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edited by Ian Farrington |
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edited by Ian Farrington |
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| Machine Time by George Ivanoff | 4th Doctor |
The Doctor responds to a distress call, calculating the odds that he should have received it at all are astronomical. He arrives outside a door and tosses an apple into a force field. The fruit is destroyed so he throws in a battery. The energy field is absorbed by the battery which the Doctor pockets for use later. He enters a hall which is full of an astonishing array of machinery, covering all sizes from small to vast and all complexities from clockwork to anti-matter fusion. At the centre is a tall box containing a man. This man is attached to the box by a va riety of wires, rods, tubes and metal cages. A scalpel is about to cut into his chest. The Doctor produces his sonic screwdriver and a leather pouch containing small tools. With these he begins to disconnect the man from the mechanical devices that have been attached to and inserted into his head, body and limbs. As he works at this the Doctor draws the man into conversation. It turns out that the Doctor has freed this man from a similar predicament several times before but never understood who the victim was or how he came to be captured in this way. This time he begins to get some answers. The man knows that the Doctor is a Time Lord. He himself is from a race that exists outside time and the universe. However, he has seen that machinery is capable of developing a life of its own. He has taken on physical shape to hold back the machinery before it expands to fill the universe, but each time he does this he is overtaken by the machines which try to mechanise his body. Each time this happens he sends out a distress call that the Doctor answers. The first time the Doctor came, the machine was the size of a spaceship; this time it is the size of a small planet. This time, unlike others, the man has a robotic arm which attacks the Doctor. Holding it in check, he allows the Doctor to escape. The Doctor returns to the TARDIS and removes the mechanical devices which are already attaching themselves to it. He turns to the man, still part-machine, and says farewell until the next time. The man says that he thinks that the next time will be the last. The Doctor says he had better go away and prepare himself for this.
Time-Placement: before The Ribos Operation. | |
| The Tide and Time by Neil Corry | 7th Doctor and Ace |
The drinkers in a London pub on the Fulham Road are perplexed by the arrival of the Doctor, who is apparently searching for his Companion, Ace. He begins to demand that the seemingly genial landlord releases her, apparently from a prison inside his mind. The Doctor tries to explain to the drinkers that the barman is a malicious alien who can use his mental powers to create a time-space trap disguised as a public house. His purpose is to use this trap to feed off the life force of the people in the pub (though in fact only half of them are real, each is accompanied by a friend who is merely a part=2 0of the illusion). Using his mental powers the Doctor disrupts the alien’s mental projection, releasing Ace. This creates a tornado effect that rips the pub apart and permits the Doctor to shepherd the drinkers into the TARDIS and back to the reality of their lives in London.
Time-Placement: Arbitrary. The Doctor is wearing his off-white jacket, placing this at the start of his adventures with Ace . | |
| Losing the Audience by Mat Coward | 1st Doctor and Susan |
The TARDIS lands in the BBC’s Paris Studios in London, 1955, where the Doctor and Susan emerge to meet the radio comedian Max Wheeler, star of the ‘Anyway, As I Say’ show. The Doctor attempts to discover the cause of the interference that is preventing the TARDIS from dematerializing. Meanwhile Susan learns of Max’s fears that the regular audience members for live transmissions of his show have inexplicably started dying. Max mentions that the infamous ‘BBC Hum’ has plagued the recording of each show, and the Doctor realises that it is the same noise which is affecting his ship. After recording is o ver for the day, Max’s producer, Jolyon, is disturbed by an apparition while editing the latest edition of ‘Anyway, As I Say’. The Doctor recognizes that the man is doomed and that there is nothing to be done to help him. Sure enough, later in the evening Jolyon drops down dead. When Max tells Susan and the Doctor that at the start of the war he was involved in guerilla training should the Germans invade, and something called Operation Shaker that would lead to the mysterious sudden deaths of German sympathisers, The Doctor decides to recreate a recording of one of Max’s shows. With Max and his ex-wife (Maxine) aided by Susan and the Doctor working in the studios at Broadcasting House, using random taped laughter to simulate the audience. They are soon confronted by a group of aliens known as ‘Shakers’ who were recruited by the British government during World War II as resistance fighters in the event of a German occupation. The creatures have been trapped in the structure of the BBC buildings, but seem to have been released by the wave patterns of audience laughter. Surmising that the German invasion was successful, and that the audience is pleased because of this (hence the laughter) the Shakers have been killing each of their victims using sonic resonance ever since. The Doctor tries to explain to the aliens that the war is over, so they turn on him and his companions. The Doctor uses taped laughter, speeded up and slowed down to match a specific pattern to rip the creatures apart.
