Leela receives news that Andred has been found murdered in the chambers of the Chancellery Guard. Leela intends to claim the Sevateem right of vengeance, but Romana needs her friend to continue serving as the acting Castellan, not a bloodthirsty killer. That’s only the latest in a series of violent incidents, including a bombing of the Time Lord Academy, targeting the alien students. Inquisitor Darkel, now openly challenging Romana’s presidency, can’t resist suggesting to the Gallifreyan public that if Romana can’t ensure that the presence of aliens at the Academy can’t be maintained without violence, then the aliens should be sent home. Romana sets Leela and K-9 on the trail of the bombers, while also assigning Coordinator Narvin of the Celestial Intervention Agency to investigate. But what Romana doesn’t know is that Narvin is working with Darkel to secure the Inquisitor’s rise to the presidency. Romana continues to consult in secret with the being known as Pandora, but continues to insist that she won’t go down the path that Pandora says in inevitable. Leela’s K-9 finds evidence of another bomb at the Academy just before it explodes; Guard Commander Hallan closes the blast doors before K-9 or many of the alien students can escape. Romana raises Gallifrey’s defensive transduction barriers and puts the planets on a war footing. Darkel calls for a public, and openly broadcasted, debate in the High Council, and Romana agrees…but she has something in mind other than than the orchestrated open debate that Darkel is planning. And naturally, Romana only has the best interests of Gallifrey and the Time Lords at heart…even if that means that the freedom to disagree with her policies is about to become a thing of the past.
written by Stewart Sheargold
directed by Gary Russell
music by David DarlingtonCast: Lalla Ward (President Romana), Louise Jameson (Leela), John Leeson (K9), Lynda Bellingham (Candidate Darkel), Sean Carlsen (Coordinator Narvin), Michael Cuckson (Commander Hallan), Robin Sebastian (Commentator Antimon), Jenny Livsey (Student Galadina), Nicholas Briggs (Gold Usher), Daniel Hogarth (Nekkistani Ambassador), Conrad Westmaas (Nekkistani Emperor)
Notes: K-9 has worn the Coronet of Rassilon before, in the 1977 TV adventure The Invasion Of Time; that story also established the transduction barriers surrounding Gallifrey.
In the Time Lord Academy, unrest grows as more non-Gallifreyan students are expelled following an attempt by a student with Free Time ties to poison the Time Lords’ water supply. The situation is made worse by Braxiatel’s disappearance from Gallifrey, and many of the students feel they’re being singled out because of their race without any regard to academic performance or actual evidence that they have terrorist ties. In the Academy archives, Romana uses K-9 to consult with what’s left of the entity known as Pandora; with its past and present aspects having found a host in the exiled Braxiatel, what remains of Pandora can only advise Romana vaguely on future matters. Pandora continues to predict that Romana will institute a totalitarian government on Gallifrey, installing herself as the Time Lords’ Imperiatrix during a bloody civil war. And when Inquisitor Darkel, with the cooperation of CIA Coordinator Narvin, makes a brazen grab for the presidency, it begins to look like Pandora’s predictions are inevitable.
The body of the mutilated Time Lord from Davidia is returned to Gallifrey in stasis – and in complete secrecy – for further study. Romana and Braxiatel discover that the experiment of opening Gallifrey’s doors to other temporal superpowers may have unintended consequences; one of Braxiatel’s alien students is caught trying to poison Gallifrey’s water supply in the name of the Free Time movement. Complicating matters even more is the fact that he’s caught by Andred, who is still on the run after having broken out of his imprisonment. The question of whether or not Romana will appoint Braxiatel to be the new Chancellor of the High Council is at the heart of Inquisitor Darkel’s latest political power grab, as she plays all sides against the middle and finds her most willing (if unwitting) ally in the naive Castellan Wynter. By preying on his fear that his inexperience will cut his reign short, Darkel convinces him to unleash the Pandora creature, which K-9 had managed to corner in a data partition in the Matrix. But in so doing, Wynter discovers in the most horrible way that the mutilated body from Davidia is himself – but even his attempts to deny Pandora a body and mind to inhabit will prove unsuccessful, as she seeks a victim who now sits in an even higher office.
