Creatures Of Beauty
The Doctor parks the TARDIS in orbit of the planet Veln to make some minor repairs, when his time vehicle is further damaged by a toxic gas leaking from a nearby freighter on a collision course. He slips the TARDIS forward by a century and sets down on Veln, finding that the atmosphere is saturated with the same deadly gas. He goes to warn the residents of a nearby mansion of the danger, and leaves Nyssa at the TARDIS. A young woman approaches Nyssa, armed with a scalpel and intent on committing suicide. When the authorities arrive, Nyssa is charged with murder, taken to Veln’s central security block, and is interrogated brutally. The Doctor’s attempts to help are blocked by Lady Forleon, who owns the mansion and seems to have a secret of her own to keep – and her agenda may or may not include preventing the Doctor from trying to rescue Nyssa. In the meantime, blood tests have revealed that Nyssa is an alien, throwing Gilbrook, a Veln security officer, into an increasing state of paranoia. Veln’s own past history with alien visitors hasn’t been pleasant, what with the Koteem freighter which, four generations ago, veered off course to avoid a collision and fatally polluted Veln’s atmosphere…
written by Nicholas Briggs
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Nicholas BriggsCast: Peter Davison (The Doctor), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa), David Daker (Gilbrook), Jemma Churchill (Lady Forleon), Nigel Hastings (Quain), Michael Smiley (Seedleson), Philip Wolff (Murone), Emma Manton (Veline), Nicholas Briggs (Koteem / Moruge Attendant / Police Officer / Guard / Control / Captain Delarphim / Pilot)
Timeline: between Spare Parts and Arc Of Infinity
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
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?
For every Time Lord who has ever meddled in history, a divergent timeline has been created, for every divergent timeline is then tied off and anchored to the Axis, a transdimensional dumping ground for the timelines (and their occupants) that have been “corrected” out of existence. But if the Axis breaks down, all hell will break loose in time and space. The Axis and its Overseer have a special, if not necessarily cozy, relationship with the Time Lords in general, and with that race’s most prolific meddler in particular. But when the TARDIS brings the Doctor, Peri and Erimem to the Axis in response to a distress call, they find the Overseer on the brink of death…and a sinister Jester is now in charge, trying to break down the barriers between the isolated timelines, and then trying to unleash them into the primary timeline of the universe. The Doctor tries to reason with the Jester, but discovers that the being that now holds the fate of multiple universes in his hands is quite mad.
The Doctor, Peri and Erimem arrive in Tibet in 1917, just in time for a cricket match the Doctor intends to take part in. But he’s soon bowled over by evidence of a great evil at work – a man from a lost expedition appears and kisses Erimem’s hand, and later she is engulfed by a black storm cloud that seems to be able to think for itself. Before the Doctor can reach her, Erimem is snatched away by the cloud, which then vanishes. The same cloud had been spotted earlier on photos of the Himalayans, and had been dismissed, but now the Doctor is racing against time to find out what kind of menace is being dealt with. It may threaten all of Earth, and the Doctor may have to choose between saving humanity or saving his friend.
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.
After her ordeal in Tibet, Erimem is uncertain of whether she wishes to continue traveling with the Doctor and Peri. The TARDIS arrives on Space Station Medusa, orbiting over a distant world that is the home to Earth Colony Phoenix. Protected from the inhospitable surface of the planet by their artificial habitats, the colonists live and work in isolated quarters, travel only by transmat, and virtually never share space with each other. After she and Peri find what appears to be a nest of enormous eggs, Erimem accidentally activates a transmat port and finds herself beamed to Earth Colony Phoenix, into the quarters of a man who has never met another human being in his adult life. The Doctor and Peri are taken by an android to meet the leader of the Phoenix colony, who insists that nothing is wrong – even though Peri later learns that the colony, capable of supporting thousands, is down to only 16 people. Soon, the Doctor learns the grisly truth: a species of aliens known as the Khellians is also lurking on both the colony and the station, and has slowly harvested the human population for food until the colonists are nearly extinct.
The Doctor, Peri and Erimem arrive to witness the Roman Empire’s first attempt to determine the people’s choice of an official religious belief. But Erimem is deeply offended when she sees that persecution and tyranny are interfering in the process – the will of the people may, in fact, never see the light of day. She vouches her support for Arius in an open session of the council, enraging the Emperor Constantine and putting Peri and the Doctor’s lives in danger. The Doctor warns Erimem against trying to reshape history to suit her beliefs and her sense of justice, but his pleas fall on deaf ears. After all, to Erimem, the 4th century A.D. is in her distant future, and she doesn’t have to live with its past.
A time displacement brings the TARDIS down for a hard landing in 21st century Moscow, stranding the Doctor and Turlough there until they can find the source of the distortion and put an end to it. While Turlough complains bitterly about the cold, the Doctor explores the enormous glass tower erected by the mysterious Somnus Foundation. Turlough hears a woman’s cries for help, and despite trying to talk himself out of it, runs to help her, finding that she’s looking for her brother, who has gone missing after joining the cult-like Foundation. The Doctor and Turlough help her get to safety, and become even more interested in her stories of the Somnus Foundation causing its enemies to “disappear.” The Foundation claims to be advancing human evolution, but the Doctor soon discovers that it’s something much more twisted than that – something that will bring power that the human race isn’t ready for.
