The Haunting Of Thomas Brewster
Young Thomas Brewster hasn’t exactly led a charmed life. Orphaned at the age of five, he winds up in the London workhouses and is eventually handed off to a vile man who forces young men into a life of virtual slavery, searching the banks of the Thames for valuable cargo thrown overboard by corrupt boat skippers who don’t want to pay taxes on what they’re carrying (or smuggling). But from his mother’s funeral onward, there have been two constants in Thomas’ life (aside from suffering): his mother’s ghost speaks to him, and he keeps seeing a tall blue box whose occupants keep asking after him. When he finally meets these two people – a man called the Doctor and a girl named Nyssa – they seem pleasant enough, but they’re an obstacle to his plans. His mother’s ghost has given Thomas instructions to build a time machine to change the future – an act which she assures him will reunite them at last. And when Thomas’ makeshift time machine isn’t enough to change history to his mother’s liking, she tells him to steal the Doctor’s TARDIS instead…
written by Jonathan Morris
directed by Barnaby Edwards
music by Simon RobinsonCast: Peter Davison (The Doctor), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa), Leslie Ash (Mother), Christian Coulson (Robert McIntosh), John Pickard (Thomas Brewster), Barry McCarthy (Creek), Sid Mitchell (Pickens), Trevor Cooper (Shanks)
Timeline: between Renaissance Of The Daleks and The Boy That Time Forgot
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
A strange, scream-like signal from a rogue asteroid leads the Doctor to send a response, which only has the effect of making the asteroid stop and change course toward the TARDIS. To avoid a colliskion, the Doctor dematerializes the TARDIS and arrives in 16th century London, where the strange screaming sound can still be heard. The Doctor and Peri find themselves at a nearby inn with none other than playwright Christopher Marlowe, who is sorting through strange – and possibly unearthly – ideas for a play about Dr. Faustus. Marlowe has been consorting with a Spaniard named Velez, rarely seen in public due to his skin’s habit of falling away from his skeleton, and claims that Velez has shown him the secrets of astral projection, giving him glimpses of unearthly events that now inspire his work. The Doctor suspects that Velez is putting Marlowe under some unearthly influence, and tries to cast doubt on Marlowe’s reliability as a spy for the British government. The accusation only lands the Doctor in the Tower of London, while Peri and one of Marlowe’s actors try to free the playwright from the influence of Velez. When they learn that Velez draws his power from blood sacrifices, they become fast candidates to be Velez’ next victim.
The Doctor returns to Scotland, finding history changed. The Jacobite uprising has lasted far longer than history records, and the oil well has been developed far ahead of schedule. Someone has begun stripping Scotland of its natural resources, and the fight for freedom is as bloody as ever, decades after it should have ended. Even more surprisingly, after encountering both British occupiers and Scottish freedom fighters, the Doctor is brought before the leader of the Scottish rebellion, Black Donald – a man the Doctor knows as Jamie McCrimmon. Naturally, thanks to the Time Lords wiping Jamie’s memories, Jamie has no idea who this incarnation of the Doctor is. All he knows is the ongoing fight to free his homeland from the domination of the Redcaps and their Overlord. Once Rob Roy turns up in the same time zone – decades before he should even be alive – the Doctor is determined to find out who’s playing fast and loose with human history. But with no idea of who this oddly-dressed English interloper is, Jamie McCrimmon isn’t sure who to trust.
Notes: Dwarf star alloy is very handy for trapping time travelers; Rorvik and his crew landed a ship with an entire outer hull made of dwarf star alloy – said to be super-dense material – to enslave the time-hopping Tharils in 1981’s 
The TARDIS arrives at the planet Samur, a strategic location in Rutan space which was once the site of fierce fighting between the Rutans and Sontarans. The planet is now coated in a colorful form of mold, with no other signs of life, at least until a Sontaran ship crashes. Only a few of its warrior crew is left alive, but they’ve lost their sealed order. When the Sontarans round up the TARDIS travelers and learn that one of them is the Doctor, they assume that their orders are somehow related to the capture and execution of the Time Lord and his companions. There are only things that save the Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa, and Turlough: this platoon of Sontarans is more inept than most, and Samur may not be as uninhabited as it looks.
The Doctor responds to Ace’s request to experience the Summer of Love in 1967 by bringing her to Soviet Russia in 1967, where strangely-helmeted motorcyclists are trying to track down a man who’s stolen classified experimental weaponry. Immediately recognizing the weapon, the Doctor knows that it’s unsafe not just in civilian hands, but in any human hands. At an official reception, the time travelers home in on wildly out-of-place businessman Markus Creevy, who has both personal and professional reasons to be mingling with members of the KGB. He’s employed by the owner of the alien weapons: Ice Lord Hhessh, on a mission to retrieve some of the Ice Warriors’ most sacred relics before humans can defile them with further experimentation. But Hhessh isn’t the only alien on the scene. A Time Lord is operating incognito on Earth, and the Doctor is doing his bidding by letting Ace do most of the work.
Aiming for London, 2015 to track down a strange energy reading, the Doctor lands the TARDIS in London, 2025, a short walk away from a protest against a corporation called Globesphere. The company promises free solar energy for the entire world, and the strange energy reading persists at Globesphere’s headquarters building. The protest becomes a riot, and Leela is arrested by Globesphere’s private security force and interrogated. The Doctor and the leader of the protest movement sneak into Globesphere and make a horrifying discovery: Globesphere’s CEO is under the control of the Daleks, who intend to use the Globesphere energy collectors, deployed across the entire face of the Earth, to wipe out the human race centuries before they become one of the Daleks’ more resilient enemies.