The TARDIS materialises in what seems to be the town of Stockbridge, but the Doctor finds that the people have been replaced by living dolls -- all but the Doctor’s old friend, Maxwell Edison, and Max’s friend and fellow paranormal investigator, a young sci-fi fan named Izzy. Max and Izzy have stolen an object called the Focus, which is sought by the Knight Templar Marwood -- but as they and the Doctor flee Marwood’s foxhound-man hunters, they are confronted by the Celestial Toymaker, who has replaced the real Stockbridge with a toy version. The Toymaker and Marwood capture Max, but the Doctor and Izzy escape into the TARDIS and flee to the real Stockbridge, which the Toymaker is holding in a macro-dimensional pocket. There, Izzy finds her parents frozen in Time along with the rest of the village, but admits to the Doctor that she was adopted and doesn’t know who her real parents are.

Izzy and the Doctor must return to the toy Stockbridge to save Max, knowing that the Toymaker will destroy the real village unless they play his game. In a Lego castle in the clouds, they are captured by Marwood and handed over to the Toymaker. The Toymaker forces the Doctor to play ‘Hangman’ with Izzy as the victim, but rather than risk losing, the Doctor hands over the Focus. The Focus is a vital component of a mirror engine called the Imagineum, which was constructed by a race of alchemists; it was acquired by the Templars when an alien spaceship crashed on Earth, and won by the Toymaker in a game of canasta with Marwood. The Imagineum can transform light into solid matter, and the Toymaker uses it to create a toy Doctor that attacks the real one.

Izzy and Max are released into a giant game of ‘Mousetrap’, where they are pursued by Marwood’s fox-hounds; however, Izzy lures the hounds under a hundred-ton weight. When Marwood protests angrily, the bored Toymaker crushes a doll in Marwood’s likeness, killing the real Marwood. The toy-Doctor witnesses this, and accepts the real Doctor’s argument that the Toymaker will likewise dispose of him once he’s had his fill. While the toy-Doctor attacks the Toymaker, keeping him distracted, the real Doctor uses the Imagineum to create a toy Toymaker. The two Toymakers become locked in perpetual stalemate, and the toy Doctor destroys the Imagineum to ensure that they will be trapped forever. The Doctor, Izzy and Max flee back to the TARDIS, which the Doctor uses to free the real Stockbridge from the Toymaker’s dimensional pocket. The Doctor then departs, taking Izzy as his new travelling companion.

An SOS summons the Doctor and Izzy to 51st-century Earth, which has been abandoned by the rich and powerful as the sun goes nova. Those left behind have fractured into millions of nation-states, warring through the ether in battles conducted via transmat. Only one place on Earth is safe from the wars -- the transmat-shielded Keep, the source of the SOS. Inside, the Doctor and Izzy find a prototype plasma sun called the Cauldron, created by the scientist Crivello. Crivello’s robot servant Marquez unexpectedly throws the Doctor into the Cauldron, but the Doctor emerges unscathed, having made a psychic link with the living sun. Crivello aged sixty years in six seconds when he tried to communicate with it, and Marquez thus summoned a time-traveller who could survive communion with the Cauldron and tell it what to do next. The Doctor instructs the Cauldron to launch itself into space, providing humanity with a new home in the Crab Nebula where they can await their eventual return to Earth. But as the Doctor and Izzy depart, Marquez snaps Crivello’s neck, and awaits the fulfilment of his true agenda...

The TARDIS explodes, and the Doctor and Izzy awaken on a stairway to Heaven. At the top of the stairway, they face judgement in a celestial arena, and the Doctor’s old enemies General Ironicus, Josiah Dogbolter and Beep the Meep are on hand to provide literally damning testimony. But just as the monstrous judge is about to sentence the Doctor and Izzy, a grey lady rescues them from the arena and reveals the truth; they are not the real Doctor and Izzy, but simulations in the TARDIS memory banks. The TARDIS has been attacked by a Vortex parasite, and the real Doctor and Izzy are lying near death in the console room. The simulated Doctor and Izzy confront the parasite in the TARDIS datascape, and when the creature summons up more images of the Doctor’s enemies from the memory banks, the Doctor summons up images of his old friends, such as Sir Justin, Sharon and the Free-Fall Warriors. Battle is joined, and the Doctor’s friends beat a path through to the monster, which the Doctor destroys with Sir Justin’s blade. The parasite dies and falls away from the TARDIS as the real Doctor and Izzy recover, unaware that for once they have shared the TARDIS’ adventure rather than the other way around.

On Icarus Falling, a satelloid in orbit around Crivello’s Cauldron, communications seer Ptolemy Muttonchops sees a vision of Armageddon in his augury pool. However, the satelloid’s paragon, Sister Chastity, advises him to keep this vision to himself for fear of fulfilling it.

The TARDIS materialises on the satelloid, and the Doctor and Izzy are brought before its Leaderene to explain their presence. The Doctor fears that his arrival on the Cauldron that he launched into space 200 years ago is no coincidence, and his fears are confirmed when Icarus Falling is attacked by the Daleks. As the Argonauts try to hold off the invaders, the Doctor takes a sample from Muttonchops’ augury pool, realising that it’s part of the Cauldron -- which begs the question of how Muttonchops is able to survive communion with it. The Daleks then launch a Contagium, a nanite-producing weapon, into the satelloid; anyone infected by the nanites falls under Dalek control at once. Only Izzy, Chastity and Muttonchops escape. The Doctor gives Izzy his coat, which contains the sample from the augury pool, and then confronts the Daleks alone, certain that they are responsible for his arrival. The Daleks appear to exterminate him -- but this is just a trick to fool certain parties on the satelloid who are working against the Daleks. It fails, as Muttonchops can sense through his link to the Cauldron that the Doctor is still alive. He too falls victim to the Contagion, and Izzy and Chastity flee to the docking bay -- but before Izzy can try to fly a ship to the Dalek Hive and rescue the Doctor, Chastity stops her and reveals herself to be an agent of the Threshold, the agency responsible for Ace’s death.

The Doctor is reunited with Marquez, who is now revealed to be a Dalek agent who posed as Crivello’s servant in order to turn the experiment to the Daleks’ ends. Some time ago, an army of Daleks from an alternative Universe emerged through a freak spatial rift in the Magellan Cluster; they were successfully exterminated, but the Daleks can’t tolerate the thought of such creatures’ existence, and intend to traverse the timelines and wipe out all alternative versions of themselves. In order to do so they must create their own spatial rift, which is where the Cauldron comes in; since the Doctor has a psychic link with the living sun, they can use him to initiate the Cauldron’s controlled collapse and create a spatial rift through which to navigate the timelines.

The Daleks cut the connection out of the Doctor’s brain and leave him for dead, but Chastity arrives and revives him. There is no love lost between the Doctor and the Threshold, but he reluctantly agrees to help them stop the Daleks. Chastity leads him to the map room, where he locates the data conduit; if he can divert the information flow back through his own brain, he can prevent the collapse of the Cauldron. Or so he thinks. However, Izzy, now held captive in the Threshold’s base, has learned that the Threshold are working on behalf of other clients, and are using the Doctor to set a trap. When he completes the circuit, the Cauldron will consume the Dalek Hive and close again, trapping them forever -- and incidentally killing the Doctor.

The Doctor, suspicious of Chastity’s motives, halts before activating the circuit -- and then the Daleks arrive and destroy it, having found a more reliable plan. Ptolemy Muttonchops is in fact a symbiote of the Cauldron, and he is now under Dalek control. The Daleks use him to open the rift, but they have forgotten that it opens both ways -- and armies of alternative Daleks emerge from the wormhole and attack the Hive. In the ensuing chaos, Izzy uses the sample of Cauldron plasma that the Doctor took from the augury pool to distract the Threshold, and steals a Threshold ring and the prize promised to the Threshold by their clients. She uses the ring to return to the Doctor, who sees that box containing the Threshold’s reward is embossed with the Seal of Rassilon. As the Hive begins to break apart, the Doctor drops the box through a hole in the floor, and as Chastity and Marquez fight over it, the Doctor communes with Ptolemy, who frees himself from Dalek control and prepares to go nova. Izzy loses the Threshold ring, but the TARDIS appears nearby -- perhaps brought to the Hive by the Daleks, or perhaps sent by other interested parties. As the Doctor and Izzy flee, Chastity kills Marquez and opens the box, and the Cauldron goes nova, destroying the Daleks and the Hive and closing the spatial rift. The Doctor and Izzy watch from a safe distance as the Cauldron returns to normal, ensuring that the humanity will continue to survive. But Chastity reappears briefly to remind the Doctor that his last match with the Threshold is yet to be played out...

The Doctor takes Izzy to the cosmopolitan city-state of Tor-Ka-Nom, but she’s too busy reading a book about its history to go exploring with him. After a brief argument, the Doctor sets off on his own, and enters a jam shop only to find that the merchant has been killed by a madman with a hook for a hand. He tries to remove the madman’s hook, but the killer knocks him out and flees, and when the Doctor wakes, he finds himself surrounded by police, lying next to a dead body with the murder weapon in his hand. He is charged not only for this murder but for six similar crimes, and by the time Izzy tracks him down he’s already been sentenced to death. She is arrested herself when she tries to free him, but as the Doctor is taken away to be executed, Izzy realises what day it is, and uses her one phone call to send an anonymous tip to the police. The police thus catch the real killer and release the Doctor and Izzy. As they depart, Izzy explains that she had read the story of the case in her history book.

The year is 1939, and as Europe prepares for war, four visitors arrive on an unnamed island in the South Pacific to sit out the violence in luxury as guests of the eccentric Varney. Actress Sabine Snitching, the mad Canon Pincock, and the Templar knight Marwood -- the ancestor of the man the Doctor and Izzy met in Stockbridge -- each provide their host with a unique gift, but Fey Truscott-Sade, art-detective and leader of the underground Salon Aesthetic, gives him the strangest gift of all -- a whistle which summons the TARDIS. The Doctor soon realises that something odd is going on, for he’s met Fey before, and knows her to be an undercover British secret agent.

