Final Genesis (comic story)

was a 1993 Doctor Who Magazine comic. A part of the brief run of comics that were closely integrated into the Virgin New Adventures continuity, it starred the Seventh Doctor and Benny, and, for the first time, a post-Dalek Wars Ace.
The story itself posited the notion of the Doctor watching over a parallel Earth in which a dead, alternative Third Doctor had brokered a successful peace between humans and Earth Reptiles at the end of TV: Doctor Who and the Silurians. This story therefore offered a second parallel Earth within the Virgin New Adventures continuity that had to do with a more dominant Silurian race.
== Summary ==
Then: A bomb explodes, killing the Third Doctor and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.
Now: The Doctor's TARDIS arrives with a rising tone, rather than the usual "vworp, vworp", the first sign for Ace and Benny that something is not quite right. Unable to get a straight answer out of the Seventh Doctor, they find the world itself isn't quite right. They see dinosaurs and are arrested by strangely familiar soldiers working for URIC rather than UNIT. The Doctor ingratiates himself into the URIC command; the late Doctor's assistant is familiar enough with regeneration and time travel to work out that although this is a Doctor, he is not their Doctor.
The Doctor becomes embroiled in the prevailing mystery. People across the globe — humans, Silurians and Sea Devils — have disappeared and unnatural beasts are attacking URIC. After an attack, one is captured and autopsied. It is a gestalt, a combination of the best genetic features of all three dominant species. After capturing a double-agent in URIC, they discover Mortakk, a rogue Silurian scientist and eugenicist, is behind the creation of the hybrid beasts. He has developed a gas he plans to release across London and then the globe. It will kill two-thirds of the infected and mutate the survivors. However, during a URIC attack on his base, an accident releases the gas, killing Mortakk. The Doctor watches coldly, protected by his Time Lord immune system and respiratory-bypass ability.
Before returning to the TARDIS, the Doctor visits his other self's grave, leaving Ace and Benny to muse about their "accidental" arrival and how for the Doctor, his parallel selves could be the closest thing he has to family.
== Characters ==
* Seventh Doctor
* Ace
* Bernice Summerfield
* Colonel Muriel Frost
* Professor Thactus
* Captain Kathryn Paris
* Mortakk
* Wilcox
* Doris
* Liz
* Third Doctor
* Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart
* Liz Shaw
== Worldbuilding ==
* Doris speaks to Liz at Cambridge.
* Mortakk is based out an abandoned nuclear research station in Darkmoor. This is taken from Captain Britain, who used to work there.
* URIC, which stands for United Races Intelligence Command, is the alternate universe's equivalent to UNIT from The Doctor's universe
* Despite having his exile on Earth lifted, the other Third Doctor chose to stay on Earth and help cement the peace between humans and Earth reptiles.
* Mortakk's mutagen gas affects all Earth sentients - humans, Silurians and Sea Devils - mutating them an amalgamation with traits of all three or killing them outright.
== Notes ==
* The TARDIS console room from the parallel word changes appearance in the middle of the story with no explanation.
* The opening page shows the Brigadier's house from TV: Battlefield and refers to his "retirement... being ancient history". With the parallel universe not revealed as such until Part 2, this was as red herring to trick the audience into thinking the Brigadier had been killed off.
* This story features a parallel Earth that was created by an alternate ending to Doctor Who and the Silurians. It should not, however, be confused with the Silurian Earth of Blood Heat. In Silurians, the titular species is destroyed. In Blood Heat, the humans are destroyed. This Earth is the middle ground of peaceful co-existence between Homo sapiens and Homo reptilia that the Third Doctor failed to achieve at the end of Silurians.
** The strip was almost cancelled when the magazine learned of Blood Heat. Scott Gray successfully argued to his editor that as parallel universes, both stories could happen and contradict each other.Commentary in the Emperor of the Daleks trade
* As the Doctor hooks up Benny into the machine that will link her mind to Kathryn Paris', she says, "No, not the mind-probe!". The Doctor takes this as a joke. Indeed, the letterer goes out of her way to put the phrase in quotation marks so that the audience knows Benny is quoting the infamous line from The Five Doctors. Neither the Doctor nor Benny present for that scene in The Five Doctors, making this line an explicit fourth wall break.
* In the backmatter commentary for a 2017 trade collection, Gray asserted that he "would have preferred to stick with the TV version of Ace" in this strip, partly as the New Adventures Ace "wasn't much fun" and partly because he felt tying into the books didn't make sense when the comic strip had more readers.
* The Doctor, Ace and Bernice Summerfield travel to another alternate universe where Silurians and Sea Devils are present in PROSE: Blood Heat. In a possible nod to this, Final Genesis states the number of possible futures and divergent timelines from the first Silurians story is near endless.
== Continuity ==
* The Doctor recalls his first meeting with the Silurians at Wenley Moor, and his inability to stop the human military from destroying them. (TV: Doctor Who and the Silurians)
* Benny says human and Earth Reptile "don't get together for another five centuries" in the original timeline. (PROSE: Love and War)
* The Doctor's Respiratory bypass system leaves him unaffected by airborne chemicals, such as how the Fourth Doctor was immune to helium. (TV: The Robots of Death)
== Footnotes ==
Category:Bernice Summerfield sources
Category:Bernice Summerfield comic stories
Category:Silurian and Sea Devil comic stories
Category:1993 comic stories
Category:Seventh Doctor DWM comic stories
Category:UNIT comic stories
Category:Stories set in parallel universes
Category:Four part comics