Doctor Who & Spin-Offs A-Z Game

[Alan]

T ~ Turn Left - 2008 story starring David Tennant as "The Doctor" and Catherine Tate as "Donna Noble".

Guest starring Billie Piper as "Rose Tyler" and Bernard Cribbins as "Wilfred Mott".

Synopsis
---------
Donna's entire world collapses, but there’s no sign of the Doctor. Instead, she finds help from a mysterious blonde woman - a traveller from a parallel universe. But, as Donna and Rose Tyler combine forces, are they too late to save the whole of creation from the approaching darkness?

[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 poisonous fungi.

[Alan]

V ~ Veiled Leopard, The - Big Finish audio adventure starring Sophie Aldred as "Ace", Philip Olivier as "Hex Schofield", Nicola Bryant as "Peri Brown", & Caroline Morris as "Erimem".

For Ace and Hex this audio story takes place after the TV story Survival and between the audio stories Night Thoughts and The Settling.

For Peri and Erimem this audio story takes place between the TV stories Planet of Fire and The Caves of Androzani and between the audio stories The Kingmaker and The Gathering.

Synopsis
----------
Monte Carlo, 1966:

Four time travellers. Two missions. One costumed ball. The Doctor has sent Peri and Erimem to prevent the fabulous Veiled Leopard diamond from being stolen. Which is odd, seeing as the Doctor has sent Ace and Hext to steal the diamond. how will the two teams cope with this contradictory task? Will Peri's asp slip? Why does Ace have to pretend to be a French maid? How will Erimem cope with Pharaoh Rammalamadingdong? And can Hex really "do posh"?

Trivia
------
Although their companions feature, the 5th Doctor (Peter Davison) and the 7th Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) do not appear.

[Spimman]

W ~Weeping Angels are a group of hunters featured in the Tenth Doctor episode "Blink". Because their physiology is quantum-locked, they only occupy a single position in space when seen by an observer (see Schrödinger's Cat). When they are not observed they become a "quantum wave form" that occupies many positions in space, thus they cannot move while being observed; but when they are not they can appear to travel exceedingly quickly. They use this ability to approach and attack unwary prey. They turn to stone when observed, acting as a defense mechanism. While in their locked state they appear as stone statues, often covering their eyes so that they will not see each other and lock themselves forever in stone form. This defense mechanism is what gave them the name "Weeping Angels".
According to the Doctor, the Angels are as old as the universe (or very nearly) but no one really knows where they come from. He also describes them as "creatures of the abstract", "the lonely assassins", and "the only psychopaths in the universe to kill you nicely", because their method of killing doesn't do anything of the sort: a touch sends their victims into the past to live out their lives before they were even born; the Angels then feed on the "potential energy" of the lives their victims would have lived in the present.
In "Blink", a quartet of Weeping Angels strand the Doctor and his companion Martha Jones in the year 1969, and attempt to feed off the vast potential energy reserves of the TARDIS. Despite dispatching the Doctor, the Angels fail to get into the TARDIS; though they get the key, they can't find the machine itself. Sally Sparrow takes the key from one of them while it is in stone form, leading them to stalk Sally to regain it. During their pursuit, Sally inadvertently leads them to the TARDIS. Eventually the four Angels, having surrounded the TARDIS, are tricked into looking at each other when the box disappears, leaving them deadlocked in their stone forms.
In a poll conducted by BBC, taking votes from 2,000 readers of the Doctor Who Adventures magazine, the Weeping Angels were voted the scariest monsters of 2007 with 55% of the vote; the Master and the Daleks took second and third place, with 15% and 4% of the vote, respectively. The Daleks usually come out on top in such polls. Moray Laing, Editor of Doctor Who Adventures, praised the concept of escaping a monster by not blinking, something both simple and difficult to do

[Guest]

X ~ Xoanon - Xoanon was a malevolent artificial intelligence encountered by the Fourth Doctor in 'The Face of Evil'. Xoanon was inadvertently created by the Doctor on a previous visit to its unnamed planet centuries prior, when he had programmed the computer belonging to a Mordee expedition that had crashed on the planet. The Doctor forgot to wipe his personality print from the computer's data core, and as a result the computer developed multiple personalities, half of them based on the Doctor himself.

