An incarnation of the Renegade Time Lord often dubbed the Monk fashioned himself as a hero who fought the Laws of Time, taking on human companions of his own, such as Lucie Miller and Tamsin Drew, in his quest to alter history for the better. His distaste of the Doctor for preserving the timeline led him to assist the Daleks in reconquering Earth.
Tamsin died in the battle to stop the Daleks. Overcome by grief, the Monk came to blame the Doctor and vowed to get revenge. With the help of a time-sensitive hybrid named Sophia, he attempted to rewrite history so that he took the Doctor's place. His experiments were foiled by the Seventh and Sixth Doctors and their locum companions before the Fifth Doctor put an end to his plans for good.
Biography[]
Travels with Lucie Miller[]
Some time after regenerating, the Monk placed a classified advertisement soliciting a fellow time traveller. Lucie Miller saw the advertisement, applied, and was chosen to join him. They met Caligula and the Sensorites and watched a final of Thordon's Got Talent before a malfunctioning directional unit in his TARDIS caused them to crash at the Abbey of Kells in 1006. (AUDIO: The Resurrection of Mars) Taking Abbot Anselm prisoner in his bedchamber and disguising themselves as Abbot Thelonious and Brother Lucianus, they employed Brother Timothy and Brother Patrick, the Abbey's illuminators, to paint replacement circuits in the Book of Kells using liquid Gallifrite.
The Monk Time Scooped the Eighth Doctor's TARDIS to cannibalise it for parts. He visited the scriptorium to check on Patrick's work, reassuring Patrick that the Abbey was not cursed. He welcomed Tamsin Drew, the Doctor's newest companion, to the Abbey. While greeting King Sitric and Olaf Eriksson, he encountered an unconscious Patrick, who explained when he came to that the Book had been stolen. In the Abbey's chapel, the Monk watched Sitric interrogate Tamsin for her alleged theft and sentence her to losing her left hand.
The Doctor and Brother Bernard broke through the chapel's walls, arriving in time to stop the amputation. The Monk exploited the ensuing chaos to stun Sitric, Bernard, Olaf, and Patrick. He demanded the page with Timothy's circuit, receiving from Tamsin Patrick's inferior page instead. After departing with Lucie, he bemoaned being tricked, something she equally faulted him for. (AUDIO: The Book of Kells)
On Deimos in the 23rd century, the Monk awakened a pack of Ice Warriors centuries early. He intended them to terraform Mars, killing its 300,000 human colonists in the process, instead of killing twenty billion in the 33rd century by terraforming Halcyon. He then traveled to Questus with Lucie to wipe its dictator from existence by killing his parents in an avalanche. He freed Lucie from the snow, only for her to lambast him for taking lives for the greater good. Declaring that their friction had become unbearable, he released her into Deimos Moonbase in the 23rd century. Not coincidentally, this stopped the Doctor, who had escaped Deimos in a passenger rocket with Tamsin and assorted survivors, from exploding a bomb that would have wiped out the pack.
The Monk traveled to the rocket to woo Tamsin into becoming his companion. After trapping the rocket in a gravity eddy to forcibly return the Doctor to Deimos, he showed her Halcyon before and after the Ice Warriors' terraforming. He made it a point to portray himself as superior to the Doctor, driving home his criticism by detracting what he perceived as the Doctor's philosophy. He dropped off Tamsin at the Moonbase and went to taunt the Doctor over the inevitable terraforming. Fleeing from the approaching Ice Warriors to his TARDIS and joined by a disillusioned Tamsin, he set off to find "some old friends who also [had] a score to settle with the Doctor". (AUDIO: The Resurrection of Mars)
Helping the Daleks[]
Lured by the promise of being granted anything he desired, the Monk and Tamsin traveled to Skaro to save the Dalek Time Controller before it could be eaten away by the temporal energy it had absorbed in the Time Vortex. It tasked the Monk with weakening the Earth of the 22nd century with a Dalek virus in preparation for a second invasion. (AUDIO: To the Death)
The Monk ejected the virus into Earth's atmosphere and traveled to the aftermath of the resulting pandemic. He took up residence with Tamsin in an English vault, stealing artefacts from museums for his personal collection while lying to her that they were preserving human culture. He played both sides of the human-Dalek conflict; while he broke a jamming frequency that he had given the rebels to reveal details of a raid on a Dalek mine shaft to the Daleks, he re-jammed the frequency when he realised that the Daleks would exterminate the rebels instead of making them slaves.