Time-Placement: just before 100,000 BC. | |
| One Card for the Curious by Xanna Eve Chown | 7th Doctor and Ace |
The doctor and Ace are having a day at the seaside. Ace sets off to buy some fish and chips but finds herself drawn into an amusement arcade. Inside the arcade is a fortune-teller’s booth. The fortune teller, Hiram White, has placed a drawing of a young woman in the window of his booth. When a girl in the arcade notices the resemblance to herself in the picture she goes into the booth to investigate and White makes a prediction that immediately comes true. Ace confronts White about this and he makes a prediction about her that appears to be nonsense but when she returns to the Doctor there is an incident involving Ace and a juggler which fits the prediction exactly. The Doctor decides that the psychic is somehow making his predictions come true. A drawing of the Doctor has also been placed outside the booth. The Doctor identifies Hiram as an alien who has come to Earth from Candram, the moon of Cramand. The fortune teller explains that he has been on Earth for a hundred years, and has become addicted to a quack remedy, Holloway’s Amazing Pills. The Doctor offers to use the TARDIS to take Hiram home, but instead the fortune teller asks him to go back in time to buy another supply of the pills. Ace is upset and confused, wondering if the Doctor will accede to this request: the pills are killing Hiram and forcing him to live in squalor. The Doctor responds that individuals are free to choose their own fate.
Time-Placement: fairly soon after The Time and Tide. | |
| Séance by John Davies | 7th Doctor and Ace |
2007. Tim Leicester spends a night with his work colleagues in a haunted pub. When somebody suggests holding a séance, Tim becomes anxious The reason for this is that as a child, in 1982, he and his friends played with a home-made ouija board, and almost immediately afterwards one of them, Andrew, was knocked down and killed by a car. Since that day Tim has been withdrawn and unsociable, finding it extremely difficult to relate to or be friendly with his colleagues at work. The glass on the ouija board starts to move, apparently of its own accord, and spells the name of one of Neil Hilton, who is in the room. At that moment a police box appears out of thin air in the corner, causing fear and distress to all in the room, not least the psychic who is conducting the séance. The Doctor steps out of the TARDIS and asks for Neil. On his own at home and smoking heavily, as his habit, Tim switches on his computer and finds Neil’s blog. It tells of Neil’s adventures aboard the Doctor’s TARDIS, and of a girl named Ace. Neil’s blog explains that he should have died in a car accident, too, but changed his plans and went to the séance instead. He has been on many wonderful adventures and even been shown his own death at the roadside, with the Doctor in attendance. The blog, like others of Neil’s, abruptly vanishes from Tim’s computer. It dawns on Tim that Neil was, in fact, one of his childhood friends who he has ignored since the accident twenty-five years earlier. He realises that Neil must have finally arrived at the time of the accident, that should have killed him and that the Doctor has restored the order of the Universe. This causes Tim to rethink his principles and give up on a plan which involved smoking himself to death so that he could at least control the manner of his own demise. He decides to make the most of his life, and to stop smoking. On the TARDIS Ace finds the Doctor deleting the last blog that Neil wrote from the universal internet. He tells Ace that while Neil was a pet project of his, Tim was a project of Neil’s. The date of Tim’s death on the screen changes in front of Ace’s eyes, becoming much later in history.
