Faction Paradox - 8th Doctor Spinoff - BBV, Magic Bullet Productions

Category: Adults, Doctor Who, Full Cast, Sci-Fi
Language: English
Keywords: Adventure Doctor Who Sci-Fi Spinoff

Written by BBV, Magic Bullet Productions
Read by Various
Format: MP3
Bitrate: Mixed
Dramatization

Originally a subplot in the Eighth Doctor Adventures, the War involves several characters and concepts evolved from the original Doctor Who set-up. In several cases, the Faction Paradox series still features these groups, albeit with names changed for reasons both literary (most of the groups or items mentioned are described from different perspectives) and legal (the Faction and the Enemy are Miles’s creations, but other elements are not — thus the Great Houses are the Faction Paradox range’s equivalent to Doctor Who’s Time Lords). Faction Paradox themselves are not the enemy in this War, and play a neutral part, willing to act against both sides in their own interests. Lawrence Miles has described them as “a ritualistic time-travelling guerrilla organisation”.

The semi-mythical founder of Faction Paradox is Grandfather Paradox, named after the grandfather paradox of time travel theory. Originally a member of the Great Houses himself, the Grandfather created a new group after he became frustrated with the ways of the Great Houses. Faction Paradox therefore takes a good deal of pleasure in irritating the Great Houses, and many of their traditions and rituals are aligned in direct opposition to the way the Great Houses do things. Their time machines are bigger on the inside, in much the same way as TARDISes are, and the familial titles its members use (eg “Father”, “Cousin”) reference family units which the Great Houses lost when they became sterile.

Faction Paradox also take a perverse pride in causing time paradoxes (something that is against the laws of the Great Houses) and achieving impossible or absurd effects for their own sake. For instance, they typically wear ritual skull masks which are in fact the skulls of vampirised members of the Great Houses who, in the Great Houses’ version of history, never existed. Their stronghold on Earth exists in a version of London, within what they call “The Eleven-Day Empire”, bought from the British government in 1752. In that year, the British Empire first adopted the Gregorian calendar, and in so doing had to correct their dating scheme by 11 days (2 September 1752 being followed by 14 September 1752). Faction Paradox claimed the missing 11 days as their base (building on the illogicality that only the numbering scheme changed and no days were actually “missing”).