Frozen Time
An expedition to Antarctica in 2012 uncovers an unexpected find: an old fashioned British police box, buried under millions of years worth of permafrost. On the heels of that surprising find comes another discovery: a man frozen more or less intact, probably for millions of years…but wearing machine-woven clothes (or at leas the rotting remnants of them). Even more amazingly, the man awakens when he is thawed out, though with little idea of who he is or what he was doing in the ice. The expedition’s financier, Lord Barset?, surprises the scientists on the expedition by wondering aloud if the man is a reptile. Before long, more figures are found in the ice, large and reptilian. The mystery man’s memory gradually returns, enough that he knows that the scaly figures frozen in the ice are very dangerous, and he himself is known as the Doctor. Despite the Doctor’s warnings, Barset orders the huge creatures thawed out. They too reawaken, but the moment they’re back on their feet, they begin a reign of terror, killing almost the entire expedition. The Doctor’s memory continues to return slowly, the result of a self-induced coma to survive being frozen alive, and he recalls that these creatures are called Ice Warriors – and that the enclave of them that has been discovered represents the most warlike of the lot: exiled war criminals put into deep-freeze on prehistoric Earth. Even though they’re millions of years old, modern man won’t be an obstacle when the Ice Warriors renew their craving for conquest. Only the Doctor can stop them…if he can remember how.
written by Nicholas Briggs
directed by Barnaby Edwards
music by Steve FoxonCast: Sylvester McCoy (The Doctor), Anthony Calf (Lord Barset), Maryam d’Abo (Genevieve), Tony Millan (Professor McIntyre), Gwynn Beech (Harman), Gregg Newton (Ben), Nicholas Briggs (Arakssor)
Timeline: between Valhalla and The Death Collectors
Notes: Frozen Time is based on Endurance, another of the 1980s Audio Visuals adventures starring Nicholas Briggs (who wrote both versions of the story) as the Doctor. Some character names are shared between the two versions of the story, but Endurance concerned itself with Silurian renegades frozen in Antarctica, and dialogue in Frozen Time tries to lead the listener in that direction as well. The 1929 expedition led by Lord Barset’s grandfather may well have encountered Silurians, but they’re nowhere to be found in the Big Finish version of the story; pre-release internet speculation frequently pegged Frozen Time as a Silurian story as well. This story and Valhalla both feature the seventh Doctor flying solo; this came about because of Sylvester McCoy’s tight schedule, since his Big Finish recording days had to be scheduled around his stage appearances in King Lear.
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
The TARDIS brings the Doctor, Peri and Erimem to 15th century Wallachia – a future part of Romania, but known for now as Transylvania. Immediately the time travelers find evidence of a brutal war in progress, and they’re caught up in events before they have a chance to leave. Radu the Handsome, a contender for the Wallachian throne who now sides with the Turks, is leading an army to remove his brother, Prince Vlad III – also known as Vlad Dracula and Vlad the Impaler – from that throne. Peri immediately balks at even the possibility of meeting Dracula himself, despite the Doctor’s assurances that the fictional character bears little resemblance to the man who inspired him. The Doctor warns his friends not to become involved, but when they find themselves surrounded by a pitched battle, Erimem is left with little choice but to take up arms, and finds herself at the mercy of Prince Vlad, whose life she has saved without knowing who he is. He spirits her away to his palace, while Peri tags along as a refugee from the war. The Doctor, still in the company of Radu, tries to convince him that further bloodshed may not be necessary – but according to the history books, the Doctor may have no influence on events and may not even be able to save both of his companions.
The Doctor and Evelyn inadvertently interrupt a key moment in history – or so they think – when they meet the parents of Julius Caesar. When Evelyn insists that they jump forward to find out if Caesar really was born via caesarian section, the time travelers think they’ve found evidence that they’ve really changed history. Later, the Doctor and Evelyn encounter Mozart on his 100th birthday, but wind up meeting someone who wishes the great musician had died young, and then go to pay their respects to a former student of Evelyn’s whose father has just died, discovering that something has planted a deadly seed in the family tree. Finally, the Doctor discovers that he has been infected with a genetically-engineered virus by an assassin, and has only 100 days to live – and he and Evelyn proceed to spend those days trying to find the moment in the Doctor’s history when he was infected, and prevent it from happening.
