With Time Lord Victorious finally kicking off, now is a great time to look at the new villains of the piece, the mysterious Kotturah. We’ve already met the Hond, an enemy of the Daleks in Titan’s first issue of Time Lord Victorious and Vampires in DWM’s Monstrous Beauty, but of the real big bad, the Kotturah, we know very little. What do we know about their origins and their agenda at this stage?
The Kotturah are a species that lived in the universe before this one. If expanded media continuity is to be believed, creatures like the Gods of Ragnarok were also from the old universe. The Kotturah were bringers of death, travelling from planet to planet and judging every species on them, ‘tasting’ their futures. If they were deemed well enough, they would be allowed to survive; if not they would be given life-spans.
In the recent short-story from the Doctor Who website, available as part of their newsletter, we hear an account of one the Kotturah’s encounters with the inhabitants of the planet Birinji, when three representatives from the Kotturah arrived in one of their villages. They explained that it was their mission to visit every species, taste their time-streams, and assess what value they could add to eternity. The Kotturah see the universe as a song, that they wish to see continue as beautifully and harmoniously as possible.
They continued to elaborate to the representative of Birinji, Majoral, that in order for an orchestra to work, every instrument can’t be played at the same time. Some instruments are more important than others; some play but a brief note and some aren’t heard at all. It’s a poetically terrifying view of life in the galaxy.
All of this goes back into the mythos of the Dark Times, where almost all of the species that evolved after the Big Bang were immortal. But the Kotturah leave the inhabitants of Birinji with a lifespan of three months, the time it takes the planet to orbit their moon.
Birinji was but the first planet the Kotturah visited, but in The Guide to the Dark Times, recently published in the Doctor Who Annual 2021, there are some more examples of the Kotturah’s inference with other aliens and entities.
Apparently the Eternals, seen in Enlightenment, were spared death but at the loss of the ability to lead their own lives, which means they can only focus on Ephemerals. The Racnoss went into hibernation to escape the Kotturah while Sutekh the Destroyer tried to negotiate with them, leading him to gain a portion of their powers. And as for the Great Vampires, they were granted immortality but only by feeding on the life force of other species.
It’s a great way of weaving the Kotturah into the Doctor Who mythos, making it seem like they have been there all along. And they promise to be a great villain, like the Weeping Angels, killing kindly, giving people a life still but just the one. But if their treatment of the Birinji is anything to go by, they are going to be very poetic villains, not just going around exterminating people at random. I’m looking to forward to how they are used throughout the various bits of media around Time Lord Victorious! And their final line to Birinji is nothing short of terrifying:
“We have judged you and given you our gift. Now you may begin screaming…”
