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aristidetwain · 4 years

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Who on Earth is Rasputin?

If you answered “the Fourth Doctor using a Chameleon Arch”, you have seen the 1971 biopic Nicholas and Alexandra and you have the sort of spirit we’re looking for. We love you, Tom Baker, we love you.

Nevertheless, while it is clearly canonical that every other part played by a given Dr Who actor represents that actor’s Doctor under a Chameleon Arch, (/s), let’s dig a little deeper, because it’s fun and we have cause to do so, into the life and history of Grigori Rasputin in the Doctor Who Universe.

(Lengthy development under the cut.)

The PETER HARNESS Story

For those who haven’t been keeping up with the flood of great content springing from the Doctor Who: Lockdown event like slightly wobbly ambrosia from the Cornucopia, Peter Harness has released a synopsis for one of the most improbable missed opportunities of the Welsh Series: a Capaldi one-parter entitled How The Monk Got His Habit.

This story would have seen the return of the Time Meddler himself, or, as you may know him, the Monk—a positively delightful antagonist from the 1960′s who got overshadowed by the more enduring and more malevolent Master, and whose gimmick was that he was an amoral hedonist who changed history for fun and profit with no care for the consequences. In his televised appearances in the William Hartnell era, the Time Meddler was played by Peter Butterworth; first encountered posing as a monk in an 11th-century monastery, he was subsequently remembered as “the Monk”, wearing that costume, and known thereafter as “the Monk” or “the Meddling Monk” in fandom and in subsequent appearances.

Harness decided to feature an early incarnation of the character colliding out-of-sync with the Twelfth Doctor, giving nothing less than the origin story of the Meddling Monk, both the “meddling” and “monk” parts, and just from the original pitch email he dug up, it is a thing of beauty.

(Source)

Further enjoyment is to be gleaned from the fully-written-out opening scene of a hypothetical novelisation of the unmade story, which can be found here and establishes the incarnation of the Time Meddler at the start of that story (currently going by “Roger”) as being his fifth.

This is mildly interesting in that in true Doctor Who fashion, it manages to contradict one of the very few already-existing stories that had tried to make sense of the Monk’s timeline. I refer of course to John Peel’s The Mutation of Time, which took time off to establish that the already-meddling, already-monasterial Peter Butterworth incarnation seen in The Time Meddler and The Daleks’ Master Plan was the Monk’s first incarnation. But never mind that.

Note that the historical Rasputin died at the tail end of 1916. I could construct elaborate theories of how and why Rasputin turning insane in 1917 could affect the Russian Revolution and the rest of human history, but I’ll spare you and myself the additional headache, and assume this was simply a typo.

The BOOK OF THE WAR Story

Where it gets complicated, as is often the case, is when you factor in the Time War. See, The Book of the War, in one of its most entertaining side-stories, establishes that Grigori Rasputin actually did not die in December 1916. Instead, Faction Paradox, those lackadaisical jackanapes, thought it would be funny to spirit him away to their hideout a few days before his death, leaving a barely-sentient clone to act out Rasputin’s real death.

Unaware of this, the Celestis (a faction of Time Lords who turned themselves into incorporeal demons to escape the Time War) had decided to recruit Rasputin in their usual faustian way, offering him a form of immortality in exchange of his accepting to be Marked by them, becoming a slave to their will. Because the Rasputin clone’s basic programming included “Do whatever freaky time travelling sorcerers are telling you to do”, the thing blithely accepted the Celestis Mark and was on its way.

And then, unaware of what the Celestis had done, but having caught wind of the Faction Paradox cultists’ plan to bring Rasputin to their homebase, the actual Gallifrey-based Time Lords decided to duplicate Rasputin themselves, leaving a “trapped” Grigori for the Faction to find, one who was secretly loyal to them, the Great Houses. And so they showed up one day before Rasputin’s death to perform the switcheroo, being under the impression that if the Faction were to whisk Rasputin away, they would do so mere instants before he was supposed to die.

(Maybe the Time Lords thought that because that’s how they would do it. For more information, see S09E12, Hell Bent.)

