The Nowhere Place
Aboard an Earth Empire carrier ship, an ace fighter jock is spooked when he hears a bell that he knows doesn’t belong to the 22nd century. Infuriated, his commanding officer has him pulled from flight rotation, at roughly the same time that the TARDIS materializes in her ship’s cargo bay. The Doctor, too, has heard the bell, but he has a better idea of where one might expect to hear that sound: on a passenger train in the 1950s, not at the edge of the solar system in 2197. When the Doctor admits that this realization terrifies him, Evelyn is concerned, and when the time travelers are caught investigating the ship, they’re held responsible for the increasing number of instances in which a member of the crew has nearly gone mad after hearing the bell. A mysterious door appears in the hold, a door which should lead directly into space without even so much as an airlock…and yet it doesn’t. As more of the carrier’s crew hear the bell, they are compelled to seek out the door and step through it, vanishing without a trace. The ship’s captain is prepared to summarily execute the Doctor, believing he is responsible for what must surely be an alien act of sabotage. But who’s behind the door, and who’s ringing the bell? And what ties this 22nd century crisis to a train in the 20th?
written by Nicholas Briggs
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Nicholas BriggsCast: Colin Baker (The Doctor), Maggie Stables (Evelyn Smythe), Nicholas Briggs (Trevor Ridgely), Martha Cope (Captain Oswin), Stephen Critchlow (O’Keefe), Andrew Fettes (Master-at-Arms), John Killoran (Palmer), Benjamin Roddy (Operations), John Schwab (EXO Moore), Andrew Wisher (Armstrong), Philip Wolff (Hayman)
Notes: Two different covers were produced for this story, the artists being fans who submitted entries to Big Finish as part of an online contest to seek new artistic talent. The artwork of the Doctor and the strange door was designed by Simon Holub, who later went on to work steadily for Big Finish, and the artwork featuring the train was designed by William Cox.
Timeline: After Pier Pressure and before 100
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
The Doctor follows a psychic attack on the TARDIS’ telepathic circuits to a living city called the Needle, but the moment that he and Melanie step out of the TARDIS, they realize that their problems are just beginning – they stumble onto the scene of a grisly murder. The two time travelers are separated, Melanie barely surviving being ejected from the city’s walls, and the Doctor is brought before Chief Blue and the Needle’s central computer, White Noise. White Noise’s function involves the careful control of both the Needle and its residents, via chips implanted in their brains which allow the computer to prevent violent impulses from becoming violent actions. Rescued by a resident of the undercity beneath the Needle – people whose chips have been deactivated and whose crave the exciting sensation of violence with little thought given to its consequences – Melanie finds that she’s quite a sensation, as her rescuers believe she’s capable of anything, even extreme acts of violence…and her insistence that she isn’t likely to do any such thing seems to fall on deaf ears. White Noise is rapidly losing control of the Needle’s even more docile populace, with murders continuing to occur…only now, via his chip implant, the Doctor can see, hear and feel the thoughts and actions of the killers as they go into “red condition.” But with White Noise attempting to control him, is the Doctor capable of fighting whatever evil is stalking the city at random?
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.
The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Peri to Baltimore, 1984 – four months since, as far as her family and friends know, Peri disappeared without a trace at Lanzarote. Far from being a happy reunion, Peri’s arrival coincides with the apparent murder of Anthony Chambers, her best friend’s father. Peri discovers that her friends and her mother aren’t exactly overjoyed to see her. The Doctor becomes interested in Chambers’ death, and when he discovers the Cybermen are behind the incident, he wonders why they’ve targeted one man. Even when the Doctor thinks he’s close to solving the mystery, it’s putting Peri, her mother and her friends into mortal danger.
War rages on Skaro, as it has for centuries, between the Kaleds and the Thals. Born to a mother who is an ambitious senator and a father whole military career is coming to an ignoble halt due to illness, young Davros leads a life of privelege, but is fascinated by the patterns of life and nature around him, almost to the exclusion of all else. His mother hires a tutor, Magrantine, whose scientific experiments on the effects of radiation on living tissue fascinate Davros. When Magrantine turns out to be out for revenge against Davros’ father – the soldier whose actions resulted in the death of Magrantine’s son – Davros traps his tutor in his own radiation experiment chamber – a torturous experience that he survives, but it leaves him horribly mutated. But his mother, far from admonishing him, sees something of her own ruthless ambition in her son – and quietly gives her approval.