The Monk returned to the vault, which the Doctor had recently materialised his TARDIS in, and summoned Daleks to capture the Doctor. He struggled to convince Tamsin that the Doctor would not be harmed, letting slip that he had betrayed the rebels. (AUDIO: Lucie Miller) He implored Tamsin to cheer up before Lucie, Alex Campbell, and Susan Campbell arrived with an unconscious Doctor. While Susan stayed with the Doctor in his TARDIS, Lucie and Alex mused on the purposes of the Monk's "collection of old tat". The Doctor emerged, rejuvenated, and reunited with Lucie and Alex.
Alex discovered the Doomsday Bomb, a nuclear bomb kept by the Monk as insurance against the Daleks. The Monk again admitted his betrayal of the rebels, copping an assault from Lucie, and described the Daleks' plans to use a time warp engine to pilot Earth around the universe. The group agreed that this could not happen, Lucie volunteering the Monk at gunpoint to explode the Bomb near the engine. After the Monk argued against this fate, a Dalek squadron raided the vault to capture the Doctor. Lucie, Alex, and Susan escaped with the Bomb to find a Dalek saucer, leaving the Monk, Tamsin, and the Doctor to face the squadron. The Monk mourned the destruction of his collection as he was cornered. Further driving him into despair, Tamsin was deemed "surplus to requirements" and exterminated.
The Monk confessed his sins to her corpse before returning to his TARDIS to, per the Doctor, "face up to [his] responsibilities" as a Time Lord. He materialised around the Doctor and Susan, saving them from the singularity caused by the exploding Bomb. Harangued by the Doctor, who had deduced who saved the Dalek Time Controller, he admitted that he released the virus and prevented the Doctor from stopping the invasion in time. The Doctor regretted that the Monk did not jump into the singularity and screamed at him to leave the Doctor's TARDIS. (AUDIO: To the Death)
Revenge on the Doctor[]
The grieving Monk decided to remove the Doctor from history, thereby reversing Tamsin's death. He located Sophia, a time-sensitive human/Hetrodon hybrid in ancient Greece, and used her abilities to create a hole in space-time from which he could take the Doctor's place. (AUDIO: The Secret History) His experiments replaced the Third Doctor with the Seventh Doctor on Delphin Isle (AUDIO: The Defectors) and the Second Doctor with the Sixth Doctor in a Cyber-Tomb in the Kuiper Belt. (AUDIO: Last of the Cybermen) With the aid of Jo Grant and Mike Yates and Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot respectively, both Doctors discovered how their past selves would have dealt with the crises and acted accordingly before the Monk's influence was undone. (AUDIO: The Defectors, Last of the Cybermen)
The Monk replaced the First Doctor with the Fifth Doctor in Constantinople in 540, forcing the Fifth Doctor to retrace his steps with Vicki Pallister and Steven Taylor. The Monk successfully replaced the Doctor's timeline with his own after trapping the Doctor in an ethical dilemma: he could allow alien healers, known as the Ostardi, to take action on Earth, altering the timeline as the Monk desired, or preserve history and let innocent people die. Sophia sensed the distortion to history and brought the Doctor back into existence. Realising that she had made a terrible mistake in trusting the Monk, who had abandoned her and was causing disastrous changes to the timeline, Sophia decided to help the Doctor, as did the Ostardi, who were not pleased at the way the Monk had manipulated them.
The Doctor summoned a group of Antoim warriors to Earth to blackmail the Monk into restoring the Doctor's timeline, the Monk faced with being killed by the Antoene for the Doctor's actions and the Doctor only willing to share his plan to stop them if the Monk restored the original timeline. Lacking better options, the Monk obliged before attempting to flee, but the Ostardi seized him and placed him in an isolation bubble, intending to take him back to the Ostardi homeworld to be imprisoned for his actions. As the Monk was taken away by the Ostardi, he warned the Doctor that he would return, something dismissed by the Doctor as unimportant. (AUDIO: The Secret History)
Personality[]
The "Abbot Thelonious" Monk was a jovial man who spouted smarmy rhetoric as if it were his first language. He was more of a wannabe than a true hero or villain, taking childish delight in meddling with history and barely, if ever, considering the consequences of his recklessness. (AUDIO: The Resurrection of Mars, To the Death) Even when he deigned to reflect, he rationalised his actions and played the victim. (AUDIO: To the Death) This further exaggerated his arrogance and fecklessness. (AUDIO: The Secret History)
