The Discontinuity Guide
The Past Doctor Adventures
The Quantum Archangel
January 2001
(Features the Sixth Doctor and Mel between Trial of a Time Lord and Time and the Rani)
Author: Craig Hinton
Editor: Justin Richards
Roots: There is a reference to "Pym particles", which hail from Marvel Comics and are named after Hank Pym, a.k.a Ant-Man (and Giant-Man... and Goliath... and Yellowjacket!), and a reference to the Shi'ar Empire, also from Marvel. Giger's Necronomicon is mentioned again. Gubbage Cones and DARDISes were mentioned in the camera script of The Chase [Gubbage Cones were the Fungoids]. The Insidium of Astrolabus is a reference to renegade Time Lord Astrolabus from Doctor Who Magazine's Voyager comic strip. The reference to Quarks and their Giant Wasps is a reference to the TV Comic Doctor Who strip The Killer Wasps. The plot is a homage to the Phoenix/Dark Phoenix saga from Uncanny X-Men, with a bit of the Necrom/Phoeniz battle from Excalibur #50 thrown in. The idea of all the heavy-hitters turning up at the end of the Millennium War is from Infinity Gauntlet #5. And there's a mention of Oa (Green Lantern from DC Comics) as well. The idea of everyone getting the universe they want, as well as a lot of the quantum stuff, is from Mark Waid's Julian September saga in JLA The Planet Kirbili is a reference to comic artist Jack Kirby. And the TITAN Array is supposed to resemble Kirby-tech from the Fantastic Four.
Technobabble: "E equals MC to the fourth power".
The TITAN [The Trans-Interstitial Time Analysis Network] array is the successor to TOMTIT. It utilises the Kikkawa-Yamasaki mathematical model, which takes Kaluza-Klein variance into account, and exotic particles gathered by the Master from the Blue Shift. It is designed to reach into Calabi-Yau space in order to analyse it. The Whitefriar lattice manipulates photons at a Quantum level and has totally superseded the transistor and the micromonolithic circuit (The Invasion).
The Chronovores [and the other Transcendental Beings] are composed of non-baryonic matter, and in their natural forms are six-dimensional polymorphic lattices of photinos and chronons bound together with super-strings.
The Doctor explains the origin of the universe: following Event One, eleven dimensions existed - five became time and space, and the remaining six became the Six-Fold Realm, known to human physicists as Calabi-Yau Space. The Transcendental Beings live in the Six-Fold Realm and feed on its energies. The Time Lords are aware of the Ancient Covenant, which forbids them from attempting to reach the Six-Fold Realm. However, both the Transcendental Beings and the inhabitants of normal space share the Time Vortex, which is "inextricably linked" to the Six-Fold Realm. The Chronovores live in the Vortex, but eat and feed in the Six-Fold Realm. The Lux Aeterna is a lattice of point singularities at the points where the dimensions of the Higher Place and Calabi-Yau Space cross, which taps into the quantum foam and is the food source of the Chronovores.
Continuity: The Transcendental Beings include the Eternals and their cousins the Chronovores, the Time Wraiths ("with their insatiable appetites"), the Great Old Ones, the Nestene Consciousness, and also the Swimmers (see The Taking of Planet V). The Ancient Covenant governs their behaviour, and appears to be a series of physical laws laid down by Event One. The Covenant forbids the union of Eternals and Chronovores, the latter of whom were exiled from the Eternals because they were seen as parasites, feeding on the energies of the Six-Fold Realm. Elektra (an Eternal) and Prometheus (a Chronovore) break the Covenants by "mating", which produces an offspring, whom they name Avatar. This results in punishment by the Council of Guardians, collectively known as the Six-Fold God; they unravel Prometheus' existence so that he never existed at all and they take the Avatar. At the moment of its birth, the Avatar was sealed in a Trident-shaped crystal created by the Key to Time, which was then hurled into the Time Vortex; they named the Avatar Kronos, (who therefore is not strictly a Chronovore) and hurled the crystal into the Time Vortex, to land wherever it was carried. The crystal was hidden on many worlds until it eventually arrived on Dæmos. The Dæmons brought it to Earth, and gave it to the Atlanteans [therefore resolving the differing accounts of the destruction of Atlantis given in The Dæmons and The Time Monster]. Knowing that Kronos would need to be released at a point when time was out of balance, the Guardians had made it possible for him to be released from the crystal; however, release from the crystal before this time would drive Kronos mad, which is why he destroyed Atlantis in The Time Monster. After The Time Monster, he was returned to the crystal [presumably after confronting the Doctor and the Master outside of time].