Nearing his 30th birthday, Davros is boiling with frustration that he’s a low-ranking tech officer testing weapons for the Kaled military, rather than a member of the elite Scientific Corps. But one meeting with the Kaled Supremo changes all that: if Davros will undertake a dangerous secret mission that takes him behind Thal lines to gather intelligence on a new weapons facility, his entry into the Scientific Corps is guaranteed. Davros eagerly agrees, but when he, a fellow tech officer, and a squad of Kaled commandos embark on their journey, he realizes it’s a suicide mission. Worse yet, the soldier leading the mission is weak-willed and proceeds to get most of his commando platoon killed before the Thal facility is even within sight. Davros insists on countermanding his orders and manages to breach the facility, discovering a vast automated weapons factory requiring no slave labor…but Thal soldiers are waiting there too, and they know Davros by name. The Kaleds manage to escape, and Davros once again assumes command, ordering the remaining Kaleds to make their escape via the wastelands between the Kaled and Thal borders. While this does prevent the Thals from giving chase, it also costs Davros the rest of his team – he’s the only survivor to make it back to the safety of Kaled territory, and is instantly declared a hero for completing his mission against terrible odds. But his first order of business is not to bask in the praise lavished upon him – he instead turns his attention to finding out who told the Thals he was coming, and the answer lies painfully close to home.
The TARDIS lands in the middle of a suburban living room, but the woman whose home has just been invaded by a time machine seems unperturbed by the sudden appearance of a Police Box, or the three people who walk out of it. The Doctor tries to take things in his stride, until he notices that the television snooker tournament is being interrupted repeatedly by the same series of scenes taking place aboard a spaceship with two astronauts. Even more incongruous is the fact that the woman who lives in this house has a grandson who she insists is 10 years old, but her “grandson” is quite clearly one of the two astronauts seen on TV. C’rizz runs afoul of a woman who would appear to be the other surviving astronaut, and the Doctor is alarmed to find that the street this house is on has no beginning and no end – and worse yet, the TARDIS is being stolen on the back of the ice cream truck. But how can the ice cream truck escape from this street if no one else can, and why is one of the astronauts acting like a child, building Lego models of his abandoned spacecraft?
Older and a little wiser to the ways of the political world, Davros walks a knife’s edge as an increasingly senior member of the Kaled Scientific Corps: his government expects him to tend to research that will deliver devastating weapons for use in the war against the Thals, but Davros himself sees a higher goal: nothing less than ensuring the survival of the Kaled people in the radioactive aftermath of the war. As Davros sees it, leaving the Kaleds’ fate to evolution will produce too random a result, with little hope of surviving the merciless postwar ecosystem; he advocates research that will help direct the mutations that will carry the Kaled legacy forward. Davros’ mother, Calcula, sees far more immediate concerns, namely that Davros and his research are accumulating some political opponents, and she feels that he’s naive about politics in general. But when Davros’ mother is murdered, and the attack on her is found to be an inside job – the work of fellow Kaleds rather than enemy Thals – he proves just how well he learned the game of political maneuvering from her while she was alive, sweeping aside some of her enemies and putting others on notice as he consolidates his newly inherited power base. Mere weeks later, though, a Thal attack on the home base of the Kaleds’ Scientific Corps changes Davros – and his ambitions – forever.
The TARDIS deposits the Doctor, Ace and Hex in harm’s way on the front lines of World War I. After a close call with a German shell, they wind up in a makeshift military hospital, and as soon as the Doctor is fully recovered, he’s startled to find that there are orders awaiting him: they ask the British commanding officer to accord the Doctor and his associates full access to the hospital in order to investigate a murder that has yet to happen. Completely mystified, the Doctor begins investigating, but not before Hex warns him of one disturbing possibility: the future murder victim could be one of the time travelers. Hex discovers first-hand that horrifying experiments in mind control are taking place at this hospital, far ahead of their time, and crude – but effective. The Doctor and Ace find themselves on the receiving end of a none-too-subtle warning about poking around where they’re not welcome. They find an ally in a man who’s being kept off the front lines for fear that his pacifistic views will send him running into the arms of the enemy, but with the rest of the soldiers turned against him, he can’t offer the Doctor much help. When the murder finally takes place, however, it seems that the base commander has his own ideas as to who should face the music for the killing, whether his suspicions are founded in truth or not. But who knew about the murder ahead of time?
