Faith Stealer
Still wandering through the Divergent Universe without the safety of the TARDIS, the Doctor, Charley and C’rizz suspiciously follow the Kro’ka to a place called the Multihaven. A melting pot of multiple religious beliefs, the Multihaven tolerates all of them equally, and dozens of churches have been established there. And any safe haven would be a blessing for C’rizz, plagued by memories of fulfilling his mate’s request for a mercy killing in the Kromon biosphere; the memories have taken on a new intensity of late, at times rendering him almost helpless. The Doctor and Charley leave C’rizz in the care of a peaceful sect of monks while they set out to explore the Multihaven, but while they’re gone, C’rizz’s caretakers themselves wind up on the wrong end of a hostile merger with another religion. The 23rd Church of Lucidianism is gaining new recruits at a rapid rate, even converting long-standing members of other established religions in the Multihaven. The Lucidians’ leader, Lan Carder, has more than just charisma on his side – and the Doctor suspects that the object of the Lucidians’ worship may be an alien force with a sinister agenda.
written by Graham Duff
directed by Gary Russell
music by Russell StoneCast: Paul McGann (The Doctor), India Fisher (Charley), Conrad Westmaas (C’rizz), Stephen Perring (The Kro’Ka), Christian Rodska (Laan Carder), Tessa Shaw (The Bordinan), Jenny Coverack (Miraculite), Ifan Huw Dafydd (Bishop Parrash), Helen Kirkpatrick (Jebdal), Neil Bett (Director Garfolt), Chris Walter-Evans (The Bordinan’s Assistant), John Dorney (Bakoan), Jane Hills (L’Da)
Timeline: between The Twilight Kingdom and The Last
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
On the planet Bortresoye, a global nuclear war has laid waste to the surface and the planet’s entire population is wiped out. The Doctor, Charley and C’rizz arrive here, driven thorugh the interzone by the Kro’Ka, who delays the Time Lord briefly to haunt him with memories of fallen companions. They seek shelter in a bombed-out building, but it collapses underneath and on top of them, leaving Charley paralyzed from the neck down and the Doctor buried under the rubble. C’rizz goes to get help, but can find only a strangely circumspect being who calls himself Requiem. The Doctor and Charley are found by a survey team and brought to a well-protected underground bunker where the planet’s only survivors are barely managing to stay alive – and earthquake damage to their bunker is slowly whittling down even that population. The ruler of one of Bortresoye’s warring nations, the Lady Excelsior, terrifies her two surviving cabinet ministers with her ability to remain blissfully deluded about the outcome of the war, and her insistence on consorting with a mysterious man named Landscar.
Galanar, Tarkov and Frey’s crew are finally en route to Velyshaa, only someone has betrayed them to the Daleks, who will soon follow. The source of the plague is discovered to have been the Daleks all along, only their cure is merely a way to mutate the victims into a new army of Daleks. The Graxis Wardens find the evidence they need on Velyshaa to warn the Galactic Union of the Daleks’ plan, only their ship is destroyed before they can leave with that evidence. The human race may finally have the means to destroy the Daleks, only they’ll have to become equally ruthless – and perhaps, in the end, as inhuman as the Daleks themselves.
The Doctor is asleep in the interzone between worlds, and the Kro’Ka appears to torment him – only to find that it must put up with Charley and C’rizz, who quickly become aware that the Kro’Ka seems to be powerless while the Time Lord is unconscious. Once awakened, the Doctor is subjected to a kind of mind-probing technique by the Kro’Ka, but he quickly gains the upper hand on the interzone guardian, forcing it to tell him, at least in general terms, where the TARDIS is located. The Doctor follows the trail to a place called Caerdroia, a surreal world where verdant hills populated by seemingly normal cows and rabbits lead to a circular maze. But that’s not the most surreal thing about Caerdroia – topping that list is the fact that the Doctor has emerged from the interzone in what seems like three aspects of his character: one rational, one inquisitive and easily distracted, and one dark and quick to anger. Charley and C’rizz can only tag along with the three Doctors as they look for a way out of the maze – and a way to find out who’s holding the Kro’Ka’s leash.
Notes: Caerdroia is a Welsh word for a labyrinth. This audio adventure received an early release – with alternate cover art (seen here) – at a Doctor Who convention in November 2004; the limited edition alternate cover version was also sold by the internet vendor Tenth Planet.
