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The Eternity Clock (video game)

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Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock is a 2012 action-adventure video game for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, and PC. It was planned to be the first in a three-part series of games, but the remaining installments were cancelled.

The game can be played by one or two players. The one-player option switches between the characters of the Eleventh Doctor and River Song. The two-player option has both characters being played simultaneously.

It was released in digital stores by BBC Worldwide and in physical media in Europe for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.

The game ends on a cliffhanger, which has never been resolved by any subsequent media.

Synopsis[[edit] | [edit source]]

Rogue time corridors are opening all over London, connecting Elizabethan, Victorian, modern day and future London. It's up to the Doctor and River Song to investigate and close these corridors - a process not made easy by the sudden appearance of Cybermen, Daleks, Silurians and the Silence throughout history!

Plot[[edit] | [edit source]]

Onboard the TARDIS, the Doctor struggles to navigate a temporal maelstrom. He lands on Earth. However, the TARDIS appears in a bad way. The instruments confirm the time storm covers the planet. The Doctor exits to find himself in the Bank of England in the modern day. When the TARDIS vanishes in a flash of light, he is trapped. On the advice of a psychic paper message from his future self he uses gold bars to smash through a grate into the Victorian-era vaults under the bank. He finds a perception filter he recognises as his own work. He disables it, revealing a sewer entrance. However, the passage below is blocked by a gate requiring someone on each side to open.

At the Stormcage Containment Facility in 5145, River Song gets a phone call. The Doctor needs her help! She escapes from the Facility. Once clear of its Tesla binding field, she uses her vortex manipulator to travel to modern day Earth, where she frees the stranded Doctor. They go through the old tunnels, trying to reach the surface.

They soon find Cyberman storage units which begin releasing their occupants. The Doctor and River flee through the tunnels to reach a Bank of England lift that lets them enter the tunnels of the London Underground. The Cybermen pursue them, but the pair seal them off behind a set of large doors.

In an area devastated by a gas explosion, the Doctor and River find an encampment of humans, refugees from the Cybermen who are converting people en masse. Before the pair can reach the surface, the Cybermen find a way into the area through more train tunnels. River and the Doctor electrify the rails, blocking their access.

Ascending to the surface, River and the Doctor find the streets empty. A dormant time corridor, caused by the raging time storm, is near. With the construction site blocked by road collapse from the gas explosion, they go into an adjacent office building. They find another time corridor, which the Doctor identifies as leading to 1892. They find a heavily guarded Cyberfactory ship on the other side of the office and the Doctor formulates a plan — he will travel through the time corridor, which has activated and alter the plans for the gas pipes in the past so the explosion takes place elsewhere. With the road traversible, they can enter the building site, use its crane to get on top of the office and drop into the unguarded Cyberfactory.

The Doctor travels through the corridor with River's vortex manipulator and comes out in a textile mill. He makes his way outside and then underground. A mysterious figure dashes over the rooftops. Beneath the streets, he finds the under-construction pipes, alters the plans and returns through another time corridor to the present.

Meanwhile, in the present, the Cybermen have entered the office block to investigate the energy from the corridor's use. Their forcible entry activates the building's security measures, trapping River inside. She tricks the Cyberman patrols into breaking open the office's security booth. She deactivates the barriers, allowing her to go out. She and the Doctor rendezvous and ascend the construction site, using a girder held by the crane to cross onto the office's roof.

With the Cybermen still inside, the Doctor and River return to the street in a window-cleaning cradle and break into the Cyberfactory, intending to disable the Cyber-Planner inside. They follow the Planner's command signal towards the centre of the ship, but are forced to flee as squadrons of Cybermen are revived to pursue them. They eventually reach the ship's thermionic core, where the Cyber-Planner is located. River notices a mysterious object suspended near the Planner, which the Doctor identifies as having a huge temporal signature and broadcasting time distortion beam. He and River split up to reach control panels at the top and bottom of the core and use them to overload the thermionic power source to destroy the Cyberfactory. They escape through a newly opened time corridor, taking the strange artefact with them.

After navigating through the corridor, they find themselves in the TARDIS. The Doctor connects the artefact to the console and finds it is responsible for generating the time corridors. The object is just one of four trying to speak with each other across time.

 
The Doctor and River exit a time corridor.

They leave the TARDIS near London Bridge in 1561, but the time corridor through which the ship appears immediately disappears. To leave they lower a drawbridge to access two other time corridors. Although they enter separate corridors, both arrive again in the TARDIS.

