An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
I’ve added a new chapter to the story written for @saplesss-tree
Chapter 4 is actually inspired by one of their stories (Nanoscopic Particulate Technology. Application, Efficacy, and Side Effects ) It’s brilliant, please go read it!
It’s also my own nod to the season 5 finale
The room was white and green and blue. The lights flashed above his head; Mac stood in that room alone. His eyes were absolutely blank and cold, his hair had fallen slightly over his face, although it was cut very neatly at the back. He stood there barefooted in some trousers and little else. There was a small bracelet on his wrist, a piece of dark blue plastic that you might find in a fair or a being sold on the side of the road. He was very pale as though he had not been outside in months. It made the mark on the back of his neck all the more vivid. A black barcode stark against his pale skin and the stubble of his blonde hair. MacGyver had scars all over his body, thin lines across his ribs, the faintest of white criss-crosses on his shoulders, on his back the marks were more ugly, less precise. On his right shoulder blade there were three raised white sections of mottled skin, all it was rough and uneven, but there was a pattern, but it appeared as though someone had wrecked it, so the shape was just a little off.
I get the creepy factor, but this annoyed me. Sure, the science in Z Nation, like in any zombie story, is dodgy at best, but the one consistency is that if you get the brain, the zombie falls. So these brainless hands crawling around break the internal consistency of the Z Nation world.
Summary: Rose has a clever solution for the Dalek invasion. Although the Doctor may have questions about her methods.
“Even when powerless, a Time Lord is best contained.” The forcefield tightly encircled the Doctor as Davros gloated. Loss of the TARDIS carved a hole in his chest. Time lines snapped stinging his senses as a telepathic bond to his oldest friend shredded and hammered at his telepathic neural pathways.
It seemed losing everything was his one constant. And now he had the familiar pain of once more dealing with Davros searing between his hearts. His only solace was that Donna stood safely beside him, although imprisoned.
Well, not his only solace. The one tiny bit of melancholic reprieve was not finding Rose on Dalek ravaged Earth. She’d faced enough Daleks, suffered enough protecting the universe and him. Rose was better off in a parallel universe away from Davros.
Funny how just thinking of her now, even if lost to him, sparked his inner rebel.
“Still scared of me, then?” he taunted Davros. This wasn’t the Time War and the Doctor was done cutting the Daleks any slack. They’d ripped away enough of his life. Davros wheezed a snide chuckle.
“It is time we talked, Doctor. After so very long,” Davros arrogant rough, gravelly voice crawled across the Doctor’s skin. The Doctor narrowed his eyes on his old adversary. Normally talking was what he liked. But not this time.
Unfortunately, Davros did most of the talking, digging at the Doctor’s inner wounds and insecurities until they oozed pain he’d shuttered away. And then it was as if the Void itself opened as Dalek Caan spoke.
“So cold and dark. Fire is coming. The endless flames.” The Doctor stilled. It couldn’t be. Yet there before him sat Caan. The Dalek who not only escaped Canary Wharf and the failed Dalek experiment in Manhattan, but who now radiated a dangerous temporal signature, like dark matter. There was only one way that type of Artron energy surrounded the twisted creature.
“What is that thing?” Donna asked.
“The last of the Cult of Skaro,” he admitted, ice running through his veins. “One of a secret order of Daleks tasked to think creatively beyond the Dalek collective. It activated a temporal shift to escape the last time we met.” The pieces clicked together. “It must have tumbled through the vortex, lost to the winds of time until it landed…blimey, in the Time War, unprotected.”
“Caan did more than that,” Davros revealed with a twisted glee. “He saw time. Its infinite complexity and majesty, raging through his mind. And he saw you. Both of you.”
“This I have foreseen, in the wild and the wind. The Doctor will be here as witness, at the end of everything. The Doctor and his precious Children of Time. And one of them will die.” Caan cackled after his prediction. Fury burned cold in the Doctor’s chest.
No Dalek could see time without dying or falling into madness. Why would Davros follow a mad Dalek? His kind were about perfection, exterminating anything they deemed defective or inferior which they found to be every living thing in the universe that was not Dalek.
This concept of intolerance lay at the heart of the Time War and the destruction of his people. He clenched his hands, shaking with a deep seeded rage at once again facing the same madness.
Davros smugly showed them his weapon, his reality bomb. A group of humans, the unlucky test subjects to Davros weapon disintegrated before their eyes.
“What’s happening?” Donna demanded as the group of humans disappeared atom by atom.
“It’s the twenty-seven planets,” the Doctor replied, his voice resonating with a cold disdain. “They’ve created a way to disrupt energy fields, tearing matter apart at the subatomic level. It’ll spread across the entire multi-verse. Never stopping, never faltering, never fading. People and planets and stars will become dust. He’s planning on committing genocide on a level no species has ever conceived of. Except mine that is.”
Oh yes, the dirty secret was out. The leaders of his people had been just as mad as Davros. Until he stopped them. The only crack in the hardened warrior that clutched the Doctor’s hearts, was the thought that even Rose, locked away in another universe, wasn’t safe. Merciless cold rage struck through him. No more. He once vowed that and he’d make good on that vow no matter the cost.