The TARDIS brings the Doctor, Steven and Dodo to Russia in 1812, not long before Napoleon Bonaparte’s disastrous attempt to take over the country. They stay for a while, making friends, even taking up jobs, and Steven looks forward to being the best man at a wedding for one of his new friends. But then the locals are terrified by blinding lights and the sound of thunder – not the French advance, but a spacecraft exploding moments after it ejects an escape pod, though of course only the time travelers realize this. Steven and his friend rush off to see if there are any survivors, but the unfortunate answer is yes – Steven is attacked and knocked out, and his friend, the groom-to-be, is killed and replaced by a “shape-stealer,” though it’s some time before anyone realizes this. The creature assumes numerous guises to allow it to move freely among the villagers, until finally it impersonates the Doctor and sets off to steal the TARDIS – until it spots someone in a more obvious position of power which will allow it to further its mission: Napoleon himself.
As the TARDIS is in mid-flight, Charley watches as C’rizz goes through his personal effects from the Divergent Universe, including an odd glowing vessel, which Charley insists on peering into – and something is released, at about the same time the time machine comes grinding to a halt. C’rizz and Charley rush to the console room, just in time to help the Doctor bring the TARDIS in for a rough landing – after which the ship seems to split apart, with C’rizz disappearing into the void. C’rizz finds himself in the company of a man called Aboresh, who begins to unlock abilities that he didn’t realize he had. The Doctor and Charley, in the meantime, find themselves among a superstitious people, though there seem to be hints of more advanced knowledge among some of the people there. Walled up in a compound surrounded by an energy barrier, this small society defies a creature called the Borarus, which constantly tries to break into the compound. The barrier stops it, but Aboresh – who lives on the outside with those cast out from the compound – now has a powerful new weapon at his disposal: C’rizz. As C’rizz’ powers increase exponentially, he may now be the greatest threat to the Doctor and Charley’s survival.
On the backwater planet of Talis Minor, Salus Kade has a decent life; he helps to bring home the food that feeds his people, he has a wife and daughter – and he wants absolutely nothing to do with the war raging between the Earth Alliance and the Dalek Empire. When he finds Earth soldiers holding a recruitment drive in the middle of his home town, he’s not pleased, and he’s not afraid of them until he discovers that the “recruiting” is just for show and it’s actually a forced conscription drive. Even as he rallies his own people around him by denouncing the Earth Alliance’s tyranny, the Daleks themselves arrive – and a catastrophic attack helps to change Kade’s mind. He enlists, along with many other men from his community, and ends up leading a battallion of Earth and allied soldiers in the Alliance’s newest gear: a sealed, self-contained armored spacesuit which is practically its own interstellar vehicle and weapons platform built around one man. Designed specifically to combat the Daleks, these suits are worn only by the Earth Alliance’s elite troopers, code named the Fearless. But Kade’s latest mission into the teeth of the Dalek war machine is enough to strike at least a little fear into his heart…
The Mind’s Eye: The Doctor finds himself alone in the jungle of a distant world, discovered by security officers from a human expedition which has arrived to examine the planet’s plant life. One particular specimen is of great interest to the expedition’s leaders: a plant which can infiltrate the dreams of animal victims before it consumes them. One side effect of even the most fleeting exposure is memory loss, and only now does the Doctor remember that Peri and Erimem were with him. Erimem is discovered in the jungle, and the Doctor has to use an experimental technique to enter her dreams and lead her back to reality. When Peri is found, however, she is in a more advanced state of the process – the plant has enveloped her body and begun to feed. The Doctor is ready to go into Peri’s dreams to save her, but he discovers that some members of the expedition have a vested interest in studying Peri as she dies.
Having long since been parted from the Doctor and Zoe, and back on Earth in the highlands of Scotland, Jamie McCrimmon recounts a story of a visit he and the Doctor once paid to an orbiting resort called Helicon Prime, located in an area of space whose tranquil properties soothe all the vacationers who visit there. But moments after the TARDIS brings them there, one of the resort’s clients is murdered. When the Doctor tries to find out why, he inadvertently brings himself to the attention of a highly-placed ambassador whose dealings on Helicon Prime are shrouded in mystery. When other vacationers die, one by one, the Doctor swings into action and makes himself – and Jamie – the next targets of the killer.
