War Doctor's sonic screwdriver
During his battles in the Last Great Time War, (COMIC: The Clockwise War) the War Doctor used a sonic screwdriver with a simple metallic handle and a red-light-emitting diode at the end. It appeared to be a further upgraded version of the Eighth Doctor's first sonic screwdriver, which he kept strapped in a bandolier on his chest. It shared the same casing type as the screwdriver used by the Fourth Doctor, but had an extending diode head instead of an emitter head, and an additional piece added to the end of the handle that looked like a small red cap. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
After regenerating at the end of the Time War, the Doctor kept this model with him during the early adventures of his ninth incarnation. This version was destroyed when the Doctor rigged it to explode in order to seal a rift in interstital space. (AUDIO: The Bleeding Heart)
Melanie Bush once found this sonic in a drawer in the Remembered TARDIS. (TV: Empire of Death [+]Loading...["Empire of Death (TV story)"])
Uses[[edit] | [edit source]]
The War Doctor often used his sonic screwdriver to summon the TARDIS to materialise, either around him, (AUDIO: The Thousand Worlds) or nearby. (AUDIO: The Heart of the Battle, A Thing of Guile)
With it, the Doctor could dismantle an Interstitial's possibility engine by removing its bolts, receive homing signals from the TARDIS in the TARDIS Undercroft below the Citadel (PROSE: Engines of War) and activate the memory-erasing device in the Black Archive. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
The War Doctor, along with his eleventh and tenth incarnations, used his sonic screwdriver to create a sonic force field to blast back and destroy an attacking Dalek in the Time War. He also implanted a permanent subroutine within the architecture of the sonic screwdriver's software that would begin the centuries-long calculation to disintegrate a door, as well as continuing a calculation to move Gallifrey into a pocket universe. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
His screwdriver was also capable of scanning a corpse and wiping security footage. (AUDIO: The Bleeding Heart)
Behind the scenes[[edit] | [edit source]]
The sonic screwdriver prop[[edit] | [edit source]]
- The War Doctor's sonic screwdriver prop was created by modifying a Fourth Doctor's sonic screwdriver replica toy.
- In this way, much like the Doctor who used it and his TARDIS control room (which, also like the sonic, was primarily of a silver colour scheme, with red highlights), this sonic combined visual elements of both the classic and revived eras of the show, as its casing was more or less shared by all of the classic sonics, and having a light-emitting diode emitter and a kind of pommel at the end of the handle are characteristic of the revived sonics.
Sonic screwdriver toy[[edit] | [edit source]]
- Since the War Doctor's sonic screwdriver prop was created by modifying a toy replica, the toy version that was subsequently produced is screen accurate.
Other matters[[edit] | [edit source]]
- The Doctor Who: Legacy mobile game contains a premium pack called "Sonic Adventure", which is centred around finding various sonic devices used by different incarnations of the Doctor and by several other characters. The playable characters form this premium pack represented almost every model of sonic screwdriver encountered in the DWU.
- The webcast He Who Fights With Monsters, which served as a trailer for the anthology of the same name, featured the War Doctor's sonic screwdriver during the early stages of his life. Notably, it was shown with the same emitter head and metallic finish used on the Seventh and Eighth Doctor's model, but with the red cap and detailing that it featured later in the War Doctor's life. This suggests it may be a modified version of the same model.
