Doctor Who: I.D. / Urgent Calls
I.D.: Something has gone horribly wrong among a spacefaring human community. “Scandroids” have systematically eliminated anyone with the knowledge to shut them down, and the populace lives in fear at the machines’ mercy - at least until the Doctor arrives to tip the balance back in the favor of the humans. But the Doctor’s own arrival may have set the scandroids’ mysterious, murderous plans into high gear - and somewhere, among the humans, is one person who knows more about those plans than they’re saying.
Urgent Calls: The Doctor contacts a telephone operator, who he claims has contracted a potentially fatal disease. Through repeated calls, he discovers that one side-effect of this illness has been a run of the most extraordinary luck, and his newfound friend is eager to share that with him, but once she learns that she’s talking to an alien, she seems to develop a few hang-ups about her benefactor.
written by Eddie Robson
directed by John Ainsworth
music by Steve FoxonI.D. Cast: Colin Baker (The Doctor), Sara Griffiths (Claudia Bridge), Gyles Brandreth (Doctor Marriott), Helen Atkinson Wood (Ms. Tevez), David Dobson (Scandroids), Kerry Skinner (Lake), Joe Thompson (Gabe Stillinger), Natasha Pyne (Denise Stillinger)
Urgent Calls Cast: Colin Baker (The Doctor), Kate Brown (Lauren), David Dobson (D.J.), Kerry Skinner (Connie)
Timeline: it is unknown if this takes place before or after the Doctor’s travels with Evelyn, so we’re left with “between The Trial Of A Time Lord and Time And The Rani“.
Review: The first in a series of experimental 2007 releases combining a three-part story with a one-part story, I.D. is a nice case of a tale that would’ve been stretched out too thinly at four parts. Urgent Calls, on the other hand, promises to set up a running story that other Doctors will have to deal with in one-part adventures spread across several subsequent releases. Aside from the new cover design, one certainly can’t accuse Big Finish of not trying to freshen things up a bit. (more…)
The TARDIS is drawn again to the planet Vortis by a powerful gravitational force - the same circumstances which once trapped the Doctor and his timeship there in his first incarnation. Determined to find out what’s trapping the TARDIS now, the Doctor and Nyssa set out to explore, but are nearly trampled by a stampede of Zarbi. An eccentric Menoptera scientist and his daughter, living in isolation away from the rest of their kind as they study the Zarbi, whisk the time travelers to safety. As the scientist’s daughter tends to Nyssa’s minor injuries, the Doctor and his new friend set out to discover what’s still causing ships to crash on Vortis. But they find that much more is going wrong: a new breed of colonization has come to Vortis by accident, and it may change the planet’s entire ecosphere forever, unless the Doctor can stop it.
The Doctor follows a psychic attack on the TARDIS’ telepathic circuits to a living city called the Needle, but the moment that he and Melanie step out of the TARDIS, they realize that their problems are just beginning - they stumble onto the scene of a grisly murder. The two time travelers are separated, Melanie barely surviving being ejected from the city’s walls, and the Doctor is brought before Chief Blue and the Needle’s central computer, White Noise. White Noise’s function involves the careful control of both the Needle and its residents, via chips implanted in their brains which allow the computer to prevent violent impulses from becoming violent actions. Rescued by a resident of the undercity beneath the Needle - people whose chips have been deactivated and whose crave the exciting sensation of violence with little thought given to its consequences - Melanie finds that she’s quite a sensation, as her rescuers believe she’s capable of anything, even extreme acts of violence…and her insistence that she isn’t likely to do any such thing seems to fall on deaf ears. White Noise is rapidly losing control of the Needle’s even more docile populace, with murders continuing to occur…only now, via his chip implant, the Doctor can see, hear and feel the thoughts and actions of the killers as they go into “red condition.” But with White Noise attempting to control him, is the Doctor capable of fighting whatever evil is stalking the city at random?
The Doctor’s TARDIS literally crashes through a suburban greenhouse, and upon stepping out of the TARDIS he immediately meets the greenhouse’s owner, though she’s more worried about her boyfriend being injured than she is about the damage. The Doctor finds her boyfriend in a delirious state, with alien toxins in his blood and a pair of bite marks in his neck, which the man apparently suffered while searching for a relic of his childhood in the attic. Concerned about the strange developments, the Doctor tracks down the toy - a pink vampire hamster called a Cuddlesome with a voice recognition device - which was apparently all the rage in the 1980s. Now he finds that others are suffering from similar injuries, and there have even been deaths, with Cuddlesomes as the common denominator, all of them leaving the scene after attacking their owners. The Doctor follows the Cuddlesomes an abandoned toy factory, where their creator, Turvey, has activated his own kind of product recall - he has attracted the Cuddlesomes to his current location. But Turvey is at the mercy of someone else who is creating a new line of Cuddlesomes…and if the Doctor thought the 1980s models were deadly, he hasn’t seen anything yet. This attempt to cash in on childhood nostalgia could endanger the entire human race.