The Romans

On sabbatical in an appropriated villa some miles outside of Rome, the Doctor and company are content and relaxed. Sort of. Vicki is bored with all the idle resting. The Doctor is getting irritable and decides to go to Rome and takes her with him, but while they are gone Ian and Barbara are set upon by slave traders and sold. A case of mistaken identity lands the Doctor and Vicki in the middle of intrigue at the court of Caesar Nero himself. All roads, they say, lead to Rome, and no matter which road the regulars are taking, all are dangerous and deadly.

Back to a televised episode now. The show starts with the TARDIS slipping off a cliff as it did at the end of The Rescue but the "cliff" doesn't appear to be as high as it did in that shot, leaving the TARDIS on a bit of an angle but nothing more. When we see the regulars again they are established in their lives and dressed in period costumes; Vicki states that they have been there a month now and a fabric merchant in the village market observes that they have been staying at a villa while the owner is away, and they have been there long enough to sell the garden produce in the market to keep some money coming in. It's not unusual for the Doctor to choose to stay in one place and time for a while as he and Susan had been in hiding on Earth in 1963 for quite some time - long enough for Susan to attend Coal Hill School. Ian and Barbara do not mind the break, they're content to laze around as long as possible - until they are made into slaves, that is.

The tone of the story is definitely a comedy, with slapstick humour and misunderstanding serving up most of the funny moments despite the horrible events going on around the regulars. The Doctor is attacked by an assassin who has been hired to do away with lyre player Maximus Petullian, for whom the Doctor has been mistaken, and he fights him off with a laugh. Barbara is chased around the bedroom and much of the palace by a randy Nero despite the jealous wrath of his wife, the Empress Poppea. Vicki makes friends with the palace poisoner, Locasta, who serves up death as casually as one might put the kettle on. Ian's story doesn't really get many laughs, though, having escaped from a sinking ship where he has been forced to row for days with fellow escapee Delos and now in Rome in search of Barbara. Barbara, however, believes she is alone but is always within mere meters of the Doctor and Vicki while in the palace and none of them are any the wiser.

When it came to the novelization of the story for Target books, though, the tale was approached quite differently and was told not in strict third person narrative as is the norm, but in a series of collected letters, diary entries and scrolls penned by the characters themselves. An interesting notion, and it works well, retaining all the humour of the original and creating a bit of its own. Most notable is it gives the mute assassin, Ascaris, a voice as he contemplates his life choices and even in a letter to his parents asks why he was named after a parasitic worm.

As far as how well Byzantium fits in with this tale... well, the tone is the same, the time period stays the same but if Vicki states that they have been in the villa for four weeks but the events of Byzantium take place over two weeks, and the travellers had to walk from the city of Byzantium to where the TARDIS was supposedly taken, their time on Earth in the Roman era would be more like months in the end. The fact that the TARDIS is seen still wedged in a gully on its side at the end of the episode pretty much shoots the whole Byzantium side plot in the foot, unless it can be argued that whoever found and moved the TARDIS thought that it needed to be kept on its side.

However it plays out, at the end of The Romans the TARDIS is
caught by some external force and is slowly dragged down. "Dragged down to where?" Ian demands.

NEXT EPISODE: THE WEB PLANET

Byzantium!

With the TARDIS crash landed in a gully, the crew have taken some time to relax from the stresses of time travel. They have arrived in AD 64 and have found themselves a temporary home in the city of Byzantium, posing as a travelling family. Trouble is never far behind, though, and eventually all four travellers are separated and must do what they can to survive in this turbulent time where life is cheap and death is lurking around every corner.

