Doctor Who & Spin-Offs A-Z Game

[Guest]

Q ~ Question Marks - Starting from the 1980 story 'The Leisure Hive', the 4th Doctor started wearing shirts with Question Marks on the collar. The 5th Doctor and the 6th Doctor also wore shirts with Question Marks on the collar and also wore trouser braces displaying them too.

The 7th Doctor wore a pullover with Question Marks on and from the 1987 story 'Delta and the Bannermen', he started carrying a Question Mark-handled umbrella too.

[Alan]

R ~ Rise of the Cybermen - 2006 story starring David Tennant as "The Doctor", Billie Piper as "Rose Tyler", and Noel Clarke in his final regular appearance as "Mickey Smith".

Synopsis
---------
On a parallel Earth, a deadly new version of the Doctor's old enemy is about to be reborn.

[Guest]

S ~ Spiridons - The Spiridons featured in the serial 'Planet of the Daleks' (1973). They were the dominant species of sentient humanoids on planet Spiridon in the Ninth System. They had developed a form of invisibility but became visible after death. They had been subjugated, to be used as experimental subjects and slaves, by the Daleks who were attempting to discover the secret of the Spiridons' invisibility and reproduce it for their own use. Some of the Spiridons, including one called Wester, resisted. They wore furs to keep themselves warm.

[Alan]

T ~ Trial of a Time Lord, The - 1986 story starring Colin Baker in his final appearance as "The Doctor", Nicola Bryant in her final appearance as "Peri Brown", and introducing Bonnie Langford as "Mel Bush".

Synopsis
----------
The TARDIS has been taken out of time and the Doctor has been brought before a court of his fellow Time Lords. There the sinister Valeyard accuses the Doctor of breaking Gallifrey’s most important law and interfering in the affairs of other planets.

If the Valeyard can prove him guilty, the Doctor must sacrifice his remaining regenerations.

[Guest]

U ~ Usurian - The Usurians from the planet Usurius are a species that abandoned military conquest in favour of economic conquest. They enslaved humanity after their engineers made Mars suitable for human habitation, humans having depleted the Earth's resources. Once humanity had depleted Mars's resources as well, the Usurians engineered Pluto so that humans could inhabit it. They created six artificial "Suns" around it and installed the Collector, seen in 'The Sun Makers', to oversee the collection of taxes from their human workforce. They intended to abandon Pluto and leave humanity to become extinct once the humans had exhausted its resources, there being no economically viable planet to relocate humanity to once more. The humans on Pluto revolted against the Collector and seized control of Pluto. The revolutionaries intended to relocate to Earth as the Doctor assured them it would have regenerated in their absence.

The Usurians have knowledge of the Time Lords, graded as "Grade 3" in their "latest market survey", considering it to be of low commercial value. Usurians can adopt a humanoid form but in their natural state they resemble seaweed. Shock can force them to revert to their natural form. According to the Doctor, Usurians are listed in a "flora and fauna" of the universe written by a Professor Thripthead under poisonus fungi.

[Alan]

V ~ Vashta Nerada - Vashta Nerada were swarming, carnivorous beings. The name meant "the Shadows that melt the flesh".

The Vashta Nerada were microscopic beings that lived in swarms, thousands strong. These swarms were able to strip a creature to its bare bones in milliseconds and the Doctor once described them as "piranhas of the air". While these swarms were not common, they inspired a fear of the dark in most species across the Universe, since any shadow could be made of Vashta Nerada. Both the Doctor and Captain Jack Harkness believed they had few weaknesses and that the only thing to do was to run.

The Vashta Nerada featured in the 2008 story Silence in the Library and were the subject of Captain Jack's Monster Files on the official BBC Doctor Who website.

[Guest]

W ~ Wirrn - The Wirrn are an insectoid race that made their debut in the 1975 Fourth Doctor story 'The Ark in Space'. The name is sometimes spelled Wirrrn, which is a spelling originating from the novelisation of the story.

The Wirrn claim to have originated from Andromeda (whether they meant the galaxy, the constellation, or even a planet named "Andromeda" is unclear), but were driven into space by human settlers. They are slightly larger than humans, dark green and wasp-like in appearance, and live mostly in space, although their breeding colonies are terrestrial. Their bodies are a self-contained system, their lungs being able to recycle waste carbon dioxide and only needing to touch down occasionally on planetary bodies for food and oxygen. The Wirrn's life cycle involves laying their eggs in living hosts; the larvae emerge to consume the host, absorbing its memories and knowledge. A Wirrn larva is a green slug-like creature, varying in size from a few inches to 1 or 2 metres across. It can "infect" another organism through contact with a substance it excretes, mutating them into an adult Wirrn and connecting their consciousness to the hive mind.

In 'The Ark in Space', the Wirrn found Space Station Nerva in orbit around an Earth devastated centuries before by solar flares. The survivors had lain in suspended animation waiting for the planet to recover, but had overslept by several millennia. The Wirrn intended to use the sleepers as a food source and claim the empty Earth for their own, as both a means of survival and an act of revenge against the human race for taking their former territories. In the course of their plan, Noah, leader of Nerva, was infected and converted to their kind. However, Noah still retained "more than a vestige of human spirit", probably thanks to the encouragements of the Doctor, and led the Wirrn into Nerva's transport ship even though he knew it was rigged to explode. It did so, ending the Wirrn threat.

[Alan]

X ~ Xoanon - Xoanon was a supercomputer which the 4th Doctor visited and helped repair its programming, and in the process of doing this the computer took a personality print, modelling itself on elements of the Doctor's personality (mainly the unstable parts). It was worshipped as a god by both the Sevateem and the Tesh.

