This episode is the second part of the Excelis arc.
- The Doctor: It can't be the same man. Not after a thousand years!
The Sixth Doctor arrives on the planet Artaris, one thousand years after his last visit. He becomes embroiled in an investigation of an attempted robbery. The target of the robbery is the Relic, and the chief investigator of the robbery is Reeve Maupassant, or as the Doctor once knew him, the Warlord Grayvorn, still alive after ten centuries thanks to the power of the Relic.
Grayvorn isn't extremely happy with the whole "being merged with the mother superior for 1000 years while unable to sleep" thing, so he's looking for a way out. Sadly, his story has passed into legend in Excelis, and the Relic is consequently very heavily guarded. But the changed appearance of the Doctor gives him inspiration... he hopes to Body Surf into a nice fresh corpse (as he believes the Doctor did) and start immortality anew, hopefully without the mother superior around. The Doctor doesn't even bother explaining regeneration and instead simply confronts Grayvorn with the Relic again, destroying Grayvorn's body. Grayvorn now has to sulk as a ghost in a stuffy old museum for a very, very long time, or at least until someone's nice enough to die there and provide him with a body to re-animate.
Continued in "Excelis Decays".
Tropes
- Immortality Hurts: It's left unspecified if Grayvorn's immortality gives him a Healing Factor or if he just doesn't age, but when it comes with an inability to sleep he's clearly got issues to deal with due to his condition.
- Refuge in Audacity: Officer Danby accepts the Doctor's claim that he entered the museum to investigate a fire alarm rather than being part of the break-in because if he was lying he'd come up with something less ridiculous.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: Grayvorn confirms that the Doctor is in a different body but has the mind of the man he first met; he just assumes this means that the Doctor has possessed someone else rather than that his body has physically changed on its own.
- Sanity Slippage: Unable to sleep, Grayvorn "dreams" while awake in the form of vivid hallucinations.
- Torture Is Ineffective: Grayvorn notes that he's learned this over the years, as while he could use torture to make the Doctor confess to anything he wanted there's always the risk that he won't get the right answers that way. That said, he notes that he's not above indulging in that interest to make a point...
