Matrix (Doctor Who) - Other Appearances

Other Appearances

The following section contains information taken from spin-off material. The canonicity of these stories with regard to the television series and each other is open to interpretation.

In the Doctor Who comic strip published in Doctor Who Magazine, the Matrix is depicted as being inhabited by the minds of dead Time Lords — including Rassilon — who have a sort of quasi-existence within its confines. They are even able to construct an agent to do their bidding in the outside world, an entity known as Shayde.

The Past Doctor Adventures novel Matrix by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry reveals the existence of the "Dark Matrix", the negative thoughts and evil impulses of all the Time Lords whose knowledge is stored in the Matrix, syphoned off and forgotten. The Valeyard gains control of the Dark Matrix following the events of Trial of a Time Lord, and attempts to use it to manipulate the Doctor's timeline, feeding it with the negative psychic energy of the Jack the Ripper murders and using it to corrupt the Doctor's other selves to their basic, evil natures. Having escaped this fate by sealing his conscious mind in the TARDIS telepathic circuits, the Seventh Doctor destroys the Dark Matrix by imploding the Valeyard's TARDIS, thereby preventing an alternate 1963 in which its influence meant the Ripper murders never stopped.

In the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Ancestor Cell by Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole, Gallifrey is destroyed by the Eighth Doctor to prevent the voodoo cult Faction Paradox from starting a time war between the Time Lords and an unspecified Enemy. In The Gallifrey Chronicles by Lance Parkin, it is revealed that the Time Lords had survived within the Matrix, which had then been downloaded into the Doctor's mind, although he had to sacrifice much of his memory to make space for it. Their reconstruction is possible, but will require a sufficiently advanced computer. At the novel's end, the question of whether or not the Time Lords will be restored remains unanswered. However, it can be assumed that both they and the planet are restored at some point before the start of the 2005 series if the novels are to remain consistent with the new series' continuity.

In the Big Finish Productions audio play Neverland, it is also established that Rassilon himself continues to exist within the Matrix. In the Gallifrey audio series, an ancient Gallifreyan evil named Pandora also survives and emerges from a special partition within the Matrix. Lord President Romana is eventually able to destroy the entity by destroying the Matrix itself. It is not clear how, or whether, the events of this series can be reconciled with those of the Eighth Doctor Adventures novels and some stories have suggested that the novels and audios take place in separate continuities.