Unbound # 4 - He Jests At Scars...

An Extract From The EC Unauthorized Programme Guide O' Tasteless Scarification Humor

W H A T I F . . . ERIC SAWARD *HADN’T* HAD A HISSY FIT IN 1986?

A Screwy Doctor – A Screwy Dimension


Serial 7C3 – It Just Doesn’t Matter!

On the space station where the Sixth Doctor was placed on trial, Mel is speaking with Inquisitor Darkel and the Kipper of the Matrix. The Bastard, Glitz, Peri, Dibber, Sil and pretty much every point of audience identification and sympathy is dead and the Doctor is missing, having apparently been lost in a multidimensional time vent with his evil future self the Valeyard.

After adequately summing up the plot of the previous episode in a very forced and artificial manner for all the audience who HAVEN’T sat through the unmade Eric Saward episode of doom, Mel and the Time Lords come to the conclusion that the Valeyard has somehow escaped the time vent and stolen all the Doctor’s regenerations.

"It has been known for a Time Lord on the point of a regeneration to be visited by an inchoate form of their future self, usually for a cheap laugh, but it is unprecedented for one to take the other to court, act as prosecutor and then try to destroy the entire universe!" the Inquisitor explains. As such, the Kipper considers the Valeyard a fascinating object of study.

Mel is appalled and points out that the Valeyard they knew was a composite of the dark sides of the Doctor’s personality – and the "good" Doctor was one on trial for his life on the charge of genocide! Unchecked by the Doctor’s morality and contracts with the BBC, who knows what the Valeyard might do now he is free?

Inquisitor Darkel tells Mel to shut the hell up as she is annoying the crap out of them and generally not being very helpful with all this doom and gloom and pessimism. In order to prove that nothing of any real import has happened, the Kipper programs the Matrix to replay "Terrified of Vervoids Part Four"...


Stardate: Tuesday, 4am, 2986, on the Atari starliner Hyperion III where some eggplant salads have evolved into phallic-looking psychopathic plant monsters who slaughter every single human being on board the ship before they decide they are socialists and shouldn’t risk damaging the environment.

The Valeyard emerges from hiding in a cupboard to kick the corpse of Commodore Travers for causing all this mess – if Travers hadn’t taken a shortcut through a dimension of pure evil, the dark forces of the Elder Ones wouldn’t have unleashed the Vervoids, would they? The Valeyard finally thought of hacking them all to pieces with an axe, but it’s too late and he’s feeling in a bitch of a mood.

The Valeyard’s companion, a sweet, young naive moped-riding Welsh girl called Rachel "Ray" Goronwy wonders what they should do now they are stuck on a ship full of deadly killers heading straight for Earth to trigger an undoubted cannibal holocaust?

"Some would say that the RIGHT thing to do now would be to stay and fight these creatures, putting ourselves in mortal danger in the glorious aim of triumphing over their evil... but then some people are just absurd. Let’s get the hell out of here like ninjas on fire!"

Cutting their losses, the Valeyard and Ray flee to the TARDIS...


Mel is appalled... again. Not only has all life on Earth been doomed to certain annihilation, but the Valeyard has chosen an awful Welsh harridan to travel with instead of her!

The Kipper checks the Matrix records, he finds that Mel apparently never left Earth with the Doctor; instead, she remained in Brighton and eventually died from overusing her cell phone.

"Was it a brain tumor or something?" asks Mel.

"No, you were just really loud and annoying and eventually the other people in the restaurant snapped and garroted you to death with some napkins!" explains the Kipper with malicious glee, for he really doesn’t like the fitness freak.

Mel points out that she must have traveled through time and space otherwise how in the name of all that is sane did she get to be on an alien space station with memories of a history that never happened?

The Time Lords can’t answer her and, after a long, awkward silence, decide to tune the Matrix to access the first episode of "The Afronauts" to discover what has happened in the new timeline...


Stardate: Tuesday, 4am, 1986. As Melanie Bush heads to her workplace, Lethe Logistics, she is suddenly stopped in the street by Ray who wants to talk about the possibility of her donating to a charity devoted to the assassination of Roland the Rat. This ends up delaying Mel for a few vital hours, so by the time Mel gets to work, it has burnt down and the place is littered with corpses and exploded Dustbin casings.

Ray meanwhile meets up with the Valeyard, who reveals that the delay means Mel never met the Sixth Doctor and he has changed his own past so he doesn’t have to travel with the irritating redhead.

"On such a full sea we are now afloat, and we must take the current where it serves or lose our ventures and I rather fear Ms. Bush’s tide has gone out," declaims the Valeyard, eyes rolling insanely.

"You talk a load of old bollocks, you know that?" Ray asks him.

"You wouldn’t understand, Ray. Different social strata," the Time Lord replies, bitch-slapping her. "Now, we can stop the Dustbins while we’re at it. All we have to do is travel back to the planet of Fargo deep in hyperspace, where the most evil race in the universe is trapped in a roller disco bunker. All we have to do is team up with the Dulls and use a special corrosive formula to rot them away!"

"That’s nice of you, that is."

"Yes, very magnanimous of me. And if it turns out my apartment still needs some decent cleaning, we can always go back in time and change things back. And in the meantime, it’s a laugh, isn’t it? Weaving new and far more erotic patterns in the fabric of space and time!"

"Ooh eck, he’s off again!"

Laughing insanely, the Valeyard skips away and Ray rushes after him...


Mel is appalled. Still. Inquisitor Darkel isn’t fussed at the Valeyard running free and creating chaos throughout reality, as all he’s done is rid himself of Mel (which anyone can sympathize with) and finally get round to destroying the Dustbins at their genesis as he was supposed to do back in 1975!

