Sympathy For The Devil
On the eve of the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997, the TARDIS materializes near a traditional English pub. The Doctor, reeling from his ordeal at the hands of the Time Lords after his trial for interfering in the course of history, wanders into the pub to find that it’s run by the retired Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart – embittered after years of having to run UNIT’s fight against the unknown without any help. Just as the two become uneasily reacquainted, they hear a low-flying jet smash into something nearby, and yet they never see it. When they arrive at the hillside into which something has crashed, the Doctor and the Brigadier realize it’s a Chinese spy plane using some sort of stealth technology that renders it invisible, not just to radar but to the human eye. UNIT quickly arrives, under the command of the brash Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood – an old adversary of the Brigadier’s – and takes over a nearby monastery, monks and all, to use as a temporary command post. The Doctor slowly grows to realize that something more than espionage is going on here – but by the time he realizes who’s behind it, it will already be too late…and this time even the Brigadier doesn’t trust him enough to lend a hand.
written by Jonathan Clements
directed by Gary Russell
music by Andy Hardwick
main theme by Ron Grainer / arranged by Lee MansfieldCast: David Warner (The Doctor), Nicholas Courtney (Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart), David Tennant (Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood), Sam Kisgart (Ke Le), Liz Sutherland (Ling), Trevor Littledale (The Abbot), Mark Wright (Marcus), Peter Griffiths (Captain Zerdin), Stuart Piper (Adam)
Timeline: after The War Games and in place of Spearhead From Space?
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
The Doctor returns to Norway, where he and Evelyn are eager to catch up with Cassie, who they left to fend for herself – away from other humans – after their horrific encounter with Nimrod, the Forge, and Project Twilight. The Doctor believes he has created a cure for the vampire virus that infected Cassie, and he even finds her soon enough – only to discover that she is now in Nimrod’s employ. Nimrod has been waiting close to Cassie, knowing that the Doctor would return to help her. Nimrod has obtained some top secret information regarding the Doctor, including UNIT records of his past regenerations – an ability Nimrod wants to study and harness for himself, even if it means forcing the Doctor to regenerate by torturing him. Evelyn, in the meantime, brings Cassie back to her senses and together they rescue the Doctor from Nimrod’s hideous experiment. As the three of them make a desperate dash to the TARDIS, which Nimrod has also brought to the Forge, Nimrod guns Cassie down…
2039 A.D.: After encountering rumors of illegal genetic experiments being conducted by the U.S. military under the cover of the Deep-sea Energy Exploration Project, the Doctor drops in with the TARDIS and confirms his worst fears. The ruthless General Flint has been using Professor Vollmer’s ecologically friendly energy experiments, harnessing power from undersea geothermal vents, as a cover for experiments that even the Army has now disavowed. Faced with the impending end of his secret project, Flint has Vollmer injected with a cocktail of accelerated DNA cultivated from sea creatures, his last chance to prove the value of his project. To prevent Vollmer’s mutation into an amphibious life form, the Doctor kills him, but not before Vollmer makes the Doctor promise to look after his daughter. General Flint confiscates the Doctor’s TARDIS key, forcing the Time Lord to abandon the seabase in an escape submarine before Flint’s plan comes to a deadly end: radioactive dirty bombs detonate around the DEEP base, ensuring that even the most curious and determined explorer can’t get near it. 
Having learned its lessons from time-traveling history tour lines of the past, Jolly Chronolidays opts instead to recreate history for its customers. One of its tours takes travelers on a visit to the Sector of Forgotten Souls, the very spot where the pioneering Time Lord Omega detonated – and then captured in mid-explosion – the star that became the source of Gallifrey’s power. But the unique dimensional instabilities of the sector have unintended side effects – the actor who portrays Omega’s ill-fated assistant Vandikirian goes mad, convinced that the real Omega is trying to kill him, and when he turns up dead it seems he wasn’t entirely mistaken in that fear. The Doctor, who has been along for the tour, is puzzled when his investigation of the man’s death dead-ends without a suspect. He’s even more alarmed when he begins hearing the voice of Omega himself, urging him to help the fallen Time Lord escape from his dimension of anti-matter. But will he be able to help Omega when it begins to look like the Doctor himself committed the murder?
