Finally, the journey comes to an end.
Last time, geez, we had a lot going on! Didn't we? Doctors and Masters generating, the Great Intelligence and the Matrix collapsing, and finally the Key to Reality was now released and ready to be used.
The fate of the omniverse lies in the hands of... the Time Lord Victorious!
Let's see how it ends!
The Chronarch raises the Key to Reality in his hand and proclaims his intention to rewrite not only his own universe, but every universe. He activates the Key... and nothing happens. Susan's Doctor begins to give those chipper, Hartnell chuckles as he mocks his alternative self for thinking he wouldn't have placed some safeguards on the device in question. Sensing that this Doctor is in his first incarnation, the Chronarch turns his abilities on the (seemingly) old man and begins to drain his regeneration energy from him for his insolence. However, the other Doctors soon spring into action, using the collapsing TARDISes to generate a force field around the Chronarch.
In rage, the Chronarch shatters the Key, splitting it into its six fragments. The power discharge from that breaks the force field and allows him to escape with three of the pieces. The other three get picked up by the various Doctors. During this, the Great Intelligence has gotten into the TARDIS with its Whisper Men and further cements the desire to destroy the Chronarch. Of course, none of the Doctors trust it or indeed the returned Black Guardian, the team noting the absence of the White Guardian in these proceedings.
However, with the help of the Great Old One and the Guardian, the TARDIS cluster gets repaired. With the three pieces of the Key, they are able to use their computers to scan the multiverse and discover where the Chronarch managed to escape to - seeing that his command ship was destroyed by the assault by the Intelligence and the Guardian.
They discover him on Gallifrey... in the Prime Doctor Who Universe. The Whoniverse, as it's often called.
Or, rather... where Gallifrey was. It is the correct coordinates - 10-0-11-0-0 by 0-2 - but there's no Gallifrey. It's gone, just like it seems to be in almost every universe. What they do find, however, is the Chronarch's TARDIS - the one thing that managed to survive the bloodbath. Desperate to survive, he has slaved the three pieces of the Key into his TARDIS and leads the team on a merry chase through time and space, but ultimately for naught when the Roseless Doctor and the Doctorless Master find a way to disconnect the TARDISes of the group and cut him off. With only the power of the fragments of the Key keeping it running, the Chronarch's TARDIS crashlands onto the nearby planet of Karn.
The Chronarch uses the fragments of the Key to fend off the Sisterhood of Karn, however he is told by Ohica that they are not there to stop him, only to observe what is to come. The TARDISes of the other Doctors arrive and the group is faced with an apparatus familiar to them all - the mind-bending device from The Brain of Morbius. The Chronarch, thinking his power absolute, challenges the other Doctors to a mind-bending contest with the fate of the Key to Reality held in the balance.
The first to step up is Susan's Doctor, who grasps the machine as does the Chronarch. However, the much younger man is unable to match the Chronarch's power and his extensive power. His body is overloaded... and he dies.
No regeneration, no nothing.
"It's... all over..." are his last words before his body falls to the rocky ground of Karn. Susan screams in protest, but is held back by Jack and Jenny as Jenny's Doctor steps up. He fares somewhat better, but the Chronarch ends up overcoming him, destroying him as well. When Jenny protests, the Chronarch breaks her other arm with a bit of psychic force before snapping her neck, killing her outright. Ross, likewise, pulls out his gun and is immediately atomized.
The Wolfverse Doctor steps up and puts up an even stronger fight thanks to his nature as a complex space-time event - arguably more so than any of the other Doctors. While he does achieve a great deal of victory, even causing the Chronarch to temporarily lose his grip, the end result is the same as the Time Lord Victorious powers through... and the Wolf Doctor dies, burning away into artron energy. Jack shoots the Chronarch in the head, which sparks a regeneration.
The Chronarch thanks Jack by telekinetically severing his body into his head, arms, torso, and legs, and leaving him in pieces on the rocks... unable to interfere any longer. In a new body, the Chronarch is refreshed and takes on the Guardian Doctor, reminding the man of the torture he endured at his hands. This ends up crippling him, and the Chronarch takes yet another victory for himself. One Doctor, left to oppose him... but before that Doctor can step up, the Doctorless Master steps up and has slaved his two multiversal counterparts to his own mental energies.
As he takes on the Chronarch, the Master also fights who he was and who he fears becoming again... which is not helped by the other two Masters who he is drawing energy from. Using this disadvantage, the Chronarch is able to trap the Master within a prison of his own making and then ending his existence much as he did the previous Doctors... and the Masters, as all three of them are destroyed when the Chronarch wins this contest.
...so, reset the clock, the Masters are totally, really dead. For real this time!
The Chaos Doctor throws his hat in, determined to finish off his opponent and claim the Key to Reality for himself. However, his menace and his evil are paltry in comparison and he suffers the quickest defeat - leaving only the Roseless Doctor standing.
In their joined minds, the Chronarch sees yet another way his life might have played out differently. He then realizes that this was the universe he touched in order to weaken the barriers between the parallel universes and thanks his opponent for his little help in doing what he needed to do. This makes Roseless all the more determined to stop him and the fight becomes even more intense. The Chronarch is nearly destroyed by the mental projection of Fenric and Rassilon, but manages to fight them off.
"At the last, you could not defeat me... and you came the closest..."
"Yeah. It must hurt, doesn't it?"
"I suppose it must."
