#the velvet dark

[cringecompanionapologist]

The Velvet Dark: The Short Trip Where the Master Does Some Stuff

Okay, there are probably enough Short Trips featuring the Master for the title to not make sense. This is just another Weird Doctor Who Thing I want to do a breakdown of. Honestly, as far as Weird Doctor Who Things go, this one's only slightly weirder than what you'd see on television. But Turlough's in it and he suffers, so let's take a look:

So we start of with Vislor being spelled wrong. I'm pretty sure this isn't the only short trip that does this.

So, we're on Earth, probably in England, and probably in the late 20th or early 21st century, but the details don't really matter. The Doctor is there to attend the Master's funeral, since he apparently died of natural causes in an ordinary Earth old folks' home. The Doctor is genuinely mourning his old friend while Tegan and Turlough try really hard to be nice about it. We start in Tegan's PoV and she misses Nyssa. Also Turlough has a big fur coat for cool rainy funerals now.

After the funeral, the Team goes to where the Master apparently spent his final days to collect his stuff and see if he left any interesting traps for them before he died. Tegan still doesn't trust Turlough, nor does she like that the Doctor seems to listen to him more than he listens to her.

They find nothing interesting, the Doctor sulks for a bit, and Tegan loses patience with the whole thing and decides to go get a cup of tea. She offers to get some for the others.

Tegan stumbles upon the plot when a nurse looking for a missing old lady has found a tiny doll of the lady in her bed that looks a bit too realistic. Tegan knows what's up here and begins her investigation.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Turlough have lunch. Turlough has no idea why the Doctor wants to eat cafeteria food.

This is kind of a reverse of a bit in Kinda where the Doctor and Adric get some food, but Adric is still hungry after he finishes his and the Doctor gives him the rest of his own food. He's a growing boy. Turlough is just miserable.

The Doctor, who isn't actually an idiot, is still trying to figure out what happened to the Master and he decides to ask the elderly.

Did Turlough not know his grandparents or are old people built different on Trion?

An old man talks to them for a little bit about how the recently dead guy mostly kept to himself but he doesn't want to miss the next show on TV. The Doctor and Turlough banter over this for a bit.

Yeah, this place is supposed run by a Mr. Tase, which might just be the laziest silly anagram the Master's ever used.

Meanwhile, Tegan and her nurse friend have gone to the boiler room to find that a lot of dolls that look a bit too similar to the patients here are people burned. The Master confronts them. He's burned too. He's still the Ainley Master in theory but he looks like he did before he stole Nyssa's dad's body for reasons that will be explained later.

While going to confront "Mr Tase", the Doctor and Turlough suddenly remember that Tegan exists and find out that she might be in trouble.

So Turlough goes down to the boiler room, finds Tegan, and they're both captured.

The Doctor meets with Mr. Tase and immediately calls him out on being the Master. The Master doesn't want to kill him this time (as if he ever genuinely does). He just needs the Doctor's help with a thing and he knows that the Doctor will refuse to do the thing, so he got the companions captured to ensure his cooperation.

However cooperative the Doctor might be in this situation, Tegan is not. This causes a bit of a kerfuffle.

The nursing home was the Master's TARDIS btw. He materialized his TARDIS around the nursing home and absorbed it. Or something. None of the things the Master does make sense.

Anyway, the TCE (shrinky death ray thing) was fired. What was that about? They wait a bit before telling you.

So, the TCE has a shrink ray version of a stun setting where it shrinks you but doesn't kill you. The Master just never uses it. Except now, mostly just to fuck with the Doctor. Also, instead of shrinking Tegan, who was actively causing trouble for him, the Master shrunk Turlough. The whole "surrendering and standing still" thing made him an easier target and the Master is a dick.

Tegan feels pretty bad about the whole thing and the Adric flashbacks it gave the Doctor.

Then, things get complicated, because it's the Master. Apparently, the Time Lords sort of half-exiled/half-executed him, taking away his stolen body, but his life force hung around by sheer force of will and he's actually been an invisible being in a castle this entire time. The burnt Master is his Watcher, who he's been acting through. He wants to do a thing with some mirrors to steal one of the Doctor's regenerations. I really can't explain it any better than that.

The Master continues to fuck with the Doctor by hypnotizing Tegan and we get...this:

Yeah. That.

Anyway, hypnotized Tegan is commanded to kill the Doctor and the Doctor is unable to fight back in any way without causing permanent damage to Turlough via the Master shaking him around inside a snuffbox, beating him up.

So, the Doctor screams and breaks all the magic mirrors because he can just do that now. I think the Fourth Doctor might've done something like this once, but it's still a bit anti-climactic here.

We just sort of cut to the Team all restored to normal trying to decide what to do with the Master.