As always, war rages on, ravaging the surface and the people of Skaro. The emphasis turns to espionage as a technological stalemate takes hold; so long as neither the Kaleds nor the Thals gain a decisive technological advantage, the war remains on a knife’s-edge detente that leaves the combatants with surgical strikes via conventional weapons. Davros is naturally working on new technology, but to the Kaled Supremo’s distaste, Davros is focusing solely on genetic engineering instead of devastating new weapons. Obsessed with the future of the Kaled race in the increasingly toxic and radioactive atmosphere, Davros – despite his debilitating injuries and being restricted to a mobile (but still very limited) life support base – is working toward providing a tank-like travel shell that will protect what he predicts the Kaleds will become, as well as allowing its occupant to defend itself. But the Thals are keenly aware that the best chance the Kaleds have of gaining an advantage in the war is Davros, and a commando unit raids the Kaled science dome to kidnap him. Separated from his life support chair, Davros is dying, but refuses to surrender any information, except the truth that he is not developing new weapons at this time. A Kaled strike team, led by the ambitious young Lt. Nyder, rescues Davros and brings him back to the Kaled capitol. Once recovered from his ordeal, Davros is finally ready to complete his rise to power…and all his people have to do is surrender their future to his great plans.
The Doctor and Peri arrive at a pleasant resort in 1913, meeting an assortment of fellow vacationers, few of whom are actually on vacation. Inspector Chardalot is pursuing a quarry he considers very dangerous, and Nurse Albertine is visiting in the company of a fellow vacationer who prefers not to show his face. That face is exactly what Miss Bultitude, a movie buff, would like to see. And the reason one of the vacationers isn’t showing his face? He’s Toby the Sapient Pig, a reclusive film star who is, in actuality, a sentient pig. But Toby’s not the only pig present, and his pursuers (whether adversaries or admirers) will stop at nothing to find him. Caught up in this collision of personalities and motives, the Doctor and Peri can do little but try to keep themselves, and anyone nearby, from coming to harm.
The Doctor finds himself unexpectedly saddled with a new companion, the aacerbic Lucie Miller, who’s not too happy to be with the Doctor, either. Unable to return her to her own time, the two mismatched companions find themselves on the planet Red Rocket Rising, where a natural catastrophe has pretty much destroyed the society. But hope seems to arrive in the form of friendly aliens called the Daleks, who ally themselves with Acting President Klint. The Doctor tries to stop the Daleks, but when they realize he is on Red Rocket Rising, they set a price for their cooperation: the Doctor.
Aboard a cargo ship buffeted by the high seas during a storm, the Doctor and Peri go from being cautiously welcomed guests to murder suspects when a member of the crew is killed. The ship’s captain orders the Doctor locked up pending his court-martial…but when his own chief mate protests that the Doctor isn’t even a member of the ship’s company and crew, the captain drafts him into service to replace the ship’s missing doctor (reasoning that now the Doctor can undergo a court-martial and subsequent execution). Peri tends to a wheelchair-bound girl who receives periodic “treatments” from the chief mate, discovering that the girl is a captive specimen of a species thought to exist only in myths. Her people will be coming to rescue her soon…but will they make the distinction between the girl’s corrupt captor and everyone else on board the ship?
The Daleks begin to show their true colors while the mad scientist Martez (in the body of his assistant Asha) has revealed his own version of the Daleks, built from salvaged technology. The Doctor realizes that it is these “new” Daleks that are the reason the “true” Daleks have come to Red Rocket Rising. As an all-out war breaks out between the two factions, the Doctor finds himself with little choice but to choose sides in the battle, in the hopes that the lesser of the two evils wins out in the end.
The Doctor tries to get Lucie back to her own time, but lands in 1974 in the middle of the Glam Rock fad. On a wintery night, they find themselves holed up in a diner with a variety of music-business types, including a manager and his up-and-coming young brother/sister act, Trisha and Tommy Tomorrow. But there’s also a never-was ex-singer with an odd connection to Lucie. And who are “The Only Ones”? And what do they want from Tommy Tomorrow?