On the Fringes of War

— Fandom.com representative to me, regarding a potential theme refresh for DoctorWho.Fandom.com.

Fandom.com frequently does official partnerships with streaming platforms to promote their shows by "refreshing" the relevant wiki to promote a new season. Fandom did these partnered refreshes to its Doctor Who wiki for each of the Gatwa seasons: as this Fandom employee said to me in 2024,

Just wanted to let you know Fandom has partnered with Disney Plus to promote the new season of Doctor Who - there's a great opportunity here for Tardis! This would involve us working with you on a wiki redesign including the theme and main page to promote the upcoming season.

And now this same Fandom staff member is pitching a 2026 refresh based on "a new potential deal with AMC+ and Doctor Who for later this year".

Fandom has an existing partnership with AMC+, which we can see at, for instance, the wiki for Sanctuary: A Witch's Tale. That wiki is totally inactive but has a great front page written by a Fandom employee advertising this "NEW SERIES STREAMING JANUARY 4" on AMC+.

It seems to me that AMC+ is a pretty obvious fit for Doctor Who:

AMC owns BBC America, which (as most American fans will remember) had Who broadcast rights until the Disney+ deal. This was a major brand for BBC America, so I'm sure they'd love to have it back.

AMC+ also has a history of picking up Disney+ castoffs: in 2023 Disney+ decided it didn't want to air a Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea adaptation it had co-produced with some British companies, so instead it was licensed to AMC+. Sound familiar?

Now, I'm aware that there was a "leaked press release" making the rounds in late April. Someone posted it on Reddit on April 27th. But April 24th is when I posted this on Tumblr originally, and April 21st is when Fandom staff first posted on the wiki. So the "press release" conveniently riding the coattails of this, almost immediately, is a point against its legitimacy.

From in "The Slow Cancellation of the Future" in Fisher's Ghosts of My Life (2013),

I am more than happy to confirm that Cernunnos and his mammoth compatriots are THE definitive identity of the Enemy.

Of course, it would be irresponsible not to note that the horrid octopoid species T. memeticus is THE definitive identity of the Enemy.

Additionally, THE Enemy is definitively Vlad Dracul, resurrected by the Master's renegade timeship.

— Fandom.com representative to me, regarding a potential theme refresh for DoctorWho.Fandom.com.

Fandom.com frequently does official partnerships with streaming platforms to promote their shows by "refreshing" the relevant wiki to promote a new season. Fandom did these partnered refreshes to its Doctor Who wiki for each of the Gatwa seasons: as this Fandom employee said to me in 2024,

Just wanted to let you know Fandom has partnered with Disney Plus to promote the new season of Doctor Who - there's a great opportunity here for Tardis! This would involve us working with you on a wiki redesign including the theme and main page to promote the upcoming season.

And now this same Fandom staff member is pitching a 2026 refresh based on "a new potential deal with AMC+ and Doctor Who for later this year".

Fandom has an existing partnership with AMC+, which we can see at, for instance, the wiki for Sanctuary: A Witch's Tale. That wiki is totally inactive but has a great front page written by a Fandom employee advertising this "NEW SERIES STREAMING JANUARY 4" on AMC+.

It seems to me that AMC+ is a pretty obvious fit for Doctor Who:

AMC owns BBC America, which (as most American fans will remember) had Who broadcast rights until the Disney+ deal. This was a major brand for BBC America, so I'm sure they'd love to have it back.

AMC+ also has a history of picking up Disney+ castoffs: in 2023 Disney+ decided it didn't want to air a Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea adaptation it had co-produced with some British companies, so instead it was licensed to AMC+. Sound familiar?

Now, I'm aware that there was a "leaked press release" making the rounds in late April. Someone posted it on Reddit on April 27th. But April 24th is when I posted this on Tumblr originally, and April 21st is when Fandom staff first posted on the wiki. So the "press release" conveniently riding the coattails of this, almost immediately, is a point against its legitimacy.