For generations, technicians extended Xoanon's capabilities, until it evolved beyond their control and became almost a living creature. It utilised the appearance of the Fourth Doctor, to the extent of having an effigy in the Doctor's image carved out on a cliff-face. Its split personality was reflected in it dividing the expedition into two tribes of technicians (who became the Tesh) and the survey team (the Sevateem), justifying its madness by thinking it was part of an experiment to create a superhuman race, with the Tesh providing mental powers and the Sevateem with their strength and independence. Enslaving the tribes, it earned the name of "The Evil One".

When the Doctor returned to the maddened world and saw the fruits of his mistakes, Xoanon tried to destroy itself and the entire planet rather than be defeated by the Doctor. However, the Doctor managed to remove his personality print from the core, restoring the computer intelligence to sanity and becoming a benign entity to the two tribes. "You have to trust someone eventually," the Doctor says.

[Spimman]

Y ~Yeti of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, although resembling the cryptozoological creatures also called the Yeti, are in actuality alien robots. Their external appearance, that of a huge hairy biped, disguises a small spherical mechanism that provides its motive power. The Yeti serve the Great Intelligence, a disembodied entity from another planet, which tried to form a physical body in order to conquer the Earth. The Yeti are initially a ruse to scare off curiosity seekers, and later form an army serving the Great Intelligence.
The Great Intelligence and its Yeti minions were thwarted twice by the Doctor's second incarnation, played by Patrick Troughton, in the serials The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear. A Yeti was also one of the creatures in the Death Zone featured in The Five Doctors.

[Guest]

Z ~ Zaroff, Professor - Professor Zaroff was a mad scientist who planned to destroy the world in the 1967 Second Doctor story 'The Underwater Menace'. Some of his scientific inventions included food made from plankton, and the ability to graft gills to humans to enable them to breathe underwater.

As part of his diabolical plans, he allied himself with the leaders of Atlantis telling them he would raise their city back to the surface or lower the ocean level by draining the water through a fissure in the Earth's crust.

The Doctor immediately realised that this would create super heated steam that could destroy the Earth. Zaroff was defeated when the Doctor and his companions sabotaged the generator he was using to pump the water. Zaroff was left to drown when his laboratory filled with water after the sea walls protecting it collapsed.

[Spimman]

A ~Argolin who appeared in the Fourth Doctor story The Leisure Hive (1980) by David Fisher, 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.

[Guest]

B ~ Bok - Bok was the gargoyle servant of Azal in the Third Doctor story 'The Dæmons'. Made of stone, he was bulletproof. He was blown apart by a UNIT bazooka, but reformed moments later. He reverted to his statue form when Azal was defeated.

[Spimman]

C ~Caxtarids are humanoids with metallic red hair and eyes, who appear in the Virgin New Adventures novels Return of the Living Dad and The Room with No Doors, both by Kate Orman. They come from the star system Lalande 21185, and are expert torturers. Amongst the planets they have conquered is Kapteyn 5, home of more than sixty sentient species including avians and butterfly-people.
The Caxtarids were wiped out by a virus that destroyed DNA. This was created by the government to be used against "the rebels". The Doctor attempted to prevent its use, but it was activated ten years after his involvement, during another rebellion.
A green-eyed Lalandian, who says she is a "different caste" from the Caxtarids, appears in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Seeing I, by Orman and Jonathan Blum. The same book states that the Caxtarids (or Ke Caxtari) do not deal in weapons, but do trade in people.

[Guest]

D ~ Destroyer - The Destroyer was an other-dimensional entity summoned by the sorceress Morgaine in 'Battlefield' (1989) to aid her in defeating the Seventh Doctor. Known by many titles, including "Destroyer of Worlds", he was kept subdued by chains of pure silver, and even Morgaine hesitated in unleashing him on the world until he allowed the Doctor to gain the upper hand, thus forcing Morgaine to free him in a desperate attempt to avoid defeat.

At the time, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart had been called out of retirement to assist UNIT against Morgaine's invasion. Taking a box of silver bullets meant for combating werewolves from UNIT stores, he loaded a revolver with them. The Destroyer taunted the elderly Brigadier for being the best Earth could offer as its champion; the Brigadier's response was to fire the silver bullets into the demon. The building the Destroyer was in subsequently exploded in a burst of magical energy, and presumably the creature was destroyed with it.

