Plot

[edit] Synopsis

Whilst in flight the TARDIS is attacked by the evil Rani, a renegade Time-Lady. The TARDIS crash-lands on the planet Lakertya. On the floor of the console room, the Doctor begins his sixth regeneration. In his post-regenerative confusion the Doctor is separated from his young companion Mel and tricked into assisting the Rani in her megalomaniac scheme to construct a giant time manipulator. Lost on the barren surface of the planet, Mel has to avoid the Rani's ingenious traps and her monstrous, bat-like servants, the Tetraps. She joins forces with a rebel faction among the Lakertyans, desperate to end the Rani's control of their planet. The Doctor must recover his wits in time to avoid becoming a permanent part of the Rani's plan to collect the genius of the greatest scientific minds in the Universe, of which she has captured many including Einstein, in order that she can create a time manipulator, which would allow the Rani to control time anywhere in the universe, at the expense of all life on Lakertya. The Doctor manages to foil her plan and free the Lakertyans of her evil control. The Rani, however, escapes in her TARDIS but it has been commandeered by the Tetraps who take her prisoner. The Doctor takes all the captured geniuses on board the TARDIS so that he can return them home.

[edit] Continuity

• Although this was the first story to feature the Seventh Doctor, it was written in anticipation of Colin Baker returning as the Sixth Doctor. When he declined to even film the regeneration sequence, Sylvester McCoy instead wore his predecessor's costume and a blond curly wig and filmed the sequence himself.
• A number of spin-off media have provided additional explanation for the Doctor's regeneration including the Virgin New Adventures novels Timewyrm: Revelation, Love and War by Paul Cornell, Head Games by Steve Lyons, all of which speculate that the Seventh Doctor's 'essence' drove the Sixth Doctor to pilot the TARDIS into the Rani's tractor beam to become Time's Champion and prevent himself from becoming the Valeyard, and the Past Doctor Adventures novel Spiral Scratch by Gary Russell, which features the Sixth Doctor sacrificing much of his energy to prevent a pan-dimensional being from destroying creation, leaving him in a weakened physical condition before the Rani's attack.
• The Seventh Doctor tries on several earlier Doctors' costumes: the Second Doctor's fur coat, the Third Doctor's smoking jacket, the Fourth Doctor's coat and scarf and the Fifth Doctor's cricket outfit, as well as other costumes. He also wears the Sixth Doctor's patchwork coat for much of the first episode, the first example of a Doctor wearing his previous self's clothes for a prolonged period rather than quickly changing after regeneration.
• It is never explained how the Rani escaped the predicament in which she had last been seen in The Mark of the Rani (trapped with the Master in her TARDIS and a rapidly-growing Tyrannosaurus rex embryo). The novelisation of Time and the Rani by Pip and Jane Baker claims that the rapidly-growing dinosaur snapped its neck on the ceiling of the Rani's TARDIS and died instantly, while the novel State of Change reveals that the Master escaped the TARDIS by separating the console room from the rest of the ship, forcing the Rani to cannibalise other controls in her TARDIS to pilot it prior to the events of the novel, although the canonicity of this claim is unclear.
• The Doctor states that he and the Rani are 953, in line with frequent (presumably approximate) claims by previous Doctors to be 900. However, in the new series, the Ninth Doctor reverted to the 900 figure, the Tenth Doctor claimed to be 903 and later 906 and the Eleventh Doctor 907.

[edit] Production

Serial details by episode

Episode	Broadcast date	Run time	Viewership (in millions)
"Part One"	7 September 1987 (1987-09-07)	24:44	5.1
"Part Two"	14 September 1987 (1987-09-14)	24:36	4.2
"Part Three"	21 September 1987 (1987-09-21)	24:23	4.3
"Part Four"	28 September 1987 (1987-09-28)	24:38	4.9
[2][3][4]

[edit] Preproduction

• This story's working title was Strange Matter.^[5]
• The Loyhargil, lightweight substitute for strange matter, is an anagram of "holy grail".
• Amongst the famous Humans the Doctor mentions towards the end as he explains to Mel the severity of the Rani's plans are Elvis and Mrs Malaprop (a fictional character). This is a reference to the Seventh Doctor's frequent use of Malapropisms throughout this story.
• Ken Trew created the Seventh Doctor's costume, based on a 1930s golfing design.

[edit] Casting

• Wanda Ventham and Donald Pickering previously appeared together in The Faceless Ones. Donald Pickering also appeared in The Keys of Marinus. Wanda Ventham also appeared in Image of the Fendahl.

[edit] Production

• The story features a pre-credits sequence where the TARDIS crash-lands on Lakertya. This is only the third time in the series history that there was a pre-credit sequence. Castrovalva (1982) and The Five Doctors (1983) were the first two stories to have a "cold opening". Only one more story of the original series, Remembrance of the Daleks would feature a pre-credits teaser, although this practice became commonplace from "The End of the World" onwards (the 1996 TV movie featured a short sequence incorporated into the title sequence).
• The main location used for the planet Lakertya including the exterior of the Rani’s laboratory was Cloford Quarry, in Somerset.

[edit] Post-Production

• This story was the first time the Doctor Who title sequence was created with a computer. Many of the effects, like the bubble Mel is trapped in, were realised in the same manner.
• Keff McCulloch arranged the new opening theme. It was used until the end of the regular run of the series. A new logo for the series was also introduced with this story along with a new opening credits sequence that moved away from the "starfield" motif introduced in 1980. The new theme arrangement marked the first time since the First Doctor's era that the theme's "middle eight" section was regularly heard during the opening credits (the previous two arrangements used the middle eight during the closing credits only). As with the opening sequence from the Sixth Doctor era, the Seventh Doctor's opening does not use a static image of the Doctor, but rather one with limited animation: the image starts as a scowl, then the Doctor winks and smiles. McCoy wears makeup that gives his face and hair a silver/grey appearance.

[edit] Commercial releases

The story was released on VHS in July 1995. The story is also to be released on DVD on September 13th 2010. It features a commentary by Sylvester McCoy, Bonnie Langford, Pip and Jane Baker.

[edit] In print

Doctor Who book
Time and the Rani
Series	Target novelisations
Release number	128 (initial printings erroneously have it numbered 127)
Writer	Pip and Jane Baker
Publisher	Target Books
ISBN	0-491-03186-6
Release date	December 1987 (Hardback) 5th May 1988 (Paperback)
Preceded by	The Mysterious Planet
Followed by	Vengeance on Varos

A novelisation of this serial, written by Pip and Jane Baker, was published by Target Books in December 1987.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Time and the Rani at BBC Online
• Time and the Rani at the Doctor Who Reference Guide
• Time and the Rani at Outpost Gallifrey

[edit] Reviews

• Time and the Rani reviews at Outpost Gallifrey
• Time and the Rani reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide

[edit] Target novelisation

• On Target — Time and the Rani

[hide] v • d • e Doctor Who season 24 serials

The Fifth Doctor and Turlough are drawn to the planet Sarn by Kamelion, where they encounter the Master in one of his diabolical plans to tap the power of the Numismaton gas.

[edit] Plot

On the desert world of Sarn, robed natives worship the fire god Logar and follow the Chief Elder, Timanov, who demands obedience. Those who dissent are known as Unbelievers, and two of them, Amyand and Roskal, cause unrest when they claim to have ventured to the top of the sacred fire mountain but not found Logar. One of the Sarns, Malkon, is known as the Chosen One because of the unusual double triangle symbol burnt into his skin: he is also unusual for having been found as a baby on the slopes of the fire mountain.

The same triangle symbol is found on a metal artefact uncovered in an archaeological dig in Lanzarote overseen by Professor Howard Foster. His stepdaughter Perpugilliam (usually called "Peri") Brown is bored with the dig and wants to go travelling in Morocco and when he seeks to prevent this she steals the strange artefact and tries to swim for freedom. Fortunately for her the TARDIS has landed nearby – responding to a distress call sent by the strange artefact - and Turlough sees her drowning and rescues her. Going through her possessions as she recovers he finds the artefact and acknowledges the same triangle symbol is burnt into his own flesh. The Doctor returns to the TARDIS after attempting to triangulate the source of the signal being emitted by the artefact, and the ship dematerialises, seemingly on its own. It soon arrives on Sarn and the Doctor and Turlough set off to explore.

The Doctor's other companion, the android Kamelion, has meanwhile made mental contact with its old controller, the Master, who attempts to assert his control and change Kamelion's appearance from that of Howard. Kamelion tries to warn Peri of the Master but the Time Lord succeeds in gaining control. She flees the TARDIS with the creature in pursuit as the rumblings of the volcanoes of Sarn gather ferocity.

In the Sarn colony Timanov has damned the Unbelievers to be sacrificed to appease Logar and stop the tremors. They flee to a secret base in the mountains which is filled with seismological apparatus and which the Doctor and Turlough stumble across. The Doctor informs the Unbelievers that the tunnels, which have been their refuge are volcanic vents which will soon fill with molten lava. It is also established that Turlough is of the same race as those who colonised the planet, and when the indigenous people see his Misos Triangle, they greet him as a second Chosen One. Turlough realises Malkon may be his brother and becomes even more worried when Peri turns up and mentions the Master.

Another important figure in Sarn mythology is the Outsider, a promised prophet, and the Master/Kamelion fulfils this role admirably. He convinces Timanov of the appropriateness of harsh action and when the Doctor arrives with the Unbelievers they are all seized for burning. However, Malkon and Peri arrive shortly afterward and end this assault, though not before Malkon has been injured. Turlough is aghast when he finds his relative has been shot and the Doctor presses him for as much information as he has on the strange circumstances of Sarn. It seems it is a long abandoned Trion colony planet, and that Turlough, a Trion, suspects some of his family were sent here after a revolution against the hereditary leading clans of his homeworld. He supposes his father died in a crash but that Malkon survived, while he himself was sent in exile to Brendan School In England, overseen by a Trion agent masquerading as a solicitor in Chancery Lane.

The Master/Kamelion has meanwhile seized Peri and uses her to transport a black box into the control room of his TARDIS. It contains a miniature Master – the real thing – who has been shrunken and transformed by a disastrous experiment with his Tissue Compression Eliminator. The Master thus re-established the psychic link with Kamelion to gain the power of movement and has manoeuvred the robot to Sarn so that he can take advantage of the restorative powers of the Numismaton gas within the fire mountain.

Turlough realises the imminent volcano bursts will destroy the Sarn colony so nobly uses a functioning communication unit to get in touch with Trion and plead for a rescue ship to evacuate Sarn. In doing so he abandons his own freedom. When the ship later arrives, the Sarns all depart, along with Turlough and Malkon. They have both been pardoned in an amnesty issued by the new Sarn government. The only one to remain on the planet and face the erupting volcanoes is Timanov, now sure to die, his faith in tatters.

The Doctor meanwhile succeeds in weakening the Master's hold of Kamelion, and interrupts the numismaton experiment. He adds calorific gas to the numismaton surge and seemingly burns the Master alive. The Doctor also puts the terminally wounded Kamelion out of its misery. He returns to the TARDIS with a heavy heart, but with a new companion, Peri, for company.

[edit] Cast notes

• Mark Strickson has also reprised the role of Turlough in the audio plays by Big Finish Productions and penned the introduction to the spin-off novel Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma (1986).
• Promotional photographs taken during production include a shot of Peter Davison wearing a tuxedo and holding a gun, with Nicola Bryant standing next to him in a bikini, in a parody of James Bond.^[2]

[edit] Continuity

• This was the last story to feature Mark Strickson as Turlough. He returned for the Fifth Doctor's regeneration scene in The Caves of Androzani. Turlough was the last male companion of the Doctor on screen until Adam Mitchell joined the TARDIS crew briefly at the end of the Ninth Doctor episode "Dalek" in 2005. Strickson has said that had he realised that the next season would involve stories consisting of two 50-minute episodes, he would not have departed from the series. He felt that Turlough was not receiving enough development because the 25-minute format necessitated more frequent cliffhangers and therefore less character development.
• This serial was originally intended as the swan song for Anthony Ainley as the Master since his contract with the show had come to an end, hence the "death" of the character in the numismaton flames at the story's climax. As a deliberate tease for the audience, the Master's truncated final line is "Won't you even show mercy to your own -", with him apparently being killed by the gas just as he is about to reveal the true nature of his relationship to the Doctor. However, the Master reappeared in the following season's The Mark of the Rani without explanation as to how he survived the flames. Script Editor Eric Saward cut from The Mark of the Rani the explanation for the Master's survival provided by writers Pip and Jane Baker but the explanation is in their novelisation of the serial.)
• It was decided that because of the climate of Lanzarote, where the serial was filmed, the cast would have to alter their usual costumes. Although Peter Davison started the story wearing his cricketer outfit, for the rest of the story, he wore a different pair of trousers with question mark braces and a beige floral waistcoat. Strickson shed his usual school uniform in favour of a blue pin-stripe shirt and tan shorts with a pair of swim briefs underneath. Nicola Bryant also wore a pink bikini beneath her clothes to which she stripped down for a couple of scenes, the first time a companion had been seen to wear a two-piece swimsuit since Sarah Jane Smith in the Third Doctor story Death to the Daleks.
• Peri's mother and her friend Mrs Van Gysegham, both mentioned in this story, appear in the 2006 audio drama The Reaping.
• Although Kamelion dies in this story, he makes a posthumous reappearance in the audio Circular Time.
• This is the only story in the Peter Davison era in which Janet Fielding made no appearance as Tegan Jovanka though she is briefly mentioned in episode 1. She left the TARDIS crew in the previous serial Resurrection of the Daleks, and appears in the Fifth Doctor's regeneration sequence in following adventure, The Caves of Androzani, as a hallucination.

[edit] Production

Serial details by episode

Episode	Broadcast date	Run time	Viewership (in millions)
"Part One"	23 February 1984 (1984-02-23)	24:26	7.4
"Part Two"	24 February 1984 (1984-02-24)	24:20	6.1
"Part Three"	1 March 1984 (1984-03-01)	23:57	7.4
"Part Four"	2 March 1984 (1984-03-02)	24:44	7.0
[3][4][5]

• The working title for this story was The Planet of Fear.
• The decision to make Peri the daughter of a wealthy American family was inspired by the popularity of the Dallas and Dynasty soap operas.
• Nicola Bryant was cast in part because she held dual citizenship in the United States - because she was married to an American - and the UK.^[6]

[edit] In print

Doctor Who book
Planet of Fire
Series	Target novelisations
Release number	93
Writer	Peter Grimwade
Publisher	Target Books
Cover artist	Andrew Skilleter
ISBN	0-426-19940-5
Release date	14 February 1985
Preceded by	Frontios
Followed by	The Caves of Androzani

A novelisation of this serial, written by Peter Grimwade, was published by Target Books in October 1984. A prologue juxtaposing the crash of the vessel Professor Foster is salvaging with the crash of the Trion ship carrying Turlough's family to Sarn opens the novelisation. The Master's teasing last line " Won't you save your own..." is removed.

[edit] Broadcast and VHS release

• This story was released on VHS in September 1998.
• The DVD was released in June 2010, with commentary by Peter Davison, Nicola Bryant, Mark Strickson and Fiona Cumming, as part of the box set Kamelion Tales along with The King's Demons. It also contained a Special Edition edit of the story overseen by director Fiona Cumming.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Planet of Fire at BBC Online
• Planet of Fire at Doctor Who: A Brief History Of Time (Travel)
• Planet of Fire at the Doctor Who Reference Guide

Reviews

• Planet of Fire reviews at Outpost Gallifrey
• Planet of Fire reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide

Target novelisation

• On Target — Planet of Fire

Synopsis

The Fifth Doctor, Tegan Jovanka and Vislor Turlough become involved with intrigue at the Court of King John.

[edit] Plot

In 1215, the Court of King John of England is at the castle of Sir Ranulf Fitzwilliam to extort more taxes, and when the lord refuses to pay the King insults him. To defend his honour his son Hugh takes on the King’s champion, Sir Gilles Estram, in a joust. The latter wins easily, though the joust is disturbed by the arrival of the TARDIS. The Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough are greeted as demons and welcomed by the King.

Having established the date, the Doctor concludes the King is not himself - in fact, he is not the King at all, as he is actually in London taking the Crusader’s Oath. Sir Geoffrey de Lacy, the cousin of Sir Ranulf, arrives at the castle and confirms he knows the King is in London. Sir Gilles is about to torture him as a liar during a royal banquet when the Doctor intervenes. It seems the King's champion is not who he claims to be, either: Sir Gilles sheds his disguise and reveals himself to be the Doctor’s arch nemesis, the Master. He flees in his own TARDIS, which had been disguised as an iron maiden.

The King knights the Doctor as his new champion, and he is given run of the castle. After a series of mishaps, including the death of Sir Geoffrey at the Master’s hands, the Doctor confronts the King and the Master and discovers the truth. The monarch is really Kamelion, a war weapon found by the Master on Xeriphas, which can be mentally controlled and used to adopt disguises and personas. Disguised as King John, the Master intends that Kamelion will behave so appallingly so as to provoke a rebellion and topple the real King from his throne, thus robbing the world of Magna Carta, the foundation of parliamentary democracy. It is a small plan on the Master’s usual scale, but nevertheless particularly poisonous to the normal progress of Earth society.

The Doctor resolves the situation by testing the Master in a battle of wills for control over Kamelion. He takes control of the robot and steals it away in the TARDIS, thus foiling the Master’s scheme. Kamelion reverts to its robot form and thanks the Doctor for his assistance and rescue.

[edit] Continuity

• For dating of this serial, see chronology of the Doctor Who universe.
• Every story during Season 20 had the Doctor face an enemy from each of his past incarnations. The old enemy for this story was the Master, who faced the third, fourth and fifth incarnations of the Doctor. This story pointedly^{[citation needed]} doesn't reveal how the Master escaped the events of his last story Time-Flight (1982).
• This story marked the first appearance of Kamelion as voiced by Gerald Flood. Freelance effects designer Richard Gregory and software designer Mike Power gave a demonstration of the robot prototype for Nathan-Turner and Saward. Nathan-Turner was so impressed he commissioned scriptwriter Terence Dudley to develop a storyline to introduce Kamelion into the series. However, shortly after filming, Power died in a boating accident and no one was able to continue his work. Subsequently, Kamelion's made only two appearances before being written out of the series.
• In the story, the Master disguises himself as Sir Gilles Estram; Estram being an anagram of "Master". The Master adopted numerous pseudonyms in the course of the series, usually to be plays on the word "Master". Other examples include "Colonel Masters", The Rev. Mr. Magister," and "Professor Thasceles", as well as the unfortunate Tremas, whose body the Master stole. In order to hide the Master's involvement in the story, the first episode and Radio Times listed Estram as being played by "James Stoker", an anagram of "Master's Joke".
• This story marks the last appearance of the TARDIS console room set which had been in use since The Invisible Enemy. A new console room would debut in the next story The Five Doctors, although the console itself would be reused as the Second Doctor's console in The Two Doctors.

[edit] Production

Serial details by episode

Episode	Broadcast date	Run time	Viewership (in millions)
"Part One"	15 March 1983 (1983-03-15)	24:48	5.8
"Part Two"	16 March 1983 (1983-03-16)	24:27	7.2
[2][3][4]

• The working titles for this story were The Android, The Demons, A Knight's Tale and Demons Keeper.
• Producer John Nathan-Turner originally wanted the Master to appear in two stories every season. However, due to production problems, he was forced to settle for one Master story per season.
• Part One of this story was billed by the BBC as the six hundredth episode of Doctor Who.^{[citation needed]}
• Some scenes were filmed on location at Bodiam Castle, which was not built until 1385.

[edit] Outside references

• The Master's TARDIS is disguised as an iron maiden. The earliest iron maiden known to historians is the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg, which was built in 1515, 300 years after the setting of this story.
• The Doctor's claim that King John wanted the Magna Carta as much as his nobles and that he could have defeated the barons easily is historically untrue. John signed the Magna Carta after it became clear that he could not suppress the Baron's Revolt, and immediately appealed to the pope to release him from his oath to support the Charter's terms.

[edit] In print

Doctor Who book
The King's Demons
Series	Target novelisations
Release number	108
Writer	Terence Dudley
Publisher	Target Books
Cover artist	David McAllister
ISBN	0-491-03642-6
Release date	February 1986 (Hardback) 10th July 1986 (Paperback)
Preceded by	The Mark of the Rani
Followed by	The Savages

A novelisation of this serial, written by Terence Dudley, was published by Target Books in February 1986.

[edit] Broadcast and VHS release

The serial was repeated on BBC One in July 1984 on consecutive Fridays (06/07/84 & 13/07/84). This story was released on VHS in November 1995 in a box set along with a special edition of the subsequent serial The Five Doctors and a postcard book. This story and Planet of Fire were released in a Kamelion-themed box set on 14 June 2010. The DVD contained two commentaries, one with Peter Davison, Isla Blair and Eric Saward, and another with Director Tony Virgo on Part One.

[edit] References

The Doctor and Ace visit England in 1988, where three rival factions - the Cybermen, a group of Nazis and a 17th century sorceress named Lady Peinforte - are attempting to gain control of a statue made of a living metal, validium, that was created by Rassilon as the ultimate defence for Gallifrey.

[edit] Synopsis

(This is based on the Extended Version presented on the VHS release rather than that originally broadcast.)

South America, 22 November 1988. In an office full of Nazi imagery, a man looks at a computer screen displaying details on which he sees "Landing Location, Windsor, Grid Ref: 74W 32N, November 23, 1988". He tells his superior, De Flores, who is preparing to shoot a parrot with a bow and arrow.

Windsor, England, 1638. A finely dressed woman is shooting pigeons with a bow and arrow whilst her servant looks on. In her house, an elderly mathematician is performing complex calculations. The woman enters and demands to know how long his work will take, but he is too engrossed in his work to answer her. She goes to the fireplace, and picking up a poisoned arrow, hands it to her servant and tells him to put it with the others. He enquires after a silver arrow, and she replies that she will deal with that arrow personally.

Back in the Nazi office, De Flores addresses a group of followers, telling them they are at the turning point of history. He proposes a toast to the fourth Reich, before taking a silver bow from a display case, preparing to board an aircraft.

In space, a comet is seen from which a glowing energy emanates… Back in Windsor, the mathematician finally reveals the result of his calculations to the woman, telling her that the Nemesis comet circles the earth every 25 years, and its decaying trajectory means that it will eventually fall to Earth from the point where it originally departed — the meadow outside. This will occur on 23 November 1988.

At a jazz performance by Courtney Pine, the Seventh Doctor and Ace relax and enjoy the music. Ace's newspaper has a story about a comet heading to Earth, but she is more interested in the football results. The Doctor hears a bleeping from his pocket watch, and wonders of what it is trying to remind him. Pine's performance ends to applause and Ace asks him to sign a tape for her. As they head back to the TARDIS, a concealed marksman raises a gun towards them. At the sound of gunfire, Ace and the Doctor duck down and retreat quickly towards the TARDIS, but have to jump in the river to escape their pursuers. Two men arrive wielding guns and wearing headsets, but assuming they must have got their targets leave again. The Doctor and Ace then struggle back on to the riverbank, safe now.

In 1638, the mathematician dreams of great inventions that he could discover. The lady tells her servant to bring forth the potion, and he replies that they only require the final ingredient, human blood. They look meaningfully towards the mathematician…

The Doctor fetches out a new tape deck that he has built to replace the one of Ace's that had been destroyed by the Daleks. This one however, can do much more than play tapes. Telling Ace that his reminder had a terminal rating meaning some planet somewhere is facing imminent destruction, an image of the planet Earth appears on the tape deck…

In 1638, the woman and her servant drink their magic potion and begin and are surrounded by a glowing miasma, and beginning to travel forwards through time. They appear in present day Windsor in the middle of a crowded cafe.

Admitting that he has known about the possible destruction of Earth for 350 years, the Doctor and Ace take a quick trip in the TARDIS to Windsor Castle. In its basement, the Doctor tells Ace he is looking for a silver bow.

As the comet finally hits Earth, the Stuart woman's arrow begins to pulsate with light. In the castle, the Doctor and Ace feel the force of the impact. The Doctor tells Ace that it is the return to Earth of a comet called Nemesis, and then reveals that it was he who had launched it into space in the first place. Led by their glowing bow, the group of Nazis head towards the comet in a van. De Flores is in no rush to retrieve the Nemesis yet, as the comet will be too hot due its descent through the atmosphere. He tells his soldiers they will wait in a hotel leaving British police to guard the site, unaware of the true power of the Nemesis. In the castle, Ace finds a card telling the history of the bow, relating how it disappeared in 1788, and that unless a place is kept in the castle for its return, the entire silver statue will return to destroy the world. The Doctor tells her that the statue has indeed returned with that purpose. At this point, the lights dim, and Ace thinks it is a power cut.

Travelling back in time to 1638, the Doctor and Ace go to the time travelling woman's house in Windsor. Seeing the corpse of the mathematician, the Doctor hurriedly covers it with a cloth so that Ace does not see it. The Doctor sees the mathematician's calculations and is impressed that he had been able to work out when the Nemesis comet will return to Earth, only months since the Doctor's previous visit. The Doctor reveals that the woman — Lady Peinforte — made the Nemesis statue depicting herself out of a silver metal that fell to Earth in the meadow outside her house. The Doctor sees a chessboard, the game is going rather badly. He tells Ace that Peinforte managed to travel forward in time to 1988 using the arrow and a rudimentary knowledge of time travel, but mostly black magic. He says that she has a nose for secrets. The Doctor tells Ace the statue is made of a living metal — Validium — which is capable of great destruction.

Peinforte and her servant Richard withdraw from the statue to assess the strength of the police guarding it. The police are having their own problems, their radios are not working, the batteries are dead. Around the comet crash site, vents emerge from the ground spewing gas, causing the policemen to choke and fall unconscious.

The TARDIS materialises outside Windsor Castle in 1988. The Doctor and Ace follow a group of tourists on a guided tour. Seeing a no entry sign, they sneak into the castle. Hearing the bark of dogs, they see a woman coming towards them with several corgis. Although the Doctor does not recognise the woman, Ace immediately realises that it is the Queen Elizabeth II and drags him into hiding. However, when she tells him who it was, he races after the Queen, saying they need the armed forces and police on their side, and what better person could they ask? The Doctor and Ace are seized by security guards before they can get anywhere near the Queen. The Doctor informs them that they got into the castle by travelling in time and space, but they are incredulous. The Doctor tells them the fate of every living person is in danger, but the guards do not believe him. The Doctor dons a pair of oversized glasses and glaring at them intones, "you will believe me! you will let us go!" Distracted by this spectacle, the Doctor and Ace flee into the corridors of the castle. As they run, Ace sees a portrait of herself hanging on a stairwell wall. When she says she does not remember this happening, the Doctor tells her that it has not happened yet.

Richard asks Peinforte what she will do when she gains control of the Nemesis, and she replies that first she will exact revenge on that "predictable little man". She predicts that he will soon arrive, and tells Richard she knows the secret of the "nameless Doctor."

De Flores and his Nazis make their move for the Nemesis comet and see the unconscious policemen. He takes the bow case and places it on the comet, and within the Nemesis statue begins to glow. The Doctor and Ace arrive, and De Flores demands they hand over the arrow. The Doctor reveals that the bow and arrow give the Validium metal critical mass. The Doctor confronts De Flores and asks if he has observed the advanced technology, which has been used to attack the policemen, and the power blackouts that have been occurring over the last few days. De Flores threatens to shoot Ace if they do not tell him where the arrow is, but at this moment a large spacecraft lands near the crash site. The doors open and from within emerge a troop of Cybermen…

---

The Cyberleader recognises the Doctor, even though his appearance has changed, and tells the onlookers that the Cybermen had predicted his presence. The Nazis open fire on the Cybermen but their bullets are ineffective. The Cybermen open fire and drive the Nazis away. The Doctor says that this happened before, but before it was the Roundheads and Lady Peinforte. Peinforte shoots one of the Cybermen with a bow and arrow. De Flores finds one of her arrows and sees that it is gold-tipped. Peinforte and Richard withdraw, allowing the Nazis and the Cybermen to fight it out, hoping to retrieve the Nemesis in the aftermath. In the confusion, the Doctor and Ace manage to seize the silver bow and return to the TARDIS. Peinforte sees this and tries to shoot them, but her arrow thuds into the TARDIS door just as it dematerialises.

While Peinforte and Richard enter the town of Windsor, the Cybermen begin to cut the Nemesis statue free of the comet. The Doctor and Ace go back to Peinforte's house in 1638. The body of the mathematician has gone, and the chess pieces have also been moved. The Doctor tells Ace that although the mathematician was a genius, he had needed a little help to get started. The Doctor picks up a piece of paper from the desk and throws it into the fireplace. Making a further move on the chessboard, they leave.

Materialising back in the present day, the Doctor explains that Validium was created on Ancient Gallifrey by Omega and Rassilon as the ultimate defence. Some of it however left Gallifrey, and now they must stop Peinforte or anyone else reuniting the statue, the bow and the arrow. Using the bow to lead them, they proceed in the direction of the statue.

In Windsor, Peinforte and Richard are confronted by two thugs, who think they are mugging social workers. The Doctor finds and questions them later; they had been left naked in a tree.

As Richard is terrified by the sight of a bizarre creature, a llama, Peinforte tells him that if he does not help her retrieve the Nemesis, she will abandon him in this future time. He then sees that they are standing by a memorial statue. She tells him that it is his tomb, placed in the grounds of her own burial place. The arrow starts glowing and they realise that that is where the Cybermen have taken the Nemesis statue. As they scour the tomb for Nemesis, the Cybermen prepare to attack, but realising they are armed with gold arrows retreat. Opening up her grave, they see that it does not contain her bones.

Ace destroys the Cybermen vehicle with Nitro-9 explosive. De Flores strikes a deal with the Cyberleader to kill Peinforte and Richard in exchange for a share of control of Earth after its conquest. The Cybermen have no intention of honouring the deal, and plan to kill the Nazis after the death of Peinforte.

The Doctor tells Ace that every time the Nemesis comet approached Earth in its 25 year orbit, it caused destruction: in 1913, the eve of the First World War; 1938, Hitler annexes Austria; 1963 Kennedy assassinated, and now it is 1988. They use the tape deck scanner trying to find the cyber-fleet.

Opening up the grave fully, Peinforte gazes upon her own image shown on the Nemesis statue. However, De Flores and his man arrives with guns, and Richard has only one arrow left. In fear, he hands over the arrow to De Flores and drags Peinforte away leaving the Nazis in control of Nemesis. De Flores believes he now has all three parts of the Validium. Placing the arrow in the statues hands, it becomes more animated. The Cybermen arrive and ask De Flores where the bow is. When he opens the case he sees that he does not have it at all.

The Doctor sees a chameleon and realises the Cyber-fleet is shrouded, and making the adjustment to the tape deck reveals the entire fleet of Cyber-warships, thousands of them…

---

The Doctor decides to activate the Validium by taking the bow to the crypt. When Ace seems frightened, the Doctor tells her she can wait in the TARDIS, but she refuses and wants to accompany the Doctor.

Meanwhile, De Flores realises he has overplayed his hand and tries to negotiate with the Cyberleader. The Cyberleader orders his lieutenant to kill De Flores, but he throws gold dust in the leader's face and flees. The other Nazi however turns on De Flores and offers him to the Cybermen, asking to be made into a Cyberman himself. The two Nazis are then taken to be prepared for Cyber-conversion. As the Doctor and Ace arrive at the crypt, the jazz tape finishes playing and the Cybermen's communications begin working. The Doctor enters the crypt holding the bow, and manoeuvring past the Cybermen with Ace places the bow in the Statue's hands but snatches it away again. The statue awakens and begins to follow the bow.

Going back to 1638, the Doctor continues his chess game against his unknown opponent. Ace asks him who brought the Validium to Earth in the first place, and what is really going on but he remains silent. Taking a bag of gold coins, they leave.

Peinforte begins to rant about all power being hers and her intent to retrieve the Nemesis. They come to the road, and attempt to hitch a lift in a passing car. Richard stands with his thumb out but no cars stops for them. Seeing this fail, Peinforte steps into the middle of the road. A large car stops, and an American woman offers to take them into Windsor. She tells them that she is in England discovering her roots. Revealing she is descended from the 17th century Remington family, Peinforte calls them thieves and swindlers. Mentioning a Dorothea Remington, the American woman recognises the name, and Peinforte knows that Dorothea died in 1621 from a slow poison.

With the Cybermen set off after the Nemesis and the Doctor, De Flores is released from his bonds by his man, who had deceived the Cybermen into thinking he had betrayed the Nazi leader. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Ace materialise inside the hangar containing the comet. Soon the Nemesis statue arrives, and the Doctor gives it the bow. The Nemesis speaks to Ace telling her that it was fashioned by Peinforte into its current beautiful form, but that it has also had horrific forms in the past, and will again in the future. The Cybermen arrive and Ace shoots one down using a gold coin and a catapult. The Cybermen pursue her, but she manages to elude them. The Doctor sets the trajectory of the rocket sled containing the Nemesis, headed for the Cyber-fleet. Ace becomes trapped on a gantry between two Cybermen and the Cyberleader, with only a single remaining gold coin. The Cybermen lift their guns to shoot her, but she fires the gold coin at the Cyberleader and ducks, causing the other two Cybermen to shoot each other instead. The Nemesis asks the Doctor if she must destroy the entire Cyber-fleet, to which he says that she must. She asks the Doctor whether she will be needed again, or whether she will have her freedom, but the Doctor hushes her.