The Master escaped from Gallifrey with ease following his release from the Matrix after The Trial of a Time Lord. He is able to regenerate injury to his body thanks to the Source of Traken, which is still within him. However, its energies are almost exhausted despite a brief boost from the Numismaton Gas on Sarn. Prior to this story he is badly injured by the Krotons. It is revealed that many years ago [Between The Dark Path and Terror of the Autons], he penetrated Gallifreyan security and materialised his TARDIS in the ruins of the old Capitol, half a mile beneath the current one, and gained access to the Matrix via an old console. This gave him a back door into the Matrix, which he used on many occasions. It was from the Matrix that he learned of the Doomsday Weapon (Colony in Space), the Crystal of Kronos (The Time Monster), Azal (The Dæmons), the Source of Traken (The Keeper of Traken), the Dalek army on Spiridon (Planet of the Daleks), and the Earth Reptiles (The Sea Devils). He also learned of the Psychic Parasites of Bellerophon [possibly a reference to the Mind Parasite from The Mind of Evil], the frozen Gods of Volvox, the Martian GodEngine (Godengine), the political machinations of the Amentethys, the Proculus and their offspring the Scerbulus, the Midnight Cathedral, and the secrets of the planet Kirbili on the edge of the Pegasus Tract, which appears to be knowledge of the Lux Aeterna. He also knows of the Planet of the Cheetah People (Survival) and the deathworms (The Eight Doctors and Doctor Who).
Kronos attacks the Master in the Time Vortex apparently to gain revenge for the events of The Time Monster, badly burning him and setting his TARDIS adrift in the Blue Shift. The Master intends to use the TITAN array and his TARDIS to open a pathway between the Higher Place and Calabi-Yau Space, allowing the Chronovores through and giving him access to the power of the Lux Aeterna, thus becoming a God and allowing him to wipe out the Chronovores. He plans to calibrate the device by using Anjeliqua Whitefriar as a test subject, but she unexpectedly absorbs the Lux Aeterna's power and becomes the God-like Quantum Archangel. He uses the alias Branko Gospodar, a Serbian businessman (Gospodar is Serbian for Master) and again uses holography to maintain this disguise. He drinks cognac and smokes Cuban cigars. He uses his TCE. He uses the same type of cube used by the second Doctor during The War Games to contact the Time Lords and inform them about his back door into the Matrix in order to stop the Quantum Archangel from using it. His body begins to degenerate back into its corpse-like state, but he eventually uses a small amount of energy from the Lux Aeterna to renew himself. He appears to be consumed by the Chronovore (along with his TARDIS) [obviously he escapes, since he next appears in Survival].