Tired of the constant political backstabbing that seems to be evolving into the more literal variety, Leela tells Romana she wants to leave Gallifrey. Romana agrees, taking her to a secure retreat on the planet Davidia so they can talk over what’s bothering Leela. While they make some headway in understanding each other, the peace on Davidia is shattered by the unexpected arrival of a TARDIS. Its sole occupant is burned beyond recognition, his hands are broken, and he is missing his tongue, and worse yet, when Romana calls Braxiatel on Gallifrey to check on the ID of the TARDIS, the Cardinal learns that the vehicle is still on Gallifrey – this TARDIS comes from the Time Lords’ future. When Romana talks about forcing the man to regenerate, Leela can only see it as more evidence that she’ll never be able to understand the Time Lords. Romana also wants to try to access the man’s thoughts via the Matrix, but given the threat of Pandora, the disembodied voice which promised that Romana would become the Imperiatrix of Gallifrey, Romana is barred from using the Matrix lest Pandora spread throughout Gallifrey’s systems. The retreat may offer an alternative way of viewing the TARDIS pilot’s thoughts, though after seeing those thoughts, Romana and Leela may wish they had let him die.
Prior to her secret assignment to join the Doctor in his search for the Key to Time, inquisitive Time Lady Romanadvoratrelundar wanders into the long-abandoned vaults beneath the Capitol on Gallifrey. Before she is discovered there by a concerned Cardinal Braxiatel, Romana hears a voice speaking to her, offering a promise of future power and demanding that she keep this chance encounter a secret. And the voice says a word: Imperiatrix.
A most curious assortment of travelers boards a train bound from Munich to Switzerland in 1939. Romana and Leela are traveling incognito, but so is swindler and arms dealer Mephistopheles Arkadian, who Romana interrogated during the Gryben crisis. He promises to give her vital information regarding that incident if she and the Time Lords turn the other cheek for only three hours and let him have his way with history. Arkadian’s specific historical interest revolves around a young woman on the train, a Nazi sympathizer named Cecilia Pollard – the sister of Charlotte Pollard, the Doctor’s traveling companion when he was last seen before vanishing into the divergent universe. While Romana uneasily agrees to Arkadian’s terms, she can’t speak for the Time Lords’ Celestial Intervention Agency, and no sooner do Narvin and Torvald appear then things start to go disastrously wrong. Time itself jumps the tracks, creating two parallel timelines – and somehow Leela and Cecilia Pollard have become stranded in the newly created alternate history, along with a Time Lord who has his own murderous intentions. Romana and Narvin are left to wring information out of Arkadian – and hope that Leela can gain enough of an awareness of what’s happened to help them heal the timeline. But Leela is preoccupied with a problem of her own: she has found the man she believes to be responsible for her husband’s death, but at a point in his own timeline before he committed the murder. And if killing him now will prevent that from happening, Leela is prepared to do it – and history be damned.
An inquiry begins regarding the timeonic fusion weapon, President Romana’s unorthodox measures to locate and retrieve it, and her apparent inability to do so – or even, for that matter, to prove that it ever existed. But curiously, the Matrix, the repository of all Gallifreyan knowledge, seems to differ with the established record – a visual document exists of the weapon being created, and even test detonated, by the Time Lords themselves. Cardinal Braxiatel admits that research was carried out, in which he himself participated, but no test of the weapon ever occurred. When Romana digs deeper to find out why the Matrix records conflict with his account, a computer virus is unleashed which Romana’s K9 is barely able to contain – and if he fails, or his batteries run out, that virus will lay waste to Gallifrey’s computer-dependent society. And while she is trying to eavesdrop on Romana’s behalf, Leela discovers how her husband Andred died…and who killed him.
A summit of the temporal superpowers is scheduled on a secluded artificial planetoid, and Coordinator Narvin is sent by President Romana to represent the Time Lords. Going with him, barely camouflaged, are Leela and K-9. But the out-of-place savage and her robotic dog aren’t there to protect Narvin; Romana has personally charged them with rooting out those responsible for an expected attempt to disrupt the conference. Leela does indeed find danger lurking, but all is not as it seems. Is someone sabotaging the summit to ensure its success?
A powerful coalition of time-traveling races monitors access to history, stopping newly-emergent time travelers and redirecting them to the planet Gryben for “processing” – though that process often strands them there permanently. That logjam of stranded time travelers has given rise to a new movement – Free Time – seeking to force these temporal superpowers to allow free access to the timeways.