Ace arrives down from the gantry, but is surrounded by two more Cybermen. They demand that the Doctor hands the bow over to them, but the Doctor threatens to destroy the bow if they harm her. Placing it in front of the rocket sled engines, he grabs Ace. As the two Cybermen advance towards them, the engines fire killing the two Cybermen. However, up on the gantry the Cyberleader plucks the gold coin from its chest unit. De Flores arrives and picks up the bow. He speaks to the Nemesis, but she remains silent. The Cyberleader raises his gun and shoots De Flores dead, and demands that the Doctor hands over the bow. At this point, Peinforte and Richard arrive. Demanding the bow for herself, she asks Ace who the Doctor is, and whether she knows where he came from. Ace says that nobody knows who the Doctor is, but Peinforte says that she does. When Ace asks how, she says the Nemesis told her. The Doctor asks what will happen if he gives her the bow, to which Peinforte replies his power will be hers, but his secrets remain his own. Appearing to concede defeat, the Doctor says he is surrendering, but not to Peinforte, rather to the Cybermen. Peinforte threatens to reveal his secrets, so he calls her bluff. She says that she will tell them of Gallifrey, of the Old Time, the time of Chaos. However, the Cyberleader says that the secrets of the Time Lords are of no interest of the Cybermen.

The Cyberleader tells the Doctor to cancel the Nemesis's destructive capabilities. The Doctor asks the statue if she understands the Cyberleader's instructions, and she replies "perfectly". The triumphant Cyberleader tells the Doctor to set that statue's course to rendezvous with the Cyberfleet. He tells them that the Earth will become their new base planet, the new Mondas. Launching the Nemesis, Peinforte screams and throws herself into the rocket sled and merges with the Nemesis. The rocket sled takes off and heads out into space. It arrives in the midst of the Cyber-fleet and there is an enormous explosion, destroying all of the Cyber-warships. The Cyberleader asks how it is possible, and the Doctor replies that he merely asked if Nemesis had understood the instruction, but had not said anything about obeying them. The Cyberleader prepares to kill the Doctor, but Richard grabs the gold-tipped arrow from the TARDIS door, and stabs it into the Cyberleader's chest unit, finally killing it.

The Doctor and Ace return Richard to 1638. There, Richard and a Stuart woman perform a concert for them. Ace asks the Doctor who he really is, but he just puts a finger to his lips and listens to the music…

[edit] Continuity

[edit] The Doctor

In this story, Lady Peinforte claims to be the only one to know the Doctor's true identity. When Ace says she knows the Doctor is a Time Lord, Peinforte shakes her head conspiratorially. Neither this nor any further televised story elaborates, although in a deleted scene from Remembrance of the Daleks, the Doctor claims to be "far more than just another Time Lord"; further omissions from Survival would have featured the Master challenging the Doctor's identification as a Time Lord. These elements are all part of what fans have dubbed the Cartmel Masterplan, a long-term scheme by the show's script editor to return some mystery to the show by way of questioning certain aspects of continuity — in particular the Doctor's character. Although the series was cancelled before the plan could run its course, its spirit was continued in the subsequent New Adventures novel line. (See The Other.)

[edit] Cybermen

Although the Cybermen's weakness to gold was established in Revenge of the Cybermen (1975), the Cybermen in Silver Nemesis are far more vulnerable than usual. In Earthshock, broadcast only six years earlier, the Doctor had to grate gold filings directly into the Cyber Leader's chest unit then shoot it several times before it was defeated. In this serial, even a low-velocity impact with a gold (or gold plated) object proves instantly fatal to the Cybermen.

This is the last appearance of the Cybermen in the Classic series.

[edit] Recurring Themes

The Doctor comments, with apparent seriousness, that Lady Peinforte can use black magic, the first time the series refers to magic as anything more than trickery. The Curse of Fenric later implies that Fenric himself had to some degree manipulated these events, leaving open the question as to whether Peinforte used magic or merely believed she was doing so.

[edit] Production

Serial details by episode

Episode	Broadcast date	Run time	Viewership (in millions)
"Part One"	23 November 1988 (1988-11-23)	24:31	6.1
"Part Two"	30 November 1988 (1988-11-30)	24:12	5.2
"Part Three"	7 December 1988 (1988-12-07)	24:36	5.2
[2][3][4]

• Working titles for this story included The Harbinger and Nemesis.^[5]
• Permission was refused for filming at Windsor Castle. Scenes set there were instead shot at Arundel Castle.^[5]

[edit] Locations

• The scenes at the Gas Works where The Doctor and Ace meet and combat the Cybermen were filmed on the site that later became The O₂ (formerly the Millennium Dome)

[edit] Casting

• Fiona Walker previously played Kala in The Keys of Marinus.
• The first episode of this serial features a brief guest appearance by the British jazz musician Courtney Pine as himself.
• In this serial, the Doctor briefly encounters Queen Elizabeth II, played by an actress. The producers attempted to get the real monarch to appear on the programme (just as members of the British Royal Family had appeared as themselves on Coronation Street), but arrangements could not be agreed.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Broadcast and reception

Episodes two and three were the second and third respectively of the series ever to be premiered outside of the United Kingdom (the first being The Five Doctors), being shown as part of a compilation broadcast of the story on New Zealand's TVNZ, after part one had shown in the UK but prior to the other two being transmitted there.^[5]

Silver Nemesis inspired the first section of Kylie Minogue's concert Fevertour 2002^{[citation needed]}. This section called Silvanemesis includes a lot of futuristic details such as robotic dancers and the transformation of Kylie into a Cyberwoman. Her stylist and friend William Baker recognised having been widely inspired by the series Doctor Who in his work.^{[citation needed]} Kylie joined David Tennant in the 2007 Doctor Who Christmas Special, "Voyage of the Damned", playing the companion Astrid Peth.

[edit] Commercial releases

• On 3 May 1993 an extended version of this three-part serial was released on VHS. Apart from featuring footage not shown in the original broadcast, the video included a short documentary looking back at the production of the adventure.
• This serial will be released on DVD as part of a Box Set with Revenge of the Cybermen on August 9th 2010 ^[6]
• The DVD will include only the original three part broadcast version, much to the consternation of a number of Doctor Who fans who consider the extended version to be the definitive one. Instead, the footage from the extended version will be included in the deleted scenes section.

 

 

The Only Con Held in a shed!

 

The Whoovers are a friendly group of people from across Derbyshire drawn together by one thing - an admiration of the television series Doctor Who and its various spin-offs. We usually meet on the first Friday of each month and after the very friendly and informal meeting we usually retire to The Old Spa Inn just up the road on Abbey Street to continue the discussions. The meetings are full of fun stuff like quizzes, the chance to see various rare clips from the shows history, The Zero Room - our version of Room 101, Desert Island Docs (our version of Desert Island Discs) and a raffle to win Doctor Who merchandise. Many of the members are extremely knowledgeable about the series, but you certainly don't need to be an expert to attend or even enjoy the meetings. From time to time the meetings even invite a special guest from the world of Doctor Who - actors, writers, directors, etc. You get the chance to meet the people who make Doctor Who, get their autograph and even have your photo taken with them. The group also organises occassional excursions - 'Wholidays' - to places of 'Who' interest and have also just held our very first Doctor Who convention - Whooverville - which included a whole handful of special guests. Sound sad and geeky? - Far from it! The content of the meetings varies from serious (though never desperately so) to downright hilarious. The Whoovers is only one of many fan groups which meet regularly up and down the country, but we happen to think it's one of the very best. Whether you're a new fan or an old one, come along and you'll be made most welcome!

---

Whoovers fan group on Facebook! Why not chat & message other Doctor Who fans via the Whoovers fan group on Facebook. Simply click the logo on the right and log in/join!

Revenge of the Cybermen was the fifth and final story of Season 12 (although it was not originally intended as the finale). The story saw the return of the Cybermen as lead villains for the first time since the 1968 story The Invasion, and their only appearance (barring flashbacks) until Earthshock in Season 19.

It was further significant for being the first Doctor Who story released on home video.

Contents [show] 1 Synopsis 2 Plot 2.1 Part One 2.2 Part Two 2.3 Part Three 2.4 Part Four 3 Cast 4 Crew 5 References 5.1 Cybermen 5.2 Metals 5.3 Space stations 5.4 Transport technology 5.5 Time travel 5.6 Weapons 6 Story notes 6.1 Ratings 6.2 Myths 6.3 Filming locations 6.4 Production errors 7 Continuity 8 Timeline 9 Home video and audio releases 9.1 DVD releases 9.2 VHS and Betamax releases 9.3 Laserdisc releases 10 Novelisation and its audiobook 11 External links 12 Footnotes

edit Synopsis

Everyone but a few men of the crew of Nerva Beacon have been killed by Cybermats. The Doctor realises that the Cybermen are close by and are hoping to destroy the planet Voga, the famous planet of gold. Gold is lethal to the Cybermen and Voga must be destroyed to enable their survival. The Doctor is captured and is sent to Voga with two humans, all three with bombs strapped to them. The Cybermen hope to detonate them in a sensitive spot in order to destroy Voga. But the Doctor manages to defuse the bombs, so instead the Cybermen decide to fill Nerva Beacon with bombs and crash into Voga. But the Doctor gets to Nerva and prevents it from destroying the planet of gold. Meanwhile the Cybermen retreat into their ship and the Vogans destroy it with a missile of their own.

edit Plot

[edit] Part One

The Doctor, Harry and Sarah Jane use the Time Ring, spinning their way through time and space back to Space Station Nerva. They land back in the control room they left when they last beamed down to Earth, but Sarah notices the TARDIS is not there. The Doctor tells Sarah that the time ship is drifting back in time towards them and they just need to wait for her to catch up. A door slides open, revealing a dead body, and many more beyond, littering the outer ring of the station.

In a communications room, crewman Warner warns off an approaching spaceship away from Nerva Beacon, which is under quarantine due to a plague. Professor Kellman, a planetary surveyor, asks Commander Stevenson how long they can run a 50-man station with three men, but the other officer, Lester, thinks they can continue to manage. Nerva is on a 30-year assignment to warn ships away from Voga, the new asteroid it is orbiting, until its presence is updated on all the starcharts of inbound ships.

The time travellers find a sealed door leading to Section Q. The Doctor surmises that this is the same station they left, but thousands of years in the past, before the solar flares that devastated Earth. As the Doctor tries to get through the door, the trio fail to see a silver, snake-like creature — a cybermat — crawling around the bodies behind them.

Somewhere else, an alien tries to contact Nerva, and barely gets through to Warner before he is shot by two more of his own kind. The only place the signal could have come from is Voga, but Kellman tells Warner that he set up the transmat station there and spent six months cataloguing its rocks. Voga had drifted into the solar system 50 years before and had been captured by Jupiter's gravity. An asteroid of that size drifting between star systems could not support life and he warns against going down to Voga and spreading the plague. Warner logs the call anyway. The Doctor manages to open the sealed door, which activates an alarm.

On Voga, Vorus, leader of the Guardians of the mines, orders his men to bury the dead Vogan that was shot earlier. Magrik, his aide, tells him that the dead Vogan was frightened of Vorus's plan. Vorus tells him that they can trust their agent on Nerva. Gold buys humans, and they have more gold on Voga than in the rest of the galaxy. The reason the agent had not contacted them is probably because the Cybermen are monitoring transmissions.

In the communications room, the Cybermat attacks Warner, biting him before it is thrown off. Warner collapses, glowing veins appearing on his face while Kellman enters and pulls the magnetic log tape from the console. Meanwhile, the Doctor, Harry and Sarah have reached the forward control room, mere seconds before Lester and Stevenson enter levelling their weapons at them. The door behind them slides open to reveal the communications room, and Kellman brings Stevenson to Warner's fallen form.

When Stevenson sees that his crewman has the plague, he prepares to shoot Warner to stop the infection's spread, but the Doctor stops him. The Doctor lies, saying that they are a medical team sent from Earth, and convince Stevenson to let Harry examine Warner. They take Warner to the crew quarters as Kellman returns to his own room and spies on the Doctor and Stevenson in the communications room using an assembled device. Stevenson tells the Doctor about the asteroid, formerly named Neo Phobos, but renamed Voga by Kellman. The Doctor recognises the name: Voga, the Planet of Gold, and realises that Cybermen are involved. Stevenson says the Cybermen died out centuries before, but the Doctor points out they merely vanished after attacking Voga at the end of the last Cyber-War. Hearing all this, Kellman contacts a Cybership nearby, its crew commanded by a Cyber Leader with a black helmet. The ship moves towards Nerva.

Warner is dead. When the Doctor examines the body he finds two puncture wounds, indicating that Warner was injected with poison and confirming the Doctor's suspicion that there is no plague. The Doctor says that if he had seen Warner earlier he might have been able to use Nerva's transmat to filter out the poison from his system. The Doctor has another suspicion; investigating Kellman's quarters, he finds the communications device as well as some gold. The Doctor hides when Kellman returns, but Kellman realises that someone has been inside the room. He sabotages the room, electrifying the floor and sending gas pouring up from it. Keeping off the floor, the Doctor reaches the door to open it with his sonic screwdriver. Meanwhile, Sarah is attacked by the cybermat.

[edit] Part Two

The Doctor escapes Kellman's room and hears Sarah scream. He throws the Cybermat to the floor and kills it with some gold dust, but Sarah has already been bitten. The Doctor carries her to the transmat chamber, handing her to Harry, and prepares to beam them down to Voga and back. However, Kellman has taken the transmat's pentalium drive. The Doctor reconfigures the transmat to bypass the sabotaged system while Stevenson and Lester go and confront Kellman. On Voga, Vorus observes a giant rocket, the Sky Striker. He tells Magrik that his agent has informed them that the Cybermen are heading for the beacon. Vorus wants the Sky Striker fitted with its bomb head in four hours.

The Doctor jury rigs the transmat, and Harry and Sarah beam down to Voga. With the poison filtered out, Sarah instantly recovers. As Harry notices that the cavern floor is littered with gold, Vogans arrive and capture them. Harry and Sarah are brought before Vorus, who wants to know who is still alive on Nerva. However, the answers will have to wait. Harry and Sarah are taken away while Vorus answers a call from Councillor Tyrum, who arranges for them to meet.

Lester and Stevenson capture Kellman. The Doctor explains that the Cybermen fear Voga because gold, as a non-corrodible substance, plates their breathing apparatus and suffocates them. The Doctor cannot get Harry and Sarah back without the pentalium drive, but Kellman feigns ignorance, trying to buy time until the Cybermen arrive. The Doctor uses a control box he found in Kellman's room to activate a Cybermat, threatening Kellman with it until he reveals that the drive is around his neck.

Harry and Sarah are chained up in a cave, where Harry notes that the chains are solid gold, which is soft metal that perhaps they can file through. Meanwhile, Tyrum tells Vorus that he knows that aliens have come to Voga. He also knows that Vorus wants Voga to emerge as a trading power again and not hide from the Cybermen, who apparently disappeared centuries ago. Because of this, Tyrum no longer trusts Vorus or the Guardians, and will send his Militia to take over the mines. Vorus is furious, but Tyrum says his troops have orders to crush any resistance.

Fighting breaks out in the mines between the Guardians and the Militia. Vorus tells Magrik to keep Tyrum from finding out about the Sky Striker, and to kill the two humans immediately. Harry and Sarah have managed to free themselves, however, and get away before the execution team arrives. They are pursued by more Guardians, who fire at them. Harry and Sarah are cornered and about to be shot when Militia troops appear, forcing the Guardians to stand down.

The Doctor has repaired the transmat, but is unable to lock on to Harry and Sarah as they have left the receptor circle. At that point, Lester detects an incoming ship, but it does not respond to their signals. As the Cybership docks, the Doctor recognises it for what it is, but is unable to lock the hatch. The Cybermen come through, impervious to gunfire, and shoot all three men down.

[edit] Part Three

The Cyber Leader tells Kellman that the three men are not dead, merely neutralised, as they are necessary to their plan. Kellman set the transmat receptors mere yards from a shaft that leads into the core of Voga. As the environment is hostile to Cybermen, the three men will carry explosives down to Voga and destroy the asteroid. Kellman insists on going down to Voga first to check that the transmat is functioning properly and the Cyber Leader beams him down. There, he runs into some Militia. Not realising the distinction between them and the Guardians, he demands to see Vorus and is taken away while trying to warn them that they are all in danger. Meanwhile, Harry and Sarah are brought before Tyrum and tell their story. When Harry mentions the cybermats, Tyrum asks Harry and Sarah to accompany him to confront Vorus.

The Doctor wonders what Kellman's reward is, if it is not Voga's gold. He taunts the Cyber Leader, saying that the Cybermen were finished once humans discovered their weakness to gold and ended the Cyber-Wars. Cyber Leader tells the Doctor that is the reason why Voga must be destroyed before the Cybermen begin their campaign again. The Cyber Leader says that Kellman was promised the rule of the solar system after the Cybermen had conquered it.

With Cyberbombs strapped to their backs, the Doctor, Lester and Stevenson are briefed. They are to plant the bombs in the core of the planet, after which they have 14 minutes to return and escape via transmat. If they try to remove their harnesses before they reach the target zone, a secondary explosion will kill them. Their progress will be followed by radar. The three beam down, accompanied by two Cybermen. Militia arrive and start to fire on the Cybermen, who make short work of the Vogans. None of the three men believe that the Cyber Leader will keep his word about letting them escape, but they have to keep moving towards the target zone as they are being monitored. On Nerva, the Cyber Leader declares that Kellman is of no further use to them.

Tyrum questions Kellman, who tells him that he and Vorus were working to lure the Cybermen to the beacon, which Vorus has targeted with a rocket. At that moment, a Militia man arrives to tell Tyrum about the arrival of the Cybermen, and how their weapons are useless. Kellman urges them to use the rocket. Tyrum orders his men to use every weapon they can while he speaks to Vorus. Harry tells Sarah to get back to Nerva and warn the Doctor while he tries to stop the rocket from being fired.

When Tyrum tells Vorus about the Cybermen on Voga, he shows Tyrum the Sky Striker, which he has been working on for two years. However, with the Cybermen already on Voga, they have no time to get it ready. Vorus claims his plans were to just free his people from the fear of the Cybermen and bring them back into the light. Tyrum scoffs, seeing as Vorus has allied himself with Kellman, a double agent and murderer, motivated only by the promise of gold. Harry suggests finding another way into the core to stop the bombs.

The Cybermen continue their slaughter of the Vogans as the bomb timer ticks down even further. Sarah transmats back to Nerva, where she overhears the Cybermen monitoring the three men's progress. However, the deeper the three men go, the heavier the concentration of gold interferes with the radar. The men continue onward, however to the centre of the asteroid.

Harry and Kellman, meanwhile, are crawling down a cross shaft towards the same location. With the exit blocked, Harry pushes against the rocks, causing a rock slide. Kellman pushes Harry out of the way, but is crushed to death by a boulder, while on the other side, rocks rain down on the Doctor. Harry exits the shaft and finds the Doctor unconscious. Not realising the danger, Harry tries to unbuckle the Doctor's harness.

[edit] Part Four

Fortunately, Harry is stopped by Lester. The Doctor awakens and conceives a plan. Stevenson will continue on and create a radar trail, while the rest use the cross shaft to surprise and attack the Cybermen with gold. The Doctor and Harry jump the two Cybermen, trying to push gold dust into their chest plates. However, the Cybermen are too strong, and Harry and the Doctor are forced to retreat. Lester leaps onto the Cybermen and undoes his harness, the explosion killing both himself and the Cybermen.

With the loss of contact, the Cyber Leader orders immediate detonation. Sarah tries to stop them but is thrown to the floor. However, when the button is pressed, no explosion follows. The Doctor has managed to disarm the countdown device, which allows him to release his harness safely. With Sarah tied up, the Cyber Leader now plans to send Nerva, loaded with more Cyberbombs, into Voga's centre to destroy it.

Magrik tells Vorus that the Sky Striker is now ready, but before he can launch it, the Doctor asks them to give him 15 minutes to transmat to Nerva and deal with the Cybermen himself, armed with a bag of gold dust. If he does not contact them by that time, then they can launch the rocket.

The Doctor reaches Nerva and frees Sarah while the Cybermen are loading the bombs. He takes the Cybermat and its control box, filling the Cybermat with gold dust. The Doctor sends the Cybermat to attack a Cyberman, injecting him with the dust and killing him. As Nerva begins to move towards Voga, Vorus sees this and attempts to fire the rocket. Tyrum shoots Vorus, but as the Guardian dies, he triggers the launch.

The Doctor and Sarah's attack on the remaining Cybermen fails; The Doctor is forced by the Cyberleader to tie himself and Sarah up and they are left to perish in the crash. However, the Sky Striker is approaching just as fast. The Doctor manages to untie them both with a trick learned from Harry Houdini, and contacts Voga, instructing them to steer the rocket towards the Cybership that is just leaving. The Sky Striker veers away from Nerva and destroys the Cybership instead. However, the beacon is still on a collision course. The Doctor manages to unlock the gyro controls, skimming Nerva just above Voga's surface until they reach the other side of the asteroid and open space.

The TARDIS materialises in the control room just as Harry arrives via transmat. The Doctor tells his companions to hurry up; he's received a message from Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart through the space-time telegraph the Doctor left him, which means it, is a grave emergency. Although Harry asks if they should say good-bye to the Commander, Sarah tells him not to argue. The three rush into the TARDIS and it dematerialises.

edit Cast

• The Doctor - Tom Baker
• Sarah Jane Smith - Elisabeth Sladen
• Harry Sullivan - Ian Marter
• Commander Stevenson - Ronald Leigh-Hunt
• Lester - William Marlowe
• Kellman - Jeremy Wilkin
• Tyrum - Kevin Stoney
• Vorus - David Collings
• Warner - Alec Wallis
• Magrik - Michael Wisher
• Sheprah - Brian Grellis
• Cyberleader - Christopher Robbie
• First Cyberman - Melville Jones

edit Crew

• Assistant Floor Manager - Rosemary Hester, Russ Karel
• Costumes - Prue Handley
• Designer - Roger Murray-Leach
• Film Cameraman - Elmer Cossey
• Film Editor - Sheila S Tomlinson
• Incidental Music - Carey Blyton, Peter Howell
• Make-Up - Cecile Hay-Arthur
• Producer - Philip Hinchcliffe
• Production Assistant - John Bradburn
• Production Unit Manager - George Gallaccio
• Script Editor - Robert Holmes
• Special Sounds - Dick Mills
• Studio Lighting - Derek Slee
• Studio Sound - Norman Bennett
• Theme Arrangement - Delia Derbyshire
• Title Music - Ron Grainer
• Visual Effects - Jim Ward

edit References

[edit] Cybermen

• The Doctor says to the Cybermen, "You've no home planet, no influence, nothing.", which may refer to either Mondas or Telos.
• The Doctor refers to the Cybermen calling them "total machine creatures".

[edit] Metals

• The Cybermen plan to destroy Voga because of its high density of gold.

[edit] Space stations

• The Doctor, Sarah and Harry have been to the 'beacon' before, in the future when it becomes Nerva Beacon.

[edit] Transport technology

• Phobic energy is associated with recent transmat use.

[edit] Time travel

• The Doctor's TARDIS has been travelling back through time to reach the Doctor and his companions.
• Once the Doctor and his companions have finished using the time ring, it disappears.

[edit] Weapons

• During the Cyber-Wars, the glittergun was used to great effect by humanity.
• The Armageddon Convention banned Cyberbombs, two of which could destroy Voga.

edit Story notes

• This story features a new form of Cybermat.
• This is the first story to feature the Cyber-Leader.
• The BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Peter Howell, later to become one of the series' regular incidental music composers, made his uncredited debut on this story when he was asked by producer Philip Hinchcliffe to add to, and enhance, the score provided by Carey Blyton.
• This story had a working titles of; The Revenge Of The Cybermen, Return Of The Cybermen, additionally;

• Part 1 had a working title of: The Beacon In Space
• Part 2 had a working title of: The Plague Carriers
• Part 3 had a working title of: The Gold Miners
• Part 4 had a working title of: The Battle For The Nerva

• A number of sets in this story were reused from The Ark in Space, which was recorded immediately before it.
• The Cybermen's voices were provided for the first time by the actors inside the costumes.
• Five of this story's guest cast had played notable roles earlier in Doctor Who's history:

• Kevin Stoney in The Daleks' Master Plan and in the previous Cyberman story, The Invasion
• Christopher Robbie in The Mind Robber
• Ronald Leigh-Hunt in The Seeds of Death
• William Marlowe as Harry Mailer in The Mind of Evil.
• Michael Wisher would go on to play Davros in Genesis of the Daleks, which came after Revenge of the Cybermen in production order even though it was aired prior to this serial.

• The Vogan seal is reused by designer Roger Murray-Leach in The Deadly Assassin.
• Between the broadcast of Episodes 1 and 2, William Hartnell, the First Doctor, passed away. Ironically he died during broadcast of a serial that served to reintroduce the Cybermen -- his final solo appearance as the Doctor occurred during the serial that introduced them.

[edit] Ratings

• Part 1 - 9.5 million viewers
• Part 2 - 8.3 million viewers
• Part 3 - 8.9 million viewers
• Part 4 - 9.4 million viewers

[edit] Myths

to be added

[edit] Filming locations

• Wookey Hole Caves, Wells, Somerset
• BBC Television Centre (Puppet theatre, TC1, TC8), Shepherd's Bush, London

[edit] Production errors

• The symbol seen hanging in the Vogan audience chamber (and smaller versions on the Vogan costumes), would later be re-used in The Deadly Assassin, and become better known thereafter as the Seal of Rassilon. (The Time Lords may have had some influence on Voga during the time before their Non-Intervention policy.)
• The launching of the Skystriker is represented by rather obvious NASA stock footage of a Saturn V rocket taking off.
• The Doctor was wearing a long brown coat and hat at the end of the previous story, but they've vanished when he materializes.
• Lester wears his interplanetary Space command insignia upside down.
• When the Doctor enters the TARDIS in episode four the paper printout of the space/time telegraph can be seen hanging on a hook just inside the door.
• At the end of the story, the Cyber-ship explodes into flames, yet oxygen is need for fire, and The Cybermen do not breathe, as seen in The Moonbase so why would the cybermen have oxygen on there ship? they may take prisoners

edit Continuity

• This story takes place after the Cyber-Wars, which started in 2526 in DW: Earthshock. The Cybermen of that story look at video of past encounters with the Doctor and watch him deliver the "no planet" line. It later becomes clear (Attack of the Cybermen) that the Cybermen have had access to time travel technology.
• The Cybermen's first home planet Mondas was destroyed in DW: The Tenth Planet, while their second home planet Telos was destroyed in BFA: Telos, which was made some time after this story.
• The discrepancy over how many moons Jupiter should have is resolved in EDA: To the Slaughter.

edit Timeline

• This story occurs after MA: A Device of Death
• This story occurs before ST: Nanomorphosis

edit Home video and audio releases

[edit] DVD releases

• This story was first released on DVD in the UK on 9th August 2010 as part of the Cybermen boxset. The one disc set includes a restored version of the story, as well as the following special features:

• Commentary by Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane), David Collings (Vorus) and Philip Hinchcliffe (Producer).
• The Tin Man And The Witch
• Cheques, Lies And Videotape
• BBC News Location Report
• Coming Soon Trailer
• Radio Times Billings
• Production Subtitles
• Photo Gallery

• Editing for DVD release completed by Doctor Who Restoration Team.

[edit] VHS and Betamax releases

Revenge of the Cybemen will be released on DVD in the UK on 9th August 2010, along with Silver Nemesis. Released on VHS and Betamax as Doctor Who: Revenge of the Cybermen. This story was the first Doctor Who story to be released to the home video market.

• UK October 1983 (edited)
• UK May 1984 (edited)
• UK April 1999 (unedited)
• Australia January 1987 (edited)
• Australia December 1999 (unedited)
• US December 1986 (movie format)
• Japan December 1983 (movie format)

Synopsis

An alien craft bearing the imperious and ruthless Dominators arrives on the peaceful planet of Dulkis. The senior, Navigator Rago, is at odds with Probationer Toba, making for an uneasy partnership. The craft lands on the Island of Death, a nuclear test site that now houses an anti-war museum, and soon absorbs all the radiation on the island. The robotic Quarks are then sent out by the Dominators to prepare bore holes into the planet’s crust, since the Dominators wish to convert the planet into rocket fuel. Toba uses the Quarks to fire on and kill three indolent, rich adventure seekers who stumble across his project. Their pilot Cully, however, survives by hiding himself away, though the craft that brought him to the island is destroyed. Rago is furious that these potential slaves have just been wasted.

The TARDIS has arrived on another part of the island and the Second Doctor and his companions Jamie and Zoe begin to look around. The Doctor has been to Dulkis before and is looking forward to a good holiday when they hear the explosion of the craft being destroyed. They take shelter in the museum building where they meet three other newly arrived Dulcians, Educator Balan and his young charges Teel and Kando. All are puzzled that the radiation reading on the Island reads nil, since it should be radioactive after the nuclear explosion 172 years earlier, and since that time the Dulcian civilisation has rejected all weapons. Cully arrives too, and tells them about the murderous Dominators and their robots. Balan does not accept this: he knows the son of the Director of the ruling council is well known as a con artist.

The Quarks have meanwhile marked out their drill sites, and begin work on drilling the outer bore holes. However, their power supply seems limited, and Rago is very keen to conserve their energy supplies to vital activities only. This actually saves the Doctor and Jamie when they are captured by a patrol of Quarks rather than killed, and taken to the Dominator ship for questioning and scanning. A scan of Jamie is presumed to apply to them both and to the Dulcian race as a whole, who are thus described as possible but not definite for conversion into a slave force. When it is time for an intelligence test the Doctor feigns stupidity to prove their worthlessness. He also fails to use a weapon from the Dulcian museum, falsely claiming such military technology has been lost to the Dulcians. The Doctor and Jamie are freed as worthless idiots.

Cully has contacted his father, Director Senex, who orders him to recharge Balan’s travel capsule and use it to return to the Capital City. He takes Zoe with him on the journey to the Council Chamber, where the discussion lacks focus and purpose. Senex refuses to believe that Cully is telling the truth, despite Zoe’s protests, so Cully steals a travel pod and heads back to the island with Zoe to get proof of their story. At the same time the Doctor and Jamie take Balan’s pod to the Capitol City. They are angry that Cully and Zoe have been allowed to return to danger and have real trouble convincing the Council of the threat which the Dominators pose, with the Dulcians repeatedly demonstrating a totally pacifist stance. The true danger is only revealed when the Council obtains a visual image of the survey station near the museum which the Quarks destroyed on Toba’s instructions – another case of wasted power in the eyes of an increasingly exasperated Rago.

The Dominators have meanwhile captured Balan, Teel and Kando, using them for further tests on their species, which the Dominators assume are a higher life-form than the Doctor. They are assigned to work as slaves in the drilling sites under the supervision of the Quarks. Zoe and Cully are soon captured too and added to the slave force, but find Balan and Kando totally opposed to using force against the overseeing Quarks. Over time, however, they all start to falter under the weight of the burden of digging the bore hole, with Balan collapsing first. Cully manages to sneak away back to the museum and capture a laser weapon stored there as an exhibit.

The Doctor and Jamie have meanwhile taken control of a travel pod and steer it back to the Island of Death. Jamie links up with Cully at the museum while the Doctor is captured by Quarks and taken with the slave force back to the Dominator ship. Cully uses the gun to destroy a Quark, prompting another of Toba’s rages. The museum is destroyed in retaliation, which once more enfuriates Rago. He orders the Quarks to hold the Doctor and Zoe for further tests while Balan, Kando, and Teel are sent to excavate to the central bore site.

Jamie and Cully survived the explosion in the museum and are hiding in a nuclear bunker below the main building. After a struggle they succeed in opening the hatch above them. They survey the area and succeed in crushing a Quark with a boulder. An angry Toba is alerted via an alarm on the ship and heads off to investigate how another Quark has been destroyed, leaving the Doctor and Zoe free to roam the Dominator ship and work out more about its power source. Jamie and Cully remain free and use the opportunity to attack other Quarks in a series of guerrilla raids.

The Dulcian Council debates the situation and not even Tensa, Chairman of the Emergencies Committee, can spur them into decisive action. The key moment comes when Rago himself uses the travel pod appropriated by the Doctor to travel to the Capitol with a Quark. The robot kills Tensa on command. Rago says that the fittest Dulcians will now all be converted into a slave force to use on the Dominator homeworld, with the Quarks used there redeployed to the front line of their expanding empire. Those not selected will be left on Dulkis to die, as the planet is doomed. Having finished his ultimatum, Rago stalks away.