Time-Placement: We've placed it between The Curse of Fenric and Survival, based on the references on p.64 and the fact that the epilogue likely places it before the BBC Books' arc. | |
| The Celestial Harmony Engine. by Ian Briggs | 7th Doctor |
A strange chime heard in the TARDIS, takes the Doctor to mid-Seventeenth Century Seville. He visits the navigational engineer Senor Carlos López who he finds putting the finishing touches to a “Celestial Harmony Engine”. This beautiful and intricate machine uses sub-chronic resonance to map the motion of the cosmos and then uses the information to make astonishingly accurate predictions about the future. Naturally, the Doctor becomes worried: this machine is so far in advance of the Earth’s technology that it will irrevocably alter the history of the planet. Lopez explains to the Doctor that he got the idea for the Engine from a Berber traveller aboard a ship when he was a boy. The Doctor is puzzled that Lopez could remember the many intricate measurements needed to recreate the Engine. López ignores the Doctor’s warning about the threat that the Engine poses, he has become so obsessed by his desire to complete it and to give it to his wife that he has become oblivious to all else, including the fact that his wife, Dona Isobel, is about to embark on an affair with Don Ramiro, an emissary of the royal household. When he sets the Engine to life its song is so beautiful that it transfixes the Doctor and the engineer until they realise that it is singing a song of death in a woman’s voice. Meanwhile, Isobel is about to surrender herself to Ramiro, thinking that the scar on his body is an ‘ H; from when he was branded for heresy. Almost too late the Doctor realises that the scar was the wrong shape, originally it was a ‘V’, indicating that Ramiro was a rapist. Racing to Isobel’s rescue as Ramiro holds her at knife point the Doctor and Lopez seem to have arrived too late. Lopez smashes a device that he confesses to having stolen from the Berber all those years ago: the blueprint for the Engine, which he had given to his wife as an ornament. Self-realisation hits Lopez: his obsession has made him betray and neglect his wife, even giving her a gift which she treasured as a token of his love when he knew it was merely a way of hiding the plan for his greatest work. López smashes the Engine, and then vows to devote his remaining years to Isobel. As the Celestial Harmony Engine dies, the Doctor observes that the song of death was that of the machine, predicting its own demise, and that the ‘Berber traveller’ was probably an alien visitor to Earth, a masculine looking female, which is why the Celestial Harmony Engine had a woman’s voice.
Time-Placement: Late 7th Doctor solo story. | |
| Mutiny by Robert Dick | 4th Doctor and Harry |
Harry Sullivan is in a cell, thinking over his mutinous act. While the Brigadier has been in Geneva he has seen three UNIT commanding officers arrive as replacements and got on with none of them. The first hadn’t really believed in what UNIT were doing, the second had merely used the job as a stepping stone to further promotion and the third was Colonel ‘Dragon’ Dennis Horsley. This latter wouldn’t take advice from anyone. When a creature is spotted roaming the woods in the north Harry is sent to investigate. He finds it to be a boy racer from Oakes Minor, involved in a hyper-space relay race, which has crash landed. Convinced that the creature is no threat, and inculcated by his travels in the TARDIS to listen to alien life forms, Harry has decided that the only way to save the boy racer from torture or the surgeon’s knife (the Dragon’s chosen options) is to call the Doctor by pressing a button on a communicator that the Doctor left. Harry is just explaining his actions to Benton when the Doctor arrives outside his cell with the Dragon. The Doctor defends Harry’s actions to the commander, offers Harry a jelly baby and takes Harry with him to interview the alien.
Time-Placement: before The Face of Evil. | |
| Numb by Dave Owen | 3rd Doctor and Sarah Jane |
Sarah Jane reads through some top secret documents in Ministry of Defence headquarters in Whitehall. She is horrified to read about the death of a Doctor John Smith ( a man with no official records) in an explosion aboard an apparent alien craft that crashed on the Isle of Wight in 1950. From this point on, and over the ensuing weeks, she tries to hide the details of his death from the Doctor but grows steadily more morose with each journey that they make. Even when the Doctor saves her life in a laboratory accident it only serves to remind Sarah how much she owes to the Doctor. Finally they make a detour to check on a ‘residual energy anomaly’ and Sarah finds herself walking through the Isle of Wight in 1950. The Doctor easily passes through the military cordon to investigate a downed cylinder but before he can arrive at the crash site it explodes. Over the army radio Sarah he ars that a Dr Smith was killed in the explosion. She confesses all of her fears to the Doctor who explains that the civilian scientist was probably a refugee who had adopted the name when he arrived from Europe during the war. He surmises that the craft was a Dejadee reconnaissance craft, before pointing out how many John Smiths there are in the world and reminding Sarah of her own surname.