Mel screams that the Valeyard is a bloody nutter and just explained that he was going around creating chaos for his own sake and is beyond any kind of logic or morality. The Kipper is certain that the Valeyard is just having a bad day and proves it by getting the Matrix to project the third installment of "Mud Ride" to prove it...


Stardate: Tuesday, 4am, 1886. The TARDIS brings the Valeyard and Ray to a Lancaster corner shop with a sign saying "EVIL SILLY LURIAN HEADQUARTERS – NO SMOKING – PLEASE LEAVE YOUR SELF-RESPECT AT THE DOOR". The Valeyard explains that the Silly Lurians are puny human worshippers of the omnisexual Bilurians, who ruled the Earth millions of years ago before going into hibernation after one orgy too many.

The Valeyard uses his Molenksi Univarius to revive the bunker’s kinkytron-powered alarm clock to revive the Bilurians in the 19th century where the human race will be too sexually repressed to resist them and by the time of Beatlemania humanity and the reptile people will be good pals and fuckbuddies and only good can come from this.

"Of course it might not turn out like that at all," the Valeyard admits. "It could turn into a long, drawn out war of bloody genocide, rape, pillage and torture. It could lead to a world where the Roman Empire never fell. Or it could be interesting? Maybe Toothpick WON’T try to conquer the entire world with pheromone sprays this time? Oh well, if he DOES annihilate every living thing on the planet, we can always come back and kill him as a baby! That’s the fun of it, Ray! Life is a Choose Your Own Adventure, old chum!"

When Ray questions the wisdom of the Valeyard’s actions, he threatens to take her back where he found her - 1959, about to be blown up in a deeply unsatisfying bus explosion as the Impressarios storm Wales in the belief that Disneyland might be there. He graphically describes the agony she’ll suffer using phrases like "blood fountain", "pureed flesh and bone" and "being eaten slowly by wild dogs, thrown up and then eaten again!"

Ray is suitably cowed and stops referring to him as "bat-shit insane".


Mel is, oddly enough, appalled. The Inquisitor is rather bored with revisiting old stories and wants something vaguely new. Thus, the Kipper of the Matrix puts on some of the Doctor’s defense tapes that he never actually got round to using because his first effort only managed to get him convicted on even MORE serious charges.

And so Mel, Inquisitor Darkel and the Kipper sit down to watch part one of "Attache from the Mind"...


Stardate: Tuesday, 4am, 6886. The TARDIS materializes in an underground vault on the planet FRED (Free Equal Democracy) which the Valeyard has read about in some rather strange drug-addled Manga comics. Not trusting a word of gerbil people called Trikes waging a war against their own LSD hallucinations, he sends Ray out to face what unknown dangers there may be.

Ray’s mission to find the secret control centre of the Penelopeans (PENultimate ELegance Order and Poise) who are using the legendary Hyno Coin to wage war on the Trikes with its ancient and terrible powers. The Valeyard wants it because it strikes him as a rather nifty little gadget with which to enslave whole cultures.

When Ray points out this seems rather unfair on her, the Valeyard sniggers and clucks "Speak to it though Hell itself should gape and bid me hold my peace! Be always displeased with what thou art, if thou desireth to obtain what thou are not!!"... for reasons known best to the author. Should there be one.

"Throughout my lives I have let such novelty items of mass influence, paperweights of incredible power, little tacky unicorns of great and terrible intensity, pass through my hands like I was handing out cans of Mountain Dew after a hard night’s drinking! Never again, Raymondo! NEVER – AGAIN!!!"

Just then, some of the dense plumbing rodent Trikes arrive and Ray dubs them "amazingly cute". Which inspires the Valeyard to use his novelty Cane of Rassilon (set to "flambé mode") to turn them into lumps of charcoal and "not so freaking cute NOW, are they?"

He crosses over to where Ray is and they pull back a cavern wall to reveal the evil, psychopathic and lemur-shaped Penelopeans. Even the Valeyard has to admit they look very sweet... so he hurls a canister of greganic acid to turn them into bubbling goo.

"I LOVE BEING AN ASSHOLE!!" the Valeyard shrieks happily.


Mel is appalled. Quelle surprise. Amused at her discomfort, Inquisitor Darkel orders the Kipper trace the events of "Ornery In Space" to make her suffer even more.


Stardate: Tuesday, 4am, 2186. The Valeyard and Ray arrive on the aptly-named planet Inaquarry which just so happens to be the home of the huge Jules Verne-style giant space gun, the Ultimate in Fashionable Doomsday Weapons. It is guarded by some racial stereotype green primitives, the survivors of an ancient civilization destroyed by Mad Cow Disease and sworn not to let anyone use it.

The Valeyard whips out an Uzzi submachine gun and kills them all while singing "I’m building a staircase to paradise, with a new step every day..." as blood spurts onto the quarry floor.

Humming the rest of the song to himself, the Valeyard decides to use the weapon to force all those in the Universe to bend to his will! But first, he decides to use the really boring planets as target practice. It comes as no surprise even to Ray that the first on his list is Gallifrey. "Yippee-kai-aie, you Time Lord bastards!" he screams and pulls the trigger, shrieking with deranged laughter...


Mel is... get this... appalled. And for once, so are the Time Lords as the Matrix screen switches to an error message saying that connection has been broken since Gallifrey and the entire constellation of Kasterborus has been blasted out of existence.

At first Inquisitor Darkel is impressed at watching stuff live, before it strikes her that the Valeyard was letting them watch archive footage while he got up to mischief. The Inquisitor has learned her folly, but unfortunately it’s in and around 60 years too late!