"No, I meant you. To know that your life could have been different... and you chose this." And, with those final words a mockery, the Roseless Doctor crumbles into artron energy and is gone. All that remains are Susan and the Sisterhood of Karn, the former terrified and the latter stoic. The Chronarch gathers the pieces of the Key to himself, proclaiming himself the winner. However, Ohica tells him that there is one more opponent that he has not yet faced.
"All of the Doctors are dead! The Key is mine!"
"No... there is one more."
The engines of the TARDIS are heard as another materializes. The door opens, and the Chronarch finds himself face to face... with his former face.
Yes, the Fourteenth Doctor - the prime and (as of this writing) current Doctor - emerges from his TARDIS to face the Time Lord Victorious. Rather than take him on in the mind-bending, however, the Doctor uses his psychic abilities to project into the Chronarch's mind all the things he could have done had he chosen a different path, starting with all the wonderful things that followed crashing into a garden in Leadworth. The memories of who he had been, who he could be, what he has cheated himself out of, and the darkness within his hearts... all of it renders the Chronarch catatonic.
He snaps out of it just in time to see the Doctor taking up the Key and, pieces assembled, activating it.
The scene changes, rewinding back through everything that had happened, all the way back to the inside of a familiar TARDIS. The Doctor is broken and despondent after seeing the projection of Ood Sigma in the snow outside the home of one Captain Adelaide Brooke. With a defiant proclamation of "No!", he sets the TARDIS off to travel into space and time... and his hand is stopped by another hand - his own. Specifically, that of the Prime Doctor.
The future Chronarch refuses the Doctor's help and declares that he is prepared to do it all over again and win this time. The Doctor sadly tells his variant that that won't be happening and, with the help of the White Guardian, locks down the Chronarch's TARDIS. The Doctor tells him that his universe is going to be sealed off from the rest of the Multiverse and that there will be no way for him to escape. The Prime Doctor then departs as the Chronarch's TARDIS drifts toward a Z-Neutrino star, leaving the man within to scream out in impotent rage...
The Guardian Doctor finds himself back in his TARDIS, with K-9 and his version of Romana II restored. His task is completed and the White Guardian informs him that he has been freed from the entity's service. He settles in for a new journey, then gets himself a gingerbeer, munches on the contents of a bag of jelly babies, and plays with a yo-yo to relax...
The Doctorless Master is returned to his TARDIS along with a restored Adam. Regretfully, seeing what Adam becomes, the Master elects to erase all his memories of him and return him to Earth. Adam protests and a brief struggle sees him actually shoot the Master through both hearts. However, the inevitable happens and the Master does erase Adam's memories. He returns Adam to Earth before departing in his TARDIS, his hands starting to glow with regeneration energy...
Jenny and her Doctor reappear on their TARDIS and are overjoyed to get started again in their travels. However, the Cloister Bell is going off and it seems that they are once more careening toward the Earth, right where they started once again...
The Wolf Doctor and Jack are back on the former's TARDIS, restored to as they were before all of this. The two stand in silence for a time before the Doctor mentions wanting to go and check out a planet with transparent grass. Jack, with a smile, agrees and the two head off into time and space...
Susan is overjoyed to be back with her grandfather, telling him that she doesn't care where they go next so long as they are together. The Doctor heartily agrees, setting their TARDIS to head off into the time vortex...
The Roseless Doctor also ends up right back where he started, freshly regenerated and ready to begin a new life...
They all remember their variants and the adventure they had just undertaken, comforted in the knowledge that they had done their part to save the day once again.
The Prime Doctor stands with the White Guardian, watching all the variants of himself (and the one of his old friends) head off on adventures of their own.
"Y'know, I almost envy them. They've got it all ahead of them. Their own little stories." He says, almost wistful.
"You have your own story, Doctor." The White Guardian reminds him.
"Oh, yes!" The Doctor nods. "I should be getting back to them."
"And so you shall! Goodbye, Doctor! Goodbye!"
The Doctor waves, entering his TARDIS, and disappearing to his own universe once again - the multiverse safe.
... or so it would seem.
C'mon, I didn't end the Mace Windu story on a super sappy note, why would I end this one the same way?
In the battered, broken, de-powered shell of his TARDIS, the Never Will Be Cronarch seethes as his world becomes hotter and hotter. His mind is tormented by all that the Prime Doctor showed him and, with no power, he is determined to make the man pay for what he's done to him. Now, however, he is down to just his two incarnations... his twelfth... and his final. As the TARDIS begins to disintegrate, the Chronarch decides that he must become something new. The Prime Doctor had said he could not escape this place, but if he were to shed his corporeal form... become something else.
When the Chronarch's TARDIS is destroyed by the Z-Neutrino star, it is empty. Just as the power of the Key to Reality seals the barriers between the universes once more... something slips out and into another universe. Specifically, the universe of the Prime Doctor.
Many years before... on Gallifrey, ending up in the halls of the High Council of Time Lords.
The entity takes on a new shape and a new name, saying that it has a bargain for the High Council...
...which they accept.
...
...and the Valeyard laughs, his existence realized as prophesied by the Whisper Men in a timeline that, now, will never be.
And that is where we end with Part 12... and this What If completely. Was it cheap to bring the Prime Doctor in at the end? Maybe. However, I think this was a good event and I thank you to those who have been sticking around since Part 1 all that time ago.
Doctor Who is a show that I love and this is just one of the ways that I want to celebrate it being around for 60 years... and how much I look forward to the next sixty.
This What If ends but, like the story of Doctor Who, another adventure is just over the horizon...
See you then!
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