Sympathy for the Devil

What if the Doctor arrived too late?

It's 1997 and the eve of the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese. Disgraced former military officer Alistair Lethbridge Stewart has come to Hong Kong to get away from his failures, from a past littered with alien encounters and the disastrous consequences of those failures. Setting up shop as a pub owner, he just wants to fade away. Above Hong Kong a Chinese stealth bomber has crashed and what's left of UNIT are racing against the clock to salvage the wreck and get out before the Handover. But the Doctor has been exiled to Earth by the Time Lords. The TARDIS lands in Hong Kong with a newly regenerated Time Lord at the helm, decades later than he was supposed to. This is not the Earth as he remembers it as it has suffered from the continued alien attacks over the years. And now something else is stirring, feeding off the waves of emotion ramping up to the handover date and the tension in the air as the Handover approaches.

With the Pertwee era now concluded and a new Doctor about to take the helm, it's an interesting time to look at a pair of stories in the Big Finish Doctor Who Unbound range for their take on how things could have been different. I know how much I decry the "parallel universe" cop out but here we have it not as the excuse but for the reason for the story. Imagine what UNIT's track record would have been like without the third Doctor's help. How would they have repelled the Autons? Stopped the Silurians? The Axons? The Master? As it turns out they would have done it anyway but the loss of life and the collateral damage resulting from the Brigadier's usual approach would have been much higher. And given how UNIT would still be covered by the Official Secrets Act there would be no way to reassure the public that the damage and battles were in any way connected to invasions and aliens; it would be down to military incompetence, and the Brigadier would be the one to take the fall for it.

The string of disasters would have encompassed the world peace talks that were being held during the narrative of The Mind of Evil and that would mean the Handover of Hong Kong in 1997 would have had a far different air to it; UNIT soldiers still within Hong Kong after the handover would be seen as an invasion force and repelled accordingly, potentially triggering a war if there hadn't already been one after the conference fell apart.

David Warner's alternate Doctor is still very much the Time Lord we know, although he is not the swash and style of Pertwee at all, meaning the regeneration from the second Doctor would have resulted in a different man altogether. Just as well; Big Finish were not keen to re-cast anyone back in the early days and once an actor had passed away that was it. The whole Unbound line meant being able to do whatever they wanted with the Doctor, and this story is just fantastic to put it in simple terms right from the casting to the careful examination of the UNIT years and how things would have gone without the Doctor. And to hear Nick Courtney again as the Brigadier... always a treat, you can't go wrong with this man in this role.

And how can you do a UNIT (ish) story without the Master? He's here too, and nothing has changed for him, except for him. Turns out he has been captured by the Chinese for his hand in attempting to provoke a war and is forced to regenerate himself when his escape plans go awry.

The big fundamental difference here though is the TARDIS is not as grounded as it was in the televised series, and the Doctor is able to leave Earth at the end of the story. And who better to go with him as his companion than his best friend on the planet?

NEXT EPISODE: MASTERS OF WAR

Planet of the Spiders

Jo Grant has sent the Doctor a package from the depths of the Amazon jungle: the blue sapphire from Metebelis III which was her wedding gift. The crystal is making the natives nervous and she has to get rid or the entire expedition she and her husband, Cliff, are on will be off. But once back in the Doctor's hands the crystal becomes the object of desire of another party - the giant spiders (known as the Eight Legs) of Metebelis III. The spiders have created a bridgehead at a meditation centre where Mike Yates is attempting to recover from his own mental breakdown, and a group of men led by the angry and scheming Lupton become the human agents of the spiders. In his fight to keep the crystal out of the hands of his enemies, the Doctor will journey back to Metebelis III and engage in a confrontation that will cost him his life.

Does anyone actually like spiders? I'm not a particular fan myself but I'm not a full on arachnaphobe either. Still my own experiences with spiders are with the smaller ones and the odd big brown one in my garden, and not with giant ones that like to leap on people's backs. Friends of mine have said that this story was the one that stoked their lifelong dislike of the creatures, so hurrah for Doctor Who for using wobbly rubber props to strike fear into hearts! The rationale behind these giants is the conditions on Metebelis III would have allowed for their mutation into bigger creatures and for accelerated brain development, allowing them to evolve and take control of the human colonists there and enslave them. And eat the odd one. So now it's not just spiders overrunning the place, it's organized spiders with a Queen running the show, and someone else called the Great One (all praise to the Great One) running everything else.

Poor Yates; here he is trying to get his head back where it should be and there's another alien threat getting in the way. But disgraced and discarded by UNIT, he can hardly show up at the door and tell them what he has found. Good thing he has a good rapport with Sarah Jane Smith, and he can get her to tell UNIT for him. It's strange how their friendship developed like this; must be some background stories we aren't aware of. Is there a relationship here? Has Mike transferred his feelings for Jo onto Sarah? Is Sarah impressed by Mike's flashy sports car (must have been a generous severance package from UNIT) or does she just feel for him now that she has seen what adventuring with the Doctor can be like. Mike isn't exactly in PTSD land though, at least not in the sense of how it is perceived today; he's been sent packing and left to his own devices without a proper care plan, just meditation as his own attempt to get things right for himself.

