Serpent Crest Part 5: Survivors In Space
The entire village of Hexford, buildings and all including Nest Cottage, has been ripped out of the Earth and transported to the rebel moon by a huge Skishtari spacecraft. For three months, Mike Yates has been struggling to keep the peace among the residents of Hexford as their food supply dwindles and they have to make do without electricity or any other artificial energy source. The second Doctor continues to make attempts to signal the outside universe for help – or so he says. The fourth Doctor and Mrs. Wibbsey arrive in the TARDIS, but the Doctor insists that it isn’t as simple as just taking the residents of Hexford back to Earth in his time machine. He wants to know what his younger self’s part is in these events, and he already has a hunch that it hasn’t been trying to send distress signals for months. But when robots converge on the dome protecting Hexford from an uninhabitable moon begin to take over the village, help will still have to come from outside, perhaps from a source whose life the Doctor has saved in the past.
written by Paul Magrs
directed by Kate Thomas
music by Simon PowerCast: Tom Baker (The Doctor), Susan Jameson (Mrs. Wibbsey), David Troughton (The Visitor), Richard Franklin (Mike Yates), Cornelius Garrett (Reverend Tonge), Nerys Hughes (Deirdre), Joanna Tope (Tish), Sam Hoare (Lucius), Paddy Wallace (The Tsar)
Notes: Mrs. Wibbsey says that months of adventures in the TARDIS occurred between the taking of Hexford and the Doctor’s arrival there (possibly leaving the door open to further fourth Doctor/Wibbsey adventures from either the BBC or perhaps Big Finish). The cover art gracing both this release and The Hexford Invasion is based on the visual style of British comic illustrator Frank Bellamy, whose dynamic illustrations graced Doctor Who listings in the Radio Times in the early 1970s and were later collected in the art book “Timeview: The Complete Doctor Who Illustrations Of Frank Bellamy”. This was the final AudioGo fourth Doctor adventure before Tom Baker’s first “season” of Big Finish adventures began early in 2012.
Timeline: after The Hexford Invasion and prior to The Ribos Operation
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
Shortly after leaving Victorian London, the Doctor and Leela ride the TARDIS to Victorian Kenton, where a fierce battle has left a manor house coated in the blood of men… and a dying alien who was their quarry. The alien failed to escape its hunters to return to its spacecraft, which has now been commandeered by a man named Lord Jack. The Doctor sets the TARDIS to follow the ship through time and space, and it arrives at the still-under-construction Nerva Dock in orbit of Jupiter, hundreds of years later. The crew, dealing with equipment failures and a shortage of manpower, fails to notice anything strange about a new arrival at Nerva until it’s too late. Simply by touch, the visitor can physically join with anyone, and he’s able to take control of Nerva’s flight deck in very short order, absorbing crew members and expanding his own skin to fill every available space. With Nerva’s commander and medical officer in tow, the Doctor and Leela race to the TARDIS, only to be cut off before they can reach it. That’s when the aliens whose technology has been used to take over Nerva arrive… and considering that it was originally stolen by a man named Lord Jack in Victorian times, they’ve had centuries to make plans to take revenge on Lord Jack and the rest of the human race.
The TARDIS arrives in Devon, 1977, near the grounds of an estate called the Grange. The Doctor’s arrival coincides with the latest in a series of unexplainable appearances of highwaymen from the past, terrorizing the locals. With all of the apparitions centering around the Grange, the Doctor decides to pay the lord of the manor a visit, only to find an uncooperative butler (named Butler) covering for the enigmatic Lord Jalnik. Suspecting that Jalnik is exploiting a weakness in the time vortex, the Doctor continues his investigation despite Jalnik offering some deadly deterrents. With a local girl named Charlotte in tow, the Doctor and Leela follow Jalnik’s trail of mystery to Devon in the distant future, finding the human race on the edge of extinction. The last of the human race regards Jalnik as a savior for his mad plan to open an escape route to the past. The Doctor realizes that Jalnik is also the cause of their predicament, and that he intends to move up the timetable for humanity’s extinction to the 20th century.
1873: Renowned explorer Professor Cornelius Perkins ventures into the Amazon rainforest to follow up on clues that might lead him to a legendary lost city of gold. He, his assistant and the locals they’ve hired to haul their supplies are never seen again, though a diary chronicling some of his discoveries turns up at a later date in surprisingly good shape.
