The Scream Sommelier
The Scream Sommelier, or simply the Sommelier, (COMIC: Everyone Must Go! [+]Loading...["Everyone Must Go! (comic story)"]) was a god (COMIC: Untitled [+]Loading...["Untitled (FCBD2024 comic story)"]) who dwelled in his own domain "beyond the universe", being recognised by the Fifteenth Doctor as akin to (COMIC: Everyone Must Go! [+]Loading...["Everyone Must Go! (comic story)"]) the Toymaker and Maestro, the members of the Pantheon he had recently defeated. (TV: The Giggle [+]Loading...["The Giggle (TV story)"], The Devil's Chord [+]Loading...["The Devil's Chord (TV story)"])
The Sommelier specialised in fear, and defined himself as a collector and connoisseur of screams, which he kept literally bottled in a giant cellar, prizing some "vintages" more than others. The Sommelier began to interfere in the Fifteenth Doctor's life during his travels with Ruby Sunday, hoping to collect the "scream of a Time Lord". (COMIC: Everyone Must Go! [+]Loading...["Everyone Must Go! (comic story)"], Untitled [+]Loading...["Untitled (FCBD2024 comic story)"])
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
Origins[[edit] | [edit source]]
The Fifteenth Doctor recognised the Scream Sommelier as being akin to "things like [him]" which he had "met before, once or twice" and came from "out there. Beyond the universe. Where the rules are different", evidently referring to (COMIC: Everyone Must Go! (part 3) [+]Loading...{"part":"3","1":"Everyone Must Go! (comic story)"}) Maestro and the Toymaker of the Pantheon. Where the Toymaker was a "living game" and Maestro was the "essence of music itself", (TV: The Giggle [+]Loading...["The Giggle (TV story)"], The Devil's Chord [+]Loading...["The Devil's Chord (TV story)"]) the Doctor identified fear as the Sommelier's "thing". (COMIC: Everyone Must Go! (part 3) [+]Loading...{"part":"3","1":"Everyone Must Go! (comic story)"})
Early activity[[edit] | [edit source]]
The Sommelier assembled a large collection of bottled screams, including the scream of the Empress of the Racnoss at the moment of her children's drowning and the scream of Torajii as it collapsed into a white star. (COMIC: Everyone Must Go! [+]Loading...["Everyone Must Go! (comic story)"])
Hounding the Doctor[[edit] | [edit source]]
Desiring to collect "the scream of a Time Lord", the Scream Sommelier (COMIC: Everyone Must Go! (part 2) [+]Loading...{"part":"2","1":"Everyone Must Go! (comic story)"}) fixated on the Fifteenth Doctor. (COMIC: Untitled [+]Loading...["Untitled (FCBD2024 comic story)"]) He was "warned" that the Doctor was "a clever one", (COMIC: Everyone Must Go! (part 2) [+]Loading...{"part":"2","1":"Everyone Must Go! (comic story)"}}) but persevered, initially taking control of the Doctor's TARDIS and dragging it back to various places with negative associations for the Doctor: Skaro, Metebelis 3, Krop Tor, the Library, Trenzalore, and several others. However, the Doctor remained impassive, forcing his tormentor to take a more complex approach. (COMIC: Untitled [+]Loading...["Untitled (FCBD2024 comic story)"])
Deal with Dick Turpin[[edit] | [edit source]]
After Dick Turpin, a murderous bandit, was arrested in 1739, (AUDIO: The Doomwood Curse [+]Loading...["The Doomwood Curse (audio story)"]) he was contacted by the collector of screams, who gave him a Cybergauntlet capable of firing energy pulses. Telling Turpin of his nature as a god, the entity also promised him "riches and infamy beyond [Turpin's] wildest dreams" if he managed to make the Doctor scream, drawing the Doctor's TARDIS to the correct time and place for him to encounter Turpin. However, their confrontation was short, with the Doctor refusing to be cowed and using his sonic screwdriver to short out Turpin's gauntlet and incapacitate him. Knowing that they couldn't alter the event, the Doctor and Ruby let the 18th centuries recapture Turpin and resume their attempt to kill him.
On his second visit to the gallows, Turpin still had hope that his god would rescue him. He initially felt vindicated upon noticing the deity among the crowd, but then realised, when he saw him laughing, that his god had forsaken him and had only come to watch him die. He screamed in terror, and the god bottled his scream, deeming it a "unique vintage", if inferior to the prize he hoped for. (COMIC: Untitled [+]Loading...["Untitled (FCBD2024 comic story)"])
In the 29th century[[edit] | [edit source]]
Tracking down the apparent origin of the Cybergauntlet given to Dick Turpin, the Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby Sunday were lured to Sanctum Shopping & Dining in the 29th century, a city-sized mall which had become a self-sustaining habitat after the Earth became uninhabitable. Shortly after they arrived, the Sommelier covertly greeted them, posing as a human sommelier who had worked for Sanctum before it ceased to operate as a business, and had chosen to retain his function even for no pay.