The Doctor realises the ship has moved to the heart of the time storm to stabilise itself. The corridors lead to the TARDIS because they are being pulled in by the maelstrom. The ship also detects a signal hidden in the time storm. The Doctor decides to investigate it. They exit the TARDIS into 1561 again, but soon notice that tally marks are appearing on the walls around them.

In London in 1892, a Silurian warrior stands over the body of a policeman. The Doctor awakens, confused. He finds the sonic screwdriver and psychic paper gone, River's blaster and hallucinogenic lipstick in their place. He notices strange pipes carrying a green liquid on a nearby building. A 16th century statue hides the psychic paper, showing a message from River: the Silence have separated them across time and the Doctor must follow these messages to find her.

In the building with the odd pipe the Doctor finds more pipes guarded by Silurian warriors. He also spots the sonic screwdriver on a statue salvaged from an old church, but the way to it is blocked by hot steam. He leaves the building and goes into the sewers beneath the streets. They are riddled with the Silurian piping. Evading guards, he finds controls to shut off the steam and returns to collect the screwdriver.

On the advice of another psychic paper message, the Doctor heads back into the sewers. He uses the sonic screwdriver to access the same vault system he passed through beneath the modern day Bank of England, where he finds a perception filter hiding a doorway. Deactivating it, he reveals an old crypt, where River lies in a stasis field.

In 1561, River wakes to find her equipment gone and the Doctor's psychic paper in their place. A message on the paper from her future self tells her the Silence have separated the Doctor and her through time. She soon comes across a doorway, but the corridor it leads to seems too big compared to the building's exterior. River deactivates a perception filter, revealing a doorway which she recognises as leading to a Silence facility. Unable to get through, she leaves to find the sonic screwdriver in the nearby St. Christopher's Church.

River uses the sonic to open the door into the Silence complex. Inside she finds them controlling temporal energy somehow and carrying out experiments on stasis field technology. She realises they are drawing the power they need from elsewhere, along conduits leading towards St Paul's Cathedral. She makes her way through the facility and steals the stasis field generator they are using. Now done with the Doctor's things, River hides the psychic paper and screwdriver on statues, then enters the church crypt. Disguising the tomb entrance with the perception filter from the Silence base, River activates the stasis field generator, allowing her to wait out the centuries in stasis until the Doctor finds her.

In 1892, the Doctor deactivates the stasis field generator, waking River. He sets up the perception filter where he found it in the modern day and they return to the sewers. They work together to access an area sealed with a Silurian door, allowing them to reach transport discs that lead underground. The Doctor grows concerned that time is wrong - the Silurians never attacked the surface world in the 19th century. In the underground Silurian city, the purpose of the pipes becomes clear - they are pumping deadly toxin into the city above and the entire system is being powered by an artefact similar to the one that the Cybermen had. The leader of the Silurian city, Vekkis, confronts them, and the Doctor forms a plan: he will reactivate walkways from the cavern's central column, allowing River to manually divert coolant, rather than toxin, into the pipes to the surface. Working together, they eventually flush all the toxin, then flee through a new time corridor, taking the artefact with them.

 
River reveals a drawing of the Eternity Clock in her diary.

After navigating through the corridor, they arrive back in the TARDIS, where the Doctor adds the new artefact to the other one. As the object begins ticking like a clock, River has a brainstorm; it is an Eternity Clock. There are notes in her diary which she has no memory of ever making on one. The Doctor begins to understand the Clock can rewrite history. The notes in the diary are 'residue' from an encounter erased from River's timeline. In addition, the Clock seems to be cataloguing all of time, ordering and recording events like a 'hard drive'.

The Doctor and River next travel to 2106, where the New Dalek Paradigm has invaded and destroyed London. The Doctor realises the Daleks have put most of London in a time lock, rendering it unreachable. River states that, back in 1561, the Silence had a laboratory that could contain a time capsule. Taking turns with the vortex manipulator, the Doctor and River travel back to 1561 and infiltrate the Silence stronghold located in the church. They find the time capsule, which is disguised as the church steeple. The Doctor begins to hotwire the alien tech; however, the Silence arrive and try to fight them, forcing River to kill them to keep them off the Doctor. Once the time capsule is hacked, a third piece of the Eternity Clock is obtained, and the time capsule flies off into the time vortex.