After dinner and champagne, which Izzy foregoes, Varney tells his guests the story of his ancestor, a mad pirate who made a deal with the Devil and fed on the blood of his enemies. A chalice in the dark chapel is filled with the evil captain’s blood, which has not clotted in centuries; it is said that whomsoever drinks of it will be possessed by the fiend’s spirit. That night, the pilot of the plane that brought Varney’s guests to the island is attacked and killed, and Izzy finds his body next to the empty chalice. Sabine and Marwood attempt to flee the island, but Varney has his monkey butlers blow up the seaplane; he will allow nobody to leave until the killer is caught. The building’s generator fails, and as the Doctor and Sabine set off to fix the problem, Varney locks himself in his room, and Fey follows the fleeing Pincock. Marwood, certain that Izzy is the killer, tries to shoot her...

The Doctor and Sabine find cave drawings telling of a demon that rose from the volcano and taught the monkeys to eat people. They are then attacked by a vampire monkey armed with a syringe, but Fey arrives and drives it off. She takes the Doctor and Sabine into the volcano’s extinct caldera, where they find a secret laboratory constructed by Varney and the late pilot, Lycett. British intelligence has been aware for some time that Varney has been developing biological weapons for the Nazis, and Fey was sent in undercover to find out what has happened to the hundreds of other people Lycett had secretly transported to the island. The Doctor finds vials full of blood taken from Varney’s former “guests”, and theorises that Lycett was killed because Varney’s plan is now near completion. He also discovers, too late, that their champagne was spiked with a chemical agent -- and Sabine is already beginning to change...

Marwood and Izzy find that Pincock has been killed by a monkey, and Marwood, realising that Izzy is not to blame after all, kills it. But then Marwood begins to transform into a vampire himself, and Varney sets his monkeys on Marwood, draining out all of the blood from his body. The Doctor and Fey arrive, but they too have fallen victim to the infection, and Sabine has died after stumbling into one of the biological weapons that Varney has developed. Varney takes them back to the caldera, where he reveals that a curcubite lives in the lake; it is a living alien spaceship which feeds on blood, but as the blood of the human race is unsuitable for its needs, it has been trapped on Earth for centuries. Ever since the mad pirate Varney stumbled across the curcubite, he and his descendents have been helping it, and now they have developed a serum which can transform human blood into the fuel that the ship requires. Varney has been selling biological weapons to both the Nazis and the Americans on the side, and once the curcubite is free, he will rule the world. Varney takes his place as the ship’s pilot and prepares to drain the Doctor, Fey and Izzy dry -- but as the ship feeds on the Doctor, the Doctor injects himself with one of Varney’s bioweapons. The toxin spreads through the Doctor’s blood and into the curcubite’s engines, causing it to explode. The death of the curcubite cures the Doctor and Fey of their infection, but Varney’s toxin is still killing the Doctor, and Fey and Izzy must take him back to the TARDIS and pilot it to Gallifrey to seek help.

Fey uses the TARDIS manual to take the Doctor to Gallifrey, where his mind is placed in the Matrix while his lifestream is purged of the toxins in his system. While the Doctor rests, Overseer Luther -- the eyes and ears of the Capitol -- contacts Castellan Tenion to warn her that the lunatic Xanti is approaching the Doctor. Xanti, an Academy dropout, is convinced that he is being stalked by a secret society called the Elysians, and that only the Doctor can save him; but when he arrives, the Elysians teleport in and try to kill the Doctor. The Matrix agent Shayde arrives and guns down one of the Elysians, but the others capture Xanti, the “Template”, and take Izzy as a hostage while they escape.

Within the Matrix, the Doctor confronts Rassilon about the box given to the Threshold, and learns what it contained. Rassilon then warns the Doctor that the galaxy’s High Evolutionaries have all experienced visions of a militant Gallifrey that rules all Time and Space, and sends the Doctor’s mind back to his healed body to face the threat. The captive Elysian turns out to be a clone of Xanti, and Luther asks the Doctor to help him investigate; perhaps Xanti’s father Uriel, who committed himself to an asylum shortly after the boy’s birth, will know something useful. The Doctor finds that his old enemy Tubal Cain is now the Director of Calm, and Cain, apparently reluctantly, allows him to commune with Uriel’s sleeping mind. When it seems that the Doctor cannot escape from Uriel’s madness, Fey follows him in -- and on Luther’s orders, Cain severs the connection to their bodies, trapping them both in Uriel’s mind.

Uriel himself saves the Doctor and Fey from the demons of his guilt, which take the form of Xanti and the Elysians. Uriel explains that he and Luther were members of a secret society called the Final Chapter, who planned to overturn Rassilon’s principle of non-interference. An army of clones was to be grown from Uriel’s biodata and used to seize control of Gallifrey, but when Uriel saw the face of his first child, Xanti, his military ambitions evaporated. He thus enlisted Xanti in a Chapterhouse and fled to the Quantum of Solace to hide from his guilt. Uriel helps Fey and the Doctor to escape from his madness, and Fey knocks out Cain and helps the Doctor to investigate Luther’s background. It turns out that Luther himself built most of the current Capitol, over the remains of Old Gallifrey.

The Doctor and Fey take the TARDIS to Luther’s Watchtower to confront him, only to find that they’re too late. Xanti is a living link to the Eye of Harmony, and Luther has placed him in the heart of the Watchtower, a TARDIS which he intends to pilot back to the start of the Time Lords’ history. The Watchtower will materialise around the old Gallifrey and replace it with a new world run by a military quorum, and Luther will rule the Universe. As the Watchtower goes back to Gallifrey, Day One, Xanti -- who can see the future -- tells Izzy not to be sad, and uses the telepathic link with his clones to turn them against Luther. As the Elysians turn on Luther, the Doctor opens up the doors of the Watchtower, but as Luther is sucked out into the Time Vortex, he flings his trident through Xanti’s chest, killing him. Without a living time brain at its core, the Watchtower cannot return to the present, and the Doctor realises he’ll have to take Xanti’s place. But Shayde then arrives to pass on the Matrix Lords’ thanks for the Doctor’s sacrifice, and the Doctor asks him for a favour...

Moments later, the Doctor returns to the TARDIS, sets the co-ordinates, and then distracts Izzy and Fey. When they next turn around, they see the Doctor on the scanner screen, telling them that he’ll see them in the present. He then connects himself to the Watchtower and pilots it back to present-day Gallifrey, but the stress of the journey is apparently too much, and Izzy and Fey emerge from the TARDIS to see the traumatically injured Doctor regenerate into his ninth incarnation...

As Fey and Izzy try to come to terms with the Doctor’s regeneration, the TARDIS is caught in an energy storm that destroys another ship before their eyes. Fey then unexpectedly reprogrammes the console to take them to Wormwood, a village in the American midwest circa 1880 -- or so it appears until they realise that they’re in fact on Earth’s Moon, in the home of the Threshold. The Threshold’s leader, Abraham White, finally reveals himself to them, but even he is surprised when the TARDIS seems to dematerialise by itself before he can examine it. He soon recovers, and sends Izzy and Fey to the heart of Wormwood -- where the Threshold agent Chastity informs Fey that the Threshold captured her after she first met the Doctor, and implanted a transmitter in her head so they could use her as a spy if she ever met the Doctor again. Fey, furious, overpowers Chastity and her guards, and she and Izzy take their Threshold rings; but while Izzy concentrates on finding the Doctor, the vengeful Fey concentrates on finding White.

According to White, the Threshold is finally ready to step out of the shadows after 3000 years. Before he can explain, Fey arrives and attacks him, but White defends himself by transforming into a shadow creature called the Pariah, and Fey has no choice but to back down. The Pariah then transforms back into White, who explains that, while a young man in 19th-century Arkansas, he stumbled across the dying Pariah, a superweapon that had been expelled from Gallifrey after trying to overthrow Rassilon. White bonded with the Pariah, giving her a new body with which to heal herself while she plotted her revenge. Inspired by Ford’s assembly line, White had the Pariah reproduce herself by fission, and set the mini-spheres in a dimensional void. He then recruited employees who weren’t afraid of the power he offered to them, and transformed them into living conduits to the spheres -- and these people became the agents of the Threshold.

Izzy concentrates on reaching the Doctor, but instead finds herself in the very centre of Wormwood, where a young new Threshold agent named Gracie Witherspoon is heading for the “Eye of Disharmony”. Gracie spots Izzy following her and captures her just as the Eye is activated, transforming every quantum particle in the vacuum of space into an entropic hole, turning space into a minefield and killing every living being outside a planetary atmosphere. White then takes the appalled Doctor to his transmission centre, where he intends to send out a message to the entire Universe. First he must tear the Time Lords’ gift of universal translation out of the Doctor’s brain; this is the prize they should have earned for wiping out the Daleks, but it was lost when Chastity accidentally dropped the box in the Dalek Hive. However, the Doctor points out that his newly regenerated brain is still unstable, and that since Chastity looked into the box before dropping it, she has the gift which White needs. White thus tears out the protesting Chastity’s mind instead, and then transmits a public service announcement to the entire Universe. Since travel in space is now impossible, only the Threshold can move between planets -- and they now intend to charge for their services.