"Don’t you just hate that when it happens?" she asks the others.

Mel suggests that the all-powerful Time Lords simply use their mighty abilities to save the Doctor from the Fridge of Eternal Suffering and prevent all this from happening. Tragically, all the mcguffins and plot devices that would allow this to occur were on Gallifrey and have now evaporated into a whiff of ozone and carbon monoxide.

Basically, they are screwed.

And, logically, have no further reason to be in this synopsis, so let us ignore them and return to the planet Inaquarry. There, the Valeyard has already got bored of an entire planet composed entirely of gravel pits identical to those you might find on Earth, and decides to move the Doomsday Weapon into his TARDIS. Not only will this allow them the ability to destroy anything anywhere anywhen, it will also help the Valeyard overcome his feelings of physical inadequacy.

One problem: as Ray points out, they can’t fit the bloody thing through the TARDIS doors and so the time meddlers and general pissers-about-with-destiny sit around idly waiting for inspiration to strike.

Amazingly enough, it does!

Another TARDIS starts to materialize nearby, but for some reason can’t fully manifest due to the sort of time distortion that turns up when you go around changing the whole fabric of history. As the Valeyard and Ray watch on, another Valeyard appears in the TARDIS doorway, screaming at the top of his voice and waving his hands in the air frantically.

"Listen to me! I’m from about 15 minutes from now! I know what you’re planning! I can’t stay long – the Web of Continuity won’t let me!" screams the Valeyard of the future. "DON’T DO IT, YOU INSANE BASTARD!"

"Don’t do what?" asks the current Valeyard, baffled.

"Go to Logopolis!"

"Logopolis?! Why in the name of fried Kroll testicles would I want to go to Logopolis? OF COURSE! I could use their technobabble to fit the Doomsday Weapon inside the TARDIS with no problems!"

"No, no DON’T go to Logopolis!"

"Thank you my friend!" says the current Valeyard happily and prances gaily back to the TARDIS, hand-in-hand with Ray who points out that the future Valeyard seems very upset. The current Valeyard threatens to snap her neck if she continues to ruin the mood, and they leave Inaquarry right away.

Inside the TARDIS, the Valeyard remembers the last time he visited Logopolis he accidentally destroyed the entire place thanks to the fact he had unwittingly taken the Bastard there as a hitchhiker. After brooding over this for about the same amount of time that it takes to read a "STOP" sign, the Valeyard hits upon the answer:

"I’ll just move this antiquated piece of junk in front of the Fourth Doctor’s antiquated piece of junk, knock him off course so he never visits Logopolis and preventing the sequence of events that led to the destruction of the planet, so they can pimp my Type 40 like there’s no tomorrow!"

"Wouldn’t it be easier to just go back in time to before it got blown up and just use it then?" asks Ray.

"No. I’ve started so I’ll finish!" the insane Valeyard cackles and programming the TARDIS with less concentration than someone would microwave two-minute noodles. This complete LACK of careful calculations is bound to have consequences and repercussions...

Not only do the two TARDISes occupy the same point in time and space, but the Fourth Doctor’s TARDIS is blasted out of existence – killing the Valeyard’s prior incarnation and, in decreasing order of priority, the Bastard, Tegan Jovanka, the weeds in the Cloister Room and Adric. But not only that, the Bastard’s TARDIS has exploded as well, triggering an energy wave which has destroyed the whole planet of Logopolis completely by accident. And not only that, Logopolis has been destroyed, kick-starting the end of the entire universe. Not only that, the only people who could save it are dead as well.

"HOW THE FUCK DID THAT HAPPEN?!? Why did it go wrong?" the Valeyard wails unhappily. "Was it because I didn’t calculate it to the last micro-second? Was it because I forgot to factor in his mass? Or that other thing, what’s it called, 'velocity'? Tell me, Ray! You’re Welsh, you can see the incredibly bleeding obvious?!"

Ray notes that in less than fifteen minutes the Valeyard has doomed the entire universe and murdered his past self, making his entire existence a temporal paradox. "That’s efficient, that is," she notes.

"Self-murder!" the Valeyard moans. "That infernal crime which all the gods level their thunder at! And it wasn’t has as fun as last time! Worse, without those bunch of silly voodoo wankers with skull-hats, I am completely and irrevocably fucked!"

Ray suggests the Valeyard simply change history back as he has been promising to do at the end of every single scene he’s featured in during this story, and the Valeyard realizes it’s a brilliant scam. Of course, they don’t simply vanish out of existence right away despite the fact the story should have ended by now.

"You see, Ray, the Web of Temporal Sequences works like physics in a Warner Brothers cartoon – just as when Wile E Coyote runs off a cliff but doesn’t start to fall until he realizes his mistake, after a cause an effect does NOT take place until all those ABOUT to be affected by it have had a chance to bemoan their impending fate!"

"Well, that’s a bit of a cheat," Ray notes.

"I know. What lice-infested plotting. Still, what can you do?" he shrugs as the TARDIS lands on Inaquarry five minutes before the Valeyard and Ray left. The Valeyard runs outside, jumps up and down and manages to grab the attention of his past self.

"Listen to me! I’m from about 15 minutes from now! I know what you’re planning! I can’t stay long – the Web of Continuity won’t let me!" screams the Valeyard of the future. "DON’T DO IT, YOU INSANE BASTARD!"

"Don’t do what?" asks the past Valeyard, baffled.

"Go to Logopolis!"

"Logopolis?! Why in the name of fried Kroll testicles would I want to go to Logopolis? OF COURSE! I could use their technobabble to fit the Doomsday Weapon inside the TARDIS with no problems!"