Professor Bernice Summerfield is contracted by a man named Lynton, claiming to be a representative of a mining consortium whose operations on Tysir IV have been brought to a screeching halt by an underground discovery that could be of great archaeological importance. That, and the fact that he’s a fan of Benny’s books, is what prompted him to secure her services to investigate the find. Benny warns Lynton that her appraisal can’t be bought for any price, but when she sees it for herself – with Lynton insisting that he must accompany her – she is stunned: a huge metallic structure with doors has been uncovered. Once she and Lynton figure out how to open the doors – which can only be unlocked by solving a logic puzzle – Benny realizes that the enormous chambers are a sleeping tomb of Cybermen. And only then does she realize that Lynton knew this all along. But why would he want to unleash the Cybermen?
A planet appears in the path of the TARDIS, moving so fast that a collision is unavoidable. Charley and C’rizz each awaken in a virtual reality of their past lives, but they each quickly figure out that the Kro’Ka is behind the illusions and are freed. When they awaken, they find not only the Kro’Ka, but Rassilon as well, who claims that he has nursed them back to health after the destruction of the TARDIS. But he shows them that the Doctor has survived as well, and he appears to have found company – a woman who has found him wandering through the jungle of the planet’s sole land mass. Charley and C’rizz both demand to be set free, but before he releases them Rassilon tries to put doubts in their minds about the Doctor – and each other. He’s at least partially successful, as the two TARDIS travelers go their own way in the jungle.
A diversion in the time vortex throws the TARDIS off course, toward a rough landing on a distant backwater world. The Doctor steps out of the doors and almost immediately blacks out. When he comes to, he is stunned to find that he is being tended to by Peri, who he hasn’t seen since the ill-timed intervention of the Time Lords whisked him away for his trial and left her helpless – 19 years ago in her personal history. She escaped her situation and obtained a spacecraft, but it crash-landed here months ago. She also claims that the Doctor was found unconscious after falling off of a mountain ledge. To make matters worse, the TARDIS has been confiscated by the local religious leader, who has placed it in the village temple and claims it is the vessel of the villagers’ goddess. When the Doctor finally gains access to that temple – normally denied to those not instructed in the local faith – he’s horrified to see that the TARDIS’ outer shell has been critically damaged, leaking chronon radiation and causing deadly time distortions. The only way the Doctor may be able to save this society – and Peri – is to give up his travels and set the TARDIS to self-destruct…assuming the villagers will let him.
With UNIT’s work now out in the open, Colonel Emily Chaudhry finds her duties as UNIT’s public relations officer growing more complicated by the day. The latest operation – making a very visible show of transporting discarded nuclear weapons to keep the press and public’s attention away from a smaller convoy transporting pieces of an apparent alien spacecraft – proves to be no exception when both the spacecraft convoy and its decoy convoy are attacked almost simultaneously. UNIT’s commanding officer, Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood, is kidnapped, but no one else is taken. The spacecraft is quietly spirited away by a group who wishes to use its technology to further its secret space-time experiments. But the experiments continue to go horribly wrong, resulting in commuter train crashes with massive casualties, a major disruption of the British banking system, and even a jetliner crash directly into Windsor Castle. Colonel Chaudhry and the rest of UNIT try to piece together the puzzle and find their missing CO, but when a new CO, Colonel Dalton, is assigned to take over, he seems like a poor fit: he knows nothing of UNIT’s past work, and shows no interest in learning. Worse yet, Chaudhry discovers that he may have ties to ICIS.
A mysterious death and a mangled body on a beach at Southend gets UNIT’s attention, and Colonel Chaudhry and Colonel Dalton arrive to investigate. What starts out looking like an investigation best handled by immigration officials takes a more sinister turn when a recorded emergency call repeatedly refers to “vrkolak” – a particularly nasty Armenian vampire legend. Chaudhry finds clues about how the illegal immigrant found dead on the beach arrived in Britain, and traces those clues back to a man who artfully dodges almost all of her questions about bringing illegal immigrants into the country as laborers. Dalton, in the meantime, finds another man just smuggled into the U.K. from Kosovo – a man who claims to be a professional vampire hunter, on the trail of the vrkolak (a claim which the still-skeptical Dalton finds incredibly had to believe). Dalton, despite now having caught up on UNIT’s past, can’t bring himself to accept that he and his officers are participating in a vampire hunt; he also accuses Chaudhry of believing in the unexplained far too readily. But before the sun rises again, something may happen to forever change Dalton’s mind.
