Hornets’ Nest Part 4: A Sting In The Tale
Mike Yates listens on as the Doctor tells him about his next encounter with the swarm of alien hornets, at an abbey in the middle ages. The nuns of the abbey tell the Doctor that they welcomed a new Mother Superior only a few months ago, at roughly the same time that wild wolves began to besiege their abbey. Despite the nuns’ protectiveness of their new leader, the Doctor demands an audience with her, confident that she is the current host of the hornets. He’s stunned to find that she’s not even human, but a hornet-infested pig. The hornets leave their host and infest one of the wolves, which then pursues the Doctor and gains entry to the TARDIS. The hornets now have their prize: with the Time Lord under their control, that can set into motion the events that he has been trying to prevent since his first encounter with them. His story told in full, the Doctor prepares to fight the hornets one last time, and Mike Yates wonders if it’s a fight they can both survive.
written by Paul Magrs
directed by Kate Thomas
music by Simon PowerCast: Tom Baker (The Doctor), Richard Franklin (Mike Yates), Clare Corbett (Nun), Rula Lenska (The Swarm), Susan Jameson (Mrs. Wibbsey)
Notes: The Doctor reminisces about some of the enemies he has defeated in the past, from the Nestenes and Axons of the Jon Pertwee era to the Kraals, the Mandragora Helix and Sutekh from Baker’s era in the role on TV. But a curious addition to that list is Vogons – quite clearly pronounced differently from Revenge Of The Cybermen‘s Vogans. Has the Doctor hitchhiked through the galaxy with Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect? The story also includes scenes set in Venice – a venue visited by writer Paul Magrs in a Big Finish Doctor Who adventure starring Paul McGann, The Stones Of Venice.
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
With a war-weary Mike Yates and nervous housemaid Mrs. Wibbsey in tow, the Doctor takes the fight to his nemesis, using the TARDIS’ dimensional stabilizer to reduce himself to the size of the hornets and confront them on their own turf. They quickly win an audience with the Queen of the alien hornets, and the Doctor resists her will, but she finds an more receptive ear in Yates, preying upon the same fears that led him astray at the end of his career with UNIT. The Doctor and Mrs. Wibbsey are locked up while the Queen continues trying to persuade Yates to join her, and the Doctor uses this time to hatch a scheme for thwarting the hornets’ invasion of Earth… assuming that Yates is still on his side.
20 years after the Daleks were driven off of 22nd century Earth, Susan Campbell still lives among humans. Her human husband has long since died, leaving her to raise her son Alex in a world that had grown paranoid, fearful of another alien invasion. Susan is outspoken in her opposition to the anti-alien Earth United movement… of which Alex is a member. The Doctor arrives to check up on his granddaughter, and finds that humanity has reverted to a Luddite mentality, destroying technology and working to avoid any contact with alien life. Susan has called upon an alien race to render aid to humanity, without consulting what passes for the planet’s government. But Earth United’s tendrils reach inside the government, and there are plans afoot to use Alex against his activist mother. The friendly aliens turn out to be the first wave of another invasion, which plays right into Earth United’s hands… but how much credibility will Alex Campbell have among his xenophobic friends when his great-grandfather and his mother are revealed to be from another world?
Flung forward in the time bubble, the Doctor and Nyssa once again find themselves in Stockbridge, though the jumble of artifacts from different points in the village’s history points toward the far future. The village’s residents are recreated as barely-intelligent clones, and guided tours through representations of the village’s four seasons take place at regular intervals. The operators of the Stockbridge attraction mistake the Docotr and Nyssa for members of the trust that determines the funding received by the village. An unexpected rainstorm, not programmed into the climate control system governing Stockbridge’s weather, turns anyone touched by its acidic raindrops into shambling, zombie-like creatures with no trace of human memory. And lurking beneath it all, laying in wait for their old enemy who has returned to Stockbridge time and again, are the Daleks. They have waited for centuries for the Doctor’s next visit to the village, and time has come to spring their trap.
Having survived the adventure with the spiders of Metebelis 3, Lucie is ready for normalcy: Christmas at home with her family in Blackpool, including her Aunty Pat. The Doctor is surprised to see that Aunty Pat – actually the Zygon warlord Hagoth – has aged considerably, the result of a Zygon disease. But something is amiss: the TARDIS has landed in 2008, and Lucie is still at her home, not yet having begun her travels with the Doctor. A mysterious driver in a yellow car stalks the time travelers, and then finally strikes: Lucie ends up the victim of a hit-and-run, hospitalized and in a coma – but someone else is in her head with her, trying to rob her of her will to live… someone who’s there because Hagoth has made a critical error in judgement.
A run-in with the Anzor, the school bully who lorded over him at the Time Lord Academy, has the Doctor running scared, to Peri’s amazement. The TARDIS brings them to the planet Magnus, where the divide between genders has left women in charge of the planet with men as an enslaved underclass. The Doctor and Peri also discover that Sil, their old profiteering nemesis, is at work on Magnus, working a play-all-sides-against-the-middle swindle. One of the sides that doesn’t reveal itself until later is a party of rogue Ice Warriors, planning to create an environmental disaster that will make Magnus more suitable for themselves. But even the locals aren’t welcoming the Doctor and Peri’s help this time.
The TARDIS lands in Kenya, during the native Mau Mau uprising against British colonialists, where the Doctor finds an isolated community of women awaiting either an end to the fighting or a rescue party. But among them is Elizabeth Klein, the Nazi scientist from an alternate future that the Doctor first met during his internment at Colditz Castle. Now trapped in a timeline where the Third Reich fell, Klein is living in exile among fascist sympathizers, making her own plans. When an alien influence is found to be waiting for its chance to invade, the Doctor and Klein are forced into an uneasy alliance.
