Home Truths
Sara Kingdom is dead, aged to death and turned to dust on
the planet Kembel when the Daleks’ time destructor was activated. But here she
is to tell the tale of another adventure she shared with the Doctor and Steven.
The sole inhabitant of a remote guest house, Sara receives a visitor who wants
to hear of her past, and she tells of an old house where merely thinking of
something makes it happen. Upon exiting the TARDIS, they find the inhabitants
of the house – a young married couple – dead. Sara’s instincts rule out a
natural death, but the question then remains: if they were murdered, is the
killer still inside with them?
This is one of the earlier Companion Chronicles with Jean
Marsh returning as Sara Kingdom for the first time; production wise it
pre-dates the audio episodes I have already enjoyed with Sara in them but as
far as continuity goes it could be anytime after The Dalek Master Plan when
Sara finds herself in this house. The events she speaks of over three episodes
here would obviously take place somewhere alongside The Anachronauts, An Ordinary Life and The Sontarans while the time travellers were on the run from the
Daleks. Marsh’s voice is pretty creaky and it’s hard to reconcile it with her
younger self in Dalek Master Plan but
with some time having flowed by before this tale, it can be more readily
accepted.
The danger with going for a haunted house episode in Doctor Who, no matter when it is placed,
is accidentally evoking the 1989 episode Ghost
Light. After all, haunted house stories usually have all the same elements:
strange sounds in the dark, dark corners, creaky stairs, claustrophobia, not
always an easy escape available. Home
Truths has all of this despite not so much being an old abandoned cobwebby
place as it is a modern eerily deserted one. The fact that a new places, a
house where the lights still work and the water still runs and there is no
decay can still contain menace is the crafty bit; Paranormal Activity made heaps off that kind of tension with the
unknown insinuating itself into what should be a safe place. The Doctor and
company may be up against the unseen, but the Doctor rationalizes that it may
not necessarily be evil despite the presence of two dead bodies.
The Drowned World
I remember when this one came out thinking that it was
interesting to see another title snatched from a Madonna song title (along with
Survival and Human Nature). No relation, though, not even a sly reference to
the metaphorical drowned world of Madonna’s song… the world in this tale is
literally drowning.
Sara Kingdom’s “ghost” is on trial of sorts. The elders of
the society are not keen on haunted
buildings – they make no distinction
between supernatural or an AI it seems. Sara is not haunting the place, she’s just
a copy of the original superimposed into the house itself, but her presence
raises a lot of concerns. Robert, her “interrogator” returns to her to get
evidence to support leaving her as she is, and Sara tells him of a time when
she, along with the Doctor and Steven, lost the TARDIS under rising waters in a
flooding mining encampment on a far off world. The miners onsite believe that
they have come to rescue them and it should be simple enough to just get the
TARDIS back from under the water and pile everyone inside and go, but the water
itself has other ideas.
Sentient water and water tentacles… think The Abyss. Well, sort of. On alien
worlds it’s hard to say what’s normal and what is not, but we’ve been down this
road with Doctor Who in other
episodes such as The Waters of Mars and
the Big Finish audio The Genocide Machine.
They tell us that the oceans of our own planet are alive, and the concept is
taken to this planet as well, but in a more literal sense.
Sara gets to be a hero here. She takes a few miners with her
into the flooded area of the base to retrieve the TARDIS and in her efforts to
get the ship back takes on a leadership role instead of just blindly following
orders as she used to do. Being with the Doctor is confusing for her at times
as she is used to doing what she is told and reporting to authority. And she is
also haunted by the death of her brother Brett Vyon - the brother she herself killed when she
believed him to have been a traitor.
There’s no real sense of when this one happens within that
gap in The Dalek Master Plan so it
doesn’t conflict with anything that has come since; the real narrative is the
drama of Sara’s conversations with Robert as he tries to formulate a case for
her preservation. Robert doesn’t want anything to happen to Sara but she is
oddly resigned to her fate if it is deemed for her to be demolished or
destroyed. But as their conversations carry on they start to grow closer,
Robert identifies the human Sara within the house and wants to do more for her.
The Guardian of the Solar System
Sara’s final tale for Robert takes her back into the past
once more, but into her own personal past before she met the Doctor and Steven.
The TARDIS materializes in the workings of a massive clock, and while exploring
Sara encounters her own brother, still alive, and realizes that she is in a
time about a year before she met the Doctor and Steven. The clock is run by old
men slaves and is vital to keeping the space lanes open while research on
instantaneous travel continues, and at the heart of the whole thing is Mavic
Chen, Guardian of the Solar System, and the man who would betray his people to
the Daleks.
Running into Brett should be enough to send Sara into an
abyss of guilt but she doesn’t have the time for that; meeting up with Chen
after seeing him betray the galaxy is almost as horrific as going back in time
and meeting Hitler. Sara realizes that she is in a precarious position here
being in the past; any wrong thing she might say could alter the future and put
the Doctor and Steven in danger when they would eventually meet Chen on Kembel.
Ah we’re into metaphor land with this one; the clock and all
its cogs are how Sara feels about her life; trapped in the machine that was
Space Security, and then in the machine that is the house. And the guilt that
weighs her down all through her life after Brett is killed… short as her life
might be after that event. The whole deal about Brett’s death was brought up in
less than subtle fashion all through the novelization of The Dalek Master Plan and here it is once more, although to
actually hear Jean Marsh articulate Sara’s feelings is much more effective.
And I am going to really blow the ending here because of
where it leads so if you’re concerned about this sort of thing STOP READING
NOW…
Through the inherent powers of the house, Sara becomes
corporeal once again and as the story closes the TARDIS lands there shortly
afterwards. Sara is told that if she wants answers, the Doctor is inside, but
he’s not the man she knew as he, like her, has changed. The Doctor’s first
regeneration is coming up fast so we know it’s not going to be the Doctor she
knew. Is he alone in the TARDIS? Which Doctor is this? Is Sara about to be a
companion once more?
Sara’s trilogy ends here, but the potential for her to return
is there, and that’s a pretty exciting notion; a companion who we hardly got to
know properly on screen could see a whole new life through Big Finish. It has worked further on in the range to bring some new life to other companions who weren't the best fit on screen, so it couldn't fail with a stong character like Sara.
But as for new lives, the Doctor is about to say goodbye to
his old one…
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