Quinnis

Somewhere in the future, the Doctor has come back and seen Susan and her family, just as he promised to do. The events of that visit remind Susan of a time when they traveled together, just the two of them, when the TARDIS slipped into the Fourth Universe to a planet called Quinnis. The planet was suffering a terrible drought and while the Doctor offered to help make it rain Susan became caught up in the local superstition of the "bad luck bird". As events unfolded further Susan discovered that the planet was more dangerous than it seemed, surviving flash floods, vicious plants, and the very real threat of attack by a giant bird creature she thought was only a myth.

As continuity goes this one is a bit of an odd piece, with the narrative taking place after an Eighth Doctor episode called An Earthly Child but the flashback story taking place before An Unearthly Child. As was the case with Venusian Lullaby this is another story crafted entirely around a single reference in another episode; during the crisis with the TARDIS in The Edge of Destruction the crew see a series of images on the scanner screen showing the previous journeys of the ship, and Susan recognizes one of them as "the planet Quinnis in the fourth universe". Script writer Marc Platt latched onto that one and brought the whole adventure into being, saying that the mention in Edge suggests that Quinnis was the last stop for the Doctor and Susan before arriving on Earth in 1963, which would place the actual adventure just before the prequel novella Time and Relative. As a prequel story then, Quinnis sees the TARDIS in a better state of function and it can still disguise itself where it lands, this time taking on the appearance of a wooden caravan with bright red and white striped awnings.

Susan in Quinnis is far more naive than when she is first introduced on television, and with that comes a certain level of loneliness as well, so when she falls in with the mysterious Meedla she is quick to accept her as a friend, despite mounting suspicions about Meedla's true nature. Susan's relationship with the Doctor, though, is still a very close one even though they do not spend as much time together in this tale, and she observes him from a distance a great deal. The Doctor himself is a bit less abrasive with the people of Quinnis than he is with Ian and Barbara as humans when he meets them, possibly because the people of Quinnis do not have any aspirations to consider themselves a superior species, and while they are certainly very superstitious and primitive on some levels they are a far more grounded race. When the Doctor starts interacting with humans, he becomes by contrast very uppity himself but here he is kinder and gentler.

The notion of other universes is not really played upon much in the early years of the series, and I remember when I heard the phrase "fourth universe" I did cringe a little as it sounds a bit cliche to just assign a number a whole universe as if they existed side by side like neighbouring states. Other universes will feature in future adventures, though, just without a neat numbering system or an easy transition between them. It won't feature for several seasons yet to come, though.

But there are still more of Susan's memories to experience, and more tales of her time with the Doctor before Ian and Barbara joined them...

NEXT EPISODE: THE ALCHEMISTS

Here There Be Monsters

Susan has nightmares. In her dreams she hears the sound of explosions and a voice from the past which she cannot forget. She says it is a curse of her people to have such clear recall of events. And she remembers everything, remembers the time when she, along with the Doctor, Ian and Barbara arrived on a spaceship piloted by a sentient plant. The ship is on a mission to benchmark a trail across the stars for humanity, but the Doctor demands that the work be stopped immediately as it puts the whole space time continuum in danger of unravelling, and from monsters which dwell on the other side of fabric of space and time itself.

Here There Be Monsters is one of the Companion Chronicles range from Big Finish, bringing Carole Ann Ford into the studio for the first time to narrate an adventure from Susan's perspective. In the continuity of the series Susan speaks from a time after she has left the TARDIS but the tale is from a time when she and the Doctor had been travelling with Ian and Barbara for some time, perhaps in the series gap between The Reign of Terror and Planet of Giants. Although there is an additional co-star to provide a voice for another character, that of the First Mate, Carole Ann Ford alters her voice's inflection from time to time to reflect the lines which would have been spoken by the other series regulars. How does it sound? She admits in the CD extras after that there is no way she would be able to imitate everyone's voices, but it is still effective enough. Seeing a story completely from Susan's point of view allows for a bit more introspection than she was normally allowed on the TV series, and as the script was written in 2008 it has the ability to reference things seen in the new episodes of the show and build on them from her perspective; there are references to her home planet (without actually naming it - that happens later) and some other hints about why she and the Doctor left it behind, although she says her own presence on the TARDIS is accidental at best. She also hints that she is getting ready to leave the Doctor to start her own life, although when it actually does happen in The Dalek Invasion of Earth she is not immediately pleased about it as we have seen.