Byzantium is a very ambitious novel for the range, starting right from the beginning. At the end of The Rescue the TARDIS is seen toppling off what appears to be a cliff, sending everyone within sprawling to the floor (some less convincingly than others), and the following week the travellers would be seen alive and well and unharmed in the next serial, The Romans. Byzantium takes place within that gap, telling a story of at least two weeks' time. It's not an easy task to do something like this, but author Keith Topping was obviously bound and determined to tell this story with this particular crew, and rather than toss it in somewhere else down the line (there's a very handy gap between The Web Planet and The Crusades where a few other stories both written and audio will be placed) he worked it in to serve as an extension of the whole Roman era visit, creating a short story arc for the TARDIS crew. And this isn't just some tossed-in prelude story printed in large font which tells a vague tale, it is absolutely packed with stuff - 280 pages in the BBC Books smaller print which made this the first novel I needed my glasses for. The separation of the TARDIS crew is not a new ploy as it allows for stories to be told from a few different angles, but it is usually with the characters split into small groups; in Dalek Invasion of Earth the Doctor and Susan stayed together for most of the story while Ian and Barbara had to make their own way to the story's climax. But with Byzantium the crew are completely split up, each thinking that the others are dead, and they are left to try and make their own way in this world. History tells us that the city, and the time itself, was rife with religious divisions complete with heretics and traitors being crucified as a lesson for others, and what better way to illustrate this than by having each member of the crew fall in with a different facet of this diversity; the Doctor is rescued by the struggling Christians, Vicki by a Greek family, Barbara by the Jews and Ian falls in with the Romans themselves.

For Barbara this is another journey into her element as a history teacher, although she is seeming to be getting a bit tired of it after seeing all the nastiest parts of it; everywhere they go in history people keep dying around her. The Doctor, too, seems to be enjoying parts of his time in the city, despite having lost his companions and the TARDIS he is finding some academic joy in realizing that he is witnessing the first draft of the Bible being written. Vicki has only just joined the crew so imagine her confusion at being an orphan again but in a distant and primitive time. Her lack of tact gets her into trouble right off the hop with her adoptive Greek family, and her mouth keeps digging her in deeper every time she opens it. It's a bit of a departure from the Vicki seen on screen, and she's even given a surname here - Pallister - although it's never actually used in any canon material (although given that this is a BBC Book one would think that it would be more readily accepted). Ian, too, is a bit off from how he is played on screen, coming off as a lot more sarcastic than he was written in the early days of the series - and he is played up as an exotic sex symbol in the novel with the Roman women seeking to seduce him, even entering his bedchambers and catching him in the buff.

Oh yes, the sex. There's a lot of it in this one. Ian being hounded by horny Roman sluts is just the tip of the iceberg. Topping was probably watching Spartacus (the TV series) for some of his reference material, describing several graphic sweaty sex scenes among the supporting cast of characters. And the violence is really amped up as well with throats slashed here and there and people being nailed to crosses and left to die. The new series of Doctor Who has been criticized by some as having far too much sexual innuendo and violence to it, but it's just a bit of cheeky fun compared to this. I'm not complaining, though; it's not gratuitous and it's what went on, as far as we know.

Topping was pretty careful about continuity with this book, keeping in mind at all times not to over-write the opening of The Romans. Despite all the blood and grit though it reads like a comedy in some spots, which is how The Romans was scripted, so tone is maintained. The Doctor makes a few private oblique references to himself and his own circumstances here and there but nothing that could really spoil anything that is to come in the rest of the series. Curiously, though, he does mention that Vicki has a destiny, but refuses to elaborate on it when Barbara asks. The other bit of continuity is a bit of a spoiler, maybe, but I don't think so. The story actually starts with a prologue set in 1973 where Barbara, under her married name of Chesterton, is at the museum with her son John Alydon Ganatus Chesterton looking at Roman exhibits. I don't necessarily think that letting on that Barbara and Ian get out alive and have a future together is a bad thing; if anything it adds to the ongoing story of life after the Doctor for the companions. The same happened in a part of The Time Travellers and again, it paints a picture of things to come, for these companions at the very least. For most fans, reading Byzantium was something done a long time after having already seen it on TV or VHS or DVD as it was published in 2001, but if someone new to the series was going to pick this up and add it to the continuity I am following would it necessarily ruin anything to come? I don't think so; in fact it would only serve as an appetite-whetter for when Ian and Barbara actually do get to leave the Doctor and go home, to see how their journey with him ends, and to perhaps wonder how he carries on without them.

But that's later, we'll get there.

NEXT EPISODE: THE ROMANS

The Rescue

The TARDIS bring the Doctor, Ian and Barbara to the planet Dido, where a spaceship from Earth has crashed leaving only two survivors: the young orphan girl, Vicki, and her guardian, Bennet. Vicki and Bennet are waiting for a rescue ship from Earth to take them away, but this is a secret they keep from the malicious Koquillion who claims to be keeping them safe from the other people of Dido. The Doctor has been to Dido before and suspects there is something else going on here. Barbara befriends Vicki and tells her that they are here to help her, but is anyone safe from the wrath of Koquillion?

