Lord Sutcliffe
Lord Sutcliffe is rich, arrogant, untrustworthy and entitled. Some would say he’s a typical aristocrat. Big house. Huge staff. And a giant sea snake chained to the bottom of the Thames… evil.
Sutcliffe is a wealthy man and it isn’t long before the Doctor discovers the source of his money: through the years, Sutcliffe and his ancestors have been harvesting the waste product of a giant sea creature which they’ve kept chained to the bottom of the Thames, using this it as a source of an extremely powerful fuel. This fuel burns hotter than any other available at the time of the Industrial Revolution and powers a number of steel mills owned by Sutcliffe.
I help move this country forward, I move this empire forward!
A by-product of keeping the creature at the bottom of the river is the extreme freezing of the Thames itself. In 1814, this has led to the latest in a long tradition of Frost Fairs to spring up on the ice. For Sutcliffe, the Frost Fair is a great opportunity to draw more and more people out onto the ice and feed the creature and so accelerate his… er… production.
But Sutcliffe faces a problem. Production is dropping. The frosts are becoming less frequent. 1814 is the first Frost Fair in years. He has developed a plan to host the biggest fair he can possibly muster… and then, when the ice is teeming with people, detonate an explosive device so that the fair is destroyed and all the people attending are fed to the creature at once. Appalled at his cavalier attitude to the creature and the humans at the fair alike, the Doctor and Bill are determined to stop him.
The atrocious ‘aristo’ meets an untimely end when the Doctor uses the explosives to free the creature, causing the ice to crack and dragging an unwitting Sutcliffe into the chilly depths, no doubt to be devoured by the creature he imprisoned for so long…
