The Condemned
Stranded after the crash of the Cybership she helped to sabotage, Charley is cut off from the Doctor, and sets about building a crude crystal radio set to signal S.O.S. into the ether. She’s relieved when the TARDIS appears, but when she steps through the doors, she’s left speechless when she meets its occupant – the sixth Doctor, not the eighth. She’s very evasive about her origins and how she got to the future, which immediately raises the Doctor’s suspicions. The TARDIS next lands in Ackley House, an apartment block in Manchester in 2008 – in the apartment of a man who appears to have been murdered. Charley goes to find help, but never makes it back to the Doctor; instead, he’s found by the police and charged with murder. Charley has been abducted by a woman who lives in one of the other flats, and is held captive there until she manages to break free. When the body of the murder victim vanishes, the Doctor is off the hook, but he’s found a receptive ear in D.I. Menzies and continues to enlist her help in an investigation that involves aliens, money, and – despite appearances to the contrary – murder. Along the way, however, the Doctor begins to suspect that the girl he rescued from the future isn’t who she claims to be.
written by Eddie Robson
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by David DarlingtonCast: Colin Baker (The Doctor), India Fisher (Charlotte Pollard), Anna Hope (D.I. Patricia Menzies), Will Ash (Sam), Sara De Freitas (Maxine), Lennox Greaves (Dr. Aldrich), James George (Slater), Diana Morrison (Antonia Bailey / Jane), Sephen Aintree (D.C.I. Turnbull / Goon / Police Officer / Guy in Gym), Steve Hansell (P.C. Blackstock / Police Officer / Guy in Gym)
Timeline: for the sixth Doctor, it is unknown if this takes place before or after his travels with Evelyn; for Charley, this story takes place immediately after The Girl Who Never Was
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
The Doctor’s TARDIS literally crashes through a suburban greenhouse, and upon stepping out of the TARDIS he immediately meets the greenhouse’s owner, though she’s more worried about her boyfriend being injured than she is about the damage. The Doctor finds her boyfriend in a delirious state, with alien toxins in his blood and a pair of bite marks in his neck, which the man apparently suffered while searching for a relic of his childhood in the attic. Concerned about the strange developments, the Doctor tracks down the toy – a pink vampire hamster called a Cuddlesome with a voice recognition device – which was apparently all the rage in the 1980s. Now he finds that others are suffering from similar injuries, and there have even been deaths, with Cuddlesomes as the common denominator, all of them leaving the scene after attacking their owners. The Doctor follows the Cuddlesomes an abandoned toy factory, where their creator, Turvey, has activated his own kind of product recall – he has attracted the Cuddlesomes to his current location. But Turvey is at the mercy of someone else who is creating a new line of Cuddlesomes…and if the Doctor thought the 1980s models were deadly, he hasn’t seen anything yet. This attempt to cash in on childhood nostalgia could endanger the entire human race.
After a particularly harrowing adventure, the Doctor promises to take Ace and Hex somewhere where they can all relax, and by virtue of having both a spa and a beer tent, the Festival of the Twin Moons of Tuin wins the toss. But of course, the Doctor hasn’t shared everything he knows about Tuin: the societies of its twin moons, despite being very closely related biologically, are locked in a seemingly endless war, from which the Festival is the only break in hostilities. Furthermore, the Doctor takes it upon himself to bring that war to an end, having read some local lore. He declares himself the suitor to an unknown bride, the marriage of whom will bring peace to Tuin at last. But instead of being one step ahead of the game, this time the Doctor’s information is woefully incomplete, as he has no idea who he’ll be marrying. And even when the bride is revealed, the Doctor discovers that the peace their wedding vows will bring will not be the peace of a war ended, but the peace of a dead world.
Young Thomas Brewster hasn’t exactly led a charmed life. Orphaned at the age of five, he winds up in the London workhouses and is eventually handed off to a vile man who forces young men into a life of virtual slavery, searching the banks of the Thames for valuable cargo thrown overboard by corrupt boat skippers who don’t want to pay taxes on what they’re carrying (or smuggling). But from his mother’s funeral onward, there have been two constants in Thomas’ life (aside from suffering): his mother’s ghost speaks to him, and he keeps seeing a tall blue box whose occupants keep asking after him. When he finally meets these two people – a man called the Doctor and a girl named Nyssa – they seem pleasant enough, but they’re an obstacle to his plans. His mother’s ghost has given Thomas instructions to build a time machine to change the future – an act which she assures him will reunite them at last. And when Thomas’ makeshift time machine isn’t enough to change history to his mother’s liking, she tells him to steal the Doctor’s TARDIS instead…
The Doctor and Lucie are aboard a train bound for Sweden in the 1800s; also on the train are priceless artifacts by an artist named Tardelli. This piques the Doctor’s interest: he has followed Tardelli through time and space, removing his artwork, which has a psychically active component that tends to manifest itself as a malign influence wherever it takes root. But two other old acquaintances are aboard the train as well: the Headhunter and Karen, Lucie’s former co-worker who seems to have been liberated from a dark destiny to serve as the Headhunter’s sidekick. They’re also there to pilfer Tardelli’s latest masterpiece, a hefty black diamond, until the Doctor and Lucie intervene in their plans. The two sets of time travelers are in a race to see who can steal the diamond first: the Doctor wants to prevent it from depositing an evil psychic influence on Earth, and the Headhunter’s motive is pure profit… but she hasn’t even told Karen what the real job is, or who they’re really working for. 
