The Eternity Clock (video game)

Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock (also known as The Eternity Clock) is the first of a three-part series of games for PlayStation 3, PS Vita, and PC. It can be played by one or two players. The one-player option switches between the characters of the Eleventh Doctor and River Song. The two-player option has both characters playing simultaneously.

Synopsis
Rogue time corridors are opening all over London, connecting Elizabethan, Victorian, modern day and future London. It's up to the Doctor and River Song to investigate and close these corridors - a process not made easy by the sudden appearance of Cybermen, Daleks, Silurians and the Silence throughout history!

Plot
Onboard the TARDIS, the Doctor struggles to navigate a temporal maelstrom. He lands on Earth. However, the TARDIS appears in a bad way. The instruments confirm the time storm covers the planet. The Doctor exits to find himself in the Bank of England in the modern day. When the TARDIS vanishes in a flash of light, he is trapped. On the advice of a psychic paper message from his future self he uses gold bars to smash through a grate into the Victorian-era vaults under the bank. He finds a perception filter he recognises as his own work. He disables it, revealing a sewer entrance. However, the passage below is blocked by a gate requiring someone on each side to open.

At the Stormcage Containment Facility in 5145, River Song gets a phone call. The Doctor needs her help! She escapes from the Facility. Once clear of its Tesla binding field, she uses her vortex manipulator to travel to modern day Earth, where she frees the stranded Doctor. They go through the old tunnels, trying to reach the surface.

They soon find Cyberman storage units which begin releasing their occupants. The Doctor and River flee through the tunnels to reach a Bank of England lift that lets them enter the tunnels of the London Underground. The Cybermen pursue them, but the pair seal them off behind a set of large doors.

In an area devastated by a gas explosion, the Doctor and River find an encampment of humans, refugees from the Cybermen who are converting people en masse. Before the pair can reach the surface, the Cybermen find a way into the area through more train tunnels. River and the Doctor electrify the rails, blocking their access.

Ascending to the surface, River and the Doctor find the streets empty. A dormant time corridor, caused by the raging time storm, is near. With the construction site blocked by road collapse from the gas explosion, they go into an adjacent office building. They find another time corridor, which the Doctor identifies as leading to 1892. They find a heavily guarded Cyberfactory ship on the other side of the office and the Doctor formulates a plan - he will travel through the time corridor, which has activated and alter the plans for the gas pipes in the past so the explosion takes place elsewhere. With the road traversible, they can enter the building site, use its crane to get on top of the office and drop into the unguarded Cyberfactory.

The Doctor travels through the corridor with River's vortex manipulator and comes out in a textile mill. He makes his way outside and then underground. A mysterious figure dashes over the rooftops. Beneath the streets, he finds the under-construction pipes, alters the plans and returns through another time corridor to the present.

Meanwhile, in the present, the Cybermen have entered the office block to investigate the energy from the corridor's use. Their forcible entry activates the building's security measures, trapping River inside. She tricks the Cyberman patrols into breaking open the office's security booth. She deactivates the barriers, allowing her to go out. The Doctor and she rendezvous and ascend the construction site, using a girder held by the crane to cross onto the office's roof.

With the Cybermen still inside, the Doctor and River return to the street in a window-cleaning cradle and break into the Cyberfactory, intending to disable the Cyber-Planner inside. They follow the Planner's command signal towards the centre of the ship, but are forced to flee as squadrons of Cybermen are revived to pursue them. They eventually reach the ship's thermionic core, where the Cyber-Planner is located. River notices a mysterious object suspended near the Planner, which the Doctor identifies as having a huge temporal signature and broadcasting time distortion beam. River and he split up to reach control panels at the top and bottom of the core and use them to overload the thermionic power source to destroy the Cyberfactory. They escape through a newly opened time corridor, taking the strange artefact with them.

After navigating through the corridor, they find themselves in the TARDIS. The Doctor connects the artefact to the console and finds it is responsible for generating the time corridors. The object is just one of four trying to speak with each other across time.

