Destination Nerva
Shortly after leaving Victorian London, the Doctor and Leela ride the TARDIS to Victorian Kenton, where a fierce battle has left a manor house coated in the blood of men… and a dying alien who was their quarry. The alien failed to escape its hunters to return to its spacecraft, which has now been commandeered by a man named Lord Jack. The Doctor sets the TARDIS to follow the ship through time and space, and it arrives at the still-under-construction Nerva Dock in orbit of Jupiter, hundreds of years later. The crew, dealing with equipment failures and a shortage of manpower, fails to notice anything strange about a new arrival at Nerva until it’s too late. Simply by touch, the visitor can physically join with anyone, and he’s able to take control of Nerva’s flight deck in very short order, absorbing crew members and expanding his own skin to fill every available space. With Nerva’s commander and medical officer in tow, the Doctor and Leela race to the TARDIS, only to be cut off before they can reach it. That’s when the aliens whose technology has been used to take over Nerva arrive… and considering that it was originally stolen by a man named Lord Jack in Victorian times, they’ve had centuries to make plans to take revenge on Lord Jack and the rest of the human race.
written by Nicholas Briggs
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Jamie RobertsonCast: Tom Baker (The Doctor), Louise Jameson (Leela), Raquel Cassidy (Dr. Alison Foster), Sam Graham (McMullan / Pilot), Tilly Gaunt (Laura Craske), Tim Bentinck (Giles Moreau / Jenkins), Kim Wall (Jim Hooley / Drelleran #1 / Security Guard), Tim Treloar (Lord Jack / Drudgers / Drelleran #2)
Timeline: immediately after The Talons Of Weng-Chiang and before Renaissance Man
Notes: This is the Doctor’s third visit to Nerva, each time at a different point in the station’s history and in a different orbit: The Ark In Space (1975) takes place on Nerva in its distant future orbiting Earth, while the Nerva of Revenge Of The Cybermen (1975) is orbiting Voga, a moon with rich deposits of gold. After years of campaigning by Big Finish, dating back to the beginning of the company’s license to produce Doctor Who audio stories, this is the first Big Finish audio to feature Tom Baker as the fourth Doctor. Louise Jameson has been reprising the role of Leela for Big Finish since 2003’s Zagreus.
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
The TARDIS arrives in Devon, 1977, near the grounds of an estate called the Grange. The Doctor’s arrival coincides with the latest in a series of unexplainable appearances of highwaymen from the past, terrorizing the locals. With all of the apparitions centering around the Grange, the Doctor decides to pay the lord of the manor a visit, only to find an uncooperative butler (named Butler) covering for the enigmatic Lord Jalnik. Suspecting that Jalnik is exploiting a weakness in the time vortex, the Doctor continues his investigation despite Jalnik offering some deadly deterrents. With a local girl named Charlotte in tow, the Doctor and Leela follow Jalnik’s trail of mystery to Devon in the distant future, finding the human race on the edge of extinction. The last of the human race regards Jalnik as a savior for his mad plan to open an escape route to the past. The Doctor realizes that Jalnik is also the cause of their predicament, and that he intends to move up the timetable for humanity’s extinction to the 20th century.
1873: Renowned explorer Professor Cornelius Perkins ventures into the Amazon rainforest to follow up on clues that might lead him to a legendary lost city of gold. He, his assistant and the locals they’ve hired to haul their supplies are never seen again, though a diary chronicling some of his discoveries turns up at a later date in surprisingly good shape.
The Doctor promises to show Leela a museum on another world, but the TARDIS lands at a destination that seems anything but otherworldly. A pleasant professor shows off her butterfly knowledge to the time travelers, but before long all three are drawn into the vast library of Harcourt, a man who claims to know a little of everything – and wants to know more. It’s something he wants so badly that he’s willing to take the knowledge from the minds of others by force. When he becomes intrigued by the Doctor, it’s a meeting of the minds that the Time Lord and his companion will be lucky to survive.