Gracie arrives with her prisoner, but the Pariah realises that “Gracie” is an impostor -- and “Gracie” is thus forced to reveal that she is really the Eighth Doctor, disguised by a personal chameleon circuit. The “Ninth Doctor” is likewise revealed to be a disguised Shayde. White transforms into the Pariah, who attacks Shayde; Shayde’s psychic bullets have no effect without the will of his Time Lord masters behind them, but he still attempts to hold off the Pariah while the Doctor takes Fey and Izzy back to the TARDIS. There, he shows Fey that the TARDIS manual she used to pilot the ship to Gallifrey is written in an alien script; when she told him what she had done, he realised that it must have been translated for her by an implant in her brain. He and Shayde thus staged the “regeneration” deception, and Shayde kept the Threshold distracted while the real Doctor explored Wormwood, disguised as Gracie.

The Pariah arrives, mortally injures Shayde before their eyes and steals the TARDIS. While Fey tends to the dying Shayde, the Doctor sends Izzy to ion control with a baseball bat and sets off to confront White and the Pariah. To White’s horror, the Pariah uses the TARDIS to drain all energy from the Threshold grid, killing all of their people and overloading the Eye of Disharmony. The Pariah reveals that she intends to fulfil her destiny as the ultimate weapon by destroying everything in the Universe, but when White realises this, he deliberately separates himself from her, knowing that they’ve been bonded for so long that neither can survive for long without the other. Before the dying Pariah can kill the Doctor, Fey arrives -- having bonded with Shayde to provide him with the willpower he lacks to repair himself. “Feyde” shoots the Pariah with psychic bullets now armed with Fey’s willpower, while Izzy smashes the ion control centre to bits. The Doctor, Fey and Izzy retreat as ion control short-circuits and destroys the Moon. When the Eye of Disharmony is destroyed, space returns to normal, and the Universe is saved. Fey departs to come to terms with her new state of being, and the Doctor and Izzy set off for new adventures.

The eight Doctors are removed from their timestreams by the Beige Guardian, who sends them to fight all their old enemies at once (although they fail to see the logic in being pitted against enemies they’ve already defeated). The Sixth and Second Doctors are sent to a space station and pursued by Davros, but they manage to trick Davros into making a bad pun, and he and his army of Daleks and Quarks are destroyed by a robotic Wildean Wit Enforcer. The Third and Fifth Doctors materialise on the set of EastEnders, where the Third Doctor administers Venusian aikido to a party of drunken Sontarans and Ogrons while the Fifth Doctor beans the shapeshifting Broton with a cricket ball. The Fourth and Seventh Doctors discuss the effect of regeneration on their changing allergies, and use their sonic screwdrivers to bring down an avalanche on an advancing alien army almost as an afterthought. The First and Eighth Doctors have been strapped to explosive candles on the Guardian’s deathday cake, but as his other schemes come to naught, he is too distracted to notice as they untie themselves and use the explosives against the Guardian himself. The Guardian vanishes in a burst of electromagnetic particles; all this time, Izzy has been playing video games on the Time-Space Visualiser.

This strip celebrates the 35th anniversary of ‘Doctor Who’.

The TARDIS lands in London in the year 2001, and as the Doctor and Izzy walk past a manic street preacher, Izzy learns that the Doctor has never actually seen the movie 2001. She has to return to the TARDIS to fetch her glasses, but there, she is accosted by soldiers. The Doctor hears gunfire break out, returns to the alley to find it deserted, and is then arrested by Duncan of MI6 and his ally, Dr Grace Holloway. Leighton Woodrow, the head of MI6, allows Grace to tell the Doctor what’s happened, and he is horrified to learn that Grace has been conducting experiments on the tissue she scraped off her arm after their encounter with the Master in San Francisco. After all the hints the Doctor had dropped about her glorious future, she had concluded that her destiny was to splice Time Lord and human DNA together and find a way for human beings to regenerate. Nobody but MI6 was interested in her work, and even though she realised they intended only to create an army of shapeshifting spies, she’d gone too far to back out. But nine days ago, her associate Dr Donald Stark vanished from a locked laboratory, and ever since then people have been vanishing from the streets.

The Doctor confirms Grace’s worst fears. The Master wasn’t in a Time Lord body at all; he had possessed the body of a morphant, a shape-shifting animal native to Skaro, and now Donald Stark has tested the procedure on himself and has become a human-morphant hybrid. Stark is now being driven mad by the memories of the people he’s eaten to increase his body mass; he has already eaten the entire platoon which attempted to capture Izzy, but when he tries to eat Izzy as well, he finds an image of the Doctor in her mind, and recognises him from Grace’s story...

The Doctor realises that Stark is now living in the Effra, London’s underground river. It comes to the surface in Bradwell Park, and MI6 evacuate the inhabitants (including the manic street preacher), using a terrorist bomb scare as a cover story. The Doctor advises using carbon dioxide gas as a weapon, but when Stark arrives, he is holding Izzy prisoner and the Doctor is forced to surrender. The carbon dioxide proves useless until Grace throws a canister into Stark’s mouth and Duncan shoots it, causing an explosion of gas that cripples Stark. The now completely insane Stark drops the Doctor and Izzy and retreats through the Effra to the Thames. The Doctor seizes a helicopter filled with CO2 canisters, planning to crash it into Stark’s body and kill him. At the last moment, Woodrow points out that the helicopter has an eject button, and the Doctor thus escapes moments before the helicopter collides with Stark and explodes.

Later, the Doctor apologises to Grace for meddling in her life, and she promises to torch all that remains of the morphant DNA. The Doctor gives her a whistle so she can call him if she ever needs him again, but as he and Izzy depart, the Doctor is left with a nagging feeling that he’s overlooked something. Meanwhile, Woodrow finds the remains of Duncan lying on the Thames; last seen confronting the street preacher, who’d appeared in a security zone for the third time in 24 hours, Duncan is now dead, his body shrunken to the size of a doll...

A squad of Sontarans attacks a primitive village incapable of fighting off the marauders by themselves -- and discover too late that the primitives have a champion, a Cyberman named Kroton who still retains some of his human personality and feelings. Kroton defeats the Sontaran squad in the village and tracks down their mothership, which is preparing to produce an army of clones; there, he fights off the awakening Sontarans and sabotages the ship, destroying it and saving the village. However, Kroton is unable to join in the celebrations back at the village, as the villagers’ happiness just reminds him of all he has lost.

This strip does not feature the Doctor or Izzy, and sets up events to come in The Company of Thieves. Kroton originally appeared in the Doctor Who Weekly back-up strips Throwback and Ship of Fools.

The TARDIS misses its target and delivers the Doctor and Izzy to 17th-century Japan, where foreigners, or “gaijin”, are regarded with mistrust. They are captured by samurai who intend to take them in for questioning, but in the forest, they are attacked by a fire-breathing dragon. Izzy’s horse bolts in fear as the dragon dissolves into a cloud of miniscule particles. The survivors are then contacted by soldiers from the castle of Lord Rikushira, who invites them to his home to recover from the strange attack -- but then poisons the samurai, leaving only the Doctor alive. Meanwhile, Izzy is rescued by Katsura Sato, former samurai to Lord Makoto; Makoto was killed by demons wearing the crest of Clan Rikushira, and the disgraced Sato intends to kill Rikushira and then commit honourable seppuku. Sato kills a squad of Rikushira’s soldiers and disguises himself in a dead man’s uniform, and Izzy agrees to act as his prisoner so he can get into the castle.

The Doctor is brought before Rikushira’s mother, Asami, who has been contacted by nameless aliens from beyond time and space who seek to understand the concept of “honour”. To this end, in order to study Asami’s reactions, the Gaijin have supplied her with a nano-sculptor that creates colonies of nanites shaped by Asami’s mind. She has already exacted revenge for a past dishonour by killing Makoto, and she now intends to destroy the rule of the shogun. In exchange for his help with their studies, the Gaijin have also provided Rikushira with a colony of nano-drones programmed to repair cellular damage instantly, granting him immortality. The Doctor is infuriated with the Gaijin, who have supplied advanced technology to those who are incapable of handling it maturely, but they see no difference between their own actions and the Doctor’s interference in human affairs.

The Gaijin have told Asami that the Doctor is a lord of Time, and she has lured him to her castle to learn about her country’s future. She is unable to read his mind, but when Izzy is brought before her, Asami reads Izzy’s mind -- and sees the nuclear holocaust of World War Two. Furious, she prepares to take pre-emptive vengeance upon the West, but she is distracted when Sato attacks her guards, trying to get to Rikushira. As the Doctor and Izzy flee, Asami sends out monsters created by the nano-drones, which take on the form of the anime characters from Izzy’s imagination -- but Asami’s rage is now overpowering, and the nano-demons turn on her own guards as well, while the palace is attacked by Gojiro, otherwise known as Godzilla. Sato kills Rikushira, but is himself mortally wounded by a fire-breathing demon. At Izzy’s request, the Doctor saves his life with the immortality drones intended for Rikushira. Realising that Asami is beyond reason, the Doctor manages to explain to the Gaijin that true honour means taking responsibility for one’s own actions, regardless of the cost. The Gaijin understand, and turn on Asami, destroying the nano-sculptor even though it costs them their lives.

As the Doctor and Izzy prepare to depart, Sato tries to commit seppuku but discovers that he is unable to kill himself, as the nano-drones in his body instantly repair any damage. He is now virtually immortal. He allows the Doctor to live for Izzy’s sake, but will never forgive the man who cheated him of his honourable death.

The TARDIS materialises in the path of an alien fugitive’s ship just as the alien engages his dimensional transbobulator, and both ships are drawn into a parallel Universe. The alien ship crashes into the BBC Television Centre on the afternoon of 12 October 1979 (coincidentally, Izzy’s birthday) -- and its occupant, the infamous Beep the Meep, uses black star radiation from his star drive to enslave the building’s inhabitants. The Doctor is captured and brought before the Meep, who refuses to believe that this is the same man who defeated him before. The Doctor also falls under the spell of the black star radiation, but Izzy remains free -- and finds the one man who can help her. The Meep is about to link his star drive to the BBC’s transmitter, bringing the whole of Britain under his control, when to his horror he is confronted by a babbling man with curly hair, buggy eyes and an immensely long scarf -- the very image of the Doctor who defeated him so long ago. While the Meep is distracted, Izzy sabotages his star drive, overloading the BBC transmitter and freeing the employees of the Television Centre. As the furious Meep is led off to the zoo, Izzy admits to the Doctor that she had help defeating the Meep -- and to explain, she gives the Doctor a copy of the first issue of a certain magazine...