Hence, come the fateful day, the Time Lords’ doctored duplicate of the Faction’s doctored duplicate of Rasputin, now secretly immortal thanks to, and under the control of the Celestis, (are you still following this?)… not only does it take forever to die because duh, it’s a badly-made golem, not a human being… but once it does find it within itself to die, it is instantly resurrected by the Celestis, who activate their Mark, ordering it to do their shadowy bidding.

At this point, the misbegotten triple-zombie experiences an existential crisis too big for its artificial brain to handle, as what passes for its soul has now been conditioned to faithfully serve the interest of three different factions who are at war with each other. Not-Rasputin goes instantly mad with confusion and goes drown itself in the nearest river.

Meanwhile, in the members-only Faction Paradox treehouse, the original Rasputin whom the cultists replaced with the first golem is properly inducted into the Faction, where he is widely observed to turn into just as crazy a Grandfather Paradox zealot as he was a devout Orthodox and mystic. He proceeds to use his newfound authority as Father Dyavol of Faction Paradox to advise his fellow Faction member Princess Anastasia to secede from the Eleven-Day Empire and bugger off to Moscow.

After Anastasia and Dyavol’s revolution crashes and burns, his corpse is found in the river again, appearing to once more have been mutilated in more ways than it would take to kill a normal human being. The Book’s ambiguous in-universe authors are themselves unsure of quite what happened.

The OTHER STUFF

Those two are the “big ones”, but I would be remiss if I did not mention other Doctor Who takes on the historical Grigori Rasputin.

Big Finish’s Companion Chronicle The Wanderer has the First Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara coming across the younger, wandering-pilgrim Rasputin in 1903. He briefly becomes a genuine prophet due to having come into contact with an alien artefact which grants him knowledge of future human history, but this is undone at the end of the story and so doesn’t amount to very much.

I am told that this is because the story was originally written with Nostradamus in mind, which makes a lot of sense. What is of interest to us is that Rasputin is here depicted as a basically good, sane man, once you set the grandiose prophetic visions aside.

Dave McIntee’s The Wages of Sin, on the other hand, is also constructed around Rasputin’s death in December 1916, but it posits that Rasputin was a non-supernatural and non-crazy monk, totally undeserving of his ghoulish and supernatural post-mortem reputation. Rather problematically, it gives us a direct insight into Rasputin’s thought processes as he dies, with no thought of being a triple-zombie with conflicting allegiances to be gleaned:

The THEORY

What this tells us is that Rasputin’s death is not strictly a bootstrap paradox — the original historical death that the Faction fetishized to the point of wanting to get their own ritualistic mitts on Rasputin, the one the Monk accidentally averts, a few months before it’s supposed to happen, in a way that threatens to change all of human history, is not the farcical catastrophe described in The Book of the War. There was an original, untampered-with timeline that got thrown out of whack by too many different Time Lords trying to meddle with it.

You could, I suppose, posit that there are three different timelines: the Monk and the various Wartime factions both split off in different directions from the baseline Wages of Sin timeline where the human Rasputin died in the river. But that is no fun at all, is it? And furthermore, it does not account for the fact that the definitely human Rasputin of The Wanderer and The Wages of Sin is a good man unfairly maligned, whereas the Rasputin who becomes Father Dyavol is a rebellious lunatic. So let’s assume instead that the Book of the War story’s time meddling is building onto what happened (or, you know, would have happened) in How The Monk Got His Habit.

If we assume that the “the Monk drives the real Rasputin insane” incident happened a few months prior to December 1916, and it is on the day when he was driven mad that the real Rasputin is taken out of time by the Twelfth Doctor and replaced by the regenerated Monk, then this finally makes sense of the difference in characterization between pre- and post-1916 Rasputin. The sane, misunderstood Rasputin was the real human being, whereas the ranting madman Rasputin is the persona put on by the repentant Monk. Remember, per Harness’s outline, the Monk has a checklist of what Rasputin is supposed to do historically speaking, but I don’t see him having any real way of knowing how Rasputin is supposed to act. Most of his involvement with the man took place on the day that he drove him irreparably kookoo, after all.