This wrap-up conversation gives off this vibe that the Doctor just can't understand why Tegan and Turlough are so upset here. But it might just be a side-effect of this story about the Doctor still having some emotional attachment to the Master despite everything being in a hurry to end.

Or maybe the narrator doesn't get it:

I'm pretty sure anyone would be upset after being shrunk and kept in a snuffbox and might not have a whole lot of patience for someone protecting the person responsible.

Still, in the end, the Doctor sort of tries to humor him a bit...

How their complete trust was restored is unclear. They just decide to stop disagreeing with him for Reasons.

So, an interesting story, the a bit of a dumb one. I'm not gonna complain about not being able to follow the Master's plan because all of his plans are like that.

Ultimately, I think the biggest problem with this one is that the 5 isn't the Doctor you want for this story. We're exploring the Doctor's relationship with the Master. No matter how many times he tries to, and no matter what he says, the Master can't kill the Doctor because he likes him too much. At the same time, no matter how many terrible things he does, no matter how personal, no matter the scale, the Doctor can never defeat the Master completely, because he likes him too much.

The problem is that 5, though it was still a bit of a thing with him, isn't as friendly with the Master as most other incarnations. 3 treated the Master's antics like a game, but when 5 comes along, the Master destroys a quarter of the universe and traumatizes all of his companions in rapid succession. It's not fun anymore. The Master still thinks of it as a game, but the Doctor's no longer amused. This all resets later on, especially after the Time War, but for 5, that's our trajectory.

Think about how things between 5 and the Master end in Planet of Fire. The Master has pushed the Doctor so far that he can stand there and watch him burn alive. One of the things that sets 5 off is Kamelion's death. The Doctor had to kill Kamelion because the Master kept fucking with him. If Kamelion were an actual character, this moment might have the emotional weight it needed. The Master spends 5's run harming his companions. This is what really changed things. During 3's era, the Master developed a respect for Jo, the only TARDIS-traveling companion he had a chance to interact with. She almost became an extension of the Doctor. The Delgado Master, outside of a bit of hypnosis, doesn't harm the Doctor's companions. The Ainley Master does. 5's first story has the Master spend most of it torturing Adric. So, the entire dynamic of 5 and the Master is 5 losing his compassion for the Master because he hurt his companions.

This is a story for a later Doctor with some distance from these events. That's the serious problem. But the story is very silly, so serious problems aren't that big a deal, really.

[whimsigothwitch]

Witchy afternoon

[sweetoothgirl]

Black Velvet Cake + Salted German Dark Chocolate Buttercream

[seulreinaz]

♪ ۫ ✢ ׅ　📰 ࣪ ︵ ⠀  ( ◞‸◟)

[rosieandthemoon]

somewhere between no longer and not yet

[happyheidi]

ig: lulumoonowlbooks - architect: trpcarquitetos

[felsicveins]

I'm so lonesome all the time

Some sweet day

Gonna take away

This hurting inside

[bambicito]

Forget About Your Sorrow *･ 🫙 :¨ ·.· ¨: ✙

[craske]

cookies...... personal favorites since ive come back to the game recently after a long break

[keokartoffel]

Happy darkness element!

[cringecompanionapologist]

Top 5 Worst Days for Turlough

Okay maybe I'm as bored as I implied in the last post but this isn't a top five you're gonna find anywhere else.

Basically, here are five stories where very bad things happen to Turlough from least bad to most bad. Obviously, these are my perceptions and other people might not be put this in the same order. Also, I haven't seen everything, so I might miss something big and just not know.

Also, this turned out really fucking long because I just had to rant about number 1.

Number 5: Loups-Garoux (Big Finish Audio from 2001, written by Marc Platt)

I'm only putting this one at the bottom because Loups-Garoux is mostly a comedic story and Turlough seems to recover fine. He sees a vision of his dark side so terrifying he jumps out of a moving train and gets eaten by a werewolf, who spits him out because he has silver on him. Unlike in many of these examples, the Doctor seems a bit upset about this. But, this almost feels like business as usual.

Number 4: Trap for Fools (Big Finish Short Trip from 2018, written by Stephen Fewell)

Okay, this one might be a bit of a me thing. I can get a bit overly sensitive about the subject of mean teachers. In order to find and defeat the Monster of the Week, the Doctor has Turlough go undercover as a student at Space Brendon, basically. The Doctor seems completely oblivious to Turlough's misery and doesn't do much to help him through reliving experiences he was willing to kill to escape. This is another one that's mostly played for laughs, with most of the Horrors Turlough faces being mild bullying and a teacher pronouncing his name wrong on purpose to be a dick, but Turlough is actually intimidated by the mean teacher and mentally categorizes the other students by how much of a threat they might be and is just generally miserable the entire time.

Really, there's one bit that made me decide that this belonged on the list because it's really sad:

Someone please hug him.