"No, no DON’T go to Logopolis!"

"Thank you my friend!" says the past Valeyard happily and prances gaily back to the TARDIS with Ray, leaving the current Valeyard to swear loudly in five billion languages as he storms back into his own TARDIS, incredibly frustrated.

"I can feel reality beginning to spin away from us!" he weeps, setting the time machine to take off. "The Web of Continuity is trying to repair the improvements I’ve made to it - by erasing me from history! How can that possibly be a fair and logical punishment!"

The Valeyard nevertheless has a cunning plan. They will travel back even FURTHER in time and use the Doomsday Weapon to destroy Logopolis before his fourth incarnation’s visit, thus ensuring that his fourth incarnation never actually travels there and is not accidentally killed. "What could possibly go wrong?" he asks cheerfully.

One destroyed star system and irreversible universal apocalypse later, the answer becomes so obvious that even Ray the stupid Welsh Imbecile can work it out unaided. He has managed to destroy Logopolis at the exact same moment he first visited the planet through sheer bad luck, and the Valeyard is unraveling out of history even worse than before!

"Is that bad?" asks the increasingly-unstable antihero.

They race back to the TARDIS and flee outside the time/space continuum, allowing them to follow the Laws of Time by complaining at length before they vanish completely.

Back at the Space Station, Mel has finally managed to break the resolve of the Inquisitor and the Kipper with her non-stop, overly-alliterative rants that she is convinced for absolutely no reason whatsoever that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the Doctor’s spirit survives somewhere within the man he’s become.

Desperate to shut her up, Inquisitor Darkel offers up her personal time travelling friendship bracelet and a Luger pistol, and tells her to try and reason with the Valeyard if she’s so damn confident.

Mel agrees and vanishes into time and space, leaving Inquisitor Darkel and the Kipper alone. Melanie Bush is Gallifrey’s last hope; if she can’t defeat the Valeyard, then the Time Lords will never have existed. But in either case, at least she’s buggered off!

In the TARDIS, Ray discovers an old copy of Penthouse owned by the First Doctor, with a review of a visit that he, Steven Taylor and Dodo Chaplet visiting the world of Logopolis in the search for a decent Chicken Kiev takeaway. The Valeyard must find a way to stop the First Doctor from visiting Logopolis, but as he tries to come up with a plan that doesn’t involve at least three hundred armed prostidroids, Mel
materializes inside the TARDIS, direct from the previous scene.

"Well, well, well, I wondered if you’d ever turn up," the Valeyard sneers. "Though I was hoping for Grant Markham if I’m honest. The Time Lords MUST have been desperate to choose you over someone halfway likely to convince me. Like Turlough. Or Sil."

Mel tries to speak to the man she knows as the Doctor, but he rebuffs her, insisting that the Doctor no longer exists. "I have purged him from my soul, eradicated him from my ego, eliminated him from my id! Look, I’m wearing halfway sensible clothes, what more proof do you require? The Doctor is no longer of any consequence to anyone but incredibly anal fanboys!"

"And what does that mean in English?" asks Mel reasonably.

"It means I have new path to walk, a new direction in life, an excellent existence in a universe of mediocrity! You see, Mel, your precious Doctor and all his previous selves were weak, spineless dogs with intellects so limited, imaginations so blinkered, that they only ever wanted to do pathetic, worthless good! I see things differently, boundlessly... because I HAVE 20-20 VISION!! BWAHAHAHAH!"

For the next fifty-one minutes the Valeyard rants that he is a new man, one who intends to recover all of the weapons of mass destruction (and seduction) which the old Doctor would have buried away or destroyed once he realized the user manuals were in Japanese and had a tantrum. The Valeyard will use them to create a new realm in which he is the absolute ruler – only, unlike every single damned villain in every single damned Doctor Who story ever, he will SUCCEED in this incredibly uninteresting and cliched end!

Mel is... sigh... appalled.

Ray points out that actually the Valeyard is more likely to be deleted from time and space before he achieves this, so the Valeyard comes up with yet ANOTHER cunning plan to prevent his First Self from visiting Logopolis and being blown to smithereens.

"You want to blow up Earth now then?" asks Ray, unimpressed.

"Oh, well, I suppose annihilating star systems IS slight hit-and-miss... mostly miss. But of course! I know a rather insipid artist in Whitechapel who painted truly derivative paintings, and I’m sure we can get HIM to knife Dodo to death. Knowing his luck, the Doctor will get framed for the murder, prove his innocence, capture the real Jack the Ripper and by the time he and Steven leave 18th Century London, the TARDIS will randomly fetch up somewhere that ISN’T Logopolis – since it will start its journey for a different point and thus end up at a different point. It’s all very Chaos theory, but I think I’m rather getting the hang of this Time Web malarkey!"

Mel can’t believe that the Doctor would do such a terrible thing. In fact, she’s APPALLED!!

"All right," the Valeyard sighs. "On this point, I have to be VERY clear. I am NOT the Doctor. Case in point."

He turns and hurls the spinning blade at Ray, rather messily decapitating her and drenching the Valeyard and Mel in her hot Welsh blood and steaming internal organs.

As Ray finally stops twitching, the Valeyard explains that she was really starting to irritate him and blames all his recent failures on the fact that his Welsh companion was distracting him. He then realizes that knifing his only real friend to death seems a bit hypocritical if he lets the far more annoying and self righteous Mel live, doesn’t it?

So saying he heaves the blade out of Ray’s corpse and throws it at Mel, but her infernal gymnastic skills mean that she is able to avoid losing a limb, several pints of blood or even her life. After chasing her around the control room twice, the Valeyard finally manages to damage her time travelling friendship bracelet!