The Master's TARDIS library contains copies of the Necronomicon, Liber Inducens in Evangelium Aeternum, The Black Scrolls of Rassilon, Book of Vile, The Ambuehl Lores and the Insidium of Astrolabus. His TARDIS has had various modifications made, including the addition of a force field from a Farquazi time cruiser, which he stole during the 300th Segment of Time, a Sontaran Osmic Projector (bought from a rogue Sontaran on Veltriis 4), a DARDIS core stolen from Skaro, Klypstrmic warheads, an artron cannon, a vortex lance, a Rutan Analysis Engine, and a Vortex Cloak stolen from the ruins of the Gubbage Cone Throneworld on the edge of the Great Attractor (see The Crystal Bucephalus). Like the Doctor's TARDIS, it possesses a Cloister Bell. Additionally, his escape from Castrovalva disrupted the link between the Eye of Harmony and his TARDIS, since when he has modified the dynamorphic generators to allow complete independence from Gallifrey - one effect of this is that his TARDIS can draw power from any local source. At some point prior to The Time Monster he stole the Profane Virus of Rassilon from the Slaughterhouse on Gallifrey (see The Ancestor Cell), a computer virus that causes a TARDIS to Time Ram itself nanoseconds in the past (an "Eigen-Ram"), and hid it in TOMTIT. Despite its name, Erkulon, the greatest nano-engineer in Gallifreyan history, created it. The Doctor learned of the Virus when he made contact with the Matrix during The Invasion of Time. The Doctor and the Master are the only Time Lords ever to have survived a Time Ram. A Cardinal Sendak taught them at the Academy.
A TARDIS' dynamorphic generators are its power source - they are vast chambers containing huge emerald columns called Trachoid time crystals, and these chambers are big enough to have clouds and thunderstorms. The Power Room's architecture reflects the personality of the TARDIS' owner; hence those of the Doctor's are a Heath-Robinson affair, whilst the Master's resemble Victorian factory furnaces.
Kronos causes the Master to believe that the Chronovores are after him, since he wants the Time Lord to take the power of the Lux Aeterna and destroy the Chronovores, in revenge for them recommending that he be destroyed at birth. Additionally, he created Paul Kairos, since he needed the development of the TITAN array to facilitate this, and manipulated Anjeliqua's personality to cause her to steal the patent on the Kairos Lattice and thus force Paul to remain focused solely on the TITAN array. He was not expecting a human to be able to absorb its power, and thus did not predict the creation of the Quantum Archangel. Kronos eventually commits suicide in order to destroy the Mad Mind of Bophemeral; this causes the Great Attractor to detonate, and also opens a gateway into Calabi-Yau Space, through which the energy of the Lux Aeterna is able to leave the Quantum Archangel and the Higher Place.
The Constructors of Destiny were one of the first races to evolve after Event One. They tampered with the evolution of many worlds, including Gallifrey, where they accelerated the evolution of the native "ape Neanderthals" [and thus were indirectly responsible for the proliferation of humanoid races - see Lucifer Rising]. They also created non-collective intelligence on Earth [The Earth Reptiles?] and created Mondas as a control (The Tenth Planet). Their crowning achievement was the Mind of Bophemeral, a vast computer created one-hundred and fifty million years before the twenty-first century inside a black hole and designed to study the Universe. It formed the Great Attractor, which is located in the Constellation of Virgo fifty million light years from Earth, on the edge of the Abel 3627 Galactic cluster and the Milky Way is drawn towards it at a rate of million miles an hour. Visitors from their future (a Time Lord), their present (the Xeraphin [Time-Flight]), and their past (Kronos, who deliberately brought about the creation of the Mind to provide the Doctor with forbidden knowledge), advised the Constructors on this, with only Kronos in favour.
As soon as it became sentient, the Mind became utterly insane and waged war on the universe in its quest to become God. The Mad Mind of Bophemeral launched a fleet of robotic servants across the universe from its home in the Great Attractor, triggering the Millennium War, in which various races united against it, including the Dæmons (The Dæmons), the Osirans (Pyramids of Mars, The Sands of Time), the Euterpians (Invasion of the Cat-People), the Greld (The Empire of Glass) (who wielded the Omnethoth (The Fall of Yquatine)), the Kastrians (The Hand of Fear), the Exxilons (Death to the Daleks), the Uxariens (Colony In Space), the Sontarans, the Rutan Host, the Grey Hegemony (Falls the Shadow), the People (The Also People), the Masksmakers of the Pageant (The Man in the Velvet Mask), the Nimon (The Horns of Nimon), Faction Paradox (Alien Bodies), and the Ministers of Grace (Decalog: The Duke of Dominoes). It was during this war that the Uxariens used the Doomsday weapon to ignite the Crab Nebula, and it was the Mad Mind's retribution that caused the destruction of the Kastrians and the societal decay of both the Exxilons and the Uxariens [although this process still took millennia]. Eventually, the Time Lords and the People time-looped the Mad Mind. Following the War, representatives of the races that had participated met in the Midnight Cathedral on Earth's Moon, which was created by the Constructors as a shrine to Kronos, whom they worshipped. They agreed that the Universe needed to forget the War and God was asked to speak out to the Guardians, who agreed to use the Key to Time to make the Universe forget both the war and the Mad Mind of Bophemeral; as a warning however, they were allowed to remember that both the Midnight Cathedral and the Great Attractor were symbols of great recklessness, and the Cathedral was declared off-limits. Thanks to Kronos however, the Doctor knows of the Millennium War and the Mad Mind.