Fresh from the departure of Susan, Vicki is brought in to fill the empty spot in the TARDIS. Unlike Susan, Vicki is as human as Ian and Barbara and on some levels a tad more mature. Except for the fits of teenage girl pique and the sulking. But she seems less inclined to panic and lose her shit than Susan, and manages to keep herself together even with Koquillion screaming in her face and terrorizing her. The Doctor takes a shine to her instantly and manages to coax her out of her teen angst moments (although it's well known that actress Maureen O'Brien was required to do exactly that when William Hartnell would be difficult on set); he's seen early in the adventure turning to address Susan inside the TARDIS and then realizing awkwardly that she's no longer there and Vicki fills the gap Susan has left. For Vicki, the TARDIS crew fill the need for a family.

Interesting bit about Susan: the Doctor obviously misses her but there's nothing akin to guilt here when it comes to her. He did, after all, lock her out of the ship and leave her behind for her own good, but it's referenced by Barbara and Ian that Susan "left". If I were them I'd be worried the Doctor might have a few more lockouts planned. Venusian Lullaby was crafted to fit in before this episode and it works out well in continuity, with Barbara and Ian not dwelling too much on Susan's absence on screen even if as far as broadcasting went it just happened a week ago. There's a sense that The Rescue happens a short while after The Dalek Invasion of Earth instead of minutes later, so the insertion of Lullaby between those episodes fits.

Koquillion is a real piece of work as an enemy; he's frightening to see and he's a coward bully at worst, tossing Barbara off a cliff and keeping Vicki and Bennet on the razor's edge of terror. When help is there, though, Vicki thinks that the arrival of the TARDIS crew will jeopardize things and says everything was fine before they arrived, that she could be free of Koquillion on her own terms. Bennet is none too pleasant a man to deal with; hiding in his cabin in the crashed ship partly paralyzed from an explosion which killed many of the Dido people and all the other crew members on the ship including Vicki's father. Yeah the ship - it's shown as a long tube like a rocket broken in half, but the interior we see doesn't really have much more room inside for anyone besides Vicki and Bennet. How many other people were on this thing? And where's Vicki's room? It's like she has to sleep in the living room and Bennet gets the only proper bedroom on the ship.

With Vicki Joining at the end of the show, the TARDIS is back up to a full crew by its early standards (three companions with the Doctor make the place feel kinda crowded in later years). New adventures awaited in the next televised episode, The Romans, with a direct lead in at the end, but before we go there, BBC Books have cleverly presented a novel to slip in between the stories...

NEXT EPISODE; BYZANTIUM!

A Storm of Angels

What if the Doctor interfered? Not just gave things a bit of a nudge here and there but out and out capital I Interfered? Imagine what would happen to his favourite planet, Earth, if he, say, took Leonardo da Vinci on a few trips through time and space and opened his mind to new ideas and alien worlds? Would the Elizabethan era have a space empire? Would Susan go along with any of this? What would the Doctor's people think of it? And if Earth was under threat by other aliens, would the Doctor do anything?

Big Finish take the Doctor's first steps away from his home planet back into the "what if" place of the Unbound series and show us a Doctor who doesn't care much for the web of time, a Doctor who is irresponsible and doesn't grasp the full implications of what his interference could cost further down the road. A Storm of Angels picks up in the months after the events of Auld Mortality with Susan falling mysteriously ill and the Doctor caring for her in the TARDIS during their adventures. They are pursued by one of their own people who has orders to bring them home, but the Doctor is having none of that now that he is out there having fun. It's quite different from the care the established first Doctor takes to not leave a mark on history, and although Susan is still his moral compass she is not entirely against the notion of going anywhere and doing anything. The Doctor's enthusiasm has infected her somewhat, it seems, and it is only heightened when he and Susan fall in with spacefaring Elizabethan privateers out to collect booty for Queen Elizabeth back on Earth.

