Aboard an Earth Empire carrier ship, an ace fighter jock is spooked when he hears a bell that he knows doesn’t belong to the 22nd century. Infuriated, his commanding officer has him pulled from flight rotation, at roughly the same time that the TARDIS materializes in her ship’s cargo bay. The Doctor, too, has heard the bell, but he has a better idea of where one might expect to hear that sound: on a passenger train in the 1950s, not at the edge of the solar system in 2197. When the Doctor admits that this realization terrifies him, Evelyn is concerned, and when the time travelers are caught investigating the ship, they’re held responsible for the increasing number of instances in which a member of the crew has nearly gone mad after hearing the bell. A mysterious door appears in the hold, a door which should lead directly into space without even so much as an airlock…and yet it doesn’t. As more of the carrier’s crew hear the bell, they are compelled to seek out the door and step through it, vanishing without a trace. The ship’s captain is prepared to summarily execute the Doctor, believing he is responsible for what must surely be an alien act of sabotage. But who’s behind the door, and who’s ringing the bell? And what ties this 22nd century crisis to a train in the 20th?
written by Nicholas Briggs
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Nicholas BriggsCast: Colin Baker (The Doctor), Maggie Stables (Evelyn Smythe), Nicholas Briggs (Trevor Ridgely), Martha Cope (Captain Oswin), Stephen Critchlow (O’Keefe), Andrew Fettes (Master-at-Arms), John Killoran (Palmer), Benjamin Roddy (Operations), John Schwab (EXO Moore), Andrew Wisher (Armstrong), Philip Wolff (Hayman)
Notes: Two different covers were produced for this story, the artists being fans who submitted entries to Big Finish as part of an online contest to seek new artistic talent. The artwork of the Doctor and the strange door was designed by Simon Holub, who later went on to work steadily for Big Finish, and the artwork featuring the train was designed by William Cox.
Timeline: After Pier Pressure and before 100
Review: There’s a fascinating premise at the heart of The Nowhere Place, but sadly it gets lost under layers of weird things happening for weirdness’ own sake. The setting – at least the future military setting – is interesting enough (and seems to owe more than a little something to the revived Battlestar Galactica), and the performances carry things along nicely, but the fact that somewhere between one-third and one-half of episode four (which already runs well over the length of a normal 25-minute TV episode of the 1980s) is spent explaining everything that’s happened should’ve been a dead giveaway during pre-production that the story needed a bit of lucidity, rather than a fourth-quarter info-dump. (more…)
Trapped in Victorian England without the TARDIS, the Doctor and Nyssa try desperately to track down the TARDIS, ultimately resorting to – out of sheer desperation – convincing guests in a Victorian sitting room to unwittingly participate in a block-transfer computation to allow the Doctor to peer into the time vortex to look for his missing ship. But instead of a peek, the Doctor, Nyssa and two of their unsuspecting acquaintances find themselves transported into prehistoric Earth – but a prehistoric Earth that shouldn’t exist at all. The dinosaurs are nowhere to be found, and giant insects seem to overrun the planet. Even the insects, however, answer to someone else – someone eager to renew his acquaintance with the Doctor and Nyssa. They’re horrified to discover a wizened, demented old man at the heart of this world, a man they once knew as a boy called Adric. Having somehow managed to survive his fiery fall to Earth, Adric has changed history, and he has a score to settle with the Doctor…and he expects to make Nyssa his queen. But is this really Adric? And if so, can his surprisingly vicious taste for revenge be turned into his own redemption before his rule comes to an end?