The list of supercomputers compiled by the Doctor and the Master includes the Conscience of Marinus (The Keys of Marinus), the God of the People (The Also People), Xoanon (The Face of Evil), the Emperor Dalek, the Matrix, Logopolis, the Star Abacus of Beta Phoenii 9 (which was destroyed by the Paragon Virus that wiped out all of the computer systems of Andromeda in 87 BC), and the ArcHive of the Cyberlords in the 100th century [this may be a reference to the ArcHives created by David Banks for his book Cybermen, which were referred to in Killing Ground. The Cyberlords are said here to be ruled by an Emperor Brandt, and may be either descended from the Cybermen or base their technology on them].
Mel leaves the Doctor early on due the events on Maradnias, but rejoins him at the end. Arlene Cole, Paul Kairos and Angeliqua Whitefriar are old friends of Mel. Paul Kairos is secretly Kronos. He created the Whitefriar lattice, the patent for which was stolen by Angeliqua Whitefriar. Kronos' alteration of history at the point of his suicide changes this, and it becomes known as the Kairos Lattice.
Maradnias (The Crystal Bucephalus) has an anti-Federalist faction with a nuclear stockpile, which they are zealous enough to use [see Unrecorded Adventures]. The people of Kirbili wiped themselves out millions of years prior to the 21st century. Prior to adopting their non-intervention policy, the Time Lords taught the people of Klist how to reverse evolution and sent a civilisation on the ring of Plastrodus 14 insane. They also colonised Trion and Drornid (Shada and Interference: Book One and Book Two). The Plath have been using Quantum computers for over ten thousand years, and the Lurlak for even longer. The Cla'tac'teth live on a neutron star orbiting the Great Attractor in a parallel universe, just prior to the heat death of the Universe.
There are still a few Ice Warriors left on Mars. The Master considers setting up the TITAN array in an old Martian city, but is worried about the effect that the leftover Osiran technology may have (Pyramids of Mars, Godengine). Mondas orbited on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth (The Tenth Planet).
Stattenheim and Waldorf created working plans for a TARDIS during the sixteenth century. The Doctor states that humans have an instinctive understanding of Time Travel, hence the Time Lords' [and particularly the Other's, if he was half-human] interest in Earth. It is because of this that the Master needed Stuart and Ruth's help to create TOMTIT during The Time Monster. The remains of TOMTIT were supposedly seized by C19 and stored at the Vault (Business Unusual), but Stuart replaced TOMTIT with a fake just prior to its confiscation. He became Emeritus Professor of Physics at West London University.
In addition to the Profane Virus, the Slaughterhouse contains the Armageddon Sapphire, an ultimate weapon that can tear reality apart, causing the Higher Place to collapse into Calabi-Yau Space [although the Doctor almost uses this in an alternate reality, Kronos seems to suggest that it exists in the mainstream reality also].
The Doctor read Rassilon's Guide to the Multiverse, volume 3 at the Academy. The Book of the Old Time refers to the Transcendental Beings as "Things Damned". He still has the "TARDIS sniffer-outer" from The Time Monster.
