Slitheen

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Doctor Who race

Raxacoricofallapatorian
Type	Living calcium bipeds
Affiliated with	Various (families)
Homeworld	Raxacoricofallapatorius
First appearance	Aliens of London

The Slitheen are a fictional family of massive, bipedal extraterrestrials from the British science fiction television series Doctor Who and adversaries of the Doctor. They first appeared in the 2005 series episodes Aliens of London and World War Three. They are creatures of living calcium, hatched from eggs and native to the planet Raxacoricofallapatorius. While, strictly speaking, the name "Slitheen" refers to a specific family, the term has been used by the Doctor and Rose to refer to the Raxacoricofallapatorian race in general.

The Slitheen are a ruthless criminal sect whose main motivation is profit, but they have an almost ritualised love of hunting, being trained to hunt and kill from a young age. The members of the family are convicted criminals on their planet, being subject to the death penalty if they return.

1 Physical characteristics
2 History within the show
3 Other appearances
4 Naming
5 Appearances
6 External links

[edit] Physical characteristics

Raxacoricofallapatorians have a greenish tint to their skin and are eight feet tall with long forearms that end in powerful claws. They have a very developed sense of smell, able to track a single target across a few city blocks, and can sense if one of their own dies. Female Raxacoricofallapatorians can produce poisons within their bodies which they then use against their enemies. Known methods of delivery include a poisoned claw that can be fired like a dart and exhalation of poisoned breath.

The Slitheen are also able to disguise themselves by fitting into the skins of their victims, using compression fields created by a collar worn around their necks to squeeze their huge size into a slightly smaller space. The compression ratio has its limits, however, so the disguises tend to be that of already big-bodied people. The exchange of gases that compression entails also builds up within the acquired skin, causing a condition similar to flatulence in humans (the expelled gas smells like bad breath, which the Doctor noted was a form of calcium decay, although in reality the bacteria that cause tooth decay are different from those that cause bad breath).

The compression field also seems to have the side effect of weakening their calcium structures, making them vulnerable to acetic acid, which reacts explosively — and fatally — with their bodies. One of the Raxacoricofallapatorian methods of execution is the lowering of the condemned into a cauldron of acetic acid, which is then heated to boiling. The acidity of the solution is formulated to dissolve the skin, allowing the internal organs to drop into the liquid while the condemned is still alive, reducing them to "soup" and resulting in a slow and painful death.

In World War Three, when a single Slitheen was electrocuted, the effects were somehow transmitted to other Slitheen, even those across the city. One was also able to sense the death of another Slitheen. Whether this "connection" is a racial trait, limited to family members, or a side-effect of the compression collars they wore is unclear.

[edit] History within the show

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

When they first appeared in Aliens of London (set in 2006), the Slitheen had been in Great Britain for quite some time, and managed to infiltrate themselves into various levels of British society, from community leaders and military personnel to mid-level politicians and government officials. Their intent was to instigate World War III and sell the radioactive remains of Earth to a depressed galactic economy as fuel for interstellar spacecraft. To that end, they staged the crash landing of an alien spaceship in central London complete with a pig they had cybernetically augmented to provide an "extraterrestrial" body.

With the world in a state of heightened alert and panic, and with one of their number assuming the role of Acting Prime Minister, they persuaded the United Nations to give the United Kingdom permission to use its nuclear arsenal against the alien "massive weapons of destruction". Before the Slitheen could receive the launch codes, the Ninth Doctor arranged for a Harpoon missile to demolish 10 Downing Street, ending the scheme and presumably their lives.

However, at least one Slitheen (the one who had assumed the identity of Margaret Blaine of MI5) did survive and appeared in the episode Boom Town. In the intervening six months, "Blaine" managed to get elected as the Lord Mayor of Cardiff and planned to get off Earth by using the energy from a new nuclear power station to interact with a local spacetime Rift, not caring that it would destroy the planet in the process. Blaine was stopped by the Doctor and his companions, and on exposure to the "soul" of the TARDIS, regressed to an egg. The Doctor then took the egg back to the hatcheries on Raxacoricofallapatorius so she could be given a second chance at life.

In Dalek, a stuffed Raxacoricofallapatorian arm was among a collection of alien artefacts owned by American billionaire Henry van Statten in the year 2012.

[edit] Other appearances

The Slitheen also appeared in the New Series Adventures novel The Monsters Inside by Stephen Cole. When the Ninth Doctor and Rose are arrested in the Justicia System in the year 2501, the Doctor shares a cell with Dram Fel-Fotch and Ecktosca Fel-Fotch Happen-Bar Slitheen, who claim that after the Earth incident, the remains of the family went bankrupt and had become historians. However, it transpires that the Slitheen have not given up business, but are in conflict with a more influential family, the Blathereen. When the Doctor and Rose defeat an attempted Blathereen takeover of the system, the Slitheen are pleased to see they can once again become the profit-holders of their race.

Rose mentions the Slitheen Parliament of Raxacoricofallapatorius in The Christmas Invasion, and a Raxacoricofallapatorian (referred to by the Doctor as a Slitheen) was captured by the Graske in the mini-episode Attack of the Graske. Rose also accuses the Doctor (after his regeneration into the Tenth Doctor) of being a Slitheen in disguise in the 2005 Children in Need mini-episode and the Doctor makes a passing reference to the Slitheen and their skin-suits in The Runaway Bride.

In the 2006 series episode Love & Monsters, an alien called the Abzorbaloff, whose natural form is similar to that of the Slitheen, claims to be from Raxacoricofallapatorius's twin planet Clom.

A Slitheen appears briefly in the Tenth Doctor novel The Nightmare of Black Island by Mike Tucker, created from Rose's memories, along with a Dalek and the Nestene Consciousness.

[edit] Naming

One of the factors that helped the Doctor determine the home planet of the Slitheen was the fact that they had a hyphenated surname. Examples include the names Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen, and Jocrassa Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen; however, the surname "Slitheen" is obviously not hyphenated. The mention of Happen-Bar Slitheen in The Monsters Inside suggests that the hyphenated name preceding Slitheen is the surname referred to, that of a family sub-unit. One subtitle gave the name Sip Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day-Slitheen, also suggesting that Slitheen is a shortened form, but the shooting script version does not have a hyphen inserted between Day and Slitheen (Doctor Who: The Shooting Scripts).