Note: This strip celebrates the 20th anniversary of ‘Doctor Who Magazine’.

The TARDIS materialises aboard a cargo freighter just as space pirates attack and slaughter the crew. The pirate ship is itself destroyed by an energy beam that draws the cargo freighter into a nearby asteroid belt. While trying to avoid the pirates, the Doctor and Izzy are confronted by a Cyberman hiding in the freighter’s cargo hold, and the Doctor electrocutes it; however, it survives, and is revealed to be Kroton, the only Cyberman ever to survive conversion without losing his individual identity. The TARDIS is removed from the cargo bay, and the Doctor, Izzy and Kroton investigate to find that it has been stolen by a madman named Tobal Reist who destroyed his home planet while testing a weapon that turned out to be far more powerful than he imagined. The weapon has maintained an atmospheric bubble around this planetary fragment, enabling Reist to survive, and it has now brought him a time machine he can use to return home. The pirates kill Reist and try to seize the weapon, but Izzy grabs it and orders it to self-destruct, which it does. The asteroid city begins to break up without the weapon to hold it together, and as the surviving pirates argue over who will use the transmat unit to get to safety, the Doctor and Izzy retreat to the TARDIS and escape... along with Kroton.

The TARDIS, apparently acting of its own accord, takes the Doctor, Izzy and Kroton to Paradost, a planet-wide museum. Here, buried memories can be stored and accessed by use of mnemonic crystals, but Kroton refuses to use them, as he doesn’t want the pain of remembering his old life before Cyber-conversion. The people of Paradost are about to return the long-lost final page of the holy Odostra to Cardinal Morningstar, of the planet Dhakan’s Church of the Glorious Dead -- a church that believes that existence is an illusion and that only the faithful will be allowed to exist when the Glory remakes creation. The Doctor recognises the handwriting in the Odostra and becomes seriously worried, but before he can act, Morningstar orders his followers to fulfil the final page’s prophecy by launching a jihad and destroying Paradost utterly.

The Dhakanians use the “soul gems” implanted in their bodies to incinerate themselves, and are apparently resurrected as Ash Wraiths, burning spectres who take the peaceful Paradost completely by surprise. The Wraiths establish a force barrier around the planet, preventing the galaxy’s allied forces from launching a counter-attack. The Doctor comes up with a plan to save the world, but abruptly vanishes into thin air before he can reveal it, leaving Izzy and Kroton stranded on Paradost as the Dhakanians slaughter entire cities. Eventually, Izzy comes to understand the Doctor’s last cryptic words, and she leads an attack on Paradost’s weather control station and creates a world-wide blizzard. As she had hoped, the burning Ash Wraiths freeze to death in the ice storm, and without their support, the force barrier collapses. But before Izzy can escape, Morningstar shoots her with a Tissue Compression Eliminator...

The Doctor is drifting through different realities, each of which contains a different version of himself. Eventually, he realises that these are all aspects of a single, greater being, of which even he is only one facet. When he comes to this understanding, Esterath the Gatherer appears to him and explains that he has been chosen as an Adversary in the battle to control the Glory -- the heart of the omniversal spectrum, the fulcrum of all that is. The living being that maintains the Glory is nearing the end of a nearly infinite life, and must be replaced by the most worthy of two adversaries. The Doctor is therefore transported to Dhakan, which he realises is a corrupted future Earth -- and there he meets his adversary, the Master, who now lives in the body of the street preacher the Doctor failed to notice during his encounter with Grace Holloway and Donald Stark.

After their battle in San Francisco, the Master was cast into the Vortex, where his hatred of the Doctor attracted Esterath’s attention. Believing that he had found a suitable champion, Esterath showed the Glory to the Master, and placed his mind in the body of a human vagrant to teach him humility before the final battle. But the Master’s essence had remained lodged in the Doctor’s TARDIS when it absorbed him, and soon after the Doctor’s battle with the Pariah, the Master found that he could control the TARDIS’ flight. To humiliate the Doctor and show him what his meddling had done, he thus transported the Doctor to Brixton to see what had become of Grace, and then to Japan, where the Gaijin’s quest for knowledge -- a parallel of the Doctor’s -- caused only death and destruction. While the Doctor was nearly killing the innocent Kroton, the Master was on Earth, acting as a sensei to Katsura Sato, the samurai who had been granted immortality by the Doctor and thus lost the ability to commit seppuku. Unable to find meaning in a life without pain, Sato fell under the thrall of the Master, who inspired him to become Cardinal Morningstar and launch the holy war that turned Earth into Dhakan. With the help of the Ash Wraiths, psionic parasites who require others’ willing sacrifice to enter this plane of existence, the Master had Sato destroy Paradost just to show the Doctor what his meddling had done. But now he has finished playing games with the Doctor, and the time has come for them to fight, to see who will become the Glory and who will die.

Somehow, Izzy has survived being shrunken to the size of a doll, and she too is horrified to learn Morningstar’s true identity. Sato and his followers retreat from Paradost and return to Dhakan, where Sato believes that his Master will defeat the Doctor and become a god. The Doctor is unwilling to sacrifice himself to the Glory, but he will nevertheless fight to prevent the Master from gaining control over all Creation. As he and his nemesis do battle throughout uncountable dimensions and states of being, the Master chips away at the Doctor’s sense of righteousness, reminding him that his quest for knowledge spreads death in its wake, and that he enjoys being the self-elected champion of what is right. The Doctor finally realises that the Master is right; he is no more worthy of the Glory than is the Master. This moment of self-doubt allows the Master to get past his defenses and strike a killing blow. The battle won, he takes the Doctor back to Dhakan to witness his apotheosis.

Kroton has stowed away aboard Sato’s mothership and followed him to Dhakan, where he intends to avenge Izzy by killing Sato. As they do battle, Izzy manages to break out of her prison and set the TCE to reverse, restoring herself to full size. Sato, immortal and invincible, withstands all of the Cybermen’s blows, but just as he is about to kill Kroton, Izzy confronts him with a mnemonic crystal and forces him to experience the full impact of all the pain and horror she felt on Paradost. As Sato collapses in horror, finally understanding what he has done, Izzy forces Kroton to accept a crystal as well, and he finally remembers his past life -- and becomes the stronger for it. At this moment, the Master arrives, but when he tries to take his place in the Glory, it rejects him. He and the Doctor were not the adversaries after all; Kroton and Sato were. Technology extended both their lives and robbed them of meaning, but by turning to hope instead of despair, Kroton has won the battle. Kroton thus becomes the heart of the Glory, and he restores Earth’s history, banishes the enraged Master, and grants Sato’s dearest wish by giving him an honourable death. Esterath reveals that he was the adversary during the last battle for the Glory, but that he allowed his rage to get the better of him; he now expunges all trace of the Master’s influence from the TARDIS and dissipates, having atoned for his past sins. The Doctor and Izzy go on to new adventures.

On behalf of a friend, the Doctor visits Blueberry House, where Dr Andrelina Hastoff is in charge of rehabilitating robots with “severe programming deviancy”. While she discusses her work with the Doctor, one of her cloned assistants “accidentally” locks Izzy in the robot congregation chamber, where Izzy is nearly attacked by the mad robots until they realise that she’s human -- just as they believe themselves to be. The depressed Emperor Zero tells Izzy that they are all human beings who have been locked up by robots, and the Doctor, watching, realises that the robots have formed their own society. They aren’t insane, they’re sentient; and just like children, they are developing emotions that they aren’t sure how to deal with. Hastoff, however, insists that their deviancy is the result of an undetected virus, and reveals that she has purchased an Adjuster from Kallulio Prime with which to electronically recondition the “deviant” machines, returning them to “normal”. The Doctor is horrified, and realises that Hastoff had Izzy locked in the congregation chamber in the hope that the robots would harm her, giving Hastoff an excuse to use the Adjuster on them all. When he threatens to shut her down, Hastoff tries to kill him with the Adjuster; however, by this time, Izzy has decided that the Doctor must be in trouble, and she and Zero thus break out of the congregation chamber to look for him. They find the Doctor being chased by the Adjuster, and Zero gives his life to destroy its guidance systems so that it careers off a balcony and sinks to the bottom of the bay. Angered by Zero’s death, the robots storm through Blueberry House -- but although they capture Hastoff, they don’t kill her. As the Doctor had hoped, they understand mercy; they are maturing, and one day they will be accepted by humanity as equals.

The Doctor and Izzy are sightseeing in the Andrallis Nebula when the TARDIS is swallowed by an enormous spaceship in the shape of a snake. A force field prevents them from escaping, and they emerge to find themselves in an enclosed jungle-like interior full of damaged starships. An eye-shaped station floats in the middle of it all, observing events. Unaware that their every move is being monitored by an alien named Panoquai, who has time-shifted nanoseconds into the future to avoid detection, they explore further and are attacked by a herd of Mobox, silicon-based predators that disintegrate their prey with bio-energy streams. A fish-woman named Destrii rescues them at the last moment, but the Gorolith who controls the world-snake decides that things have become too complicated and orders Panoquai to kill them all. Before he can do so, the Doctor detects his presence and grabs his arm, forcibly phasing him into the present and causing him to lose consciousness from the shock.

