Medicinal Purposes
The Doctor and Evelyn arrive in Scotland, and the Doctor quickly deduces that they’ve arrived at the time of the infamous string of grave robberies attributed to Burke & Hare. But things are not as they should be – the Doctor begins to notice that certain things are out of place, and certain elements of history are not as they should be. The time travelers quickly find out why history seems to be playing out differently than recorded: they’re not the only ones there with a TARDIS.
written by Robert Ross
directed by Gary Russell
music by David DarlingtonCast: Colin Baker (The Doctor), Maggie Stables (Evelyn), Leslie Phillips (Dr. Robert Knox), David Tennant (Daft Jamie), Glenna Morrison (Mary Patterson), Kevin O’Leary (William Burke), Tom Farrelly (Billy Hare), Janie Booth (Old Woman)
Notes: The villain in this story claims to have procured his TARDIS second-hand on the planet Gryben; that planet is mentioned in the Gallifrey audio miniseries as a stronghold set aside by the universe’s time-traveling superpowers to detain any time travelers who gain access to time without having developed sufficiently enough to use that ability maturely and harmlessly.
Timeline: after Arrangements For War
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
Galanar is told that he is a creation of the alternate Daleks who emerged from the Project Infinity dimensional rift two millennia ago. Genetically engineered to have abilities beyond normal humans, Galanar is one of the only experiments to survive. And it turns out that someone else on Skelanis VIII is another one of the surviving experiments, a woman named Elaria. Galanar also learns that the Daleks are trying to find the planet Velyshaa. With Elaria’s help, Galanar frees Tarkov – posing as a patient in the Daleks’ treatment center, and the only man alive who has been to Velyshaa and knows how to go back – and together they launch a desperate escape attempt.
Commander Frey Saxton leads a charge against the Daleks, with hundreds of Graxis Wardens as her army and an armed but battered freighter at her disposal. During the attack on Skelanis VIII, Frey’s crew rescues Galanar, Elaria, and Tarkov from a waiting Dalek force. Once aboard Frey’s ship, however, Tarkov turns against his rescuers, believing that they work for the Daleks, until Frey manages to smooth things over and Tarkov agrees to lead the Graxis Wardens to Velyshaa. There, he believes, they will find the final telepathic imprint left by a man called Kalendorf who fought in the last great war against the Daleks, though what information he might have left behind 2,000 years ago is anybody’s guess. Something else that no one can even begin to guess at is the true nature of the cure that the Daleks are offering to the plague sweeping the galaxy.
Notes: One of the Daleks refers to a refueling station called Exxilon Gamma 9 – apparently despite the trouble they encountered on Exxilon during their final clash with the third Doctor, the Daleks prevailed against the planet’s many perils.
Still wandering through the Divergent Universe without the safety of the TARDIS, the Doctor, Charley and C’rizz suspiciously follow the Kro’ka to a place called the Multihaven. A melting pot of multiple religious beliefs, the Multihaven tolerates all of them equally, and dozens of churches have been established there. And any safe haven would be a blessing for C’rizz, plagued by memories of fulfilling his mate’s request for a mercy killing in the Kromon biosphere; the memories have taken on a new intensity of late, at times rendering him almost helpless. The Doctor and Charley leave C’rizz in the care of a peaceful sect of monks while they set out to explore the Multihaven, but while they’re gone, C’rizz’s caretakers themselves wind up on the wrong end of a hostile merger with another religion. The 23rd Church of Lucidianism is gaining new recruits at a rapid rate, even converting long-standing members of other established religions in the Multihaven. The Lucidians’ leader, Lan Carder, has more than just charisma on his side – and the Doctor suspects that the object of the Lucidians’ worship may be an alien force with a sinister agenda.
On the planet Bortresoye, a global nuclear war has laid waste to the surface and the planet’s entire population is wiped out. The Doctor, Charley and C’rizz arrive here, driven thorugh the interzone by the Kro’Ka, who delays the Time Lord briefly to haunt him with memories of fallen companions. They seek shelter in a bombed-out building, but it collapses underneath and on top of them, leaving Charley paralyzed from the neck down and the Doctor buried under the rubble. C’rizz goes to get help, but can find only a strangely circumspect being who calls himself Requiem. The Doctor and Charley are found by a survey team and brought to a well-protected underground bunker where the planet’s only survivors are barely managing to stay alive – and earthquake damage to their bunker is slowly whittling down even that population. The ruler of one of Bortresoye’s warring nations, the Lady Excelsior, terrifies her two surviving cabinet ministers with her ability to remain blissfully deluded about the outcome of the war, and her insistence on consorting with a mysterious man named Landscar.
