The 42nd Doctor
The 42nd Doctor, played by Ian Richardson, was co-created by Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham for the Odyssey series of fan novellas. Unfortunately, none of those novellas have survived to the Internet age, but based on the few documents that have survived, it’s possible to gain a fair understanding of the adventures of this Doctor and his wife – and they connect in some pretty interesting ways to various bits of lore that ended up in the Eighth Doctor novels!
I.
The 42nd Doctor’s only “canon” appearance is in Beige Planet Mars, where Benny learns about him and his teenage companion Iphegenia (created by Clapham for the Odyssey novella Integration, based on the appearance of Caitlin Moran) in a museum on Mars. The duo helped coordinate the final attack that repelled the Dalek invasion of Mars. We know it’s them because they’re wearing the same clothes as in their other appearances, and repelling Dalek invasions is a common theme in the 42nd Doctor’s lifetime.
In the first draft of the epilogue to The Dying Days, Jason Kane meets the Doctor and Iffy playing cards at a casino. Iffy, whose appearance is based on Caitlin Moran, is “no older than eighteen”; she’s her parents’ seventh child, and her younger brother is named Ipswitch. She married the Doctor in his forty-first incarnation, and she accordingly identifies her last name as “Who”. (There’s a galaxy brain meme waiting to be made about River, Scarlette, and Iffy.)
We get some lore about the Daleks: they executed Davros for good, then found a new Emperor, who has united all Dalek principalities into the Dalek Nation and led them to victory against the Movellans, the Galactic Federation, and the People (RIP). President Blake repelled them from Earth’s galaxy, so the Daleks are “shoring up the front with the old Empires at the Universal Core”, though “the Children of Kasterborous are giving them particular trouble.”
(The Doctor also tells Jason that Benny has become “Supreme Commander Bernice Surprise Summerfield, Lord of the Inner and Outer Worlds, High Admiral of the Galactic Fleets, Lord General of the Six Armies and Defender of the Earth” and “God Empress of All Human Space” – which turns out to be a joke. Shame!)
Then there’s this delightful exchange:
The Dalek on the scanner was getting more agitated. ‘Our Em-pe-ror has sent-enced you to death for crimes ag-ainst the Dal-eks.’
‘It’s not the first time he's tried to prosecute me,’ the Doctor shouted back. ‘He was a lousy lawyer then, and he's a lousy lawyer now.’
The Dalek drifted forward, filling even more of the screen. ‘This to be your fi-nal des-tin-y, Doc-tor. Ex-ter-min-a-tion! To-tal an-ni-hil-ation!’
The TARDIS rocked again. This time instruments on the console began to spark and burst.
The Doctor looked over at Iphegenia. ‘If only they knew who their Emperor really was,’ he chuckled.
‘Talk about your final destiny,’ she replied, beaming over at Jason. He smiled wanly, pretending he knew what they were talking about.
(These clues about the new Dalek Emperor’s identity make a lot more sense when you remember Parkin called this draft “Valeyard of the Daleks”!)
In the second draft, “Eulogy of the Daleks”, the 42nd Doctor gives a lengthy … well, eulogy of the Daleks, commemorating their final extinction. He explains that he attended Davros’ execution in 4723, knowing that the next Emperor’s Dalek Nation would reach the peak of the Daleks’ power. But – and this seems to be new information, set after the previous epilogue – the Children of Kasterborous allied with humanity and attacked the Daleks in their own territory. The Final Dalek War was ridiculously costly, but the last Daleks were ultimately exterminated, as verified by the Matrix itself. In the process, all the beings in the universe banded together and formed new friendships and alliances, ushering in a new age of universal peace.
(We also find out that Iffy has a hint of a West Midlands accent, which is nice.)
Thus concludes the summary of everything we learn in the Dying Days prequel drafts. But when you consider these tidbits in the context of Parkin’s other writing, a much bigger picture emerges.
II.
Those two epilogue drafts were published by Parkin in May 1997 while he was writing The Infinity Doctors, and looking at that novel, it’s obvious that they were on his mind. When the Doctor visits the year 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, shortly before the end of the universe, he finds four “knights” living on the Needle. They share some theories about their forgotten origins:
Pallant looked at the Doctor, smiling. ‘We are Gallifreyan/Human hybrids, the Children of Kasterborous. Before the Curse*, we pursued interventionist policies designed to promote harmony in the known galaxies, and ushered in a new age of universal peace. We failed in our mission: this is our punishment.’
The Doctor’s eyes widened.
‘That is Willhuff’s theory,’ Helios added. ‘I think I like it best, even though it probably isn’t true. It relies on apocryphal sources and a great deal of speculation on his part. Gordel’s theory is equally outlandish.’
[…]
Gordel looked wearily at the others. ‘We are clearly the super-evolved survivors of the Thal race, fleeing the penultimate destruction of Skaro, that sparked off the Final Dalek War.’
There’s a lot to unpack here. But very obvious are the connections to Parkin’s “apocryphal sources”: both the Final Dalek War and the Children of Kasterborous were first mentioned in the 42nd Doctor epilogue drafts. In particular, the Children of Kasterborous’ “new age of universal peace” very closely matches his description of what happened after the Final Dalek War.