A Storm of Angels is not entirely about the Doctor's choices, though; Earth is indeed under threat from a new menace but no-one can see beyond the glitter and promise that hides the invaders' true identity and motives. And I'll gladly spoil this much for you: they're not those Angels so Moffatt fans can go sulk. This is another Marc Platt script, which touches on some of his favourite themes about the Doctor's past but does not dwell there this time. 

And it's longer than I expected; Auld Mortality and the other five titles of the initial Unbound range were just a single disc about an hour long, maybe a bit more. The second go at the line, which starts with this one and disappointingly only had one more title (although as I said before that will change in a few months) featured episodes twice as long. This was presented in a four episode format like what was standard for the classic era television episodes, complete with period theme music and maybe a few modern sound effects for the TARDIS interior. 

In the end it's not as if the Doctor really learns anything from his meddling, and seems quite content to carry on doing so. There are, however, no further adventures with this alternative first Doctor to see if he indeed does continue to go where and whenever he pleases, or if he manages to curb those desires. That's still all up for speculation.

What if the Doctor changed his ways and made a point of not going anywhere or getting involved anymore? Certainly interesting, and an Unbound tale for later. But for now, a return to the TV series.

NEXT EPISODE: THE RESCUE

Auld Mortality

What if the Doctor had never left his home planet? What if he had never stolen a TARDIS in the first place? If he had stayed, what would become of him? Would the Doctor still be a rebellious voice against his society's default setting of dullness or would he, say, become a celebrated author and immerse himself in a probability generator and experience other worlds through a safe computer generated environment? And what of the family he left behind? And the family he would have taken with him? What would have happened to Susan?

Big Finish created the Unbound series for just this purpose: to explore the what-if's about the Doctor, to see how things could have happened differently for him and how changes in his circumstances would impact the universe he so often saves (although in the early days of the show the stakes were not made to be so high as the whole universe on a weekly basis). Author Marc Platt got the first shot at this with Auld Mortality, and as he is fascinated with the Doctor's home and the conditions there it would only be right for him to start there. His version of the stay-home Doctor is grouchy as ever but lacking the drive to really want to leave home and explore. Indeed the notion has occurred to this Doctor once but he changed his mind and stayed put, and grumbles to himself about the state of the planet. Now he is saddled with his family in their ancestral home, more particularly with his uncle, Quences, and a robotic beast manservant named Badger. Quences has big plans for his nephew; he sees him ascending to the presidency that governs their world to bring honour and title to the family. The Doctor isn't interested. But there are other members of the family, that girl named Susan who keeps calling the Doctor "grandfather", she might do in his place.

As far as series continuity goes, the name of the Doctor's home planet hadn't been mentioned yet on screen and would not be for several years, nor had the name of his species for that matter, but as Auld Mortality is written from the perspective at the far ends of the series both do get mentioned, as do all the inner political working of the home planet and it's people. Marc Platt did not come up with those details himself; they were carefully built up by the series producers over the years and culminated in the revelations of the recent series', but the Doctor's family is very much his own creation (aside from Susan) from his seventh Doctor novel, Lungbarrow, which is still a long way off from here. When I listen to these sorts of things I always try to put them in a context of other episodes but have to remind myself that they are outside the realm of the series and are not meant to be subject to continuity. It's a fun notion to see what could have happened, and there are still several others out there from the range which I am going to drop in at turning points in the series just to see how things compare.

Despite the Unbound range not being a series as such with regular characters, Auld Mortality does have a sequel which will be next, with Geoffrey Bayldon as the Doctor once more and Carole Ann Ford as a gutsier version of Susan. Further episodes see some other regular series characters pop up as alternatives to their established selves, but there are several other actors lined up to play alternative Doctors alongside them. The range stopped at 8 episodes in 2008 but has recently been revived with some new direction to it later this year, so there will be even more "what if..?" moments to come.

NEXT EPISODE: UNBOUND - A STORM OF ANGELS

The Sleeping Blood

Susan remembers a time when the Doctor fell ill while exploring on a strange new planet, and as conventional cures failed and his illness progressed she was forced to leave the TARDIS and strike out on her own to find help. After several tries the ship put down in a disused medical research facility far in the future; antibiotics were obsolete and all medical treatment was now administered through use of nanotechnology. Susan's luck, however, changes with the arrival of a squad of exosuited security personnel; the nanotech which has permeated their society has been hijacked by a terrorist named the Butcher, and they're here to take him out before he kills everyone in the world.