Toba now returns to the ship, with his slaves in tow, and demands to know who destroyed the Quark. Balan is killed for refusing to answer, and the Doctor is selected to die next. Luckily for him Rago returns and is incensed that Toba has wasted more lives and not even begun work on digging the central bore hole even if the four perimeter ones have been completed. Toba is sent to complete the drilling and prepare the bore rockets, using the Quarks and the Doctor, Zoe, Teel and Kando as slaves; while Rago focuses on a precious seed device that is intended to be dropped down the central bore hole. Rago also hears from the Fleet Leader that no Dulcian slave force is to be assembled: all the Dulcians are now to stay on the planet to die when it is destroyed.

The dig proceeds with the Doctor and the other slaves making some progress, but when Toba abandons his watch post Jamie and Cully seize their opportunity and disable another Quark to enable the freedom of their friends. The Doctor has now worked out the Dominator scheme: a nuclear fission seed will be dropped down the bore hole which will convert the entire planet into a radioactive mass ideal for use in powering the Dominator fleet. The four outer bores are for launching rockets through the planet’s crust – which is especially thin at the point of the Island – and will cause volcanoes to erupt; while the seed will then be used to detonate the volcanoes being created and begin a radioactive chain-reaction. Their collective response is to capture the seed and they begin digging a perpendicular tunnel which should reach the central bore hole and enable them to steal the deadly device before it can detonate. However, there is little that can be done to stop the volcano creation. Jamie and Cully support this effort by continuing to attack and destroy Quarks with homemade bombs. This has the desired effect of totally fracturing the relationship between Rago and Toba, as they argue about priorities rather than prioritising the dig, but yet the bore hole is still ultimately completed and the seed primed.

The access tunnel scheme is successful and the Doctor intercepts the seed during its descent, telling his friends that it cannot be defused. Cully, Teel and Kando are told to flee in the remaining travel pod, while Jamie and Zoe are sent to the TARDIS to wait. The Doctor runs to the Dominator ship and manages to smuggle the seed on board before the craft lifts off. It soon departs and the Dominators’ last vision is of the seed device rolling on the floor toward them. The Doctor watches the Dominator ship being destroyed and then heads back to the TARDIS where he and his two companions must depart in a hurry to avoid the advancing lava flows from the new volcanoes

The Doctor and Amy Pond  travel to the oldest planet in the universe where a legendary message turns out to be another "calling card" of River Song. Following the coordinates from the message, they arrive at Roman Britain in 102 AD and find River posing as Cleopatra. River explains that she has received warning of the destruction of the TARDIS from a painting by Vincent van Gogh ("Vincent and the Doctor") that in 1941 reached Winston Churchill and Professor Bracewell ("Victory of the Daleks"). Churchill had attempted to warn the Doctor himself, but the TARDIS instead connected his call to River; she subsequently escaped from prison and encountered Liz 10 ("The Beast Below"), who had Van Gogh's painting in her collection, and then used a vortex manipulator to transport herself to the oldest planet then to the coordinates in the painting. The Doctor realises the painting and destruction of the TARDIS may be connected to the "Pandorica", a fabled prison for the universe's deadliest being, and rationalises that it must be stored in a memorable location, the site of Stonehenge.

At Stonehenge, the Doctor, Amy, and River find a passage to an underground area, which the Doctor terms "the Underhenge". Inside, they find the Pandorica, a room-sized metal box outfitted with every type of lock imaginable. The Doctor and River become concerned when they discover that the Pandorica is opening from inside and transmitting a message across time and space, drawing many of the Doctor's foes to Earth. River warns that "everything that ever hated [the Doctor] is coming tonight". The Doctor refuses to flee and instead asks River to seek help from the nearby Roman legion while he remains with the Pandorica. She finds the legion's commander reluctant, though one mysterious centurion and fifty others do volunteer.

Back underground, while Amy questions the Doctor about the engagement ring she has found, the pair are attacked by the debris of a Cyberman's suit trying to find a new host. The Doctor is stunned and Amy sedated with a flechette. She runs away and is rescued by the mysterious centurion, who turns out to be Rory Williams. The revived Doctor is baffled to find Rory alive, since he is supposed to have been erased from history by a crack in the universe ("Cold Blood"). Rory is even more confused and says he simply remembers dying one second and being a Roman soldier the next.

As more enemies gather in orbit, the Doctor temporarily delays the aliens and instructs River to bring the TARDIS to Stonehenge. Although shown to be an expert TARDIS pilot ("The Time of Angels"), River now finds the machine impossible to control and gets locked on course for Amy's house on 26 June 2010 - the very date of the time energy explosion that caused the cracks in the universe ("Flesh and Stone"). Whilst she ventures outside, the scanner screen suddenly cracks into the same shape as the other cracks in the universe, while an ominous voice declares "silence will fall". River finds large burn-marks on the lawn, and then begins to explore Amy's bedroom, still full of representations of the Doctor and the TARDIS. She also finds elements such as Pandora's box and the Roman soldiers within Amy's drawings and books. She relays this to the Doctor, who starts to worry they might all be imaginary constructs taken from Amy's mind to entrap him, and believing their own cover story until they are activated.

Rory meanwhile has an emotional conversation with Amy as he tries to connect with her using the engagement ring that he had left aboard the TARDIS, but she is still unable to remember him. The TARDIS begins to malfunction dangerously. Upon discovery of the date to which River has been taken, the Doctor orders her to get out of that timezone, but the TARDIS is now controlled remotely. He urges her to get out, as the TARDIS engines are supposed to shut down automatically when no one is on board, but she finds herself locked in.

Suddenly, Rory and the 'legionaries' with the Doctor are activated: they are Autons. The Rory Auton remains with Amy, struggling to retain his human consciousness and stop himself from killing her. Shortly after she remembers who he is, he loses control and shoots her. Meanwhile, the other Autons capture the Doctor and take him to the now-open Pandorica, which proves to be empty. Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, and other enemies arrive and reveal that they have formed an alliance and built the Pandorica as a prison for the Doctor, as they believe he is about to destroy the universe. The Doctor pleads that they have made a mistake and the TARDIS, not him, is about to destroy the universe but the aliens refuse to believe that anyone else can pilot the TARDIS.

River frantically manages to hot-wire the TARDIS door, but finds her way blocked by a stone surface. She declares, "I'm sorry, my love," as the TARDIS goes critical and explodes. Rory is still cradling the lifeless Amy. The Pandorica closes on the Doctor, and a dramatic reveal shows explosions surrounding the Earth, which slowly fades to black as silence falls.

Following from the cliffhanger of the previous episode, the Doctor is sealed in the Pandorica, a prison designed for him by his greatest foes and baited by elements of Amy's childhood imagination, while River Song is trapped in the TARDIS as it explodes, triggering the end of the universe. As the episode begins, the Earth, Moon, and what appears to be the Sun are all that remain in a starless black void. In 102 AD, the Auton replica of Rory, having shot Amy, is still holding her lifeless body when a future version of the Doctor, using a Vortex Manipulator, briefly appears and gives Rory his sonic screwdriver, with instructions to open the Pandorica. Rory releases the imprisoned Doctor, who places Amy inside the Pandorica where she will be revived and held in stasis. Rory, ageless due to his Auton nature, stays with the Pandorica, guarding it through nearly two millennia and creating a mythology around the box that survives to the present day.

The Doctor jumps forward in time to 1996, and provides hints to the young Amelia Pond—who has dreams of a star-filled sky—that lead her to the British Museum, where the Pandorica is on display. Amelia's touch opens the Pandorica, releasing her older self. Rory, now a security guard at the museum, arrives just in time to save the Doctor, Amy and Amelia from a fossilized Dalek. After an emotional reunion, the Doctor uses the Vortex Manipulator to pass his screwdriver to Rory in the past and rescue River from the TARDIS. The group flees through the museum, purused by the Dalek, which the Doctor surmises has been re-activated by the light of the Pandorica. They meet a mortally wounded version of the Doctor from twelve minutes in the future, who whispers something to his past self and dies. The Doctor explains that a fragment of the original, star-filled universe is inside the Pandorica, and if they can transfer it to every point of the collapsing universe simultaneously, they may be able to "reboot" reality. He is then shot by the Dalek, and jumps twelve minutes into the past. Rory and Amy escape, while River confronts the Dalek- which uncharacteristically begs for mercy when told her name.

After jumping back twelve minutes, the Doctor did not die, but instead directed his earlier self to create a diversion, giving the wounded Doctor the opportunity to program the Pandorica to fly into the Sun-like source of light: the TARDIS, exploding simultaneously at every point in space and time. When his companions return, the Doctor explains that once the universe is rebooted, Amy—having lived near the cracks in the universe all her life—will be able to use her memories to restore people who have been erased, and that he himself will be trapped in the void between universes once the cracks close. The Doctor then pilots the Pandorica into the TARDIS explosion, creating a second Big Bang and returning the universe to normal.

The Doctor then finds himself rewinding through his life as an observer. Amy can hear but not see him, and as he passes through the events of "Flesh and Stone", he takes advantage of her closed eyes to tell her to remember what he told her when she was seven years old. Arriving on the day he met Amelia Pond ("The Eleventh Hour"), he finds the young girl asleep outside, waiting for her "raggedy Doctor" to return. The Doctor carries her to bed, and tells her a story about a daft old man who stole—"well, borrowed"—a magic box that was "big and little at the same time. Brand new and ancient. And the bluest blue ever." He then steps into the crack in Amelia's bedroom wall, sealing it completely.

Amy wakes up on 26 June 2010, the day of her wedding, to find she has remembered her mother, father and the human Rory back into existence. During the wedding reception, however, she feels as if she is forgetting something. When she sees River Song's diary, its cover fashioned after the TARDIS, she tearfully recalls the Doctor's story of "something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue", causing the Doctor and the TARDIS to be restored. The Doctor joins in the wedding celebration.

After the wedding, the Doctor gives River the Vortex Manipulator to return to her time. River sadly warns him he will soon learn who she truly is, and that it will change everything. Aboard the TARDIS, the Doctor explains to Amy and Rory that unanswered questions remain about the destruction of the TARDIS and the nature of "the Silence" that will fall, but before they can contemplate that, the Doctor receives a telephone call alerting him to the presence of an escaped Egyptian goddess on the Orient Express in space. Rory and Amy decide to join him, and the three leave on their next adventure.
[edit] Continuity

The episode revisits several scenes from earlier in the series. The first scene in the episode mirrors the start of "The Eleventh Hour", except this time the Doctor does not crash into Amelia's garden, instead appearing later to direct her to the museum. Upon the TARDIS's restoration Rory tells Amy's parents that "I was plastic" and that the Doctor was "the stripper at my stag do", the latter event having been seen in "The Vampires of Venice".

As the Doctor rewinds through his life, he sees events which relate to "The Lodger", but which were not shown in that episode. His conversation with Amy during the events of "Flesh and Stone" appeared in that episode, though it was not clear that this was a Doctor from a different timeline. Finally, he arrives in seven-year-old Amelia's house the night she waited for him in "The Eleventh Hour".

Early in the episode, Amy's aunt states that she does not trust Richard Dawkins (who appeared as himself in "The Stolen Earth") due to his support for the existence of stars. When the sonic screwdriver given to Rory and that in the pocket of the Doctor in the Pandorica touch they cause sparks, in a revived-series reference to the Blinovitch Limitation Effect.

Plot

The TARDIS lands in Colchester rather than its intended destination, the fifth moon of Sinda Callista, and the Doctor finds himself stranded there with Amy left in the TARDIS. Meanwhile, passers-by are seen being lured into a nearby house by various voices seeking help, from the intercom at its front door. The door opens and they ascend the staircase to the first floor, entering the room which lies there; flashing lights are seen and screams heard emanating from the room.

The Doctor turns up at the house and rents a ground floor room from the flat's owner, a shy call centre worker called Craig Owens. Although Craig finds him odd, The Doctor quickly woos him and moves in. The Doctor tries to blend in his new environment with guidance from Amy, with whom he still manages to communicate through an earpiece. He also gets to know Craig who is locked in a platonic relationship with a colleague called Sophie and tries to manoeuvre them into declaring to each other. This backfires and Sophie decides to leave for an exotic destination.

The Doctor has become aware that the first floor room may not be all it appears to be, as a strange damp patch is spreading on the living room ceiling, but thinks using his sonic screwdriver might alert whatever is up there and is instead building a crude apparatus in his room. His experiences on Earth are punctuated by increasingly frequent "time-loop" events, in which his own time is separated from those around him, who are unknowingly involved in repetitive events. This also affect Amy in the TARDIS.

Craig touches the damp patch on his ceiling and is seriously poisoned. The Doctor revives him and goes to replace him at work while he recovers. Craig, however, far from being grateful, becomes jealous of the increasingly popular Doctor, since Sophie in particular has expressed enthusiasm, and tells the Doctor to leave the house, throwing his £3000 deposit back at him. While the two quarrel, Sophie turns up at the house and gets called upstairs by the voice from the first floor room. To save time, the Doctor reveals to Craig who he is and what he is doing... by head-butting him. Craig is overwhelmed by all the information, but the two hear screams upstairs and rush to intervene. Spotting Sophie's set of keys on the door, they realise that she is the one in danger. Amy meanwhile, having studied the house's plans in the TARDIS's database informs them that the building is supposed to be only one storey tall.

The Doctor and Craig enter the "upstairs flat" to save Sophie and discover that someone has been trying to build a TARDIS, which is now trapped on Earth and is disguised by a perception filter. Its pilot is an emergency AI hologram who is able to appear in the form of the various victims it has attracted, as well as Craig's seldom-seen neighbour.

After the Doctor and Craig prevent Sophie from being forced to activate the ship's console, the hologram informs the Doctor that as the ship has crashed and the crew was killed, it has rebuilt itself and attempted to fly away by luring in humans to act as pilots. However the human minds weren't sufficient and burned out, leaving only husks. Recognising the Doctor as a suitable pilot, the ship tries to pull him in. Knowing he cannot pilot the ship safely and he would destroy the entire solar system in the process, the Doctor realises that the ship had only lured in people who wanted to escape or leave somewhere, which is why it hadn't attempted to lure Craig, or Sophie, until the Doctor motivated her to leave. After finally admitting their love for each other, both Craig and Sophie touch the panel's activator, causing the engines to shut down and the ship to implode. The Doctor, Craig and Sophie escape in time to see the top floor of the house turn into a spaceship which then disappears.

Afterwards, the Doctor says his goodbyes to Craig and Sophie, who give him his set of keys to the flat as a parting gift. Back in the TARDIS the Doctor travels back in time a week and instructs Amy to leave the note in the newsagent's that directed him to Craig's flat in the first place. However, whilst rooting in the pocket of his discarded blazer for a pen, Amy discovers the ring Rory had given her before he was erased from time and becomes visibly unsettled. The crack from her bedroom appears once again, this time in the wall behind Craig's fridge, and glows ominously.

 ] Continuity

On Craig's fridge is a postcard advertising the Van Gogh exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay, which the Doctor, Amy and later Van Gogh himself visit in the previous episode.^[2][3] In the Time Engine, Craig also uses the Eleventh Doctor's catchphrase of "Geronimo!", introduced in The End of Time.

During the head-butting scene when the doctor performs a psychic link, the faces of some of the previous Doctors are seen. These include Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, Paul McGann, Tom Baker, Jon Pertwee, William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy do not appear in the montage. He also explicitly states that he is the eleventh incarnation.

The Doctor playing football is the second time he has shown exceptional skill when playing a sport, entering a team at the last minute. In Black Orchid, the Fifth Doctor plays a cricket match and proves to be equally skilled with both bat and ball.

  Outside references

The Doctor paraphrases the Doctor hologram from Star Trek: Voyager when he states “Please state the nature of your emergency.” (The original line being "Please state the nature of your medical emergency.").^[4] He also refers to himself as Captain Troy Hadsome of International Rescue, referencing Thunderbirds.

  Reception

Gavin Fuller, writing for The Daily Telegraph, assessed the episode as "a delight", "thoroughly enjoyable (and) often amusing". In particular he praised Corden and Haggard for avoiding the usual "cliches of romcom", and Smith's portrayal of The Doctor as almost but not-quite human. He expressed some disappointment that the origin of the lurking time machine was not explained.^[5]

  Production

Location filming took place in Cardiff in early March 2010. The house in which Craig has his flat is in Westville Road,^[6] and the location for the football match was Victoria Park (building on Matt Smith's previous experience as a youth footballer, having played for the youth teams of Northampton Town F.C., Nottingham Forest F.C. and Leicester City F.C.^[7][8]); the play area there had previously been used as a location in "Forest of the Dead".^[9]

  References

Synopsis

During a visit to an art gallery with Amy, the Doctor's interest is caught by a painting of a church by Vincent van Gogh: there's a face in the window of the church – a curious, shadowed creepy face with a beak and nasty eyes. The Doctor is worried, and is sure he has seen the face somewhere before. There is only one thing for it: a trip in the TARDIS back to 1890, so the Doctor can find out from the artist himself.

Plot

In a field of wheat, something begins running through it, scaring the crows away, while an artist paints the scene. The same painting, years later, hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. A man, Dr. Black, in glasses and a bowtie tells a group of people that the painting is one of van Gogh's last paintings and that the last few months of his life were the most astonishing months of his artistic outpouring. As he compares van Gogh to Shakespeare, the Doctor and Amy pass behind him, admiring the pieces of art around them.

Amy thanks the Doctor for bringing her to the museum and asks why he is being so nice to her. The Doctor defends himself and Amy says that she was only joking, asking why he was being so serious. Dr. Black tells the group the value of van Gogh's work today, tens of millions, and compares it with the value of it when van Gogh died, the value of a sofa and some chairs.

A child says "He's the doctor." Thinking it is him, the Doctor turns around, only to discover the children are looking at a picture of van Gogh's doctor. Amy grabs the Doctor's hand and pulls him towards a painting of a church. As the Doctor admires the work, he notices something in the window of the church. Amy asks if it is a face and the Doctor tells her that it is, and that it isn't a nice face.

The Doctor approaches Dr. Black, interrupting his talk and asks him when the painting was painted, asking him to skip a long speech. Dr. Black tells him that it was probably between the first and third of June in 1890. The Doctor thanks him, then the two men compliment each others bow ties. The Doctor then grabs Amy's hand and pulls her away. She asks about looking at the rest of the paintings, but he shoves her ahead, telling her that it is a matter of life and death, and that they must talk to Vincent van Gogh.

The TARDIS materializes and the Doctor and Amy exit. The Doctor tells Amy the plan, to find van Gogh, wait for him to take them to the church, then defeat the monster. Amy exclaims that it will be easy, but the Doctor disagrees. He says that van Gogh will probably be in the local café and describes it. Amy flicks through her van Gogh guide and finds a painting of it. The Doctor tells her that that painting is the one, then Amy points out that the real café is right infront of them.

The Doctor approaches the owner and asks about Vincent van Gogh. The owner disappears inside, so the Doctor asks the waitresses. The waitresses tell the Doctor and Amy that van Gogh is a mad drunk who never pays his bills. The Doctor tells them he's a good painter and the two women just laugh at him.

As the Doctor sits at a table, a man follows the owner out of the café and tries to bargain with him, one painting for a drink. The Doctor points to the man and mouths to Amy that he is van Gogh. The owner says that the painting is no good, and tells van Gogh to either pay for drinks or get out. The Doctor offers to either pay for van Gogh's drink or to buy the painting, to which van Gogh asks who the Doctor is. The Doctor tells him that he is new in town, to which van Gogh tells him three things; that he pays for his own drinks, that no-one buys his paintings lest they be laughed out of town and that Amy is cute, but the Doctor should not interfere.

Van Gogh returns to bargaining with the owner who still refuses to give him a drink, until Amy interferes and tells the two to shut up. She tells the owner that she will buy a bottle of wine, and will share it with whomever she wishes, looking at van Gogh. The owner agrees and follows Amy inside.

Inside, the Doctor and Amy talk with van Gogh. Van Gogh asks about Amy's accent and whether she comes from Holland. She replies "no" while the Doctor replies "yes" at the same time. The Doctor introduces himself properly as "the Doctor", which causes van Gogh to believe that he is a doctor sent by his brother to help him with his mental state. The Doctor laughs at the notion and points to a painting beside van Gogh. Amy says that it is one of her favourites, to which van Gogh tells her she's never seen it before. She covers up her mistake and van Gogh comments on her hair colour, so she comments on his.

The Doctor interrupts and asks Vincent if he has painted any churches lately and van Gogh tells him that he has been thinking about painting one church. The Doctor says that is good news, when someone screams, the Doctor says that that is not good news.

Out in the street, the three find a girl who has been killed. The mother of the girl pushes her way through, then blames Vincent for her daughter's death. She and some of the crowd throw stones at Vincent, so the Doctor, Amy and Vincent leave immediately. The Doctor asks Vincent if a similar murder has happened before. Vincent tells him that there was one a week ago and the Doctor says he thought so. He tells Vincent that he must get home. Vincent asks where the Doctor and Amy are staying, which the Doctor takes as an invite to stay with him. Amy nervously laughs and follows the Doctor, Vincent in tail of the two.

Outside Vincent's home, the Doctor comments on the dark and the starry night. Van Gogh says that Amy and the Doctor will be alright to stay with him for one night, and one night only. Amy exclaims that they will be staying with him and the Doctor tells her until he paints the church.

Inside, van Gogh lights a lamp and apologizes about the "clutter", saying he must really clear it out. Vincent offers coffee and after seeing Vincent put coffee on one of his works, the Doctor tells him to be careful with his work and that they are precious. Vincent disagrees with the Doctor, but Amy tells Vincent that they are precious to her. The Doctor asks about the church, to which Vincent asks about his obsession with it. The Doctor asks about Vincent, and Vincent tells him that it seems to him the world offers much more than the normal eye can see. The Doctor agrees with him, glancing at Amy.

Soon after, Vincent wildly talks about colours and how he can hear them, and how he thinks. The Doctor stares at Vincent saying that he believes he has had enough coffee. The Doctor asks where Amy is and a scream comes from outside.

Vincent and the Doctor rush outside and find Amy on the ground, shaken, but not injured. The Doctor says not to worry that the attacker has gone, but Vincent screams and runs to get a fork. The Doctor tries to calm Vincent down, but Vincent runs towards them. Amy and the Doctor move to the side and van Gogh tells them to run. The Doctor agrees and tells Amy that Vincent is having a fit. The Doctor again tries to calm Vincent down, telling him that it is only him there, when something large knocks him off his feet. Amy shouts that she cannot see anything and asks what it is. The Doctor agrees that her question is good. He gets up and grabs a stick, telling Vincent he will help him fight it. Vincent asks the Doctor if he can see the creature too, to which the Doctor says he can, kind of, and finally not. The Doctor then gets hit again and thrown over a table, landing on his back. Vincent tells the Doctor that he couldn't see the creature. The Doctor returns to where the creature was, swinging his stick around, while Vincent attacks the creature and fends it off. Both Vincent and Amy watch as the Doctor continues to fight nothing, swinging his stick around. Vincent tells the Doctor that the creature has gone, to which the Doctor stops.

The three return inside. The Doctor says that the creature was invisible, and asks Vincent what it looked like. Vincet says he'll show them and begins to paint over one of his paintings, much to the Doctor and Amy's horror. After he has finished, the Doctor takes the painting from van Gogh and gives Amy instructions to keep Vincent safe. Amy protests the Doctor going outside as it is dangerous, but the Doctor decides to still go, telling them he'll be back before they can say "where's he got to now?" The Doctor leaves and Amy turns back to Vincent. The Doctor screams "not that fast" to keep the two on their toes and says he'll be pretty fast, then leaves.

The Doctor walks down the alleyways, seemingly being followed by the creature, but reaches the TARDIS before he comes to any danger. Inside, he drags a chest from one of the alcoves, talking to a specific item. He apologizes to the item, saying he thought it was just a useless, embarrassing present from his godmother, who had two heads and bad breath, on both the heads. He pulls out a machine attached to a mirror and puts it up on the TARDIS console. He links it up to the TARDIS and sticks his tongue out at it. The machine identifies the Doctor as "Doctor" and his home planet as Gallifrey and prints a copy out on the console's typewriter, including pictures of the first and second incarnations. The Doctor then shows Vincent's drawing of the creature to the mirror in order to identify it. The machine first identifies it as a parrot, then a polar bear, both of which the Doctor dismisses. He then complains that the impressionists are not accurate enough and that it wouldn't happen with one of the "proper" painters, but then apologizes to Vincent. He says that Vincent will have to draw something better and throws the painting away behind him.

Leaving the TARDIS, now day, the Doctor alters the machine. The creature appears behind the Doctor, appearing in the mirror. The machine's "match" noise sounds and the Doctor says that there may be a time delay, but the machine always gets it in the end, not noticing the actual creature behind him. The Doctor reads the details on the creature, a Krafayis, before noticing that it is directly behind him. The Doctor begins to run and hides behind a corner. He uses the mirror to see the creature charging towards him, before running again. He tries to slow the creature by blocking its path, and the creature hits its head on an archway. The Doctor hides behind another corner and sees the creature fleeing. He breathes a sigh of relief, before turning the corner and seeing Amy. Both of them scream and the Doctor says that she scared the living daylights out of him. Amy apologizes and says that she was bored of Vincent's snoring.

The Doctor enters Vincent's room and opens the windows, letting in a flood of light and waking Vincent up. Vincet gets up as the Doctor leaves the room, telling Vincent that Amy brought him a present. Amy tells him she brought the present for saving her the previous night. Vincent looks out to see the outside surrounded by sunflowers. Amy suggests he paint the flowers, but Vincent says that they are not his favourite flower, much to the surprise of Amy and the Doctor. Vincent explains that he finds them complex, half-living and half-dying, a little disgusting, but a challenge. The Doctor tells Vincent he is sure he will rise to the challenge.

The Doctor shows Vincent a picture of the Krafayis, explaining how the species travels in space as a pack and that they are a brutal race; if one falls behind, the rest of the pack do not return for it. He explains that this particular one has been left behind, and like the other Krafayis abandoned across the universe, it will kill without mercy until killed, which they usually are not, given their invisibility. The Doctor tells Vincent that they are in a unique position of being able to stop this one if Vincent paints the church. Vincent asks about the monster, but the Doctor tells him that if he paints the church, the monster will come. Vincent agrees and the Doctor tells him that he and Amy will be no longer bothering him by the next day and will be gone. After Vincent has left the room, the Doctor tells Amy that taking Vincent is risky. Amy asks if it is riskier than normal. The Doctor checks to see that Vincent is not listening and tells Amy that if Vincent is killed, half the pictures in the Musée d'Orsay will disappear and that it will be their fault.

The Doctor knocks on Vincent's door and enters. He finds Vincent on his bed crying. The Doctor asks if he can help. Vincent tells the Doctor that he and Amy will leave as everyone always leaves him, that he will be left with an empty heart and no hope. The Doctor tells Vincent that his experience is that there is always hope, but Vincent tells him that he does not have a full experience and that he knows it will not end well. The Doctor tries to console him, but Vincent gets angry and tells him to get out. The Doctor leaves.

Amy asks the Doctor what is happening and the Doctor explains how delicate Vincent is, that he will eventually shoot himself, and that is why they should leave. After looking at some of Vincent's paintings, the Doctor says that he and Amy must go to the church and hope that the Krafayis still turns up. Before they can leave, Vincent appears at the door, fully clothed and ready to go, selecting a paintbrush.

Amy, walking arm in arm with Vincent, tells him that she is sorry he is sad. He tells her that the moods he has last for weeks or even months, but that he can soldier on if she can. She tells him that she is not soldiering on but he says to her that he can hear the song of her sadness and points out that she is crying. He tells Amy that he understands but Amy replies, telling him that she does not. The Doctor, having listened to the conversation interrupts and proposes a plan. Vincent says that they will fight the creature, but the Doctor explains that it needs to be more developed, that he needs to be able to see the creature as well. Amy asks how the Doctor is supposed to see the monster, to which he replies that he has the answer inside a box he is carrying, giving praise to his godmother.

Further up the road, the three see the funeral of the girl who was killed the previous night. They stand at the side of the road, Vincent having taken his hat off in respect, as the coffin passes with sunflowers on top. Amy asks the Doctor if he has a plan, to which he tells her that he doesn't, but something similarly greater.

Vincent sets up his easle as the Doctor makes sure that he will be told when the creature appears. Vincent tells the Doctor that he is mad and not stupid. The Doctor begins to explain that he may not actually be mad, just deeply depressed, but Vincent tells him to shush, and that he is working.

As Vincent paints, the Doctor talks about watching Michaelangelo painting the Sistine Chaple, and how he winged because he was afraid of heights but Amy tells him to shush. Later he moves on to Picasso, and how he tried to advise him on his paintings. Much later, the Doctor, bored, asks if time normally passes really slowly and in the correct order. He stands up and tells Amy and Vincent that he can't stand an unpunctual alien attack. Amy asks if he is nervous, when Vincent tells the two that the monster is now at the window.

The Doctor tells Amy and Vincent that he is going in, so Vincent tells him that he is going in too. The Doctor stresses that Vincent is Vincent van Gogh, and that he is not going in. Vincent protests that the Doctor is not armed, but the Doctor tells him that he is, with overconfidence, the machine and a small screwdriver. The Doctor says that all he needs to do is find the correct prozac setting to stun the creature. He gives Amy one simple instruction, not to follow him and signals to Vincent to watch her. Amy agrees and the Doctor heads towards the church. Vincent leans in towards Amy and asks if she will follow him, and she tells him that she will. Vincent then tells Amy that he loves her.

Just outside the chapel, the Doctor opens his box and takes out the machine. He puts it on and before heading into the chapel, looks at a carving above the door, a carving of an angel slaying a dragon. Inside, the Doctor looks around for the Krafayis. Outside, Amy asks Vincent if the Krafayis has moved. Vincent tells her that it hasn't, but suddenly tells her that it has turned around. After approaching the window where the Krafayis was, the Doctor believes the creature has moved. Suddenly, a hand knocks the Doctor flying. Amy and Vincent hear the crash, look at each other and head inside to help the Doctor. The Doctor recovers from his fall and tries to stun the Krafayis. He runs towards a room when he bumps into Amy. The two of them hide in a confessions box to hide. While inside, the Doctor tells Amy to breath quieter. Amy says that she cannot, then believes that it has walked past them. Then the Krafayis begins attacking the confessions box, and the Doctor compliments its excellent hearing.

Vincent then calls on the monster, fighting it with a chair, while telling Amy and the Doctor to get behind him. The Doctor, twice, tries to stun the Krafayis again but is unsuccessful and on the second attempt, the Krafayis actually seems to enjoy it. Vincent tells the Doctor to duck as the creature takes a swipe at him, then to move to his left. However, because of miscommunication, left being Vincent's left and not the Doctor's, the Doctor is hit by the monster against a wall. The Doctor suggests that they run like crazy and regroup, so Amy chooses the nearest room to hide in. They get in the room and attempt to close the door until the creature blocks it with its foot. Vincent, however, stands on the foot and the creature retreats.

The Doctor begins to tell Amy and Vincent his plan, but accidentally calls Vincent, Rory. When Amy asks what the plan is, the Doctor tells her that the only plan he is sure of his that he will only use his sonic screwdriver to screw in screws in future. Vincent tells Amy and the Doctor to give him a second and that he will be back. The Doctor considers talking to the Krafayis and hearing his side of the story. Although he thinks the Krafayis may not be in the mood for it, the Doctor but tries anyway. The Doctor explains to the creature that he understands that it is trapped on the planet and alone, and tells it that he is also alone. Suddenly, the window behind them smashes open and the invisible creature jumps through.

Vincent returns with his easle, holding the feet up, the spikes being used as a weapon. The Doctor asks what it is doing and is told it is feeling it's way around the room. The Doctor calls himself stupid and comments that he is getting old. The Doctor figures out that the Krafayis is blind and raises his voice when mentioning the fact it has perfect hearing. Vincent then tells them that it is now charging towards them. Vincent runs forward as the creature charges, telling the Doctor and Amy to get back. The creature is stabbed by the easle, and Vincent is sent hanging in the air. As the creature falls to the ground, Vincent lets go of the easle and lands on his feet.

Vincent tells the Doctor that he didn't mean to kill the creature, and the Doctor comforts it as it dies. He makes out that the creature says that it is afraid and the Doctor tells it not to be while stroking it. Vincent compares the Krafayis to humans who lash out when they are frightened, much like those in the town that scream at him and the children who throw stones at him. The Doctor then says that sometimes winning is no fun at all.

Amy, Vincent and the Doctor lie in a field and hold hands. Vincent asks the other two to see the world as he does, describing the night sky. The Doctor tells him that he has seen nothing as wonderful as what Vincent has. Vincent tells the Doctor and Amy that he will miss them when they are gone.

The next morning, Vincent tries to give the Doctor a self portrait as a gift, but the Doctor refuses (though Vincent isn't surprised). Vincent hugs Amy who tells him to be good and kind to himself and to trim his beard before next kissing someone. Vincent also tells Amy that if she tires of the Doctor, she should return and they could have children together. Vincent then tells the Doctor that he thinks he might not do as well on his own than when he was with him. They embrace in a hug, then Amy and the Doctor leave.

