Valeyard

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Doctor Who character

The Valeyard
Affiliated with	Time Lords
Race	Time Lord
Home planet	Gallifrey
Home era	Gallifrey era
First appearance	The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet
Last appearance	The Trial of a Time Lord: The Ultimate Foe
Portrayed by	Michael Jayston

The Valeyard (pronounced "Valley-ard") is a fictional character from the long-running British science fiction television series, Doctor Who. In the serial The Trial of a Time Lord, comprising the whole of Season 23 of the series, the Time Lords place the Sixth Doctor on trial and the Valeyard serves as the prosecutor. The character is played by Michael Jayston.

The Valeyard appears in all four segments of Trial — The Mysterious Planet, Mindwarp, Terror of the Vervoids and The Ultimate Foe. In episode 4 of The Mysterious Planet it is stated that "valeyard" means "learned court prosecutor".

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

During the course of the trial, the Doctor was accused of "conduct unbecoming a Time Lord" and transgressing the First Law of Time. As prosecutor, the Valeyard presented the events of The Mysterious Planet and Mindwarp as extracts from the Matrix, the computer network that serves as the repository of all Time Lord knowledge. The Valeyard used these extracts as evidence of the Doctor's meddling in time and space. Throughout the presentation of the evidence the Doctor barracked at the Valeyard, calling him names such as "the Boneyard" and "Knacker's Yard" and only the interventions of the Inquisitor, another Time Lord, kept the trial going.

What was not discovered until later was that the Matrix extracts had been tampered with to show the Doctor in the worst possible light. In The Mysterious Planet this involved the editing of particular scenes. Scenes of the mercenary Sabalom Glitz attempting to buy "secrets" from the robot Drathro were censored completely. In Mindwarp substantial portions of the extract were falsified entirely by the Valeyard. The most significant alteration was when the Time Lords intervened in the brain transplant experiments of Lord Kiv and his scientist Crozier. In the Matrix extract, it appeared that Yrcanos was possessed and that he killed the Mentors and the Doctor's companion Peri.

When the Doctor presented in his defense the future events of Terror of the Vervoids, he began to suspect that the Valeyard was tampering with the evidence, but lacked proof. The Doctor was forced to destroy the human-plant hybrids known as the Vervoids when they ran rampant on a space liner. If they had been allowed to reach Earth they would have eliminated all animal life. The Valeyard tampered with the scenes and made it appear as if the Doctor had committed genocide.

In The Ultimate Foe, the Master appeared in the Matrix revealing that it was possible to infiltrate it. Sabalom Glitz and the Doctor's future companion Melanie Bush were presented to the Court to rebut the Valeyard's accusations. It was then revealed that the Valeyard was, in fact, the Doctor himself — or rather, a distillation of the Doctor's evil side, a potential dark version who might exist between his twelfth and final incarnations. This concept is similar to the ethereal "Watcher" that manifested itself to bridge the gap between his fourth and fifth incarnations (Logopolis).

The Valeyard was also revealed to be acting at the behest of the High Council of Time Lords to cover its corruption in the Ravalox affair. The "secrets" were information from the Matrix. Ravolox was Earth, but the Time Lords moved it through space, killing virtually every human being living on it. To prevent the Doctor discovering the secret and revealing it, they used the Valeyard to try to have the Doctor executed under the pretence of a trial. The reward for the Valeyard's actions would have been to give him all of the Doctor's remaining regenerations and make his existence concrete. However, the Valeyard would then have slain every member of the Court as well, using a particle disseminator located within the Matrix.

The Doctor entered the Matrix and fought and defeated the Valeyard in a fictional world of his creation. The Inquisitor revealed that Peri had indeed survived and was married to Yrcanos. The Master and the Valeyard appeared to be trapped in the Matrix, but at the end of the serial, the Valeyard was seen disguised as the Keeper of the Matrix. The subsequent whereabouts of the Valeyard have never been disclosed in the television series. It remains to be seen if the Valeyard will still manifest himself when and if the Doctor, now in his tenth persona, reaches his final regeneration.

[edit] Other appearances

The Valeyard has appeared in some of the spin-off media, although their canonicity is unclear. In these stories, the Doctor is aware that he has the potential to become the Valeyard and tries to step away from any path that might lead him to that future. In the Virgin Publishing Missing Adventure Millennial Rites by Craig Hinton, the Sixth Doctor succumbed to his darker side and became the Valeyard very briefly, but snaps back to normal.

In the BBC Books novel The Eight Doctors, by Terrance Dicks, the Eighth Doctor returns to the trial of the Sixth Doctor and rescues him from an alternate timeline in which the Sixth Doctor is about to be executed by the Valeyard. The Master reveals to the Eighth Doctor that the Valeyard is "an amalgam of the Doctor's darker side, somewhere between his twelfth and thirteenth regenerations."

In the Past Doctor Adventures novel Mission: Impractical by David A. McIntee, the villanous Mr Zimmerman, a renegade Time Lord, refers to the Sixth Doctor as "I" before correcting himself. McIntee has confirmed that this is a subtle hint that Zimmerman was actually the Valeyard.^[1]

In Matrix by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker, the Valeyard again appears, and encounters the Seventh Doctor. After possessing the body of the Keeper, he acquires control over the Dark Matrix, the repository of all of the Time Lords' most evil impulses, and tries to use it to take revenge on the Doctor. To this end, he travels to London in 1888, taking on the identity of Jack the Ripper, and using the Ripper murders as sacrifices to power the Dark Matrix. Once it has enough power, the Dark Matrix will be unleashed on the world, creating a dystopian nightmare and corrupting history forever. As an added bonus, the Valeyard has tracked down all thirteen incarnations of the Doctor, reverting them to their basic, evil natures, using their corrupted spirits to animate golems to do his work. However, the Seventh Doctor escapes the Valeyard's attack by sealing his conscious mind away from the assault in the TARDIS telepathic circuits. Having regained his memory, the Doctor confronts the Valeyard (now calling himself "the Ripper"), causing his foe to lose control of the Dark Matrix. The Valeyard is eventually killed and history is restored to normal.

The Big Finish Productions' Doctor Who Unbound audio drama He Jests at Scars... (a quotation from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet) documents an alternative timeline in which the Valeyard, once again voiced by Michael Jayston, has defeated the Doctor (in the aftermath of the trial) and gone on to ransack time and space. He has forged an empire by carefully eliminating time sensitives and altering his own (i.e. the Doctor's) past to his advantage, monopolising time travel. The Doctor's companion Mel, hardened by many years of dark experience, eventually tracks him down with a view to assassinating the Valeyard, but finds that he has become the victim of his own time meddling. She and a seemingly repentant, broken Valeyard, suffer the penalty for breaking the TIme Lords' first law, and become trapped in the TARDIS, perhaps forever enmeshed in the web of time...