Rassilon - Other Appearances

Other Appearances

Rassilon's rise to power was explored in the Virgin New Adventures novel Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible. It is revealed in the novel that Ancient Gallifrey was ruled by the Pythia, who controlled the population through prophecies and superstition. Rassilon, whose followers believed in science and rationality, led a revolution against the Pythia, eventually causing her to kill herself, and send her followers to the planet Karn. However, before she died she cursed Rassilon and all future Time Lords to sterility. Rassilon's unborn daughter was one of the deaths. In later New Adventures we are introduced to the concept of the genetic Looms, from which new Time Lords were created. This leads to Rassilon becoming part of a ruling triumvirate with Omega and a mysterious figure called the Other. Together they rebuilt Gallifrey and re-ordered the universe along rational and scientific lines, outlawing superstition and banishing magic. The latter novel Lungbarrow shows Rassilon becoming increasingly tyrannical and violently crushing resistance to his reforms, which ultimately leads to the Other breaking with him and throwing himself into the genetic looms, leading to his later apparent reincarnation as the Doctor.

In the last three stories of Alan Moore's run on Doctor Who Monthly we see the first Time War in Time Lord history, where the Order of the Black Sun make a pre-emptive strike on the Gallifreyans' experiments with time travel. In the first story, "Star Death" (Doctor Who Magazine #47), we see Rassilon gaining the equipment to control time travel thanks to the failed initial attack. In the DWM comic strips, Rassilon is shown existing in the Matrix as part of a council of "Higher Evolutionaries" acting as the guardians of Time (The Tides of Time Part 2, DWM #62, among others).

In the Doctor Who audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions, Rassilon is voiced by Don Warrington in Seasons of Fear, Neverland, and Zagreus. In those plays, he was also shown to continue to exist in the Matrix. He is also portrayed, not as a benevolent figure, but a master manipulator willing to preserve Time Lord history and society as he knew it at all costs, transforming the Doctor into his assassin- a being of pure anti-time that identifies itself as Zagreus- to defeat the Divergents, a race who would have evolved to surpass the Time Lords if reality had progressed as it should have, only for his plans to fail when the Doctor proclaims that he does not kill and Zagreus refuses to be Rassilon's puppet.

At the end of Zagreus, the Doctor was exiled to the Divergents' universe, having previously cast Rassilon into that reality to end his actions but unable to return to his universe as he is still contaminated by anti-time. He eventually tracked down Rassilon in that universe, and discovered that he had been manipulating an entity called the Kro'Ka to observe and control the Doctor and Charley's actions. At the end of the events of "The Next Life", the Doctor and his companions escaped the timeless Divergent universe- Rassilon having previously filtered the Zagreus energies out of the Doctor upon his arrival in this universe without the Doctor's knowledge-, but Rassilon and the Kro'Ka remained trapped in a permanent loop.

In Doctor Who: The Adventure Games, Rassilon's Final Solution is mentioned when Amy Pond looked at a Time Lord Staff that the Eleventh Doctor kept in his study.