The Human Factor
Six months after becoming the mouthpiece of the Daleks’ billions of slaves, negotiating with the Dalek Supreme and touring Dalek-subjugated worlds, Susan Mendes has become troubled. Kalendorf feels that she’s become a collaborator, but agrees to join her as she’s shuttled by the Daleks from planet to planet to give her inspirational pitches to the slave populations there. On his own, Kalendorf visits a warehouse where one group of slaves trying to mount a rebellion, and he tries to quash their effort to save their lives – and to avoid derailing a larger rally for freedom to come. When Suz learns of the rebellion, she asks the Daleks to let her negotiate with the rebels – but the rebelling slave won’t do as she asks. Suz steps aside and tells the Daleks to exterminate the rebels, and Kalendorf is appalled – she’s gone too far to the other side. In the meantime, Alby and Pellan have traced Suz’s trail and close in on her location – but the Daleks are also closing in on their ship.
written by Nicholas Briggs
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Nicholas BriggsCast: Sarah Mowat (Susan Mendes), Gareth Thomas (Kalendorf), Joyce Gibbs (Narrator), Ian Brooker (Drudger / Gurian), David Sax (Morebi), Mark McDonnell (Alby Brook), John Wadmore (Gordon Pellan), Adrian Lloyd-James (Highness), Georgina Carter (Daughter), Nicholas Briggs (Dalek voice), Alistair Lock (Dalek voice)
The Doctor and Evelyn pay a visit to the banks of the Thames in southeast London, but what was originally meant to be a quiet stop becomes a deadly ordeal as they happen upon an assault in progress behind a casino called the Dusk. The proprietors of the Dusk, Reggie Mead and his evasive associate Amelia, take the victim to a surprisingly well-stocked operating room in the Dusk’s basement, and the Doctor forces his way in as well, demanding to know what’s going on. He finds himself embroiled in the plight of a group of people who were subjected to ghastly secret experiments during World War I, but he soon discovers that they’re not powerless – nor are they impervious. Amelia has designs on the future of humanity, intending to make the rest of the human race just like herself and Reggie. But someone named Nimrod is stalking Amelia, intending to end her experiment and bring the top-secret Project Twilight to a close at long last. But can the Doctor trust either Nimrod or Amelia, and will Evelyn survive Amelia’s next experiment?
As the Doctor is trying to show Peri how to find her way around the TARDIS, something yanks the timeship violently off-course. By the time they reach the console room, however, the TARDIS has landed, depositing them in the sands of Egypt around 1400 B.C. Worse yet, as soon as they step outside the doors, they spot a young woman in a chariot being chased by the driver of another chariot. At Peri’s urging, the Doctor lends his assistance, saving the girl’s life – and earning both of the time travelers the favor of Erimem, the Pharaoh-in-waiting. But the Doctor is concerned – he can’t remember a female Pharaoh from this time period, and the other chariot’s driver was trying to kill her. Erimem asks the Doctor and Peri to accompany her to Thebes, where she plans to honor their heroics with a banquet, but only more court intrigue awaits them, including an assassination attempt thwarted by the Doctor, and the presence of an alien mind who can take humans – willing or unwilling – as hosts.
The TARDIS has brought the Doctor and Ace to Colditz Castle, the legendary German prison camp, at the height of World War II. The time travelers are captured almost immediately, and the Doctor is shot in the shoulder. Ace instantly attracts the interest of Kurtz, the head of the guards – more interest than she would like. She also befriends English prisoners of war who are already planning their next escape attempt, but are reluctant to let her in on the plot unless she gives them more concrete information about where she’s from. In the meantime, the Doctor – and his TARDIS, which the guards witnessed materializing the courtyard – have gotten the interest of someone who appears to be very closely connected to the upper ranks of the German war effort. When the Doctor is given a choice – hand over the keys to the TARDIS or spare Ace’s life – he gives the Nazis his time machine, setting ripples in motion which will change history forever unless he can regain control of the situation.
