#drwho
Started with a quest in what seemed to be the Simpsons to prevent something happening, leading to the the assembly of a magical artifact (physically two massive silver or mithral plugs) which pulled the immediate location out of time while putting the rest of time into a complicated loop, which if you managed to take the right set of corners could be escaped and navigated around the outside by a set of stairs which almost but not quite turned at right angles each time the timeline reset.
Something happened during the episode which was the precursor/complement to something set up 5 seasons earlier a level of pre-planning I was impressed by.
For some reason Rincewind was also stuck traversing these stairs. [cameo?]
There were a lot of stairs but they were outside time so you could spend the nearly-forever it took to walk/climb their entire length. There were cupboards you could look through to catch a glimpse of events in version of the timeline on the other side - although occasionally someone would also open them from the other side. There were a group of 2-3 villains (I can only remember partial specifics of two of them - a man in a brown coat who was leader and a woman in a red coat) who were traversing the stairs back to the "beginning" (because it was a loop) where they connected to the oldest/first/original timeline so they could set things up to rule over all the timelines forever (apparently the timelines didn't have to play out the same way each time, only in generalities about the beginning and end). They started old but acquired artifacts/power ups as they went to restore their youth and give them subtle powers (like mind control) by the time they entered the timeline.
Meanwhile the Doctors Who (1 to 11 who were also trapped - one per timeline) got involved - first they tried wiping out humanity about WWII by giving advanced technology to a race of gnomes - that didn't actually work because it just meant that gnomes were dominant for the rest of the timeline. So then they worked around the stairs (in conflict with the villains), force-regenerating on the stairs at the points matching where they regenerated in the timelines to set up an energy pattern which blew apart the artifact, did ghod knows what to the timelines (shortly after the villains had entered) and opened up a bleak new future wasteland where they were finally able to become 12.
This possibly just goes to show how much Who I've osmosed from FB/Tumblr over the past month.
Started with a quest in what seemed to be the Simpsons to prevent something happening, leading to the the assembly of a magical artifact (physically two massive silver or mithral plugs) which pulled the immediate location out of time while putting the rest of time into a complicated loop, which if you managed to take the right set of corners could be escaped and navigated around the outside by a set of stairs which almost but not quite turned at right angles each time the timeline reset.
Something happened during the episode which was the precursor/complement to something set up 5 seasons earlier a level of pre-planning I was impressed by.
For some reason Rincewind was also stuck traversing these stairs. [cameo?]
There were a lot of stairs but they were outside time so you could spend the nearly-forever it took to walk/climb their entire length. There were cupboards you could look through to catch a glimpse of events in version of the timeline on the other side - although occasionally someone would also open them from the other side. There were a group of 2-3 villains (I can only remember partial specifics of two of them - a man in a brown coat who was leader and a woman in a red coat) who were traversing the stairs back to the "beginning" (because it was a loop) where they connected to the oldest/first/original timeline so they could set things up to rule over all the timelines forever (apparently the timelines didn't have to play out the same way each time, only in generalities about the beginning and end). They started old but acquired artifacts/power ups as they went to restore their youth and give them subtle powers (like mind control) by the time they entered the timeline.
Meanwhile the Doctors Who (1 to 11 who were also trapped - one per timeline) got involved - first they tried wiping out humanity about WWII by giving advanced technology to a race of gnomes - that didn't actually work because it just meant that gnomes were dominant for the rest of the timeline. So then they worked around the stairs (in conflict with the villains), force-regenerating on the stairs at the points matching where they regenerated in the timelines to set up an energy pattern which blew apart the artifact, did ghod knows what to the timelines (shortly after the villains had entered) and opened up a bleak new future wasteland where they were finally able to become 12.
This possibly just goes to show how much Who I've osmosed from FB/Tumblr over the past month.