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| “ | The Doctor: I've come from the future. I've seen the chaos you cause. The bloodshed. The Fisher King: Tell me what you have seen. The Doctor: Ghosts. The Fisher King: Ghosts? The Doctor: Souls wrenched from the dead. Repeating directions to here, to this spot, over and over. The Fisher King: How many ghosts do I create? How many!? The Doctor: Four that I know of. Maybe five by now. Probably more since I left. The Fisher King: My ghosts will make more ghosts. Enough to bring an armada. Enough to wake me from my sleep. The Doctor: What will happen when your people arrive? The Fisher King: We will drain the oceans and put the humans in chains. The Doctor: This world is protected, by me. The Fisher King: Yes. One man, lost in time. |
„ |
| ~ The Doctor and the Fisher King meet. |
| “ | Time Lords. Cowardly, vain curators who suddenly remembered they had teeth and became the most warlike race in the galaxy. But you, YOU!!! [The Doctor staggers, bent backwards over the open suspended animation chamber.] You are curious. You have seen the words, too. I can hear them tick inside you. But you are still locked in your history. Still slavishly protecting Time. Willing to die rather than change a word of the future. | „ |
| ~ The Fisher King to the Doctor. |
The Fisher King is the main antagonist of "Before the Flood", the fourth episode of series 9 of Doctor Who.
He is an alien warlord who conquered the planet Tivoli and ruled it for a decade, before the planet was liberated by another race. Following his apparent demise, his body was transported to Earth where he would pose a massive threat with a plan he had schemed for such an occasion.
He was played by the late Neil Fingleton but his voice was provided by Peter Serafinowicz, who also played Darth Maul in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, Duane Benzie in Spaced, Pete in Shaun of the Dead, Darth Chef in South Park, George Spelvin in Archer, Goran the Mutilator in American Dad!, Forrest Blackwell in the LEGO City Undercover video game series, Blind Ivan in Gravity Falls, Johnny's Father in the Sing films, the Agency Director in Rick & Morty, Kang the Conqueror in LEGO Marvel Super Heroes 2 and Iofur Raknison in His Dark Materials. His roar was done by Corey Taylor.
Appearance[]
The Fisher King's full appearance.
The Fisher King was intentionally designed to look monstrous and scary, appearing powerful and brutal. He towered over every human he encountered, intimidating them with his sheer size, but also his tough and boney insect/crustacean-like appearance, with menacing sharp mandibles and a carapace with spikes all over it.
He wore what resembled tribal clothing and looked just as though he had come from an arid world with very dry deserts, which he did according to one deleted scene, contrasting with the underwater setting seen in much of the episode, some of his boney skin seemingly blending in or merging with his exoskeleton, strangely but perhaps intentionally. The carapace and clothing of the Fisher King had a black and white or greyish coloration in the show, sometimes with a hint of blue or brown over the white/grey depending on the lighting, or green in some production photos. What appeared to be cables could be seen going through his carapace, mainly his neck, perhaps implying part of his body was mechanical or that much or a percentage of it was armor.
His hands had three fingers and his feet only two, though one was much larger than the rest in both cases, giving him almost hoof-like feet in the case of the latter.
Personality[]
| “ | The Fisher King: You will be a strong beacon. How many ghosts can I make of you? The Doctor: You know, you've got a lot in common with the Tivoleans. You'll both do anything to survive. They'll surrender to anyone. You will hijack other people's souls and turn them into electromagnetic projections. That will to endure. That refusal to ever cease. It's extraordinary. And it makes a fella think. Because you know what? If all I have to do to survive is tweak the future a bit, what's stopping me? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The ripple effect. Maybe it will mean that the universe will be ruled by cats or something, in the future. But the way I see it, even a ghastly future is better than no future at all. You robbed those people of their deaths, made them nothing more than a message in a bottle. You violated something more important than Time. You bent the rules of life and death. So I am putting things straight. Here, now, this is where your story ends. [The Fisher King growls] The Fisher King: There is nothing you can do. The Doctor: I've already done it. The words have gone. I got rid of them. The future I saw, none of that will happen now. The message will never contaminate my friends. No one will die. No one is coming to save you. That's the thing about knowing you're going to die. You've got nothing left to lose. [The Fisher King angrily pushes the Doctor aside and stomps away] |
„ |
| ~ The Fisher King and the Doctor's last exchange. |
The Fisher King intimidating the Doctor.
Coming from a warmongering race and what seems to be a very militaristic background, the Fisher King is very cold and stern, quite confident in his power and weapon especially when confronting the Doctor, who comes from a species as fearsome as the Time Lords whose last war affected the very Universe. His occasional growling and roars made him out to be more of a feral beast before his true intellect was revealed, and even still he showed signs of aggression, such as when the Doctor wasn't quick to reply how many ghosts he was going to have under his command, an attitude that went perfectly alongside his status as a top ranking chief in a combative army that had presumably traveled throughout the cosmos conquering worlds.
The Fisher King's only concern and interest, aside from joining up with his people, appears to be conquest, battle and little else, with no regard for the lives of the race being invaded and enslaved and using them as he saw fit. He only chose to speak with the Doctor once the Time Lord informed him of the chaos and bloodshed he had and would spread in the future.
Biography[]
Sometime in the 20th century, in a faraway galaxy, the Fisher King and his alien armada conquered the planet Tivoli and ruled for ten years until it was liberated by the Arcateenians. After the conflict resulted in the Arcateenians' victory and loss of his forces, he faked his death and his body, in a state of stasis, was transported to Earth, specifically the mock Soviet town Краснодар (pronounced "krasnodar") in Scotland, in 1980 in a hearse-like ship by the Tivolian funeral director Albar Prentis.