Outside, the Doctor asks Amy if she is thinking what he is thinking. She replies telling him she wants food before they leave, not exactly what the Doctor was thinking. The Doctor then calls Vincent, who hangs out a window, and tells him he has something to show him and to tidy himself up first.

The Doctor takes Vincent to a poster covered TARDIS and lets him inside. Vincent then peers out of the TARDIS and feels the outside walls before going back in and asking how he is crazy and the Doctor and Amy are sane. The Doctor enters and takes Vincent's hat off him, placing it on the hatstand. Amy closes the door and they head to the console. Vincent asks what all of the buttons do and the Doctor explains several of them; one which plays soothing music, one which makes a large noise and one which makes everything shake. Vincent asks what a button does and the Doctor lunges forward to stop Vincent from pressing it, telling him that it is the Friction Contrafibulator. Then Vincent asks what another button does, to which the Doctor tells him that it is ketchup, then points to another which he calls mustard.

Vincent asks them back to the café, but the Doctor tells him that he wishes to show him something first. In Paris 2010, outside the Musée d'Orsay, the last few posters burn off the TARDIS. Amy, Vincent and the Doctor step outside and head into the museum, the Doctor explaining when and where they are.

The three enter the van Gogh exhibition. Vincent looks around at his work in awe at the number of people looking at them. The Doctor then asks Dr. Black to tell him where van Gogh stands in the importance of the history of art. Amy positions Vincent behind Dr. Black so he can hear all the positive things he thinks of him; that he is the finest painter of them all, the most popular painter who managed to transform his pain into beauty, that he was not only the world's greatest artist but also one of the greatest men of all time.

At hearing these words, Vincent begins to cry, but when the Doctor asks if it is too much, he replies that they are tears of joy. Vincent then kisses, hugs and thanks Dr. Black, apologizing about his beard after. Dr. Black then walks away, but pauses for a moment to ponder. He looks back and then dismisses the thought.

The Doctor returns Vincent to his own place and time. Vincent tells the Doctor that he will be a new man and the Doctor tells Vincent that it has been an honour. Amy then hugs Vincent as he jokes about her marital status, to which Amy tells him she in not the marrying kind. The TARDIS departs and Vincent walks off.

Amy and the Doctor return to the Musée d'Orsay, Amy believing that there will be hundreds more paintings, but the Doctor is doubtful. In the gallery, Amy finds no new paintings and hears Dr. Black still saying that he commited suicide at age 37. Amy thinks that they didn't make a difference to Vincent's life at all, but the Doctor explains to her that although good things can't remove the bad things, the bad things can't spoil the good things, and that they certainly added a large amount of good things to Vincent's life. The Doctor also shows Amy that they did make a couple of minor changes, such as the non-existance of the evil face in the church window.

As Amy walks away, she walks towards another painting, one of sunflowers, which she sees is dedicated in her name. She tells the Doctor that if they had been married, their children would have had very red hair. The Doctor calls them the "Ultimate Ginger". Amy smiles at him and says the "Ultimate Ginge". The two chuckle together as Amy tears up.

Cast

• The Doctor - Matt Smith
• Amy Pond - Karen Gillan
• Vincent van Gogh - Tony Curran
• Dr Black - Bill Nighy (uncredited)
• Mother - Chrissie Cotterill
• Student - Morgan Overton
• Student - Andrew Byrne
• Maurice - Nik Howden
• Waitress - Sarah Counsell

Crew

Executive Producers: Steven Moffat, Piers Wenger and Beth Willis
Produced by Tracie Simpson Patrick Schweitzer		Directed by Jonny Campbell		Written by Richard Curtis script editing by Brian Minchin and Emma Freud		Director of Photography Tony Slater Ling		Production Designer Edward Thomas		Visual Effects The Mill
Make-up Designer Barbara Southcott		Casting Director Andy Pryor CDG		Music Murray Gold		Costume Designer Ray Holman		Editor Jamie Pearson		Special Effects Real SFX
Original theme music by Ron Grainer• Title sequence by Framestore• With thanks to BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Martha Freud

General production staff Production Executive - Julie Scott Line Producer - Patrick Schweitzer Location Manager - Gareth Skelding Unit Manager - Rhys Griffiths Production Co-ordinator - Jess van Niekerk Production Management Assistant - Claire Thomas Production Runner - Sian Warrilow Production Accountant - Ceri Tothill A/Production Accountant - Carole Wakefield Directorial/DOP staff 1st Assistant Director - John Bennett 2nd Assistant Director - James Dehaviland 3rd Assistant Director - Heddi-Joy Taylor-Welch Runners - Nicola Eynon Price, Laura Jenkins Continuity - Non Eleri Hughes Camera Operator - Ian Adrian B Camera Operator - Matthew Poynter Focus Puller - Steeve Rees Grip - John Robinson Assistant Camera - Tom Hartley, Jon Vidgen Boom Operator - Dafydd Parry Gaffer - Mark Hutchings Best Boy - Pete Chester Electricians - Ben Griffiths, Steve Slocombe, Bob Milton, Alan Tippets	Art department Supervising Art Director - Stephen Nicholas Art Department Co-ordinator - Amy Oakes Associate Designer - James North Production Buyer - Ben Morris Set Decorator - Keith Dunne Props Buyer - Catherine Samuel Set Designer - Ben Austin Storyboard Artist - James Iles Concept Artists - Richard Shaun Williams, Peter McKinstry Graphic Artist - Jackson Pope Standby Props - Phil Shellard, Rom Evans Standby Art Director - Tristan Peatfield Standby Carpenter - Will Pope Standby Rigger - Keith Freeman Standby Painter - Ellen Woods Props Master - Paul Aitken Dressing Chargehand - Matt Wild Dressing Props - Martin Broadbent, Rhys Jones Props Fabrication Manager - Barry Jones Prop Makers - Penny Howarth, Nicholas Robatto Construction Manager - Matthew Hywel-Davies Construction Chargehand - Scott Fisher Practical Electrician - Albert James Scenic Artists - John Pinkerton, John Whalley Graphics - BBC Wales Graphics Costume Costume Supervisor - Bobbie Peach Crowd Supervisor - Lindsay Bonacorssi Costume Assistants - Sara Morgan, Maria Franchi	Make-up and prosthetics Make-up Supervisor - Pam Mullins Make-up Artists - Abi Brotherton, Morag Smith Movement Stunt Co-ordinator - Crispin Layfield Casting Casting Associates: Andy Brierley, Alice Purser General post-production staff Post-production Supervisors - Ceres Doyle, Chris Blatchford Post-production Co-ordinator - Marie Brown Assistant Editor - Becky Trotman On-line Conform - Matthew Clarke, Mark Bright Special and visual effects VFX Editor - Cat Gregory Colourist - Mick Vincent Sound Sound Recordist - Bryn Thomas Dubbing Mixer - Tim Ricketts Sound Maintenance Engineer - Jeff Welch Supervising Sound Editor - Paul McFadden Sound FX Editor - Paul Jefferies Foley Editor - Helen Dickson

Not every person who worked on this adventure was credited. The absence of a credit for a position doesn't necessarily mean the job wasn't required. The information above is based solely on observations of the actual end credits of the episodes as broadcast, and does not relay information from IMDB or other sources.
This was the first episode of the BBC Wales series to have two credited script editors. Oddly, Emma Freud was credited at the end of the roll, suggesting she was considered more "senior" than Brian Minchin.  As on The Vampires of Venice, Patrick Schweitzer was double-credited as both producer and line producer.

References

• The episode makes numerous direct and indirect references to van Gogh's most famous works, though artistic liberty was taken in regard to their chronology and the locations in which they were painted. While the setting for the episode was ostensibly Auvers-Sur-Oise, the last place of residence and resting place of van Gogh, where he painted Church at Auvers, inspiration for the set decoration of his home and the cafe he frequented (or rather was frequently thrown out of), came from works he previously produced while living in Arles several years before (Bedroom in Arles, Cafe Terrance at Night). Also, while the episode suggested Amy Pond inspired van Gogh to paint sunflowers, particularly Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, to which he then 'dedicated' to her, they were, in fact, painted in 1887 and 1888.
• Van Gogh works referenced in the episode include: Church at Auvers (1890), Bedroom in Arles (1887), Cafe Terrance at Night (1888), Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers (1888), Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890), The Starry Night (1889), Wheatfield With Crows (1890), Vincent's Chair with His Pipe (1888), Self-Portrait with Straw Hat (1887).
• Among the posters covering the TARDIS are those for the cafe Au Tambourin at 27 Rue Richelieu in Paris, which was the first place to exhibit van Gogh's artwork in Paris.
• The Doctor refers to having met Michaelangelo and Pablo Picasso.
• The Doctor expresses frustration with van Gogh's 'impressionist' style when attempting to identify the invisible monster (though van Gogh is considered to be post-Impressionist by art historians), suggesting that this would "never happen with Gainsborough, one of those proper painters." While this suggests the Doctor's affinity for some notion of 'scientific accuracy' over emotive artistic expression, he later humbly tells Vincent that while he has seen many things, "you are right, nothing quite as wonderful as the things you see."

Story notes

• The episode was incorrectly entitled, Lend Me Your Ear. However, no mention or reference was made in the episode regarding van Gogh's ear at all.
• Unlike most stories in this series, this story focuses much more on characters than plot, and has hints and references to van Gogh's depression and suicide, something the series has not explored very much before. In fact, a message and phone number for the 'BBC Action Line' was broadcast following the 'Next Time' trail, for those wanting more information on 'issues raised in this program.'
• Pictures of the First and Second Doctors are printed on the TARDIS' typewriter.
• This is the second story in the series to lack any cracks, silence, or other foreshadowing of the series' finale (the first being Amy's Choice). However, it does tie in to Rory's death and establishes that, on some level, Amy is aware he has died.
• Although originally believed to be standalone, spoilers make this story involved with the series arc, some mentioning van Gogh's paintings, one of which is Dr. Gatchet, relating to the finale. Dr. Gatchet is supposed to be appearing in the mentioned episode. Others include van Gogh communicating a disturbing prophecy to the Doctor in the finale through one of his paintings, and a van Gogh reference in DW: The Lodger.
• Bill Nighy was not credited for his role.
• Numerous positive or affirmative references were made in the episode to van Gogh and Amy's hair colour, perhaps in a conscious effort to address the accusation by some viewers of the program being 'anti-ginger' (the so-called 'ginger' controversy).
• The song used for the final scenes is "Chances" by Athlete.
• Amy attempting to get Vincent to paint 'The Sunflowers' is similar to Rose trying to get Queen Victoria to say, "I am not amused." (DW: Tooth and Claw)

Ratings

5.0 million

Filming locations

• National Museum of Wales [1]
• Trogir, Croatia [2]
• Roald Dahl Plass [3], which is supposed to double for the Musée d'Orsay in Paris

Rumours

• It was rumoured that either the Timoreen, the Ha'rik or the Skarkish will appear. The monster was a Krafayis.
• It was rumoured that Vincent van Gogh will stab a yellow monster. He stabbed the Krafayis, the monster was pale yellow.

• Howard Lee plays a character called "Dr. Gachet" [4]. Dr. Gachet was van Gogh's real doctor, who nursed him during his final years. He was mentioned but he was not actually in the episode.
• Nighy plays a van Gogh expert, with similar fashion tastes to the Doctor himself. This turned out also true. He also wore a bowtie.
• Steven Moffat stated in a recent interview that the controversial topic of the regeneration limit for Time Lords will be "addressed in a very, very cheeky way by an old friend of mine" at some point in Series 5. [5] As the "old friend" could very well be Richard Curtis, the issue might be addressed in this episode. This turned out to be false for this episode, but it could happen in later episodes with Alex Kingston's character River Song addressing the subject, as Steven Moffatt created her character.
• As a Vincent van Gogh painting will feature in the events of "The Pandorica Opens", it was likely that this story would bring more developments to the main story arc of the series. [6] This was not the case, with the episode being more or less a stand-alone story, but apparently the finale will still feature a van Gogh painting in some way. This connection may be illuminated in "The Lodger", as a pamphlet for a van Gogh exhibit can be seen on Craig's fridge in the trailer. Although, the Doctor does take a van Gogh painting inside the TARDIS trying to identify the Krafayis, he pitches the painting over his shoulder into the TARDIS. Perhaps that painting is the one to carry a message 1,000 years into the future.
• It was rumoured that Vincent will propose to Amy or ask the Doctor to travel with them because in the preview clips, he shows a large interest in Amy and the Doctor and even tells Amy that he loves her. This turned out true.

Production errors

• When running through the streets with his mirror, the Doctor screams "Ahh", but his mouth is not synced with his screaming.
• For most of the episode, Amy is wearing tights. During the church scene, when van Gogh starts painting the Church, they've gone. Later on when the group are hiding from the monster, she's wearing them again, as was the case with the previous episode.
• When in the chapel looking for the monster, the Doctor switches the mirror from his left to right side while holding his sonic screwdriver. For each change, the camera angle also changes, and the sonic screwdriver changes from being in closed mode and extended mode.
• At the beginning, when looking at the painting of the church, the Doctor scratches his head. When the camera is behind the Doctor, he uses his right hand but when the camera cuts to in front of him, he is using his left hand.

Continuity

• The Doctor and Dr. Black compliment each other's bow ties, the Doctor exclaiming again that "bow ties are cool". (DW: The Eleventh Hour, Amy's Choice)
• The Doctor mentions that he had a godmother with two heads. Before his ninth regeneration, he declared that he might have ended up with two heads. (DW: The Parting of the Ways) Although it seemed like a joke at the time, this statement suggests that a regeneration actually could result in the creation of an extra head. It may also be a reference to the Aplans. (DW: The Time of Angels)
• The first and second Doctors are pictured.
• The Doctor finds his species identifier device by rifling through a chest in the TARDIS' alcoves; this plot device for providing artifacts and tools was utilised in several of the previous incarnations' series (e.g. DW: The Abominable Snowmen, where the Second Doctor finds a holy Tibetan bell and Jamie a set of bagpipes). It has also been used in the Tenth Doctor's era, in which he retrieved an Agatha Christie novel. (DW: The Unicorn and the Wasp)
• The Doctor once again mentions that he is aging mentally, contrasting with his physical appearance. (DW: Time Crash, The End of Time)
• Amy mentions that the Doctor took her to Arcadia. The planet was featured in NA: Deceit, and the "fall of Arcadia" was mentioned as one of the events of the Time War in DW: Doomsday.
• The Doctor mentions Rory, to which Amy asks "who?" Amy also says that the Doctor is being extra kind to her, feeling guilty about Rory's erasure. Van Gogh also sees that Amy is crying, although she doesn't know why; he theorises that she has lost someone. After receiving a half-joking marriage proposal from Vincent, Amy tells him that she's "not the marrying kind". (DW: Cold Blood).
• This marks the fourth episode this season which opens on a nature shot. DW: The Time of Angels, Amy's Choice, The Hungry Earth and this episode all open on beautiful, wide-open fields on bright, sunny days.
• Vincent van Gogh is the second historical figure in the new series to have romantic feelings for one of the Doctor's companions and the third to have such feelings for a member of the TARDIS crew. Previously, William Shakespeare made advances towards Martha Jones, and Madame de Pompadour fell in love with the Doctor. (DW: The Shakespeare Code, The Girl in the Fireplace)

Home video releases

BBC Video - Doctor Who Series Five - Volume Three will feature Amy's Choice, The Hungry Earth, Cold Blood and Vincent and the Doctor. It will be released on Monday 2nd August 2010 (UK Only) on DVD and Blu-ray.^[1]

The Doctor, Amy and Rory land in the small Welsh village of Cwmtaff in 2020, as opposed to their intended destination of Rio de Janeiro. They encounter a mining operation, led by Doctor Nasreen Chaudry, studying minerals deep in the earth that have not been seen for over 20 million years. Nasreen is accompanied by a local, Tony Mack, whose daughter and grandson, Ambrose and Elliot, are examining the disappearance of bodies from underground at the graveyard of a nearby church. An earth tremor causes the ground to open and send Tony and Amy falling into it; Tony is rescued but Amy is pulled under by unknown forces. The Doctor surmises the minerals form a bio-reactive defense system that was triggered by the drilling operation. The group is soon alerted to the presence of three life forms traveling up the drilling shaft from 21 kilometres below the earth, and they barricade themselves in the church. The Doctor explains Amy's disappearance to Rory and assures him he will get her back.

The three beings turn out to be reptilian humanoids, and in a scuffle, they capture Elliot and strike Tony with a venomous forked tongue; the Doctor and the group are able to subdue one of the beings while the other two retreat with Elliot back into the earth. The Doctor realises the beings are a new form of Silurians, and that they have relented in their attack since both side hold a hostage. The captured Silurian calls herself Alaya, a member of the warrior caste awoken by the intrusion of the drill. Alaya believes, as with all the other Silurians, that the Earth still belongs to them and will defeat humanity eventually. Tony, suffering from the effects of the venom, believes they should dissect Alaya, but the Doctor warns that it will be seen as an act of war. The Doctor decides to travel in the TARDIS down the drilling shaft to talk to the rest of the Silurians and work out a truce, with Narseen desiring to come along.

Amy awakens to find herself strapped to an examining table, near to where Ambrose's husband Mo is similar ensnared. Mo apologizes to Amy that the Silurians intended to vivisect them. The Doctor and Nasreen descend in the TARDIS, where the Doctor explains the Silurians and that he only expects to encounter a small number of the aliens. The show ends on a cliffhanger as the Doctor and Nasreen are surprised to find an immense Silurian civilisation stretching out for miles in the caverns below the earth.

This second part starts with the Doctor and Nasreen walking along a bridge in the Silurian civilisation, as the Doctor marvels at the technological advances they have made since he last met them. They find themselves in a corridor covered with plants long thought extinct, and find an entrance. As soon as they walk through it, an alarm goes off and the pair are inevitably captured by the Silurian soldiers where they are taken to the same lab Amy and Mo are in. Amy is about to be dissected by the Silurian doctor Malohkeh, but he is called off moments before doing so by the alarm triggered by the Doctor and Nasreen.

Malohkeh had used a palm-sized device to lock Amy's hands into the cuffs and had placed it in his pocket. But while he is distracted by the alarm, Amy pickpockets him and steals the device. Amy quickly unlocks the clamps around her arms and frees Mo. As they walk around trying to find a way out, they stumble upon a chamber where the Silurians are keeping Elliot alive, but sedated, for observation. Mo, Elliot's father, is enraged and determines they need to find weapons to protect themselves and later get his son out. They then find two contiguous chambers, each with a Silurian warrior inside, although they appear to be immobile. Amy deduces that they are hibernation pods, with each warrior standing on a transport disc that can take them to the surface. Since they don't know how to work the transport discs, they take the hibernating Silurians' weapons instead to have something to fight with while looking for another exit.

In the church, while the group are awaiting the Doctor's and Nasreen's return, Ambrose notices her father's injury from Alaya's sting, so she goes to Alaya's room and implores her to give her the cure. Alaya responds that she has no desire nor need to tell her. Angered, Ambrose picks up a stun gun to pretend to threaten Alaya. However, Alaya begins taunting her by asking her where her son is, and how she is too much of a coward to use the stun gun even to protect her family. Angered and worried about her family, Ambrose does stun her, at first lightly to get the information, but when Alaya still refuses, she shoves the stun gun into her stomach with greater strength, killing her. The others run in, shocked, for keeping Alaya alive was probably the only way to achieve a peaceful resolution.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Nasreen are clamped onto the operating tables, where Nasreen is knocked unconscious. The Doctor is kept awake as the Silurians attempt to 'decontaminate' him for analysis. The Doctor, however, is unusually finding the decontamination painful, and yells out in between cringing at Malohkeh that he is not human. After Malohkeh checks and notices the Doctor's two hearts, he turns the machine off and uses a rod similar to the Doctor's sonic Screwdriver to wake up Nasreen. Another Silurian, Restac, Alaya's sister and the Silurians' military commander, enters, however, and is adamant that they be destroyed. She takes the Doctor and Nasreen to a conference room, which turns out to be the Silurian court, and informs them they will be executed. On the way, the Doctor explains some of the Silurians' history: that they went into hibernation when their astronomers predicted a solar catastrophe approaching Earth. When the Silurians ask how he knows so much about them, the Doctor explains he has encountered their kind before. Initially delighted that others of their species survived, the Doctor angers them by explaining humans wiped out those who woke before. Restac views such an act as justification to destroy humanity.

Just as Restac is about to fire, Amy and Mo arrive, armed with the Silurian guns. They are soon overwhelmed by the dozens of Silurian guards, however, and are about to be executed as well. Back at the church, Rory and the gang have wrapped Alaya's body in an orange afghan, when a screen on an unplugged computer turns on, revealing Restac who shows them the others as hostages. The Doctor reminds Rory that if they bring Alaya back, the Silurians will leave them alone, but Restac refuses and announces that the first to be executed will be Amy, aiming her gun as the screen switches off completely, leaving Rory in shock. Malohkeh attempts to reason with Restac as he believes that the Silurians and humans are compatible with each other and so war is unnecessary; however, she simply orders him to leave. Nevertheless, Amy manages to survive because Eldane, a Silurian above Restac in rank, arrives after being fetched by Malohkeh and orders for them to be untied.

The Doctor proposes that the Silurians hold talks, with Amy and Nasreen as the human race's representatives, to try to figure out a peaceful way for the Earth to be shared between the species. They are making progress, as Amy suggests that certain areas of the planet that are inhospitable to humans could work for the Silurians. In exchange, Eldane proposes that all Silurian technology can be used to both species' benefit. As they have found common ground, Eldane is open to the idea of exchanging them for Alaya, so they open another communication link to Rory and the others in the church. They agree to bring them down to the Silurians' habitat for the exchange, and it appears as if it will all work out. Meanwhile, Restac and a number of troops storm into Malohkeh's lab and execute him for betraying her cause.

After the communications link is closed, Ambrose, still distrustful of the Silurians and worried because Alaya is in fact dead, decides that before going down, they should set the drill to go off in 15 minutes, which would destroy all oxygen in the Silurians' habitat. As the group arrive with Alaya's corpse, Restac returns with many more warriors, who she has woken up from hibernation, intending to stage a coup. When she sees that Alaya, her sister, is dead, Restac loses control and orders her warriors to kill all the humans, starting with Ambrose. As the Silurians open fire, the Doctor deters them by breaking down their weapons with the sonic screwdriver, as all the humans and Eldane lock themselves in the lab. There, they realise that they have very little time before the drill impacts the surface of the Silurians' habitat and they all die. The Doctor decides that they should use the Silurian technology to send an energy pulse through the tunnel network to destroy the drill before it demolishes the Silurian civilisation. However, doing so would cause an underground collapse, so they will need to escape before the drill is destroyed. They need to get from the lab to where the Doctor and Nasreen left the TARDIS, but the Silurian army is blocking the way. Eldane tells them that he can stall the army by activating 'toxic fumigation'; a safety system that warns everyone to return to hibernation before a toxic gas is released, for only those stubborn and violent enough to follow Restac will die. The Doctor approaches Eldane and promises that in a thousand years, the Silurians and humans should attempt living together once again, for he will ensure that the humans are the best they can be by then. He approaches Elliot and asks him to create a myth, story or religion that can inform all coming human generations of the Silurians and how they can cohabitate peacefully one day in order to promote this plan.

As the safety system is triggered, Tony yells out in pain. Alaya had previously suggested that he should have been dead soon after she attacked him, but the Doctor finds that instead of killing him, the spit from Alaya has triggered a mutation. The Ambassador tells them that Tony can be put in a chamber to stop the infection, but the process takes much longer than the 15 minutes they have before the drill impacts. To this, Tony responds that he will stay behind, and everybody else clamors to get to the TARDIS. The Doctor realises Nasreen is not moving, as she informs him she will stay behind with Tony, to study the Earth and help the Silurians co-operate with mankind when the time comes. As the Doctor is taking so long, Amy returns to get him, prompting Rory to wait for Amy and the Doctor as well.

Ambrose, Mo and Elliot quickly get onto the TARDIS, but before Amy, Rory and the Doctor go in, they all notice a crack in the wall, just like that in Amy's bedroom as a child. The Doctor surmised that the cracks in the universe must have been formed by an explosion and insists on reaching into the other side to see what it holds, because explosions often leave shrapnel. He takes something out and looks at it in horror. Just as Rory, Amy and the Doctor are about to finally go into the TARDIS and take off to safety, Restac, dying due to exposure to the toxic gas, appears and shoots at the Doctor. Rory pushes him out of the way and takes the blast, dying in Amy's arms, confused because they had seen a future version of themselves across the hill from where they 'parked' the TARDIS in the beginning. The energy from the crack in the wall soon begins to absorb Rory, and the Doctor recalls what he said to Amy in the forest at the 'Byzantium': that if the time energy catches up to you, all evidence of your life is erased, as if you had never been born.

Since the drill is moments away from killing them, the Doctor pries a sobbing Amy away from Rory's lifeless body, locks her in the TARDIS and takes off, watching Rory's body dissipate into the crack. However, Amy implores the Doctor not to let her forget Rory, so he prompts her to clutch onto all the memories of him so that he can live on in her mind. Unlike with the Byzantium and the Weeping Angels, Amy will not remember Rory just because she is a time traveller, as he is part of her own personal history. For a moment, it looks as if Amy remembers. However, the TARDIS jolts, causing Amy to lose her focus, and she is not able to hold onto memories of Rory. The Doctor finds Amy's engagement ring on the floor of the TARDIS.

They arrive at the surface just as the drill explodes. Ambrose thanks the Doctor, since he could have let the Silurians kill her for killing Alaya. The Doctor responds that an eye for an eye is no way to live, and that she should seek some sort of repentance by making sure that her son really is the best humanity can be, in preparation for when the Silurians end their hibernation in a thousand years. Amy and the Doctor return to the TARDIS to leave, and they spot someone across the hill again, except this time, it is only 'future Amy', and no Rory. Amy does remark that for a second she thought she saw someone else as well, but lets go of the thought. On her way back into the TARDIS, Amy makes a remark to the Doctor and uses the term "you boys".

The Doctor lags behind to examine what he pulled from the other side of the crack: a burnt piece of the TARDIS.
[edit] Continuity

The events of "Cold Blood" continue the running series arc about by the Cracks in Time, resulting in Rory's deletion from history.

After his "decontamination", the Doctor asks the Silurians whether they have any celery or tomatoes. The Eleventh Doctor expressed similar food cravings early in his regeneration in "The Eleventh Hour", whilst the Fifth Doctor wore celery on his jacket and in The Caves of Androzani claimed it had restorative powers.

Mising dates

June 30                                                                                                              

 

August      2                                                                                                                

 

August      19                                                                                           

August      21

It has been five years since Amy Pond last travelled with the Doctor, and when he lands in her garden again, on the eve of the birth of her first child, she finds herself facing a heartbreaking choice – one that will change her life forever. They will have to choose which is the dream world and which is reality.

Plot

Leadworth, 2015. Amy Pond is stirring some custard in a bowl but starts to feel pain in her pregnant body. Rory immediately arrives on his bike (with a pony tail on his head) and Amy screams Rory's name so he can get inside thinking the baby is coming. Amy's pain then subsides and both of them are about to resume their daily lives, when the TARDIS materializes outside their kitchen window. The Doctor exits the TARDIS whilst Rory and Amy hurry to him and the TARDIS before hugs are exchanged and the Doctor stating how happy they look five years after they last travelled with him.

Cast

• Eleventh Doctor - Matt Smith
• Amy Pond - Karen Gillan
• Rory Williams - Arthur Darvill
• Dream Lord - Toby Jones
• Mr Nainby - Nick Hobbs
• Mrs Poggit - Audrey Ardington
• Mrs Hamil - Joan Linder

Production crew

to be added

References

• The Doctor reveals to Amy and Rory that he threw the TARDIS Manual at a Supernova because he 'disagreed' with it.
• The Dream Lord brings up the Doctor's relationship with Elizabeth I.
• The Dream Lord teleports himself around much like The Valeyard did in DW: The Ultimate Foe.
• The Dream Lord refers to The Doctor as the 'last of the Time Lords' and 'the oncoming storm', two nicknames he has been given. (DW: Doomsday, Journey's End et al.)

Story notes

• The enemies the old folks play are a race known as the Eknodine.
• The Dream Lord traps the Doctor, Rory and Amy in an alternative world and Amy has to decide what is the real world.
• Technically, the entire episode took place in the TARDIS.
• The box under the TARDIS console the Doctor opens has the words: "TARDIS. Time And Relative Dimension In Space. Build Site: Gallifrey Blackhole Shipyard. Type 40. Build date: 1963. Authorised for use by qualified Time Lords only by the Shadow Proclamation. Misuse or theft of any TARDIS will result in extreme penalties and permanent exile." written on it.
• There is no indication of how much time has passed since DW: The Vampires of Venice.
• The sign outside the old peoples' home reads "SARN Residential Care Home". Sarn was the setting for DW: Planet of Fire.
• This is only the second episode of the series (after Time of the Angels) not to feature a Crack in time but is the first non 2 part story to not feature a crack.

Ratings

to be added

Rumours

• The 'Dream Lord' was rumoured to pretend to be the Doctor because of a shot of him inside the TARDIS wearing the Eleventh Doctor's costume in the trailer. He was, in fact, the Doctor himself - at least, his dark side.
• Aunt Sharon will appear. This was false

Filming locations

to be added

Production errors

• When Rory and Amy are running from the Eknodine you can clearly see no mud on his back, but he was thrown on his back, into mud, a minute before.
  It concerns a dream, that puts things in perspective.

• The Doctor mentions again that bow ties are cool. (DW: The Eleventh Hour)
• The Dream Lord refers to what happened between the Doctor and Queen Elizabeth I. (DW: The Shakespeare Code, The End of Time, The Beast Below)
• The Doctor initially assumes that the TARDIS has jumped a time track (DW: The Space Museum)
• The Doctor tries to jump start the TARDIS by kicking it. (DW: Rise of the Cybermen)
• The Dream Lord accuses the Doctor of abandoning his companions in favour of younger friends, echoing remarks by Sarah Jane Smith about the Tenth Doctor and his relationship with Rose Tyler. (DW: School Reunion)
• The Dream Lord, once alone with Amy, echoes a conversation Jackie Tyler had with the Ninth Doctor about how 'anything could happen'. (DW: Rose)
• After Rory dies in the dream, Amy asks the Doctor "What is the point of you?", similar to how Gwen asks the same to Jack after Rhys dies. (TW: End of Days)
• The swimming pool has turned up; the Doctor said that "it'll turn up" in DW: The Eleventh Hour.

DVD and Blu-ray release

BBC Video - Doctor Who Series Five - Volume Three will feature Amy's Choice, The Hungry Earth, Cold Blood and Vincent and the Doctor. It will be released on Monday 2nd August 2010 (UK Only) on DVD and Blu-ray.^[1]

External links

to be added

Footnotes

Dessicated corpses, terror in the canal and a visit to the sinister House of Calvierri – the Doctor takes Amy and Rory for a romantic mini-break, as the TARDIS touches down once again.

But 16th-century Venice is not as it should be. The city has been sealed to protect it from the Plague, although Rosanna Calvierri may have other plans...

