| “ | Her parents never left in the car, and that made a hole in the world, in the Abbot's Gateway. The Trickster walked through the Abbot's Gateway and sucked the life out of the world. | „ |
| ~ The alternate Gita Chandra about the Abbot's Gateway. |
The Abbot's Gateway is a stone arch appearing in The Sarah Jane Adventures, a spin-off of the popular science fiction series Doctor Who. It is the site of a weak point in the Web of Time, and a critical part of the Pantheon of Discord's plan to manifest on Earth in 1951.
History[]
The Gateway was a completely normal archway built as part of a Cistercian abbey in the English village of Foxgrove. It stood for many centuries until at least the 1950s, even as the rest of the abbey fell into disrepair.
However, the entire town was built on a fault line in the web of time, also known as a "hole in the world". Time was particularly weak around the Gateway due to its nature as a religious site. This weakness meant that the Abbot's Gateway was an ideal area for the Pantheon of Discord (ancient beings from limbo that fed on chaos) to escape limbo and manifest themselves on Earth. The Trickster, a being who served as the living embodiment of the Pantheon, devised a plan to break through the Gateway and destroy the Earth.
With the aid of an alien named Krislok who was enslaved by the Trickster, the Pantheon manipulated Sarah Jane Smith into travelling back in time to the year 1951 and preventing the deaths of her parents. This resulted in a time paradox and the weak spot in time being ripped open, allowing the Trickster to come through the Abbot's Gateway and exist in a physical form for the first time. The Trickster having successfully travelled through the Gateway, an alternate timeline was created where the Trickster devastated the entire planet and enslaved humanity to the Pantheon's will.
Sarah Jane later returned to 1951 to prevent the Trickster's victory. As the Trickster began to materialize at the Abbot's Gateway, Sarah Jane reversed the sabotage she had performed on her parents' car. Her parents independently worked out that they needed to die to prevent the Trickster from fully manifesting and willingly got in the car and drove away, leading to the accident that claimed their lives. The paradox and alternate timeline were thus averted, and the Trickster was barely able to drag himself away from the Abbot's Gateway and into the town centre before he was again banished to limbo.