Black Guardian
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| Doctor Who character | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| The Black Guardian | |
| Affiliated with | Council of Guardians |
| Race | Not applicable |
| Home planet | Not applicable |
| Home era | Various |
| First appearance | The Armageddon Factor |
| Last appearance | Enlightenment |
| Portrayed by | Valentine Dyall |
The 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 artefact of immense power that would give the wielder supreme power over all existence.
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 time machine to avoid being tracked through time and space.
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. The use of the Enlightenment crystal apparently banished the Black Guardian, although the White Guardian warned 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.
[edit] 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 finally catches up with the Fouth Doctor and Romana, and they are forced to leave the known universe. 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 the universe.
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. Although extremely powerful, the Guardians apparently cannot be seen to act directly, which is why they can only affect things through agents like Turlough or the Doctor.
