The Flywheel Revolution

In a junkyard somewhere else in space, robots and household machines are casually dumped when they start to malfunction, or if they were made defective. While most of the junk is just piles of twisted dead metal, a community of sentient machines has formed. One of them, a machine named Frankie, happens upon a monster living in the scrapheap - a monster that takes the bodies of his friends and tinkers with them in a hut.  And this monster calls itself "the Doctor".

Yep, it's another line from Big Finish, this one called Short Trips. The essence of the storytelling is that it is indeed a short one, told in just under 40 minutes by a single narrator; in this case Peter Purves provides the voice, lending his own impressions of William Hartnell to the dialogue where needed. It used to be that the Short Trips tales were done in volumes of eight stories, one for each Doctor under Big Finish's license (and look for that to change as they have the rights to everything up to 2014), but now Big Finish have made them available as standalone downloads from their site. Am I starting to suspect that Big Finish are after my wallet? Maybe. But I don't care, their stuff is good and a lot of fun.

This time the Doctor is an unknown to the narrating character; they do not travel together, and what the Doctor is doing in his hut - which is trying to escape from this place - is nothing but pure macabre as far as Frankie is concerned. Frankie sees the bodies of other machines, people he knew, being pulled apart and stuck back together again as the Doctor attempts to create a device to aid his escape. He is just as much of a prisoner as the machines, but in his haste to get away from the scrapyard he has not noticed that the machines are effectively living, feeling entities, not until Frankie makes him aware of it. And if he is going to escape, he will need to think of something else. When he does realize what he has done, though, he changes his views on his environment and reacts with compassion and a bit of humility; this only goes to show how far he has come as a character for in the early days he wouldn't have shown much emotion at all and just gotten on with it.

As far as timeline goes it has been suggested that the Doctor has been separated from Susan, Barbara and Ian, although he does not mention them by name, nor does he seem to be in a great hurry to get back to them. Exactly what circumstances brought him to this place are not known either; The Flywheel Revolution is very much a joined in progress kind of tale. For now it serves as a finale to season "1A" as it were, or at least it will until the next batch of Early Adventures arrives later this year and The Age of Endurance slips into this spot with a re-cast Barbara Wright filling out the cast further. But now, seven adventures later, it's time to rejoin the televised episodes.

NEXT EPISODE: PLANET OF GIANTS