Doctor Who: 9 Things You Never Knew The Ninth Doctor Did
2. He Teamed Up With The Slitheen
WHAT: The Slitheen, the monster that should have had everything going for it. They were able to disguise themselves as other species by fitting into their skin, they had faster-than-light travel and they were particularly callous to boot. They were like your local crime-boss, if you didn't mind them farting all the time and looking like E.T.'s older, uglier cousin with a taste for flesh. From the planet Raxacoricofallapatorius, they were exiled and decided to try to conquer Earth in other ways, from facing the Ninth Doctor in London and Cardiff, to battling Sarah Jane Smith over their plan to crush the Earth into a giant diamond, to being stopped by the Tenth Doctor in ancient Greece over their tampering with time, transporting ancient Grecians to the future, and making them fight for the pleasure of extraterrestrial tourists. They were amoral, terrifying creatures (farting notwithstanding) and, as such, it would totally make sense that the Ninth Doctor would team up with them, right? HOW: It does make sense, of course, if you consider an even worse enemy. When the Doctor and Rose arrive upon a prison planet in the year 2501, they are immediately arrested for trespassing and sent to separate prisons, on separate planets, in a solar system dedicated to prisons. You know, normal Doctor Who stuff. While the Doctor is forced to do scientific experiments with several Slitheen prisoners, Rose is stuck in a youth prison with terrifying guards. And as everything goes to heck in a handcart and suspicious deaths increase, the horrible truth comes out - the guards and government of the system has been replaced by Blathereen (another criminal family of Raxacoricofallapatorius who came to power after the Slitheen's own defeats) who intend to use the entire solar system as a weapon to incinerate planets and convert them to fuel, therefore making a profit somehow. The Doctor and Rose, after escaping and freeing the human prisoners, foiled the Blathereen's scheme and left happy, although ignorant, that the Slitheen had faked their deaths and begun to reverse-engineer the device and return the Slitheen family to the heights of crime and infamy. SO: Stephen Cole's The Monsters Inside took its opportunity to bring back the Slitheen in a way that underlined their ruthlessness, intelligence and deviousness, rather than the farting green stereotypes fans have all come to know and dislike. It also showed that the Doctor was not above making deals when lives were at stake - 'the enemy of my enemy' and all that - and while that might have occurred in his War incarnation, the Ninth Doctor was different. He actually believed the Slitheen could change, and had changed, for the better, and was disappointed that they hadn't. The Doctor had finally regained some of his hope for humanity after the Last Great Time War. Of course, feel free to check this adventure out too if you ever wanted to imagine Rose Tyler in prison orange.
