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“ | I'm starting to feel, quite, peckish.
— Mark Gatiss, The Ambiguous Force
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Mark Gatiss was a citizen of the 38th century who got turned into a Sandman.
Biography[]
Gatiss was the brother of Philip Rassmussen, who was the father of Gagan Rassmussen. He got along well with his nephew. Gatiss was one of the first patients to sleep in Rassmussen's M'k2 Morpheus pod. Sleeping in the pod turned him into a Sandman along with Rassmussen and the other crew of the Le Verrier space station. (TV: Played by the Moon)
He worked with Rassmussen as they constructed their plan to broadcast an exciting adventure across the solar system. The adventure had the Morpheus signal encoded within it so anyone who watched it would be turned into a Sandman. Their plan was disrupted by the Sixteenth Doctor however, who took out the grav-shields of Le Verrier, sending it crashing towards Neptune. (TV: Conjunctivitis, The Ambiguous Force)
As the station was falling, Gatiss began disintegrating, but then remembered a bright flash of light occurring, and then finding himself on Earth in late 2014. Due to multiple things being different to normal history, he realised that he was in a parallel universe. He found out that in this world, there was a TV program about "the Doctor" called Doctor Who, and his parallel universe counterpart was a writer on it. He decided to use this chance to re-broadcast the infectious adventure that he and his nephew were planning earlier. He kidnapped his counterpart (but didn't eat him, due to "not wanting to eat himself"), and took his place at the BBC, writing the same adventure (with changes), which he called Sleep No More. He encoded the Morpheus signal within it, even putting a code within the signal to make a king Sandman, but on broadcast the story failed to convert the population of Earth for some reason unknown to Gatiss, and Gatiss was sent to the far future again.
Arriving in the future, he planned to spread the infection again by re-broadcasting the adventure, this time shortened, so he once again infiltrated the BBC, and encoded the signal into the end of Sleep No More, and put it on the broadcasting schedule, but when he went to the broadcasting tower to "real-ise" the transmission, he found out that the Seventeenth Doctor had called him and the other writers of Doctor Who in for a meeting.
After the meeting was over, Gatiss revealed to the Doctor that he was a Sandman, and told the Doctor his plan, before attempting to kill him. Thinking the Doctor was dead, Gatiss went to the transmission tower, as he came across David and Georgia Tennant. Recgonising David as the tenth incarnation of the Doctor, he attempted to consume him, but Georgia hit Gatiss with a chair and he disintegrated. He managed to travel in particles to the lift however, and went up to the roof. As he got to the tower, he was confronted by Peter Davison, and Peter threatened to sacrifice himself to stop Gatiss's plan, but Georgia then used the Doctor's sonic screwdriver to destroy the transmitter.
Gatiss was then pushed off the transmitter by Peter, and landed on the floor, but reformed into a Sandman. Furious with her for disrupting his plan, Gatiss chased Georgia across the roof. Georgia jumped down the lift shaft, and Gatiss followed her down. Georgia was saved by David however, and Gatiss fell down to the bottom of the shaft. He was trapped in a glass box by the Doctor, and sent off in a van, before being sent into space by the Doctor, staying there forever. (TV: The Ambiguous Force)
Behind the scenes[]
The original ending for the meeting in The Ambiguous Force was that after the Doctor had gone, Mark Gatiss was going to reveal his identity as a Sandman the same way Rassmussen did at the end of Sleep No More, but it would've just been left as a little bit of trivia, rather than being important to the plot. Gray Moffet-Nish[1] then decided to have Gatiss in a bigger role, rather than being a bit of trivia that would've undoubtedly become an unresolved plot thread. This would kick off the rest of the Sandmen's appearances after World of Enemies.
Gray Moffet-Nish has claimed that he belived that the Sandman that killed Deep-Ando in Conjunctivitis was infact Gatiss in Sandman form.
Mark Gatiss, who played this version of himself, had previously played another man who turned into a monster due to a failed experiment - Richard Lazarus, in Series Three's The Lazarus Experiment.
Footnotes[]
- ↑ Not real surname