Circular Time
Spring: The Doctor and Nyssa, at the behest of the Time Lords, visit a world where bipedal birds are the dominant life form - and a rogue Time Lord has installed himself as their ruler, accelerating their technological progress dramatically. The Doctor knows that causing his fellow Time Lord to regenerate would confuse the locals and break his hold, but it seems that his actions have been anticipated…
Summer: The Doctor and Nyssa are brought before Isaac Newton for heresy, and the time travelers are horrified when Newton guesses their origins with alarming accuracy. The Doctor tries to bluff his way around it, but Newton insists on a look at the Doctor’s time machine. But will the truth set the time travelers free…or alter the course of history for one of Earth’s greatest scientific minds?
Autumn: The Doctor brings the TARDIS to Earth for quite a long stay as he settles in to play a season of cricket with some old friends. For the first time, Nyssa meets someone who makes her think that staying on Earth might not be all bad…if not for the Doctor’s tendency to slip away quietly.
Winter: Long after leaving the Doctor, Nyssa is a wife and a mother, but a disturbed one. She’s recently experienced vivid dreams of her time traveling friend, and asks her husband, the inventor of a machine that facilitates interactive lucid dreaming, for help. But only when she’s able to make the dream more coherent does she realize that somewhere, in time and space, the Doctor is reaching out to his old companions from the brink of death…
written by Paul Cornell & Mike Maddox
directed by John Ainsworth
music by David DarlingtonCast: Peter Davison (The Doctor), Sarah Sutton (Nyssa)
- Spring: Jamie Sandford (Hoodeye), Toby Longworth (Redklaw), Lois Baxter (Carrion), Teresa Gallagher (Snowfire), Hugh Fraser (Zero)
- Summer: Jeremy James (Guard), Sunny Ormonde (Molly), Trevor Littledale (Jailer), David Warner (Sir Isaac Newton)
- Autumn: Jamie Sandford (Andrew), Toby Longworth (Jack), Jeremy James (Anton), John Benfield (Don)
- Winter: Jeremy James (Lasarti), Sunny Ormonde (Anima)
Notes: In a rare major continuity blooper for Big Finish, in the “Spring” segment, the Doctor’s fellow Time Lord calls him a “rebel president” - even though this episode’s events precede The Five Doctors, in which the fifth Doctor was drafted into that office, by almost an entire season. Given that the TV series has quietly established that the Doctor’s lives, the lives of other Time Lords and events on Gallifrey seem to exist in their own continuum in which it’s impossible for a Time Lord to visist Gallifrey’s past or future, it seems unlikely that Zero would have had foreknowledge of the Doctor’s Presidency. In the “Summer” segment, the Doctor protests that the TARDIS is not a jade pagoda, a reference to the New Adventures novels, in which a portion of the TARDIS can indeed be split off into a jade pagoda with roughly the same dimensions as a Police Box. The Doctor also quotes the song “I Am The Doctor”, originally recorded by Jon Pertwee and Rupert Hine in the early ’70s.
Timeline: between The Game and Renaissance Of The Daleks (first three segments) and during episode 4 of Caves Of Androzani (last segment)
Review: An interesting swipe at a Doctor Who short story anthology in audio drama form - BBC Books’ audio book adaptations of various “Short Trips” stories notwithstanding - Circular Time is actually quite refreshing. Any one of the first three stories within could have been expanded with more secondary characters, lots of escapes, chases and captures, and other general padding. But instead, each tale is boiled down to its bare essence, says its piece, and bows out gracefully. Add to that a dash of Paul Cornell’s tendency to drop meta-commentary into the dialogue of the story itself (i.e. the belly laugh resulting from the second episode’s quote of the Jon Pertwee song “I Am The Doctor”), and it all breezes along nicely - at least for the first two episodes. And David Warner to boot - could it get better? Oh yes. (more…)
The TARDIS is drawn to a meeting with General Tillington, an American general heading up an anti-alien agency called Global Warning in the U.K., in 2158 - a year after the Daleks should have overrun the entire planet to begin a ten-year occupation of Earth. But the Daleks are on Earth as tiny toys that are all the rage among kids and collectors. Global Warning employs a number of “time sensitives” who foresee the Dalek invasion that the Doctor thinks should be in progress, and yet they can’t pin down when or how it will happen, and for that matter, with the timeline apparently already disrupted, neither can the Doctor. With the help of Tillington’s seemingly rebellious son Wilton, the Doctor escapes and returns to the TARDIS and begins trying to track down Nyssa, who he left in an earlier point in Earth’s history to test a piece of temporal communications equipment she’d invented. But Nyssa isn’t where or when he left her - she and one of the Knights Templar who was pursuing her have somehow been transported to the American Civil War, where they aid a wounded former slave. The Doctor rescues them, but the TARDIS then leaps into the heart of the Vietnam War, where they rescue yet another passenger, a tough-talking female helicopter pilot. But unknown to the Doctor, Wilton has brought his toy collection with him - the miniature Daleks - and the tiny but deadly Daleks sieze control of the TARDIS. They need the Doctor’s time machine - and, of course, him to pilot it - to launch a new and more devastating invasion of Earth.