…just then, the “other” Doctor and Melanie arrive on the human colony planet Puxatornee, discovering that the alien Slithergees have all but taken over, using humans are seeing-eye dogs and servants, and even edging human traditions, history and beliefs out of the humans’ own teachings by way of claiming rampant anti-Slithergee discrimination. Two terrorists, Stewart and Reed, are out to restore the balance and put the humans in charge again, and when they discover that the Doctor and Mel are time travelers, they force the TARDIS crew at gunpoint to take them back in time to change history. But the history they bring about is one where the Slithergees were refused permission to settle in the Puxatornee system, resulting in a war that left the planet permanently contaminated. Stewart and Reed are killed, and the Doctor makes a hasty exit, worried about encountering his and Mel’s counterparts from the divergent timeline that has been created. Just then, the “other” Doctor and Melanie arrive on the doomed planet Puxatornee, where two soldiers, Stewart and Reed, wish to change history so the human-Slithergee war never fatally polluted Puxatornee. When they discover that the Doctor and Mel are time travelers, they force the TARDIS crew at gunpoint to take them back in time to prevent these events. But the history they bring about is one where the Slithergees were granted permission to settle and slowly took over. Stewart and Reed are killed, and the Doctor makes a hasty exit, worried about encountering his and Mel’s counterparts from the divergent timeline that has been created…
During his trial, the Doctor struggles with the Valeyard and becomes trapped in the Matrix as Melanie watches in horror – and the other Time Lords, including a newly elected Lord President, watch with distant interest and no desire to interfere. Mel insists on trying to rescue the Doctor, but finds no interest from the Time Lords, who plan to watch the unfurling of the Doctor’s history with detached curiosity should the Valeyard win. And indeed the Valeyard does win, but he doesn’t limit himself to the Matrix – and he doesn’t stop with killing the Doctor. The Valeyard interferes with time and destroys Gallifrey itself, and even goes back and kills the fourth Doctor en route to Logopolis. That act begins to unravel the Valeyard’s own history, however – and in trying to go back and restore his past timeline as the Doctor, he may destroy the web of time itself.
Martin Bannister, in 1961, was voted one of the Times‘ ten most promising young writers for his innovative stage plays. But he tried to venture into television, and was recruited for a new BBC science fiction program called Doctor Who. Despite his extraordinary efforts to define the show’s characters, themes and parameters, Martin watched as Doctor Who made it as far as one failed pilot episode before being abandoned by the BBC. Now, 40 years later, Martin is confined to a nursing home, subjected to unsettling visits by his adult son, who’s still bitter that Martin divorced his mother when he was only six. Martin isn’t sure what is the truth and what isn’t from what his son tells him, and this isn’t the only place he’s having problems with reality – he imagines a burgeoning romance with a nurse, he imagines that he’s being tapped to write the celebratory 40th anniversary comeback of Doctor Who (but why celebrate a show that was never made?), and he imagines that he is the Doctor, that most mysterious traveler in time and space. Will Martin Bannister trade his unpromising reality for an unrealized fantasy?
The Doctor stumbles upon a plot to revive Davros, thought to be long dead, but this time the Daleks aren’t behind it. This attempt to tap into Davros’ evil genius is a purely commercial concern, funded by a shady Earth corporation whose CEO wants Davros to work for him. Horrified by the implications of this, the Doctor counters with an offer to provide his own services in exchange for keeping Davros under lock and key. The company’s chief executive, realizing that he has two geniuses on his hands, instead strikes a bargain that both parties find even more terrifying – he will hire the Doctor and Davros, and they will share lab and office space. But what the corporation wants is someone who’s not afraid to set ethics aside for the sake of profit – and the Doctor soon becomes ripe for termination. Or, if Davros has his way, extermination.
Trapped by the Time Lords and tried for the crime of interfering in history, the Doctor is scheduled to be exiled to Earth – but he escapes into his TARDIS and leaves Gallifrey. Not that this really does him much good, as he winds up trapped on Earth anyway. A few incarnations later, the Doctor’s situation has become even more unsettling – he has not only changed bodies, but changed gender as well. Without her TARDIS, the Doctor becomes bored, listless, and – with the help of two friends she makes on a job she takes to eke out a meager existence – perhaps just a little bit alcoholic. Or perhaps a lot – the Doctor begins to see and hear her previous (male) incarnation, warning her of alien invasions and labyrinthine plots against modern-day Earth. When the Time Lords send two agents to track the Doctor down and bring her back to justice (though they don’t know that the Doctor is now a woman), the only thing standing between the Doctor and her doom is an increasing reliance on the bottle. When it comes right down to it, which oblivion will the Doctor choose?