Time-Placement: this story occurs shortly after the events of Invasion of the Dinosaurs. | |
| Closing the Account by Stephen Hatcher | 7th Doctor and Ace |
The Doctor visits the ageing President Josef. It becomes apparent from their conversation that the Doctor is concerned about Ace’s whereabouts. On the other hand, the president, who seems very unwell, observes that over the previous twenty five years – during which he has met the Doctor on a number of occasions – the Doctor has not aged. Suspecting something of the Doctor’s true nature, Josef asks him how he will be viewed by history. The Doctor tells him that for the century after his death his name will be synonymous with the dictators he fought against and that history will focus on the extre me measures he used to achieve his goals. However, after a hundred years there will be a rethinking in this position and a new revolution inspired by the president will complete the work he started. Josef thanks him for allowing him to die in peace. Ace enters the room, accompanied by a handsome officer, Andrei. She kisses Andrei affectionately and leaves with the Doctor. The Doctor notices Grigori, the president’s servant, pouring his master a drink and then adding something to it. The Doctor notes that Josef has achieved his destiny, as has the servant.
Time-Placement: Arbitrary. Later on his travels with Ace. Note: President Josef certainly resembles Joseph Stalin in this story and some historians argue that Stalin was murdered when warfarin was added to his drink, leading to a fatal stroke. | |
| The Great Escapes by Simon Guerrier | Lucie |
The Doctor has apparently been shot dead by robot soldiers. Lucie is imprisoned in a cell with two Illixtrians but produces a key from her sleeve. Her escape bid is cut short when she is chased down by the robots and of her fellow prisoners, Albumen, is shot dead. Refusing to believe that the Doctor is dead, Lucie tries again to get away, this time having to first break out of some manacles. This time they make more of a fight when they are hunted down but still end up back in the cells. The robots do not kill them because they do not want to disappoint a populace that is expecting a public execution. The next escape involves a cunning ruse where Lucie switches off a robot with her nose but ends when they are shot down with stun guns. Finally, Lucie has to accept that the Doctor is dead, and is led off to her execution when...
Time-Placement: Arbitrary. In the second Big Finish season. | |
| Loose Change by Steven Savile | 6th Doctor |
Strolling through a city the Doctor is touched by the beauty of a busker’s guitar playing. He feels in his pocket and finds a coin, with a rough edge and tosses it into the musician’s guitar case. The busker, Si, uses the coin to buy a hotdog. The hotdog vendor, Jay, puts the coin into his pouch but is promptly robbed by Ellis. Ellis uses the coin to play on Space Invaders. The machine is emptied by Jervis McCreedy who uses the coin to buy an orchid to propose to his girlfriend. The florist, May, has stayed open late, knowing that McCreedy wanted to buy the flower and why. May uses the coin to pay her bus fare and on the bus meets a young man who asks her out. The bus driver, Dave Mason, parks up at the end of his shift and goes into the foyer of a hospital to buy cigarettes. The machine rejects the coin but he gives it instead to Chris Welsh who needs it to phone his mother about the birth of his baby daughter. The coin jams the slot but is taken anyway by Vernon Robey when he empties the phone. He goes to the bank to deposit the money, arriving in the middle of a hold-up. His money and wedding ring are stolen by the bagman, Stevie Carr, and put into a plastic bag. The bagman leaves the bank as police cars arrive. He starts to run but the bag splits and the treasures within are spilled on the street. The coin rolls towards the gutter and the Doctor picks it up, then trips the escaping Carr so that the police can dive on him. The Doctor pockets the coin and walks on, whistling.
Time-Placement: The Doctor is alone, so not long before Incongruous Details | |
| Lepidoptery for Begginners by John Dorney | 2nd Doctor, Jamie and Zoe |
The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe find themselves trapped in a temporal dampening field that will not let the TARDIS dematerialize. The emerge from the ship to find that they are the prisoners of Iolas Blue, an evil genius who has created a fantastically complex computer, the Predicticon, that can predict every event in the universe with startling accuracy. The computer has produced a schedule that accurately predicts every action that the Doctor and his compani ons will make up until the moment of their deaths, which he tells them will occur in four hours time. To convince them of this he shows them the death of a racing driver who once bullied him at school, brought about by the manipulation of events so complex and apparently unrelated as to almost defy belief (events that include an interplanetary war, a meteorite and an apparently random delivery of a recording of popular music). Blue is using a time transmat that astonishes the Doctor – despite this adventure taking place in the seventy-fourth century the time transmat is not due to be invented for another fifty years. He tells them that he needs to kill them because his Predicticon will allow him to rule the Universe but his reign will end when he dies at the hands of the Doctor. The Doctor and his companions make various attempts at escape but all are thwarted in the manner that the computer has predicted. The predicted moment of death finally arrives, but Iolas becomes confused when they do not die. The Predicticon then announces that it has lied to its inventor: he is rude, grudgeful and murderous. Far from dying at the hands of the Doctor, it is the mere fact of the Time Lord’s arrival that the computer has used to ensure that Iolas dies in a natural disaster, and despite its statement of the inevitability of the outcome the Doctor still makes one final attempt to save the life of the inventor before admitting defeat and leaving Iolas to his fate.