Nyssa has fallen critically ill, and the Doctor has brought her to her home world of Traken 3,000 years before her birth (and its destruction), desperate to find someone who specializes in Traken medicine. Unaccustomed to visitors, the Consuls of Traken are alarmed by the presence of the Doctor and Nyssa, but as with virtually every decision in this era of their recent history, they defer to the wisdom of the Source…only it seems to refuse to render a decision for them. The Doctor is told to leave and take Nyssa with him, dying or not. Unable to appeal to the Consuls, the Doctor takes his plea for help to Kwundaar, a telepathic being who has been trying to take over the Union of Traken for centuries. But Kwundaar’s price for saving Nyssa’s life is steep – the Doctor must give him the means to invade Traken and enslave its people. Still certain he can find a way to save Nyssa without allowing Kwundaar and his fanatical pirates to overrun Traken, the Doctor tries to play both sides against the middle, unaware that Kwundaar has forseen his actions – and has taken full advantage of them.
The Doctor reluctantly answers a distress call from the planet Generios (in the Generios system, which is nestled away quietly in the constellation of Generios). When he arrives, though, he finds he’s surplus to requirements – the people of Generios are celebrating their victory over the evil Skelloids, a victory they say was engineered by that legendary time traveler known as the Doctor! Mel chalks it up to one of the Doctor’s other incarnations, but the Doctor isn’t so sure. When he runs into the man the people of Generios have hailed as a hero, the Doctor is even more certain that this man isn’t one of his future selves – this “Doctor” travels around the universe in what is essentially a transmat disguised as a Porta-Loo, and generally being far too chummy with his buxom sidekick Sally Anne. But when a new alien menace threatens to destroy Generios – this time decidedly more real than the fake Doctor’s equally fake holographically-projected Skelloid invasion – the planet must look to the Doctor (the real Doctor) for help.
The Doctor and Charley arrive in Manhattan just before Halloween, 1938. One of the first things Charley encounters upon her first visit to New York City is the body of a recently murdered private detective. When a woman arrives at the gumshoe’s office to hire him, the Doctor impersonates him and agrees to take on the case of her missing uncle (to Charley’s alarm). But things aren’t as they seem – Charley is kidnapped by mobsters, and even the Doctor’s new client isn’t who she seems. As Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater Players prepare to broadcast their infamous panic-inducing radio adaptation of “The War Of The Worlds”, a very real alien invasion is taking place – and the Doctor hopes to use one to fight the other.
On a momentary sidestep after dropping Gravis off harmlessly on an isolated planetoid where it can no longer harm the people of Frontios, the Doctor arrives on Artaris, a primitive world where he meets a gruff warlord named Grayvorn. Grayvorn is en route to a convent whose nuns are entrusting him on a quest for an unidentified Relic. But the Doctor is horrified to learn that the nuns have taken on a new visitor: the irrepressible Time Lady known as Iris Wildthyme, the Doctor’s sometimes old flame and sometimes nuisiance. To make matters even worse, the convent’s Mother Superior has entrusted the only known map leading to the Relic to Iris, and insists that the troublesome time traveler accompany Grayvorn on that quest, with another nun, Sister Jolene, in tow. The Doctor, smelling trouble, tags along, and finds himself more than once keeping Grayvorn and Iris from each other’s throats. The Doctor is also suspicious of Sister Jolene’s motives for coming on the trip – and indeed, those of the Mother Superior who is behind the quest. Is the search for the Relic a deadly trap, or a true holy quest which may require terrible sacrifices of those who undertake it?
After numerous misadventures, the TARDIS finally brings Charley to Singapore in 1930, right on time to make her appointment with a young man who she had originally stowed away aboard the R-101 to meet. While she is away, the Doctor meets a man named Sebastian Grayle – a man both blessed and cursed with immoirtality, a man who knows that the Doctor is a Time Lord, and a man who claims to have killed him some with the help of his masters at some point in the Doctor’s future. When Charlie returns, the Doctor once against whisks her away, urgently setting out to find out how Grayle came to be immortal, and who he serves who might want the Doctor dead. They travel back in time to the third century A.D. and meet Grayle in his original form: a naive priest who has made a tenuous pact with an alien power beyond his understanding. If the Doctor cannot stop Grayle from gaining immortality, his new nemesis will grow in power and cunning through the centuries until, at least, he does have the means to defeat a Time Lord.