The Monk's ego was by far his greatest vice. He was deeply hurt by insults, perceived or not, removing Lucie from his TARDIS when she called him a "homicidal, blooming maniac", (AUDIO: The Resurrection of Mars) begging Tamsin to forgive him for betraying the rebels, (AUDIO: Lucie Miller) and risking the stability of the Web of Time to spite the Doctor for Tamsin's death. (AUDIO: The Secret History) He often acted to preserve himself over others, betraying the rebels when the Daleks spooked him into helping them, escaping his potential death in the explosion of the Doomsday Bomb by offering to teach Lucie to pilot a Dalek saucer, and imploring the Dalek squadron to spare him by reminding them of his loyalty to the Time Controller. (AUDIO: To the Death) He had a habit of projecting his faults onto others, calling the Eighth Doctor an irresponsible, incessant meddler with a spurious, biased morality (AUDIO: The Resurrection of Mars, To the Death) who poked his nose where he was not wanted. (AUDIO: Lucie Miller) Lucie, on the other hand, was an "ungrateful, interfering, aggravating pest" (AUDIO: The Resurrection of Mars) who was "making a nuisance of herself" by joining the rebellion against the Daleks. (AUDIO: Lucie Miller)
The Monk had an eclectic set of interests. He disguised himself as Abbot Thelonious, after the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, (AUDIO: The Book of Kells) kept a Blu-Ray of Something's Got to Give amongst his Van Gogh paintings and Fabergé eggs, and enjoyed foods as varied as Arctic coffee, "Caesar's own" Caesar salad, and cakes from the kitchens of Marie Antoinette. His TARDIS was his "pride and joy"; he sold himself to Tamsin in part by observing its improvements over the Doctor's. (AUDIO: The Resurrection of Mars)
Lucie's excitement at traveling with the Monk curdled as she learned how damaging his meddling could be. She was appalled by his causing an avalanche on Questus to wipe its dictator from existence, threatening to shove a statue made by Michelangelo "where the sun don't shine" and declaring that she had fired him as she departed his TARDIS. Despite her disdain of Tamsin, she warned Tamsin not to join the "murdering lunatic" who smiled like a used car salesman. (AUDIO: The Resurrection of Mars) Her suffering under the Daleks deepened her disgust. She insulted the Monk by calling him "Monkey Bum" and "Monkey Boy", assaulted him after he revealed that he had betrayed the rebels, pulled a gun on him to pressure him into piloting the Doomsday Bomb into the Dalek mine shaft, and immediately concluded that he had summoned the Dalek squadron to his vault to exterminate the group. (AUDIO: To the Death)
Perhaps because she had spurned the Doctor to join the Monk, Tamsin was more appreciative of the Monk's meddling. She defended his art theft to the Doctor in the vault by claiming that he was acting in "the good of mankind". Her faith was shaken by his glib dismissal of the Doctor's fate with the Daleks (AUDIO: Lucie Miller) and faded completely when he admitted to betraying the rebels. Though she continued to catalogue artifacts, she did so in a cold, curt manner. She responded to his plea to not accompany the Doctor to Amethyst Viral Containment Station by brusquely asking that he not talk to her. (AUDIO: To the Death)
Remembering their relatively prior confrontations, the Eighth Doctor was wary of the Monk when he realised his identity. (AUDIO: The Book of Kells) Upon being told of the avalanche on Questus, he compared the Monk to the Seventh Doctor: someone else who concocted convoluted schemes which could hurt people as necessary for the greater good. He called the Monk a tyrant and a "feckless idiot" for his willingness to sacrifice the colonists on Mars. (AUDIO: The Resurrection of Mars) He was angered by the Monk's exploitation of the Dalek occupation, entertaining Lucie's proposal to blast him into space with the Doomsday Bomb and calling him a "dangerously powerful child" who needed to "grow up. Fast." He vented his fury at the Monk for causing Lucie's death by implicitly wishing that he had died by suicide, screaming at him to leave the Doctor's TARDIS, and musing on becoming a killer to Susan. (AUDIO: To the Death) He carried this resentment long enough after that he voiced his shock that the "Reverend Mortimer" Monk could stand to face him. (AUDIO: The Side of the Angels)
Skills[]
The "Abbot Thelonious" Monk was a skilled actor, convincing the monks at the Abbey of Kells that he was Abbot Anselm's legitimate replacement (AUDIO: The Book of Kells) and successfully getting Tamsin to ditch the Doctor for him. He was at least a decent TARDIS pilot, remarking to Tamsin that he knew both the physical and temporal coordinates of each materialisation point. He was something of a tinkerer, replicating the functionality of a directional unit with inferior technology, (AUDIO: The Resurrection of Mars) jamming and un-jamming communications frequencies, (AUDIO: Lucie Miller) and saving the Dalek Time Controller from the decay caused by its time in the Time Vortex. (AUDIO: To the Death)
Appearance and clothing[]
The "Abbot Thelonius" Monk resembled a short, balding older man with a broad face and green eyes. He largely rejected the monk's habit in favour of a tan coloured checked suit with a waist coat and a garish bow tie and pink shirt. (AUDIO: The Book of Kells)
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