It’s a dark and stormy night in the town of Perfugium, and old friends have gathered at a stately Edwardian mansion to celebrate the birthday of their mysterious friend, Dr. John Smith. Only it’s not really his birthday – it’s the tenth anniversary of the day that the amnesiac, seemingly horribly burned, and yet compassionate-to-a-fault Smith first appeared in Perfugium. His inability to remember anything beyond the past ten years troubles Dr. Smith greatly, but he has become even more concerned recently with thoughts that seem to betray his gentle nature – thoughts that can only be described as pure evil. Even more unnerving is the arrival of a strange little man, also claiming to be a doctor, who begins to drop disturbing hints that Dr. John Smith does indeed have a past – a past in which he was known as an irredeemably evil genius called the Master.
The Doctor and Charley arrive in Italy as the country celebrates its 1982 World Cup victory. But something more sinister lurks behind the revels: two aliens – Threllips – are scouting the Earth for conquest and colonization. And while the Threllips have the strength of a dozen humans, technology at least on a par with the Sontarans, and the willpower to subjugate the entire human race, they’re also a little short on brainpower. With that in mind, the Doctor and Charley set the pair of invaders up to fail under the weight of their own egos.
The Doctor, now in his ninth generation, finds himself in 2003 England. The small town he has been sent to (by powers unknown) has been overcome by strange, ground-dwelling creatures known as the Shalka. The Shalka keep the townspeople under their thrall with the ever-present threat of destruction. The Doctor comes to realize that the Shalka use sound as their weapon and turns that weapon against them. What he doesn’t realize is that the plan is much bigger than simply taking over one small town in England. All over the world similar towns are being invaded, their populations being slowly, subtly altered. Once complete, these humans can be used as a conduit to bring about the destruction of the Earth by way of a scream that will alter the Earth’s atmosphere, making it habitable for the Shalka, but little else. While combating this latest threat to the Earth, the Doctor tries to deal with the demons of his past and find his way in the Universe.
Imbued with the energy of anti-time and possessed by the power-mad Zagreus, the Doctor wrestles for self-control and terrifies Charley into hiding within the TARDIS. A familiar face appears to Charley as she hides – the Brigadier, or, more precisely, a TARDIS-projected simulation of Lethbridge-Stewart intended to help her. Its method of doing so, however, is unorthodox to put it mildly: Charley must divine the true nature of the increasingly disastrous situation from a series of metaphors, ranging from her own childhood to a visit to Gallifrey’s past to an insane amusement park where animatronic cartoon characters are slaughtering one another. The Doctor, too, hears from some familiar voices in his own past, coaxing him to regain control of his own mind. But all too late, the Doctor realizes that his body and soul are not Zagreus’ only battleground, and the real battle for the fate of the entire universe is only now being joined.
The Doctor emerges from his trial a changed man – and a very melancholy one. Seeking a bit of refuge to contemplate recent events, he happens upon Bianca’s, an exclusive nightclub in World War II-era Berlin, but even as he tries to relax, he notices that things may not be as they appear. Worse yet, even as he tries to piece together what’s going on, Iris Wildthyme staggers into Bianca’s as well, shattering any hope the Doctor may have had of discreetly investigating the mystery.
In the Divergent dimension, the TARDIS is barely able to maintain its shape, dimensions and function, struggling to keep itself intact in a pocket universe where the normal physical laws do not apply. It brings the Doctor and Charley – who stowed away aboard the TARDIS after the Doctor’s harrowing battle with Zagreus – to what seems to be a dark void. The Doctor and Charley finds themselves battered by deafening, disjointed repetitions of their own words in their own voices, and the Doctor surmises that they’re dealing with a creature made of pure sound. But Charley, preoccupied with her unrequited feelings for the Doctor, isn’t as fascinated by the experience. And before either of them knows it, they’re trapped, together alone at the whim of an unseen, and yet incomprehensibly heard, tormentor.