The TARDIS is drawn again to the planet Vortis by a powerful gravitational force – the same circumstances which once trapped the Doctor and his timeship there in his first incarnation. Determined to find out what’s trapping the TARDIS now, the Doctor and Nyssa set out to explore, but are nearly trampled by a stampede of Zarbi. An eccentric Menoptera scientist and his daughter, living in isolation away from the rest of their kind as they study the Zarbi, whisk the time travelers to safety. As the scientist’s daughter tends to Nyssa’s minor injuries, the Doctor and his new friend set out to discover what’s still causing ships to crash on Vortis. But they find that much more is going wrong: a new breed of colonization has come to Vortis by accident, and it may change the planet’s entire ecosphere forever, unless the Doctor can stop it.
Devastated after C’rizz makes his exit from the TARDIS crew, and outraged over the Doctor’s apparent lack of emotion about it, Charley decides she’s had enough time travel and wants to return home – even though history records her death aboard the doomed airship R-101. The Doctor tries to surprise her by taking her to her intended destination, Singapore in 1930, but the TARDIS is drawn off course in time, depositing the Doctor and Charley in Singapore in 2008. Now more disgruntled than ever, Charley tries to leave as the Doctor tends to the TARDIS controls to see what caused the time change, instead running into a man named Byron who not only seems to know who she is, but has a gun drawn on her the whole time. The Doctor arrives to foil whatever it is that Byron’s planning, and talks Charley into one last adventure – a trip back in time to the 1940s, and the source of the temporal event that redirected the TARDIS. The trail leads them to a docked sea freighter, but even there something is making a mess of the flow of time. Charley is stuck in the 1940s with a man who looks and sounds exactly like Byron – not a day older or younger – while the Doctor winds up back in 2008, only to find that Byron has staked a claim to this ship. An elderly woman accompanies Byron, and though he initially introduces her as his mother, the Doctor learns that her name is Charlotte Pollard, age 85, and she doesn’t remember anything about traveling in time – and she certainly doesn’t remember the alien invasion force stored in the ship’s hold…at least not until they stand before her, and then she remembers a single word: Cybermen.
The Brigadier receives an urgent but cryptic summons from his old friend, Colonel Heinrich Konrad, of UNIT’s force in West Germany. The message brings Lethbridge-Stewart to an ancient fortification, the Kriegskind, which is now home to a secret UNIT detachment. But rather than being greeted by Konrad, Lethbridge-Stewart is met by his distinctly nervous second-in-command, Schrader, who assures him somewhat unconvincingly that nothing is amiss. The Brigadier pulls rank and is horrified to discover that his old friend is in critical condition in the base’s sick bay, claiming to be the only survivor of some unspecified incident and warning that “time is against me.” Later, Lethbridge-Stewart sees for himself what Schrader didn’t want him to see: medieval swordsmen engaging UNIT troops in a pitched battle, capable of wounding men heavily armed with modern weapons but apparently taking little damage themselves. Lethrbridge-Stewart makes an urgent call to his scientific advisor; the Doctor parachutes into the base hours later. Both men stumble across evidence that they are indeed facing yet another threat of alien origin – but this time, UNIT has brought this menace upon itself.
The TARDIS arrives at the height of an alien world’s occupation by the Dalek Empire. Susan Mendes is there as well, serving as the Daleks’ “Angel of Mercy,” urging local populations on subjugated worlds to cooperate in order to live (and perhaps fight another day). But the locals here know all about the Daleks – this is far from their first encounter with them. Even with the Doctor and the rebellious Kalendorf working side-by-side, it may not be enough to stop the Daleks’ audacious schemes as they enslave the planet’s citizens and begin a desperate dig beneath the surface for an objective they refuse to name. The locals also have a history with the Doctor, as it was he – in a different incarnation – who helped them begin the fight against the Daleks…when their world was known as Spiridon.