Wirrn Isle
The TARDIS lands the Doctor and Flip in a frozen wasteland near a hut containing a transmat pad and related equipment, where they meet Roger Buchman and his daughter, nicknamed Toasty. Flip is surprised to learn that this is Earth, Scotland to be precise, during a future ice age. Buchman and Toasty bring the time travelers back to their home, an isolated settlement near Loch Lomond. Decades after humanity took refuge aboard Nerva Beacon, Earth is being resettled by its heartiest occupants. But something is wrong: the Buchmans’ son has been missing for years, though memories of his disappearance (or death) cause wildly different reactions among the surviving family members. When the Doctor realizes that the Wirrn are still trying to overrun humanity, reaching the transmat hut becomes a priority, and Flip volunteers to pilot and ultralight plane to go there and make the necessary repairs, against the Doctor’s better judgement. Not only does her flight end prematurely, but she also discovers that everything she and the Doctor have heard about the fate of the Buchmans’ son is wrong.
written by William Gallagher
directed by Nicholas Briggs
music by Simon RobinsonCast: Colin Baker (The Doctor), Lisa Greenwood (Flip), Tim Bentinck (Roger Buchman), Jenny Funnell (Veronica Buchman), Tessa Nicholson (Toasty Buchman), Rikki Lawton (Iron), Dan Starkey (Sheer Jawn), Helen Goldwyn (Dare), Glynn Sweet (Paul Dessay)
Notes: This story takes place 40 years after The Ark In Space, the Doctor’s previous bruch with the Wirrn. The apparent capitol of the resettled Earth is named Nerva City in honor of Nerva Beacon, the space station in which humanity rode out a period of intense solar flares and fought off an attempted Wirrn invasion.
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
Reunited with his old friends, theatre impresario Henry Gordon Jago and Professor George Litefoot, the sixth Doctor whisks them away in the TARDIS for a brief adventure, landing on the planet Venus in that world’s terraformed future. The Venusians – mostly women – who inhabit the second planet of the solar system are distant descendants of humanity, having fled ecological disaster on Earth. The Venusians are in turmoil, their chief scientist having died under mysterious circumstances. When her replacement continues her work, she too finds herself in the crosshairs of the Venusian Empress, Vulpina. The Doctor discovers that the future of the Venusian transplants from Earth is in peril, and offers his help, only to find that anyone who has discovered this secret is marked for death.
Promising to take Jago and Litefoot from the wild environs of Venus to a decent pub, the Doctor brings the TARDIS in for a landing… near Roanoke, Virgina in 1590, a missing British colony in the Americas, and decidedly bereft of pubs… or, for that matter, people. The expedition sent to check up on Roanoke has found nothing except for three suspiciously out-of-place Englishmen and a group of Native Americans believed to have massacred the missing colonists. Jago falls ill and begins to fade away – quite literally, gradually turning transparent. It’s a fate that he shares with many others, both British and Native American alike, as a mysterious translucent being and a swarm of spectral children routinely appear to claim new victims. None of this is in the history books, because something has caused a major diversion in history… namely, the arrival of the TARDIS. The Doctor must set history right with little more than the power of persuasion on his side.
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.
The Doctor is once again dragged into the court of the Time Lords, but this time he is sought not as the accused, but as the attorney for the accused. His client is revealed to be the Valeyard, who mercilessly prosecuted the Doctor at his own trial before being revealed as a dark, twisted future incarnation of the Doctor himself. The crimes of which the Valeyard is accused are kept classified, leaving the Doctor few avenues for defending his client, so the Doctor takes the opportunity to delve into the Valeyard’s background, trying to use the trial as a way to discover how the Valeyard came into existence. The answers prove to be both disquieting and cryptic, with the Valeyard finally admitting that he is the result of an experiment to extend a Time Lord’s regenerative life span beyond the accepted limit of 13 incarnations. The Valeyard claims to be the product of a failed bid for immortality, but whose bid? And how does the Valeyard’s very existence constitute a crime punishable by his death?