Time-Placement: explicitly states that The Seeds of Death was their most recent adventure, so straight afterwards and before any other short trips in the same gap. | |
| One Step Forward, Two Steps Back by Chris Thomas | 2nd Doctor and Jamie / 5th Doctor and Turlough |
The Second Doctor and Jamie are enjoying the Atkyan Peace Festival known as Yelyahj. This festival celebrates the Atkyans survival from a plague that killed many of their race one thousand years earlier. Jamie in particular seems very attracted to a young woman called Soji whose parents are providing somewhere for the time travellers to stay. The next morning, however, they wake up in a harsh and militaristic world where their hosts view them with hostility. The Doctor is enrolled as a scientist in a weapons facility and Jamie is conscripted into the army. The Doctor suspects that time is in flux and that somehow only he and Jamie have any memory of the alternative time stream.
One thousand years earlier the Fifth Doctor and Turlough manufacture the cure for the plague, but it has a side effect – transforming the peaceful Atkyans into an aggressive and warlike people. The Doctor then manages to come up with a stabilising agent that removes this dreadful side-effect and departs the planet, congratulating himself on his work.
The Second Doctor and Jamie now find themselves alone in a giant museum. It tells them that the entire race was wiped out by the Doctor’s cure which halved their life expectancy for each generation. The Doctor realises that this must be a reference to a future incarnation of his. Jamie wonders why this future version of the Doctor has not got any memory of the fate of the people he was trying to save. The Doctor replies that once the time stream has settled the memories - and a giant headache - will come flooding back.
The memories return to the Fifth Doctor and he tells Turlough what they have done. Turlough asks if they can go back in time to undo their mistakes but the Doctor tells him that time has crystallized already. As a consolation Turlough reminds the Doctor that the Atkyans would have died anyway, or (in the alternative version) become a deeply unpleasant race.
Time-Placement: just before Planet of Fire for the 5th Doctor and after The Christmas Presence for the 2nd Doctor. | |
| Homework by Michael Coen | 2nd Doctor, Jamie ands Zoe |
Norman Bean writes a homework assignment that tells what he did during his summer holidays. One night, Norman was woken in his bed by an apparition that resembled his father. The apparition claims to be Norman’s older self, but visiting from thirty years in the future. He instructs the younger Norman to buy lots of toys but not to take them out of their packaging, saying that this will lead to him being a lot richer later in life. While t his seems a ridiculous idea to the young Norman, he points out the practicalities: he doesn’t have any money to buy the specified toys. The apparition vanishes and Norman decides that his mum won’t believe him so he keeps the incident to himself. In the park the next day he meets the Doctor who offers him a jelly baby and asks if he has ever seen a ghost. Norman kicks the Doctor in the shins and runs off to get the park keeper but the Doctor has vanished. The next night the apparition reappears, trying to persuade Norman to steal some money from his grandmother, saying that she won’t need it as she has only a week to live. He says that Norman can use this money to buy the toys but the young Norman argues that stealing is wrong. The next day Norman meets Zoe. She seems to know that he is going to visit his grandmother and is keen to impress on him the importance of not doing anything to hurt her, even if the old lady never found out about it. That night the apparition returns but becomes solid. He is jubilant that he can ‘travel back and forth’ but is accosted by the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie. They take the older Norman away and the Doctor says he has closed the time-rift that he had found. Zoe is keen to impress on Norman that he should remember what is important. His mother does not believe what he says about all this and even when his grandmother dies she treats it all as some sort of premonition in a dream. Norman decides that Zoe’s silver suit must indicate that she is from the future and develops an interest in books about space travel. He is still puzzled by what Zoe meant about things being important but reconciles himself with the thought that he might understand better when he is older.
