The Rosemariners and Little Doctors

An innocent act of curiosity by Jamie has the TARDIS make an accidental landing on the research satellite Earth Station 454 just as it is being closed down. The final xenobiologist on board does not fully understand why the station is closing but suspects that there is some connection to the recent arrival of a group of Rosemariners from the planet Rosa Damascena. Suspicion rises as it becomes obvious that the Rosemariners have something else going on behind the scenes, and there is much more to it than their love of pretty flowers.

The Rosemariners as a species are an interesting bunch; they do not have blood per se but an ichor, and they are definitely plant-like humanoid creatures themselves. Their very existence is linked to roses and they haul a vast arboretum around with them in their ships to never be far from the plants they need. In looking at the cover I was thinking we were headed into some kind of origin story for the Chameleons from The Faceless Ones but the similarity ends at the vague faces. Oh, and the ability to copy people.

Evil alien plants, like the previous story’s evil feminist regime, is a science fiction conceit as old as the genre itself, most notably illustrated in Day of the Triffids where semi-intelligent plants (although they were probably just following instinct) attacked and slaughtered the blinded people of Earth. The Rosemariners themselves are not as plant-like as the Triffids, but their drive to collect every species of rose for their own preservation has led them to pick up the deadly rosa toxicara, which is a flesh eater of a rose developed by the Daleks to be a guard dog like the Varga plants on Kembel. The toxicara has a bit more aggression and actively grabs victims and sends them into a dream like trance with a touch of its thorns… I was sort of reminded of Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors. Or maybe Biollante.

Doctor Who has had (and will have) its own brushes with evil plants, and Rosemariners makes a fascinating addition to that list. The production for screen though would not have been the easiest to realize in the 1960s, with actors required to thrash around in plastic tendrils and pretend they are being attacked and consumed, which is most likely why it did not make it to screen. It’s also a bit on the horrific side as well and would be more suited to something like The Outer Limits, whose own plant from hell monster from the episode Counterweight was a right nasty looking thing with teeth. Still, the magic of Big Finish and all that, right?

Continuity placement is all good where it is, with the story not having any references to anything else in season six, and it’s realized with, again, the full cast of regulars and guest star David Warner who pops up a lot in the Big Finish series, although he laments not having been in the televised series yet in the interviews after the story concludes (and a year or so later though he actually was in one).  The interviews also go on to say that this is the last of the Lost Stories from Big Finish but that’s not true at all – this was just recorded last and there are several still to come.

And some stories to come are a bit… shorter than others…

LITTLE DOCTORS

Supercomputer Zeus has everything under control. Nothing can go wrong. And if something does, there’s an automatic system that creates robot guards through simple matter synthesis, and the machines to do so are everywhere so there’s no escape for wrongdoers. But when the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe are threatened by this mechanism, the Doctor’s course of action leads the machines to produce an army of miniature Doctors, all infected with a sense of mischief and play – and havoc ensues.

Little Doctors is a Big Finish Short Trip read by Fraser Hines, and as such we get him voicing not only Jamie but the Doctor once again. Curiously, though, I couldn’t help but feel this is more of a Zoe story despite Wendy Padbury not reading it. Maybe she was supposed to and things changed up. Zoe is after all a computer genius so when dealing with a malfunctioning supercomputer she'd be the obvious saviour of the story.

But as with the other Short Trips it’s not a long tale at all but it still entertains; I was on the road for a day when I had this playing so it made the drive through the rural areas of Nova Scotia less dull to have this going on over the speakers. The Short Trips aren’t meant to be taken to too much depth – there’s simply not the time in the format to do complete soul searching or defeat an entire army. But an approximate 30 minute dose of the Doctor is an excellent way to be entertained.

NEXT EPISODE: THE KROTONS