The TARDIS experiences problems in flight, and lands at the earliest opportunity so the Doctor can try to effect repairs. The scanner shows that the TARDIS has landed in medieval England, complete with a mythical hunter who stalks the locals “when their time comes.” If that isn’t strange enough, evidence of energy weapons and robotics are barely hidden from view as well. The locals are instantly suspicious of the time travelers, especially when the Doctor decides to take up the cause of freeing them from the terror that stalks the land. But the Doctor and Peri are in too deep before they discover that it isn’t land, and it’s not inhabited by locals… and that the hunter is among the least of their problems.
The Doctor and Peri have a difficult time remembering their latest adventure, but bit by bit, details come back to them: they visited the quaint village of Hollowdean in the early 1980s, with the Doctor planning to visit the Reverend Foxworth, formerly a Bletchley Park artificial intelligence expert who worked with Alan Turing on early computer technology. But Foxworth hasn’t abandoned his penchant for creating new technology, and that has the Doctor worried. Also worrying is the hold that self-styled religious guru Professor Stream has over the entire village. Peri befriends a local boy named Simon, who shows her a piece of a scaly carapace – a fragment that the Doctor instantly recognizes as part of the outer shell of a Tractator, an alien species he once met who can influence gravity. Peri and Simon discover that the Tractators are being enslaves for their unique gravitational properties, but whoever has trapped them needs something that only the Doctor can provide: a working TARDIS, and the coordinates of the Gravis, the most powerful of the Tractators.
Klein’s Story: The Doctor is curious as to how Klein went from the future to Colditz Castle, the first time he encountered her. He learns of an alternate Doctor’s grisly fate, and the very precise guidance of a young man named Johann Schmidt in helping Klein learn how to control the fallen Doctor’s TARDIS. And Klein learns, to her alarm, that the Doctor has been pulling the strings of her life all along.
The TARDIS is now in Klein’s hands, and she has rewritten history as she pleases. Whenever threats arise to challenge her “Fourth Reich”, she simply goes further back in time and prevents those threats from existing. The web of time is stretched to its breaking point. In a cell in Klein’s headquarters, a Time Lord called the Doctor is kept in chains, because he remembers events that Klein wiped from history, from meeting her in in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising to taking her to an alien world to thwart genocide. To anger Klein is to risk being erased from time itself; even though she’s not the nominal Fuhrer of the Fourth Reich, few dare to cross her. But when a Selachian attack force arrives with its own time travel technology, the Doctor instantly becomes a suspect – and, it turns out, he helped to plan the Selachian invasion in advance. Or maybe he did that in another timeline. In any case, Klein and her “Bureau of Temporal Affairs” have met their match, and her own place in history is subject to revision.
A strange, scream-like signal from a rogue asteroid leads the Doctor to send a response, which only has the effect of making the asteroid stop and change course toward the TARDIS. To avoid a colliskion, the Doctor dematerializes the TARDIS and arrives in 16th century London, where the strange screaming sound can still be heard. The Doctor and Peri find themselves at a nearby inn with none other than playwright Christopher Marlowe, who is sorting through strange – and possibly unearthly – ideas for a play about Dr. Faustus. Marlowe has been consorting with a Spaniard named Velez, rarely seen in public due to his skin’s habit of falling away from his skeleton, and claims that Velez has shown him the secrets of astral projection, giving him glimpses of unearthly events that now inspire his work. The Doctor suspects that Velez is putting Marlowe under some unearthly influence, and tries to cast doubt on Marlowe’s reliability as a spy for the British government. The accusation only lands the Doctor in the Tower of London, while Peri and one of Marlowe’s actors try to free the playwright from the influence of Velez. When they learn that Velez draws his power from blood sacrifices, they become fast candidates to be Velez’ next victim.
The Doctor returns to Scotland, finding history changed. The Jacobite uprising has lasted far longer than history records, and the oil well has been developed far ahead of schedule. Someone has begun stripping Scotland of its natural resources, and the fight for freedom is as bloody as ever, decades after it should have ended. Even more surprisingly, after encountering both British occupiers and Scottish freedom fighters, the Doctor is brought before the leader of the Scottish rebellion, Black Donald – a man the Doctor knows as Jamie McCrimmon. Naturally, thanks to the Time Lords wiping Jamie’s memories, Jamie has no idea who this incarnation of the Doctor is. All he knows is the ongoing fight to free his homeland from the domination of the Redcaps and their Overlord. Once Rob Roy turns up in the same time zone – decades before he should even be alive – the Doctor is determined to find out who’s playing fast and loose with human history. But with no idea of who this oddly-dressed English interloper is, Jamie McCrimmon isn’t sure who to trust.
The TARDIS is sucked into the business end of an interstellar whaling ship, whose crew hunts for space whales known as Megaptera. The Doctor, not a fan of space whaling, immediately blusters his way aboard the ship, posing as a safety inspector, though this ruse isn’t very long-lived. When Peri is infected by contact with an alien creature aboard the ship, it looks like she might not be long-lived either, until the Doctor intervenes. Then, piloting the TARDIS into the belly of the whale itself, the Doctor is shocked to discover that living within the belly of the endangered beast is an entire society which itself might be wiped out, leaving the Time Lord with the responsibility to save more than just the whales.