The TARDIS lands in 60 A.D., where Leela is entranced by the sight of Boudica routing a legion of Roman soldiers. The Doctor, knowing full well how history will unfold for Boudica and her followers, orders Leela back to the TARDIS, only to be disobeyed. Leela saves Boudica from two Romans and then, after hearing her story, pledges to leave the TARDIS and fight by Boudica’s side. The Doctor attempts to leave, only to be accused of being a spy. Leela claims the Time Lord is a prophet, which saves him from execution but turns every word he says into something that could change the course of human history.
Deep in a secret underground facility in the Nevada desert, a small team of American scientists has created an amazing artificial life form. Capable of neutralizing any toxic spill, and potentially capable of eliminating almost any man-made hazard, the polymorphic autonomous compound manipulator – Pac-Man for short – could be the future savior of humanity. But first, Pac-Man and his creators must impress a military VIP with the power to shut down the project. Does Pac-Man stand a ghost of a chance?
Cast: Daisuke Ono (Susumu Kodai), Houko Kuwashima (Yuki Mori), Kenichi Suzumura (Daisuke Shima), Takayuki Sugo (Captain Juzo Okita), Akio Ohtsuka (General Domel), Aya Hisakawa (Lt. Kaoru Niimi), Aya Uchida (Warant Officer Yuria Misaki), Cho (Analyzer / Sukeji Yabu / Ganz), Daisuke Hirakawa (Hiroki Shinohara), Fumihide Ise (Hajime Hirata), Hiroshi Tsuchida (Susumu Yamazaki), Houchu Ohtsuka (Shiro Sanada), Keiji Fujiwara (Master Chief Isami Enomoto), Kenji Akabane (Yasuo Nanbu), Kikuko Inoue (Starsha of Iscandar), Kouichi Yamadera (Desler), Masashi Hirose (Gremmdt Goer), Masato Kokubun (Yoshikazu Aihara), Mitsuru Miyamoto (Mamoru Kodai), Motoki Takagi (Toru Hoshina), Mugihito (Hikozaemon Tokugawa), Rie Tanaka (Ensign Akira Yamamoto), Rina Satou (Makoto Harada), Shigeru Chiba (Dr. Sakezo Sado), Shinji Ogawa (Heikuro Todo), Tessho Genda (Kotetsu Serizawa), Toshihiko Seki (Shinya Ito), Unshou Ishizuka (Ryu Hijikata), Yoshimasa Hosoya (Saburo Kato), Yousuke Akimoto (Redof Hiss), Yuuki Chiba (Kenjiro Ota), Akira Harada (Commander Ishizu), Ei Mochizuki (Kirishima Navigator A), Hiroyuki Takanaka (Yukikaze Communications), Masaaki Itatori (Kirishima Radar), Masayoshi Sugawara (Kirishima Gunner), Ryuichi Kijima (Kirishima Navigator B), Taira Kikumoto (Kirishima Communications), Takaomi Ashizawa (Yukikaze Navigator), Toshiharu Nakanishi (Yukikaze Helmsman)
Notes: Space Battleship Yamato 2199 is a remake of the first season of the seminal 1974 anime series Space Battleship Yamato, drastically updating its visuals and design aesthetics while essentially telling the same story. Now in HD and featuring battle sequences that lean heavily on CGI, the look of the new episodes is overseen by Yutaka Izubuchi, who was a mechanical design artist on the original Yamato series. He also directed and/or designed episodes of Macross, Rahxephon, Escaflowne, and Record of Lodoss War. The series’ composer, Akira Miyagawa, is the son of original Yamato composer 
Notes: Originally written by Jon Povill and Jaron Summers for the never-made 1977 TV relaunch of the original Star Trek (from which this fan series, Star Trek Phase II, borrows its name), The Child was intended to chronicle Deltan navigator Lt. Ilia giving birth to a mysterious daughter, since Ilia, Decker and Xon were intended to be series regulars. Structurally, this version of The Child is much more faithful to the original ’70s script than the hastily-adapted version of The Child which opened the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation (which bestowed a mystery child upon Counselor Troi instead). The original script as written for the ’70s series, minus alterations for either this fan series or TNG, appears in full in the book “Star Trek Phase II: The Lost Series” by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens. Writer Jon Povill was the story editor for the aborted ’70s series and worked closely with Gene Roddenberry through the series development cycle, and here he directs his own script.