The Actual Text, Posted Online for the First Time

A generous friend has shared with me the full text of “Gallifrey: Notes on the Planet’s Background” – Andrew Cartmel, Ben Aaronovitch, and Marc Platt’s original outline of their masterplan for the Doctor’s origins – as printed in Virgin Books’ 1996 Doctor Who: A History of the Universe. Please see also Lance Parkin’s explanatory footnote and my commentary beneath!

The planet Gallifrey, world of the Time Lords in the constellation of Kasterborous, is one of the oldest and most powerful oligarchies in the universe. Its political and scientific influence is prevalent throughout the cosmos. But it is a world apart. Its power is substantially used for observation rather than involvement. Over the millennia, its self-imposed isolation has made it a staid and decaying society, obsessed with its own self-importance and tradition. It was not always so…

The spirit of Colonel Kortez uttered the strongest cursemantra he knew. The Doctor, again. The memory of the man had followed him up from Cloud Seven. The Doctor was different to the way the Colonel remembered him, taller and older. The details were unclear, though, as the Time Lord was wearing a shroud over his head.

‘We are all of us living inside the bottle,’ the Doctor explained, while the worms of the astral plane began eating away his flesh. ‘And one day, the bottle will break. Then all worlds will be one world. The inside will meet the outside.’

— Alien Bodies, 1997

MAKE THINGS OUT OF SIN MANSON IS AS INNOCENT AS HE LOOKS MAKE THINGS OUT OF DUST WE ARE ALL IN THE BOTTLE AND ONE DAY THE BOTTLE WILL BREAK THESE ANIMAL MEN NOTHING IS REAL AND NOTHING TO GET HUNG ABOUT THE MORE YOU PLAY WITH THIS TOY THE WEAKER EVERYTHING GETS FALLEN ANGELS DORIAN IS A SPOTTY TWAT CHRISTINE ON A RATIONAL PLANET THE GREAT HOUSES ARE THE MEN WHO WILL NOT BE BLAMED FOR NOTHING CHRIS HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM THE SCENE AND YOU ARE THE BLONDE GIRL MIDOCTOBER

— Dead Romance, 1999/2004

The section of the manuscript which follows this sequence suggests a conversation between the prisoner and “One”, or between the prisoner and the interrogator, or possibly both:

‘Is that what you’re planning / It might be / It still could be / Remember / Inside the skin of the sun / It’s an option / It wouldn’t work / What if someone tried it / What if you were called to account / It’s an option / Always an option / You keep the sun / In a bottle / You want to know what happens if you lose control / Don’t you?’

In Paul Cornell’s Four Doctors comic, we see a glimpse of the​ universe where the Tenth Doctor stays in his Time Lord Victorious phase and abandons Wilf in the radiation chamber. This alt-Ten eventually becomes ruler of the universe, reigning supreme over all time and space until meeting his end at the hands of a Raxarocoricofallicoptarorian assassin.

In parallel, Lance Parkin’s Father Time shows the last surviving Time Lord as supreme emperor of the universe for a thousand years, ruling from the Needle through his ruthless secret police and the power of fear. On the day of his daughter’s birth, he’s assassinated by an uprising; his daughter Miranda goes on to be adopted by the Eighth Doctor, and and in The Gallifrey Chronicles it’s baaaasically confirmed that the Emperor is (or was) the Doctor.

Both these stories seem to be a peek into the same future, where the Tenth Doctor becomes Time Lord Victorious and emperor of the universe. In fact, since Father Time portrays this as the definite future of the Eighth Doctor’s universe, we could even say that the Emperor Victorious is the Doctor’s “original” future; something must have changed the timeline to turn him off of this path. (I hypothesize that it’s the return of Gallifrey in The End of Time: in particular, the interference of the mysterious Time-Lock-busting woman in white.)

If this timeline change did come so late in Ten’s life, when River Song described “her Doctor” in Silence in the Library, she was actually talking about the Time Lord Victorious. He was the one to marry her, while our Doctor only gave hasty vows in a collapsing bubble universe; he was the one to give her a sonic screwdriver, which is clearly a modified version of Ten’s, not Eleven’s or Twelve’s. This idea is quietly supported by her statements in the episode, which suggest that her Doctor still wears Ten’s face: for instance, she has to ask him whether he’s lived through the Byzantium, and she says he’s like an “early photograph” of her Doctor.