Elektra dreams of punishing Nyarlathotep for past atrocities, although what these are are not specified (see All-Consuming Fire).
The alternate realities created by the Quantum Archangel include one in which Mel becomes the British Prime Minister, only to see Earth invaded by the Cybermen, one in which the Doctor is Lord President of Gallifrey and leads a war against the Daleks (who are aided and abetted by the Master), and one in which the Master, the Rani, the Monk and Drax try to destroy the world using a DNA recombinator.+
Links: The whole story is a sequel to The Time Monster. The Quantum Archangel shows the Doctor images of Adric, Katarina, Sara Kingdom and Kamelion. It was revealed that there are six Guardians in Divided Loyalties. There are references to plethora of sources, with mention of the Eternals, the Nestene Consciousness, the Great Old Ones, the Krotons, Colony in Space, Death to the Daleks, The Horns of Nimon, The Hand of Fear, the Sontarans, Underworld, The Trial of a Time Lord, Falls the Shadow, The Crystal Bucephalus, the Jagaroth (City of Death), the Osirans (Pyramids of Mars and The Sands of Time), The Dæons, Enlightenment. Mel recalls the events of Millennial Rites and Business Unusual. The Government after thirty years released details of Professor Whitaker's time experiments from Invasion of the Dinosaurs. The Chapel Institute is named after Ashley Chapel, the villain from Millennial Rites. There is a reference to Aaron Blinovitch, who is said to be Russian, and the Bocca scale (The Two Doctors). Titan 3 (from The Twin Dilemma is mentioned), as is Tempus Fugit, the restaurant opened by the Doctor on Pella Saturnis in The Crystal Bucephalus. The polygonal Zero Room beneath the Capitol on Gallifrey (Castrovalva) was built by the Other. The Master recalls the Deca, specifically the Rani, the Meddling Monk and Drax (Divided Loyalties). The Doctor's comment that his TARDIS is not a 22 bus to Putney Common is a reference to Iris Wildthyme's TARDIS (The Scarlet Empress, The Blue Angel and Verdigris). He makes a psionometric isolator powered by Metebelis crystals (Planet of the Spiders). The Doctor and the Master discuss the Entropy wave from Logopolis.
Location: London and the Moon (and various alternate Earths), 2003.
Future History: The Master steals from a Farquazi Time Cruiser during the 300th Segment of Time. The Ministers of Grace travelled back from the end of time to fight the Millenium War (see Decalog: The Duke of Dominoes). A national grid of processing power was established in Britain in 2001, which is called simply "The Grid".
Unrecorded Adventures: Immediately prior to this story, the Doctor and Mel visit the planet Maradnias, where the Doctor's intervention accidentally results in nuclear war, destroying most of the planet. As a gift in exchange for dealing with the Quantum Archangel and Kronos, the Chronovores and the Eternals change history so that the pair never visited the planet. At some point, the pair encountered rogue Bandrils (Timelash), who caused damage to the TARDIS' dynamorphic generators. The Doctor offers to take Mel to the halls of Mount Aeternis "where the air is like nectar and the food is prepared by the Gods themselves", and also the Rainbow Pillars of Hercules on the Rim of Twilight "overlooking the very edge of reality", both of which he may have visited. The pair visited the planet of the Sporrads at some prior point, and also encountered Stalagtrons, Herecletes, and the Quarks (The Dominators) and their Giant Wasps (see Millennial Rites).
The Doctor spent "decades" during the latter part of his second incarnation on the planet Darron, learning the psychic techniques of the Mind Monks.
The Bottom Line: As a sequel to The Time Monster, The Quantum Archangel is everything you'd expect. Virtually every story element from its predecessor is rehashed, and it probably contains more continuity references than any other Doctor Who novel. Nevertheless, despite being continuity-heavy (or perhaps because of it) it's a fun romp and the Master gets to threaten the universe again, which beats trying to interfere with the signing of the Magna Carta or the Industrial Revolution.
Discontinuity Guide by Paul Clarke
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