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