The Veiled Leopard
It’s Monte Carlo, 1966, and Peri and Erimem are on an assignment: the Doctor has sent them to steal the Veiled Leopard, a spectacular diamond with unusual markings at its center. But this time, the TARDIS travelers are on their own, and the Doctor isn’t there to help them deal with someone else who’s there for the same reason, to say nothing of the other shady characters populating the casino. Two of the other guests in particular stick out like a sore thumb, which is an odd coincidence, because their names are Hex and Ace - and they’ve been sent by the Doctor to make sure that nobody steals the Veiled Leopard.
written by Iain McLaughlin & Claire Bartlett
directed by Gary Russell
music by David DarlingtonCast: Nicola Bryant (Peri), Caroline Morris (Erimem), Sophie Aldred (Ace), Philip Olivier (Hex), Lizzie Hopley (Lady Lillian Hawthorne), Alan Ruscoe (Peter Mathis), Steven Wickham (Gavin Walker), Stephen Mansfield (Jean, the Commisionaire)
Notes: Alan Ruscoe appeared in almost half of the episodes of the first season of the revived Doctor Who, playing heavily-costumed parts such as Autons, Slitheen and assorted androids; he also appeared in the first two movies of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Steven Wickham was Lister’s blushing GELF bride in the Red Dwarf episode Emohawk: Polymorph II. If you’re trying to fit written and audio Doctor Who into the same continuity, the fifth and seventh incarnations of the Doctor met up again both before and after this story; the Missing Adventures novel “Cold Fusion” takes place further back in the fifth Doctor’s life (when he’s traveling with Tegan, Nyssa and Adric), and much later in the seventh Doctor’s (when he’s no longer traveling with Ace or Hex, but instead shares the TARDIS with Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester).
Review: A fun little adventure in two parts - each “episode” focusing on one pair of companions - The Veiled Leopard is the most recent Doctor Who Magazine exclusive produced by Big Finish Productions, and it’s an interesting experiment; if it weren’t for the fact that so many Doctor-less audio adventures have already taken place in the Doctor Who universe during Big Finish’s reign, one could almost say this is the audio equivalent to Love & Monsters. (more…)
Once again, Sarah’s life is saved by Josh, though this time, in addition to killing the Keeper, he’s also killed Will Sullivan. Sarah puts as much distance between herself and Josh as she can, but he still tries to stay in touch with her, even showing up at Will’s funeral. Just when Sarah’s had about enough, Sir Donald Wakefield shows up too, inviting her to join him on the first passenger flight into space - a flight that will coincide with Earth passing through the tail of a comet that last approached the planet 500 years ago, a comet whose return now was predicted in the writings of Count Giuliano. Sir Donald also reveals that Josh is his son - and an operative of the pacifist chapter that follows Giuliano’s writings as prophecy. Sarah and Nat take Sir Donald up on the offer and are flown to the launch site - a place the rest of the world knows as Area 51. But while Sarah is undergoing training for her first visit to space since her travels with the Doctor, there’s a change of crew: Sir Donald’s cancer returns with a vengeance, and on his deathbed, he asks Josh to replace him on the flight. But once the passenger spaceship launches, something goes wrong. The pilot exposes himself as one of the Keeper’s last operatives, carrying out his mission to deliver Sarah to death’s door. Josh and the pilot exchange gunfire, damaging the controls in the process and leaving Sarah as the only survivor as the ship pushes into a higher orbit than it was designed for - and straight into the path of the comet.
After returning from another brush with death in Antarctica, Sarah, Josh and Will pry into a research company with ties to Hilda Winters - and to the secret society that has twice tried to kill Sarah. Protests fill the streets outside the company’s research center, where Josh finds his environmentalist friend Maude worried about her daughter, who managed to get inside the building but never returned. Will uses his medical credentials to gain access to the center, only to discover that he is expected. Sir Donald Wakefield, a terminally ill multimillionaire who has made recent news headlines by planning to be on the first passenger flight into space, contacts Sarah and reveals that he heads up another faction of the secret society, and warns her that one of her closest friends has orders to kill her. When the society’s more violent faction starts a countdown to the release of a deadly bio-engineered plague, they name their price for stopping the outbreak: Sarah must lay down her life willingly.
Two months after her brush with death in Italy, Sarah is still recuperating from being shot, and planning to pay the Morgan expedition in Antarctica (and Will Sullivan) a visit. Josh insists on going with her, not quite trusting how conveniently a close relative of an old friend has insinuated himself into Sarah’s life. When they arrive there, however, all is not well - Will is sporting a black eye, tensions are running high among the small team at the isolated Antarctic base, and it seems that Sarah can’t get a straight answer to any straight questions. She begins to worry that another Krynoid seed pod has been found, but something else is happening behind the scenes - something deadly, and something that has a connection to the secret order whose members tried to murder Sarah in Italy.
Two years after Hilda Winters’ attempt on her life, Sarah suddenly finds herself relieved of the obligation to testify about the incident - Winters herself is murdered while awaiting trial. Josh, still overprotective of Sarah, marks the occasion with a bitter “good riddance,” but when a letter from Winters arrives - apparently written before, and yet predicting, her death - Sarah is spooked. When Sarah shows up for a yearly rendezvous with her fellow former TARDIS traveler Harry Sullivan, Harry doesn’t show, but a man claiming to be his stepbrother, Will Sullivan, shows up instead. Due to leave for a 13-month stay at an Antarctic research base (which, coincidentally, happens to have been funded by Sarah herself with the money she inherited from her late Aunt Lavinia), Will is also looking for Harry. Sarah’s friend Natalie has moved on to become a research assistant to a prominent forensic scientist, though an excavation into a crypt that should contain a body thousands of years old turns out to hold the body of a very recent murder victim, and Nat herself becomes a suspect. When Sarah and Josh go to visit her in Italy, Sarah discovers that the Book of Tomorrows mentioned in Hilda Winters’ posthumously delivered letter is very real - and it belongs to a secret order that believes Sarah herself is playing her part in an ancient prophecy. And one member of that order wishes to help Sarah complete her prophetic role by killing her.