Plot

Cast

• The Doctor - Matt Smith
• Amy Pond - Karen Gillan
• Rory Williams - Arthur Darvill
• Rosanna Calvierri - Helen McCrory
• Francesco - Alex Price
• Isabella - Alisha Bailey
• Steward - Simon Gregor
• Guido - Lucian Msamati
• Inspector - Michael Percival
• Vampire - Gabriela Montarez
• Vampire - Elizabeth Croft
• Vampire - Gabriella Wylde
• Vampire - Sonila Vieshta
• Vampire - Hannah Steele

Crew

Executive Producers: Steven Moffat, Piers Wenger and Beth Willis
Produced by Tracie Simpson Patrick Schweitzer		Directed by Jonny Campbell		Written by Toby Whithouse (script editing by Brian Minchin)		Director of Photography Tony Slater Ling		Production Designer Edward Thomas		Visual Effects The Mill
Make-up Designer Barbara Southcott		Casting Director Andy Pryor CDG		Music Murray Gold		Costume Designer Ray Holman		Editor James Pearson		Special Effects Real SFX
Original theme music by Ron Grainer• Title sequence by Framestore• With thanks to BBC National Orchestra of Wales

General production staff Production Executive - Julie Scott Line Producer - Patrick Schweitzer Location Manager - Gareth Skelding Unit Manager - Rhys Griffiths Production Co-ordinator - Jess van Niekerk Assistant Production Manager - Claire Thomas Production Runner - Sian Warrilow Production Accountant - Ceru Tothill A/Production Accountant - Carole Wakefield Directorial/DOP staff 1st Assistant Director - John Bennett 2nd Assistant Director - James DeHaviland 3rd Assistant Director - Heddi-Joy Taylor-Welch Runners - Nicola Enyon Price, Laura Jenkins Continuity - Non Eleri Hughes Camera Operator - Ian Adrian B Camera Operator - Matthew Poynter Focus Puller - Steve Rees Grip - John Robinson Assistant Camera - Tom Hartley, Jon Vidgen Boom Operator - Dafydd Parry Gaffer - Mark Hutchings Best Boy - Pete Chester Electricians - Ben Griffiths, Steve Slocombe, Bob Milton, Alan Tippets	Art department Supervising Art Director - Stephen Nicholas Art Department Co-ordinator - Amy Oakes Associate Designer - James North Production Buyer - Ben Morris Set Decorator - Keith Dunne Props Buyer - Catherine Samuel Set Designer - Ben Austin Storyboard Artist - James Iles Concept Artists - Richard Shaun Williams, Peter McKinstry Graphic Artist - Jackson Pope Standby Props - Phill Shellard, Tom Evans Standby Art Director - Tristan Peatfield Standby Carpenter - Will Pope Standby Rigger - Keith Freeman Standby Painter - Ellen Woods Props Master - Paul Aitken Props Chargehand - Matt Wild Dressing Props - Martin Broadbent, Rhys Jones Prop Makers - Penny Howarth, Nicholas Robatto Construction Manager - Matthew Hywel-Davies Workshop Manager - Mark Hill Construction Chargehand - Scott Fisher Practical Electrician - Albert James Scenic Artists - John Pinkerton, John Whalley Graphics - BBC Wales Graphics Costume Costume Supervisor - Bobbie Peach Crowd Supervisor - Lindsay Bonaccorsi Costume Assistants - Sara Morgan, Maria Franchi	Make-up and prosthetics Make-up Supervisor - Pam Mullins Make-up Artists - Abi Brotherton, Morag Smith Movement Stunt Co-ordinator - Crispin Layfield Stunt Performers - Gordon Seed Casting Casting Associates: Andy Brierley, Alice Purser General post-production staff Post-production Supervisors - Chris Blatchford, Ceres Doyle Post-production Co-ordinator - Marie Brown Assistant Editor - Becky Trotman On-line Conform - Matthew Clarke, Mark Bright Special and visual effects VFX Editor - Cat Gregory Colourist - Mick Vincent Sound Sound Recordist - Bryn Howarth Dubbing Mixer - Tim Ricketts Sound Maintenance Engineer - Jeff Welch Supervising Sound Editor - Paul McFadden Sound FX Editor - Paul Jefferies Foley Editor - Helen Dickson

Not every person who worked on this adventure was credited. The absence of a credit for a position doesn't necessarily mean the job wasn't required. The information above is based solely on observations of the actual end credits of the episodes as broadcast, and does not relay information from IMDB or other sources.
According to a pre-launch press pack issued by the BBC, Patrick Schweitzer was actually the co-producer of this episode, but in the event, he was actually double credited — as both a full producer and a line producer.

References

The Doctor

• The Doctor shows his Library Card to the Vampires. It has a picture of his first incarnation on it. The name on it appears to be "Dr. J. Smith."
• Amy describes her time with the Doctor as involving "lots of running."
• The Doctor gives Amy a boiled sweet.

Individuals

• The Doctor compares the Vampires to Harry Houdini.
• When Rory asks why the Psychic paper says he is Amy's eunuch, she says "I'll explain later".

Races and species

• The relationship between Calvierri and her son and their plan to convert people to become their species is similar to that of the Family of Blood who shared a close bond and took over individuals to go unnoticed.
• When Calvierri commits suicide she asks The Doctor if he can carry another dead race on his conscience, and to remember her, much like Davros did when he died.

Technology

• Rosanna Calvierri uses a Perception filter. The perception filter is shown to have a self preservation loophole, making the teeth visible when the brain detects a threat.

Story Notes

• A 90-second clip from this episode was aired during Matt Smith's appearance on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross on 26 March 2010.
• The Vampires are not real vampires, but are of alien origin. They are fish-like alien creatures using Perception Filters to hide themselves to other people.
• There was some initial confusion over the title of this story, with some media sources (as well as Matt Smith in a TV interview^[1]) using the title Vampires in Venice.
• In the Series 5 preview, one of the vampires leap for Rory, without any change. In the actual episode, he changes to his alien form. Differences like this have happened many times from trailer to episode.
• The name of the species, Saturnynians, isn't spoken in the episode, though the planet Saturnyne is mentioned twice.
• The Saturnynian are hiding from the Cracks and the Silence.
• The Doctor mentions meeting Casanova. David Tennant had previously played Casanova in a television series written by Russell T Davies.
• This is the first Doctor Who episode that, instead of having the last scene cut to the closing titles, the closing titles 'merge' with the scene. In this case, the camera zooms into the TARDIS keyhole, and through it, the Time Vortex is visible.
• This episode is notable for being filmed in Croatia, and is therefore the first episode of a Doctor Who universe show to be filmed in a formerly Communist country.
• The Vampires of Venice contains similarities to School Reunion, also written by Toby Whithouse:
  • Pre-titles sequence involves scene of a young girl being attacked by an alien, followed by a scene in which the Doctor appears during a mundane activity and says something rather ordinary.
  • The companion's boyfriend joins in for the adventure and becomes part of the TARDIS crew for the following episodes.
  • Both episodes feature scenes where two of the main characters discuss the Doctor's effect on relationships.
  • The leader of the alien race in both episodes proposes an alliance with the Doctor.
  • A minor character disposes of most of the aliens by causing an explosion.
  • The alien's plan is thwarted by a simple flick of a switch.

Ratings

6.2 million

Filming Locations

• Croatia was used as the primary location for the setting of this episode. It is the third episode of the revival series after DW: The Fires of Pompeii and Planet of the Dead to include major filming outside the UK.
• Some filming took place in Caephilly Castle. [1]
• Scenes featuring The Doctor, Amy and Rory were filmed at Llancaiach Fawr. [2]

Continuity

• The Doctor tells Rory that Amy kissed him. (DW: Flesh and Stone)
• Instead of his Psychic paper, the Doctor shows his library card, which includes a photo of his first incarnation.
• The First Doctor's library card can read out 76 TOTTERS LANE, first seen in DW: An Unearthly Child
• The library card lists his name as "Dr. J. Smith," presumably standing for "Dr. John Smith," a frequent alias of the Doctor's.
• The Fourth Doctor previously encountered vampires of a different kind in DW: State of Decay
• The Seventh Doctor encountered a kind of vampire known as "Haemovores", which also happened to reside in water, in DW: The Curse of Fenric.
• The Eighth Doctor had previously visited 23rd Century Venice in BFA: The Stones of Venice.
• The Doctor mentions how a life of time travel can make it difficult to readjust to a normal existence. Sarah Jane Smith told him much the same thing in DW: School Reunion.

DVD and Blu-ray Releases

BBC Video - Doctor Who Series Five - Volume Two will feature The Time of Angels, Flesh and Stone and The Vampires of Venice. It will be released on Monday 5th July 2010 (UK Only) on DVD and Blu-ray.^[2]

Plot

The Doctor discovers a message in Old High Gallifreyan engraved on the side of a ruined flight recorder from the starship Byzantium 12,000 years in the past by Doctor River Song. With Amy Pond, the Doctor takes the TARDIS to meet her before the ship crashes on the planet Alfava Metraxis. After reuniting with the Doctor, whom she has had extensive contact within his relative future, Dr. Song warns the Doctor of a Weeping Angel, creatures that cannot move when observed but otherwise can move incredibly fast, that the Byzantium was carrying, and calls for Father Octavian and his troops to join her on the surface to recapture it. Dr. Song shows the Doctor and Amy a four-second loop of security footage of the Angel as the soldiers set up base camp. The Doctor and Song review a book written by a madman about the Angels which warns that any form of image of the Angels become Angels themselves. Simultaneously, Amy finds, when she looks away, the Angel from the footage moves and begins to emerge from the screen, further trapping her in the viewing room. As the Doctor and Song attempt to free Amy, Amy is able to freeze the image on a loop break, causing the Angel to disappear and saving herself. As the Doctor and Song verify Amy is safe, she continues to believe she has something in her eyes.

To access the Byzantium and locate the Angel, the group must travel through a "Maze of the Dead", a stone labyrinth with numerous statues erected by the planet's natives that the Angel could hide among. The group splits up, with some soldiers left to guard the entrance. As they explore, the Doctor and Song come to realize that the native species of the planet have two heads, while all the statues have one; they quickly realise that every statue is a Weeping Angel, slower and weaker than the captured Angel due to lack of beings to consume over the centuries but now absorbing energy from the crashed ship. As the group tries to escape, Amy believes her hand to have become stone and cannot move, but the Doctor points out that her perception has been influenced by the Angel, and she is still fine, allowing her to flee. The group soon finds that the Angels have killed their rear guard and are using their consciousness to speak to the Doctor. The Angels reveal they have lured the group in the trap, and are planning to use their essences to further regenerate. The Doctor threatens that the Angels should have never put him in the trap, and prepares the group to act once he fires at the globe of light providing the only illumination the maze; the episode ends on this cliffhanger.

The Doctor, Amy, River Song, Father Octavian and his clerics find themselves standing on the nose of the Byzantium, looking down on the surface and the Weeping Angels, after having been caught by the ship's artificial gravity when the gravity globe burst. The group make their way to the secondary flight deck while being chased by the regenerating Angels, who have now also jumped up to the ship. All the while, Amy is counting downwards from ten without realising it. Angel Bob claims that this is a countdown to when they will kill her, after which they will take control of the universe. The Doctor asks the Angels where they can possibly expect to get the power from to take over the universe, but the Angels just laugh at the Doctor's ignorance of the situation. The Doctor turns around and then sees a giant crack in the ship's wall, identical to the one in Amy's bedroom in "The Eleventh Hour", and as seen in "The Beast Below" and "Victory of the Daleks", it is a crack in the universe. While the others escape into the ship's oxygen factory, a giant forest, the Doctor examines the crack, before noticing he is surrounded by Weeping Angels - one of whom catches him by his jacket. He warns the Angels that the crack, whilst full of energy, is not full of the energy they need (time energy); it is instead a crack from the end of the universe, a crack that will consume everyone. While distracting them with this thought, he escapes, minus his coat, and quickly follows after the others.

Just before the Doctor can reach her, Amy collapses to the forest floor, seemingly dying. Recollecting that the image of an Angel is itself an Angel, the Doctor realises that Amy has the image of a Weeping Angel in the visual centres of her mind. The Doctor tells her to close her eyes in order to suppress the visual centres of the brain and explains that if she opens her eyes for more than a second, the Angel will kill her. Before he leaves, Amy confesses to the Doctor she is unsure if she can trust him yet, as he isn't always truthful with her, but the Doctor simply informs her that if he always told her the truth, she would never need to trust him. He implores her to remember what he told her when she was seven, but Amy does not know what he is referring to. The Doctor, River and Father Octavian head off to the main control room in the hope of slowing down the descent of the Angels, while Amy is left alone with the clerics as the Weeping Angels advance. Whilst walking through the forest, the Doctor traces the origins of the crack back to the point in time and space at which it began - June 26th, 201x (the last digit is not revealed until the end of the episode). While trying to break into the control room, an Angel traps Octavian. The Doctor is helpless to save him and Octavian urges him to leave and join River inside. Just before his inevitable death though, Octavian divulges to the Doctor that River is a criminal currently in his custody, guilty of the murder of a man whose identity he will not reveal. The Doctor gives his last apologies to Octavian and hurries inside.

The crack in the secondary flight deck widens into the forest, where Amy is being guarded by four of the clerics. The Angels run away from the crack, in fear from the Doctor's warning, leaving the clerics and Amy behind. The Doctor speculates that the crack is allowing time to be rewritten and River asks him how they can close it. The Doctor explains that the best way to close it is to feed it a complicated space-time event: him. In the forest, three of clerics go to inspect the crack, which just looks like a very bright light but, after they've gone, the remaining cleric doesn't even remember that they existed. He goes to investigate the crack himself, leaving Amy truly alone and with only a communicator. The Doctor radios Amy and tells her to come to the control room. She asks why she should risk confronting the Angels and the Doctor tells her that the Angels can only kill her, but the crack can erase her from time. Reluctantly and still with her eyes closed, she follows his sonic screwdriver signal, until the Angels arrive and surround her. Since the Angels are still very scared, the Doctor informs Amy that if she walks like she can see, the Angels will remain in stone form due to their survival instincts, but Amy soon gives herself away as blind by tripping over and shouting, allowing the Angels (who are seen moving for the first time) to advance in on her. Just in time, River teleports her to the control room.

All the Angels come to the entrance to the room as they drain energy from the doors, which then open. The lead Angel, whom the Doctor has named "Angel Bob" after the man whose voice it was using, demands that the Doctor throw himself into the crack in order to save the Angels. River, as a time traveller, wants to throw herself in but the Doctor laughs at the idea, claiming that she is not even as complicated as one Angel and that only all the Angels are equivalent to him. He then realises that as the ship's power is quickly draining, its artificial gravity field is about to collapse, and he urges his friends to hold on to something to stop themselves from falling. The gravity field then collapses and all of the frozen Angels fall into the crack. This is enough to seal it, erasing them all from existence. The group escapes to the outside of the temple, and Amy is again able to see - the Angel within her mind never existed, due to the fact it fell into the crack. Confused, Amy asks how it is possible she remembers all of the clerics who seemingly "ceased to exist," but the Doctor informs her that, since they are time travellers, and time has no context in which to work, they can remember them. River, who after completing her mission is about to be teleported back to her cell in space, tells the Doctor she will see him again when the Pandorica opens (unnerving the Doctor, who claims the Pandorica is just a fairy tale), and that the man she killed was the best man she'd ever known. She is teleported back to the penal starship, with the remaining soldiers.

Amy tells the Doctor to take her home. There, she tells him that she is getting married in the morning and tries to seduce him (to which he acts alarmed). He declines to reciprocate and, whilst looking at her bedside digital clock, realises that she is at the centre of all the cracks and that the time explosion which created them occurs today - the day of her wedding, June 26th 2010. He quickly whisks her away in order to try to sort the issue out.

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Sorry its late

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(late) third avviversary show.

 

Enjoy

Youtube link

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL8qirrysRM

 

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and the link to WHO AT FAB CAFE

 

http://www.fanslikeus.org.uk/

 

 

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dvd review

 notes to follow

SFX have given the alliance 50 sets of 4 tickets to give away on our 
shows... all listeners have to do is phone
 
08700110034 and quote promotional code DWPOD

enjoy this xmas gift from the TDP

RPG Update

info to follow

The Waters of Mars is the second of the 2009 Specials leading up to the end of the David Tennant era. It aired on 15th November 2009 on BBC One.

Contents [show] 1 Synopsis 2 Plot 3 Cast 4 Crew 5 References 5.1 Earth history 5.2 Locations 5.3 Races and Species 5.4 Robots 6 Story Notes 6.1 Ratings 6.2 Filming Locations 6.3 Discontinuity, Plot Holes, Errors 7 Continuity 8 International broadcasts 9 DVD release 10 External links 11 Footnotes

Synopsis

Mars. 2059. Bowie Base One. Last recorded message: "Don't drink the water. Don't even touch it. Not one drop."

Plot

The TARDIS arrives on Mars and the Doctor steps out in his spacesuit, seemingly just to relax and enjoy the landscape. Stumbling across a base inhabited by a team from Earth, the Doctor is detained by a remote-controlled robot called "GADGET" and brought inside. The base commander, Adelaide Brooke, is at first suspicious of the Doctor, but after a tense interrogation, decides to trust him. The Doctor learns that the date is 21st November 2059, and that this is in fact Bowie Base One, the first human outpost on Mars. History has it that on this date the base was destroyed in a mysterious explosion and Brooke and her crew were all killed. Unwilling to break the laws of time and interfere with fixed points in history, the Doctor decides to leave. However, at the very same moment a crisis is developing: two crewmembers, Andy Stone and Maggie Cain, have been infected by a mysterious life form which takes over their bodies and causes them to gush copious amounts of water. Adelaide confiscates the Doctor's spacesuit, reasoning that he could be responsible for the infection in some way, and orders him to come with her and another crewmember, Tarak Ital, to investigate.

The infection spreads, with Andy passing on the condition to Tarak. The two men are contained in the base's "bio-sphere" section while Maggie is secured in the medical wing. In a conversation with colleague Yuri Kerenski, the organism occupying Maggie's body reveals its desire to reach Earth, a planet rich in water. The crew plan to evacuate in an escape shuttle, and the Doctor breaks the news to Adelaide that she must die today, on Mars, if events are to unfold as they should. However, he also tells her that her death will inspire her descendants to travel further into space and establish peaceful relations with numerous extraterrestrial species. Unwillingly, Adelaide lets him leave. As the Doctor is making his way back to the TARDIS, Maggie breaks out of confinement, infiltrates the shuttle and infects pilot Ed Gold, Adelaide's deputy. Before the condition takes a hold over him, Ed manages to trigger the shuttle's self-destruct mechanism, which traps the infection on Mars but also leaves the surviving crew with no means of escape. The destruction of the shuttle is witnessed by the Doctor who, overcome by defiance against time itself, returns to the base to save the others.

Realising that there is no way to change the course of history, Adelaide activates Bowie Base's self-destruct sequence. The infected personnel mount the roof of the control centre and exude more water, which pours into the room and claims GADGET's operator, Roman Groom, and Steffie Ehrlich. However, the Doctor uses GADGET to access the TARDIS, operate its controls remotely and transport the time and space machine into the base, rescuing Adelaide, Yuri and Mia Bennett from the resulting nuclear explosion.

The TARDIS materialises outside Adelaide's house on Earth. Mia and Yuri are shocked by their experiences on Mars and Doctor's power and depart, bewildered. In a conversation with Adelaide, the Doctor reflects on why he ultimately decided to save her and the others. He argues that the Time Lords' rules were only valid while their civilisation existed, and that since he is the last of his race he has total authority over time. He proudly declares himself the "Time Lord Victorious" and remarks that with this power he will now be able to save influential figures such as Adelaide as well as "little people" the likes of Yuri and Mia. Scolding the Doctor for his new found arrogance, Adelaide returns home and commits suicide, reverting the changes that the Doctor has made to the timeline.

Only now understanding the full impact of his actions, the Doctor is overcome with horror and realises that there will be a price to pay for his interference. Ood Sigma appears in the street, prompting the Doctor to ask him whether he has finally gone too far — whether the time has come for him to die. Unresponsive, Sigma vanishes, and the Doctor staggers back into the TARDIS to the ominous sound of the Cloister Bell. With a defiant "No!", he begins to work the machine's controls.

Cast

• The Doctor - David Tennant
• Adelaide Brooke - Lindsay Duncan
• Ed Gold - Peter O'Brien
• Tarak Ital - Chook Sibtain
• Andy Stone - Alan Ruscoe
• Maggie Cain - Sharon Duncan-Brewster
• Mia Bennett - Gemma Chan
• Yuri Kerenski - Aleksander Mikic
• Steffie Ehrlich - Cosima Shaw
• Roman Groom - Michael Goldsmith
• Emily Brooke - Lily Bevan
• Mikhail Kerenski - Max Bollinger
• Ulrika Ehrlich - Anouska Strahnz
• Lisette Ehrlich - Zofia Strahnz
• Adelaide's Father - Charlie De'ath
• Ood Sigma - Paul Kasey
• Young Adelaide - Rachel Fewell

Crew

1st Assistant Director - William Hartley 2nd Assistant Director - James DeHaviland 3rd Assistant Director - Sarah Davies Location Manager - Gareth Skelding Unit Manager - Geraint Williams Production Co-ordinator - Jess van Niekerk Production Secretary - Kevin Myers Production Runner - Siân Warrilow Floor Runner - Alison Jones Continuity - Llinos Wyn Jones Script Editor - Gary Russell Camera Operators - Roger Pearce, Rory Taylor Focus Pullers - Steve Rees, Jamie Southcott Grip - John Robinson Camera Assistants - Jon Vidgen, Tom Hartley Gaffer - Mark Hutchings Best Boy - Peter Chester Electricians - Ben Griffiths, Jonathon Cox Boom Operators - Jeff Welch, Bryn Thomas Stunt Co-ordinator - Abbi Collins Choreographer - Ailsa Berk Supervising Art Director - Stephen Nicholas Associate Designer - James North

Art Department Coordinator - Amy Pope Standby Art Director - Ciaran Thompson Standby Props - Phill Shellard, Jackson Pope Set Decorator - Joelle Rumbelow Property Master - Paul Aitken Construction Manager - Matthew Hywel-Davies Graphics - BBC Wales Graphics Costume Supervisor - Lindsay Bonaccorsi Assistant Costume Designer - Rose Goodhart Costume Assistants - Barbara Harrington, Louise Martin Make-Up Artists - Pam Mullins, Steve Smith, Morag Smith Casting Associate - Andy Brierley Casting Assistant - Alice Purse VFX Editor - Ceres Doyle Post Production Supervisors - Samantha Hall, Chris Blatchford Post Production Co-ordinator - Marie Brown Colourist - Mick Vincent Dubbing Mixer - Tim Ricketts Supervising Sound Editor - Paul McFadden Sound FX Editor - Paul Jefferies Dialogue Editor - Douglas Sinclair

References

• Adelaide was 10 years old when the Earth was stolen by the Daleks, she witnessed one herself.
• Whilst on Earth when the Doctor is in the TARDIS the cloister bell is audible.

Earth history

• Adelaide Brooke says that the last forty years on Earth have been chaos, with massive climate change, ozone degredation, and "the oil apocalypse"; humanity "almost reached extinction" during this period. Andy's obituary mentions "appalling storm conditions" in 2040, and climate change affecting agriculture in 2045.
• Maggie believes the Doctor may be a Philippino or Spanish astronaut, as the Philippines are rumoured to be building a Mars rocket and Spain have a "space link" that they managed to keep secret. Andy Stone's sister worked for the Spanish space programme. Ed Gold believes the Doctor is from a non-state independent group, referring to the Branson Inheritance.
• Various lunar missions have been carried out, including ten German missions and Project Pit Stop, establishing a refueling station on the moon. Mars was landed on in 2041, with Adelaide Brooke as part of the crew. Thirty years after 2059, Brooke's granddaughter Susan will pilot the first lightspeed ship.
• At least one of the webpages -- the one showing Brooke's granddaughter -- dates from the 2080s or later, suggesting the Internet still exists in some form in the late 21st century.

Locations

• Bowie Base One is Earth's first off world colony.

• "Bowie Base One" is a reference to the David Bowie song "Life on Mars", which is also the name of a BBC TV series set in 1972 starring John Simm, who currently plays The Master.

• Bowie Base One is located on Mars in the Gusev Crater.

Races and Species

• The Doctor mentions the Ice Warriors and suggests that they may have frozen the Flood.

Robots

• The Doctor said that he hates "funny robots" but notes that he'd be okay with a robot dog.
• Gadget was built by Roman Groom using parts from the drones that constructed Bowie Base One.

Story Notes

• This story was initially envisaged as a Christmas special, several festive references remain, such as the crew on Mars preparing for Christmas dinner, and it snowing when the Doctor arrives back on Earth as he exclaims how he likes snow.
• This story was originally entitled; Red Christmas.
• As Lindsay Duncan has been cast as a companion, she is the oldest actor to play a companion on television since the beginning of the series, although this title will be taken away from her in the next episode when Bernard Cribbins becomes the Doctor's companion.

Ratings

• 9.1m
• 33.9% of TV share

Filming Locations

• Victoria Place, Newport
• National Botanic Gardens of Wales, Carmarthenshire
• Taff's Well quarry, Cardiff, Wales

Discontinuity, Plot Holes, Errors

• If no Human had ever heard of the Ice Warriors then how can the events of NA: The Dying Days not be known by the Humans? The novels may not be considered canon, by the current production team, also that event may have been in flux. It is never explicitly stated that Humans have never heard of the Ice Warriors. When the Doctor mentions them, Adelaide simply states, "I haven't got time for stories."

• After the explosion of the shuttle, several fires are burning all around the site. Taking into account the initial explosion was fueled by the base's oxygen, and given that Mars has no appreciable atmosphere, how can these smaller fires burn in the vacuum? Because Mars does have an atmosphere, albeit one with a pressure roughly equivalent to one hundredth that of Earth's atmosphere.

• Given that Mars's thin atmosphere consists primarily of carbon dioxide, with a very small concentration of oxygen (which is required for combustion), how can the smaller fires after the explosion burn? There is a lot we don't know about Bowie Base One. We don't know what sort of fuel they're using, we don't know how the self-destruct mechanism on the rocket works.

• In Father's Day The Reapers turned up due to Rose saving her father when somebody who was dead is now alive - surely this should be the case now for Yuri and Mia as they should have died but are now alive. The Reapers only showed up in Fathers Day due to Rose saving her father's life, as then, that altered the timeline meaning that in the future Rose wouldn't have travelled to the past to save her father, causing a paradox, the Doctor only changed the future when he saved Adelaide's life. Had Adelaide's granddaughter travelled back in time to save her grandmother, for instance, that would more likely have caught the Reapers' attention. Also, as Adelaide almost immediately kills herself, thereby maintaining the timeline, there was no need for the Reapers to appear.

• The news article on Adelaide claims that she was born in 1999 and yet was also 10 when her parents died in 2008. (There was clearly a typo in the article in regards to either the year or her age.)

• The news article identifies The Stolen Earth as occuring in 2008, instead of 2009 (as the show's been a year ahead since Aliens of London). The production team have deliberately stated that Series Three occurs within a space of a few days to rectify the year-off discrepancy that Aliens of London introduced, so the Whoniverse timeline is in sync with ours again. (Two explanations: either the article we were "seeing" had some sort of typo, or the events of The Stolen Earth actually did happen in 2008.)

• The news article on the mission refers to "Dr Tarak Ital MD." It would be correct to write either the "Dr" or the "MD," but both at once is redundant and grammatically incorrect. Ital's obituary also misspells "Havana". It is correct if the person has both an MD and a PhD.

• The article on Susie Fontana Brooke's first "Faster then Light" flight lists Adelaide's team at the end as hers.

• Why would the Doctor comment on Mia's age when Roman is two years younger than her?

• When it is revealed that Maggie is one of the creatures, the outer shot shows her hair back while in the closer shot, it is around her face.

Continuity

• The Doctor speaks partially to the events of DW: The Fires of Pompeii.
• There is a flashback to (which includes a cameo by a Dalek) DW: The Stolen Earth / Journey's End
• The spacesuit the Doctor wore was the same suit from DW: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit.
• Mars appears not to have much of an atmosphere, however NA: The Dying Days suggests otherwise.
• SJA: The Mad Woman in the Attic is also (partially) set in 2059.
• Carmen's prophecy "he will knock four times" is mentioned from DW: Planet of the Dead.
• Sound clips of the Doctor talking about the Time Lords and The Time War are used from DW: Gridlock, Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords

International broadcasts

• ABC1 - Australia : 6th December 2009^[1]
• BBC America: 19th December 2009
• Space - Canada: 19th December 2009^[2]

revisiting the past

info to follow

INFO TO FOLLOW

TDP info to follow

info to follow

Sorry. no show this week

my top 20 Whoness things

Plot

After his regeneration from their previous adventure, the Doctor starts behaving erratically. He goes to the wardrobe and looking for a new outfit and finds a glaring, mismatched, brightly coloured coat to which he immediately takes a shine. Peri tells him that he could not go outside wearing such an awful garb, to which the Doctor takes offence.

Two twins, Romulus and Remus Sylveste, receive a visitation from a mysterious old man called Professor Edgeworth. They question how he managed to get inside their house; he tells them he will return when their father is there, then proceeds to abduct them and the trio disappear. They arrive on a spacecraft in deep space. Edgeworth then communicates with his superior, a slug-like creature called Mestor, who instructs Edgeworth to take the twins to Titan 3.

In the console room, the Doctor has a funny turn, quoting a poem about a Peri — a good and beautiful fairy in Persian mythology, but one which used to be evil. The Doctor accuses her of being evil, and of being an alien spy before rushing toward her and throttling her. He catches a sight of his own manic face in a mirror and collapses in a heap, releasing Peri. When she tells him that he tried to kill her, he initially denies he could be capable of such an act, but seeing how terrified of him she is, decides he must become a hermit on the desolate asteroid Titan 3.

The twins' father contacts the authorities; he found Zanium in their room — a sure sign of intergalactic kidnap. A Commander Lang begins the pursuit and soon finds a suspicious ship previously reported missing. He tries to contact it, but it enters warp drive — something that class of ship is not designed to do.

On Titan 3, as the Doctor contemplates a thousand years of solitude and Peri expresses her disapproval, they hear the crash landing of a craft. Examining its wreckage, they find the concussed body of Commander Lang. They take him back to the TARDIS where he reveals his whole squadron has been destroyed. Believing the Doctor to be responsible, he points his gun at the Doctor and threatens to kill him…

Peri pleads with Lang, telling him that the Doctor had in fact saved him, but he faints away. The Doctor is not keen to treat Lang, more concerned for his own life, but eventually agrees to Peri's persuasion.

Edgeworth argues with Romulus and Remus, making them do Mestor's work. He scolds them for setting up a distress signal, so they are not allowed to use electronic equipment to solve the equations they have been set. An image of Mestor appears and gives the twins a more blunt threat — work for him or have their minds destroyed.

On the TARDIS scanner, the Doctor and Peri see a building — something which has no place on an uninhabited asteroid. Leaving Lang behind, they find a tunnel which may lead to the building, but on exploring find two aliens wielding guns. The Doctor cowers in fear and pleads with them not to shoot him. They are led off and are brought before Edgeworth. The Doctor claims to be a pilgrim to Titan 3, but Noma, one of the aliens, says they are spies and should be shot. The Doctor suddenly recognises Edgeworth as an old friend - Azmael, master of Jaconda, whom he last saw two incarnations ago. When the Doctor sees Romulus and Remus and discovers it is Azmael who has abducted them, he is disgusted. Azmael teleports away with the twins and the aliens, leaving the Doctor and Peri locked in the building. The Doctor starts to break the lock's combination, but Peri discovers Noma has set the base to self-destruct. The Doctor improvises a solution to teleport them back to the TARDIS. Peri makes a successful return, but the Doctor has not appeared when she sees the base explode on the scanner…

A glimpse of the Doctor is seen appearing in the TARDIS; he was delayed returning because he was using Peri's watch to synchronise their arrival, but the watch had stopped. The Doctor is surprised at Peri's compassion when she thought he had died.

On Jaconda, Mestor is seen putting one of the bird-like Jacondans to death for a petty offence of stealing a few vegetables. Soon, the TARDIS arrives, but instead of the expected beautiful planet the Doctor is expecting, he, Peri and Lang find a desolate wasteland covered with giant Gastropod trails. The Doctor is reluctant to go to the palace, scared for his own life, but is persuaded to take Lang there in the TARDIS. In the palace corridors they see murals depicting Jaconda's history, depicting the slugs of myth - but it appears that they are now all too real. After avoiding Gastropods, Lang gets stuck in their slime trail.

Azmael takes the twins to his laboratory and shows them a store room full of Gastropod eggs. Mestor arrives and tries to persuade them that his aims are benevolent. Azmael begs him to stop reading his thoughts and stop Noma watching his every move. He agrees and leaves. Azmael explains to the Twins that Mestor usurped him as leader of Jaconda and outlines a plan to draw two outlying planets into the same orbit as Jaconda. The Twins' genius is required to stabilise those planets in their new orbit. The Doctor, leaving Peri and Lang behind, finds Azmael's lab. In a manic fit of pique, he attacks Azmael, but is restrained by a Jacondan and the Twins. The Doctor apologises to Azmael but demands to know what is going on.

Meanwhile, Peri is captured by Jacondan guards and brought before Mestor. When Lang escapes to Azmael's lab and informs them what has happened, the Doctor finally shows compassion for her when he thinks she might die…

Mestor refrains from killing Peri immediately, finding her appearance pleasing. Jacondan guards arrive in Azmael's lab and seize the Doctor. The Doctor tells Mestor that he ought to allow him to assist with the dangerous operation of moving the planets, as a single mistake could blow a hole in that corner of the universe. Back the laboratory, Azmael informs the Doctor the details of the plan to bring the planets into the same orbit — they will be placed in different time zones using time travel technology that Mestor stole from Azmael. The Doctor realises that, as the other planets are smaller than Jaconda, bringing them closer to Jaconda's sun will lead to catastrophe. The Doctor enters the egg storeroom, and is disturbed that they have no nutritional mucus. He tries to cut one open with a laser cutter; the shell is impenetrable, but the egg reacts slightly to the heat. The Doctor realises they have been designed to withstand the heat of an exploding sun — the explosion of the Jacondan sun will scatter the eggs throughout the universe. When they hatch, the Gastropods will conquer the universe.

The one remaining Jacondan in the lab collapses dead, his mind burnt out. Mestor had been using him as a monitor, and knows the full details of what has been discussed. Peri, Lang and the Twins return to the TARDIS, whilst the Doctor and Azmael go to confront Mestor. When Mestor refuses to abandon his plans, the Doctor hurls a vial of acid taken from the lab at him, but a force field protects Mestor from any harm. Mestor threatens to possess the Doctor's mind and body, and demonstrates by taking control of Azmael's body. Azmael tells him to destroy Mestor's body before he can return to it, which he does with a further vial. Then Azmael, in his last regeneration, forces himself to regenerate — killing himself — and in doing so destroys Mestor. Dying, Azmael says he has no regrets and that one of his fondest memories was a time spent with the Doctor by a fountain.