Number 3: The Velvet Dark (Short Trip: Farewells from 2006, written by Stewart Sheargold)

The Master shoots Turlough with the TCE, making the Doctor think he'd just casually murdered him, only to reveal that he shrunk Turlough without killing him to make him a more manageable hostage. The Master places him in a box and shakes the box around when the Doctor hesitates in cooperating with him.

This story starts with the Master faking his death and the Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough attending his funeral. Tegan doesn't get why the Doctor is sad that the guy who killed her aunt is dead now. Turlough also doesn't get it, but he doesn't have as much of a personal reason to hate the Master, so he tries to be patient and Tegan seems kind of jealous that the Doctor listens to him more than her.

After being returned to his proper size, Turlough hates the Master just as much as Tegan does. The Doctor, apparently unable to truly hate the Master, kind of treats them both like the bad guys in this.

Number 2: Frontios (TV Serial from 1984, written by Christopher H. Bidmead)

An actual TV story! Tractators. Trion, at some point in the planet's history, was attacked by this story's Monster of the Week and now all Trions, regardless of when they were born, remember the Tractators on some level. It's never explained how this actually works, but Turlough personally had probably never heard of the Tractators until he saw a tunnel and a massacre just showed up in his brain. The Doctor awkwardly hands him off to the one-shots to go explore the tunnels, not knowing what to do about all this emotional stuff.

You'll notice that the Doctor's response to whatever happens to Turlough is a major factor in how I rank these.

Anyway...

Number 1: The King of Terror (Past Doctor Adventure novel from 2000, written by Keith Topping)

It isn't even close. The novels of the Wilderness Years (1990-2004) were aimed at an adult audience and there were very few limits on what sort of situations the Doctor and his companions could end up in. So, sometimes, shit got dark. I usually tend to find these morbidly funny, because saying things like "The Doctor and Dodo meet the Marquis de Sade" and "Doctor Who's Cannibal Holocaust" is fun. It just is. Shut up.

These books vary in quality. Some actually do interesting things with their darker subject matter while others are just sort of edgy for the sake of it. The King of Terror is in the latter category and is annoying as hell about it. I could go into way more detail about every stupid thing that happens in this book, but the Turlough stuff is the most interesting stupid thing, because of how fucked up it is.

So, Turlough, feeling a bit OOC on a trip to Los Angeles in 1999, goes to a bar, gets completely wasted, and chats up local girls trying to get laid. Then one woman stands out as hypnotically sexy, introduces herself as Eva, and invites Turlough back to her place to have sex. Turlough is too drunk to notice that this is moving a bit fast.

Anyway, Eva is actually a member of an alien species called the Jex who are trying to take over the world. They want to terraform Earth to be more like their homeworld, which has a hotter, thicker atmosphere, but their human slaves wouldn't be able to do hard labor in those conditions, so they want to genetically modify the humans to have higher heat resistance, among other things. There's something wrong with Jex DNA, so they need the DNA of some other alien with higher heat resistance.

The CIA, wanting to see where this is all going, tipped the Jex off that some aliens had just showed up in LA and Eva went out to kidnap one. Turlough then spends like half the book being experimented on to both confirm that he's an alien and that he's the right type of alien.

It's a lot of torture. I'm not even going to say any of what happens. Here's one screenshot of Turlough reflecting on all the torture happening to him that is vague but sums up why I'm not going to elaborate:

(Note: There actually is a reference to something specific in here and I apologize in advance)

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Tegan find out that Turlough's missing. Tegan seems to think that they should do something about this, while the Doctor comments jokingly on how often Turlough gets captured. He eventually gives Tegan the day off to take her mind of things, leading to a really stupid romance subplot, while he does absolutely nothing to find Turlough.

Turlough eventually very brutally murders Eva in an understandable lapse of sanity and escapes. The Doctor isn't even there when he gets back and they reunite "offscreen". From that point on, the whole subplot is basically dropped. The Doctor asks Turlough if he's okay, he lies and says he is, the Doctor knows it's a lie, but he's glad for a chance to act like it never happened.

So, it really sucks to be Turlough and I'm now exhausted.

[whimsigothwitch]

Purple, color of the intuition

[obrigados]

⠀⠀⠀⠞⡷⠀⠀𝓔mbrace　𝓣he　𝓕eminine⠀⠀•̩̩͙*˚ ❀

[bonsiii-art]

Last New Year's gift for my friend, Mouse ο(=•ω＜=)ρ⌒☆

They ship all four of these guys together and while I'm not a big canon shipper, they really endeared me more to the characters with their adorable art and lore building! Check them out on Twitter!

[i-ate-a-purse]

Silly dog shenanigans

I have so many Dc and baby Velvet ideas

[siriusfelis]

Sorry idk lol