Lucie has resumed her boring, pre-time-travel life in Blackpool; after all, there’s no way anyone the Doctor could’ve survived his battle with Morbius on Karn. But the Headhunter seems to disagree, strongly enough that she appears at Lucie’s door and shoots her. The Headhunter also has the TARDIS in her possession, and with Lucie aboard, sets the timeship on a course for the planet Orbis – a world where she says the Doctor is very much alive. Lucie finds the Doctor living among the Celtans, a jellyfish-like-race which exists in an uneasy truce with the warlike Molluscari…and she also finds that the Doctor has spent six centuries here and has completely forgotten her. Despite this, Lucie tries to help him save the Celtans from a new Molluscari attack. And in the background, the Headhunter is playing all sides against the middle, regardless of how many lives will be lost as a result.
written by Alan Barnes and Nicholas Briggs
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Andy HardwickCast: Paul McGann (The Doctor), Sheridan Smith (Lucie Miller), Andrew Sachs (Crassostrea), Laura Solon (Selta), Katarina Olsson (Headhunter), Beth Chalmers (Saccostrea), Barry McCarthy (Yanos)
Notes: The “time bullets” used by the Headhunter seem to have a similar effect to the slow-motion gunshot wound suffered by Gwen in the Torchwood episode They Keep Killing Suzie. The Doctor admits here that he’s lost track of his own age, and in any case he’s guilty of rounding it up or down to account for relativistic time, which is a handy throwaway explanation for why the tenth Doctor is only 900 years old, while the seventh Doctor – in his first adventure – was 953 years old, and the third Doctor was “over a thousand years old”.
Timeline: after The Vengeance Of Morbius and before Hothouse
Review: A strange way to pick up from the Morbius two-parter that closed the second eighth Doctor/Lucie “season”, Orbis matter-of-factly tells us that the Doctor didn’t fall to his death, no questions asked, and Lucie’s off to save him. All fairly routine stuff, except that the Doctor has been living among sentient sea creatures so long that he’s lost his memory. I’m of the opinion that there are few plot/character devices in drama that are as cheap as amnesia or mind control, and Orbis doesn’t improve my outlook on that front. (more…)
The Doctor and Lucie are reunited by the Sisterhood of Karn, but the Sisters plan to summarily execute them both, eliminating the Doctor as a potential subject for gene-splicing experiments to revive Morbius. However, the Sisters have miscalculated: the Doctor isn’t the only Time Lord available to become an unwitting DNA donor to revive Morbius. Forced down on Karn, Straxus becomes the donor and Rosto is enslaved. The new reign of Morbius begins. The Doctor and Lucie are whisked away to Gallifrey, already under siege from Morbius’ forces. Unsurprisingly, the Time Lords respond to the crisis by going into hiding, while the Doctor and Lucie use the TARDIS to go to Karn. With the Time Lords cowering, the Doctor is ready to take Lucie’s advice: he plans to cross his own timeline and prevent Morbius’ rebirth from taking place. But with Gallifrey’s Eye of Harmony faltering under attack from Morbius, the Doctor’s TARDIS misses the intended temporal destination and arrives ten years into Morbius’ new reign of terror.
After a near-miss with the TIme Lords’ time scoop in the vortex, the TARDIS materializes in the cargo hold of a space freighter. The Doctor and Lucie are immediately ambushed the moment they set foot on the ship; Lucie awakens in a prison cell, with no idea who took the Doctor or where he was taken, and is questioned by a large, centipede-like police officer named Rosto, who doesn’t seem inclined to believe a word she says. Straxus appears, asks Lucie about the Doctor’s whereabouts, and then infuriates her by leaving her stranded in Rosto’s custody. A woman appears and attempts to kidnap Lucie, but when her cover story slips, Rosto comes to the rescue. Lucie’s would-be kidnapper vanishes into thin air, but not before Rosto identifies her as the leader of the raiding party that took the Doctor. Rosto and Lucie follow the clues and discover that the woman was a member of an obscure mystic sect called the Sisterhood of Karn. Rosto and Lucie travel to Karn, hoping that they’ll find the Doctor there, unaware that a much larger crisis looms, endangering the whole universe.
The Doctor and Lucie travel to 1984 to pay another visit to Lucie’s Aunty Pat, and Lucie discovers that Pat’s married to a former folk singer and running a secluded hotel – a marriage that Lucie’s never heard of before. Two other visitors to the hotel also catch the Doctor’s eye; Lucie tries to spy on them, and discovers that they’re Zygons – aliens who can shapeshift to resemble any human that they kidnap and put into their equipment… a fate that Pat’s husband Trevor has suffered, and a fate that now awaits Lucie. The duplicated Lucie tries to throw the Doctor off-course, but even with her interference, he soon discovers that Lucie’s Uncle Trevor is a Zygon warlord who has defected to Earth, taking with him the secrets needed to launch a terrifying new Zygon invasion. Trevor’s fellow Zygons want those secrets, and they’ll do anything, from exposing Trevor’s true identity to killing the human woman he has fallen in love with, to get them.
The Doctor and Lucie are aboard a train bound for Sweden in the 1800s; also on the train are priceless artifacts by an artist named Tardelli. This piques the Doctor’s interest: he has followed Tardelli through time and space, removing his artwork, which has a psychically active component that tends to manifest itself as a malign influence wherever it takes root. But two other old acquaintances are aboard the train as well: the Headhunter and Karen, Lucie’s former co-worker who seems to have been liberated from a dark destiny to serve as the Headhunter’s sidekick. They’re also there to pilfer Tardelli’s latest masterpiece, a hefty black diamond, until the Doctor and Lucie intervene in their plans. The two sets of time travelers are in a race to see who can steal the diamond first: the Doctor wants to prevent it from depositing an evil psychic influence on Earth, and the Headhunter’s motive is pure profit… but she hasn’t even told Karen what the real job is, or who they’re really working for. 
On the very blue planet Indigo 3, the Doctor and Lucie find a monastery in the midst of the planetary desert – and they find themselves beseiged within its wills when someone starts shooting at them. The monks and nuns there, however, are too busy trying to cover up a grisly murder – possibly more than one – to really extend any hospitality to the time travelers. When reptilian warriors begin to manifest themselves in the lower levels of the monastery, the Doctor deduces that they are the killers – and that they’re just warming up to doing something really nasty. It turns out that the warriors represent two factions who have been at each other’s throats for hundreds of years, dating back to the beginnings of their hostilities on the feudal planet Sobek. One of the alien combatants decides that the Doctor will be his chosen champion, whether he wants to be or not. The other picks an even more unlikely champion – Lucie – and pits the two against each other in a ritual fight to the death.