The Church And The Crown
The TARDIS brings the Doctor, Peri and Erimem to the eve of the French Revolution, though they aren’t aware of this at first. As soon as the Doctor realizes what period of history he’s brought his friends to, he tries to round them up to make a quick exit, but it’s too late. Peri has attracted some unwelcome attention due to her striking resemblance to Queen Anne, and Erimem’s usual curiosity has led her to some of the more colorful locals. Peri has become a target of kidnappers plotting against the Queen, and in trying to defend her, the Doctor has made a target of himself as well.
written by Mark Wright and Cavan Scott
directed by Gary Russell
music by Russell StoneCast: Peter Davison (The Doctor), Nicola Bryant (Peri), Caroline Morris (Erimem), Andrew Mackay (King Louis), Michael Shallard (Cardinal Richelieu), Marcus Hutton (The Duke of Buckingham), Peter John (Delmarre), Andy Coleman (Rouffet), Robert Curbishley (Captain Morand), Wendy Albiston (Madame De Chevreuse)
Timeline: between No Place Like Home and Nekromanteia
Review: From the writers who brought us the excellent The One Doctor comes yet another tale of mistaken identity - and as much as I loved their earlier work, The Church And The Crown just doesn’t live up to it, despite the promise of its rich historical setting and a new companion aboard the TARDIS whose presence was previously unrecorded by the Doctor’s TV adventures. (more…)
The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Evelyn to the Clutch, a ragtag fleet of ships flying in a constant close formation for mutual protection. The chief inhabitants of this interstellar gypsy caravan are a repitilian race known as the Galyari, who - according to their legends - are forbidden from ever settling a world of their own. They’re not safe on the Clutch either, as a number of them, both young and old, have turned up dead recently. The Galyari believe that the Sandman, the being who banished them from their planet, is also responsible for the murders. But they also believe he wears a coat of blindingly bright colors, travels in a blue box, and calls himself the Doctor. To Evelyn’s shock and horror, the Galyari are right about all but one of those things.
The Doctor and Ace arrive in Ibiza on the eve of an international broadcast from a recently-opened nightclub called The Rapture. The club’s two DJs, Gabriel and Jude, have established a reputation for throwing quite a party - and that suits Ace just fine, following her harrowing experiences in Nazi Germany. As Ace joins some other people her age for a night of clubbing, the Doctor meets his old friend Gustavo, who warns him that something sinister is afoot at The Rapture. When the Doctor goes to investigate, he finds that Jude and Gabriel’s trance music is living up to its name quite literally - the two DJs who claim to be angels are slowly exerting mind control over their club’s patrons…including Ace.
The Doctor and Peri pay a visit to a linguistic symposium in the future, to which the Doctor, legendary for his own viurtuoso verbosity, has a personal invitation. But things begin going horribly wrong soon after the TARDIS lands. Professor Osefer, an old friend of the Doctor who is due to deliver a keynote speech, turns up dead - apparently by her own hand - though the Doctor is mystified by her unusually misspelled suicide note. The campus artificial intelligence, designed to offer its adaptable, ever-growing database to students and experts alike, begins exhibiting murderous tendencies. The Doctor learns that a young man who has caught Peri’s eye may be the most diabolically dangerous man on the planet. And then all of the attendees begin repeating one thing, a suffix without a prefix, a syllable with barely any meaning of its own, the calling card of a malevolent intelligence bent on universal domination: ish.
The Doctor and Nyssa visit a planet which seems to be almost exactly like Earth, but the sky is nowhere to be seen - the cities are all underground. The people have already taken plastic surgery one step further as well - they’ve added artificial organs and limbs, not just altered their skin, and even the indigenous animals are being subjected to the augmentation surgeries. It all adds up to confirm the Doctor’s worst fear: the TARDIS has landed on Mondas, at the moment in history poised precariously between the extinction of the Mondasians and the birth of the Cybermen. And if he and Nyssa stay there too long, they may be captured and converted themselves.