Time-Placement: Just before The Seeds of Death. | |
| The Devil Like a Bear by Brian Willis | 7th Doctor and Ace |
The TARDIs lands in Chelmsford, 1645, at the height of the witch trials. While the Doctor is making some repairs to the TARDIS they are disturbed by the pursuit of a young girl, Tilly Brewer, by the Witchfinder Gen eral, Matthew Hopkins, and a gang of henchmen. The Doctor and Ace track her to a clearing in a forest and speak to her. Tilly thinks that she has been possessed by a demon and that when her father tried to beat it out of her she accidentally killed him by breathing fire. The Doctor recognizes that the girl had been infected by the spores of the Skreeth. These alien parasites transform their victims into wild fire-breathing beasts that have destroyed many worlds. The Doctor was sent once by the Time Lords to the planet of Hysperikos Prime to investigate a Skreeth infestation. Finding the planet over-run by Skreeth he realises that their aim is galactic domination. The Time Lords order him to seek the help of some influential races to halt this menace and begins by visiting the Draconians. The Draconians implement a ‘Scorched Galaxy’ solution to the Skreeth menace, obliterating any planet where they are found. The Doctor blames himself for the fact that he shared information with the Draconians and for his part in the subsequent destruction of worlds where Skreeth presence was merely suspected. The Doctor leaves Ace to care for Tilly while he goes back to get the TARDIS. When they are surprised in the clearing Ace manages to take the girl to a barn but is horrified to see that Tilly is transforming into a beast. Worse is to come when Hopkins and his men track them down. By now Tilly’s transformation is complete and she launches herself at Hopkins but, against her better nature, Ace distracts her. When the Skreeth turns to pounce on Ace the Doctor materialises the TARDIS around the creature. Cut off from link to the rest of the Skreeth Tilly transforms back to a human shape. Realising that she can never leave the TARDIS the Doctor creates a cottage in a meadow for her, deep within the TARDIS itself. He and Ace pay regular visits to her but never reveal to her where she is actually living.
Time-Placement: Arbitrary. There's a reference to the Daleks [p.165], which we took to be a reference to being between Remembrance of the Daleks and The Happiness Patrol. | |
| Stanley by Lizzie Hopley | 4th Doctor and Leela |
The Doctor and Leela arrive outside London Zoo early in the twenty-first century but find the streets largely deserted. Inside the zoo the animals are running free and attacking visitors. One little boy holds the corpse of a dead baby wallaby. As they make their way through the zoo they see more animals rampaging around the zoo. There are human corpses littered around the grounds but one zoo keeper is still alive in the gorilla cage, being groomed by one of the gorillas. The Doctor tells this very frightened man that he is as safe as can be where he is and moves on. It seems that the Doctor has a clear idea of what has happened, particularly when he sees an escaped Golden Lion Tamarind monkey holding the keys to the cages. He surmises that someone or something has used mind control to persuade the monkey to steal the keys and set the animals free. Surprisingly he seems to know who the culprit is and takes Leela to a tank where a purple cod named Stanley can be seen. He tells Leela that this is actually General Secretary Murigan Epinephelus III of the Black-fin Army of Halemida. He is a political prisoner who was convicted of war crimes four thousand years earlier and has been exiled to Earth. Instead of water his tank contains an enzo-gel that has extended his life and imprisonment well beyond his expected span. Using the superior mind power that allowed his aquatic race to rule their planet from the sea, despite the apparent advantages of their land-based subjects he has decided to exact a petty revenge on the people of Earth. The Doctor engages the fish in a mental battle during which he learns that the corpse of the woman in front of the tank is the mother of the little boy he met earlier. The general overwhelms the Doctor with superior mind control but this is a ploy of the Doctor who wants his adversary to see the destruction of Halemida when its sun expanded. This seems to drain the fight out of the general. The golden monkey and the little boy join forces to drain the tank of the enzo-gel and kill the general. The Doctor tells Leela that the monkey comes from a race that did not originate on Earth but from the same star system as Halemida. The boy and monkey had probably used the kick-start that the general’s intrusion into their minds had given them to develop a plan for revenge against him for the various crimes he had committed against them – historically in the monkey’s case, more contemporary in the boy’s. Possibly it was an instruction by the general that made them kill him, a suicide brought on by the realization that his planet was dead and that he could never return or rule again. As approaching gunshots indicate that order is being restored to the zoo the Doctor suggests that he and Leela visit Madame Tussauds instead.