Another tale from before the Doctor and Susan arrive on Earth, which is now becoming the norm for Companion Chronicles with Carole Ann Ford reprising her role as Susan, and quite right, too; William Russell has his own episodes to come once Ian and Barbara leave the TARDIS, and they will have enough flashbacks between televised episodes. Enough care is being taken to ensure that there are no big reveals of series monsters before their time (although in The Alchemists Susan notes that gold is useful for "fighting certain things" which can only mean Cybermen, although where she gets that knowledge from is anyone's guess) and the pre-series continuity is being maintained. The TARDIS still functions properly enough to blend with its surroundings even if the shape it chooses in this episode is not the best fit (signs of the mechanism starting to break down, perhaps). Susan still manages to keep her head though and not go into panic shrieking over the Doctor's health as she did in The Daleks, and as it is being told in a past perspective Ford makes sure to pitch her voice up somewhat to sound like her younger self when engaged in direct dialogue with other characters, and to speak normally while performing the narrative.

As I listened to this one in the car I realized that I was hearing a bit of a statement condemning the health care system, where ordinary people are not always given the best and most effective treatment and the rich and powerful get top notch service when they need it. It's not really anything new in itself but it's not often that Doctor Who makes a big political statement in any of its media. I'm not sure if Martin Day's script is focussed on health care in the United States where it's always been a battle to get care for the poor, or if there's something he is trying to say about the National Health System in the UK. Again, though, it's a theme that is not unique to a Doctor Who narrative, it's just rare when it does happen.

This makes the last of the current Companion Chronicles with Carole Ann Ford providing exclusive narration; she will be back later although the story will be told in other perspectives, and no doubt Big Finish will have her back doing more stories with just her and the Doctor, and some more under the Early Adventures banner now that the role of Barbara Wright has been re-cast to fill out the TARDIS crew that much more.

Big Finish have gone off in some other directions, though, playing around with the possibilities of how things could have been different for the Doctor if he had made other choices. I'll be going there next.

NEXT EPISODE: UNBOUND - AULD MORTALITY

The Alchemists

Sometime early in their travels together Susan writes a letter to Barbara and Ian, explaining that if either of them ever finds this and Susan has left the TARDIS either by choice or by her death she is to read it. Susan starts to relate a tale of another visit she and the Doctor made to Earth before they arrived in 1963 London - this time arriving in 1930s Berlin before the outbreak of the second World War. The Doctor has knows that there is a gathering of great scientific minds in the city and wants to get in on it, but he and Susan attract unwanted attention and find themselves hunted by the SA.

This one is pretty straightforward adventure for the Doctor and Susan, one of their first adventures on Earth before finally settling down in 1960s London. 1930s Berlin is not really that far away but the world will definitely have changed by the time Susan attends Coal Hill School. Berlin is painted as a very glamourous place in the early 1930's, and Susan delights in the bright lights of the city, the fashion of the people and the energy of the era, although she knows well enough what is lurking behind the scenes.

The temptation when it comes to Germany and pre-WWII is always there for Hitler to make an appearance but thankfully it doesn't happen here; the focus is on Susan and how she copes without the Doctor, and the inclusion of a significant historical figure would take something away from her struggle to survive and be reunited with the Doctor. The menace of Hitler still, though, works its way into the story, for any gathering of scientific minds at his behest at this point in history cannot be for anything good; Albert Einstein was already out of Germany by this time and would not be returning - he was, after all, Jewish and it was not going to be a safe place for him. So there's another historical figure out of the narrative to allow Susan to be the star.

While the Big Finish Companion Chronicles are a great means to explore the pre-series adventures of the Doctor and Susan they do tend to stray into developing their characters a bit too much. When Susan is separated from the Doctor in An Unearthly Child she freaks out, but that level of hysteria doesn't materialize here in an episode set some time before. There are other connections to the series to come though, for Susan notes the Doctor fussing over a mysterious packing case he has brought along with them in the TARDIS and musing over where he should leave it. More retcon at work: this mysterious object will be explained in 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks.

The Doctor says that he must show Susan something of the rest of the twentieth century, which is a lead up to their eventual arrival in that junkyard in Shoreditch. But there's still a way to go before that.

NEXT EPISODE: THE BEGINNING