Penultimate Evil

The story of the Penultimate Evil was one of Lady Nine Teeth's stories about the unhappened days. The Hermit told it to the First Doctor under his tree on Mount Lung.

In the story, a race was at war against the greatest evil imaginable. Since experience had taught them that there was always something worse that they could not imagine, the people called this evil the Penultimate Evil. A child loved to hear tales of heroism from the war against the Penultimate Evil, and he wished to become a warrior, so he trained all his young life, starting with minor evils and working his way up to greater threats, from Quarks to Piscatarians to wristcom hailing-tone designers. Finally, one day, he had found all their weaknesses and bested them all.

Fully trained, he took command of his silver-prowed ship, ready to face the enemy, but on that very day the war ended in one of the freak ontological accidents that always seemed to be happening in the unhappened days. The Penultimate Evil was annihilated anticlimactically and without any heroid self-sacrifice.

Now there was no one left to fight, the young man found that the reason for his existence had disappeared overnight. In his distress, he sought advice from the Crone, and she gave him a sword to slay the Ultimate Evil with.

The First Doctor interpreted this story as a lesson to "be careful if you fight Nietzscheans lest you become a Nietzschean yourself"; the Hermit thought it was a koan about the difficulty of making league tables. He admitted he had no sword to give the Doctor, but he did give him his old Five Hundred Year Diary. (PROSE: The Three Paths)