The Crimson Horror
The Doctor is summoned to the Victorian era once again by Madame Vastra and her colleagues. People are signing up to become model residents of a walled-off, gated community promising traditional values… and then, once accepted, they are never heard from again. The Doctor and Clara pose as another perfect couple hoping to become residents of Sweetville, and their application is quickly accepted. Once inside the gates, though, the time travelers learn that residency in Sweetville carries a horrifying cost, one which puts them out of the picture. Now the fate of humanity, and the Doctor, rests with the Doctor’s unlikely trio of allies.
written by Mark Gatiss
directed by Saul Metzstein
music by Murray GoldCast: Matt Smith (The Doctor), Jenna-Louise Coleman (Clara), Dame Diana Rigg (Mrs. Gillyflower), Rachael Stirling (Ada), Catrin Stewart (Jenny), Neve McIntosh (Madame Vastra), Dan Starkey (Strax), Eve de Leon Allen (Angie), Kassius Carey Johnson (Artie), Brendan Patricks (Edmund / Mr. Thursday), Graham Turner (Amos),
Olivia Vinall (Effie), Michelle Tate (Abigail), Jack Oliver Hudson (Urchin Boy)
Notes: Dame Diana Rigg is one of the most recognizable faces of British TV, having co-starred as Mrs. Peel in The Avengers with Patrick Macnee for several seasons. (Her predecessor as Steed’s sidekick, Honor Blackman, had a guest starring role in parts 9-12, a.k.a. Terror Of The Vervoids, in 1986’s The Trial Of A Time Lord.) The BAFTA, Tony, and Emmy-winning actress has also appeared in the James Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and more recently in Game Of Thrones. Actress Rachael Stirling is Rigg’s daughter and a well-regarded actress in her own right, having appeared in Minder, Tipping The Velvet, Hotel Babylon, and Snow White & The
Huntsman.
The Doctor mentions traveling with an air stewardess who wanted to return to Heathrow; this is a rare reference to Tegan Jovanka, the Australian companion of the fourth and fifth Doctors. Though the character has been revived by actress Janet Fielding for the Big Finish audio adventures, this is the first mention of Tegan in the new series. (She was also mentioned in the laundry list of former TARDIS travelers and their respective outcomes in part two of the Sarah Jane Adventures story The Death Of The Doctor (2010).
LogBook entry & review by Earl Green
Cast: Matt Smith (
Guest star Warwick Davis (incorrectly credited on-screen as “Warwick Davies”), making his first Doctor Who appearance, is usually associated with the 
(and stand-ins), William Hartnell has a speaking part in an episode of Doctor Who for the first time since the prologue of 1983’s 
The Great Intelligence mentions some of the Doctor’s “other names”, including “the Oncoming Storm” (the Daleks’ name for the Doctor, first revealed in the novelization of 1988’s 
UNIT scientific advisor Elizabeth Klein is discussing work performance issues with her recently-hired assistant, Will Arrowsmith, when the dreaded “Umbrella Man” is sighted nearby. Klein orders Will to stay put while she tries to follow the Doctor to ask him why he’s there; Will, naturally, follows them both right into the TARDIS, which then proceeds to take off. It lands in postwar Germany, where something decidedly strange is happening. A couple speaking entirely in couplets seems to have the nearby village in their thrall, while a man named Schalk, the developer of a prototype mind-control device called the Persuasion Machine, hides out among the locals hoping to escape the notice of anyone who would wish him to build such a device for them; sure enough, a spacecraft does turn up looking for him, as does the Doctor, who is aware of Schalk’s past as a wanted war criminal. The Persuasion machine could conceivably end free will throughout the universe, and more than one party would do nearly anything to claim either the machine or its inventor. The Doctor must be prepared to be even more ruthless, and this, he reveals, is why he has brought Klein with him.
The Doctor, Klein and Will discover that Schalk’s Persuasion Machine design – and possibly even Schalk himself – are up for grabs in an auction of rare weapons of mass destruction. Such a sale of salacious merchandise has already drawn the attention of such unsavory suitors as the Sontarans and other assorted warmongers. Hosting the auction is the equally unsavory Garundel, unaware that his own underling, Ms. Ziv, is planning a double-cross of her own. The Doctor adopts a curiously hands-off approach to this TARDIS trip, assigning Klein and Will to stage a heist of their own to steal the Persuasion machine and Schalk himself. But things quickly go wrong, leaving the Doctor with little choice but to take a more direct hand in events, and risking the lives of his companions.
The Doctor tries to take Nyssa to 1963 to show her the heyday of Beatlemania, only to find that another band, the Common Men, has taken the Beatles’ place in history. Worse yet, as the Doctor and Nyssa stand in the screaming crowd awaiting the Common Men’s arrival, they see someone in the crowd with a gun. The Doctor warns the band while Nyssa tries to disarm the shooter, only to find that he has a weapon that’s definitely not from 1963, definitely not from Earth, and he also has a time transporter which he uses to escape, taking Nyssa with him. Trying to find out what’s going on, the Doctor befriends the band and a fan named Rita, with whom he witnesses several incidents of the band’s fans taking their devotion to dangerous levels. Nyssa, in the meantime, also finds herself in the company of the Common Men, at a different point in their career. As she awaits rescue via TARDIS, she also meets Lenny Kruger, a man determined to manage the Common Men’s careers. It turns out that he’s an alien (but then, so are the boys in the band), and he hopes to harness the power of their popularity for something beyond mere show business. The Doctor, determined to restore the Fab Four to their rightful place in history, is an obstacle to Kruger’s plans, one which Kruger wants to remove by any means necessary.
The Doctor, Klein and Will return to Earth, now certain that Schalk is still hiding there and perhaps never left. What they find instead is a Dalek, which Klein manages to destroy with her usual ruthless efficiency. The trail then leads them to Azimuth, a world the Doctor previously visited in the company of Ace, where he helped the locals fend off a Dalek invasion. But Azimuth is strangely changed: even saying the word “Dalek” out loud violates the law, since the government of Azimuth has declared that no invasion ever took place, and no Daleks ever landed there. Will immediately runs afoul of this law and discovers that there is an underground movement on Azimuth that not only believes that the Dalek invasion happened, but that it never ended. This resistance movement’s leader is known only as “Father”, a wizened, damaged man whose life support system resembles the lower half of a Dalek – a man known to the Doctor by another name. And the Daleks do indeed still have Azimuth under their control, thanks to their new leader… a particularly persuasive man known to the Doctor and Klein as Schalk. Klein’s destiny and her origins are inextricably linked to Schalk’s, though discovering precisely how may be as dangerous as fighting the Daleks.
The Doctor is startled when a flashing red light appears on the TARDIS console. The surprise isn’t that the light has never flashed before, but that it is there at all, where there was no light on the console before. And it’s not just one Doctor, but all of the Doctor’s incarnations.
project, which was classified for over 40 years; a similar Soviet plan to nuke the moon was also left on the drawing board. The “Voskhod 3KV” ICBM mentioned was actually a Vostok 3KV, a booster which propelled the second Voskhod flight into orbit. A real Vostok 7 mission was in the planning stages for late 1963, but it was never intended to venture further than a high Earth orbit. Vostok 6, flown by cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova (seen here), was the final Vostok flight; after her flight, the Vostok program ended and the Voskhod program began, but only two Voskhod flights were made before emphasis shifted to Soyuz and the Zond lunar program. Soviet space engineers did, in fact, design their own lunar landing vehicle, but the N-1 lunar rocket never proved to be safe enough for manned flights.