Destrii takes them all to her camp, which is located behind a hole in the jungle wall. The remote drones which are supposed to repair the damage are malfunctioning in this area, and the Doctor picks one up for later study. In the meantime, he decides to use Panoquai’s time-cloak to explore further. Left alone, Izzy and Destrii share life stories, and seem to hit it off, as they both left their own worlds to seek adventure. When Panoquai awakens, Destrii and Izzy force him to lead them to a transmat, which takes them to the central eye-station; there, Destrii finds a machine which she claims is a telepathic transmitter Izzy can use to locate the Doctor. Izzy allows Destrii to connect her to the machine -- and it transfers her mind into Destrii’s body, and vice versa. Destrii is in fact on the run, and she intends to destroy her old body, throwing her pursuers off the trail while she escapes with the Doctor in Izzy’s body. She finds herself unable to shoot and kill her old body, and thus sets the machine to overload and explode. She shoots Panoquai as she goes, but with the last of his strength, he releases Izzy so she can take revenge against Destrii.

Inside the floating eye, the Doctor finds hundreds of beings like Panoquai -- some of whom are restrained and are vowing revenge. Just as he reaches the Gorolith’s chamber, the time-cloak is discovered and forced back into phase, and the Doctor is taken prisoner by bipedal Mobox wearing the clothing of the Ophidians. Given the opportunity to make a final statement, he requests confirmation of his suspicions, which are correct; the Ophidians are dying, and intend to transfer their race’s minds into stronger bodies. They have thus kidnapped several space travellers and used a psionic field to revert them to an animalistic state in order to determine which are the strongest. The world-snake Ophidius is now taking them all to the Mobox homeworld, where they will use their psionic agitators to transform the entire race into beasts, unable to resist when the Ophidians take over their bodies.

The Doctor creates a distraction and flees, having slipped the malfunctioning spider-drone into the control systems; thus, while the Ophidians pursue him, the drone causes the anti-grav systems and psionic agitators to fail. The eye crashes into the jungle, where the Ophidians’ victims find their intelligence returning. Enraged at what has been done to them, they attack the eye-station and begin to slaughter the Ophidians, ignoring the Doctor’s pleas for mercy. He frees the Mobox who have been transferred into Ophidian bodies, telling them to hide until their own kind stop killing every Ophidian in sight. He then tries to deactivate the Gorolith before it can trigger Ophidius’ self-destruct circuits, but is attacked by its organic defenses. At the last moment, “Izzy” apparently appears and guns down the Gorolith, saving the Doctor’s life. He is taken aback by her casual display of violence, and tricks her into slipping up, revealing that she is really Destrii. Destrii tries to force the Doctor to take her back to the TARDIS, but then her crimes catch up to her. On her way to find the Doctor she was confronted by an angry Mobox, and killed it when it tried to prevent her from escaping -- but this was witnessed by the Mobox’s lover. The grief-stricken Mobox tracks her down just as the real Izzy arrives -- and Izzy, still in Destrii’s body, watches in horror as her old body is blasted to ashes...

Issue 300 marks the comic strip’s change to full colour from black-and-white.

The Doctor finds Izzy huddled in her room, still shattered by her sudden transformation into a fish-person. The Doctor tries to convince her to see this as an opportunity, but it’s too much of a nightmare for her to handle. She begs the Doctor to take her back in time so she can warn her past self, but that’s one rule even he can’t break. She can never go home again. Enraged, she lashes out at the Doctor and runs out into the TARDIS corridor, where she collapses, dying; her new, amphibious body needs water to survive. The Doctor carries her to the TARDIS pool and submerges her, forcing her to breathe through her gills. After some resistance, she does so, and then collapses in tears. Later, she joins the Doctor in the console room, having changed back into her old clothing -- such as will fit her new body. Shoes will be a problem, and so will trusting people. She’s not going to make the same mistake again...

The Doctor traces a strange energy signature to the Mexican village of Coyoacan on 2 November 1941. This is the Day of the Dead, when the people of the cities build shrines to their lost loved ones and welcome their spirits into their homes; in this culture death is to be faced, not feared. Izzy is afraid of how people will react when they see that she isn’t human, and stays in the TARDIS while the Doctor goes out to investigate. Feeling guilty, she eventually disguises herself in a floppy hat and scarf and goes out looking for him; but instead, she sees a strange light in a nearby window, and watches as the ghost of a young man embraces his loving parents... and liquefies their flesh, drinking it down and leaving only skeletal remains.

Izzy flees in terror and is struck by a car driven by artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Frida, fascinated by Izzy’s appearance, takes her back home to recover while Diego goes looking for the “Doctor” whom Izzy mentioned in her delirium. Izzy recovers, but panics when she sees the skeletal decorations and tries to flee; however, Frida’s late father then appears and beckons Frida towards him, and Izzy knocks her aside, saving her life. The “ghost” attacks Izzy, smashing apart the shrine to Frida’s father, and the furious Frida shoots him, causing him to burst apart into ashes. Izzy tells Frida what she saw earlier, and realises that the photo of Frida’s father from the shrine is now blank. As she and Frida set off in search of Diego and the Doctor, Izzy tells the curious Frida about her recent change and shows her a photo of the human girl she used to be. Frida becomes angry when Izzy claims she can’t understand what Izzy is going through; Frida’s spine was shattered in a bus crash years ago, and although she’s learned to walk again, she lives with pain every day of her life. Izzy isn’t the only one who’s woken up to find herself trapped in an alien body...

Diego sees a strange light in Costillio Park, and finds the Doctor hiding in the bushes and observing an alien spacecraft. Assuming that the aliens are friendly like Izzy, Diego rushes out to greet them before the Doctor can stop him, and they are thus captured by the Torajenn, aliens like demonic glowing skeletons. The Doctor describes their bodies as plasma matrices held together by bio-nuclear containment fields, and the Torajenn leader, Voreseth, realises that he’s no native of this world. He thus takes the Doctor and Diego to his mistress, Susini of the Wasting Wall -- a necrotist who creates art by killing the innocent, holding that a true act of creation must be born of destruction. The Torajenn struck a deal with her to steal the flesh they need to rebuild their bodies, providing her with the bones as raw material for her next creation. They lost their own bodies due to a side-effect of a weapon used in their last war, but they have the power to psionically strip the flesh of other species if their victims are too weak to resist. They also have the ability to subtract images from photographs and take the form of the people within; and as this is the Day of the Dead, all of the people of Coyoacan will have placed photographs of their loved ones in shrines and will even be expecting them to show up. They will offer no resistance when the Torajenn arrive to strip the flesh from their bones...

Susini has been looking for a Time Lord for some time, and she leaves a Torajenn to guard him and to take Diego apart. The Torajenn guard reveals that his people intend to turn on Susini once they have what they want, which is no more than the Doctor had expected. He attacks the guard with a burning bone from one of Susini’s other “sculptures”, but the fire has no effect; the ship’s fire alarm, however, sends the Torajenn into convulsions, causing it to burst into ashes. The Doctor realises that sonic disruption interferes with the Torajenn’s containment fields, and he and Diego come up with a plan involving the guard’s transmat platform.

Izzy and Frida go to the nearby cemetery to deliver a warning to the people of the city, but the revellers retreat from Izzy in terror. When the Torajenn descend, one of them takes the form of Izzy’s human self, and Izzy, shaken by the people’s reaction to her, nearly gives in to it. Frida shoots at the creature, and she and Izzy realise that it’s not the bullets but the sound of the gunfire that is injuring it. They set off the fireworks which were intended for display later, forcing the Torajenn to reveal their true natures and driving them away from the cemetery, saving the villagers’ lives.

Susini builds a vast skeletal tower out of the remains of the Torajenn’s victims, while the Torajenn clothe themselves in the flesh which she doesn’t need. The Doctor arrives and distracts her by criticising her creation as unoriginal, giving Diego the opportunity to materialise behind her and use the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver against Voreseth. It has little effect, but the Doctor realises that Susini’s ultrasonic projector is not one of her artistic tools but a weapon she intended to use should the Torajenn turn against her. He steals it and uses it to destroy the Torajenn, and when Susini tries to kill him, Diego knocks her into the vortex she was using to build the tower, permanently embedding her in her own creation. The people of Coyoacan decide to leave the tower where it stands as a memorial to the dead, while Frida paints a picture of Izzy’s human self to replace the photo she lost, telling Izzy to face the future on her own terms and never forget who she truly is.

Due to “unforeseen circumstances”, Episode 2 was pushed back for an issue; its place in Issue 307 was taken by a reprint of the classic ’60s strip, Flower Power.

The Doctor takes Izzy to the planet Kyrol so his old friend, marine biologist Alison Lavelle, can study Izzy’s new amphibious body and help her to understand it better. Alison is currently serving on the submarine Argus, which is exploring the oceans of Kyrol. The human colonists believe that there are no dangerous predators on the planet -- but when the submarine begins to scan the previously unexplored Asamda Ridge, it is struck by an electromagnetic pulse that disables the sub’s engines and causes it to crash on the sea bed. A squad of Daleks then boards the submarine -- but rather than killing the crew, they merely stun them, and make their way to the reactor simply in order to shut it down safely. And rather than trying to kill the Doctor, they greet him as their saviour.

The Daleks then attach anti-grav propulsion units to the submarine and take it into the Ridge, where a huge Dalek city is hidden underground. This is Azhra Korr, home of thousands of the humanised Daleks which the Second Doctor once created. Their leader, Alpha, reveals that he and his Daleks fled Skaro at the end of their civil war, and sought refuge here, in a world which Alpha had seen in his mind. Decades of meditation have enabled these Daleks to develop their natural psychokinetic abilities, and they follow the ways of peace now; they are not responsible for the EMP which disabled the Argus, and acted to save its crew from certain death. But the Universe still fears the Daleks, and they therefore destroy the sub, informing the humans that they can never leave Azhra Korr to take their story to the outside world.