Of course, that’s when his friends, his children of time, popped in for a little let’s poke the homicidal Daleks and wager billions of lives for trillions of lives. Bile rose in his throat as he watched his brave friends threaten with weapons he never wanted them to feel compelled to use.
Davros sliced away at his faith in them, accusing the Doctor of what the feared most, that the Dalek on the Game Station was right. He was the greatest exterminator of them all. His weapons were those closest to him. Friendships warped into weapons.
One face captured his attention more than Martha, Sarah Jane or Jack. Mickey Smith, dressed in combat black, eyed him with a slight nod. If Mickey was here…
After separating from Ahsoka in the aftermath of Order 66, Rex goes looking for a way to save his brothers from the hell of being nothing more than meat clankers. He comes across a scientist who is on the run from being conscripted into the Imperial bureaucracy, and saves the scientist from being run down because the whole process gives Rex flashbacks to what Fives went through.
It turns out the scientist, a Twi’lek named Doctor Faesta Snamis, has been experimenting with how sound waves influence technology and the Empire wants to utilize her research by turning it toward military applications. Since Faesta, whom Rex takes to calling “Doc”, refuses to see even more destruction wreaked upon the galaxy (and Ryloth in particular, given that it was devastated by the battles fought over it by the Republic and the Confederacy), she’s been running from not just the Empire, but others too who wish to use her work for destructive means. Rex thinks she’s too idealistic, but feels obliged to help her out (it sticks it to the Empire in some small way, practically the only way he’s managed since he and Ahsoka fled Mandalore).
So lots of crazy shit happens and Faesta finds a way to use her research to neutralize the chips in the clones’ minds. They do this on a small scale at first, but then Rex starts getting ideas (boy does he get ideas). He, Faesta, and a crack team of clones who are really fucking pissed off at the Empire for turning them into flesh droids, at the Republic for making them slaves in the first place, and the Sith who have taken over, find a way to hack the Holonet and deliver the knockout punch that deactivates the chips and also manages to deliver a message to the various clone units on what’s happened - the Sith have taken over, etc. They are then encouraged to either get out, or, if they want to do something about it, start tearing the Empire down. A few end up taking the first option, completely traumatized and just can’t take it anymore, but the majority are pissed off enough to want to finish what they started.
Essentially, there is a massive military coup. Palpatine and Vader may be powerful, but even the strongest lions can be brought down by the coordinated attack of a hyena pack (or just insert an appropriate GFFA analogy here). Tarkin is found and shot, field execution style, along with a lot of other leading Imperial figures and leaders.
There are some serious tensions in the aftermath, because the clones are very distrusting of politicians, even the ones with good reputations like Bail Organa and Mon Mothma. As far as many of the clones are concerned, they colluded in keeping the brothers as slaves in a desperate attempt to preserve the Republic, along with the Jedi.
It’s Faesta who steps up and does her best to talk everyone down. She’s always believed in peace, hoped for better times once the war ended, but found herself in even worse straits as time passed. She may not have the deep understanding of being used as fodder like the clones do, but she knows oppression. She and Rex were the ones who found a way to free the clones from their chains. Now she asks them what they really want to do now that their chains are off and the primary culprits are themselves either dead or fettered in chains of their own? Continue the cycle and thus see more blood spilled, blood of their brothers, blood of innocents?
Faesta freely admits that there are no real good answers to the shitty situation they’re in. She just asks that the clones, that everyone, look for answers that don’t involve doing their level best to kill one another.
The story gets left a little open-ended, letting readers decide for themselves how things go. The clones have control at the end, but it’s control by the barrel of a blaster, and hardly sustainable, but they’re just so angry at everyone. Will Faesta’s words be enough to bring peace, when the words of so many others failed?
Back in May (I’m catching up with my backlog!) we were treated to another epic new-series UNIT boxset: UNIT – Cyber-Reality. It promised much, but for me, while it entertained I have some niggles. I’ll explain… (more…)
One thing that bothers me about Doctor Whois deciding if the show is science fiction or fantasy. If pushed I know it’s really a fantasy, but I’d like it to be science fiction; it’s the physicist in me wanting it all to make sense in something close to our universe. Back in the day, in the time of Kit Pedler, science adviser and Cyberman creator, the show tried to be as scientific as possible.…
Again I’ve delayed reviewing a TV episode, and again it’s a reluctance to document exactly why I felt an episode didn’t work. At the highest (most abstract) I felt Pyramid at the End of the World was interesting, but beyond that it seemed a victory of style over substance. Harsh words, and possibly unfair, but bear with me and I’ll explain. (more…)
I’ve been mulling over The Girl Who Died and have decided it needs to be considered from four directions. Partly this is as it has two writers (Jamie Mathieson and Steven Moffat), mostly for reasons I’ll explain.
The four directions are: the Viking story, the Doctor’s face, Ashildr (aka the Girl who Died herself) and Maisie Williams. Here it comes, ware spoilers! (more…)