[Spimman]

E ~Eternals, as seen in Enlightenment (1983), are beings who live in the "trackless wastes of eternity", as opposed to the likes of the Doctor and his companions who are "Ephemerals". Eternals use Ephemerals for their thoughts and ideas. The Eternals have lived for so long that they are unable to think for themselves and need human minds to give them existence, and entertainment; as such, they use human crews on their ships. Eternals seek out "Enlightenment", the wisdom to know everything. They are aware of the Void, calling it "the Howling" ("Army of Ghosts" (2006)) and were responsible for banishing the Carrionites ("The Shakespeare Code" (2007)).
An article by Russell T Davies in the Doctor Who Annual 2006 states that during the Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks, the Eternals (one of the Higher Species who were aware of the war's presence and its outcomes) fled the Doctor's reality in despair, never to be seen again.
A group of Eternals who had taken the role of gods to the ancient Gallifreyans were recurring characters in the Virgin New Adventures. The most notable were Time, Death and Pain, and the Seventh Doctor was "Time's Champion".

[Guest]

F ~ Fendahl - The Fendahl was an entity that devoured life itself, it appeared in the Fourth Doctor serial 'Image of the Fendahl'. It originated on the fifth planet of Earth's solar system, which the ancient Time Lords placed in a time loop in an attempt to imprison the creature. However, the Fendahl escaped and, in the form of a humanoid skull, was buried under volcanic rock on prehistoric Earth 12 million years ago. The story of the Fendahl passed into Time Lord myth, and was forgotten. The Fendahl's power, contained in a pentagram-shaped neural relay in the bones of the skull, affected life on Earth via a biotransmutation field, influencing life forms in its vicinity (including the early hominids) to develop into forms it could use.

In the late 20th century, the Fendahl skull was discovered in Kenya by a team of anthropologists under the leadership of one Dr. Fendelman. Fendelman brought the skull to an English research facility at Fetch Priory, near the village of Fetchborough. The Priory was built on a time fissure, causing psychic ability in some nearby residents. In the Priory, Fendelman and his fellow researchers Thea Ransome, Adam Colby and Maximillian Stael performed experiments on the skull, attempting to unlock its secrets. Fendelman used a crude time scanner to examine the skull, a dangerous activity which drew the attention of the Fourth Doctor. Stael attempted to capture the power of the Fendahl for himself by means of black magic rituals, performed with the aid of a local coven, but he, Fendelman and Ransome were all being used by the Fendahl to recreate itself.

The Fendahl was a gestalt creature with multiple aspects. Thea Ransome was transformed into the Fendahl Core, a humanoid female with golden skin and blank, staring eyes. Several of the cult members became slug-like creatures called Fendahleen. All the aspects of the Fendahl had powerful psychotelekinetic ability, and can control the muscles of human victims. The Fendahleen were vulnerable to sodium chloride, which altered the creatures' conductivity and destroyed their electrical balance.

In its final form, the Fendahl would consist of the Core and twelve Fendahleen; however, the Doctor was able to prevent the creature from reaching its full manifestation. He rigged Fendelman's time scanner to implode, destroying the Core and the Fendahleen. He also removed the skull, planning to drop it into a star about to go supernova.

[Spimman]

G ~GENIEs (Genetically Engineered Neural Imagination Engines) are artificial life forms developed by a scientist working in artificial reality. They resemble a cross between a small dragon and a Platypus ensconced in a box, and are capable of altering reality and perception according to people's desires, whether spoken or thought. Lacking free will, they are thus compelled to grant "wishes", potentially causing disruption when in the presence of human beings. To date, their only appearance is in BBC Books novel The Stone Rose.

[Guest]

H ~ Harrison Chase - Harrison Chase was an eccentric millionaire whose primary hobby was botany, He appeared in 'The Seeds of Doom'. He was a madman with a disdainful attitude toward human life, and favouritism over another form of life, in this case plant life.

Through his vast resources, Chase learned that the seed pods of a Krynoid, an intelligent form of alien plant life, had been found in Antarctica. A collector of rare specimens, Chase became obsessed with obtaining a sample, and successfully acquired one. He allowed the Krynoid to possess one of his henchmen, who began to mutate into a Human-Krynoid hybrid. As the monster grew in size and power, Chase too became possessed by the Krynoid.

Convinced of a future where Krynoids are the dominant life form on Earth, Chase aided the monster in earnest. By this time, the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith were trapped on Chase's property. Chase eventually captured Sarah and attempted to kill her by throwing her into a compost shredder. The Doctor stopped him, and the two fought, until Chase fell into the shredder and perished.