Cook (The Greatest Show in the Galaxy)

Cook
Species:	Human
Place of origin:	Earth
First appearance:	The Greatest Show in the Galaxy
Appearances:	PROSE: Reclaiming Kroagnon
Main actor:	T. P. McKenna

You may wish to consult Cook (disambiguation) for other, similarly-named pages.

Captain Cook, often simply the Captain, was a notorious intergalactic explorer. Despite his fame and the high regard in which he held himself, the Seventh Doctor, and later history, regarded him as a self-interested "scoundrel" who held the lives of others, particularly non-humans, in little regard. This was demonstrated by his treatment of his werewolf companion Mags, whom he saw as a mere "specimen".

Biography

Origins

The Captain was born on Earth at some point following the planet's occupation by aliens which started in 2164. (PROSE: Reclaiming Kroagnon)

A life of adventure

Captain Cook's adventures included "once visiting the gold mines of Katakiki", (TV: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy) participating in a conflict in the Groz Valley of Melogothon which was initially viewed as a demonstration of bravery on his part, but later cast in a more negative light as acts of genocide; (PROSE: Reclaiming Kroagnon) and a visit to the planet Periboea, where he met "someone who [walked] around when he was already dead". This unidentified man made it look more glamourous than the Captain found the experience when he himself became undead. (TV: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy)

At some point, Captain Cook was the one to "re-discover" Paradise Towers, long thought lost, some decades after the Paradise Towers Massacre and the establishment of a new, flourishing society by the Kangs. This allowed contact between the rebuilt Towers and the rest of human society to be repaired. However, leading Kang Drinking Fountain was sceptical of the man who presented himself as her "rescuer", and the progressive Kang Ice Hot movement came to vilify him as a sometimes-murderous tourist deriving spurious glory out of "discovering" places whose inhabitants had been getting on perfectly well without him. (PROSE: Reclaiming Kroagnon)

Eventually, Cook met Mags on the planet Vulpana and he took her with him because of her status as a werewolf, (TV: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy) supposedly rescuing her from a "murderous mob". (PROSE: Reclaiming Kroagnon) He would later overbearingly remind Mags that without his intervention, she'd have been "dead with a bullet in [her]… a silver bullet". (TV: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy)

At the Psychic Circus

While travelling with Mags, Captain Cook learned that there was a mighty power on Segonax that he could claim. There, he met the Seventh Doctor and Ace, and at the Psychic Circus he allied himself with the henchmen of the Gods of Ragnarok.

Eventually, despite sending others to their deaths in the ring, Cook and Mags ended up as an act along with the Doctor, where Cook turned Mags into a werewolf and set her on the Doctor. He was killed by Mags, and raised as an undead being by the Gods of Ragnarok as their pawn to stop an important medallion getting into the Doctor's hands. Though taking his new status as one of the walking dead in stride, Cook did not find it pleasant. He ended up falling into a well. Mags believed that the Captain was "finished", an assumption with which the Doctor agreed. (TV: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy)

Legacy

After his death, Captain Cook was the subject of multiple biographies. Some were sympathetic to their subject, and tended to paint his relationship with Mags as a respectful and even perhaps romantic one, with Mags being seen as "the muse of the Captain’s later life". Other historians were less kind, identifying Mags as a specimen, hostage, or even slave, with the Captain's quote that "everything is a specimen of something!" in relation to Mags, (PROSE: Reclaiming Kroagnon) something he had said to the Seventh Doctor shortly before his death, (TV: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy) being widely disseminated. Writing for the Journal of Presentism and Transtemporal Mendacity, Doctor Megali Scoblow, a non-human scientist, wrote a particularly scathing account of Captain Cook's genocidal actions on Melogothon. In a later edition, Doctor T. E. Hamster pushed back against what he viewed as a politically-motivated character assassination of a paragon of humankind as an aside in his opinion piece "Take Me Down To Paradise Towers": Reclaiming Kroagnon: Democratic accountability and the Defence of the Past, which dealt with the posthumous campaign against the memory of Kroagnon. (PROSE: Reclaiming Kroagnon)

Personality

Sophisticated in manner and with an enquiring and intelligent mind, Captain Cook was nonetheless a very ruthless individual who had learnt to survive at all costs. He became a famous explorer, but he did not care much for the people accompanying him, judging them by their usefulness to his own agenda. To survive, he teamed up with the henchmen of the Gods of Ragnarok in the Psychic Circus and tricked others, like Nord and the Whizz Kid, into dying in his stead.

He never showed any remorse or guilt, claiming to follow the rules of the "survival of the fittest". He enjoyed tea-time and drinking tea. (TV: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy)

Mags later told Wilric about being kidnapped by a "selfish, self-centred, egotistical explorer." (AUDIO: The Monsters of Gokroth)

Behind the scenes

• T.P. McKenna was credited as "The Captain" in the closing titles of all four episodes, and as "Captain" in Radio Times.
• The role was originally intended for Ian McKellen.