The story has a far more science fiction edge to it than some others; the TARDIS crew have been on spaceships before, such as in The Sensorites, but the technology being used on board is more in line with later scripts and stories. It's not as if the script takes the original crew into the realm of cyberpunk or any other radical departures, but the difference is noticeable and is almost refreshing; out of the stuffy small sets of the BBC studios it's easy to imagine a more vast setting with the tendrils of the pilot plant, Rostrum, hanging everywhere. The concept of the pilot itself is something which may not have been attempted in the original series out of sheer practicality, but other alien plants, indeed ones which can talk, would show up in later days. Human society in this tale has progressed to a point where the humans sound like idle creatures, spending their days creating art and poetry and breeding sentient plants to do their work for them (a theme which would be revisited in a 1986 tale called Terror of the Vervoids). Exactly how practical that would be remains to be seen, but some other author might pick that angle up and use it some more.

Susan's life on Earth with David carries on, but she will still remember her time on the TARDIS.

NEXT EPISODE: QUINNIS

Venusian Lullaby

Susan is gone. The Doctor is keen to get on with business as usual, but Ian and Barbara are perplexed at how casually he has taken his granddaughter's unwilling departure from the TARDIS. They arrive on Venus at the invite of an old friend of the Doctor's to attend a funeral and find the planet in its last days and different sects of society at odds over how to cope: accept it, fight it, survive it. Knowing the Doctor of old, the Venusians ask for his help, as well of that of Barbara and Ian, but as they try to work with the Venusians a third party with the perfect solution arrives into the mix, but it may just be too perfect in the end.

First, the title: Venusian Lullaby comes from events further ahead in the series, when the third Doctor will tame a savage beast with a spinning charm and a song, a song which he says is actually an old Venusian lullaby verse that goes "close your pretty eyes my darling; well, three of them, at least". As with a lot of the trivia of the televised series it was just a matter of time until it was picked up in the expanded universe, its origins explained somewhat. This is not the only time this sort of thing will happen.

The Venusians themselves, then, have at least three eyes. In fact they are described as having five, as well as five legs, five arms, and five mouths. The cover illustration of the novel gives an interesting take on the offered description, although people I have shown it to have said it looks a little too gynecological for their liking. Their society is well ordered for the most part until the imminent demise of their planet causes it to break down and fracture, and then all manner of terrible things start to go wrong including plans to blow the planet up early and mass slaughters of the population where the people have become redundant. Different factions want different things, and each of the TARDIS crew are at one point or another kidnapped by them and then are freed or escape and end up separated for long stretches of time. The Venusians also have a custom of eating the brains of their dead (even their children) in a remembrance ceremony, an act which is to them only logical as the chemicals in the brains of the dead fuse with those of the living and memories are preserved. Barbara and then Ian partake and are swamped by the memories of those who have died, temporarily losing themselves in the wash. The important thing is, though, that the Venusians are not monsters; Barbara forms a close friendship with Trikhobu after eating parts of her father's brain, and Ian is rescued from the incredibly sensitive Jellenhut and becomes a travel companion. Mind you, the names... some of them are tongue twisters to say the very least.

Having encountered the Venusians before, the Doctor is dismayed at their plight but knows that Venus will die eventually, and he isn't going to do anything about it, nor can he. When more aliens arrive with a promise of salvation, though, he knows that it's not right and sets our to make the Venusians see it for themselves rather than tell them directly. Even if he is working this way the Doctor is still trying to let things happen on their own with just a slight nudge. If he has any remorse over leaving Susan behind on Earth the plight of Venus is a handy way to avoid it, although at times when talking to Barbara there are glimpses of a lonely hurt man under there. The fact that several of the Venusians keep asking him about where Susan has gone only makes the issue harder for him it seems. On an interesting note, the Doctor alludes to his identity being in flux while speaking to the Venusians, harkening back to the plot points of Frayed although this was written first.

