The End of the Rainbow (short story)

The End of the Rainbow was a short story published in Doctor Who Storybook 2010. It was written by Jacqueline Rayner.

Plot summary
In a small English town at the beginning of the 21st century, the Doctor happens across a bright green cat. He follows the cat onto the town’s highstreet, where a crowd of people have gathered to look at a rainbow. The rainbow is arcing to the ground just outside a greengrocer’s, stopping inside a tray of fruit. The fruits all appear to have unusual colours – the bananas are blue, and the pears are indigo. The greengrocer is stood with his arms around the rainbow, trying to stop people from touching it. The crowd around him grows restless, and a surge from the back sends an old woman at the front of the crowd stumbling towards the rainbow. Her arm brushes it, and to her horror she begins to turn violet. The Doctor helps her to her feet, and the grocer ushers her inside his shop.

Inside, the Doctor and the woman find a shop employee, Ted, who has turned bright yellow, as well as a red dog, two bright green schoolgirls, a few customers who have turned indigo, and a violet policeman. The Doctor tells everyone in the shop that he’s a doctor, and should be able to help them.

Ted recalls when the rainbow landed, around ten minutes prior to the Doctor arriving. The schoolgirls say that when they touched the rainbow it felt “fizzy” and “fuzzy”. The Doctor asks if everyone has turned the colour of the part of the rainbow they touched, and everyone says they have. He then notices that the rainbow is changing the colours of living things – people and fruits – but not objects. He also observes that people’s clothes have changed colour with them.

Suddenly the old lady and the policeman collapse to the floor. The Doctor checks their pulses, and confirms they are still alive. There is a shriek outside the shop, and the Doctor runs out to see what’s happening. The rainbow colours are spreading out across the ground in a puddle-like manner, and one man in the fleeing crowd is turned blue. The grocer shuts the shop door, but the colours seep in underneath it. He then opens a storeroom at the back of the shop and ushers everyone inside. The Doctor carries the collapsed lady to the storeroom. When he goes back for the policeman he finds that red from the rainbow has already made contact with the collapsed man, but his violet colour is not changing. As the Doctor lifts the policeman he finds that he’s unexpectedly light in weight. Then, without a sound, the policeman simply disappears. In the storeroom, the old lady has vanished too. The Doctor gets in and shuts the door, and a pool of red begins to seep under it.

The Doctor climbs onto a crate, to prevent himself from touching the pooling red. One of the schoolgirls hypothesises that the colours are like acid, which dissolves you from the inside until you disappear, but the Doctor reassures everyone in the storeroom that this is probably not the case. As the red begins to creep up the crate the Doctor climbs onto a chair. One of the schoolgirls tells Mr Cousins, the greengrocer, that he will be next, since people are disappearing in the reverse order of the colours of the rainbow. Cousins begins to get flustered, asking for a phone so he can call Mary. The Doctor has an idea – he asks for a watch, and confirms that roughly ten minutes passed between the rainbow touching the old lady and her disappearing. Mr Cousins then collapses to the floor. The Doctor announces that ten seconds pass between one colour disappearing and the people with the next colour collapsing. Ted accuses the Doctor of wasting time, and the Doctor admits that he doesn’t know enough about what’s happening to have saved Mr Cousins. He assures everyone that he will work it out, and estimates that he has about half an hour to save everyone. He then jumps onto the floor and sprints out of the room.

Outside, the Doctor grabs onto the semi-solid rainbow and begins to climb it. He wants to find out what’s on its other side. When he gets to the top of the rainbow arc the Doctor has turned bright red. He sees that the rainbow touches the ground again in the middle of a cluster of high-rise buildings. Not wanting to waste any more time, he sits on the rainbow and slides the whole way down. As he neared the buildings, the Doctor realises that the rainbow passes through one of their sloping roofs. He tries to slow himself down, so he doesn’t hit the roof at speed and end up falling from the building. To his surprise, the rainbow takes him right through the roof, and through multiple storeys of the building, until he eventually lands with a thump in a carpeted room. Upon seeing a bright red stranger fall through the ceiling of her room, a young girl begins to scream.

The Doctor sees a gold-coloured rock with a crack in it, from which the rainbow seems to be sprouting. The Doctor says hello to the girl, who introduces herself as Bobby. She tells the Doctor that she found the rock in the park, and when she picked it up a beam of blue had shot out from it and turned a daffodil blue. She had decided to take it home, wanting to use it to dye her hair. The Doctor examines the rock with his sonic screwdriver. He tells Bobby that the rock likely belongs to a race called the Filbik. The Filbiks are prolific collectors and museum-curators, and use the colour-changing rock to catalogue the samples they collect from other planets. He says that the colour-markings give off a low-level sedative, so any living samples are not distressed when they get beamed up to a Filbik ship. He suggests that the rock may have been dropped by accident, and the crack in its side is causing the marking beams to escape. The Doctor then seals the crack with his sonic screwdriver, and the rainbow vanishes. Suddenly he notices some orange objects from the room have disappeared. Looking at the watch, the Doctor realises he has just ten seconds before he falls unconscious. He tells Bobby that she’s the only person who knows what’s really happening, and says she needs to find a way to contact the Filbiks, or he and everyone else will end up in a museum forever.

The Doctor wakes up, feeling groggy, in an unfamiliar spaceship. He sees Bobby is there too. She tells him to relax, saying she’s spoken to the Filbiks and everything is going to be okay. She explains that she used the rock to dye herself red, but only a little, so she wouldn’t be too sleepy on arrival. The Doctor sees that she isn’t red anymore, and then notices that the red colour has left his body as well. Bobby explains that they’re on a storage ship, like a trailer, which isn’t staffed by any Filbiks, but that they have a sort-of telephone which she used to contact the main ship. She had then noted down their instructions on how to remove the colour dye. The Doctor finds everyone from the greengrocers, still unconscious, noting that they don’t have a “Time Lord’s constitution”. He hopes that if he can send them back to Earth before they wake up they won’t remember too much of what has happened to them. After looking around the storage ship’s control room, the Doctor turns on its auxiliary power and prepares to send the kidnapped people back to Earth. He decides to return all of the stolen birds and fish too, but leaves a television for the Filbiks to study. He asks Bobby to return to the spot she arrived in, so she can be safely transported back down to Earth, and as she leaves he tells her she’s a star.

Characters

 * Tenth Doctor
 * Bobby
 * Ted
 * Mr. Cousins

Worldbuilding

 * The Doctor asks if anyone has tried removing their new colours with soap and water.
 * The Doctor checks the old lady’s pulse by feeling her wrist.
 * The Doctor mentions The X Factor.

Food and beverages

 * The greengrocer's shop sold apples, bananas, cucumbers, courgettes, cabbages, oranges, peaches, pears, pineapples, and potatoes.

Continuity

 * The Doctor says he's always wanted to be ginger. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor, Rose, TV: The Night of the Doctor, The Christmas Invasion)
 * The Doctor recalls travelling with a red-haired woman, and this story is set after they parted ways. (TV: Journey's End)