The Doctor tries to convince Alpha that this is not the way forward, and Alpha concedes that the EMP must be investigated -- but first, he forces the Doctor to agree not to try to contact the humans on the surface. However, Captain Julius Otago won’t listen to the Doctor -- the humans are all convinced that these Daleks will turn on them any moment, and the Daleks also fear that the humans pose a threat to their way of life. Knowing that this situation will only lead to violence, the Doctor steals an anti-grav unit and sends Izzy to attach it to the TARDIS so he can bring it back up to the surface and rescue the crew of the Argus. He and Alpha then set off to investigate the mysterious EMP, into tunnels which cause strange fears and forebodings to surface in the minds of the Daleks. However, soon after their departure, Julius and his men manage to jury-rig a weapon, steal one of the Dalek guns, and kill the Dalek guards on the ship that originally brought Alpha and his people to Kyrol, intending to send a warning to the humans on the surface. Outside the ship, violence erupts when a panic-stricken human colonist finally snaps and attacks a Dalek...

The Doctor and Alpha finally reach a large cavern beneath Azhra Korr, where they find Kata-Phobus, the last native Kyrolian -- a giant octopus-like creature with dozens of eyes and tentacles. Kata-Phobus reveals that it used its own telepathic abilities to summon the Daleks to Kyrol, and claims that it tried to destroy the Argus in order to protect them from discovery; but now Alpha’s altruism has led to violence and death in Azhra Korr. The Doctor questions Kata-Phobus’ motives, but Kata-Phobus then reveals that it’s captured Izzy and the TARDIS, and the Doctor is forced to admit that he went back on his word to Alpha. Enraged by this betrayal, Alpha tries to kill the Doctor, but misses and hits Kata-Phobus. The Doctor then uses the anti-grav unit to fling the TARDIS towards Alpha, stunning him, and he and Izzy escape with the TARDIS, heading back to Azhra Korr.

Kata-Phobus recovers and travels to Azhra Korr, where he begins to drain the psychokinetic energy out of the Daleks. He is the last of his kind because he devoured all of the others, and he only drew the Daleks here so he could farm them. With the strength he takes from them he will go on to wipe out the human colony. Alpha realises that his people have been used, and calls on them to do the right thing -- and every single Dalek in Azhra Korr self-destructs simultaneously, interrupting Kata-Phobus’ feeding cycle and killing him. Thousands of Daleks have given up their own lives for the sake of the humans, but not all of the humans seem to appreciate the sacrifice. Disgusted, both with the humans and with himself, the Doctor takes his leave -- but before he and Izzy can enter the TARDIS, two glowing figures emerge from a swirling vortex in mid-air, having tracked down the woman they believe to be Destriianatos. Before the Doctor can protest, they stun him and transport Izzy back “home”...

Austria, November 1941. Fey Truscott-Sade and Jacob Gansmann are fleeing from the Nazis, having stolen the troop movement schedule for the Fifth Panzer Division, but Jacob is badly wounded in their flight and urges Fey to leave him behind. However, when Colonel Kessler catches up to Jacob he sets his dog on him, and Fey, hearing this, refuses to let it pass. She thus forces Shayde, the living Gallifreyan weapon with whom she has merged, to help her slide through the shadows and use psychic bullets to kill Kessler and his soldiers. Upset by Jacob’s brutal death, she lashes out at Shayde for refusing to let her use their powers to kill Hitler and the other Nazis in the inner party, due to the damage he claims this would cause to the web of Time. This old argument must be shelved, however, when Shayde receives a call for help from the Doctor...

Note: This strip does not feature the Doctor, and serves as a prologue for the following strip, Uroborous.

Fey answers the Doctor’s summons to find him in an uncharacteristically angry mood. He needs Shayde’s help to trace Izzy’s kidnappers through the Vortex, but since the creatures had been tracking him and Izzy, the path leads first to Coyoacan, Mexico, and then to the world-snake Ophidius. Ophidius’ power inhibitor is operating again, and the Doctor is furious when he finds that the TARDIS is thus unable to dematerialize. Fey, concerned for her friend, sets off to find the inhibitor and shut it down -- but as the Doctor heads back to the TARDIS, he is captured by Mobox led by Major H’rakk, who recognizes the Doctor from their previous encounter and decides to take him to Presidor B’rostt for questioning. Ophidius is now moored in the atmosphere of the Mobox homeworld, and B’rostt, the Mobox who destroyed Izzy’s old body, is now in charge, having played on his people’s fears of invasion to seize power. The Doctor realizes that B’rostt is using his personal experience as an excuse to stifle freedom on his homeworld, but refuses to get involved, as he’s only concerned with getting away and rescuing Izzy; however, the seer C’sorr, cursed or gifted with the ability to foresee the future, seems to believe that the Doctor will have a part to play in the events to come nonetheless.

Fey finds her way to the biorganic world-snake’s central nervous system, where she sees the Mobox and Ophidians working together to restore Ophidius’ power of flight. She is spotted and blasted down by the Mobox scientist S’lokk, and as she does not disintegrate, S’lokk realizes that she is not fully corporeal and places her in a neural-static net for further study and possible dissection. When he reports her capture to B’rostt, B’rostt concludes that she and the Doctor are working together to steal Ophidius, and orders H’rakk to kill the Doctor. Meanwhile, Fey notes that S’lokk is forcing the Ophidians to work for him on pain of torture, and confers with Shayde on how to escape -- but in order to bypass the neural field without destroying Fey’s mind, Shayde will have to take full possession of her body.

The Doctor forces H’rakk’s flyer down in a pool in the jungle, and swims to safety while the silicon-based H’rakk sinks to the bottom. Much to the Doctor’s shock, he then runs into Destrii, who reveals that, although the Mobox can disintegrate their prey with the isotetric particles their bodies generate, they can also store the patterns of that prey and reconstitute it later if they so choose. B’rostt reconstituted Destrii in the jungle and dropped her in a pool full of pirahna-like mykkadon to die slowly, but somebody poured poison in the well and left her a rope so she could climb out; she’s been fending for herself in the jungle ever since. The Doctor is furious with himself, for if he’d researched the biology of the Mobox he could have saved Izzy months of anguish. Destrii doesn’t particularly care -- but when the Doctor reveals that he’s got a way off this planet, she decides to throw her lot in with him anyway. On his way back to Ophidius, the Doctor stops off to see C’sorr, who warns him that he’s too late; the world-eater has already woken.

S’lokk successfully reactivates Ophidius’ central neural processor, but realizes too late that he is not in control; the world-snake has an intelligence of its own, and it slaughters the Mobox and Ophidians inside itself and begins to destroy the city beneath it, calling for the Saviour. Fey allows Shayde to take control of her body to get through the net, but he refuses to return control to her just yet, claiming that he must destroy Ophidius despite Fey’s moral scruples. Fey, however, points out that Ophidius is a living weapon with no control over what it was created to do... like Shayde himself. Shayde acknowledges her point and surrenders control of Fey’s body to her again.

As C’sorr helps his fellow villagers to evacuate, the Doctor and Destrii steal a flyer and head back to Ophidius to stop its rampage. Once inside, the Doctor realizes that the Saviour whom Ophidius is seeking is not himself, but Destrii, who killed the Gorolith and freed Ophidius from its control. At first, Destrii is prepared to let Ophidius kill all of the Mobox, but Fey bluffs her by holding her at gunpoint, and Destrii thus tells Ophidius that it doesn’t have to destroy all of the Mobox to prove that it’s stronger than them. However, when B’rostt and his guards arrive and attempt to kill the Doctor, Destrii and Fey, Ophidius strikes them down instantly.

Before leaving, the Doctor stops off to see C’sorr one last time, realizing that he engineered this situation by freeing Destrii from the pool. However, while C’sorr can foresee the future, he is just as much a pawn of it as any of them, and he warns the Doctor that the one he seeks will remain lost to him. Refusing to accept this, the Doctor returns to the TARDIS, where he coldly informs Destrii that, despite her terror of the place she came from, she’s going back with him and Fey whether she likes it or not. The Doctor is going to save Izzy and restore her body to her, and nothing and nobody will get in his way...

Izzy awakens in a bizarre court populated by grotesque animal/human hybrids who believe her to be the Primatrix Destriianatos, daughter of the Matriax Scalamanthia -- a violent matriarch who orders her “daughter” to prepare for her coming wedding. Outside the court, the TARDIS materialises in an urban wasteland festooned with skulls, on a world which isn’t listed in the TARDIS data banks. Fey sets off in search of the real Izzy, but the real Destrii then flees, telling a group of passing peasants that the Doctor is from the castle. The angry peasants attack him, but he is rescued by the leonine Jodafra, Destrii’s uncle, who detected the arrival of the Doctor’s TARDIS. Jodafra is also a scientist who built the chronon capsule that first enabled Destrii to escape Oblivion, and as her test flight has proven that his theories are sound, he needs only a suitable power source in order to escape the planet himself.

Fey enters the palace, where Scalamanthia, assuming that she’s trying to help Destrii escape, orders Helioth and Hassana -- the twin energy-based beings who kidnapped Izzy from Kyrol -- to destroy the intruder. With Shayde’s guidance, Fey survives the assault and retreats to safety outside the city’s protective dome. Outside the city, the twins are no longer bound to obey the Matriax, and instead they greet Fey as one who is like them, two minds co-existing as one. Fey explains why she’s here, and the twins return to the city to “fix” the broken Destrii.

Destrii learns that this is the day of her wedding and rushes to the palace, unwilling to see her old body destroyed. Izzy is shocked when she’s marched into a killing arena where she must prove her worthiness to wed by fighting a duel to the death with the vengeful Lady Tetronnia. At the last moment the real Destrii arrives and stabs Tetronnia in the back, and then Hassana and Helioth arrive and use their powers to switch Destrii and Izzy’s minds back into their own bodies. In the process, they momentarily share each other’s memories. Destrii sees how Izzy withdrew into herself after learning she was adopted, and was never able to trust herself or reveal her feelings for other girls; Izzy sees how Destrii was punished and abused all her life, forced to fight duels to the death in the arena and treated with reverence and fear by everyone but her uncle Jodafra.