However, when the Doctor and Ruby found a scared young girl in one of the disused areas of the mall, the Sommelier remotely and covertly influenced Ruby, tapping into her deep-rooted fear of abandonment. He then sent a horde of illusory Cybermen to attack the three humanoids, causing the Doctor and Ruby to split off. (COMIC: Everyone Must Go! [+]Loading...["Everyone Must Go! (comic story)"]) He briefly distracted himself by pushing Bruce Cotton, who had a debilitating fear of heights, to his limit. With a snap of his fingers, he caused a fuse to blow in a crucial generator located at the very top of the building, forcing Cotton to take the lift up; when that didn't suffice, another snap of the Sommelier's fingers caused the maintenance bridge Cotton stood on to collapse, and the Sommelier collected the scream he let out as he fell to his death.
Meanwhile, the Doctor saw through the Cybermen illusion, instructing the little girl — Maria, to stop thinking about her fear of the Cybermen, causing them to vanished. However, when the Doctor made his way back to the common areas of the shopping centre with Maria and the fake Cybermen attacked again, he discovered that the collective fear of the shoppers was enough to make the Cybermen physically deadly. Unable to convince the whole crowd to ignore them to death, the Doctor took Maria and ran, back to his TARDIS, from which he attempted to find Ruby. Irritated at this development, the Sommelier redirected the TARDIS's materialisation to his domain as it vanished in front of Ruby's eyes.
The Doctor, realising someone was attempting to "play" with him, angrily goaded the Sommelier into revealing himself, which he did, dropping his human disguise to shift into his Victorian-attired and vampiric-looking form as he hovered menacingly over the TARDIS's outer shell. (COMIC: Everyone Must Go! (part 2) [+]Loading...{"part":"2","1":"Everyone Must Go! (comic story)"}) The Doctor told the Sommelier upfront that he knew the Sommelier wouldn't actually kill him, as enacting violence would harm his actual goal of making the Doctor as scared as possible. Irritated, the Sommelier departed, telling the Doctor that he would keep him and the TARDIS imprisoned in his pocket universe for "thousands of years" if need be until the Doctor changed his tune.
Turning his attention back to Sanctum, the Sommelier watched with glee as Ruby's idealistic attempt to help the Cankaranka, insectoid aliens who'd been hiding in the vents in fear of the humans, instead got them killed as the humans' paranoia made them see the Cankaranka as untrustworthy monsters responsible for Cotton's death. The Sommelier noted to his audience that he "hadn't even planned this bit", which simply worked out by itself as a result of the mounting tension in the shopping centre. Ruby's despairing scream allowed the Doctor, who'd powered the TARDIS back on using the conceptual energy of the Sommelier's own creations, to home in on her psychic signature and return to Sanctum. However, as he stepped out, the Sommelier abducted Maria, claiming that he had finally figured out what the Doctor's deepest fear was.
Physical appearances[[edit] | [edit source]]
The Sommelier appeared as a gaunt, clean-shaven, pale-skinned man with long black hair. His eyes had black scleras and glowing yellow irises. He could alter the finer details of his appearance, however, ranging from a look which could pass for human with unremarkable black eyes, to a nearly-human-like look which retained his peculiar yellow eyes, to a more monstrous form with elongated, claw-like fingers and a mouth full of sharp fangs. (COMIC: Untitled [+]Loading...["Untitled (FCBD2024 comic story)"], Everyone Must Go! [+]Loading...["Everyone Must Go! (comic story)"]) His eyes could also appear like pitch-black pits without any visible iris or pupil. (COMIC: Everyone Must Go! [+]Loading...{"precisecite":"[[15D 3]] Cover C by [[Robert Hack]]","1":"Everyone Must Go! (comic story)"})
The Fifteenth Doctor believed that the "fangs and claws and things" were just a façade he put on to scare people, (COMIC: Everyone Must Go! (part 3) [+]Loading...{"part":"3","1":"Everyone Must Go! (comic story)"}) and indeed, when by himself within his own domain, he seemed to default to the more human skin tone and flat teeth, (COMIC: Everyone Must Go! (part 1) [+]Loading...{"part":"1","1":"Everyone Must Go! (comic story)"}) although he was depicted in his domain by himself in his clawed and fanged state on one occasion, when he archived Dick Turpin's freshly-bottled dying scream. (COMIC: Untitled [+]Loading...["Untitled (FCBD2024 comic story)"])
Behind the scenes[[edit] | [edit source]]
In an interview posted on the Comicon.com website on 4 June 2024, after the release of the Free Comic Book Day comic which first teased the Sommelier but before the publication of Everyone Must Go! [+]Loading...["Everyone Must Go! (comic story)"], the Sommelier's creator Dan Watters shared a few thoughts on the character, establishing upfront his nature as a new extrauniversal god in the mould of the Toymaker and Maestro[1]:
Well, we’ve seen the Toymaker and Maestro now, and are well aware there are other things out there from outside time and space, refusing to adhere to the laws of logic and science they’ve found in our rinky dink little universe. The Scream Sommelier is one of them, and he’s a particularly nasty piece of work. I’ve enjoyed finding ways to utilise those elements on the comics page. The Sommelier doesn’t necessarily feel the need to adhere to comic book structure either.
Footnotes[[edit] | [edit source]]
- ↑ Rachel Bellwoar (4 June 2024). An Interview With Dan Watters And Kelsey Ramsay On The Fifteenth Doctor’s Titan Comics Debut. Comicon.com. Archived from the original on 6 November 2024. Retrieved on 6 November 2024.
