Wormwood (comic story)

Wormwood was the main comic story of 1998 in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine. It concluded the long-running Threshold story line, which had been ongoing for several years. It also set up future narratives by introducing the gestalt character of Feyde, who would return in the much later story, Me and My Shadow, and ultimately empower Izzy to finally depart the Eighth Doctor's company.

Wormwood also featured what seemed to be "the Ninth Doctor". Although revealed as a narrative trick, the point of the deception was to see if DWM readers would accept a regeneration into a new incarnation exclusive to the magazine. Ultimately, nothing actually came of the plan, and the Eighth Doctor remained the "current" DWM Doctor until the arrival of Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor.

Summary
The Doctor has regenerated, or has he?

The TARDIS arrives in Wormwood, an American village, in 1880. However, the Doctor and his companions soon discover they are not on Earth, but the Moon, and they have been lured into a final confrontation with their old enemies, the Threshold. After three thousand years, they are preparing to step out of the darkness and descend on the whole galaxy. Can Izzy and Fey survive in a world populated by ruthless Threshold agents, and what has happened to the Doctor?

Plot
As Fey and Izzy try to come to terms with the Doctor’s regeneration, the TARDIS is caught in an energy storm that destroys another ship before their eyes. Fey then unexpectedly reprogrammes the console to take them to Wormwood, a village in the American midwest circa 1880 -- or so it appears until they realise that they’re in fact on Earth’s Moon, in the home of the Threshold. The Threshold’s leader, Abraham White, finally reveals himself to them, but even he is surprised when the TARDIS seems to dematerialise by itself before he can examine it. He soon recovers, and sends Izzy and Fey to the heart of Wormwood -- where the Threshold agent Chastity informs Fey that the Threshold captured her after she first met the Doctor, and implanted a transmitter in her head so they could use her as a spy if she ever met the Doctor again. Fey, furious, overpowers Chastity and her guards, and she and Izzy take their Threshold rings; but while Izzy concentrates on finding the Doctor, the vengeful Fey concentrates on finding White.

According to White, the Threshold is finally ready to step out of the shadows after 3000 years. Before he can explain, Fey arrives and attacks him, but White defends himself by transforming into a shadow creature called the Pariah, and Fey has no choice but to back down. The Pariah then transforms back into White, who explains that, while a young man in 19th-century Arkansas, he stumbled across the dying Pariah, a superweapon that had been expelled from Gallifrey after trying to overthrow Rassilon. White bonded with the Pariah, giving her a new body with which to heal herself while she plotted her revenge. Inspired by Ford’s assembly line, White had the Pariah reproduce herself by fission, and set the mini-spheres in a dimensional void. He then recruited employees who weren’t afraid of the power he offered to them, and transformed them into living conduits to the spheres -- and these people became the agents of the Threshold.

Izzy concentrates on reaching the Doctor, but instead finds herself in the very centre of Wormwood, where a young new Threshold agent named Gracie Witherspoon is heading for the “Eye of Disharmony”. Gracie spots Izzy following her and captures her just as the Eye is activated, transforming every quantum particle in the vacuum of space into an entropic hole, turning space into a minefield and killing every living being outside a planetary atmosphere. White then takes the appalled Doctor to his transmission centre, where he intends to send out a message to the entire Universe. First he must tear the Time Lords’ gift of universal translation out of the Doctor’s brain; this is the prize they should have earned for wiping out the Daleks, but it was lost when Chastity accidentally dropped the box in the Dalek Hive. However, the Doctor points out that his newly regenerated brain is still unstable, and that since Chastity looked into the box before dropping it, she has the gift which White needs. White thus tears out the protesting Chastity’s mind instead, and then transmits a public service announcement to the entire Universe. Since travel in space is now impossible, only the Threshold can move between planets -- and they now intend to charge for their services.

Gracie arrives with her prisoner, but the Pariah realises that “Gracie” is an impostor -- and “Gracie” is thus forced to reveal that she is really the Eighth Doctor, disguised by a personal chameleon circuit. The “Ninth Doctor” is likewise revealed to be a disguised Shayde. White transforms into the Pariah, who attacks Shayde; Shayde’s psychic bullets have no effect without the will of his Time Lord masters behind them, but he still attempts to hold off the Pariah while the Doctor takes Fey and Izzy back to the TARDIS. There, he shows Fey that the TARDIS manual she used to pilot the ship to Gallifrey is written in an alien script; when she told him what she had done, he realised that it must have been translated for her by an implant in her brain. He and Shayde thus staged the “regeneration” deception, and Shayde kept the Threshold distracted while the real Doctor explored Wormwood, disguised as Gracie.

The Pariah arrives, mortally injures Shayde before their eyes and steals the TARDIS. While Fey tends to the dying Shayde, the Doctor sends Izzy to ion control with a baseball bat and sets off to confront White and the Pariah. To White’s horror, the Pariah uses the TARDIS to drain all energy from the Threshold grid, killing all of their people and overloading the Eye of Disharmony. The Pariah reveals that she intends to fulfil her destiny as the ultimate weapon by destroying everything in the Universe, but when White realises this, he deliberately separates himself from her, knowing that they’ve been bonded for so long that neither can survive for long without the other. Before the dying Pariah can kill the Doctor, Fey arrives -- having bonded with Shayde to provide him with the willpower he lacks to repair himself. “Feyde” shoots the Pariah with psychic bullets now armed with Fey’s willpower, while Izzy smashes the ion control centre to bits. The Doctor, Fey and Izzy retreat as ion control short-circuits and destroys the Moon. When the Eye of Disharmony is destroyed, space returns to normal, and the Universe is saved. Fey departs to come to terms with her new state of being, and the Doctor and Izzy set off for new adventures.

Characters

 * Eighth Doctor
 * Izzy Sinclair
 * Fey Truscott-Sade
 * Shayde
 * Threshold

Continuity

 * The Threshold first appeared in COMIC: Ground Zero, where their actions result in Ace's death. By chance, Izzy uses Ace's baseball bat to defeat them.
 * The mysterious box that the Threshold were being paid with in COMIC: Fire and Brimstone is stated to have come from Rassilon, and was the gift of universal translation. It's also absent, having been dropped and lost in the same story.