The Doctor and Peri return to the TARDIS; Lang decides to stay behind on Jaconda to assist with their rebuilding. When Peri tells the Doctor off for being rude, he reminds her that he is an alien, with alien sensibilities: "I am the Doctor… whether you like it or not!"

[edit] Cast notes

• Maurice Denham makes a guest appearance as Azmael. See Celebrity appearances in Doctor Who
• Colin Baker also provides, uncredited, the voice of a Jacondan at Freighter Control in part three.
• Dennis Chinnery had previously appeared as Gharman in the Tom Baker story Genesis of the Daleks.

[edit] Continuity

• The Doctor states that he has regenerated twice since his last encounter with Azmael. This means that this last time (including the incident at the fountain) occurred during the Doctor's fourth incarnation.
• The Doctor is unusually violent at the start of this episode, even attempting to strangle Peri. The intention was to create a Doctor that was initially unlikeable, but would gradually reveal a kind-hearted soul (glimpsed in Revelation of the Daleks). This was also intended to be a contrast to the instantly likeable Tom Baker and Peter Davison Doctors. However, in later interviews, director Peter Moffatt said that the original idea was merely to have the Doctor in a much more energetic state than he was during the Fifth Doctor's début story Castrovalva. Colin Baker said during a 2003 documentary celebrating the series' 40th anniversary that "the idea was that over the many, many years I would be playing the part, the outer layers would gradually peel away, revealing the kind-hearted soul."
• Eric Saward intended for Azmael to be the hermit to whom the Doctor had spoken in his youth, referenced in The Time Monster. Anthony Steven misinterpreted the request and instead made Azmael a former academy tutor of the Doctor.^[2] The Hermit character had already been introduced as K'anpo Rinpoche in Planet of the Spiders ten years before.

[edit] Production

Serial details by episode:

Episode	Broadcast date	Run time	Viewership (in millions)
"Part One"	March 22, 1984 (1984-03-22)	24:42	7.6
"Part Two"	March 23, 1984 (1984-03-23)	25:09	7.4
"Part Three"	March 29, 1984 (1984-03-29)	24:27	7.0
"Part Four"	March 30, 1984 (1984-03-30)	25:04	6.3
[3][4][5]

• Anthony Steven worked very slowly on the scripts, offering many strange excuses (purportedly saying that his typewriter had literally exploded) and turning them in at a very late stage. Compounding things were the fact that the scripts were viewed as being of poor quality and too much for the show's budget by script editor Eric Saward, who was forced to rework them at great length in a very short amount of time.^{[citation needed]}
• At least one aspect of Steven's original script featured the Jaconda and Gastropods being dropped totally early in the fourth episode without resolution to the plot, with the final battle taking place in another dimension against a being called Azlan who was controlling Mestor all along.
• The cat badge worn by the Sixth Doctor on his lapel for this story was hand-made and painted by Suzie Trevor, and purchased for the programme from a specialist badge shop in central London. For each subsequent story, the Doctor was to wear a different cat badge to symbolise that he was a "travelling cat of different walks."
• Besides being adjusted for the new Doctor, the opening credits underwent additional modifications with this episode. A prism-colour effect is added and the series logo takes on a somewhat bluish hue (which also results in it appearing slightly curved in comparison to the version introduced during Tom Baker's era). The theme music remains the same version as that introduced in 1980. Prior to this, the opening sequences of the Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Doctor eras had incorporated a still photograph of the lead actor. For the Sixth Doctor opening this was changed to using two photographs - one of the Doctor with a serious expression which changes to a second image showing the Doctor smiling. This limited animation would continue with the opening sequence for the Seventh Doctor.
• Fandom often holds the serial in a very low light, being regarded as one of the very worst serials in the history of the series (indeed in SFX #150 new series producer Russell T. Davies cites this story as "the beginning of the end" of Doctor Who). A 1997 poll by Doctor Who Magazine ranked the serial the second worst of all time (the Children in Need special Dimensions in Time was ranked lowest), while a 2003 poll by fansite Outpost Gallifrey ranked it worst of all, below even Dimensions in Time.

[edit] Outside references

Shortly before the Doctor assaults Peri in a paranoid rage, he quotes the line "One morn a peri at the gate Of Eden stood disconsolate" and asks Peri to identify its author. The answer is Thomas Moore, in his poem Lalla Rookh.

The first two instalments of the BBV Stranger video series appear to borrow the premise of the Doctor's desire to become a hermit to atone for mistakes he has made. Since the Stranger is played by Colin Baker and his companion Miss Brown is played by Nicola Bryant, it is often viewed as a "What-If" scenario, despite the fact that the BBV production could not legally use the Doctor Who characters.

[edit] In print

Doctor Who book
The Twin Dilemma
Series	Target novelisations
Release number	103
Writer	Eric Saward
Publisher	Target Books
Cover artist	Andrew Skilleter
ISBN	0-491-03124-6
Release date	October 1985 (hardback) 13 March 1986 (paperback)
Preceded by	The Time Monster
Followed by	Galaxy 4

A novelisation of this serial, written by Saward, was published in hardback by Target Books in October 1985, and in paperback in March 1986. The cover illustration originally featured Colin Baker. However when Baker's agent enquired about a royalty, the decision was taken to not feature him on the cover and a replacement was commissioned. This adaptation is notable for Saward's convoluted attempt at explaining in detail how the regeneration process works.

[edit] Broadcast, VHS and DVD releases

• This story was released on VHS in May 1992. The tape was available exclusively through branches of Woolworths as part of a special promotion. A general release followed in February 1993.
• A Commentary with Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant and Kevin McNally was recorded in April 2008 for a planned DVD release on September 7 2009. This will also be the last of the Colin Baker years of Doctor Who to be released onto DVD.

[edit] References

notes to follow

info to follow

Not sure if anyone else is aware of the Twitter/James Moran things. Thought youd like to read the item from his blog. the direct link is at the bottom of the page



Sunday, July 12, 2009
Stepping back
Before I start, this post - and every post on here, and anything I say on Twitter, or anywhere else - is entirely MY opinion. Nothing to do with the people I've worked with, or the BBC, or anyone else. I don't speak for any other writers, I *only* speak for myself, and I will not pass on any messages to anyone.


Here's my position: I'm not going get into any more discussions or debates about what happened in Torchwood this week (being vague, in case people come across this and haven't seen it). Not now, not in the future.

Why? I started trying to discuss it, but swiftly realised that it was pointless. It simply turns into "No it isn't" / "Yes it is", and there's no way I can win the argument, because in certain people's opinion, I am wrong, and that's the end of it. And it's all just opinion anyway. It would also feel like I was trying to justify the show, and I'm not doing that. I have absolutely no need to. The show is the show. Whether you like it or dislike it, that's up to you.

I helped plot the whole storyline, and I stand by every single decision. Yes, including *that* one - I had my hand on the death lever along with everyone else, and was fully involved. I think it's a fantastic, brave, challenging drama, and contains some of the best moments on TV all year.

I've received over a thousand messages from viewers talking about the show. The vast majority have been extremely positive. Even though many of them are upset and shocked, they have managed to express that without making it personal. So to you, I'm extremely grateful. I'm glad you liked the show, and love that it made you respond so strongly. I can't reply to everyone, it'd take weeks, so please accept my thanks.

But the rest of the messages? Unacceptable. Some have been spewing insults and passive aggressive nonsense. Accusing me of deliberately trying to mislead, lie, and hurt people. Telling me I hate the fans, that I'm laughing at them, that I used them, that I'm slapping people in the face, that I've "killed" the show, that I'm a homophobe, that I want to turn the fanbase away and court new, "cooler" viewers, even that I'm hurting depressed people with dark storylines. Asking me to pass on vitriolic, hateful messages to people I love and respect.

Not cool.

These are all things that nobody would dare to say to me in person. But on the internet, it's easy for them to fire off these things. Forgetting that at the other end is me, a real person, someone who has been nothing but open and friendly. But I've been a bit too open, a bit too nice, a bit too willing to explain the thought process behind story decisions. And some people are taking advantage of that, or misinterpreting what it means.

So here's the deal: I'm a professional writer. That's my job. I write what I write, for whatever the project might be. I have the utmost respect for you, and honestly want you to like my work, but I can't let that affect my story decisions. Everybody wants different things from a story, but this is not a democracy, you do not get to vote. You are free to say what you think of my work, even if you hate it, I honestly don't mind. But the ONLY person I need to please is myself, and the ONLY thing I need to serve is the story. Not you. I will do my work to the very best of my ability, in an attempt to give you the best show, the best movie, the best story, the best entertainment I possibly can. Even if that means that sometimes, I'll do things you won't like. I won't debate it. Either you go along with it, or you don't. None of it is done to hurt you, or to force some agenda down your throat, or anything else. It's all in service of the story.

When I started this blog, I wanted to give some insight into the writing process. I've done that. I've answered all the questions, written about the process, done several huge posts trying to pass on what I've learned. The posts are all still there, and will remain there. I've had great fun with it, and given as much as I can, but it's never going to be enough. For a while now, I've let things get too cosy here, indulged myself too much, and if I let it carry on, it will affect my work. The last few days have just confirmed that for me. So I'm going to step back and take a break from it. Things are very busy for the next month or two, and I won't have the time anyway. I'm extremely grateful to everyone who has commented on here, and the blog will probably continue in some form, but limited to anything that isn't about the work - announcements, TV/movie recommendations, etc. I have to concentrate on my writing.

And I will not put up with any more abusive messages, or threats, or accusations, or attempted guilt trips. So while I completely understand your pain at some of the events in the series, that does not give you the right to insult me. Talk about the *work*, all you want. But lay off the person behind the work. Because I'm simply trying to tell you good stories. In the end, that is all I can do.

James Moran
Writer


Please feel free to pass this on, I encourage you to do so, to make my position clear to everyone - but you must include the link to the full post here: http://jamesmoran.blogspot.com/2009/07/stepping-back.html
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The War Games

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

050 – The War Games
Doctor Who serial
The Doctor and his friends are caught in the middle of World War I... or are they?
Cast
Doctor	Patrick Troughton (Second Doctor)
Companions	Frazer Hines (Jamie McCrimmon)
	Wendy Padbury (Zoe Heriot)
Guest stars
David Savile — Lt Carstairs Jane Sherwin — Lady Jennifer Buckingham Noel Coleman — General Smythe Richard Steele — Commandant Gorton Terence Bayler — Major Barrington Hubert Rees — Captain Ransom David Valla — Lieutenant Crane Esmond Webb — Sgt Major Burns Brian Forster — Sergeant Willis Pat Gorman — Military Policeman Peter Stanton — Military Chauffeur David Garfield — Von Weich Gregg Palmer — Lieutenant Lucke John Livesey, Bernard Davies — German Soldiers Philip Madoc — War Lord Edward Brayshaw — War Chief James Bree — Security Chief Vernon Dobtcheff — Chief Scientist John Atterbury — Alien Guard Charles Pemberton — Alien Technician Bill Hutchinson — Sgt Thompson Terry Adams — Corporal Riley Leslie Schofield — Leroy Rudolph Walker — Harper Michael Lynch — Spencer Graham Weston — Russell David Troughton — Moor Peter Craze — Du Pont Michael Napier-Brown — Arturo Villar Stephen Hubay — Petrov Tony McEwan — Redcoat Bernard Horsfall — First Time Lord Trevor Martin — Second Time Lord Clyde Pollitt — Third Time Lord Clare Jenkins — Tanya Lernov
Production
Writer	Malcolm Hulke Terrance Dicks
Director	David Maloney
Script editor	Terrance Dicks (uncredited)
Producer	Derrick Sherwin
Executive producer(s)	None
Production code	ZZ
Series	Season 6
Length	10 episodes, 25 minutes each
Originally broadcast	April 19–June 21, 1969
Chronology
← Preceded by	Followed by →
The Space Pirates	Spearhead from Space

The War Games is a serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which originally aired in ten weekly parts from April 19 to June 21, 1969. It was the last regular appearance of Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor, and of Wendy Padbury and Frazer Hines as companions Zoe Heriot and Jamie McCrimmon. It is the 50th story of the series, and the last Doctor Who serial to be recorded in black and white.

Contents [hide] 1 Plot 1.1 Synopsis 1.2 Continuity 1.2.1 Firsts 1.2.2 Lasts 2 Production 3 Commercial releases 3.1 In print 4 References 5 External links 5.1 Reviews 5.2 Target novelisation

[edit] Plot

[edit] Synopsis

On an alien planet the Doctor uncovers a diabolic plot to conquer the universe, with brainwashed soldiers abducted from Earth forced to fight in simulated environments, reflecting the periods in history from whence they were taken. The alien's aim is to produce a super army from the survivors, to this end they have been aided by a renegade from the Doctor's own race the 'Time Lords'.

Joining forces with rebel soldiers, who have broken their conditioning, the Doctor and his companions foil the plan and stop the fighting. But the Doctor admits he needs the help of the Time Lords to return the soldiers to their own times, but in asking risks capture for his own past crimes including the theft of the TARDIS. After sending the message he and his companions attempt to evade capture, but are caught.

Having returned the soldiers to Earth, the Time Lords erase Zoe and Jamie's memories of travelling with the Doctor, and return them to the point in time just before they entered the TARDIS. They then place the Doctor on trial for stealing the TARDIS and breaking the rule of non-interference. The Doctor presents a spirited defence citing his many battles against the evils of the universe. Accepting this defence the Time Lords announce his punishment is exile to Earth. In addition the operation of the TARDIS is wiped from his memory and his next regeneration is imposed.

[edit] Continuity

• Patrick Troughton later reprised the role of the Second Doctor in The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors and The Two Doctors. In the second of these, he expresses knowledge of events of the final episode of this serial, on the face of it a chronological impossibility, and in the last he is on an assignment for the Time Lords, which is incompatible with the events seen here. These facts gave rise to the Season 6B theory, enabled by the aforementioned lack of on-screen depiction of the regeneration.
• The Doctor again faces trial in The Trial of a Time Lord, the beginning of which refers to this previous trial.
• The time machines designed by the War Chief and used by the War Lords are called SIDRATs, an inversion of the name TARDIS. Though this name is used only once, and then merely in passing, on-screen during the serial (and pronounced "side-rat")^[1], the expanded acronym is revealed to stand for "Space and Inter-Dimensional Robot All-purpose Transporter" in the 1979 novelisation by Malcolm Hulke. It is repeated in the Virgin New Adventures novel Timewyrm: Exodus by Terrance Dicks, which forms a sequel to The War Games.
• The Second Doctor's appearance in Terrance Dicks' BBC Books Eighth Doctor Adventures novel, The Eight Doctors, occurs during this story.

[edit] Firsts

• For the first time, this serial names the Doctor's race as the "Time Lords". Although his home planet (Gallifrey) is seen, it would not be referenced by name until The Time Warrior (1973). His reasons for leaving Gallifrey, and the fact that he stole the TARDIS, are also revealed.
• Aside from the Doctor and Susan, the War Chief is the second person of the Doctor's race (after the Meddling Monk) to appear in the television series.
• Again the concept of regeneration is presented but not named in this serial, following The Tenth Planet/The Power of the Daleks. The process was eventually named in Planet of the Spiders, then retrospectively attributed to the earlier two changes of actors — first by series fans, then later by the early-'80s production team in The Five Doctors. Until that point, there was some fan controversy over whether the Second Doctor had actually regenerated or merely had his appearance changed.
• While Troughton's Doctor is sentenced to a forced regeneration at the end of this serial, we do not actually see him regenerate into the Third Doctor (who first appears — briefly wearing the Troughton costume — in the next serial, Spearhead from Space). The only other Doctor not to receive an on-screen regeneration is the Eighth Doctor, who has already regenerated into the Ninth Doctor at the start of the 2005 series.
• In the first Episode, the Second Doctor kisses Zoe. [1] This display of platonic affection is the first time that the Doctor kisses one of his companions, though as the series went on it would be far from the last.

[edit] Lasts

• In the final episode, the Time Lords wipe Zoe's mind and return her to the Wheel, where she encounters Tanya Lernov, a character from The Wheel in Space. A set from The Wheel in Space was rebuilt and actress Clare Jenkins (Tanya) rehired for this one scene.^[2] The Big Finish Productions audio drama Fear of the Daleks shows an older Zoe having detailed dreams of her adventures with the Doctor, suspecting that something is blocking her memory, and seeing a psychiatric counsellor in an effort to understand the "dreams".
• This marks the last appearance of the TARDIS Control Room until The Claws of Axos in 1971, though the removed TARDIS console would be seen in the Doctor's UNIT headquarters laboratory in The Ambassadors of Death, and in a hut on the grounds of the titular project in Inferno.
• Episode 10 is the last episode of the original series to be produced in black and white.

[edit] Production

Serial details by episode:

Episode	Broadcast date	Run time	Viewership (in millions)	Archive
"Episode 1"	19 April 1969	25:00	5.5	16mm t/r
"Episode 2"	26 April 1969	25:00	6.3	16mm t/r
"Episode 3"	3 May 1969	24:30	5.1	16mm t/r
"Episode 4"	10 May 1969	23:40	5.7	16mm t/r
"Episode 5"	17 May 1969	24:30	5.1	16mm t/r
"Episode 6"	24 May 1969	22:53	4.2	16mm t/r
"Episode 7"	31 May 1969	22:28	4.9	16mm t/r
"Episode 8"	7 June 1969	24:37	3.5	16mm t/r
"Episode 9"	14 June 1969	24:34	4.1	16mm t/r
"Episode 10"	21 June 1969	24:23	5.0	16mm t/r
[3][4][5]

Doctor Who book
Doctor Who and the War Games
Series	Target novelisations
Release number	70
Writer	Malcolm Hulke
Publisher	Target Books
Cover artist	John Geary
ISBN	0-426-20082-9
Release date	25 September 1979
Preceded by	Doctor Who and the Image of the Fendahl
Followed by	Doctor Who and the Destiny of the Daleks

[edit] Commercial releases

This serial was released in the UK February 1990 in a two-tape set in episodic form. It was re-released in remastered format in September 2002. Since this VHS re-release, better quality film prints of the story have been located at the BFI, and were used for the DVD release.^[6] The DVD will be released on July 6th 2009 and is a 3 disc set,^[7] with a commentry provided by Frazer Hines, Wendy Padbury, Philip Madoc, Graham Weston, Jane Sherwin, Terrance Dicks and Derrick Sherwin.

[edit] In print

A novelisation of this serial, written by Malcolm Hulke, was published by Target Books in September 1979, entitled Doctor Who and The War Games. Despite the length of the serial, Hulke was allotted only 143 pages in which to adapt the 10-episode script, the third longest Doctor Who serial. By comparison, the later novelisation of the second longest serial, the 12-episode The Daleks' Master Plan, was published in two volumes, each of which were much longer than Hulke's book, while four books were used to novelise the longest serial, the 14-episode The Trial of a Time Lord.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• The War Games at bbc.co.uk
• The War Games at Doctor Who: A Brief History Of Time (Travel)
• The War Games at the Doctor Who Reference Guide
• Doctor Who Locations - The War Games
• Doctor Who Restoration Team - The War Games

[edit] Reviews

• The War Games reviews at Outpost Gallifrey
• The War Games reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide

[edit] Target novelisation

• Doctor Who and the War Games reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide
• On Target — Doctor Who and the War Games

info to follow

Synopsis

On an alien planet the genocide of the Chimeron by the merciless Bannermen led by Gavrok is almost complete. The last survivor, Chimeron Queen Delta, escapes by the skin of her teeth clutching her egg, the future for her species. She makes it to a space tollport where the Navarinos, a race of shape changing tourist aliens, are planning a visit to the planet Earth in 1959 in a spaceship disguised as an old holiday bus. She stows aboard, as does Mel, while the Doctor follows them in the TARDIS. The Doctor and Mel have won the trip as a prize for arriving in the Navarino spaceport at the right time to be declared the ten billionth customers. No sooner has the tourist vehicle blasted away than the Bannermen turn up, ruthlessly hunting down the fugitive, and they kill the Tollmaster when he refuses to co-operate.

The holiday vehicle from Nostalgia Tours meets an unfortunate collision with an American space satellite and is diverted off track, landing at a holiday camp in South Wales rather than Disneyland. However, the basic but cheerful Shangri-La holiday camp is happy to accommodate the visitors led by the ebullient Burton, who assures the travellers of a warm welcome while they wait for the driver, Murray, to repair their innocuous seeming transport. Mel gets close to Delta and uncovers the truth of her situation, including the hatching of the egg into a bright green baby that starts to grow at a startling rate. The Chimeron Queen supports this development with the equivalent of royal jelly given to bees.

Delta tries to take her mind off the situation and goes to the Shangri-La dance, instantly capturing the heart of Billy, the camp’s mechanic – and making an enemy of the smitten Rachel (or Ray), who loves Billy herself. Ray confides her situation to the Doctor, and they both stumble across a bounty hunter making contact with the Bannermen to tell them of the Chimeron’s whereabouts. It is only a matter of time before Gavrok and his troops arrive. Delta and Billy head off on a romantic countryside ramble the following morning, but the Doctor wastes no time in persuading Burton to evacuate the camp, helping Murray repair the ship, and then heading off to find the young lovers while there is still time. Once they are found, everyone returns to the camp but the situation has become dire. The Bannermen have destroyed the Navarino bus with all its official passengers inside, taking Mel as a hostage, as Gavrok tries to work out how to capture the Chimeron. The Doctor’s early attempts to intercede are futile, but he does rescue Burton and Mel from the Bannermen.

Two Bannermen are holding prisoner two aging American agents, Hawk and Weismuller, who were tracking the missing satellite when they first arrived. The Bannermen were instructed by Gavrok to wait for the Doctor, Burton and Mel on the side of the road. Just before they left the Americans, they place a joined head lock device to prevent them from escaping. While the two Bannerman were placing a tracker on the Doctor, riding Billy's motorbike with Burton and Mel, in an attempt to disguise an ambush attempt, Ray manages to rescue Hawk and Weismuller head locks with an Allen key. They all make contact with the mysterious beekeeper Goronwy, who hides them for a while in his house.

As the two Bannerman find that the Americans have been set free, they track the Doctor’s party to Goronwy House. As they were closing in to the house, the Chimeron child Princess made a high pitched scream of warning which traumatised the ears of the two Bannermen, allowing Delta was able to shoot one of them, while the other escaped to inform Gavrok of the location of Delta and the Princess. At Shangri-La, before leaving to attack Goronwy House, Gavrok booby-trapped the outside of the TARDIS in an attempt to kill the Doctor. As Gavrok and his Bannermen approached Goronwy House shooting, and crashing into the rock-and-roll-music-filled house, only to have honey broken over them in the process. This then set Goronwy's bees on the honey-covered Bannermen. In the meanwhile, the Doctor and his party made it to Shangri-La to set up a defence. Billy rigged up the Shangri-La sound system to amplify the perfectly pitched scream of the Chimeron child Princess – a sound which is excruciatingly painful to Bannermen.

Goronwy explains to Billy the purpose of royal jelly in the lifecycle of the honeybee, provoking the mechanic to consume Delta's equivalent that she has been feeding her daughter, in the hope of metamorphosing into a Chimeron.

As Gavrok and his band of Bannermen attack Shangri-La, the amplified scream of the Chimeron princess traumatised the attackers, including Gavrok, who becomes so stunned that he falls into the beam of the booby-trap he placed on the TARDIS and is incinerated. Other Bannermen are so traumatised that they are easily rounded up. Delta and Billy leave together with the child and the prisoners, heading for an intergalactic war crimes tribunal. To their delight, The Doctor shows Hawk and Weismuller the missing satellite nearby. All is well and the next bus of holidaymakers, this time human, arrive at Shangri-La as the Doctor and Mel slip away.

[edit] Continuity

• The Seventh Doctor's question mark handle umbrella makes its first appearance in this story.
• Sylvester McCoy can be seen wearing his glasses in certain long shots of him riding a motorcycle (consequently, the only time the Seventh Doctor is seen wearing spectacles, though he does produce a pair for use as an aid to hypnosis in the extended version of Silver Nemesis).
• The Navarinos are also featured in the novel Return of the Living Dad by Kate Orman.

Production

Serial details by episode:

Episode	Broadcast date	Run time	Viewership (in millions)
"Part One"	2 November 1987	24:47	5.3
"Part Two"	9 November 1987	24:23	5.1
"Part Three"	16 November 1987	24:22	5.4
[2][3][4]

Preproduction

• This was the first three-part story since Planet of Giants (1964), not counting the 3 x 45 minute episodes of The Two Doctors, which had been broadcast 2 years previously, and the first intended to be this length (Giants had been recorded as a four-parter and cut).
• Working titles for this story included The Flight of the Chimeron^[5]. The eventual title is a reference to the British band Echo and the Bunnymen. The story title makes a single substitution using the phonetic alphabet and a slight change in the final word of the title.
• The character of Ray was originally created as a new companion for the Doctor as Bonnie Langford had announced she would be leaving the series at the end of the season. The serial, with the working title, The Flight Of The Chimeron, was originally scheduled to end the season. However, as the serial neared production, Langford had not yet decided whether she would leave at the end of Season 24 or during Season 25; that, plus the rescheduling of Delta and the Bannermen to earlier in the season and the decision by script editor Andrew Cartmel to create another replacement companion named Alf (later renamed 'Ace'), led to the idea of Ray as a new companion being abandoned^[5].

Casting

• Features guest appearance by Ken Dodd, Don Henderson, Hugh Lloyd, Richard Davies, and American stage and screen actor Stubby Kaye. See also Celebrity appearances in Doctor Who.

Production

• The scenes at the Shangri-La holiday camp were shot on location at the Butlins Holiday camp on Barry Island, Wales. The holiday camp is no longer there, but the island was used again, this time as a stand-in for a bomb site in 1941 London, in the 2005 series episodes "The Empty Child" and "The Doctor Dances".^[6]
• The soundtrack of this serial contained a higher-than-usual number of recognizable pop songs, although due to licensing costs all were re-recorded by "The Lovells", a fictional group created by the show's incidental music composer Keff McCullough. The songs featured in the serial were: "Rock Around the Clock", "Singing the Blues", "Why Do Fools Fall in Love", "Mr. Sandman", "Goodnight, Sweetheart", "That'll Be the Day", "Only You", "Lollipop", "Who's Sorry Now?" and "Happy Days Are Here Again".
• The motorbike ridden by Billy in this story is a Vincent, made by British manufacturer Vincent Motorcycles.
• The guitar the Doctor is seen hugging at the end of the story is a Fender Stratocaster, although the model is not one available at the time the story was set.

Commercial releases

The story was released on VHS in March 2001 in the UK and June 2002 in North America, but music clearance issues prevented the release of the serial in Australia. A commentary by Sylvester McCoy, Sara Griffiths, Chris Clough and Andrew Cartmel has been recorded for the DVD release. The DVD will be released on June 22 2009.

In print

Doctor Who book
Delta and the Bannermen
Series	Target novelisations
Release number	131
Writer	Malcolm Kohll
Publisher	Target Books
Cover artist	Alister Pearson
ISBN	0-426-20333-X
Release date	19 January 1989
Preceded by	Paradise Towers
Followed by	The War Machines

A novelisation of this serial, written by Malcolm Kohll, was published by Target Books in January 1989.

"Planet of the Dead" is an episode of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who that was simultaneously broadcast on BBC One and BBC HD on 11 April 2009. It is the first of four special episodes to be broadcast throughout 2009 and early 2010, which serve as lead actor David Tennant's denouement as the Tenth Doctor. He is joined in the episode by actress Michelle Ryan, who plays one-off companion to the Doctor Lady Christina de Souza. The episode was co-written by Russell T Davies and Gareth Roberts: the first writing partnership since the show's revival in 2005.

The episode depicts Christina fleeing the police from a museum robbery by boarding a bus that accidentally travels from London to the desert planet of San Helios, trapping her, the Doctor, and several passengers on board a damaged bus. After the bus driver dies trying to return to Earth, the Unified Intelligence Taskforce, headed by Captain Erisa Magambo (Noma Dumezweni) and scientific advisor Malcolm Taylor (Lee Evans), attempt to return the bus to Earth while preventing a race of metallic stingray aliens from posing a threat to Earth. At the end of the episode, one of the passengers delivers a warning to the Doctor which foreshadows the remaining three specials.

"Planet of the Dead" is the first Doctor Who episode to be filmed in high definition, after a positive reaction to the visual quality of spin-off series Torchwood and the financial viability of HDTV convinced the production team to switch formats. To ensure that the desert scenes looked as realistic as possible, the production team filmed in Dubai for three days, sending several props—most notably, a 1980 double-decker Bristol VR bus—to the United Arab Emirates for filming. After the bus was unintentionally damaged in Dubai by a shipping container, Davies rewrote the script to explain the damage in the narrative.

Reaction to the episode was mixed: the audience gave the episode an Appreciation Index of 88^[3]—considered excellent—but critics gave average reviews to the episode. The consensus among critics was that it was enjoyable as a whole but that it was only an average script. The main point of praise was Evans' performance alongside Dumezweni in scenes set on Earth, which countered their criticism of the events on San Helios as being relatively boring.

Plot

The episode begins with a young thrill-seeking burglar, Lady Christina de Souza (Ryan), stealing a gold chalice once belonging to King Athelstan from a museum. She then narrowly evades the police by riding on a London bus on which the Doctor (Tennant) is also travelling, shortly before the bus suddenly passes through a wormhole and arrives on the desert planet of San Helios. The Doctor and the other passengers find that the wormhole is still present, but deduce that the bus had protected them like a Faraday cage after the bus driver is killed trying to cross back on foot, evaporating to a skeleton instantly. Seeing the driver's skeleton coming out on the other side of the portal, the police call in UNIT, commanded by Captain Erisa Magambo (Dumezweni) and aided by scientific advisor Malcolm Taylor (Evans), to close the wormhole. Trapped on a heavily damaged bus, the other passengers introduce themselves: Angela (Victoria Alcock) is a middle-aged mother travelling home to her family; Lou (Reginald Tsiboe) and Carmen (Ellen Thomas) are an elderly couple who win £10 each time they play the National Lottery due to Carmen's low-level psychic abilities; Barclay (Daniel Kaluuya) was travelling to a friend's house to ask her on a date; and Nathan (David Ames) was travelling home to watch television. The Doctor and Christina decide to scout the planet, spotting an approaching storm, while Nathan and Barclay try to fix the bus.

As they travel, the Doctor learns of Christina's troubled history, and appreciates her callousness and aptitude to the alien situation. The Doctor and Christina encounter the Tritovore, an anthropomorphic fly species, who take them to their wrecked spaceship. The Tritovore explain that they were making a routine goods collection from the planet but crashed in an unfamiliar environment; a year previously, the planet housed a hundred billion inhabitants and a thriving ecosystem. The Tritovore send out a probe to investigate the cause, and discover a large swarm of metallic stingray-like aliens who routinely create wormholes and destroy ecospheres as their biological imperatives. To rescue the Tritovore and the bus passengers, Christina uses her burglary skills to retrieve a crystal which powers the spaceship (together with the pedestal it is located on), unintentionally awakening a stingray that kills the two Tritovore.

The Doctor attaches parts of the pedestal to the bus and uses the chalice of Athelstan as an interface to the technology. This allows the bus to fly through the wormhole, with the stingrays in hot pursuit. Taylor quickly closes the wormhole but not before three of the stingrays pass through it. After UNIT has shot down the stingrays and the passengers have been debriefed, Christina asks the Doctor to let her travel with him; he rejects her because he does not want to lose another companion. The characters part ways. The Doctor recommends that UNIT hire Barclay and Nathan, Christina is arrested by the police for the theft and Carmen has a premonition that visibly unnerves the Doctor:

You be careful, because your song is ending, sir. It is returning, it is returning through the dark. And then Doctor... oh, but then... he will knock four times.

—Carmen, "Planet of the Dead"^[4]

As a final act of kindness, the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to release Christina from her handcuffs. The pair part on good terms as she flies away in the bus as the Doctor enters his TARDIS and dematerialises.