Xoanon featured in the 1977 story The Face of Evil.

[Guest]

Y ~ Yana, Professor - Professor Yana appeared to be a Human scientist, who was in reality an incarnation of the renegade Timelord known as the Master.

Just as John Smith had false memories concerning his early life, Yana's might have remembered false memories created when Yana came to existence. It can be said with some degree of certainty that at least 17 years of Yana's memories prior to Utopia are real, as that is how long he had been with Chantho.

Physically Human, Yana was an orphan found on the coast of the Silver Devastation with only a fob watch, which in reality held the Timelord self of the Master. He could never keep time and was always late for things. He spent his life moving from one refugee ship to another and all his life he heard the sound of drums every waking hour as if they were getting closer.

In actuality, as the Doctor had done, he had subsumed his identity into that of a human form and locked his actual Timelord identity into the fob watch. As the Master later observed, this disguise was so perfect that he forgot who he was, although Yana was plagued by half-remembered fragments of his former life (a fallout of the fob watch) and terrible headaches in which he heard the beat of drums (which had been harassing the Master's mind since he stared directly at the Time Vortex, at Gallifrey). Yana retained the Master's brilliant intellect and ultimately became responsible for sending the remnants of Humanity to Utopia.

He eventually became friends with the last of Malmooth race, scientist Chantho, thought to be the last of her kind. Together, they worked on the Utopia Project to get the humans from the planet Malcassairo to Utopia.

Yana met the Doctor and Martha Jones who said phrases curiously familiar to him, phrases such as Time Vortex, Time War and regeneration. Martha made the Professor suspicious of a watch in his possession, so that, hearing voices in his mind that commanded and entreated him; he activated the device and returned to his true identity.

As the Master, he let down the defences allowing the Futurekind in and dismantled the components, which allowed the system for the rocket to start up in the first place. Chantho held him at gunpoint. The Master grabbed the loose end of the live electrical cable and first threatened and then fatally attacked her, incidentally killing the last of the Malmooth.

As the Master grabbed the Doctor's hand, which Jack Harkness had brought to Malcassario, the dying Chantho managed to shoot him before she died herself. The Master stumbled into the Doctor's TARDIS with the hand, locked the door with a deadlock seal and regenerated.

The name Yana is thought to be an acronym of "You Are Not Alone", a reference to the Face of Boe's dying words.

[Alan]

Z ~ Zeiton-7 - Zeiton-7 was a rare fuel which is used by TARDIS'. It used to generate orbital energy, which allowed the ship to move. It can be also used for fuel by other space-time vessels. It was generally found on Varos, though Galatron Mining Corporation had also found traces of Zeiton-7 on an asteroid.

[Guest]

A ~ Argolin - The Argolin, who appeared in the Fourth Doctor story 'The Leisure Hive' (1980), are the inhabitants of Argolis. In 2250, the Argolin, led by Theron, fought and lost a 20-minute nuclear war with the Foamasi. As a result of this war, the Argolin became sterile. They were also quite long-lived, but when they neared the end of their life they aged and declined very rapidly. The Argolin who survived the war put aside their race's traditional warlike ways and remade Argolis as "the first of the leisure planets", catering to tourists from many worlds. They built a "Leisure Hive" dedicated to relaxation and cross-cultural understanding; due to radioactive fallout from the war, the Argolin planned to live in the Hive for at least three centuries. Argolis continued to struggle financially, and by 2290 faced possible bankruptcy. A rogue faction of Foamasi known as the West Lodge attempted to purchase the entire planet to use as a criminal base, sabotaging recreation facilities to encourage the Argolin to sell. The criminal nature of the offer was exposed by a Foamasi agent, aided by the Fourth Doctor and Romana.

Since the Argolin were sterile, they attempted to renew their race using cloning and tachyonics, but only one of the clones, Pangol, survived to adulthood. Pangol was mentally unstable and obsessed with the Argolin's former warrior culture. He attempted to create an army of tachyonic duplicates of himself, but was unsuccessful and was eventually restored to infancy through the same tachyonic technology that had created him.

In appearance, Argolin are humanoids with greenish skin. Their heads are covered with what appears to be elaborately coiffed hair, but may not be (since when Pangol is reduced to infancy he retains the distinctive Argolin hairstyle). Their heads are capped with small domes covered in beads, which fall off when the Argolin become sick or die.

[Alan]

B ~ Black Destiny - 1996 comic strip adventure that appeared in Doctor Who Magazine. It featured the 4th Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith, and Harry Sullivan. It takes place between the TV stories Revenge of the Cybermen and Terror of the Zygons.

[Guest]

C ~ Charged Vacuum Emboitment - Abbreviated CVE, this is part of a system created by the mathematicians of Logopolis to allow the universe to survive past its point of heat death by shunting excess entropy into other universes ('Logopolis'). The Fourth Doctor and Romana unwittingly travel through a CVE into a parallel universe known as E-Space at the start of 'Full Circle'.

[Alan]

D ~ Dead Man Walking - Series 2 episode of Torchwood. Guest starring Freema Agyeman as "Martha Jones".

Synopsis
----------
Owen has died. Jack decides to return him to life for a few minutes. But no one could have guessed what will happen as a consequence of this decision.

[Guest]

E ~ Eye of Harmony - The Eye of Harmony is the name given by the Timelords to the artificially created black hole that provides nearly inexhaustible amounts of energy to their home planet of Gallifrey and providing the power needed for time travel.