"Honestly, is that the best you’ve got?" Mel mocks the Valeyard before the damaged bracelet activates, expelling her from the TARDIS and sending the ex-computer-programmer off into the time vortex, a random series of dots floating helplessly through the universe.

Finally she reappears in the hold of a slave ship heading for the incredibly tacky Temporaville. Mel is quickly surrounded by Leonard Nimoy (his eyebrows shaved off to keep him docile), an Impresario, one of the Moaning Host, a Frogoid, an Archaeopteryxian called Nullan Dvoid, a Tharil called Getoff. They all enslaved by the mysterious and all-powerful V-Man, and they are the only survivors from their respective species all of whom were once able to travel through time until the V-Man eradicated their planets and civilizations.

The slaves are shocked to see Mel, mainly because there is a legend of a strange elfin human with red hair and superiority complex the size of the Black Hole of Tartarus who will one day save all of creation from the unbeatable talons of the V-Man, who rules the cosmos with his private army of Morons from the planet Xerox!

The slave ship arrives at Temporaville and lands in the even tackier city of Chronopolis, an unpopulatec crystalline replica of Brighton – Mel’s home just in case you forgot that incredibly obvious bit of information after it was rammed down your throat earlier in the play.

Mel is...

...

...APPALLED and realized that the enigmatic V-Man is NOT Hugo Weaving in a Guy Fawkes mask but, in fact, the Valeyard. Mel reveals she is on a mission from the Ancient Time Gods to confront the V-Man and make him see reason, or else kill him with her Luger.

Gerrof laughs his ass off at her insanely arrogant confidence, and begins to taunt Mel with a melody from an Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical. Mel finally snap and shoots Gerrof through the head – the last of the Tharils, which means Mel just eradicated his entire species.

Mel is APPALLED!!!!!! But not actually as much as before, as the last few minutes of her mission have changed her, and not for the better. So she doesn’t whine QUITE as annoyingly when she guns down the Moron guards and make a prison break.

Leaving the rest of the prisoners to perish as a distraction, the ever-decreasingly-appalled Mel and Nullan head for the Chronopolis Throne Room and shoot their way inside to find...

...the Valeyard by a karioke machine singing the chorus "Thubthumping" by Chumbawumba and dancing embarrassingly.

Mel fires at the ceiling and shouts out to the Valeyard, but he just stares at her in confusion and asks if she is a singing telegram or something? He has absolutely no idea who she is.

"Mel? Mel? I knew a Mel once," he muses to himself. "Chubby cheeky chappy who was Gryff Rhys Jones’ comedy partner..."

Mel finally explains who she is, but the Valeyard can’t remember how she died or even how she joined the Doctor – he’s all confused about what is canon: New Adventures, Past Doctor Adventures, Fan fic, John Satan-Turner’s Guide To Companions? Which is real? It’s hard enough to work out at the best of times, especially now he’s wrought havoc throughout space and time...

"I did it for the greater good!" he screams for absolutely no reason.

It’s then Mel realizes that Nullan has been dead for five years – the Valeyard used his mighty powers to change history. He then brings her back to life, changes history and snaps her neck five minutes ago, then brings her back to life. His oddly-named Chronopolis is at the very heart of the vortex, allowing him to create or destroy at whim!

Mel is appalled. I mean, seriously appalled. We’re taking "You're telling me you at that apple from the tree of knowledge after I specifically sat down at length and told you NOT to?!?!" appalled.

"I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT!!" she screams and opens fire with her gun... but remembers too late that the Valeyard has godlike powers and can travel back in time and change history so she doesn’t have a gun. And since he just TOLD her that to her face, she really ought to have remembered sooner rather than later.

"I rather think you’re losing your grip on reality," the Valeyard laughs easily when suddenly the lights splutter out... and when they switch on again, he and Mel are standing in the TARDIS control room.

"Oh, bollocks," he sighs and goes to cower in the corner.

"WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED THERE?!?" screams Mel.

"For once in your life, stop screaming!" the Valeyard tells her. "The sonic vibrations of your screams disturbs the equilibrium. You see, after I stabbed Raymondo to death, I realized I hadn’t a fucking clue how to save myself from time. If I left the Vortex, I’d vanish. So I tried to be positive, so I piloted the TARDIS to a still point at the epicenter of reality where it must stay forever!"

"And that’s because...?"

"Because I made a complete balls-up of changing history again and again. And you see, the thing about meddling with time is that one moment something is real, the next it’s been erased! Probability becomes just a possibility. Established truth becomes a theoretical falsehood. Like dominoes, as one timeline falls the others come cascading down around it. It’s damned inconvenient, I tell ya!"

"So why didn’t you just engineer new timelines and possibilities?"

"I did, but before long the distinction between what IS, what WAS, what MIGHT BE and what NEVER CAN BE got very blurry. So I decided to play it safe and stop changing things by staying absolutely still and NOT blowing up huge chunks of reality. Clever, eh?"

"So what the hell was up with Temporaville?"

"Well, I was bored shitless, so I tapped into the heart of the TARDIS and created a phantom reality to pass the time. Unfortunately, I must have crossed a wire because after one afternoon the energy ran out and it’s also destroyed everything in the TARDIS apart from this room."

Mel is appalled. Once more with feeling.

"But the TARDIS is freezing us in place with its internal force fields, because any action we make will ripple out and devastate the universe! And with all it’s power running out, it’s not going to waste it by letting us talk. Maybe it’s afraid of us opening our mouths and causing damage. I always thought the old girl had critical faculties..."