Time-Placement: We took Leela's comment about jeans being ridiculous as an indication that it was before Horror of Fang Rock (by which time she sees them as being suitable). | |
| Twilight's End by Cavan Scott and Mark Wright | 7th Doctor |
The TARDIS materialises inside a vast high-tech building called The Forge where he has previously fought against Project Lazarus and Project Valhalla. As security guards close in on him the Doctor realises that the heavy security doors are sliding shut to keep him safe but opening in order to lead him deep into the building. He finally arrives in a vast room where he encounters a computer called Oracle that is attached to a once-human figure, now cybernetically propagated. This near-dead man is Nimrod who revives to tell the Doctor that he is now one and the same as The Forge. The Doctor is appalled by what has become of Nimrod; or rather Doctor William Abberton who he thinks is still within the monstrosity in front of him. He leaves a syringe containing the Twilight cur e beside Nimrod, leaving it up to him whether he uses it and makes his way back to the TARDIS.
Time-Placement: Arbitrary. Near the end of his incarnation. Continuity Notes: The story refers to Project: Twilight, Project: Lazarus and Project: Valhalla. | |
| The Book of My life by Ian Mond | 6th Doctor |
The Doctor has been helping a group of revolutionaries fight against the repressive regime of their planet. His allies have been killed and he is taken prisoner and driven to the Malamud, who is waiting for him. The Malamud leads the Doctor to House Osmo, a palatial structure that contains hundreds of thousands of books. In the course of their conversation it is revealed that everyone on the planet has a book which accurately foretells the events of their lives. The revolution which he has been aiding is an attempt by the Doctor to free the people from this apparent tyranny: it is seen as blasphemy to attempt to break from the path predicted by the books. The Malamud explains that every inhabitant, building, garden or visitor to the planet has their own book, but even the busiest only generate around twenty five volumes or so, and the record was thirty-four. Then the Doctor’s books began to arrive, appearing overnight as if from nowhere. No-one on the planet knows the origins of the books. It gradually dawns on the Doctor that House Osmo is solely the collection devoted to his life and is told that it extends to a massive 750,000 volumes. By their count the Malamud and the archivist of the library think that the Doctor is over 20,000 years old, a point which the Doctor does not contradict. Instead he retorts that the volumes merely recount his adventures and do not foreshadow them. The Malamud disagrees and says that the final volume arrived three years ago. The Doctor scans this volume and sees that it predicts he will be dead within two days.
Time-Placement: After Incongruous Details and Defining Patterns: Linking Material | |
| Linking Material by Ian Farrington | 6th Doctor, Emily Chaudhry and Will Hoffman |
The Doctor, Lieutenant Will Hoffman and Colonel Emily Chaudhry return to September 1957 to investigate a mysterious gap in the UNIT archives. They head off to the Ministry of Defence where the records were stored at that time, wondering who would want to delete records of wartime activities twelve years after the event. When the Doctor leaves them waiting in an ante-room in Whitehall Emily worries that if they lose him they will not be able to return to their own time. She is also perplexed that they are only a few hundred yards from her local pub and that they have just had a wartime adventure in the same pub. Hoffman refuses to find anything sinister in these apparent coincidences. The Doctor returns and takes Emily to meet Ronnie Tillyard, a British agent based in Washington. Ronnie has come to London to remove records that detail the Doctor’s methods and which he feels are detrimental to world safety. Ronnie and the Doctor pull records from filing cabinets while Will and Emily discuss the irony of the fact that in returning to find out who stole the records they discover that it was them all along. As they walk back to the TARDIS later Emily wonders what would have happened if they hadn’t removed the files. The Doctor says that he is sure something from his past waiting to haunt him as if it were already scripted.
Time-Placement: Follows on immediately from Incongruous Details. | |
| Source: Mark Senior with placement notes by David Hancock | |
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