The Doctor and Jodafra arrive in the arena just as the enraged Scalamanthia begins to beat her daughter for making a mockery of their traditions -- but Destrii, finally pushed too far, stabs her mother to death. At the moment of the Matriax’s death, a horde of creatures just like the twins, ten billion strong, descends upon the city, melting away anyone and anything in their path. Fey rescues the others and takes them back to Jodafra’s laboratory, where he explains that the ruling families of this world once unleashed upon their enemies a biological weapon that stripped away its victims’ minds. The elite sealed themselves inside this citadel to wait until the plague burned itself out, but instead it transformed its victims into psychic generators with no sense of invidivual identity. The Horde’s power shielded this planet from the rest of the Universe and transformed the royal family into monsters, and ever since they’ve been forced to fight for the Horde’s amusement. Presumably some vestige of memory kept them deferential to their Matriax, and now that she’s gone there’s nothing holding them back.

Destrii, shaken by her experiences, surrenders to the Horde, perhaps wanting to be punished -- but instead, they pour all of their energy into her. The Doctor realises that the people of the Horde have no identities of their own, and that the gladiatorial combats were meant to weed out a leader. Destrii now has all the power of the Horde at her disposal, but as she prepares to strike back at the cruel palace that destroyed her childhood, Izzy reminds her that she’s always wanted to be free -- and as long as she’s the core of the Horde, they’ll be with her for the rest of her life. Destrii, confused, follows her uncle back to his laboratory, where the Doctor has just realised the truth; Jodafra sent Destrii into the Vortex as a distraction, and while the twins were searching for her, he constructed a psionic extractor with which he intends to use to drain the psychic energy out of the Horde and into his chronon capsule. Realising that even her uncle has used her, Destrii makes her own decision what to do next -- she grabs the capsule with Jodafra inside, carries it up above the city, and draws the Horde into it. The capsule vanishes in a burst of psychic energy, and Destrii recovers inside, mortal once again. Now she and her uncle are free to travel throughout time and space together.

The surviving courtiers flee in terror as the peasants raid the palace, realising that their rule is at an end. Izzy has come to terms with who she really is at last, and after kissing Fey farewell she asks the Doctor to take her home so she can set things right with her adoptive parents. The Doctor returns her to Stockbridge at the moment her younger self first started travelling with him, and after bidding him a fond farewell, she returns home, having grown and learned from her travels.

The Doctor, feeling somewhat morose, visits a bar on an alien world to ponder his role in the Universe. The bar’s owner, “Bish,” notes his new customer’s attitude and gets him talking, and the Doctor confesses that he’s recently been making mistakes, losing his temper and getting other people hurt. As he speaks, however, a female robot named Zalda bursts into the bar to confront her robot lover Renaldo; he’s been having affairs with other robots behind her back, and she’s set her mesonic reactor to overload and take out Bish’s entire bar. The Doctor manages to talk her down, sympathising with her pain, and as she collapses in tears he switches off her reactor and has her sent to the Carstairs Cybernetics Institute for treatment. Cheered by the patrons’ gratitude, the Doctor accepts Bish’s advice to stop taking things so seriously and decides to take a holiday. As the Doctor leaves, “Bish” -- full name Frobisher -- closes up for the night, morphs back to his penguin shape and goes home with his wife Caralla, both he and the Doctor unaware that they’ve just had a close encounter with an old friend...

The TARDIS is drawn off course by a parastatic vortex beam and materialises in a football arena in 1977. Investigating the presence of alien technology on Earth, the Doctor questions young fan Billy Wilkins, who tells him that Delchester United has been performing poorly since the Shakespeare brothers, Milo and Frank, bought out the team. The Doctor is then attacked by two monstrous Morgs who believe that the Doctor is an agent of the Galactic Police, but he escapes, waits for nightfall and then returns to the stadium. There, he meets Ray “Butch” Stobbs, a disgruntled player who hasn’t been allowed to participate in the new special training programmes -- because he’s too dim-witted for the alien hypnotic conditioning to work on him...

The hypnotised players are being used as slaves to tend to a vast alien being embedded in the ground beneath the stadium; the team’s performance has suffered because they’ve been too tired to play. Billy Wilkins breaks into the stadium to help the Doctor because there’s nothing good on TV, and helps Stobbs to distract the Morg killer-unit which the Shakespeare brothers have sent to kill the Doctor. The Doctor confronts the Shakespeare brothers, who are revealed to be components of a single biological entity, the Prime Morg, which absorbed all life on its homeworld and has spread out to consume the universe. A seed of the Morg’s being, a Nukaryote, was planted on Earth centuries ago and has been absorbing life energy from the planet ever since; the Prime Morg has now returned to absorb it into itself.

Believing that the Galactic Police have hunted them down, the Shakespeare brothers activate the Nukaryote and launch the football stadium into orbit to join the waiting Prime Morg. It tries to absorb the Doctor’s knowledge into itself, but he resists its probing and learns that the entire organism is still dependent upon the original Morg cell. The Doctor, Stobbs and Billy get hold of one of the Morg’s seed pods, and with a series of soccer moves they kick it into the original cell, splattering it into goo and delivering a fatal blow to the Morg. The Morg’s human slaves are freed from its control, and the Doctor takes them back to Earth in the TARDIS as the Morg explodes. The team’s play promptly improves, and though the Doctor later returns to offer Billy a ride in the TARDIS, Billy is too caught up watching the game to notice.

The Doctor is on holiday in Ancient Egypt when the hippo goddess Thoueris suddenly rises from the waters of the Nile and demands tribute from a nearby fishing village. As a demonstration of her power, she throws a random villager into the river and uses the power of her ring to set the crocodiles on him. The Doctor challenges Thoueris from atop a nearby cliff, dismissing her as another third-rate Osirian pining for worship -- hardly worth his time to deal with at all. The enraged Thoueris climbs the cliff to get at him, but the Doctor and his friend Ediphis fling oil in her face and set it on fire, and while she is distracted the Doctor seizes her control ring. Thoueris slips on the oil and falls into the river, and the crocodiles attack her and tear her apart while the Doctor is still trying to figure out how the ring works.

While visiting London in the year 1840, the Doctor encounters a sleepwalking young woman, Penny Chapman, who speaks of something called “the essence.” Penny is then attacked by an insane, demonic alien who has been assaulting young women, but the Doctor intervenes, and “Spring-Heeled Jack” retreats when the police arrive. The Doctor walks Penny home, but she can’t remember what she was dreaming about while sleepwalking.

Jack attacks the Doctor and tries to read his mind, but the Doctor turns the psychic attack back on Jack and sees images of war in his mind. Penny drives Jack off with her landlady’s shotgun, and insists upon helping the Doctor to investigate further. The Doctor takes Penny to the TARDIS and traces an anachronistic electrical discharge to the Blackthorne Gasworks, Penny’s workplace. There, they find a door which opens only to Penny’s touch, and behind the door, they find a storage facility for a bioplasmic entity -- the essence that Penny spoke of.

The sight breaks Penny’s conditioning, and she turns her gun on the Doctor, revealing that she is really an alien named Morjanus. Her people are at war with Jack’s, and Morjanus came to Earth to build and test a new weapon. “Penny Chapman” was a false persona she constructed in order to hide her psychic scent from Jack, and he’s been trying to trace her for years. The essence is now ready, and Morjanus activates it, releasing the Pyrodines, creatures of living flame that burst out of gas lamps all around the city and attack the terrified population. To test her weapon, Morjanus will burn London to the ground.

However, the Doctor reveals that he removed the bullets from the gun earlier, since he suspected that Penny was under some form of alien influence. The Pyrodines attack the Doctor, but Jack arrives and holds them off while the Doctor uses the pilfered bullets to destroy the essence’s container. Destroying the essence causes the Pyrodines to dissipate, and Jack then attacks Morjanus, erasing her mind but leaving the innocent Penny Chapman persona intact. The Doctor advises the bewildered Penny to return to the countryside where it’s safe, while Jack, who’s been driven somewhat mad by his years amongst the primitives of Earth, decides to remain in London as a protector of the innocent.

The Tardis brings Dr Who and his grandchildren, John and Gillian, to a dull alien city whose natives don’t react to their presence. Dr Who tries to stir the aliens’ imagination using fireworks from his amazing black bag, and manages to awaken a sense of wonder in some. But the fireworks also attract the attention of hostile robots which kidnap Gillian. Dr Who uses a spotlight from his bag to drive away the remaining robots, and one of the natives, Pobla, leads Dr Who and John to the Darbonian parliamentary building to rescue Gillian. There, they fall into a dastardly trap, but Dr Who cuts his way free with an acetylene torch from his black bag. They then confront the sinister scientist Wargonn, who has captured the Figments, creatures of pure thought that inspire the Darbonians’ imagination and creativity. Wargonn believes that new ideas are dangerous and that only he should control the planet’s creativity. He orders Dr Who to surrender his black bag, but John tricks him and pushes him inside the bag -- which, like the Tardis, is bigger on the inside than the outside. Dr Who threatens to leave Wargonn trapped inside forever unless he releases the Figments, and the scientist does so, restoring imagination to the people of Darbonia. Dr Who and his grandchildren depart -- and the real Doctor awakens, cheered and inspired by his dreams of a world where evil is easily defeated and there are always happy endings.

Note: This story celebrates the 40th anniversary of Doctor Who, and pays homage to the 1960s comic strips from TV Comic magazine, which began with The Klepton Parasites.