An attack on a space cruiser they’re visiting forces the Doctor and Melanie to evacuate by any means necessary. Mel manages to make her way to an escape pod, which takes her to a research colony on the planet Lethe. The Doctor and the TARDIS, however, are captured by the Daleks, who offer to send the Doctor to Lethe too…so long as he reports back on what their creator, Davros, is doing there. When the Doctor arrives, he finds that Davros has managed to conceal his appearance and is calling himself Professor Vaso – and worse yet, he has unearthed specimens of one of the Daleks’ worst enemies, the Mechonoids. Davros has quietly set up self-replication facilities for the Mechonoids, aware of their potential for battling the Daleks, claiming that he hopes to atone for his past by ridding the universe of his creations. But even with this claim of a noble mission, the Doctor sees Davros up to his old tricks, leaving a trail of death in his wake. But when the Doctor fulfills his end of the bargain and alerts the Daleks, who still want to capture Davros and try him for crimes against them, things only get worse, with an entire colony of innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire of a new Dalek-Mechonoid war.
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.
Lt. Hoffman is caught in the middle of a terrorist bombing of a pub in London, but lives long enough to call Colonel Dalton and identify the attackers who sweep through the rubble, murdering survivors, as Scottish. Other attacks follow, and the media quickly dubs the night “Britain’s 9/11.” As Colonel Chaudhry races to meet reporter Francis Currie, who calls her claiming to know who’s behind the rapidly escalating series of attacks, Dalton listens as reports emerge in the news media about Muslim attackers – not Scottish. More suicide bombings take place, and Major Kirby of ICIS puts pressure on the Prime Minister to put Britain under martial law – and to put ICIS in charge. When Chaudhry meets Francis Currie, she’s amazed when the reporter tries to strangle her. She incapacitates him and finds that he’s under some form of mind control – and increasingly, it appears that all of the incidents involve similar mind control, all seemingly triggered by random phone calls from “help lines.” But Chaudhry and Dalton soon find that the trail leads to ICIS itself – and that even UNIT’s finest aren’t immune to the mind control.
The TARDIS arrives on what appears to be an asteroid with a city on it, a city where the cars, the people and even the buildings have turned to stone. Some of the human colonists on the asteroid have escaped that fate – some of them steeped in Australian Aboriginal lore, and others much more determined to return the colony to normality, by brute force if necessary. The strange situation is not helped by the arrival of a Galyari ship, its crew determined to salvage something from the asteroid before they leave. When the Doctor vanishes into something called the Dreaming, and Ace is knocked out cold, Hex finds himself on his own in a situation he can barely even begin to fathom.
Unless it was of Hex’s scenes, that is. Philip Olivier continues to make his new TARDIS traveler likeable, and when he’s thrust into danger that’s beyond what he can grasp, his part of the story quickly becomes the most compelling thing to follow. Ace has to deal with an uncooperative brute determined to gain control of the situation by any means necessary – hardly a situation she hasn’t been in before – while the Doctor finds himself in bizarrely unfamiliar circumstances to which he reacts with what almost seems like calm familiarity. Sophie Aldred and Sylvester McCoy turn in fine performances, and the first episode is gripping stuff, but it gets a bit muddled after that, leaving the cast to do the best they can with what the script gives them. There are even tantalizing hints that we’ll follow up on the Galyari’s relationship with the Doctor – something explored much more deeply in The Sandman – but even that doesn’t materialize.
The Doctor and Melanie arrive at the National Foundation for Scientific Research just prior to a public ceremony marking the Foundation’s 100th anniversary. Mel’s eccentric uncle, John Hallam, is not just a member of the Foundation but actually lives on the grounds. During the ceremony, involving the burial of a time capsule, it is discovered that something else has already been buried there. When the Doctor and Hallam examine the object, it causes an explosion in another one of the Foundation’s laboratories – one where a rather bored Melanie is reading through Hallam’s records of their family history. Melanie is missing when the Doctor and Hallam try to come to her aid, and the Doctor strongly suspects that the mysterious object has catapulted her back in time. He also thinks that her time journey may have been directed by her thoughts at the time, so the TARDIS homes in on the sprawling Hallam estate in 1782. That leaves only a few rather significant problems: in Melanie’s timeline, six months have passed since her arrival, and in that time, she has been heavily drugged by a family doctor who feels that her ramblings about being from the future are a sign of dementia. Worse yet, with no sign of rescue from that future, Mel has started to believe that she is who her ancestor, Henry Hallam, tells her she is: his future wife, and therefore her own ancestor.