The Doctor and Lucie travel to 1984 to pay another visit to Lucie’s Aunty Pat, and Lucie discovers that Pat’s married to a former folk singer and running a secluded hotel – a marriage that Lucie’s never heard of before. Two other visitors to the hotel also catch the Doctor’s eye; Lucie tries to spy on them, and discovers that they’re Zygons – aliens who can shapeshift to resemble any human that they kidnap and put into their equipment… a fate that Pat’s husband Trevor has suffered, and a fate that now awaits Lucie. The duplicated Lucie tries to throw the Doctor off-course, but even with her interference, he soon discovers that Lucie’s Uncle Trevor is a Zygon warlord who has defected to Earth, taking with him the secrets needed to launch a terrifying new Zygon invasion. Trevor’s fellow Zygons want those secrets, and they’ll do anything, from exposing Trevor’s true identity to killing the human woman he has fallen in love with, to get them.
Trapped in Victorian England without the TARDIS, the Doctor and Nyssa try desperately to track down the TARDIS, ultimately resorting to – out of sheer desperation – convincing guests in a Victorian sitting room to unwittingly participate in a block-transfer computation to allow the Doctor to peer into the time vortex to look for his missing ship. But instead of a peek, the Doctor, Nyssa and two of their unsuspecting acquaintances find themselves transported into prehistoric Earth – but a prehistoric Earth that shouldn’t exist at all. The dinosaurs are nowhere to be found, and giant insects seem to overrun the planet. Even the insects, however, answer to someone else – someone eager to renew his acquaintance with the Doctor and Nyssa. They’re horrified to discover a wizened, demented old man at the heart of this world, a man they once knew as a boy called Adric. Having somehow managed to survive his fiery fall to Earth, Adric has changed history, and he has a score to settle with the Doctor…and he expects to make Nyssa his queen. But is this really Adric? And if so, can his surprisingly vicious taste for revenge be turned into his own redemption before his rule comes to an end?
After a near-miss with the TIme Lords’ time scoop in the vortex, the TARDIS materializes in the cargo hold of a space freighter. The Doctor and Lucie are immediately ambushed the moment they set foot on the ship; Lucie awakens in a prison cell, with no idea who took the Doctor or where he was taken, and is questioned by a large, centipede-like police officer named Rosto, who doesn’t seem inclined to believe a word she says. Straxus appears, asks Lucie about the Doctor’s whereabouts, and then infuriates her by leaving her stranded in Rosto’s custody. A woman appears and attempts to kidnap Lucie, but when her cover story slips, Rosto comes to the rescue. Lucie’s would-be kidnapper vanishes into thin air, but not before Rosto identifies her as the leader of the raiding party that took the Doctor. Rosto and Lucie follow the clues and discover that the woman was a member of an obscure mystic sect called the Sisterhood of Karn. Rosto and Lucie travel to Karn, hoping that they’ll find the Doctor there, unaware that a much larger crisis looms, endangering the whole universe.
The Doctor and Lucie are reunited by the Sisterhood of Karn, but the Sisters plan to summarily execute them both, eliminating the Doctor as a potential subject for gene-splicing experiments to revive Morbius. However, the Sisters have miscalculated: the Doctor isn’t the only Time Lord available to become an unwitting DNA donor to revive Morbius. Forced down on Karn, Straxus becomes the donor and Rosto is enslaved. The new reign of Morbius begins. The Doctor and Lucie are whisked away to Gallifrey, already under siege from Morbius’ forces. Unsurprisingly, the Time Lords respond to the crisis by going into hiding, while the Doctor and Lucie use the TARDIS to go to Karn. With the Time Lords cowering, the Doctor is ready to take Lucie’s advice: he plans to cross his own timeline and prevent Morbius’ rebirth from taking place. But with Gallifrey’s Eye of Harmony faltering under attack from Morbius, the Doctor’s TARDIS misses the intended temporal destination and arrives ten years into Morbius’ new reign of terror.