The TARDIS materialises in the Dakota Hills in 1875, near a village of Lakota Sioux led by Chief Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull, who was told of the Doctor’s coming in a vision, informs him that the miners from the town of Lincoln have woken something ancient and evil, and when the Doctor and the Sioux investigate, they find the town deserted apart from the mutilated body of a priest. General George Armstrong Custer and his men then ride into town, but the impending confrontation between the Sioux and the cavalry is interrupted when they are all attacked by monstrous man-wolf creatures that the Sioux believe to be the legendary windigo.

The Sioux and the cavalry retreat to Saunders Plateau, where an injured soldier transforms into a windigo while his wounds are being treated. As the windigo approach the survivors, however, a familiar vessel appears overhead and cuts down the attacking creatures with a laser barrage -- and the Doctor is thus reunited with Count Jodafra and his niece Destrii. Jodafra invites the Doctor and Custer aboard his space-time vessel to discuss the situation, but the Doctor is suspicious of Jodafra’s motives and tricks Destrii into revealing that she knows more than she’s letting on. Jodafra deposits the Doctor back in the Sioux village and speaks privately with Custer, offering to supply the general with advanced weaponry so his people can properly “civilise” the native Indians. Custer accepts the offer, and while Destrii hands out laser weapons to Custer’s men, Jodafra arranges for the Doctor’s TARDIS to be moved out of his way.

Sitting Bull convinces the Doctor to accompany him on an astral journey to seek help, and a raven spirit gives the Doctor a cryptic warning. He and Sitting Bull then narrowly escape an encounter with the spirit of the Windigo, and when the Doctor awakes, he interprets the raven’s warning to mean that alcohol is the catalyst for the change. The Lakota evacuate all but their warriors from the village until the danger has passed, while the Doctor, having predicted that Jodafra will try to hide the TARDIS from him, traces it to the mines where the Lincoln miners first woke the sleeping spirit of the Windigo.

Unfortunately, the Doctor has miscalculated somewhat, as Jodafra has supplied Custer’s men with stun guns so they can ambush and kidnap the Lakota children. Custer is becoming suspicious of Jodafra’s motives, but he acts too late; as soon as his men have taken the Lakota children into the mines, Jodafra uses a machine to trigger the Windigo transformation in the cavalry. Only the teetotal Custer survives, and he flees in terror. The Doctor and the Sioux arrive, but are too late to prevent the transformed soldiers from leaping into a pool of alcohol, and within seconds the individual windigo have merged into one giant physical vessel for the evil spirit.

With the help of Jodafra’s technology, the Windigo is capable of freezing Time in its tracks; only the Doctor, Jodafra and Destrii, who have crossed the time-streams, are immune. Jodafra made contact with the Windigo after the miners woke it, and offered to grant it corporeality in exchange for its help navigating the time-stream. In order to fuel its new body, however, it needs to eat untainted human flesh -- and only now does Destrii realise that her uncle intends to feed the Lakota children to it. The Doctor calls out to the spark of decency within her, and when her uncle ignores her plea to stop, she shoots the machinery he’s using to support the Windigo’s cry. Freed, the Lakota shoot flaming arrows into the Windigo’s alcohol-soaked body, destroying it. As they free their children and prepare to bury the mine, trapping the evil spirit forever, the Doctor pursues Jodafra, only to find that he’s beaten his niece nearly to death in a fit of rage and left her dying in the snow. As Jodafra departs, the Doctor carries the grievously wounded Destrii to the TARDIS...

The Doctor takes the injured Destrii to Hippocrates Base, a hospital space station where she is tended to by Dr Partho of the Kulkan Collective. Once he’s sure Destrii is healing, Partho gives the Doctor a tour of the station, which is regulated by an artificial intelligence named Bob; gravity enhancers regulate the pull of the local star, providing different levels of gravity in different areas of the station. Unfortunately, Destrii’s nurse turns out to be a mercenary named Lythia, who has killed the real Nurse Walters and taken her place using a holographic disguise. Lythia creates a distraction by giving Destrii a stimulant and sending her on a psychotic rampage through the arboretum, and while the station’s security guards are dealing with Destrii, Lythia gets into Bob’s computer core and destroys the gravity enhancers and communications system.

The Doctor manages to calm Destrii down, and they investigate the failure of the station’s artificial gravity. Destrii knocks Lythia out before she can do any more damage, but the station is then attacked by her employers, ape-like Zeronites led by Commander Tollios. The Zeronites are a genetically engineered kamikaze race created by the Kulkan Empire before they became the peaceful Collective to conduct maintenance in their long-range interstellar missiles -- and the few survivors have returned to Hippocrates Base, where their species was created, seeking revenge.

Tollios kills Parthos and orders his men to blow up the station, but Destrii uses Lythia’s holographic generator to disguise herself and get close enough to take Tollios hostage. However, Tollios orders his men to shoot through him if they must. When it becomes clear that the Zeronites will not listen to reason, the Doctor challenges Tollios to prove his worthiness as a warrior by fighting Destrii one-on-one; if he wins, the Doctor promises not to interfere in the Zeronites’ revenge attempt. Tollios accepts the challenge, but while he and Destrii fight, the Doctor connects the TARDIS to the station’s gravity enhancers and inverts its dimensions, restoring the station’s artificial gravity. Tollios falls to his death, while the remaining Zeronites, engineered to live in a zero-gravity environment, find themselves unable to move. The Zeronites responsible for this attack are taken into custody, but the Kulkan Collective will now have to be on constant alert for further attacks, even though they have changed their warlike ways and have atoned for their past. The Doctor takes this lesson to heart, and instead of returning Destrii to Oblivion, he offers to let her travel with him -- on a probationary basis.

The TARDIS materialises in Camden Market in the early 21st century, and Destrii, using the holographic generator she acquired at Hippocrates Base to appear human, sets off to explore. When she inadvertently makes a racist comment to a Chinese stall-holder, Tony, he loses his temper and goes after her with a knife. Destrii easily overpowers him, and the Doctor invites the recovering Tony and his wife, Linda, out to the pub to apologise for the incident. However, he notices that Tony isn’t the only one to be overreacting; several other people in the market seem to be having trouble controlling their emotions. He also realises that he’s being followed, and he and Destrii nab their shadow, an MI6 agent named North who works for Leighton Woodrow. Before the Doctor can find out what North is doing here, Destrii -- who can perceive a wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum than humans -- spots two silver figures enter the bar. She shoots them with North’s taser, shorting out their light refraction shield and revealing to the Doctor that Camden Market has been invaded by the Cybermen...

The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to scramble the pursuing Cybermen’s recognition signals, rendering them unable to tell one another apart. The Cybermen are waiting at the Doctor’s TARDIS, and the Doctor thus contacts Woodrow and asks for help. Woodrow sends a helicopter to Primrose Hill to evacuate the Doctor and his friends, but the Cybermen pursue them and shoot their van off the road. The Doctor, Tony and Linda are knocked out in the crash, but North gets the Doctor to the helicopter -- and takes off, leaving the others behind. Destrii tries to defend Tony and Linda, but she is eventually overpowered by the Cybermen. The Cybermen are unable to convert Destrii, as she is not human, but they stun her for later study, and she is unable to prevent the Cybermen from taking Tony and Linda away.

The Doctor is enraged when he awakens at MI6 to learn that his friends were left behind, but he has no choice but to help Woodrow find a way to fight the Cybermen. However, he fears that these Cybermen, the most advanced he’s ever seen, are time-travellers from the future -- and that his arrival will have forced them to advance their schedule. The Minister of Defense contacts Woodrow and informs him that the country’s nuclear codes have been erased, and the Cybermen’s mothership then materialises above London, causing panic in the streets. The Cybermen descend upon Camden Market and collect their “test subjects,” while another squad traces the Doctor to MI6. The Doctor’s attempt to drive them off fails, and the Cyber Leader melts away the roof of the building and unleashes a localised rainstorm -- which drives the humans mad with extreme emotional attacks. When the rain cuts off, the Cyber Leader offers the humans freedom from their emotions, and, traumatised by the intensity of their experiences, they willingly turn to the Cybermen for conversion.

The Doctor and Destrii are taken aboard the Cybermen’s mothership to meet the Cyber Controller, who confirms the Doctor’s suspicions that the Cybermen have been using the multicultural Cambden Market as a testing ground for a biological agent that affects the emotional centre of the brain, driving the human nervous system into complete emotional collapse. They have shut down the planet’s nuclear capabilities, and now intend to flood the world, saturating the atmosphere and driving the human race mad enough to accept their offer of conversion. It’s too late for the Doctor to save the people from MI6 and Camden Market, but to save the rest of the human race, he offers to allow the Cybermen to kill him and observe his subsequent regeneration on condition that they return to their own time. The cyber-conversion process is still keyed to the human and Mondasian genetic structure, but the data from the Doctor’s regeneration will enable the Cybermen to convert other species into their kind.

The Cyber Controller accepts the Doctor’s offer, and prepares to expose him to their ship’s power source -- which, as the Doctor had sensed when he boarded, turns out to be a fragment of the Time/Space Vortex. However, the Controller then reveals that they will test the conversion process on Destrii and subsequently proceed with the conquest of Earth. The Doctor had suspected this, which is why he released Destrii from her handcuffs earlier. While Destrii attacks the Cybermen, the Doctor frees himself, opens up the window to the Vortex, and leaps through, apparently destroying himself. But just as the Cybermen are about to kill Destrii, the Doctor rises from the Vortex, imbued with its power; as a Time Lord, he has the ability to tap directly into the power the Cybermen tried to harness for their own ends. The Doctor initiates a controlled temporal meltdown, and the Cybermen and their ship literally begin to melt away. Realising that Destrii is trapped aboard the disintegrating ship, the Doctor returns to his corporeal state, giving up the chance of becoming at one with all things in order to save Destrii’s life. He and Destrii return to the TARDIS and escape as the Cybermen’s ship explodes. The world has been saved, and the Doctor and Destrii go on together to see what the future holds in store.