Production

Writing and casting

Russell T Davies co-wrote the episode with Gareth Roberts, the first writing partnership for the show since its 2005 revival.^[5] "Planet of the Dead" was a departure from Roberts' usual stories—Roberts had previously only written pseudo-historical stories—and instead consisted of "wild" science fiction elements from his literary career and teenage imagination. The episode had no clear concept—such as Shakespeare and witches in "The Shakespeare Code" or Agatha Christie and a murder mystery in "The Unicorn and the Wasp"—and instead was a deliberate "clash [of concepts] with many disparate elements". Roberts explained he was cautious to ensure that each element had to "feel precise and defined ... like we meant that", citing the serial Arc of Infinity as an example where such control was not enforced.^[6] The episode includes a common feature of Davies' writing in that there is no clear antagonist: the Tritovore are eventually sympathetic to the protagonists and the stingrays are only following their biological imperative.^[7][8]

Unlike the Christmas specials, the theme of Easter was not emphasised in the story; the episode only contained a "fleeting mention" of the holiday instead of "robot bunnies carrying baskets full of deadly egg bombs". The episode's tone word—"joyous"—was influenced by Davies' realisation that "every story since "The Fires of Pompeii" [had] a bittersweet quality" and subsequent desire to avoid the recurring theme.^[5] The starting point for the story was Roberts' first novel The Highest Science. Davies liked the image of a London Underground train on a desert planet and rewrote it to contain a bus. Davies nevertheless emphasised it was not an "adaptation as such" because tangential elements were constantly being conceived and added.^[5]

Michelle Ryan portrays Lady Christina de Souza, the daughter of a recently impoverished aristocrat and adrenaline junkie. Christina is a "typical" Doctor Who companion, Davies electing to draw parallels from the Time Lady Romana rather than new series companion Rose Tyler. Roberts described her as an "adventuress" who is "upper class and glam, suited and booted, and extremely intelligent" which the Doctor could relate to because they both rejected their heritages. The episode's director James Strong described the character as reverting to a traditional romantic-based companionship—rather than the platonic companionship of Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) in the fourth series—while still being a unique companion:^[9]

It's back to basics: she's probably more of a traditional, romantic kind of Thomas Crown Affair kind of heroine, if you like. [...] It echoes to me of Rose, in that there may be a good old fashioned romantic connection between them. She's young, she's beautiful, she's sexy, but whereas Rose was a very ordinary, normal girl, Lady Christina is a lady, she comes from a very privileged, very elite background. She's different to any of the companions we've ever had in that she doesn't particularly want to get caught up with the Doctor. She's got her own thing going on, so she's very much a match for the Doctor and very much an equal. Often in an adventure the Doctor will take control and everyone will do what he says. She's very much in control – the two of them are in a sparring way, battling against each other to get through this adventure.

—James Strong, Digital Spy interview.^[9]

Comedian Lee Evans plays Professor Malcolm Taylor, a UNIT scientist devoted to his predecessor, the Doctor. Davies created Evans' character to serve as a foil for Noma Dumezweni's pragmatic character Captain Erisa Magambo, who previously appeared in the episode "Turn Left".^[5] Roberts noted after writing the episode that Evans' character had unintentionally become a "loving" caricature of Doctor Who fandom.^[6][10]

The episode was influenced by several works: Davies described "Planet of the Dead" as "a great big adventure, a little bit Indiana Jones, a little bit Flight of the Phoenix, a little bit Pitch Black.";^[11] the relationship between the Doctor and Christina was influenced by 1960s films such as Charade and Topkapi, which included Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn "being witty and sophisticated together, and then running for their lives";^[5] and the Tritovore were influenced by 1950s and 1970s science fiction B-movies such as The Fly and Davies' habit of including aliens that were recognisable to the audience as animals from Earth, such as the Judoon.^[7] Carmen's warning evoked memories of the Ood's warning to the Doctor and Donna in the fourth series episode "Planet of the Ood".^[7] Tennant explained the prophecy meant that the Doctor's "card [had become] marked" and the three specials would thus be darker—characterising "Planet of the Dead" as the "last time the Doctor gets to have any fun"—and that the subject of the prophecy was not the obvious answer:

David Tennant

Really, from this moment on, the Doctor's card is marked. Because when we come back in "The Waters of Mars", it's all become a little bit darker.

Julie Gardner

And as we know, David, he really does knock four times.

Tennant

Yeah, absolutely, and if you think you've figured out what that means, you're wrong!

Gardner

But when you do figure it out, it's a sad day.

—David Tennant and Julie Gardner, Doctor Who: The Commentaries, "Planet of the Dead"^[8]

Filming

Pre-production on the four specials started on 20 November 2008—four days before scheduled—because the episode's overseas filming in Dubai required the extra planning time.^[12] Two weeks later, the production team was on a recce for the special and the final draft of the script was completed.^[13] The production team examined overseas locations to film the episode because they wanted the scenery to feel "real" and thought that they would be unable to film on a Welsh beach in winter. After examining countries such as Morocco and Tunisia, the production team decided to film in Dubai because the area was more amicable to the filming industry and viable filming locations were nearer to urban areas than other locations.^[14]

Production began on 19 January in Wales.^[2][10] The special was the first Doctor Who episode to be filmed in high-definition television resolution.^[15] The move to HD had previously been resisted for two major reasons: when the show was revived in 2005, high-definition television was not adopted by an adequate portion of the audience to be financially viable; and special effects were considerably more expensive to create in high-definition than in standard-definition. "Planet of the Dead" was used to switch to HD because of the show's reduced schedule in 2009 and because the filming crew had become experienced with the equipment while they were filming Torchwood.^[8]

Filming began at the National Museum Cardiff,^{[location 1]} which doubled for the history museum depicted in the episode's first scene. To portray the tunnel the bus travelled into, the Queen's Gate Tunnel of the A4232 road in Butetown^{[location 2]} was closed for four nights to accommodate filming. The last major piece of filming in Wales took place in the closed Mir (formerly Alphasteel) steelworks in Newport,^{[location 3]} which doubled almost unaltered for the Tritovore spaceship. Filming took place at the peak of the February 2009 Great Britain snowfall, where the sub-zero temperatures slowed filming and had a visible effect on the cast. To accommodate for the adverse conditions, Davies included a line in the script that specified that the Tritovore spaceship cooled as external temperatures increase.^[8]

Filming in Dubai^{[location 4]} took place in mid-February 2009. Two weeks previously, one of the two 1980 Bristol VR double-decker buses bought for filming had been substantially damaged when a crane accidentally dropped a container in Dubai City Port.^[7][16]After an emergency discussion by the production team, they agreed that the damage was unintentionally artistic and decided to include the damaged bus in the episode;^[7] instead of shipping the spare bus from Cardiff—which would have delayed the already hurried filming schedule—the production team decided to partially reconstruct the bus in Dubai, damage the spare bus in Cardiff to match the bus in Dubai, and rewrite part of the script to accommodate and mention the damage to the bus.^{[7][8][17][18]} James Strong recalled the reaction of the production team to the damage to the bus in an issue of Doctor Who Magazine:

One morning in the first week of February, I was leaving my flat when Julie Gardner phoned. She said, "there's been a little accident with the bus [...] it's a disaster; the bus is fucked." When I got into the office, I was handed a photograph—and my initial reaction was absolute horror. We called an emergency meeting. Russell came in [...] and we discussed our options. We had bought an identical London bus to film on in Cardiff, so could we send that out to Dubai? We could have got it out in time if it'd left Cardiff, literally, the next day, but we'd have had to find a third bus, an exact replica, to film on in Cardiff a week later. It had taken us a month to find the one we had. It was even mooted that we'd have to forget Dubai and opt for a beach in the UK. But Russell's response was "Okay, let's embrace it. Let's say that the bus was damaged on its way to the alien planet. [...] He wove it into the narrative. We're not trying to hide the damage at all. In fact, we show it off, enhancing it with special effects, smoke and sparks. It works rather marvellously. That London bus, damaged and smoking, in the middle of the desert—yeah, it looks incredible, especially in gorgeous hi-def.

—James Strong, Doctor Who Magazine issue 407.^[14]

The damaged bus was not the only problem to filming in Dubai: the first of the three days was afflicted by a sandstorm which left most of the footage shot unusable.^[14] The production team then struggled to complete three days of filming in two days; the last day was compared to "filming Lawrence of Arabia".^[7] To complete the episode's filming, interior scenes in the bus were filmed in a studio in Wales. To disguise the fact they were using a translite—a 360-degree background image—, Strong utilised often-avoided techniques such as muddied windows and lens flares; the latter also served to create a warmer environment for the viewer.^[8] After filming ended, editing and post-processing took place until two days before transmission, leaving the BBC to resort to using an unfinished copy to market the episode.^[7][8]

200th story

"Planet of the Dead" was advertised as Doctor Who's 200th story. Writer Russell T Davies admitted that the designation was arbitrary and debatable, based upon how fans counted the unfinished serial Shada, the season-long fourteen-part serial The Trial of a Time Lord, and the third series finale consisting of "Utopia", "The Sound of Drums" and "Last of the Time Lords".^[19] Davies personally disagreed about counting The Trial of a Time Lord as one serial—arguing that it "felt like four stories" to him—and grouping "Utopia" with its following episodes, but agreed that it was only an opinion which did not override any others.^[19] Gareth Roberts inserted a reference to the landmark—specifically, the bus number is 200^[20]—and Davies emailed the show's publicity team to advertise the special as such.^[19] Doctor Who Magazine's editor Tom Spilsbury aknowledged the controversy in the magazine's 407th issue, which ran a reader survey of all 200 stories.^[21]

€Broadcast and reception

Overnight figures estimated that the special was watched by 8.41 million people, a 39.6% share of the audience. An additional 184,000 watched the programme on BBC HD, the channel's highest rating so far. The initial showing had an Appreciation Index of 88: considered excellent.^[22][23] A BBC One repeat, two days later, gained an overnight figure of 1.8 million viewers.^[22] The special was therefore the second most watched programme of the day, being beaten by the premiere of the new series of Britain's Got Talent.^[23] The final viewing figure for the initial broadcast was 9.54 million viewers on BBC One and 200,000 viewers on BBC HD, making it the fifth most watched programme of the week and the most watched programme ever aired on BBC HD.^[24] Including repeats in the following week and viewings on the BBC iPlayer, 13.89 million viewers watched the episode in total.^[25]

The episode received average critical reviews. Simon Brew of science fiction blog Den of Geek said the episode was "by turns ambitious and predictable" but "still quite entertaining". The first part of the review mentioned an objection from his wife that the bus trapped in the sand "[looked] really fake", despite the episode being actually filmed in Dubai, and then mentioned Brew's appreciation of the concept of people stranded in the desert and concluded that "made a fair fist of it". Brew positively reviewed Michelle Ryan's performance—comparing her performance to be on par to her role in Bionic Woman rather than her role as Zoe Slater in Eastenders—and Lee Evans' performance as Malcolm Taylor, calling him the highlight of the episode because of his dialogue. He closed his review by saying that ""Planet of the Dead" was passable enough": he thought it "never really gelled" for him; but he thought it was overall entertaining and was excited for the remaining three specials as a result of Carmen's prophecy.^[26]

Charlie Jane Anders of io9 "mostly loved "Planet Of The Dead"", commenting that it was a standard Russell T Davies script that had the "elements of a cracking good story":

POTD was pretty much everything you've come to expect from Russell T. Davies' Who: crazy adventures, slightly cartoony characters, clever dialogue, moments of sheer silly fun, a childlike solemnity, a miraculous save, bombastic music, and one woman who's held up as being the most special person ever.

It didn't hurt that POTD had all the elements of a cracking good story: The Doctor and friends trapped on an alien planet, on the other side of the universe, with no easy way to get home. Alien creatures who might be hostile. A deadly swarm coming to tear our heroes apart. And UNIT on the other side of the wormhole, trying to come to grips with this almost unimaginable threat.

—Charlie Jane Anders, io9^[27]

She compared it to two previous episodes, "The Impossible Planet" and "Midnight", both of which she enjoyed. She criticised three aspects of the episode: Lady Christina, who was the "first RTD heroine who actually filled [her] with revulsion", leaving her hoping that the character would be killed off-screen, Malcolm's reluctance to close the wormhole and the implausibility of only three stingrays travelling through it. She thought that the episode was "a pretty solid adventure with a cool set of monsters".^[27]

Ben Rawson-Jones of entertainment website Digital Spy gave the episode two stars out of five. He characterised the episode as being "as hollow as a big chocolate Easter egg" because it was "lacking in the enthralling drama and compelling characterisation that has been the lynchpin of the Russell T Davies era". His main criticism was towards Ryan's character, describing the romantic tension between Christina and the Doctor as "feeling forced" and arguing that Ryan was "utterly unconvincing" as Christina. Conversely, he was appreciative of Strong's direction and the UNIT subplot. Specifically, he approved of Evans' performance, noting that "the fact that Malcolm names a unit of measurement after himself is both inspired and hilarious". His review ended by describing the episode as "lifeless for much of the hour" and expressing his hope that the ambiguous entity from Carmen's premonition would "hurry up".^[28]

Orlando Parfitt of IGN gave the episode a 7.1 (Good) rating out of ten. Parfitt called it a "straightforward story" that did not elevate to the level of excitement typically seen in Doctor Who until the episode's climax, instead describing the majority of the story as being "taken up with Tennant and Ryan standing in the desert, swapping flirtatious banter in between proclaiming how dire their situation in between", and criticised the writing of the part of the episode where the bus was on San Helios, claiming that plot devices such as the Tritovore or Taylor being held at gunpoint and ordered to close the wormhole as "feel[ing] forced and unnaturally shoe-horned into the script". His praise of the episode went to Ryan and Evans: although he thought of Christina as a "shameless Lara Croft ripoff", he said that the character "still proves a sexy and wise-cracking counterpart to the Doctor"; and Evans' acting alongside Dumezweni highlighted his "undeniably great comic acting" as opposed to his "love-it-or-hate-it" stand-up comedy. The last paragraph of his review focused on the climax, which he thought was "a cracker [that] just-about makes up for the previously plodding plot", and described the entire episode as having "enough enjoyable moments" to entertain fans before the transmission of "The Waters of Mars".^[29]

DVD and Blu-Ray release

"Planet of the Dead" will be released on DVD on 15 June 2009,^[30] and on Blu-Ray on 29 June 2009.^[31]

 to follow

Synopsis

The Doctor answers a summons and finally returns to his homeworld, Gallifrey, seat of the Time Lords. However, when the President of the High Council is assassinated, he becomes the prime suspect, while an old enemy lurks in the shadows, pulling the strings.

[edit] Plot

The Fourth Doctor has arrived on Gallifrey after receiving a mysterious summons from the Time Lords. Along the way, he has a precognitive vision about the President of the Time Lords being murdered.

As soon as the TARDIS materialises within the Gallifreyan Citadel, an alarm sounds and it is surrounded by soldiers. Their leader, Commander Hildred, reports to Castellan Spandrell. Both note that the TARDIS is a Type 40, which is no longer in service. Since the arrival is unauthorised, the soldiers are ordered to impound the TARDIS and arrest the occupant. The Doctor overhears this, and realises that the Time Lords did not summon him. Someone has gone to great lengths to set him up.

Spandrell goes to see Coordinator Engin in the Archives Section, leaving Hildred in charge. Hildred and his troops enter the TARDIS, but the Doctor manages to sneak out and make his way to a service lift that leads to the main tower. A soldier is present, and threatens to place the Doctor under arrest. However, the soldier is quickly killed by a phantom-like figure who disappears before the Doctor can get a good look at him. The Doctor sends the lift on its way, in an attempt to fool the soldiers into thinking he has fled deeper into the Citadel. All of this has been observed by the Doctor's old adversary, the Master, who is wearing a black hood that conceals his features. "Predictable as ever, Doctor," he snorts, before returning to the shadows.

Chancellor Goth arrives outside the TARDIS to see the situation for himself. Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor is watching a news broadcast by a reporter he recognises as Runcible (whom the Doctor nicknames "the Fatuous"), a classmate from his days at the Academy. It is revealed that the President is set to retire, and he is to name a successor before he does. Runcible is talking to Cardinal Borusa, one of the Doctor's former teachers. He asks Borusa who the Presidential successor will be, but Borusa brushes him off.

The TARDIS is transmatted to the museum, and the Doctor takes the opportunity to steal a set of traditional Gallifreyan robes to mingle with the crowds. Meanwhile, deep within the archive tower, the Master, revealed to be horribly emaciated, confers with an unseen accomplice. He says that the trap has been set, and they must make sure the Doctor dies quickly.

At the Panopticon, the disguised Doctor briefly converses with Runcible before the outgoing President makes his entrance. The Doctor scans the area and notes a camera stationed on an unguarded catwalk. He also spots a sniper rifle next to the camera. The Doctor fights his way to the catwalk, warning that the President is about to be killed. Unfortunately, for the Doctor, the assassin is actually among the delegates. He pulls out a pistol and shoots the President dead. The crowd sees the Doctor on the catwalk with the rifle and assume he is the assassin.

---

The captured Doctor insists that he is innocent. Eventually, Spandrell starts to believe him and orders Engin to assist him in an independent investigation. Meanwhile, Goth and Borusa debate over the Doctor's impending trial. Goth notes that the election for a new President will occur in forty-eight hours, and he is eager to see the Doctor executed before then. Borusa, however, wants to ensure that the Doctor receives a fair trial, according to law. The Doctor surprises everyone by invoking Article 17: he will run for President, which will mean he can only be tried if he loses the election. The Master and his assassin are not pleased with this turn of events.

The Doctor returns to the scene of the crime with Spandrell. They discover that the sight on the Doctor's rifle was fixed, making it impossible for this weapon to have killed the President. They conclude that the real assassin would have been caught on tape by a nearby video camera, but when they inspect the camera, they find the shrunken body of the technician inside. The Doctor then realises that the Master is behind this. Runcible attempts to take the tape from the camera to the archives for review, but he is killed by a spear to the back.

The Doctor realises that the Master sent the Doctor the premonition of the assassination through the Matrix, a vast computer which turns thought patterns into virtual reality. He decides to enter the Matrix as a means of tracking the Master. Engin warns him that if he dies in the virtual world, he will die in the real world as well.

The Doctor enters the Matrix and finds himself in a forbidding landscape of crumbling white cliffs and sparse vegetation. The disembodied laughter of some unknown presence echoes off the canyon walls. The Doctor is then engaged in a series of surrealistic sequences. First he nearly walks into the open jaws of a hungry crocodile, which simply disappears into thin air. He is then attacked by a masked samurai warrior and falls from a cliff into unconsciousness. He revives upon an outdoor operating table with a masked surgeon standing over him. The surgeon tries to inject him with a substance from an extremely large hypodermic needle. The Doctor pushes the surgeon away and runs off to find himself in the midst of a World War I battle. Shell and machine gun fire is heard and gas canisters explode all around. A soldier and his horse stumble out of the smoke wearing gas masks. The Doctor runs bewildered until he comes upon a train track, the rail of which closes upon one of his boots and traps him. A group of three masked men appear and one attempts to run him down with a mine train.

---

The train disappears before hitting the Doctor and he works his foot free. The Doctor realizes that his surroundings are but an illusion and tries to deny their existence, but passes out from the strain. Recovering consciousness he becomes aware of the two large black eyes of his unknown adversary in the side of a cliff, telling him that he is the creator of this world and that there is no escape. The Doctor, dehydrated and thirsty, hears the sound of running water, but when he attempts to dig into the ground to locate its source he is greeted by a red-nosed clown peering through a window, laughing at him. He is then strafed by machine gun fire by a masked pilot in a biplane, eventually receiving a bullet wound in the leg. The Doctor tries to deny the existence of the wound, and it disappears. However, the disembodied voice of the assassin reminds him that this is his reality, and his rules, and the wound reappears. The Doctor declares that he will then fight the assassin in his reality.

In the real world, Engin tells Spandrell that the Doctor’s adversary is using a lot of energy to maintain the virtual environment, so the Doctor can defeat him if he provides an adequate distraction.

Inside the Matrix, the dry barren virtual environment merges into a thick, sticky jungle, and the assassin soon appears dressed as a big game hunter, a mesh veil obscuring his face. The assassin concludes that the Doctor will need water, and, leaving his backpack behind him, goes off to contaminate the local supply with poison from a small bottle. The Doctor finds the assassin's backpack and takes a grenade and some twine, setting up a makeshift booby trap. The assassin returns and trips it, setting off an explosion which wounds him in the abdomen.

Fearing that his protégé might lose, the Master sends a hypnotised guard to kill the Doctor's physical form.

Back inside the Matrix, the Doctor continues to be hunted through the virtual jungle. Coming to the pool of water, he finds dead, floating fish and the empty bottle and realises that the water has been poisoned. He finds a small amount of uncontaminated water and drinks it through a reed, then uses the reed and some thorns off of a nearby tree to make a blowgun, dipping the ends of the darts into the remnants of the poison from the bottle. The Doctor climbs up into a tree and shoots the assassin in the leg with a dart. The assassin fires his rifle and hits the Doctor in the arm, causing him to fall out of the tree. Ripping his pants leg open to reveal a potentially fatal wound, the assassin injects himself with an antidote while the Doctor again escapes.

In the real world, the hypnotised guard makes his way to the Matrix chamber, but Spandrell manages to shoot him before he can sabotage the Matrix link.

Back in the Matrix, the Doctor has made it to a gas-filled marsh, where the assassin reveals his true identity: Chancellor Goth. Goth tries to shoot the Doctor but ignites the marsh gas, setting himself on fire. Goth falls into the water to extinguish the spreading flames. The Doctor comes out of hiding to confront him, but is caught by surprise by Goth and tackled. Intense hand-to-hand combat ensues, with Goth seeming to gain the upper hand. He attempts to drown the Doctor.

---

However, the strain of fighting and keeping up the virtual reality overcomes Goth. The Doctor breaks free and hits Goth over the head with a large stick. The Master, realising that Goth has been effectively defeated, decides to hedge his bets and tries to trap the Doctor in the Matrix by overloading the neuron fields, even though this will also kill Goth. Engin manages to get the Doctor out, but Goth is not so lucky. The Master then injects himself with a hypodermic needle.

The Doctor and Spandrell, accompanied by soldiers, manage to make their way to the chamber where the Master and Goth were accessing the Matrix. They find the Master slumped in a chair without a pulse and Goth dying. Goth reveals that he found the Master, near death, on Tersurus. The Master was nearing the end of his twelfth and final regeneration. Goth went along with his schemes mainly for power: he knew the President had no intention of naming him as a successor, but if a new election was held, he would be the front runner. Before he dies, Goth warns that the Master has a doomsday plan.

When Spandrell relates the story to Borusa, the Cardinal orders that a cover story be created to maintain confidence in the Time Lords and their leadership. The official story will be that the Master arrived in secret to assassinate the President, and Goth heroically tracked him down and killed him but perished in the attempt. The charge against the Doctor will be dropped on condition that he leave Gallifrey.

Attempting to piece together what the Master and Goth were planning, the Doctor inquires as to what becoming the President entails. He is told that the President has access to the symbols of office: the Sash and Great Key of Rassilon. As Engin plays the records of the Old Time, which describes how Rassilon found the Eye of Harmony within the "black void", the Doctor realises these objects are not ceremonial. The Doctor inspects the hypodermic needle, and realises that it contained a neural inhibitor. The Master is still alive.

The Doctor, Spandrell, and Engin arrive at the morgue, to find that the Master has revived and killed Hildred. Armed with Hildred’s staser pistol, the Master seizes the Sash from the President's corpse and traps the three in the morgue. The Doctor explains what he has deduced: that the Eye is actually the nucleus of a black hole, an inexhaustible energy source that Rassilon captured to power Gallifrey, and the Sash and Key are its control devices. The Doctor deduces that the Master was planning to steal this energy to gain a new cycle of regenerations. However, if the Eye is disrupted, Gallifrey will be destroyed and a hundred other worlds will be consumed in a chain reaction.

Inside the Panopticon, the Master makes his way to the obelisk containing the Eye. He unhooks the coils that connect it to Gallifrey, and is prepared to access the energy. The Doctor makes his way to the Panopticon via a service shaft. The Citadel begins to quake, and cracks appear in the floor. The Doctor and the Master fight, until the Master loses his footing and falls into a chasm. The Doctor reconnects the coils and saves Gallifrey, although half the city is in ruins and many lives have been lost.

The Doctor is now free to return to his TARDIS. He bids farewell to Borusa, Spandrell, and Engin, but also warns that the Master may not be dead. He had harvested some energy from the obelisk before he was stopped, and may have been able to channel it. As the Doctor’s TARDIS dematerialises, Spandrell and Engin witness the Master sneak into his own TARDIS – disguised as a grandfather clock – and make his escape. Spandrell concludes that it is only a matter of time before the two enemies cross paths again.

[edit] Cast notes

Bernard Horsfall guest stars as Chancellor Goth. He had previously appeared as an unnamed Time Lord (credited as 'Time Lord 1') in the serial The War Games prompting some speculation that they were the same character. Other parts played by Horsfall in Doctor Who were Gulliver in The Mind Robber and Taron in Planet of the Daleks.

[edit] Continuity

• This is the only serial of the original Doctor Who series in which the Doctor does not have a companion. This was reportedly at Tom Baker's request as he wanted to try a solo adventure. In addition, some have suggested that the production team hoped to discourage Baker's interest in solo serials, but his enthusiastic reaction to the scripts seems to have belied this.
• Although this story was well-received, the experiment of the Doctor without his companions was not repeated until the revived series episode "Midnight" in the 2008 series. Robert Holmes later stated how difficult it was to write a script without anyone for the Doctor to share his thoughts and plans with (the character is seen to talk to himself more than usual).
• The planet Tersurus, where Goth says he found the Master, is seen in the 1999 charity spoof Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death. How the Master arrived there in an emaciated state is described in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Legacy of the Daleks by John Peel.
• The character of Borusa reappears in The Invasion of Time, Arc of Infinity and The Five Doctors. In each subsequent story, the character is played by a different actor, Borusa having regenerated. He has also been promoted in each interim, a cardinal here, Chancellor, President, and Lord High President in the later serials, respectively.
• Earth is referred to as Sol 3; this name is again used in "Last of the Time Lords".^[1] The Factfile for that episode on the official BBC Doctor Who website, compiled by fan Rob Francis, refers to the term as Earth's Gallifreyan name.^[2] It is used as such again in "Voyage of the Damned".
• The Doctor's trial and subsequent exile to Earth by the Time Lords and the later lifting of that sentence are mentioned.

[edit] Notable additions

• This is the first story to state that there is a limited number of times that a Time Lord can regenerate, and that this number is twelve. None of the Time Lords who are killed in this story are seen to regenerate, and the Doctor does qualify (in The War Games) that his people can live forever "barring accidents." In The Brain of Morbius, the fourth Doctor states that his people chose to not live forever because "death is the price of progress."
• This episode is one of the very few where we see the written Galifreyan language by way of a note to the authorities the Doctor leaves in the Tardis. The handwriting, done with a quill pen, resembles random stylized penstrokes shaped like the upside down capital letter L.
• The source of the Time Lords' power and that of the TARDIS is the Eye of Harmony, the nucleus of a black hole that lies beneath the citadel on Gallifrey. The Eye (or a link to it) is seen inside the TARDIS in the 1996 television movie. Whether the Eye survived the destruction of Gallifrey mentioned in the 2005 series is not clear, though the TARDIS is seen twice ("Boom Town", "Utopia") drawing its power from the time rift in Cardiff.
• This story introduces Rassilon who, along with Omega (introduced in The Three Doctors) would become the central figure in Time Lord mythology. When Rassilon's name is first mentioned, the Doctor inquires who he is.
• One of the artefacts that controls the Eye of Harmony is the Great Key of Rassilon, a large ebonite rod. Confusingly, there are two other Keys of Rassilon mentioned later in the series. One, also known as the Great Key, whose location is known only to the Chancellor, resembles an ordinary key and is a vital component of the demat gun (The Invasion of Time). The other, simply called the Key of Rassilon, gives access to the Matrix (The Ultimate Foe).

[edit] Production

Serial details by episode:

Episode	Broadcast date	Run time	Viewership (in millions)
"Part One"	30 October 1976	21:13	11.8
"Part Two"	6 November 1976	24:44	12.1
"Part Three"	13 November 1976	24:20	13
"Part Four"	20 November 1976	24:30	11.8
[3][4][5]

• Working titles for this story included The Dangerous Assassin (which Holmes changed to "deadly" because he thought it "didn't sound right"). The final title is a tautology: a successful assassin must, by definition, be deadly. However, since Time Lords can in general survive death, and the assassin's victims do not, he is perhaps "deadly" in that sense.
• The story drew considerable hostile commentary from Mary Whitehouse, who particularly objected to the extended freeze frame of Goth drowning the Doctor at the end of episode 3.

[edit] Outside references

• The story was largely inspired by the film and book The Manchurian Candidate, down to the inclusion of a CIA.
• The serial begins with Tom Baker doing a voiceover introduction referring to Time Lords in the third person, over a text crawl similar to that seen in the opening of Star Wars (although The Deadly Assassin predates the premiere of Star Wars by six months). The 1996 television movie, "Father's Day", "Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday" are the only other stories so far that begin with a voiceover.
• See also: Simulated reality

[edit] In print

Doctor Who book
Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin
Series	Target novelisations
Release number	19
Writer	Terrance Dicks
Publisher	Target Books
Cover artist	Mike Little
ISBN	0-426-11965-7
Release date	20 October 1977
Preceded by	Doctor Who and the Mutants
Followed by	Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang

A novelisation of this serial, written by Terrance Dicks, was published by Target Books in October 1977, entitled Doctor Who and The Deadly Assassin.

[edit] Broadcast

This serial was repeated on BBC One in August 1977 (04/08/77) to (25/08/77) on Thursdays at 6.20pm.

The cliffhanger to Episode 3 — where Goth holds the Doctor's head underwater in an attempt to drown him — came in for heavy criticism, particularly from television decency campaigner Mary Whitehouse. She often cited it in interviews as one of the most frightening scenes in Doctor Who, her reasoning being that children would not know if the Doctor survived until the following week and that they would have this strong image in their minds during all that time. After the episode's initial broadcast, the master tape of the episode was edited to remove the original ending. However, off-air U-matic recordings of the original broadcast exist with the ending intact, and have been used to restore the ending on the VHS and subsequent DVD release.

[edit] VHS and DVD release

• This story was released in March 1989 in edited omnibus format in the US only.
• It was released in episodic format in the UK in October 1991. It was also re-released & remastered for the W H Smith exclusive Time Lord Collection in 2002 with a better quality freeze frame cliffhanger for Episode 3.
• DWM 404 confirmed this story for 2009 DVD release. Play.com has it listed for 11th May and Amazon.co.uk have this listed for a 4th May release.

Season 6B

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Season 6B or Season 6 (b) is a popular fan theory related to the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. An example of fanon, it is a hypothetical series of adventures of the Doctor that takes place between the last serial of Season 6, The War Games (first broadcast in 1969), and the first serial of Season 7, Spearhead from Space (first broadcast in 1970). This unconfirmed piece of continuity was first used by fans, notably Paul Cornell, to explain away certain continuity problems in the programme.

Although the majority of stories in the series were constructed to leave short gaps (or no gaps at all) between episodes, the Season 6B hypothesis inserted a sizeable gap in which untold stories and previously unknown companions could be inserted into series continuity, in a number of novels and other productions. Other potential gaps in the eras of other Doctors have been identified, and utilised in the same way.

Season 6B is not to be confused with 6B, the production code for the Doctor Who serial Earthshock (1982).

Contents [hide] 1 Continuity problems 2 Season 6B 3 Adoption in tie-in fiction 3.1 BBC website 4 Footnotes 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Continuity problems

The conclusion of The War Games sees the capture of the Second Doctor by his people, the Time Lords, who put him on trial for interfering with the universe contrary to Time Lord policy. This was the first time the Time Lords had appeared in the programme, and also the first time the Doctor had revealed he was one of them (prior to this the other members of the Doctor's race to appear on television, the Doctor's granddaughter, Susan, and the Meddling Monk, were not explicitly identified as Time Lords). The Time Lords return his companions Jamie and Zoe to their own times and wipe their memories of their experiences with the Doctor bar their first adventure with him. They then sentence the Doctor to exile on Earth, as well as forcing him to regenerate. The first part of Spearhead from Space follows on from this, introducing the Third Doctor, who does not actually appear on screen at the end of The War Games, one of only two occasions (the other being the regeneration of the Eighth Doctor into the Ninth) that a regeneration has not been shown to completion on screen in one form or another.

Patrick Troughton reprised his role as the Second Doctor in the anniversary stories The Three Doctors (1973) and The Five Doctors (1983). In the latter story, illusions of Jamie and Zoe are dismissed because the Second Doctor knows that the Time Lords wiped their memories and therefore Jamie should not have recognised Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.

However, it is not explained how the Second Doctor could know of Jamie and Zoe's memory wipe, since he was told of it only just before his forced regeneration and exile, and consequently there does not seem to be any time to fit in the events of The Five Doctors between his trial and Spearhead from Space. Conversely, if this Second Doctor came from a time before The War Games he would have had no knowledge of the memory wipe because, from his perspective it had yet to happen.^[1]

Troughton once again returned to the series in the 1985 serial The Two Doctors, where the Second Doctor and Jamie are on a mission for the Time Lords. This caused confusion among fans, since Jamie did not find out about the Time Lords until just before he was sent back to his own time. Robert Holmes, who wrote The Two Doctors, stated on occasion that he believed the Doctor had long been a discreet agent of the Time Lords, undertaking missions for them despite his autonomous status. However, this was still at odds with what had been seen on-screen in The War Games. (Holmes felt that the Second Doctor had lost half a life due to the events of The War Games and came up with an idea to extend his life span).

Coupled with this were other, more minor problems - the visibly aged appearance of the now grey-haired Troughton and Frazer Hines (who played Jamie) and the second Doctor's confidence in his ability to control his TARDIS time machine, which would hardly have been justified given what was seen on-screen during his own era.