Galanar, Tarkov and Frey’s crew are finally en route to Velyshaa, only someone has betrayed them to the Daleks, who will soon follow. The source of the plague is discovered to have been the Daleks all along, only their cure is merely a way to mutate the victims into a new army of Daleks. The Graxis Wardens find the evidence they need on Velyshaa to warn the Galactic Union of the Daleks’ plan, only their ship is destroyed before they can leave with that evidence. The human race may finally have the means to destroy the Daleks, only they’ll have to become equally ruthless – and perhaps, in the end, as inhuman as the Daleks themselves.
The Doctor is asleep in the interzone between worlds, and the Kro’Ka appears to torment him – only to find that it must put up with Charley and C’rizz, who quickly become aware that the Kro’Ka seems to be powerless while the Time Lord is unconscious. Once awakened, the Doctor is subjected to a kind of mind-probing technique by the Kro’Ka, but he quickly gains the upper hand on the interzone guardian, forcing it to tell him, at least in general terms, where the TARDIS is located. The Doctor follows the trail to a place called Caerdroia, a surreal world where verdant hills populated by seemingly normal cows and rabbits lead to a circular maze. But that’s not the most surreal thing about Caerdroia – topping that list is the fact that the Doctor has emerged from the interzone in what seems like three aspects of his character: one rational, one inquisitive and easily distracted, and one dark and quick to anger. Charley and C’rizz can only tag along with the three Doctors as they look for a way out of the maze – and a way to find out who’s holding the Kro’Ka’s leash.
Notes: Caerdroia is a Welsh word for a labyrinth. This audio adventure received an early release – with alternate cover art (seen here) – at a Doctor Who convention in November 2004; the limited edition alternate cover version was also sold by the internet vendor Tenth Planet.
Professor Bernice Summerfield is contracted by a man named Lynton, claiming to be a representative of a mining consortium whose operations on Tysir IV have been brought to a screeching halt by an underground discovery that could be of great archaeological importance. That, and the fact that he’s a fan of Benny’s books, is what prompted him to secure her services to investigate the find. Benny warns Lynton that her appraisal can’t be bought for any price, but when she sees it for herself – with Lynton insisting that he must accompany her – she is stunned: a huge metallic structure with doors has been uncovered. Once she and Lynton figure out how to open the doors – which can only be unlocked by solving a logic puzzle – Benny realizes that the enormous chambers are a sleeping tomb of Cybermen. And only then does she realize that Lynton knew this all along. But why would he want to unleash the Cybermen?
A planet appears in the path of the TARDIS, moving so fast that a collision is unavoidable. Charley and C’rizz each awaken in a virtual reality of their past lives, but they each quickly figure out that the Kro’Ka is behind the illusions and are freed. When they awaken, they find not only the Kro’Ka, but Rassilon as well, who claims that he has nursed them back to health after the destruction of the TARDIS. But he shows them that the Doctor has survived as well, and he appears to have found company – a woman who has found him wandering through the jungle of the planet’s sole land mass. Charley and C’rizz both demand to be set free, but before he releases them Rassilon tries to put doubts in their minds about the Doctor – and each other. He’s at least partially successful, as the two TARDIS travelers go their own way in the jungle.
A diversion in the time vortex throws the TARDIS off course, toward a rough landing on a distant backwater world. The Doctor steps out of the doors and almost immediately blacks out. When he comes to, he is stunned to find that he is being tended to by Peri, who he hasn’t seen since the ill-timed intervention of the Time Lords whisked him away for his trial and left her helpless – 19 years ago in her personal history. She escaped her situation and obtained a spacecraft, but it crash-landed here months ago. She also claims that the Doctor was found unconscious after falling off of a mountain ledge. To make matters worse, the TARDIS has been confiscated by the local religious leader, who has placed it in the village temple and claims it is the vessel of the villagers’ goddess. When the Doctor finally gains access to that temple – normally denied to those not instructed in the local faith – he’s horrified to see that the TARDIS’ outer shell has been critically damaged, leaking chronon radiation and causing deadly time distortions. The only way the Doctor may be able to save this society – and Peri – is to give up his travels and set the TARDIS to self-destruct…assuming the villagers will let him.