They leave the TARDIS near London Bridge in 1561, but the time corridor through which the ship appears immediately disappears. To leave they lower a drawbridge to access two other time corridors. Although they enter separate corridors, both arrive again in the TARDIS.

The Doctor realises the ship has moved to the heart of the time storm to stabilise itself. The corridors lead to the TARDIS because they are being pulled in by the maelstrom. The ship also detects a signal hidden in the time storm. The Doctor decides to investigate it. They exit the TARDIS into 1561 again, but soon notice that tally marks are appearing on the walls around them.

In London in 1892, a Silurian warrior stands over the body of a policeman. The Doctor awakens, confused. He finds the sonic screwdriver and psychic paper gone, River's blaster and hallucinogenic lipstick in their place. He notices strange pipes carrying a green liquid on a nearby building. A 16th century statue hides the psychic paper, showing a message from River: the Silence have separated them across time and the Doctor must follow these messages to find her.

In the building with the odd pipe the Doctor finds more pipes guarded by Silurian warriors. He also spots the sonic screwdriver on a statue salvaged from an old church, but the way to it is blocked by hot steam. He leaves the building and goes into the sewers beneath the streets. They are riddled with the Silurian piping. Evading guards, he finds controls to shut off the steam and returns to collect the screwdriver.

On the advice of another psychic paper message, the Doctor heads back into the sewers. He uses the sonic screwdriver to access the same vault system he passed through beneath the modern day Bank of England, where finds a perception filter hiding a doorway. Deactivating it, he reveals an old crypt, where River lies in a stasis field.

In 1561, River wakes to find her equipment gone and the Doctor's psychic paper in their place. A message on the paper from her future self tells her the Silence have separated the Doctor and her through time. She soon comes across a doorway, but the corridor it leads to seems too big compared to the building's exterior. River deactivates a perception filter, revealing a doorway which she recognises as leading to a Silence facility. Unable to get through, she leaves to find the sonic screwdriver in the nearby St. Christopher's Church.

River uses the sonic to open the door into the Silence complex. Inside she finds them controlling temporal energy somehow and carrying out experiments on stasis field technology. She realises they are drawing the power they need from elsewhere, along conduits leading towards St. Paul's Cathedral. She makes her way through the facility and steals the stasis field generator they are using. Now done with the Doctor's things, River hides the psychic paper and screwdriver on statues, then enters the church crypt. Disguising the tomb entrance with the perception filter from the Silence base, River activates the stasis field generator, allowing her to wait out the centuries in stasis until the Doctor finds her.

In 1892, the Doctor deactivates the stasis field generator, waking River. He sets up the perception filter where he found it in the modern day and they return to the sewers. They work together to access an area sealed with a Silurian door, allowing them to reach transport discs that lead underground. The Doctor grows concerned that time is wrong - the Silurians never attacked the surface world in the 19th century. In the underground Silurian city, the purpose of the pipes becomes clear - they are pumping deadly toxin into the city above and the entire system is being powered by an artefact similar to the one that the Cybermen had. The leader of the Silurian city, Vekkis, confronts them, and the Doctor forms a plan: he will reactivate walkways from the cavern's central column, allowing River to manually divert coolant, rather than toxin, into the pipes to the surface. Working together, they eventually flush all the toxin, then flee through a new time corridor, taking the artefact with them.

After navigating through the corridor, they arrive back in the TARDIS, where the Doctor adds the new artefact to the other one. As the object begins ticking like a clock, River has a brainstorm; it is an Eternity Clock. There are notes in her diary which she has no memory of ever making on one. The Doctor begins to understand the Clock can rewrite history. The notes in the diary are 'residue' from an encounter erased from River's timeline. In addition, the Clock seems to be cataloging all of time, ordering and recording events like a 'hard drive'.

Coming soon...

Cast

 * The Doctor - Matt Smith
 * River Song - Alex Kingston

Crew
to be added

Background
The original release date was to be in February 2012, but it was pushed back several times until it was finally released 23 May 2012 for PlayStation 3. A version of the game is set for release on the PS Vita on 13th June, 2012, with a PC Version to follow shortly afterwards.