"You mean we’re going to be trapped here together, unable to move for all eternity? Just like Sapphire and Steel?"

"Well, I was thinking more like the Doctor and I in the Time Vent. It’s more dramatically ironic that way. But in the meantime, the Universe can recover from the damage I did it to. It might take millions of centuries, but eventually it’ll be back the way it was. And this time the Sixth Doctor will kick my ass, the Bastard will take over Gallifrey and the whole thing will have been scripted by Pip and Jane Baker rather than Eric Saward."

Mel is... oh, well, you know. "So, this has all been in every possible and literal sense, a complete waste of time?"

"Yes, Mel," the Valeyard mutters. "At the end of the day, it just doesn’t m——————"


Book(s)/Other Related –
Time’s Champignon by The Ghost of Craig Hinton

The Mighty One, Ruler of Chronopolis, Master of the Universal Destiny, Keeper of the Flame of Life, Guardian of the Time Ways in an Exciting Adventure Where He Throws Acid on Dustbins And Kills Them All In Five Second Flat (Pathetic Completist Fanwank Editions)

Why JST Owes Me EVERYTHING by "Big Eric"

"How Green Is My Valeyard?" -- Tales of the 13th Doctor including "May Tricks!", "Millennial Tights", "The Simpering", "Dark Solitaire", and the infamous "Qixotl Was Talking Shit, I’m Perfectly All Right And Living With A Supermodel On Dronid!" the last EVER bit of Doctor Who fiction by Mad Larry the Pirate King


Fluffs – Michael Jayston seemed uncannily like an excited Sylvester McCoy for most of this story.


Goofs -
Nullan Void says that Mel used Tantric Sex to break into Chronopolis, when she did nothing of the kind. Unless of course, she DID and my brain was forced to remove that information to keep me sane...

Why does Mel demand to know who Ray is after watching no less than four entire episodes with her as the main companion? Is Mel suffering from senile dementia? Or is she just trying to be a total bitch?

Why the hell does Ray try to annoy the Valeyard by giving him the nickname "Doctor"? How does she even find out about the Doctor when the Valeyard has absolutely no reason to tell her? Is it perhaps down to the rumors that Ray was one of Sarah Jane Smith’s rebound lovers following the events of "School’s Out"?

If the Valeyard is such a swinger, why doesn’t he stay behind to join in the Bilurian orgy of peace when they awake? Ray would definitely have been up for it, surely!

When the Valeyard is on Inaquarry, he says the humans are there ten thousand years early, but not only was "Ornery in Space" set in set in 2471 (only one thousand years later), there are no humans on Inaquarry when the Valeyard visits it anyway. Methink he doth talk crap too much. And wouldn’t he and Ray have perished from Mad Cow Disease by now?

Why doesn’t the Valeyard remember how to defeat the Vervoids since he had to sit through the whole four-parter? Did he just really hate Commodore Travers after the incident on the treadmill?

Frogoids aren’t a time travelling race, so why is one collected? Is this something to do with the Total Perspective Vortex? Can’t the Valeyard run the TARDIS on a small piece of fairy cake?

If the Valeyard destroys Gallifrey before life evolves, why is a mouse when it spins?


Technobabble -
The Doomsday Weapon runs on a "Megabyte Modem of Mass Destruction".


Links and References -
The Doctor (or possibly the Valeyard) picked up a verruca from Walter Sickert in Whitechapel.


Untelevised Misadventures -
The Valeyard and Ray have been on Saurius Major where they waited for three wanted criminals to teleport into the quarry on a terrorist mission, and then shot them all dead. "It’ll make things a lot simpler in the long run," the Valeyard says, but I think he just wants to get into Supreme Commander Servalan’s white lycra pants...


Groovy DVD Extras –
"Hardcore Whovian Fanwank", a 100-minute filmed documentary by Morgan Spurlock investigating why Gay Russell chose of his own free will to write this story. This fascinating expose revealed the horrific truth: Russell has no ego whatsoever! He does not care about looking clever or thoughtful in his writing, and unselfconsciously writes out his secret fantasies he would have liked others to write for him. This "triumph of unselfconsciousness" lead to Russell being placed on a special list of dangerous subversives by MI5. A copy of this CD can be seen in the background of "Spooks" episode twenty-two.


Dialogue Disasters -

Mel: Don’t make me appalled. You wouldn’t like me when I’m appalled.


Ray: Blimey, Valeyard, I had no idea it was this big.
Valeyard: One doesn’t like to boast, Raymondo. I am truly twice the man the Doctor was. And I have certain photographs to prove it when the Sixth Doctor became a 1970s porn star with a droopy moustache.
Ray: I think I’ve got that on Betamax, I have!


Nullan: What is your mission, Lady Melanie Jane Bush?
Mel: Simple. I’m here to find and talk to the Mighty V-Man - or as I know him, the Doctor - and if I don’t like what he has to say to me, I’m going to be appalled.


Ray, just before the Valeyard cuts her head off:
"I have a bad feeling about this."



Dialogue Triumphs -

Mel: So. The Doctor’s gone forever. Still, at least we’re free of that appalling dress sense. And it was appalling. I am APPALLED!!!


Ray: Right now your brain is being munched by the Web of Time!
Valeyard: I can’t be outwitted by a non-sentient theoretical concept!
Ray: Why not?
Valeyard: Why not? WHY NOT?!
Ray: Yeah. You fire a gun at planets. It’s not very subtle or cunning, is it? You’re not using wit at all, are you?
Valeyard: Oh, Raymondo, do have any idea how easy it would be to stab you to death?
Ray: ...you’re having a laugh, right?
Valeyard: Hmm. What? Oh, of course. Hahahah!