And what kind of future Ten does this describe? Who was the man that scared away the Vashta Nerada with just his name?

Now my Doctor, I’ve seen whole armies turn and run away. And he’d just swagger off back to his TARDIS and open the doors with a snap of his fingers. The Doctor in the TARDIS. Next stop, everywhere.

For instance, here’s the text of the Ouija board from the original, broken into phrases:

It’s a favourite book of mine, so I own both editions, albeit I’ve only read the Mad Norwegian edition (since that’s the one I got first, and I never felt the need to read the other since I knew these are the only real difference — that and some phrasing around gravity wells)

My friend has never seen Doctor Who, she knows it from pop culture osmosis at best. Personally I think this might actually benefit the experience of reading Dead Romance for her, since she’ll be completely blind and taking it in as a unique thing.

The copy-editors used by Virgin Pubishing - and, later, by BBC Books - were notoriously draconian, and insisted on Correct English even when there was a good reason not to use it. The original Dead Romance had commas in places where commas should never be, and anyone who knows me will know that I’d rather have an editor give the story a happy ending than let him fiddle with the punctuation. Worse, in 1999 it was copy-editing policy to put certain words in standardised places. “I’m only mentioning this because…” wasn’t acceptable; it had to be “I’m mentioning this only because…”, even if the character who was speaking would never phrase it that way.

cousin clara of the faction paradox:

They come for her - for the last time - when she is twenty-six. It isn’t the first time, but it is the only time.

it’s like i’m breaking into a million pieces.

It’s an interesting thing, being a companion to the Doctor. They show up one day, out of the blue, pick you up without rhyme or reason or any kind of justification beyond let’s go have an adventure, and just like that you aren’t human anymore - not in any way that matters. You’re not even a person. You’re a pawn or a weapon or a weakness, a way to get to their hearts, and nothing else.

You never escape a thing like that - everybody in the Spiral Politic wants a piece of the Oncoming Storm, the Major Powers squabbling like gull-birds over the Doctor’s discards. You never go back. You never can go back.  You’re part of the War.

falling apart i don’t know where i am i’m falling

The Doctor showed her time and truth and never-looking-back. The Faction trained her in war and shadow and the beautiful horror of impossibility. The Song splintered her, fractured her, scattered her across the Doctor’s timeline like shards of broken glass. There’s Danny Pink, and there’s the Lady Me, and there’s the woman calling herself the War King, and always the War. Never ending. Never starting. Strictly speaking, never even existing at all.

She’s not Clara Oswald anymore. Maybe she never has been.

let me be brave. let me be brave. (Oh, Paradox.) let me be brave.

Tomorrow is promised to no one. She got that much right.

Unfortunately, neither is anything else.

i don’t think i’ll ever land.

The original Clara Oswald died in The Name of the Doctor.

The Doctor then found a splinter of Clara and replaced her memories with an archive of the original Clara (Fitz Kreiner-style).

That's why Clara seems like a reinvented person in The Day of the Doctor.

Alien Bodies x Lines 14-18, Verse 1 (The Burial of the Dead):

In November 2001, to celebrate the release of the first Faction Paradox Protocols audio the previous month, the Faction Paradox website published the first edition of Lawrence Miles’ official series timeline. Over the next four years, the timeline received several substantial revisions.

I’ve rehosted the initial and final versions of the timeline on the Faction Paradox Wiki, formatted such that, using the wiki software, one can directly compare what was added, removed, and changed between the initial and final editions. I think these changes give us a pretty interesting peek into the origins and evolution of the Faction Paradox universe.

… so read the original introduction to this post. Over the last few years in my drafts folder, it’s undergone a bit of a mutation. As it stands, it’s part canon-welding, part history of the Faction Paradox series, and part meditation on the future of the Doctor Who spin-off universe. Be warned, though: it’s long.