One big sticking point though is how the Doctor managed to get the TARDIS to Venus at all. This sudden show of control over the ship is at odds with the Doctor's skills at the time of the show, and will be not be maintained once back to regular televised material.  But not yet. Not yet.

NEXT EPISODE: HERE THERE BE MONSTERS

The Dalek Invasion of Earth

Sometime after 2164 the Earth has fallen to the Daleks, and the TARDIS brings the Doctor and company back to London during the final days of the Dalek operation. The travellers are separated and fall in with various factions of the remaining humans who are actively resisting and fighting back against the Daleks. Over the course of their separate journeys to the centre of Dalek operations - a vast mine in what used to be Bedford - new allies are discovered and new friendships are made; the future of the Earth hangs in the balance and Susan finds her own personal future linked with that of a young man named David Campbell.

It's not unusual for Doctor Who to go outside of the studio and shoot on location nowadays - indeed almost all of season 26 in 1989 was shot on location - but Dalek Invasion was the first major use of outdoor locations for the show. The bulk of the location work was around Barbara's journey across a deserted and ruined London in the company of the cranky Jenny as they assist a man in a wheelchair named Dortman to flee the retribution of the Daleks; this is where the famous scene of the Daleks crossing Westminster Bridge comes from, as well as patrols of them trundling past Nelson's Column and other landmarks. Years later in theatres 28 Days Later will revisit some of these locations almost matching the shots used here to imagine a deserted London populated by rampaging zombies. There are the odd zombies about in this story, though, but less of the flesh eaters and more of the dehumanized slaves of the Daleks, the Robomen.

The Daleks get a bit of a makeover for their second appearance, featuring a disc attached to their casings presumably for communications and a thicker base for handling terrain and making them taller. There are two new types of Dalek as well; while the regular forces are still silver/grey machines with blue globes, there is a "pilot" class with a black top dome and an alternating black and grey colour scheme to its lower section and an all-black model which is identified as the Supreme Dalek. Given the limited space available in studios the sheer number of Dalek machines on set is surprising; in one shot I counted at least six moving units (as opposed to two dimensional cardboard models in the background used to swell the ranks once more). Ian is horrified to see the Daleks on Earth as one emerges from the murky waters of the Thames, having thought the species dead on Skaro, but the Doctor is quick to remind him that their adventure there was far in the future and they are now seeing the Daleks at the height of their power. These Daleks are a full scale occupying force with considerable air support from their flying saucers, which do not look all that terrifying in the original version of the show but are revamped in an optional CGI enhanced version on the DVD. (And it's nice to see that the same model they are using for the CGI version is the same one in the current series).

The TARDIS crew undergoes its first change here, as Susan is drawn to and falls in love with resistance fighter David. She is torn between her new love for him and her devotion to the Doctor but at only sixteen years old is she really in love or just a big mushpot of jumbled emotions, despite her alien origins. The Doctor spots the developing interest over their time with the resistance fighters and in a sudden twist decides to make the choice for her and locks her out of the TARDIS, abandoning her on Earth and leaving her behind with a casual promise to return and see her again. Looking at the series from a future perspective it almost seems cruel of the Doctor to maroon her in one place and one time, considering how limited and humiliated he is when its his turn in a few years, but the revisionist elements who have been providing the additional novels and audio stories to fit in between the early episodes have worked their own angles on this and its a bit easier to accept having read and listened to them respectively. In The Time Travellers the Doctor alludes to their involvement being noticed and how he must protect Susan from the fallout that is to come, so his opportunity to drop her off somewhere safe can be seen as an act of protection more than one of abandonment. There is talk that the Jenny character who became Barbara's own companion during the adventure was slated to replace Susan on the TARDIS crew, and she was perfect material given that she was an orphan, but I imagine the production team decided there was only room for one cranky character in the TARDIS and they opted out. We do not get to see exactly how Ian and Barbara react to Susan's departure as the exchange between her and Grandfather is the sole focus of the scene it happens in.