The capsule crashes in the centre of the Dalek stronghold, which is the same office building the Cybermen invaded in 2012. They sneak past the Daleks and into the Dalek Command Node. A ten-minute timer begins - the Doctor and River have to make their way to the flag ship before the alarm goes off. The Doctor, piece by piece, deactivates the controls to the time lock, then activates the Dalek transmat which sends them up to the Dalek Flagship.

 
River attacks the Dalek Emperor.

Within the flagship, the Doctor realises that the Daleks are using the Eternity Clock to make the time lock bigger, pushing it out until the entire planet is locked and under control of the Dalek Empire; once they perfect the technology to time lock entire planets, they would be unstoppable. The Doctor and River take an elevator through the ship, past the Dalek armies, to the chamber of the Dalek Emperor, who states that the Doctor's time is over and the Daleks are "the new lords of time". The Doctor and River formulate a plan; River will blast the Emperor Dalek's eyestalk, stunning it and keeping it from attacking, while the Doctor reverses the polarity of the Dalek Matrix, which deactivates the time lock once and for all, and releases the final piece of the Eternity Clock from its force field. Once the Doctor has the piece in his hands, a new time corridor opens up, taking the Doctor and River back to the TARDIS, and wiping the alien invasions which were not supposed to happen from history.

Back in the TARDIS, the clock reassembles itself, and the time storm stops. However, the Doctor's equipment picks up a temporal signal - one that the interference from the fragmented Eternity Clock was drowning out, and one that the clock is now trying to track down. River realises that the Eternity Clock and the TARDIS are synching together, and that when they do, the TARDIS will travel to find that point in time. They barely have time to state this before the TARDIS takes off on its own; unable to stop it, the Doctor and River cling to the controls and yell "GERONIMO!"

Cast[[edit] | [edit source]]

Cast listed under 'Voice Actors' in Supermassive Games section of credits.

Additional voices for international versions[[edit] | [edit source]]

International cast listed under their respective heading in Babel Media section of credits.

Crew[[edit] | [edit source]]

Supermassive Games[[edit] | [edit source]]

BBC Worldwide[[edit] | [edit source]]

Babel Media[[edit] | [edit source]]

Worldbuilding[[edit] | [edit source]]

Story notes[[edit] | [edit source]]

As production on this game predates the War Doctor's debut in the 2013 television story The Name of the Doctor, the entries in River Song's diary involving past incarnations of the Doctor do not refer to him. Following the broadcast of The Name of the Doctor, in the 2015 television story The Husbands of River Song, it is revealed the possibility that River Song has met the War Doctor as well when his face is included among the photos of the Doctor she owns.

Background[[edit] | [edit source]]

The original release date was to be in February 2012, but it was pushed back several times until it was finally released on 23 May 2012 for PlayStation 3 via PlayStation Network and on 25 May 2012 on physical media.[1] A version of the game was released for PlayStation Vita, via PlayStation Network, on 10 October 2012, and on PC, via Steam, on 15 November 2012.

As of 2017, the PC version is no longer available to purchase.

Though intended to be the first in a trilogy of games, the other two instalments were ultimately not produced after the release of The Eternity Clock. As of 2020, no plans have been made to continue on the intended story.

Promotion[[edit] | [edit source]]

to be added

Rumours[[edit] | [edit source]]

to be added

Production errors[[edit] | [edit source]]

  • When River picks up the sonic screwdriver in her solo Elizabethan segment, she mentions the corridor with the perception filter even if the player has not yet entered it.
  • In the Dalek command node, the Doctor mentions sending the Supreme Dalek to the North Pole in the Arctic, but the description of the trophy received in the PlayStation 3 version states that it was sent to the Antarctic.
  • If the player receives a trophy at the same time as being caught by a guard in the Storm Cage, the game will freeze.
  • It is possible to stop all Cybermen from advancing in the London Underground by electrifying the tracks as the Cybermen are being generated by the game.
  • It is possible to remove the majority of the Cyber Units in River's half of the CyberPlanner section by climbing to the top to reach The Doctor. On the way back down all Cybermats and most Cybermen will be missing, making it easier to reach collectables. (Tested in the PS3 version of the game)
  • The Doctor has lines explicitly referring to the Eternity Clock by name during the battle against Vekkis, which takes place prior to the cutscene in which he and River find out what it is.

Continuity[[edit] | [edit source]]

External links[[edit] | [edit source]]

  1. ↑ https://www.engadget.com/2012-05-16-doctor-who-the-eternity-clock-lands-on-psn-may-23.html
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