Mel: You are the Doctor, whether you like it or not.
Valeyard: Fuck off!
Mel: How utterly APPALLING!


Valeyard: What good is power if it sits around with no one making use of it? You ask any head of any electricity company and they’ll ask the exact same question! But rest assured, my dear, I’m not the man I once was and so I’m coming to claim that power and make FULL USE of it, before the bastards send me a final demand and cut us off!


Viewer Quotes –

"Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Shakespeare it ain’t! Avoid at all costs. I’m begging you!" - Jo Ford (2003)

"I had to buy this in a specialist shop by mail order over the internet in a brown paper bag. I experienced it alone and I feel fascination mixed with pity for the people in it. It is an artless, titilatory work designed to give me what they think I want and make me feel bad about myself afterwards. It needs to kept away from the easily-offended, and makes us privy to what should have remained the secret fantasies of its creator. The only difference between It Just Doesn’t Matter and Hardcore Dutch Pornography is that the spanking lesbians have a coherent plot, convincing acting, realistic plotting and an upbeat ending. Yes, Big Finish has convinced me I am wasting my time with Doctor Who audios when I could watching high-quality porn instead. Thanks for that!"
- Nigel Verkoff (2003, before he went blind)

"This is certainly no audio for the uninformed, but then most of the uninformed wouldn’t probably even know who the Valeyard was. So... yeah." - Ewen Campion-Clarke (2003)

"Continuity? Mythos? Ha, I spit in your face! The Valeyard is like Noel Coward playing Henry V! He fought the law and the law won!"
- Ned Kelly (1992)

"Surreal and typically derivative, and the most frustrating thing about it is that I know I could do better. If you want a story about the return of the Valeyard and Mel, littered with fanboy references to the original television era, my magnum opus, "End-Time" where the Valeyard is in Space Station Nerva at the very end of the Universe with a laser gun that erases people from history. Yes, I know I’ve ripped that off from Red Dwarf, but it just seems too easy to build a story primarily on the ideas of others... so why the hell not? Particularly if you are writing in a professional capacity as I am. Who knows, one day we might get a fully orginal, sorry, ORIGINAL Valeyard story on TV, written by MEEEEEE!!!!!!!!" - Ron Mallet (2004)

"Mein gott! Colonel X has turned bad!!" - Steve Moffat (1996)

"An anti-climatic pile of shit! Possibly the worst ever Doctor Who story I have ever seen or read or heard! It encapsulates everything I hate about Russell's approach to Doctor Who; it is a tedious, unimaginative mess that lacks atmosphere, brain cells and good lines. The more I listened that more annoyed I got! I almost refused to get to the end but managed it, gluing the earphones inside so I couldn't tear them away. Was this what the man wanted to achieve, to see how long we could bear to listen to this drivel?"
- Jo Ford after months of painful rehabilitation after the first listening of It Just Doesn’t Matter!

"It was all a dream? GAAAAAAAAAAHHHHRRRR!!!!" - Dave Restal (2004)

"So NOW we know why the Valeyard was discouraged from the novel range. He’s complete fucking shit as the darker version of a popular fictional character. Oh well. Have you ever heard that thing about what lions do when the leader of the herd gets killed? All the female lions go on heat and can you feel the love? LET’S PLAY LIONS!!!"
- Mr. Hyde (2007)


Psychotic Nostalgia -
"I often killed my grandparents, but I never turned into a living paradox. After a while I realized that I hadn’t GONE BACK IN TIME and killed them BEFORE they had my parents. I can relate the Valeyard missing the obvious like that. I’m very understanding. I’ll still remove your skeleton bone by bone, but I get you have your own needs."


Michael Jayston Speaks!
"Once Doctor Who had finished on TV, I never thought it would take off again. But if it DID take off, I thought I’d probably feature in it, because to all the Doctor Who fans KNOW I am the Doctor. An evil Doctor Who, but I’m rather proud of that.

I still get several letters a week. Four or five death threats too, which is amazing as they’re actually for a bloke called Michael Hayston and I get them by accident. I think the postman deliberately makes the mistake because I ran over his dog. It’s sweet, really.

I don’t get accosted in the street with women demanding me to let them have my babies, like that jammy sod Tom Baker, but it WAS seventeen years ago I appeared on screen with a bin liner on my head throwing beachballs around the place. There’s an audience for Doctor Who and there always will be, I think. Pure evil NEVER dies. It has an amazing following, rather like the Cult of Cthulu.

I must say I was looking forward to meet Bonnie Langford again... and then I discovered she hasn’t changed a bit. Damn her."


Rumors & Facts –

It Just Doesn’t Matter! is the aptly-titled return of Michael Jayston as the Valeyard, who was the Doctor’s lugubrious prosecutor during the season long story Mistrial Of A Time Lord, where it was eventually revealed that he was the "amalgamation of the darker side" of the Doctor’s nature who enjoyed nature rambles. There, the Valeyard wanted existence at the expense of the Doctor’s lives by... hitting him in the face with a beachball and laughing insanely. This story muses what might have happened had he actually done something remotely sensible and actually tried to get said lives.

Producer, director and writer Gay Russell had, three years previously, worked with a bunch of fans on their In-Denial magazine range as they revealed the scandalous parade of blackmail, drug-addiction, pornography and very bad spelling behind each and every episode of Doctor Who in existence. In the issue for Colin Baker’s untimely swansong, The Competent Foe, they found a dusty copy of Eric Saward’s script for the final episode.