The Doctor promises to show Leela a museum on another world, but the TARDIS lands at a destination that seems anything but otherworldly. A pleasant professor shows off her butterfly knowledge to the time travelers, but before long all three are drawn into the vast library of Harcourt, a man who claims to know a little of everything – and wants to know more. It’s something he wants so badly that he’s willing to take the knowledge from the minds of others by force. When he becomes intrigued by the Doctor, it’s a meeting of the minds that the Time Lord and his companion will be lucky to survive.
The TARDIS lands in 60 A.D., where Leela is entranced by the sight of Boudica routing a legion of Roman soldiers. The Doctor, knowing full well how history will unfold for Boudica and her followers, orders Leela back to the TARDIS, only to be disobeyed. Leela saves Boudica from two Romans and then, after hearing her story, pledges to leave the TARDIS and fight by Boudica’s side. The Doctor attempts to leave, only to be accused of being a spy. Leela claims the Time Lord is a prophet, which saves him from execution but turns every word he says into something that could change the course of human history.
Aiming for London, 2015 to track down a strange energy reading, the Doctor lands the TARDIS in London, 2025, a short walk away from a protest against a corporation called Globesphere. The company promises free solar energy for the entire world, and the strange energy reading persists at Globesphere’s headquarters building. The protest becomes a riot, and Leela is arrested by Globesphere’s private security force and interrogated. The Doctor and the leader of the protest movement sneak into Globesphere and make a horrifying discovery: Globesphere’s CEO is under the control of the Daleks, who intend to use the Globesphere energy collectors, deployed across the entire face of the Earth, to wipe out the human race centuries before they become one of the Daleks’ more resilient enemies.
The Doctor and Leela arrive in rural England in 1979, finding a village dominated by fears of a legendary white worm who consumes animals and people alike. A man-sized trail of mucus makes it look like the legend isn’t purely superstition, and the time travelers follow the trail. The Doctor encounters the suspicious locals, while Leela finds herself on the grounds belonging to Colonel Singleton. Both of them meet Demesne Furze, who is able to help the Doctor solve the mystery of a missing girl whose disappearance sparked local fears of the white worm. But Demesne isn’t who she seems, and neither is the hooded, disfigured man who hides at Colonel Singleton’s estate. He reveals himself to be the Master, and he has enslaved the white worm to do his bidding, creating a path for even more unearthly allies to follow and conquer Earth.
The Master’s allies are revealed to be the Kraal Second Army (their First Army having already been defeated by the Doctor), preparing for a second invasion of Earth at the evil Time Lord’s invitation. The Doctor tells Leela to run for her life, and the Master orders Singleton to pursue her, a task relished by the man who feels that he civilized a corner of Africa. The Doctor is handed over to the Kraals, but they turn the tables on the Master, not trusting his motives. And with good reason: the Master is merely using the Kraals for his own purpose – and now the Doctor and Leela have to escape their enemies and discover what that purpose is.
In the time vortex, the TARDIS registers the presence of a swarm of life forms numbering into the billions; one of them telepathically contacts Romana as it passes, with its only message being “the sands of life.” The TARDIS materializes on Earth, which is the swarm’s eventual destination. Both newly-elected Earth President Sheridan Moorkurk and a ruthless industrialist named Cuthbert are already aware of the swarm’s approach, and are preparing in their own ways. The approaching swarm has already fouled one of Cuthbert’s R&D projects, so he’s keen to eliminate the creatures, whatever their intention might be, while President Moorkurk quickly learns, in her first day in office, that Cuthbert’s influence runs deep within the government she’s inherited. The Doctor and Romana are captured, and the arrival of two aliens ahead of the swarm arouses more than just a little bit of suspicion. Romana is taken into custody by the military, and General Vincent plans to make use of her ability to commune with the approaching creatures. The Doctor is handed over to Cuthbert, who wants to put the Doctor’s knowledge and intuition to use for his personal gain. And finally, the first of the Laan reaches Earth. A large, whale-like species whose domain is the time vortex, they have some to the Sahara Desert to spawn in the “sands of life.” The birth of each group of Laan pups releases an enormous amount of both kinetic and temporal energy – enough, the Doctor surmises, to do serious damage to Earth. Is Cuthbert right to want to declare war on the Laan?
