Black Guardian

Doctorwhocharacter


name=The Black Guardian
series=Doctor Who
affiliation=Council of Guardians
race=Not applicable
planet=Not applicable
era=Various
start="The Armageddon Factor"
finish="Enlightenment"
portrayed= Valentine DyallThe Black Guardian is a character in the long-running British science fiction television series "Doctor Who". He was played by Valentine Dyall.

The Black Guardian is an anthropomorphic personification of the forces of entropy and chaos, the counterpart of the White Guardian, a personification of order. The two Guardians balance out the forces in the universe, although the Black Guardian seems to desire to upset the balance in favour of chaos and evil while the White Guardian prefers to maintain the status quo. The Guardians both appeared in Season 16 of the programme, where all six serials of that season were linked together in the quest for the Key to Time, an artifact of immense power that would give the wielder supreme power over all existence.

Overview

The White Guardian gave the Fourth Doctor the task of finding the scattered six segments of the Key at the beginning of "The Ribos Operation". Once the Doctor had assembled the Key the Black Guardian disguised himself as the White and attempted to trick the Doctor into handing it over. The Doctor saw through the deception after the Guardian appeared indifferent to the fact that the sixth segment — Princess Astra of Atrios — had ceased her independent existence by becoming part of the Key. The Doctor then dispersed the Key, earning the Black Guardian's eternal enmity and forcing the Doctor, for a period, to attach a randomiser to his TARDIS to avoid being tracked through time and space.

He briefly appears at the end of "Logopolis", in the montage of past enemies taunting the Doctor. The next appearance of the Black Guardian was in the 1983 serial "Mawdryn Undead", the first of three linked serials known as the Black Guardian Trilogy. He enlisted a young public school student named Vislor Turlough, offering the young man (who was really an alien exiled on Earth) passage home if he killed the Doctor (then in his fifth incarnation), and death if he failed. Turlough joined the TARDIS crew, struggling with the dilemma and eventually chose loyalty to the Doctor in "Enlightenment", the last serial of the trilogy. Although extremely powerful, the Guardians apparently cannot be seen to act directly, which is why they can only affect things through agents such as Turlough and the Doctor. Other agents of the Black Guardian include Cessair of Diplos in "The Stones of Blood", The Shadow in "The Armageddon Factor" and Captain Wrack in "Enlightenment".

Turlough's choice and the use of the Enlightenment crystal apparently banished the Black Guardian – he is seen to burst into flames and appear in negative again, before disappearing. The White Guardian warned, though, that he would return – angrier now that the Doctor had thwarted him twice. However, the character has yet to make a return appearance in the television series.

Other appearances

The Black Guardian features in the Virgin Missing Adventures spin off novel "The Well-Mannered War" by Gareth Roberts. In that story he catches up with the Fourth Doctor and Romana following the loss of the Randomiser, and they are forced to leave the known universe as a consequence. The canonicity of spin off novels is unclear, and in this story in particular. It is of course possible that the Doctor was later able to return to our universe.

In the pages of Doctor Who Magazine, The Guardian resurfaced again in "Time and Time Again", written by NA author and new series writer Paul Cornell as a means of celebrating the series thirtieth anniversary. In the story, The Guardian punishes The Doctor for his defiance by changing the very history of his beloved planet Earth by ensuring he never arrived there, leaving it open to repeated alien invasion. The Doctor, Benny, and Ace are sent by The White Guardian across The Doctor's own timestream in a bid to once again assemble the Key to Time, its segments now represented by key items from The Doctor's past.

It is not made clear how the Key's segments could have been placed in The Doctor's timestream, as it would mean Princess Astra's life would be sacrificed once more to make this plausible. These elements seem to imply that Cornell's strip is a send-up of the Pantomime set-up of The Five Doctors, developed for the series twentieth anniversary, where many things were contradicted whilst progressing the established mythology.

In the BBC Books spin-off novel "The Quantum Archangel" by Craig Hinton, the Black Guardian appears briefly with the White Guardian and four others, who form a Council of Guardians that oversee reality. The other four Guardians were first mentioned in "Divided Loyalties" by Gary Russell, which states that one of them is the Celestial Toymaker.