Saward was determined to end Doctor Who in whatever way he could and got completely drunk one night, tapped out a few pages, stapled together Bonnie Langford’s audition script and handed it over to Producer John Satan-Turner with a sinister gleam in his bloodshot eye. JST was disgusted: not only was script terrible, not only did it give Michael Grade and the BBC enough reasons to cancel the show and hunt down and kill everyone involved in it... but Saward had thrown up on it twice before handing it over.

Saward assumed that JST was spoiling for a fight, swung his fist at him, lost his balance, hit HIMSELF in the bollocks and promptly resigned. As is often the case in situations like this, myths, lies and legends about the lost script grew (even though no one knew whether it every truly existed) but Saward himself made clear that his script was so brilliant it could cure cancer and by not making it, JST had lost his marbles and damned Doctor Who for all eternity.

Russell had put so many of his hopes and dreams and above all fanwank lusts into this article that when he read the actual thing, he lost it. There was a faint sound of breaking glass, a faint pink light was seen to emerge from his left ear, and from that moment on he could do nothing but quote bits of the episode in a think Seth Efriken accent.

It then became his ambition to do an unspecified something with this script. Colin Baker laughed out loud at the suggestion of turning it into an audio, and clipped Russell around the ear for his impertinence. The rest of the production team were far from interested in a Valeyard story – after all, was it not laid down in BBC Doctor Who guidelines that the character should never return in any way, any form, any time, any where lest he turn into a stereotypical supervillain undermining the incredibly intriguing and unoriginal concept of what he really was?

By now, Russell had managed to piece together what little of his sanity Nicholas Briggs was not tearing apart with the tenacity of a colony of termites. He decided to try and turn the dross Saward has scripted into a proper episode that would be the culmination of Season 23’s work and cure the common cold!

After eleven minutes, Russell was tearing up loads and loads of paper out of his typewriter screaming "WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? WHAT?!?!" and hurling loose objects – including Alan Barnes – out the window in fury.

It seemed, for the time being, that Russell was free but this was to change suddenly and terribly when the Doctor Who Unsoiled project came into being and instantly "What If The Valeyard Won?!?" was added to the list of potential scripts, between "What If Adric Survived?" and "What If Nicholas Briggs WAS the Doctor?!?!?"

Series producer John Ainsworth was totally unimpressed with the idea, and called Russell "a strange and insane individual" in short trousers. Russell expected point blank to be allowed to write one of the Unsoiled series, which was rich considering he had blackballed the project from day one (seeing it, quite rightly as another attempt by Nick Briggs to usurp Russell's rightful place as ruler of Big Finish).

Russell nagged Ainsworth every second of every minute of every hour for sixteen days straight until Ainsworth snapped and agreed on the condition he could have a detailed plot synopsis. Russell provided one, and Ainsworth had to lie down in a darkened room for a while. He later begged Russell to never, ever speak to him ever again.

Luckily, Russell anticipated the idea of a story featuring the Doctor using insanely ruthless methods to achieve good ends was EXACTLY the plot of Fully-Fisted Five. Thus, he kept to Saward’s plan of the Valeyard being completely evil with no real good intentions or even the slightest hint of intellectual competency and really be a completely impotent wanker with no redeeming features whatsoever.

And if you think that Russell is excessively and gratuitously indulgent in referencing many past television stories, Big Finish audios and Doctor Who novels, it’s comforting to know it was actually 480 minutes long originally, featuring guest appearance by two incarnations of Romana, President Lockwood the Unwilling, Coordinator Vansell, Sarah Jane Smith, Ace, the Dustbins, the Dulls, Reginald Perrin, the entire cast and crew of Bust Reading and Prince Charles.

Ultimately, the Valeyard is like a child experiencing the universe for the first time and doped up to the eyeballs on ritalin. While he may have absorbed the Doctor’s experiences, past and future, he hasn’t been paying the slightest bit of attention as he was far more interested in watching The A-Team instead. This is his failing. His naivete combined with his cavalier attitude for realistic dialogue completes his downfall because he simply cannot be the Doctor, which is ultimately what the Valeyard wants. Deep, huh?

The same depth of characterization sure as hell does not extend to Melanie Jane Bush, that’s for sure. We don’t actually get to see the events which shape her into the hard, aggressive Mel. In fact, there AREN’T any events that shape her in any way whatsoever. This makes the dramatic progression of her character, from someone who would have been utterly offended (dare I even say... APPALLED?!?) by the idea of killing to an individual who will take life to make her point to ensure the success of her mission completely retarded.

Michael Jayston possesses a wonderfully malicious and powerful voice, making the audio medium the perfect place for him to reprise the role of the Valeyard and he does. Not very well, in fact, quite awfully, but he does it. Can’t fault him there! He communicates the Valeyard’s potential power with ease, making him a complete laughing stock since the script has a character who can’t break wind without creating a self-destructive temporal paradox. For ineptitude like that, you don’t get a man who sounds like he’s Satan’s boss. You need Conrad Westmaas.

It Just Doesn’t Matter! has a bleak final scene both emotional and intriguing... but basically it’s nine minutes of exposition resolving the plot in a very downbeat manner. But this is a story unfettered by the proprietorial pomposity that slams Atari of the Cybermen for being too continuity-laden and broken loose of the preposterous protesting over perceived lack of quantities like "originality" and "freshness".

It takes something else, something perhaps even greater than originality, to sculpt a monster that can turn your brain inside out, yes even a fan brain! Suddenly originality itself seems stale by comparison. Like reality, it’s no longer a two dimensional concept! This is a breath of tangled imagination, and that’s no mean feat in this restricting, suppressing, stale world of originality!

...can I have my money now, Mr. Russell?