Despite these knights’ theories being entirely speculative and apparently mutually exclusive, they point the way for further developments of the Needle in Parkin’s later books. As any reader of this blog probably already knows, in his Eighth Doctor novel pitch Enemy of the Daleks, Parkin introduced the Klade – a race first mentioned in The Infinity Doctors – as the final evolution of the Daleks, a race of humanoids working with the Doctor’s father to prevent the War in Heaven. Given that Unnatural History previously established the Doctor’s father to be working with a secretive society from the Needle in the far future, it’s perhaps unsurprising that, by the time the Klade made their official debut in Father Time, the Needle was where they made their home. “Super-evolved survivors of the Thal race” wasn’t too far off after all, was it?
III.
Father Time also revealed quite a bit about one particular political conflict between the Klade and the previous rulers of the Needle. Who were these previous rulers? Who indeed. As is made clear in Parkin’s The Gallifrey Chronicles and AHistory, as well as a number of other sources, they were the four Time Lords who survived the end of the War in Heaven, and their descendants. In other words … Children of Kasterborous.
Well, you might say, hold up a second. The “Children of Kasterborous” are specified to be Gallifreyan/Human hybrids, but there’s scarce mention of humans on the Needle. To which I counter: the Doctor provides enough human biodata to the gene pool to go around; and even setting aside my theories about River Song, Parkin’s short story Iris Explains shows Ms Wildthyme asking Miranda (the daughter of the Emperor of the Needle, mind you!) if her mother was Bernice Summerfield, so that also has to be remembered as a possibility.
Oh, yeah, speaking of Bernice Summerfield! While “Iris Explains” draws no conclusion concerning Miranda’s mother, Iris does say rather flat-out that the Doctor had thirteen children with Benny. In Parkin’s 2002 short story “Paydirt”, where some 46th century archeologists are discussing rumours about Benny’s life, not only does one mention that Benny was “Supreme Commander of all human space“ (a clear connection to the 42nd Doctor’s joke all those paragraphs ago), another mentions a rumour that Bernice “had thirteen half-immortal children** by the last survivor of a race of time travellers.”
On the one hand, as previously noted by @rassilon-imprimatur, this likely refers to the Eighth Doctor’s status as one of the few survivors of the War in Heaven and, ultimately, Emperor of the Klade. But on the other hand, it’s notable to me that, though this was never alluded to in the actual story, when Parkin’s “Eulogy of the Daleks” draft was published in the Matrix fanzine, its title described the 42nd Doctor as “Last of the Time Lords”.***
Am I suggesting that the 42nd Doctor cheated on Iphegenia with Benny Summerfield? Both Dying Days epilogue drafts do mention that the Doctor has always had a “soft spot” for her, after all. Quel scandale!
No, surely not. Rather than an opportunity for canonwelding, this is an insight into the thought processes that went into Parkin’s stories, a roadmap to the evolution of some of the EDAs’ most interesting ideas. Ideas which were invented in the context of 42nd Doctor stories, and meant to take place during the 42nd Doctor’s far-off lifetime, but which were filtered through The Infinity Doctors before ending up in a transformed state in Father Time or The Gallifrey Chronicles.
This pattern recurs time and time again throughout Parkin’s books, and not just in major elements like “evolved Daleks” but also in harder-to-notice parallels: for instance, the way Father Time’s conflict between the Klade and the Imperial Family echoes the Final Dalek War between the Daleks and the Children of Kasterborous, or the resonance between the future Doctor as Emperor of the Klade in The Gallifrey Chronicles and the Valeyard as Emperor of the Daleks in “Valeyard of the Daleks”. By examining the 42nd Doctor stories, we can gain a richer appreciation for what went into the Eighth Doctor’s arc, and vice versa.
IV.
A final note:
In the Dying Days epilogue drafts, the 42nd Doctor mentions that the People were exterminated by the Daleks.
In The Infinity Doctors, Helios’ theory on the Needle knights’ origin is that they are descended from one group of Ben Aaronovitch’s the People: specifically, the “Accidentally Left Behind When Everyone Else Transcended This Reality Interest Group. It would certainly explain our obsession with finding God.”
In Father Time, the Klade leader Ferran uses the ship Supremacy, which one of his teams found crashed near the Librarinth on the Needle. He says it was built by “people who have long since gone. Nothing to do with you [Time Lords]. This is a relic of an earlier time. A time that may not even have happened.”
In AHistory, Parkin explains that the Supremacy was originally made by the People.
Maybe there might be some canonwelding to be done after all…
Footnotes
* Presumably “the Curse” refers to the knights’ inability to remember the past, which Wilhuff also later called a curse, not the Curse of Pythia from the Cartmel Masterplan account of ancient Time Lord history, which The Infinity Doctors elsewhere refers to in a similar way.
** Interestingly, Benny isn’t the only woman Parkin establishes to have had 13 of the Doctor’s children: Patience has the same number with a Morbius Doctor in Cold Fusion.
*** As the “Last of the Time Lords” appellate is totally unjustified by the actual epilogue draft itself, this seems to be a reference to the lost Odyssey novellas: notably, in Clapham’s 42nd Doctor / Iffy short story "Wheel”, Gallifrey appears as a dead world which has been abandoned for millennia and is haunted by the ghostly Lords of the Matrix.