There will be new companions to follow as is the tradition of the series, but for now there's opportunity to break from the televised episodes again and see how the smaller TARDIS crew carries on without Susan and how Susan herself carries on without them...

NEXT EPISODE: VENUSIAN LULLABY

The Time Travellers

Still recovering from their ordeal in miniature, the Doctor, Susan, Barbara and Ian arrive in London of the not too distant future to find the world has changed for the worse. The year is 2006 and England is at war with almost everyone else, the city of London shattered by bombings except for Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs which have been left untouched. The Doctor discovers that some crude time travel experiments are afoot and contrary to what he has been telling his companions all along it seems that history can be changed, and the consequences have been devastating. Alternate versions of a test pilot named Andrews are arriving all the time in London as the enemy forces close in, and the Doctor faces the dilemma of either leaving things as they are or getting involved and facing even further consequences.

This one is great. Out of all the supplemental adventures with the original crew I have to say that The Time Travellers is by far the most complex and rewarding one of the bunch. For starters it captures all of the characters perfectly and even gives them a bit more depth with Ian and Barbara beginning to develop feelings for each other which are only barely hinted at on screen. Susan gets to have some of her best moments here, finally showing some of that scientific know-how that she should have been doing all the time given that she is obviously not human and far more advanced than her schoolteacher companions. Susan's cleverness, though, often gets marred by her bursts of immaturity; she is still young, after all, and resents being treated like a child, and I am sure if this had been made for screen she would have predictably lost her shit once or twice in a very theatrical way. But she comes through some pretty scary events relatively okay; The Time Travellers has a pretty high body count and some nasty ways for the supporting cast to meet their fates. The Doctor harrumphs his way through the tale as one would expect, assuming a commanding presence and persuading the scientists of the time to take him on as one of their own as he tries to suss out what they have done to damage the time lines and create this hellish future. And that future is pretty dark and dreadful - one of the nastiest places the original crew would have been in the continuity of these tales.

The Time Travellers is a bit of a retcon piece; it was published in late 2005 after the first of the new series with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor had aired and there is no denying that it was influenced by the new direction the revived TV series took. At the heart of the story are numerous references to disaster that befell London in the sixties by something known only as "the Machine". The Doctor does not know anything about this, and rightly so as for him it has yet to happen; the book refers to the events of The War Machines from the end of the third season in 1967. That's still a bit off from where I am now, but I'll revisit this tale when that happens. And there is also a very tantalizing moment where events from the 1988 season premiere, Remembrance of the Daleks, are referenced and the impact it has on the Doctor and Susan is fascinating to read. Historical perspective is great, isn't it? Some readers don't enjoy tales like this, referring to them as "fan-wanks" and they are often criticized for piggybacking on established episodes and not really creating anything new, but I personally like this sort of thing. When the Doctor travels back and forth at his whims through time it's inevitable he is going to come across strands of his own actions, and even in some cases come face to face with himself; the later episodes of the series from 2010 onwards have taken criminal license with this notion, though, and go way to far in my opinion, casually dismissing the notion of changing time as something "wibbly wobbly timey wimey" - annoying at best but when delivered by an idiotic fop in a bow tie it's almost insulting to the viewer's intelligence. William Hartnell would NEVER have said those lines; I think he'd be more apt to bitch slap the moron who wrote them. The original Doctor takes it far more seriously and admits that yes history can be changed but time changes around you, making it possible for you to still be aware of the change you made even if no-one else notices it, and to him it's a dreadful concept, not just some fun thing to do to impress your latest tagalongs.

Things are about to change for the TARDIS crew, though. The Time Travellers has an epilogue that shows Ian and Barbara returning home one day, but they're not going to do that for a while. In other spots in the book, though, there come a few hints about Susan's future and how the Doctor wants her to have somewhere stable to live; he hints that what they have done here is going to attract attention and Susan might be safer without him. This is more from the perspective of having seen the entire series already, but still cleverly worked in as to explain Susan's future departure from the crew without writing a whole new take on it. Not that it's going to make the impact any less, in fact it may just be a bit more poignant this way...

NEXT EPISODE: THE DALEK INVASION OF EARTH