[edit] Season 6B

To account for these apparent discrepancies, the "Season 6B" theory was proposed. It was first published in the 1995 book The Discontinuity Guide, by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping.^[2] The hypothetical "Season 6B" takes place off-camera between The War Games and Spearhead from Space, and has Troughton's Doctor working as an agent of the Time Lords, specifically their covert organization the Celestial Intervention Agency, who grant him increased control over his TARDIS at the cost of his freedom. The Second Doctor who shows up in The Five Doctors comes from this period, and is therefore aware of Jamie and Zoe's mindwipe.

The plausibility of the theory is aided by the fact that we never actually see Troughton regenerate into Pertwee. The end of The War Games merely sees Troughton vanish into darkness and the opening of Spearhead from Space sees the Pertwee Doctor stumbling out of the TARDIS already transformed. The Third Doctor also carried a ring, a bracelet, and a watch which homed in on the TARDIS, none of which he had at the close of The War Games.

During this time, the Second Doctor apparently regains Jamie and Victoria Waterfield (who is mentioned as being away studying graphology in The Two Doctors) as companions, acquires a Stattenheim remote control device to summon the TARDIS, and undertakes the mission which was related in The Two Doctors. Eventually, either the Time Lords tire of keeping the Doctor on a leash, or, as is more likely, the Doctor rebels and attempts to escape once more. This results in the exile which begins in Spearhead from Space. To explain why the Sixth Doctor does not remember his own past in The Two Doctors, it is also suggested that the Time Lords wiped the Second Doctor's memory of the events of Season 6B — the Third Doctor did claim significant memory loss in Spearhead. (The Discontinuity Guide acknowledged that alternatively, this could be due to the fact that the Doctor is injected during The Two Doctors with "siralanomode"; a fictitious drug that the Doctor states can affect one's memory.^[2])

Although the specifics of Season 6B were first laid out in The Discontinuity Guide, the idea of a post-The War Games Second Doctor had already been introduced in the TV Comic comic strip in 1969. Action in Exile (TVC #916-#920) sees the Doctor arrive in London without his TARDIS, and he checks into the luxurious Carlton Grange Hotel. From this base, he proceeds to have five Earth-bound adventures, culminating in The Night Walkers (TVC #934-#936). In this story, the Doctor investigates tales of scarecrows walking. He discovers that the scarecrows have been animated by the Time Lords to capture him, and we learn that the Doctor escaped from the Time Lords before they could complete his sentence of a forced change of appearance. The scarecrows take him into the TARDIS and proceed to trigger his regeneration, leading directly into Spearhead from Space.

[edit] Adoption in tie-in fiction

Some parts of the Past Doctor Adventures novel Players are set in this period, as is the whole of World Game. Both books are written by former Doctor Who series writer and script editor Terrance Dicks. Dicks co-wrote The War Games and his adoption of the Season 6B hypothesis is seen by some as lending authorial legitimacy to the idea.

In World Game, it is revealed that at the conclusion of the Second Doctor's trial, he was actually sentenced to death. However, the Celestial Intervention Agency required an operative who could discreetly investigate temporal disturbances but could also be disavowed. The CIA approaches the Doctor and the Time Lord High Council, proposing that the Doctor's sentence be commuted if he becomes their agent.

To test this arrangement, the Doctor is first sent via time ring to 1915 France (Players) and subsequently given a Type 97 TARDIS and a supervisor/companion in the politically ambitious Time Lady Serena (World Game). Although the relationship between the two was more antagonistic, over the course of the mission they begin to appreciate each other's talents.

At the conclusion of World Game, Serena sacrifices herself for the Doctor's principles, while the Doctor uses what he learned of Gallifreyan politics from her to negotiate with the CIA, agreeing to their terms, but demanding the return of his TARDIS and Jamie. The CIA also agree, giving him a Stattenheim remote control and fitting the TARDIS with an override to give them ultimate control. They alter Jamie's memories so that he believes Victoria is away studying graphology, and the novel leads into the events of The Two Doctors.

[edit] BBC website

The BBC Doctor Who website uses excerpts both from The Discontinuity Guide and The Television Companion by David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker. The mention of Season 6B on the site could be taken as the BBC lending legitimacy to the theory. However, the BBC has never made a clear statement on canonicity, and the site also contains material which is explicitly non-canonical. The exact position remains unclear.

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] References

• Cornell, Paul, Day, Martin & Topping, Keith (1995). The Discontinuity Guide. London: Virgin Publishing, ISBN 0-426-20442-5.

[edit] External links

• Discontinuity Guide entry at the BBC website
• The WHOniverse's timeline
• Doctor Who - The Complete Adventures timeline
• Outpost Gallifrey timeline (not current with World Game)

P

The Cybermen are a fictional race of cyborgs who are amongst the most persistent enemies of the Doctor in the British science fiction television series, Doctor Who. Cybermen were originally a wholly organic species of humanoids originating on Earth's twin planet Mondas that began to implant more and more artificial parts into their bodies as a means of self-preservation. This led to the race becoming coldly logical and calculating, with emotions usually only shown when naked aggression was called for.

They were created by Dr. Kit Pedler (the unofficial scientific advisor to the programme) and Gerry Davis in 1966, first appearing in the serial, The Tenth Planet, the last to feature William Hartnell as the First Doctor. They have since been featured numerous times in their extreme attempts to survive through conquest.

A parallel universe version of the Cybermen appeared in the 2006 series' two-part story, "Rise of the Cybermen" and "The Age of Steel". These Cybermen also appeared in the two-part 2006 season finale, "Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday". This then carried through to the spin-off Torchwood in the episode "Cyberwoman". They would later return to the revived series in the 2008 Christmas Special "The Next Doctor", introducing two new variants of the race; the Cyber-Shades and the Cyber-King.

Contents [hide] 1 Physical characteristics 1.1 Costume details 1.2 Voice 2 Cybermen variants 3 Technology 4 Cybermats 5 History 5.1 Conceptual history 5.2 History within the show 5.2.1 Origins 5.2.2 The Earth invasions 5.2.3 The Cyber-Wars 5.2.4 Parallel Earth and the Battle of Canary Wharf 5.2.5 Torchwood Three Incident 5.2.6 The CyberKing 6 Other appearances 6.1 Spin-offs 7 Major appearances 7.1 Television 7.2 Stage plays 7.3 Audio plays 7.4 Novels 7.5 Games 8 References 9 Footnotes

[edit] Physical characteristics

While the Doctor's other old enemies the Daleks were on the whole unchanged during the original series' twenty-six season run, the Cybermen were seen to change with almost every encounter. The Cybermen are humanoid, but have been cybernetically augmented to the point where they have few remaining organic parts. In their first appearance in the series, the only portions of their bodies that still seemed human were their hands, but by their next appearance in The Moonbase (1967), their bodies were entirely covered up in their metallic suits, with their hands replaced by two finger claws, but changed back to regular five-fingered hands in The Invasion (1968). As they are relatively few in number, the Cybermen tend towards covert activity, scheming from hiding and using human pawns or robots to act in their place until they need to appear. They also seek to increase their numbers by converting others into Cybermen (a process known as "cyber-conversion").

It is presumed (and often implied) that there are still organic components beneath their suits, meaning they are actually cyborgs, not robots: in The Tenth Planet, a Cyberman tells a group of humans that "our brains are just like yours", although by the time of Attack of the Cybermen, their brains seem to have been replaced with electronics. Also in this same story, two human slave-prisoners of the Cybermen on the planet Telos, named Bates and Stratton, reveal that their organic arms and legs have been removed by the Cybermen, and replaced by Cyber-substitutes. In Earthshock (1982), the actors' chins were vaguely visible through a clear perspex area on the helmet to suggest some kind of organic matter. In The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967), veins and brains were visible through the domed head of the Cyberman Controller and similarly, in Attack of the Cybermen (1985) and "The Age of Steel" (2006), the Cyber-Controller's brain is visible through the dome. The first is a Mondas Cyber Controller, while the second involves alternative Earth's John Lumic. However, in Revenge of the Cybermen (1975), the Doctor says they are "total machine creatures".

The audio play Real Time implies that the converted victim's face remains beneath the Cyberman faceplate, although the audio plays, like all non-televised spin-off media, are of uncertain canonicity with regards to the television series. The Virgin New Adventures novel Iceberg by David Banks states that some Cybermen experience rare flashes of emotional memory from the time before they were converted, which are then usually suppressed. The parallel Earth Cybermen in the 2006 series are usually constructed from human brains bonded to a Cyberman exoskeletal shell with an artificially grown nervous system threaded throughout ("The Age of Steel"), although direct grafting of cyber-components is another method of conversion ("Cyberwoman").

Although the Cybermen often claim that they have done away with human emotion, they have exhibited emotions ranging from anger to smug satisfaction in their confrontations with the Doctor (although this is only clearly present during their appearances in the 1980s). Some Cybermen in the early stories were even given individual names such as "Krang". Some parallel Earth Cybermen did retain some memories of their pre-conversion lives, although their emotional response varied. In "Cyberwoman", the partial conversion led to a degree of insanity in Lisa Hallett, which was retained even after she transferred her brain into a cyberman body. In "Doomsday", Yvonne Hartman is able to retain at least some elements of her personality in order to prevent the advance of a group of other Cybermen, and is last seen weeping what appears to be either an oil-like substance or blood. In the same episode, the Cyber-Leader expresses clear frustration at the humans' refusing to surrender, although in a later scene he criticizes the Doctor for showing emotion. In "The Age of Steel", the Doctor is able to defeat the Cybermen by shutting down their emotional inhibitors, enabling them to "see" what had become of them. Their realization of what they had become led them to either simply shut down out of sheer horror, or partially explode. Lastly, when the first Cyber Leader is killed, his head explodes with some white liquid leaking down his body; there are references in that episode to a patented Cybus Industries mixture of chemicals used to preserve the brain.

The Virgin Missing Adventures novel Killing Ground by Steve Lyons suggests that some Cybermen imitate emotions to intimidate and unnerve their victims. The Big Finish Productions audio play Spare Parts (set on Mondas in the early days of cyber-conversion) suggests that the Cybermen deliberately remove their emotions as part of the conversion process to stifle the physical and emotional trauma of becoming a Cyberman. The conversion process in the parallel Earth is termed "upgrading".

This motive behind the removal of emotions is made more explicit in "The Age of Steel" where it is done by means of an emotional inhibitor. In that episode, the deactivation of their emotional inhibitors drives the converted Cybermen insane when they realise what they have become, killing them. This motive may also be applicable to Mondas Cybermen, given their forcible conversion of other lifeforms to Cybermen to maintain their numbers, despite the fact the Mondasians appear to have originally willingly converted themselves as a survival mechanism.^{[citation needed]}

Cybermen have a number of weaknesses over the years. The most notable weakness is the element gold. Their aversion to gold was not mentioned until their attempt to destroy the planetoid Voga (the so-called "Planet of Gold") in Revenge of the Cybermen (1975). Initially, it was explained that, due to its non-corrodible nature, gold essentially chokes their respiratory systems. For example, the glittergun, a weapon used during the Cyber-Wars in the future, fired gold dust at its targets. However, in later serials, gold appeared to affect them rather like silver affects werewolves, with gold coins or gold-tipped bullets fired at them having the same effect. The revived series' Cybermen have no such weakness, though the tie-in website for the episode makes mention of it.^[1] Cybermen are also rather efficiently killed when shot with their own guns. Other weaknesses from early stories include solvents, gravity based technology, and excessive levels of radiation. In "The Age of Steel" an EMP grenade is shown to disable a Cyberman and shut down its emotional inhibitor. Their armour is often depicted as flexible and resistant to bullets, but can be penetrated by gold arrows and projectiles made of gold. The Parallel Earth Cybermen are bullet-proof and are very resilient, but are not indestructible — they are vulnerable to heavy explosives, electromagnetic pulses and specialised weaponry, as well as Dalek weapons.

[edit] Costume details

The design of the Cybermen acted almost as a guide to prevailing fashion at the time of transmission. Nearly all were silver in colour and included items and material such as cloth, rubber diving suits, PVC, chest units, tubing, practice golf balls, cricketers' gloves, and silver-painted Doc Martens boots.^[2] A BBC Cyberman costume from the black & white era of TV has recently been discovered.^[3]

The 1980s design used converted flight suits painted silver. Unlike the Doctor's other foes, the Cybermen have changed substantially in appearance over the years, looking more and more modern, although retaining certain commonalities of design, the most iconic being the "handle bars" attached to Cybermen heads, that were supposed to aid with their hearing, their round eyeholes and their chest units. Completely black-coloured Cybermen were seen briefly in "Attack of the Cybermen".

Aside from these changes, variations in design between rank-and-file Cybermen and their leaders have been seen. In The Wheel in Space and The Invasion (both 1968), the Cyber Director was depicted as an immobile mechanism. In The Tomb of the Cybermen and Attack of the Cybermen, the Cyber Controller was a larger Cyberman with a high domed head instead of the "handle bar" helmet design. In Revenge of the Cybermen, the Cyber Leader had a completely black helmet except for his face. From Earthshock (1982) onwards he could be distinguished from his troops by the black handle bars on his helmet. The Cyber-Leader in "Army of Ghosts" also had black handles.

Because the Doctor is a time traveller, he meets the Cybermen at various points in their history out of sequence from the order the serials were made. This can be confusing since Cybermen from serials set in "earlier" periods of history can sometimes look more sophisticated than those from "later" periods. Lawrence Miles suggests in his reference work About Time 5 that the anachronistically designed Cybermen of Earthshock and Silver Nemesis are time travellers, like those in Attack of the Cybermen.

A Cyberman head was seen in the 2005 episode, "Dalek", kept in a display case. The text on the info card states that the head was found in a sewer, suggesting that the head was from The Invasion. However, the enlarged Cyber-Handles suggest that the head is from Revenge of the Cybermen. The info card states the head was found in 1975, the year in which The Invasion was set and the year in which Revenge of the Cybermen was broadcast.

The Cybermen returned in episodes 5 and 6 of the 2006 season of the new series, in a two-part story set on an alternate Earth. The new Cybermen were designed by production designer Edward Thomas's team and Neill Gorton at Millennium FX. The new Cyberman design is physically imposing, being about 6 feet 7 inches (2.0 m) tall. The general design is made to resemble modern consumer electronics, such as the iPod. To this extent, they are made from burnished steel instead of silver, feature the Cybus Corporation symbol on its chest, and have a general art deco design. The other distinct Cyberman design is that of the Cyber-Controller, which had glowing eyes, a transparent forehead revealing the brain, and sockets on its chest-plate providing connectors to other systems.

The Torchwood episode "Cyberwoman" features a partially cyber-converted woman who lacks the outer plating of a fully converted Cyberman. Her body is encased in metal structures but much of her flesh, including her face, is visible. She also has clearly visible metallic breasts, though it is not clear how much of her own flesh has been replaced and how much is merely covered. Another character speculates she could be 40-45% human, and 55-60% Cyberman.

[edit] Voice

Early Cybermen had an unsettling, sing-song voice, constructed by placing the inflections of words on the wrong syllables. In their first appearance, the effect of this was augmented by the special effect of having a Cyberman abruptly open his mouth wide and keep it open, without moving his tongue or lips, while the separately recorded voice would be playing, and then shut it quickly when the line was finished. Although the cloth-like masks of the first Cybermen were soon replaced by a full helmet, a similar physical effect involving the mouth "hatch" opening and then shutting when the line was finished was used until The Wheel in Space (1968).

Later, the production team used special effects from its Radiophonic Workshop by adding first a mechanical larynx, then a vocoder, to modify speech to make it sound more alien and computer-like. In later stories of the original series and in the audio plays, two copies of the voice track were sampled and pitch-shifted downwards by differing amounts and layered to produce the effect, sometimes with the addition of a small amount of flanging. From Revenge of the Cybermen to Silver Nemesis (1988) the actors provided the voices themselves, using microphones and transmitters in the chest units.

The voices for the 2006 return of the Cybermen are similar to the buzzing electronic monotone voices of the Cybermen used in The Invasion. They were provided by Nicholas Briggs (who performed the voices for the Cybermen in Big Finish audio stories as well as the Daleks in both the new series and the audio stories). As shown in the season 2 DVD special feature "Confidential Cut Downs," the timbre was created by processing Brigg's voice through a Moog moogerfooger ring modulator. Unusually, in "The Age of Steel", the Cyber-Controller (John Lumic, played by Roger Lloyd Pack) retains his voice after being upgraded, but it is still electronic. In "Doomsday", a Cyberman which contains the brain of Torchwood Institute director Yvonne Hartman retains a female-sounding though still electronic voice, as does the partially converted Lisa Hallett in "Cyberwoman" when her Cyberman personality is dominant. The reason for this is that their minds are taking control of the suit into which their brain has been placed, thus allowing the Cyber-suit's design to be exploited through sheer mental power. In an effect reminiscent of the earliest Cybermen's mouths snapping open while speaking, the new Cybermen have a blue light in their "mouths" which blinks in synchronisation with their speech.

[edit] Cybermen variants

Some Cybermen are given titles, being credited as "Cyber Leader" (or variants thereof), "Cyber Lieutenant", "Cyber Scout" or the "Cyber Controller". The Cyber Controller in particular has appeared in multiple forms, both humanoid and as an immobile computer, and has also been referred to as the "Cyber Planner" or "Cyber Director". The Controller seen (and destroyed) in various serials also may or may not be the same consciousness in different bodies; it appears to recognize and remember the Doctor from previous encounters. In Iceberg, the first Cyber Controller is created by implanting a Cyber Director into the skull of a recently converted Cyberman.

The Cyber-Controller in "The Age of Steel" used the brain of John Lumic, the creator of the Cybermen in that parallel reality. In "Doomsday", a Cyber-Leader appears, and when he is destroyed, mention is made of downloading his data files into another Cyberman unit, which is then upgraded to Cyber-Leader.

The 2008 Christmas special, "The Next Doctor", featured a new variant called a Cybershade.^[4], The Doctor theorises that it is a more primitive version of a Cyberman, using the brain of a cat or a dog. In the same story a "Cyber-King" appears; according to the Doctor, it is a "Dreadnought-class" ship resembling a Cyberman hundreds of feet tall, and contains a Cyber-factory in its chest. It is controlled from within its mouth. Its right arm can be converted into a cannon, and its left into a laser.

[edit] Technology

Cybermen technology is almost completely oriented towards weaponry, apart from their own bodies. When originally seen in The Tenth Planet they had large energy weapons that attached to their chests. In The Moonbase, the Cybermen had two types of weaponry: an electrical discharge from their hands, which stunned the target, and a type of gun. They also made use of a large laser cannon with which they attempted to attack the base itself.

The hand discharge was also present in The Tomb of the Cybermen, which featured a smaller, hand-held cyber-weapon shaped like a pistol that was described as an X-ray laser. In The Wheel in Space the Cybermen could use the discharge to also operate machinery, and had death rays built into their chest units. They displayed the same units in The Invasion as well as carrying large rifles for medium distance combat. In Revenge of the Cybermen and Real Time their weapons were built into their helmets. Killing Ground indicates that this type of Cybermen also have more powerful hand weapons. Subsequent appearances have shown them armed almost exclusively with hand-held cyberguns.

The Cybermen have access to weapons of mass destruction known as cobalt bombs, which are also sometimes known as Cyber-bombs, which were banned by the galactic Armageddon Convention (Revenge of the Cybermen). A "Cyber-megatron bomb" was mentioned in The Invasion, supposedly powerful enough to destroy all life on Earth. In Earthshock, the Cybermen also used androids as part of their plans to invade Earth.

The parallel Earth Cybermen electrocute their victims by touching them and at first carried no other weaponry. In "Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday", the Cybermen are equipped with retractable energy weapons housed within their forearms (these were actually first shown in "The Age of Steel", but only very briefly and were not used during that episode), but also use modified human weapons to battle the Daleks. The arm mounted guns prove effective against humans but are unable to penetrate Dalek shields. Two Cybermen sent to parley with Dalek Thay at the Battle of Canary Wharf shot the Dalek but were promptly exterminated. In the Torchwood episode "Cyberwoman" the partially converted Lisa Hallett used her electrical touch against the Torchwood team, as well as an energy beam fired from her arm which could only stun the part of the body at which it was aimed.

[edit] Cybermats

The Cybermen also use smaller, cybernetic creatures called "cybermats" as weapons of attack. In their first appearance in The Tomb of the Cybermen, they resembled oversized metallic silverfish and had segmented bodies with hair-like tactile sensor probes along the base of their heads, which were topped with crystalline eyes. The Second Doctor described them as a "form of metallic life," implying that they may be semi-organic like the Cybermen, and that they attacked by feeding off brain waves.

The second model of cybermat seen in The Wheel in Space was used for sabotage, able to tune in on human brainwaves. They were carried to the "Wheel" in small but high-density sacs that sank through the hull of the space station, causing drops in air pressure. These cybermats had solid photoreceptors for eyes instead of crystals. The Second Doctor used an audio frequency to jam them, causing them to spin, crash and disintegrate.

The third model, seen in Revenge of the Cybermen, was a much larger, snake-like cybermat that could be remotely controlled and could inject poison into its victims. It had no visible eyes or other features, and was as vulnerable to gold dust as the Cybermen were.

In Spare Parts, "mats" are cybernetically augmented creatures, sometimes kept as pets. Cybermats of a different design are used for surveillance by Mondas' Central Committee. The creatures occasionally go wild, chewing on power sources, and must be rounded up by a "mat-catcher." In the Past Doctor Adventures novel Illegal Alien by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry, set in the 1940s, the Cybermen create cybermats by cyber-converting local animals like cats or birds, possibly because of lack of technological resources.

In the Bernice Summerfield audio adventure The Crystal of Cantus, a Cyberman reveals that the organs of children who are too small to be fully cyber-converted are used in the creation of cybermats.

[edit] History

[edit] Conceptual history

The name "Cyberman" comes from cybernetics, a term coined in Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, 1948). Wiener used the term in reference to the control of complex systems in the animal world and in mechanical networks, in particular self-regulating control systems. By 1960, doctors were performing research into surgically or mechanically augmenting humans or animals to operate machinery in space, leading to the coining of the term "cyborg", for "cybernetic organism".

In the 1960s, "spare-part" surgery was starting out, with the first, gigantic heart-lung machines being developed. There were also serious suggestions of wiring the nerve endings of amputees directly into machines for quicker response.^[5] In 1963, Kit Pedler had a conversation with his wife (who was also a doctor) about what would happen if a person had so many prostheses that they could no longer distinguish themselves between man and machine. He got the opportunity to develop this idea when, in 1966, after an appearance on the BBC science programmes Tomorrow's World and Horizon, the BBC hired him to help on the Doctor Who serial The War Machines. That eventually led to him writing, with Gerry Davis's help, The Tenth Planet for Doctor Who.

Pedler, influenced by the logic-driven Treens from the Dan Dare comic strip, originally envisaged the Cybermen as "space monks", but was persuaded by Davis to concentrate on his fears about the direction of spare-part surgery. The original Cybermen were imagined as human, but with plastic and metal prostheses. The Cybermen of The Tenth Planet still have human hands, and their facial structures are visible beneath the masks they wear. However, over time, they evolved into metallic, more robot-like designs.

The Cybermen attracted controversy when parents complained after a scene in The Tomb of the Cybermen in which a dying Cyberman spurted white foam from its innards. Another incident was initiated by Pedler himself, who took a man in a Cyberman costume into a busy shopping area of St. Pancras. The reaction of the public was predictable, and the crowd almost blocked the street and the police were called in. Pedler said that he "wanted to know how people would react to something quite unusual," but also admitted that he "wanted to be a nuisance."^[6] Pedler wrote his last Cyberman story, The Invasion, in 1968, and left Doctor Who with Gerry Davis to develop the scientific thriller series Doomwatch.

[edit] History within the show

[edit] Origins

Millennia ago, during prehistoric times, Mondas was knocked out of solar orbit and drifted into deep space. The Mondasians, already far in advance of Earth's technology and fearful for their race's survival, sent out spacecraft to colonise other worlds, including Telos, where they pushed the native Cryons aside and used the planet to house vast tombs where they could take refuge in suspended animation when necessary.

On Mondas, the Mondasians were dying out, and therefore, in order to survive and continue the race, they replaced most of their bodies with Cybernetic parts. Having eventually removed all emotion from their brains, to maintain their sanity, the natives installed a drive propulsion system so they could pilot the planet itself through space. As the original race was limited in numbers and were continually being depleted, the Mondasians — now Cybermen — became a race of conquerors who reproduced by taking other organic beings and forcibly changing them into Cybermen. The origins of the Cybermen were further elaborated upon in Spare Parts.

The move to "cybernise" Mondasians must have commenced on Mondas before they conquered Telos. Otherwise, there must have been some ongoing contact between Mondas and Telos after it was conquered, or the move to develop into Cybermen must have been paralleled after that point.

[edit] The Earth invasions

The Cybermen's first attempt at invading Earth, around 1970, was chronicled in The Invasion. A group of Cybermen from "Planet 14" had allied themselves with industrialist Tobias Vaughn, who installed mind control circuits in electrical appliances manufactured by his International Electromatics company, paving the way for a ground invasion. This was uncovered by the newly formed United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, led by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, who repelled the invasion with the help of the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe.

In The Tenth Planet, the First Doctor and his companions Ben and Polly, met an advance force of Cybermen that landed near an Antarctic space tracking station in the year 1986. This advance force was to prepare for the return of Mondas to the solar system. As Mondas approached, it began to drain Earth's energy for the Cybermen's use, but in the process absorbed too much energy and disintegrated. The Cybermen on Earth also fell apart as their homeworld was destroyed.

In 1988 a fleet of Cyber warships was assembled to convert Earth into a New Mondas. A scouting party was sent to Earth in search of the legendary Nemesis statue, a Time Lord artifact of immense power, made of the "living metal" validium. Due to the machinations of the Seventh Doctor and his companion Ace, however, the Nemesis destroyed the entire Cyber-fleet instead. (Silver Nemesis).

In 2012, the inert head of a Cyberman was part of the Vault, a collection of alien artefacts belonging to American billionaire Henry van Statten ("Dalek", 2005). According to its label, it was recovered from the London sewers in 1975^[7] and presumably came from the 1970 invasion attempt, although it is of a design only seen in Revenge of the Cybermen, which took place in the late 29th century (in a metafictional sense, the label is accurate, as Revenge was broadcast in 1975).

By the mid-21st century, mankind had reached beyond its planet and set up space stations in deep space. One of these, Space Station W3, known as "The Wheel," was the site of a takeover by Cybermen who wanted to use it as a staging point for yet another invasion of Earth. The Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe prevented this in The Wheel in Space.

The Cybermen returned in The Moonbase. By the year 2070, Earth's weather was being controlled by the Gravitron installation on the Moon. The Cybermen planned to use the Gravitron to disrupt the planet's weather patterns and destroy all life on it, eliminating a threat to their survival. This attempt was also stopped by the Second Doctor, Ben, Polly, Jamie and the surviving crew of the moonbase.

[edit] The Cyber-Wars

Five centuries after the destruction of Mondas, the Cybermen had all but passed into legend when an archaeological expedition to the planet Telos uncovered their resting place in The Tomb of the Cybermen. However, those Cybermen were not dead but merely in hibernation, and were briefly revived before the Second Doctor returned them to their eternal sleep, with help from some of the archaeologists, Jamie and Victoria.

This was short-lived, however. By the beginning of the 26th century, the Cybermen were back in force, and the galactic situation was grave enough that Earth hosted a conference in 2526 that would unite the forces of several planets in a war against the Cybermen. A force of Cybermen tried to disrupt this conference, first by trying to infiltrate Earth in a freighter and when that was discovered by the Fifth Doctor, to crash the freighter into Earth and cause an ecological disaster. Although the attempt failed, the freighter was catapulted back in time to become the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs (Earthshock). Unfortunately, the Doctor's Companion Adric was trapped aboard the freighter, and died in the crash; leaving the Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa to mourn him.

The Cybermen faced complete defeat now that humanity was united against them in the Cyber-Wars. The glittergun had been developed as a weapon against them, with Voga, the legendary "Planet of Gold", being a major supplier of gold dust ammunition. Meanwhile, the native Cryons on the planet Telos rose up and sabotaged the Cybermens' hibernation tombs. Using a captured time travel machine, a group of Cybermen travelled back to Earth in 1985 to try to prevent the destruction of Mondas, but were stopped by the Sixth Doctor and his companion Peri (Attack of the Cybermen). The Cryons also finally succeeded in taking back Telos.

The Cybermen did survive, but by the late 29th century they had been reduced to small remnant groups wandering throughout space. The Fourth Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan encountered one such group during this time; and the Doctor very sarcastically pointed out their diminished state, noting that they had "no home planet, no influence, nothing!", and were "just a bunch of pathetic tin soldiers, skulking about the galaxy in an ancient spaceship." These Cybermen had discovered that Voga had drifted through space and wandered into the solar system, being pulled into orbit around Jupiter as a new moon. They planned to restore their race's power with a plan of revenge against Voga by destroying it with Cyber-bombs. They hoped that this would disrupt their enemies' supply of gold, but their plot was stopped by the Doctor. This was their last chronological appearance to date, with the Cybermen seemingly vanishing from history after this point (Revenge of the Cybermen).

A Cyberman (of the type seen in The Invasion) also appeared in the Miniscope exhibit in Carnival of Monsters (1973). Three squads of Cybermen of the Earthshock variety, each led by a Cyber-Leader, appeared in The Five Doctors (1983) in a slightly larger role.

[edit] Parallel Earth and the Battle of Canary Wharf

In the "Rise of the Cybermen"/"The Age of Steel" two-part story, the Tenth Doctor, Rose Tyler, and Mickey Smith crash down into a parallel London in a parallel universe, where the Cybermen are being created on modern-day Earth. These alternate Cybermen were created as an "upgrade" to humanity and the ultimate move into cyberspace, allowing the brain to survive in an ageless steel body. These Cybermen also referred to themselves as "Human Point 2 (Human.2)" and "deleted" all those deemed incompatible with the upgrade. They could electrocute humans with a touch.

These Cybermen were created by John Lumic, a terminally ill and insane genius whose company, Cybus Industries, had advanced humanity considerably. To find a way to survive, he perfected a method to sustain the human brain indefinitely in a cradle of chemicals, bonding the synaptic impulses to a metal exoskeleton. The Cybermen "handle bars" were part of a high-tech communications device called an EarPod. Also created by Lumic, the EarPods were used extensively in the place of MP3 players and mobile phones, allowing information to be directly downloaded into people's heads.

Lumic began to trick and abduct homeless people and convert them into Cybermen, and assassinated the President of Great Britain after the President rejected his plans. Using the EarPods, Lumic took mental control of London, marching thousands to be cyber-converted. He was betrayed by an old friend who damaged his wheelchair's life-support systems. He had told the Cybermen that he would upgrade 'only with my last breath' and since that moment was at hand he was involuntarily upgraded into the Cyber-Controller, a superior model of Cyberman. However, the Doctor and his companions, having accidentally landed on the parallel Earth, managed to foil his plans. They freed London from mental control and disabled the Cybermen's emotional inhibitors, causing them to go insane and in some cases explode. Lumic himself fell to his apparent death into the burning remains of his factory. A human resistance group, the Preachers, then set about to clean up the remainder of Lumic's factories around the world.

These Cybermen reappeared in the 2006 season finale "Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday". It is to be noted that these Cybermen also use energy weapons built into their right arms. However, in "The Age of Steel" after the conversion sequence, the newly created Cybermen can be seen to have the retractable weapons in place after exiting the conversion chambers. Having infiltrated that world's version of the Torchwood Institute and discovering a breach between universes caused by the passage of an interdimensional void ship, the Cybermen used it to invade the Doctor's universe. However, the void ship's users, the Daleks, also revealed themselves, leading to all-out war across London with mankind caught in the crossfire. Eventually, the Doctor re-opened the breach, causing the Cybermen and Daleks (who had been saturated with background radiation from the Void) to be sucked back into it. The breach then sealed itself, leaving the Cybermen and Daleks (except the Cult of Skaro, who used their emergency temporal shift function to escape) seemingly trapped in the Void forever.

[edit] Torchwood Three Incident

In "Cyberwoman" it was revealed that at the height of the "Battle of Canary Wharf" the Cybermen had begun to directly convert whole bodies using regular Earth technology, rather than transplant their brains into parallel earth Cyberman shells. One of their victims, a woman called Lisa Hallett, was only partially converted when the power was shut off and she was rescued by her boyfriend, Ianto Jones.

Jones took her to Torchwood Three in Cardiff along with a cyber-conversion unit which he made into a life support system for her under her directions. He tried to find a cure for her condition, calling on cybernetics expert Dr Tanizaki. Unfortunately Hallett's Cyberman personality asserted itself, leading to her killing Tanizaki and trying to take over Torchwood Three as a staging area for a new Cyberman army. She eventually transplanted her own brain into the body of a pizza delivery girl whom she let into the base, and was shot to death by the other members of the Torchwood team.

[edit] The CyberKing

A small handful of the Cybermen t