With UNIT’s work now out in the open, Colonel Emily Chaudhry finds her duties as UNIT’s public relations officer growing more complicated by the day. The latest operation – making a very visible show of transporting discarded nuclear weapons to keep the press and public’s attention away from a smaller convoy transporting pieces of an apparent alien spacecraft – proves to be no exception when both the spacecraft convoy and its decoy convoy are attacked almost simultaneously. UNIT’s commanding officer, Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood, is kidnapped, but no one else is taken. The spacecraft is quietly spirited away by a group who wishes to use its technology to further its secret space-time experiments. But the experiments continue to go horribly wrong, resulting in commuter train crashes with massive casualties, a major disruption of the British banking system, and even a jetliner crash directly into Windsor Castle. Colonel Chaudhry and the rest of UNIT try to piece together the puzzle and find their missing CO, but when a new CO, Colonel Dalton, is assigned to take over, he seems like a poor fit: he knows nothing of UNIT’s past work, and shows no interest in learning. Worse yet, Chaudhry discovers that he may have ties to ICIS.
A mysterious death and a mangled body on a beach at Southend gets UNIT’s attention, and Colonel Chaudhry and Colonel Dalton arrive to investigate. What starts out looking like an investigation best handled by immigration officials takes a more sinister turn when a recorded emergency call repeatedly refers to “vrkolak” – a particularly nasty Armenian vampire legend. Chaudhry finds clues about how the illegal immigrant found dead on the beach arrived in Britain, and traces those clues back to a man who artfully dodges almost all of her questions about bringing illegal immigrants into the country as laborers. Dalton, in the meantime, finds another man just smuggled into the U.K. from Kosovo – a man who claims to be a professional vampire hunter, on the trail of the vrkolak (a claim which the still-skeptical Dalton finds incredibly had to believe). Dalton, despite now having caught up on UNIT’s past, can’t bring himself to accept that he and his officers are participating in a vampire hunt; he also accuses Chaudhry of believing in the unexplained far too readily. But before the sun rises again, something may happen to forever change Dalton’s mind.
An attack on a space cruiser they’re visiting forces the Doctor and Melanie to evacuate by any means necessary. Mel manages to make her way to an escape pod, which takes her to a research colony on the planet Lethe. The Doctor and the TARDIS, however, are captured by the Daleks, who offer to send the Doctor to Lethe too…so long as he reports back on what their creator, Davros, is doing there. When the Doctor arrives, he finds that Davros has managed to conceal his appearance and is calling himself Professor Vaso – and worse yet, he has unearthed specimens of one of the Daleks’ worst enemies, the Mechonoids. Davros has quietly set up self-replication facilities for the Mechonoids, aware of their potential for battling the Daleks, claiming that he hopes to atone for his past by ridding the universe of his creations. But even with this claim of a noble mission, the Doctor sees Davros up to his old tricks, leaving a trail of death in his wake. But when the Doctor fulfills his end of the bargain and alerts the Daleks, who still want to capture Davros and try him for crimes against them, things only get worse, with an entire colony of innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire of a new Dalek-Mechonoid war.
The Doctor brings the TARDIS to the planet Cray, at a point in history where one of his heroes, famed peace negotiator Lord Darzil Carlisle, is about to broker peace talks between the Gora and Lineen nations. But before the Doctor can watch Carlisle in action, he’s drafted into playing a hockey-like game called Naxy. The training is exhaustive, but once the Doctor is out on the field for his first real game, he discovers the true nature of Naxy – it’s close-quarters combat to the death, with thousands of lives hanging in the balance. Nyssa, forced to watch the Doctor compete as the Naxy match is broadcast live across Cray, discovers the horrible truth: Naxy has evolved from a popular sport into Cray’s form of warfare – and the Doctor, who hoped to witness the peace process without having to participate in it, has now unwittingly taken sides as a combatant. And Carlisle is powerless to stop it.