Cast: Peter Davison (The Doctor), Mark Strickson (Turlough), Eve Polycarpou (Qel), Maitland Chandler (Seo), Michael Cuckson (Cord), Natasha Radski (Lena Korolev), Oleg Mirochnikov (Alexi Korolev), Max Bollinger (Pavel Fedorin), Dominika Boon (Natalia Pushkin), Billy Miller (Tev), Marq English (Xen)
It’s Monte Carlo, 1966, and Peri and Erimem are on an assignment: the Doctor has sent them to steal the Veiled Leopard, a spectacular diamond with unusual markings at its center. But this time, the TARDIS travelers are on their own, and the Doctor isn’t there to help them deal with someone else who’s there for the same reason, to say nothing of the other shady characters populating the casino. Two of the other guests in particular stick out like a sore thumb, which is an odd coincidence, because their names are Hex and Ace – and they’ve been sent by the Doctor to make sure that nobody steals the Veiled Leopard.
A Shakespeare premiere goes awry when Peri and Erimem wind up drawing too much attention to themselves, but that’s not as incongruous as the Doctor attempting to drink the Bard himself under the table during a heated argument over historical accuracy, specifically with regards to the fate of the two princes in the Tower of London. The Doctor, after clearing his head, decides to investigate the matter for himself, but the TARDIS is in the hands of an impaired driver – a temporal “hiccup” strands Erimem and Peri in the right place, but two years before the Doctor’s arrival. The Doctor is brought before Richard III, and is disturbed to find himself in the presence of a King who is not only aware of time travel, but of the Doctor himself. Peri and Erimem set out to solve the mystery for themselves in the Doctor’s absence, but they find no princes in the Tower – instead, they become the Tower’s two captives, changing history with nearly everything they say or do…no matter how hard they try not to.
The Doctor follows a trail of highly unusual energy emissions through Earth’s history to Brisbane, Australia in 2006. There, he meets Dr. Katherine Chambers, a woman whose life was changed forever by her last encounter with the Doctor (an encounter that won’t happen until his next regeneration). When he tells her that he’s trying to track down potentially dangerous alien technology, Dr. Chambers begins evading the Doctor’s questions, but he follows her to a surprise birthday party, badgering her with question anyway. But the guest of honor at the surprise party manages to stun the Doctor into silence: it’s Tegan, his former traveling companion, who hasn’t seen him in over 20 years. She isn’t thrilled to renew their acquaintance, since she maintains that anywhere the Doctor goes, trouble – and death – follow. But even without the Doctor, they’re already catching up with Tegan anyway.
Spring: The Doctor and Nyssa, at the behest of the Time Lords, visit a world where bipedal birds are the dominant life form – and a rogue Time Lord has installed himself as their ruler, accelerating their technological progress dramatically. The Doctor knows that causing his fellow Time Lord to regenerate would confuse the locals and break his hold, but it seems that his actions have been anticipated…
The TARDIS is drawn to a meeting with General Tillington, an American general heading up an anti-alien agency called Global Warning in the U.K., in 2158 – a year after the Daleks should have overrun the entire planet to begin a ten-year occupation of Earth. But the Daleks are on Earth as tiny toys that are all the rage among kids and collectors. Global Warning employs a number of “time sensitives” who foresee the Dalek invasion that the Doctor thinks should be in progress, and yet they can’t pin down when or how it will happen, and for that matter, with the timeline apparently already disrupted, neither can the Doctor. With the help of Tillington’s seemingly rebellious son Wilton, the Doctor escapes and returns to the TARDIS and begins trying to track down Nyssa, who he left in an earlier point in Earth’s history to test a piece of temporal communications equipment she’d invented. But Nyssa isn’t where or when he left her – she and one of the Knights Templar who was pursuing her have somehow been transported to the American Civil War, where they aid a wounded former slave. The Doctor rescues them, but the TARDIS then leaps into the heart of the Vietnam War, where they rescue yet another passenger, a tough-talking female helicopter pilot. But unknown to the Doctor, Wilton has brought his toy collection with him – the miniature Daleks – and the tiny but deadly Daleks sieze control of the TARDIS. They need the Doctor’s time machine – and, of course, him to pilot it – to launch a new and more devastating invasion of Earth.
Exotron: The TARDIS arrives at a distant human colony, and the Doctor is ready to be off again, but Peri is still sampling the local flora. When they meet their first exotron, however, both of the time travelers are ready to go. The enormous, remotely-operated mechanical men – or at least whoever is controlling them – takes a keen interest in the Doctor’s scientific knowledge. An exotron snatches up the Doctor and simply walks away with him in hand, while Peri encounters some human colonists and barely survives a meeting with the local fauna. The Doctor finds that the exotrons are powered by telepathy, or in this case, the machine-enhanced telepathy of a man who seems to have something to hide. The Doctor decides to use his own mental powers to level the playing field, but doing so may put his own survival, and Peri’s, at risk.
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.