Promotion
to be added

Rumours
to be added

Production errors

 * At one point, the Doctor refers to the Eternity Clock by name before that name has been established by River.
 * When River picks up the sonic screwdriver in her solo Elizabethan segment, she will mention the corridor with the perception filter even if the player has not yet entered it.
 * In the Dalek command node, the Doctor mentions sending the Supreme Dalek to the North Pole in the Arctic, but the description of the trophy received in the PlayStation 3 version states that it was sent to the Antarctic.
 * If the player receives a trophy at the same time as being caught by a guard in the Storm Cage, the game will freeze.
 * It is possible to stop all Cybermen from advancing down the London Underground by electrifying the tracks as the Cybermen are being generated by the game.

Continuity

 * In the pages of River Song's diary the player collects, there is an entry entitled "An Unearthly Mess", which apparently occurs before the events of DW: An Unearthly Child. In it, River recalls the First Doctor catching her snooping around I.M. Foreman's junk yard; when she hears a young woman calling for her grandfather, she takes off, writing "That's a conversation I'm not yet ready for!"
 * As soon as the Doctor and River penetrate the Silurian base, the first thing the Doctor remarks is "Oh, look! Rocks!" This reference the same sarcastic comment the Fourth Doctor said in DW: Destiny of the Daleks.
 * River's diary describes the first nine incarnations of the Doctor. She has apparently traveled back in time and spied on them; she will not meet the Tenth Doctor until DW: Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead.
 * River uses her Hallucinogenic lipstick, first seen in DW: The Time of Angels; the Sonic blaster, left in the TARDIS by Jack Harkness in DW: The Doctor Dances; River had it in DW: Silence in the Library; and her vortex manipulator, which she obtained in DW: The Pandorica Opens.
 * When The Doctor and River encounter an army of Cybermen, The Doctor yells to River, "Basically, run!" This is the same line that the Eleventh Doctor first used in DW: The Eleventh Hour when he was threatening the Atraxi about leaving Earth. Here, however, the situation is reversed. Instead of a threat, he's warning River that they need to get away.
 * There are several hats that can be collected.
 * The first hat is a fez. When the hat is clicked, the Doctor says "Don't worry, I won't let the bad lady near you," referencing the way Amy Pond and River Song treated his fez in DW: The Big Bang.
 * One of the hats is the helmet that the Tenth Doctor wore when he was possessed by Torajii. When the hat is clicked on, the Eleventh Doctor jokes, "Burn with me! Burn with me!" (DW: 42)
 * One of the hats is Captain Jack Harkness's uniform cap, The Doctor did say it looked better on Captain Jack. (DW: The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances).
 * Two of the hats reference UNIT. There is a soldier's red beret and a UNIT officers' cap; when this hat is clicked the Doctor muses how much fun it was working with UNIT in "the seventies, or was it the eighties?"
 * One of the hats is a Santa Claus cap; when the hat is clicked, the Doctor says "And a Merry Christmas to all of you at home!", the fourth wall-breaking line from DW: The Feast of Steven.
 * One of the hats is the Fifth Doctor's Panama. The Doctor says it still smells like Spectrox antitoxin from DW: The Caves of Androzani.
 * At one point The Doctor tells River "Pay attention: this is about to get complicated!" which echoes the line "Okay, kids, this is where it gets complicated" that Amy says in DW: The Big Bang and DW: Space.
 * The Doctor mentions that once he has moved all the boxes, he's going to have arms like The Corsair. DW: The Doctor's Wife.
 * River decided to take a nap on a sarcophogus and when The Doctor finds her she wakes up and says, "You know me: love a tomb!" cf. her "love a tomb" line to Rory Williams in DW: Day of the Moon.

Timeline

 * Given that the Doctor and River are already aware of the existence of the Silence, River is still imprisoned in Stormcage, there is a reference to Bitey the Cybermat and Amy and Rory are not seen, it is safe to date The Eternity Clock as taking place between DW: The Wedding of River Song and DW: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe.