Winter For The Adept
A girls’ school in the Swiss Alps in late 1963 is the site of some unusual incidents. Two of the students have escaped, but they’re wandering through the already bitterly cold snow with a major storm just hours away. The headmistress of the school is convinced that evil is lurking just around the corner. And a man sent to track down and rescue the two truants finds only one girl, who identifies herself as Nyssa, and claims that some kind of experiment gone awry has brought her to this place. Nyssa is taken back to the school to warm up, while Lt. Peter Sandoz, her rescuer, continues his struggle to find the other missing girls. When they are found and brought back, unexplainable – some might even say paranomal – happenings begin to take place, endangering them all. At the height of one of these “poltergeist” events, a Police Box materializes in the school’s attic. A man who calls himself the Doctor emerges, and is immediately drawn into the mystery. Is the school truly haunted? Or is a much more sinister – and more tangible – threat at work here?
written by Andrew Cartmel
directed by Gary Russell
music by Russell StoneCast: Peter Davison (The Doctor), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa), Sally Faulkner (Miss Tremayne), Liz Sutherland (Alison Speers), India Fisher (Peril Bellamy), Peter Jurasik (Lt. Peter Sandoz), Hannah Dickinson (Madamoiselle Maupassant), Christopher Webber (Harding Wellman), Andy Coleman (Commodore), Nicky Goldie (Empress)
Timeline: between Land Of The Dead and The Mutant Phase
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
The Doctor and Nyssa are thrust into a deadly situation involving the Thals and the Daleks. An unknown contaminant has invaded the Daleks’ biology, a contaminant which is spreading like wildfire through the interconnected consciousness/data network of the metallic terrors. The Daleks are now asking their arch nemesis for help – but they’re still not beyond their usual brand of treachery, and the Doctor discovers that helping the Daleks could unravel his own history, creating a temporal paradox… assuming that the paradox hasn’t already trapped him.
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 parks the TARDIS in orbit of the planet Veln to make some minor repairs, when his time vehicle is further damaged by a toxic gas leaking from a nearby freighter on a collision course. He slips the TARDIS forward by a century and sets down on Veln, finding that the atmosphere is saturated with the same deadly gas. He goes to warn the residents of a nearby mansion of the danger, and leaves Nyssa at the TARDIS. A young woman approaches Nyssa, armed with a scalpel and intent on committing suicide. When the authorities arrive, Nyssa is charged with murder, taken to Veln’s central security block, and is interrogated brutally. The Doctor’s attempts to help are blocked by Lady Forleon, who owns the mansion and seems to have a secret of her own to keep – and her agenda may or may not include preventing the Doctor from trying to rescue Nyssa. In the meantime, blood tests have revealed that Nyssa is an alien, throwing Gilbrook, a Veln security officer, into an increasing state of paranoia. Veln’s own past history with alien visitors hasn’t been pleasant, what with the Koteem freighter which, four generations ago, veered off course to avoid a collision and fatally polluted Veln’s atmosphere…
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.
Spring: The Doctor and Nyssa, at the behest of the Time Lords, visit a world where bipedal birds are the dominant life form – and a rogue Time Lord has installed himself as their ruler, accelerating their technological progress dramatically. The Doctor knows that causing his fellow Time Lord to regenerate would confuse the locals and break his hold, but it seems that his actions have been anticipated…
The TARDIS is drawn to a meeting with General Tillington, an American general heading up an anti-alien agency called Global Warning in the U.K., in 2158 – a year after the Daleks should have overrun the entire planet to begin a ten-year occupation of Earth. But the Daleks are on Earth as tiny toys that are all the rage among kids and collectors. Global Warning employs a number of “time sensitives” who foresee the Dalek invasion that the Doctor thinks should be in progress, and yet they can’t pin down when or how it will happen, and for that matter, with the timeline apparently already disrupted, neither can the Doctor. With the help of Tillington’s seemingly rebellious son Wilton, the Doctor escapes and returns to the TARDIS and begins trying to track down Nyssa, who he left in an earlier point in Earth’s history to test a piece of temporal communications equipment she’d invented. But Nyssa isn’t where or when he left her – she and one of the Knights Templar who was pursuing her have somehow been transported to the American Civil War, where they aid a wounded former slave. The Doctor rescues them, but the TARDIS then leaps into the heart of the Vietnam War, where they rescue yet another passenger, a tough-talking female helicopter pilot. But unknown to the Doctor, Wilton has brought his toy collection with him – the miniature Daleks – and the tiny but deadly Daleks sieze control of the TARDIS. They need the Doctor’s time machine – and, of course, him to pilot it – to launch a new and more devastating invasion of Earth.
The TARDIS is drawn again to the planet Vortis by a powerful gravitational force – the same circumstances which once trapped the Doctor and his timeship there in his first incarnation. Determined to find out what’s trapping the TARDIS now, the Doctor and Nyssa set out to explore, but are nearly trampled by a stampede of Zarbi. An eccentric Menoptera scientist and his daughter, living in isolation away from the rest of their kind as they study the Zarbi, whisk the time travelers to safety. As the scientist’s daughter tends to Nyssa’s minor injuries, the Doctor and his new friend set out to discover what’s still causing ships to crash on Vortis. But they find that much more is going wrong: a new breed of colonization has come to Vortis by accident, and it may change the planet’s entire ecosphere forever, unless the Doctor can stop it.
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…
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?
Time Reef: His TARDIS returned to him by Thomas Brewster, the Doctor is suspicious of everything, and it seems with good reason, since the TARDIS is missing vital pieces – one of which holds the timeship’s the internal dimensions in place. The Doctor backtracks to the TARDIS’ most recent destination, a “time reef” isolated in a shrinking pocket universe, where two other ships have become marooned. The missing pieces of the TARDIS are easy to find: Brewster had been selling and bartering items such as the TARDIS’ food machine to both ships’ crews. Hawklike predators from another dimension swarm around the stranded ships – including the Doctor’s now-useless TARDIS – and the Doctor isn’t sure he wants Brewster’s help to try to set things right.
1899: The Doctor and Nyssa visit Stockbridge at Christmas, taking in the local flavor, including the performance of a traditional play which includes a doctor who is said to be “an earl of space and a lord of time.” Unnerved by the specificity of that reference, the Doctor sets out to discover the origins of the play.
The Doctor and Nyssa are trapped aboard the Rutan ship, which has been set to apply all available power to the task of leaving Earth. Engine overload is imminent, and the ship explodes with the time travelers aboard.
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.