The Fisher King had crafted a plan: his people would come and recover him by killing people and turning them into ghost-like electromagnetic projections, transmittors which would send coordinates from Earth across space to his armada, as he waited inside a stasis chamber.
The Doctor, a time traveler from the planet Gallifrey, arrived alongside his companions Alice O'Donnell and Mason Bennett to the town in his machine, the TARDIS, to try to solve the mystery of the ghosts created by the Fisher King, a figure unknown to them at the time. During their time in the town, they bumped into Albar Prentis, a Tivolian undertaker who was taking the Fisher King to his destination. When the Fisher King escaped, he murdered Prentis and became a ghost that would go on to haunt an underwater mining facility known as the Drum in 2119. As a ghost, Albar followed the Fisher King's orders and converted people into ghosts on the occasion of their death after murdering them in brutal ways.
The Fisher King looking for the Doctor and his companions.
The Doctor and the crew ran from the Fisher King and the warlord pursued them into an abandoned building, killing O'Donnell during the chase and having her join the group of ghosts in the future. Just before a face off with the Fisher King, the Doctor sent Bennett back to the base in the TARDIS, while sealing himself into the stasis chamber for the next 139 years. Many other ghosts are seen back in the Drum, including the Doctor's, implying he would be killed in the present.
The Fisher King revealed himself from the shadows as the Doctor confronted him about the abominations that he'd created and the deaths he'd violated, the Fisher King caring very little about the Time Lord's opinion and telling him what would happen to the Earth and the humans.
| “ | The seed of their destruction is already sown. They will die. The message will be sent. My people will come, and you will do nothing to stop it, Time Lord. | „ |
| ~ The Fisher King reveals himself to the Doctor. |
The Doctor, being something of a guardian for the planet, protected it the best way he knew how when up against such an unbeatable foe, through trickery: as the Fisher King saw that he could make a strong transmitter out of the Doctor and that there's nothing he can do to stop him, the Doctor tells him that he has erased the words on the ship. The Fisher King believed this to be a bluff; however, the Doctor pointed out that any change to the future made by preventing the Fisher King from conquering the Earth would be better than the Earth being conquered by such a terrible race. Angered, the Fisher King decided to hold off on killing the Doctor until he could rewrite the words.
The Fisher King left the Church and stomped into the ship, but noticed that the symbols were still on the bulkhead.
| “ | The Time Lord... lied. | „ |
| ~ The Fisher King's last words. |
The Fisher King, seconds before his demise.
He also noticed that one of the power cells was missing, and unaware to him it was left over by the dam at the back of the town, beeping away its countdown. The Fisher King left the spaceship and saw an explosion which stopped him on his tracks. He watched cracks form in the dam, releasing water by the millions of tons all over the town and was killed by the powerful flow, accepting his demise with a guttural roar. The lake created from this would become the Drum in the future.
The Doctor later used the Fisher King's roar through speakers to call and control the ghosts, and it turned out that the roar was actually coming from the Doctor's ghost, which vanished once the Ghosts were all lured into the Faraday Cage. The Doctor revealed his ghost had actually been a holographic projection under his command the entire time.
The Doctor puts his sonic sunglasses on Clara to erase the coordinates rom her memory, and does the same for Cass, in order to avoid any future ghosts in case they die. Before he does this to Bennett, who is staring at O'Donnell's ghost in the Faraday cage and wonders what will happen to them, he states that UNIT will toss the cage into space, where the ghosts will die due to the lack of a magnetic field.
Powers and Abilities[]
The Fisher King with his blaster.
Befitting his size and appearance, the Fisher King is stronger and tougher than a human. He never gets the chance to showcase just how powerful he is physically, but the Doctor, who is above the average human, was no match for him. If his superiority in the strength department wasn't enough, the Fisher King also wielded a powerful blaster capable of killing a human and even a Time Lord, or so he thought possible, in one shot.
Though he was tricked by the Doctor, he was still quite intelligent, given his strategy of manipulating those who read his writings and creating a small army of ghosts who would serve as beacons for his people to come for him. Through extremely advanced technological means, he could control the ghosts so they would do their bidding, even while he was in stasis. He could also "hear" the words inside the Doctor since he had read them as well.
His main weakness is revealed in a deleted scene, where Albar Prentis reveals that the Fisher King comes from a barren world and that the amphibious Arcateenians defeated him by raising the sea level on Tivoli, which is how the Doctor ended up defeating him. However, given how he managed to avoid such a fate in the battle of Tivoli, it's possible he might've survived this second attempt to kill him as well.
Audio Samples[]
- The Fisher King's roars.
Trivia[]
- He was presumably inspired by a figure in Arthurian legend also known as the Fisher King (named that because, in some, if not all, tales, all that the king did was fish by the river of his castle), the supposed last keeper of the Holy Grail and a legendary king who waited, wounded, for someone able to heal him upon their arrival.
- As a basketball player, the Fisher King's main actor, Neil Fingleton, was quite tall (tallest British-born man and the tallest man in the European Union in fact, and among the 25 tallest men in the world), standing 232.6 cm or 7 ft 7.56 inches in height. While in the Fisher King's guise he stood even taller, thanks to the character's carapace and additional headgear.
- Corey Taylor's guttural roar for the Fisher King is well-known among his many songs, being part and the lead singer of the heavy metal band Slipknot (Corey himself being a big Doctor Who fan, additionally).
- Near the end of the episode, there's a curious production error: The Fisher King's gun is missing when he sees the dam break up, but is back in his hand when he roars in defiance of the oncoming flood.
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