The Doctor isn't aware of his own imminent regeneration at all, no matter how much retconning is done on this one they can't make it happen. There's no sense of finality in the background until the last two episodes; firstly when the Doctor realizes that going into the cave of the Great One (a massive HUGE spider - all praise to the Great One) will irradiate him beyond hope of recovery, and the second most obvious and least subtle is when he meets fellow Time Lord K'anpo Ripoche who regenerates himself just because he is old, much like the Doctor did in The Tenth Planet. K'anpo's regeneration is different though; there is a projection of his future self running around, a Tibetan monk named Cho-je, and the regeneration process absorbs Cho-je into K'anpo. Exactly why K'anpo is there though, is never really explained, unless he was there to guide the Doctor as he had in their old days on Gallifrey when he lived up the hill behind the Doctor's house.

That part is what's referred to as a fan-wank.

I often wonder how well Lupton would have fared without the aid of the spiders. He's not at the retreat to gain any kind of peace of mind, he's a bitter man there to focus his fury at the world and get revenge on the people who pushed him out of his job. That's a dangerous enough motivation right there but without a weapon of sorts (in America this man would just go to the gun shoppe and mow down kindergarteners as his outlet) Lupton would have been pretty ineffective and would have died angrily under the care of the NHS. The involvement with the spiders, though, shows that Lupton can learn fast and he has some capacity for learning to use his own latent mental powers. Who knows, maybe he might have become a credible threat over time. But he's a good driver and pilot it seems - stealing cars and helicopters and boats in a dreadfully long chase scene which eats up most of the second episode, fun as it is.

Despite this being the last outing for the third Doctor, the episode doesn't get to wallow in it and maintains a sense of fun the whole time even as things get desperate and nasty. Benton making jokes about hairdressing. The Brigadier's past love, Doris, getting a mention much to the Doctor's amusement. It's only once the Doctor emerges from the TARDIS in the last few minutes of the final episode that it becomes alarmingly evident that it's over for him, and it will be time to say goodbye to the third Doctor. He goes out with dignity right to the end, and with the Brigadier and Sarah watching, he regenerates.

NEXT EPISODE: SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

Island of Death

Jeremy Fitzoliver has decided to chuck it all and has left Metropolitan magazine to join a new group all about brotherhood and a new way of life. Sarah knows a cult when she sees one and sets about investigating what they are all about, not buying the spiritual well being line for a second. Sarah discovers that the figure at the heart of this is an insectoid creature named the Skang; a creature that the Doctor recognizes as not being of this world. The cult picks up and leaves to join members from around the world, with the Doctor, Sarah and the Brigadier following behind to delve into the mystery, and in doing so they uncover an alien menace set to take over the world.

I get the feeling that Barry Letts might have submitted this idea for BBC Radio as he did previously with The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N Space, or maybe he was just on a roll when he picked up the pen again. All the elements are there from the previous stories; Sarah not exactly being a full time companion for the Doctor yet, a reduced UNIT presence with the Brigadier operating away from his usual support base, and Jeremy Fitzoliver being generally frustrating (although this time we don't actually have to listen to his wheedling). The Doctor is still maintaining his link with UNIT as well even though he has the TARDIS back (sort of; there's a waste of time chapter where it doesn't function) and could leave Earth anytime, and as with the other stories he is found engrossed in his own experiments when the action starts to move.

But another cult story! Actually this was written before the Big Finish audio Transcendence of Ephros where the Doctor and Jo tried to make a suicide cult change their ways, and here the cult is borne of the human fascination with enlightenment through spiritual well being. All they have to do to get the ball rolling is to enjoy some of the dangerous Kool Aid on offer and then Mother Hilda will show them the way. The way, is, mind you, to surrender your human identity and become a Skang yourself if you are into insects. The picture is pretty enough on the island - it's literally a paradise but is it all just an elaborate fraud? Just as with Paradise of Death there's a strong reliance on illusion, and an easy way to see through it.

You know what I don't like most about this one? It feels so.... damn.... long. The journey by sea to the Island from Bombay crawls on for pages and pages with Sarah treating it like a luxury cruise and sunbathing in her bikini and the Brigadier annoyed that he's not in control of the situation. I could only take it a chapter at a time and for that reason it took me a while to get through the book. I suppose, though, that as most of the episodes produced for television under Letts were six part adventures he wouldn't have been too concerned about the length of the sequences; he may have been going for epic status on this one. But I kinda doubt it. And he just couldn't help but drop another of the old foreshadowing references to the Doctor's eventual regeneration.

And that's next.

NEXT EPISODE: PLANET OF THE SPIDERS