ongoing plague of rats. (TV: The Day of the Clown (part 2) [+]Loading...{"part":"2","1":"The Day of the Clown (TV story)"}) Mr Smith's data file would later claim that what he called simply "the Entity" had instead fed on the locals' fear of "the plague". This file more definitively claimed that the Entity had personally "travelled" to Earth "embedded in a meteorite", and described the Jeggoabax Cluster as "a region of space known to harbour beings that feed on emotions". (TV: SJAF 2 [+]Loading...["SJAF 2"])
When working it out with Sarah Jane, Mr Smith theorised that "once manifested, the entity required more fear for its survival". After learning that the Piper could not be truly destroyed, Sarah Jane corrected this guess, realising that the Piper had remained connected to the meteor, and the fear made him "strong enough to resist its pull". Starved of it, he would be unable to maintain a corporeal, material form and his essence would be sucked back into it. (TV: The Day of the Clown (part 2) [+]Loading...{"part":"2","1":"The Day of the Clown (TV story)"})
The Hamelin affair
Having manifested near mediaeval Hamelin, the Pied Piper offered to magically rid the town of the rats. The Mayor of Hamelin promised him 1000 guilders if he could achieve this feat. The Piper did so simply by playing a hypnotic tune on his pipe, leading all the rats into the river Weaser. When he returned, the Mayor forswore himself, declaring that he would pay no more than 50 guilders; angered, the Piper played a different tune on his pipe, (COMIC: Challenge of the Piper [+]Loading...["Challenge of the Piper (comic story)"]) telekinetically controlling them (TV: The Day of the Clown [+]Loading...["The Day of the Clown (TV story)"]) and leading them to a cave on Koppelberg Hill which functoned as a portal to a "Magic Wonderland" from which he did not allow them to escape. (COMIC: Challenge of the Piper [+]Loading...["Challenge of the Piper (comic story)"])
Encounter with the First Doctor
Just as the children of Hamelin grew tired of the Magic Wonderland and began to search for a nonexistent way home, the spaceship TARDIS materialised by chance in a "barley-sugar grove", carrying Doctor Who and his grandchildren John and Gillian. Packing a great deal of scientific equipment in a haversack, the Doctor travelled to the "black castle", guarded by magic, which the children had pointed out to him as the Piper's dwelling-place. The Doctor used a fire extinguisher to scare off the dragon which guarded the castle, and an echo-sounder to navigate the treacherous bog of variable depth which surrounded the fortress.
When they arrived, the Piper let them into his castle, but refused to let the children go merely upon request. When the Doctor insisted, the Piper challenged him to pass three tests; if the trio failed any of them, he, John and Gillian become his prisoner. The Doctor used various technological tricks to pass the tests, then led the children back to Hamelin using a recording of the Piper's own tune. The Mayor gave the Doctor the thousand guilders to give to the Piper (after the Doctor threatened to take the children away again), but on returning to the cave in the Koppelberg Hills, the Doctor and his grandchildren discovered both the Piper and his realm had disappeared. Before the three departed in the TARDIS, the Doctor left the bag of coins in the cave in case the Piper came back to look for it. (COMIC: Challenge of the Piper [+]Loading...["Challenge of the Piper (comic story)"])
20th century
Over the next seven hundred years, the Pied Piper continued to abduct children in order to create fear. One notable stint was an eight year period between 1932 and 1940, in America, as "Odd Bob the Clown". Among the kidnapped children were Louis Arbourne, Melissa Deaver, Barbara Knorr and 26 children of the Millhouse community.
When Sarah Jane Smith was young, there was a clown marionette in her bedroom, one of her Aunt Lavinia's things. She disliked the puppet, which always seemed to be watching her. One night, during a thunderstorm, it seemed to move of its own accord, although the terrified Sarah was unable to convince Lavinia that it had been more than a trick of the light. She remained traumatised by the incident, which induced a lifelong case of coulrophobia in her. During their confrontation decades later, the Pied Piper would display knowledge of this incident, which she'd never mentioned to anyone else, as part of trying to convince Sarah Jane that he was something far more than an alien she could ever "understand". (TV: The Day of the Clown (part 2) [+]Loading...{"part":"2","1":"The Day of the Clown (TV story)"})
As Elijah Spellman
In 2009, he set up Spellman's Magical Museum of the Circus in London in order to steal children from the city. This was made possible by the fact that the Weserbergland meteorite was on loan to the nearby Pharos Institute. He managed to kidnap several children, among those were Tony Warner, David Finn, Jeremy Larsson and Tricia Chan. The now adult Sarah Jane Smith prevented him from stealing more children from Park Vale Comprehensive School whom he was controlling through red balloons he'd sent to float over to the playground, but in retaliation, "Spellman" abducted Luke Smith and imprisoned him in his hall of mirrors. (TV: The Day of the Clown (part 2) [+]Loading...{"part":"2","1":"The Day of the Clown (TV story)"})
However, Rani Chandra went to the Museum for herself to investigate. When she also became trapped in the Hall of Mirrors, she managed to send out a distress signal to Mr Smith, who tasked Clyde Langer with following her to the Museum and rescuing her, succeeding in lighting up an escape route before "Odd Bob" could capture her. (GAME: Light [+]Loading...["Light (video game)"]) With the pair's help, Sarah Jane overcame her fears, which weakened him to the point where she could force him back into a fragment of the Weserbergland meteorite. She then placed the fragment in an alien box made of Halkonite steel from which nothing could escape, not even thoughts. All the children that had disappeared within the previous weeks in Ealing reappeared when the Pied Piper was defeated, all of them with no recollection of what had happened. (TV: The Day of the Clown [+]Loading...["The Day of the Clown (TV story)"])
Behind the scenes
- Critics believe that the Sarah Jane Adventures character Pied Piper is based on Stephen King's Pennywise the Dancing Clown in IT.[1][2] Similar to Pennywise, the Pied Piper is an alien who feeds on the fear of children, makes children see and face their worst fears, uses red balloons when he appears, and grown-ups usually do not see Pennywise or the Pied Piper.
- Odd Bob was mentioned in an episode of The Chase, hosted by Bradley Walsh, dated 6 April 2012. A contestant who was a Doctor Who fan said he wanted Bradley Walsh's autograph as he had a role in a Doctor Who spin-off, which Walsh recounted as Odd Bob the Clown from The Sarah Jane Adventures.
- Bradley Walsh later was cast as the Thirteenth Doctor's companion Graham O'Brien.