So we end up with the following story:

The original Grigori Rasputin, who meets the First Doctor in 1903, is a mostly-sane and wholly-non-evil man. He has a traumatic experience with visions of future history, which the Doctor is forced to telepathically lock away, Donna-style. (The Wanderer) In the original timeline witnessed by the Third Doctor, Rasputin lives out his days largely as he had begun. He is assassinated in largely-mundane circumstances; Jo’s attempt to avert this by switching out the poisoned cakes for normal ones gives rise to a legend that Rasputin was unusually hard to kill, and causes the event to go down in history. (The Wages of Sin) The Earth band Boney M write a song about Rasputin which inspires the Fifth Monk to go back in time and make Rasputin listen to it. This drives him irreparably bananas, likely because of his having already had one barely-contained traumatic experience with future knowledge given to him by aliens, back in 1903.This screws with time to the extent that when he realizes he is out of his depth and calls for help, the Fifth Monk actually reaches the post-War Twelfth Doctor. After a lot of shenanigans, the Doctor leaves the Monk in 1916 with instructions to regenerate into a Sixth Monk physically identical to Rasputin, and then act out the part Rasputin was supposed to play in history to a T. (How The Monk Got His Habit) The Sixth Monk’s Rasputin cosplay leaves a lot to be desired, since he mostly bases his performance on the damn Boney M song and on the bananas, post-listening-to-the-song Rasputin. Nevertheless, it’s enough to fool Faction Paradox into abducting him a few days before he was supposed to fake his death and go back to business as usual. The improbable series of coincidences which follows, with the triply-brainwashed duplicate, might represent Time trying to adjust so that the myth of Rasputin’s outlandish death, which started this entire series of events, still goes down in History somehow. Once in the Eleven-Day Empire, the Sixth Monk realizes pretty quickly that his being there at all, in the middle of the Time War, is a perfectly irregular breach of all the Protocols of Linearity. Hoping to avoid detection, he continues hamming it up as Mad Prophet Rasputin until he figures out a plan. To his surprise, he manages to fool Anastasia, and so he manipulates her into giving him a free ticket out of the Faction, namely the whole Thirteen-Day Republic thing. (The Book of the War) But wait. What happened to the real Rasputin who went crazy? I reckon the Twelfth Doctor took him to some place of caring or other. What’s more, I reckon he voiced his intention to do so while the Fifth Monk was still with him. (How The Monk Got His Habit) And so the final grisly piece of the puzzle comes into place. Desperate to escape back to his own place in Gallifreyan history, where it’s safe and black-and-white, when he sees the Valentine’s Day Battle approaching, the Sixth Monk commits his first truly evil act by hopping back into his timeship unseen, bringing the real Rasputin back to the Thirteen-Day Republic, and murdering him in a way which he hopes will look like the original timeline reasserting itself. To further avoid detection in case he should be intercepted on the way out, the Sixth Monk regenerates himself into a clean-shaven Seventh Monk right there and then, probably hiding in a closet. (The Book of the War) As far as any of the Wartime powers know, “Father Dyavol” is dead, and so the now-inconspicuous Seventh Monk is free to slink away back to his TARDIS. Knowing the Doctor is found on Earth in almost all of their incarnations, the Monk hovers close to Earth’s timeline, hoping to find the “right” Doctor again and rejoin Linearity by latching onto him. When they finally bump into each other in 1066 Northumbria, there’s still a 50-year difference between them, but the Monk thinks “eh, close enough” and reenters normal time for good, now with much-loosened moral standards. After all, act or no act, he spent quite a lot of time working with Faction Paradox — besides which he has seen that everything the Time Lords of his day stand for is torn down eventually by the War, so why bother with any of those Laws of Time he know will eventually be suspended? (The Time Meddler, The Daleks’ Master Plan)

…oh!

And if you want the real Rasputin’s story to have a happy ending, maybe the Faction, once they rifle through the possessions found on the corpse of Father Dyavol, find a fobwatch and open it… reviving the Fourth Doctor, who offers the befuddled coroner-Cousin a jelly baby, shrugs that this particular attempt to throw off the Black Guardian clearly didn’t work, and returns to his own era.

The jelly baby in question was then placed, with religious deference, on a velvet cushion inside the Catalogue.

#Canon-Welding #Doctor Who #Doctor Who Fandom Shenanigans #Faction Paradox

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