Endgame (DWM comic story)

Endgame, also titled End Game, was the first Eighth Doctor strip in Doctor Who Magazine. It reintroduced the character of Maxwell Edison, absent since the Fifth Doctor's DWM run, and linked him to the Eighth Doctor's new companion, Izzy Sinclair. Furthermore, the story depicted the first comic-based story encounter between the Doctor and the Toymaker, with dialogue indicating that this was the characters first meeting since the events of The Celestial Toymaker.
== Summary ==
Returning to Stockbridge, the Doctor is reunited with an old friend, gains a new companion and comes into conflict with an old enemy.
== Plot ==
On horseback, Knight Templar Marwood pursues and kills a man named Felix. The TARDIS arrives in the valley below, in the village of Stockbridge, but things are not as familiar as they should be, and the Eighth Doctor is soon attacked by grotesquely doll-like people. He is saved by Izzy Sinclair and Maxwell Edison who tell him that Stockbridge has been invaded by aliens. However, Marwood arrives and disputes this. Izzy has a pendant named the Focus that belongs to him. He and his fox-headed huntsmen give chase as the Doctor, Max and Izzy run for the TARDIS. But the Celestial Toymaker is waiting for them.
The Doctor informs a perplexed Izzy that the he once bested the Toymaker in a game, and so the Toymaker wants a rematch. The Toymaker reveals that the village is not the real Stockbridge, but as the Doctor and Izzy escape into the TARDIS, Max is caught. Izzy explains that two days before, she and Max returned to Stockbridge to find it strangely changed and all the people either missing or possessed. They met Felix, who was Marwood's adjutant, who had stolen the Focus. He charged Izzy and Max with getting it away from Stockbridge. The Doctor thinks the real Stockbridge is close by and disengages the TARDIS's sub-spatial gyros to get there, but the Toymaker has them and the whole village trapped in a snow globe.
Realising the stakes, the Doctor and Izzy return to the Toymaker's version of Stockbridge to play the games set for them. Entering a floating castle, they are drawn into the Toymaker's domain where the Toymaker forces the Doctor to play a deadly game of hangman... with Izzy on the gallows. He loses and surrenders the Focus, which is part of a contraption known as the Imagineum, a device capable to transmuting raw light into matter itself. The Toymaker uses it to create a champion to defeat the Doctor, which is a twisted version of the Time Lord himself, after having spent millennia in his banishment to the ether to find the best way to defeat his rival.
Izzy and Max are pursued by the fox-headed huntsmen in a game of Mousetrap while the Doctor battles himself. However, as his destruction seems inevitable, he tells his evil duplicate that the Toymaker will never set him free and will always keep him as a plaything. The duplicate stops to listen. Izzy and Max, meanwhile, turn the tables on the huntsmen and drop a large weight on them, just as in the traditional game. Marwood is distraught at the demise of his little foxes and turns on the Toymaker, who casually kills him. This act is enough to convince the Doctor's duplicate that the Doctor speaks the truth. While he distracts the Toymaker, the Doctor uses the Imagineum to create a duplicate Toymaker who drags the real Toymaker back to the Dark Places whence the Toymaker came, locked in perpetual stalemate. The Doctor's duplicate then destroys the Imagineum and himself. With the Toymaker gone, the fake Stockbridge begins to break apart. Max finds the real village locked in the snow globe, actually a macro-dimensional linkage device and the Doctor is able to transpose the containment vectors to restore the village. The Doctor invites both Max and Izzy aboard the TARDIS, but only Izzy accepts.
== Characters ==
* Eighth Doctor
* Izzy Sinclair
* Celestial Toymaker
* Maxwell Edison
* Knight Templar Marwood
* Imagineum Eighth Doctor
* Felix
* Imagineum Celestial Toymaker
* Rufus
* Reynard
* Basil
* Grum
* Sandra Sinclair
* Les Sinclair
== Worldbuilding ==
* The Doctor carries an alarm clock from Somnambulos IV.
* Izzy expected the TARDIS to be more like the Star Ship Enterprise.
* There is an Osiran grimoire in the TARDIS library.
* One of Izzy's first stops in her initial TARDIS experience is the TARDIS library, where she finds Pavlovian Response in the Undead, Secrets of the Black Museum and Jane's Alien Artefacts.
* The Toymaker has bested Le Chiffre at baccarat and Napoléon Bonaparte at risk.
== Notes ==
* The first words spoken by the Eighth Doctor in his comic book tenure are: "Freshly-mown grass. Linseed oil. September hay and blackberries... the chirrup of crickets and a murmur of applause in the afternoon sun... Stockbridge. Definitely civilisation!"
* Endgame was reprinted in the Endgame graphic novel.
* The name "Marwood" is a reference to the film Withnail and I, which starred Richard E Grant and Paul McGann, both of whom have portrayed various incarnations of the Doctor@senrab_nala on twitter.com and both exist in-universe. The name "Marwood" was also used for the character Claudia Marwood, who, in a erotic novel called The Stranger, fell in love with a character very heavily implied to be the Eighth Doctor during the "Earth arc" of the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures. The novel also featured other homages to Withnail and I.
* Endgame posits that this is the first encounter between the Doctor and the Toymaker since The Celestial Toymaker, with the Doctor referring to only the 1966 serial when recapping their previous encounter, and the Toymaker also states that he was outright banished into the ether for millennia upon his last defeat, in which time he had being searching for a way to best the Doctor. However, several stories published since have depicted incarnations of the Doctor between the first and eighth incarnations facing the Toymaker.
== Continuity ==
* Max tells Izzy about how he met the Doctor, which was depicted in Stars Fell on Stockbridge.
* The Doctor indicates that this is his first encounter with the Toymaker since The Celestial Toymaker, with the Toymaker threatening to turn the Doctor invisible again. The Toymaker also indicates that he hadn't faced the Doctor since his debut serial.
* The Doctor mentions riding with the Templar Knights in Palestine, who the First Doctor met during The Crusade.
* Marwood and Max refer to the Toymaker as the "Mandarin", a name which originated in The Nightmare Fair.
== External links ==
== Footnotes ==
Category:Eighth Doctor DWM comic stories
Category:Stories set in Stockbridge
Category:The Toymaker comic stories
Category:1996 comic stories
Category:Stories set in 1996
Category:Four part comics