Snow Blind
Two months after her brush with death in Italy, Sarah is still recuperating from being shot, and planning to pay the Morgan expedition in Antarctica (and Will Sullivan) a visit. Josh insists on going with her, not quite trusting how conveniently a close relative of an old friend has insinuated himself into Sarah’s life. When they arrive there, however, all is not well – Will is sporting a black eye, tensions are running high among the small team at the isolated Antarctic base, and it seems that Sarah can’t get a straight answer to any straight questions. She begins to worry that another Krynoid seed pod has been found, but something else is happening behind the scenes – something deadly, and something that has a connection to the secret order whose members tried to murder Sarah in Italy.
written by David Bishop
directed by John Ainsworth
music by Steve FoxonCast: Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith), Jeremy James (Josh), Tom Chadbon(Will Sullivan), Nicholas Briggs (Munro), Julia Righton (Morgane), Jack Galagher (Jack), Shaun Ley (Newsreader), Jacqueline Pearce (The Keeper), David Gooderson (Dexter), Stephen Greif (Sir Donald Wakefield)
Notes: Sarah’s previous visit to Antarctica and her encounter with a Krynoid seed pod took place in the televised 1976 Doctor Who story Seeds Of Doom.
LogBook entry by Earl Green
After returning from another brush with death in Antarctica, Sarah, Josh and Will pry into a research company with ties to Hilda Winters – and to the secret society that has twice tried to kill Sarah. Protests fill the streets outside the company’s research center, where Josh finds his environmentalist friend Maude worried about her daughter, who managed to get inside the building but never returned. Will uses his medical credentials to gain access to the center, only to discover that he is expected. Sir Donald Wakefield, a terminally ill multimillionaire who has made recent news headlines by planning to be on the first passenger flight into space, contacts Sarah and reveals that he heads up another faction of the secret society, and warns her that one of her closest friends has orders to kill her. When the society’s more violent faction starts a countdown to the release of a deadly bio-engineered plague, they name their price for stopping the outbreak: Sarah must lay down her life willingly.
Once again, Sarah’s life is saved by Josh, though this time, in addition to killing the Keeper, he’s also killed Will Sullivan. Sarah puts as much distance between herself and Josh as she can, but he still tries to stay in touch with her, even showing up at Will’s funeral. Just when Sarah’s had about enough, Sir Donald Wakefield shows up too, inviting her to join him on the first passenger flight into space – a flight that will coincide with Earth passing through the tail of a comet that last approached the planet 500 years ago, a comet whose return now was predicted in the writings of Count Giuliano. Sir Donald also reveals that Josh is his son – and an operative of the pacifist chapter that follows Giuliano’s writings as prophecy. Sarah and Nat take Sir Donald up on the offer and are flown to the launch site – a place the rest of the world knows as Area 51. But while Sarah is undergoing training for her first visit to space since her travels with the Doctor, there’s a change of crew: Sir Donald’s cancer returns with a vengeance, and on his deathbed, he asks Josh to replace him on the flight. But once the passenger spaceship launches, something goes wrong. The pilot exposes himself as one of the Keeper’s last operatives, carrying out his mission to deliver Sarah to death’s door. Josh and the pilot exchange gunfire, damaging the controls in the process and leaving Sarah as the only survivor as the ship pushes into a higher orbit than it was designed for – and straight into the path of the comet.
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.
War rages on Skaro, as it has for centuries, between the Kaleds and the Thals. Born to a mother who is an ambitious senator and a father whole military career is coming to an ignoble halt due to illness, young Davros leads a life of privelege, but is fascinated by the patterns of life and nature around him, almost to the exclusion of all else. His mother hires a tutor, Magrantine, whose scientific experiments on the effects of radiation on living tissue fascinate Davros. When Magrantine turns out to be out for revenge against Davros’ father – the soldier whose actions resulted in the death of Magrantine’s son – Davros traps his tutor in his own radiation experiment chamber – a torturous experience that he survives, but it leaves him horribly mutated. But his mother, far from admonishing him, sees something of her own ruthless ambition in her son – and quietly gives her approval.
Nearing his 30th birthday, Davros is boiling with frustration that he’s a low-ranking tech officer testing weapons for the Kaled military, rather than a member of the elite Scientific Corps. But one meeting with the Kaled Supremo changes all that: if Davros will undertake a dangerous secret mission that takes him behind Thal lines to gather intelligence on a new weapons facility, his entry into the Scientific Corps is guaranteed. Davros eagerly agrees, but when he, a fellow tech officer, and a squad of Kaled commandos embark on their journey, he realizes it’s a suicide mission. Worse yet, the soldier leading the mission is weak-willed and proceeds to get most of his commando platoon killed before the Thal facility is even within sight. Davros insists on countermanding his orders and manages to breach the facility, discovering a vast automated weapons factory requiring no slave labor…but Thal soldiers are waiting there too, and they know Davros by name. The Kaleds manage to escape, and Davros once again assumes command, ordering the remaining Kaleds to make their escape via the wastelands between the Kaled and Thal borders. While this does prevent the Thals from giving chase, it also costs Davros the rest of his team – he’s the only survivor to make it back to the safety of Kaled territory, and is instantly declared a hero for completing his mission against terrible odds. But his first order of business is not to bask in the praise lavished upon him – he instead turns his attention to finding out who told the Thals he was coming, and the answer lies painfully close to home.
Older and a little wiser to the ways of the political world, Davros walks a knife’s edge as an increasingly senior member of the Kaled Scientific Corps: his government expects him to tend to research that will deliver devastating weapons for use in the war against the Thals, but Davros himself sees a higher goal: nothing less than ensuring the survival of the Kaled people in the radioactive aftermath of the war. As Davros sees it, leaving the Kaleds’ fate to evolution will produce too random a result, with little hope of surviving the merciless postwar ecosystem; he advocates research that will help direct the mutations that will carry the Kaled legacy forward. Davros’ mother, Calcula, sees far more immediate concerns, namely that Davros and his research are accumulating some political opponents, and she feels that he’s naive about politics in general. But when Davros’ mother is murdered, and the attack on her is found to be an inside job – the work of fellow Kaleds rather than enemy Thals – he proves just how well he learned the game of political maneuvering from her while she was alive, sweeping aside some of her enemies and putting others on notice as he consolidates his newly inherited power base. Mere weeks later, though, a Thal attack on the home base of the Kaleds’ Scientific Corps changes Davros – and his ambitions – forever.
As always, war rages on, ravaging the surface and the people of Skaro. The emphasis turns to espionage as a technological stalemate takes hold; so long as neither the Kaleds nor the Thals gain a decisive technological advantage, the war remains on a knife’s-edge detente that leaves the combatants with surgical strikes via conventional weapons. Davros is naturally working on new technology, but to the Kaled Supremo’s distaste, Davros is focusing solely on genetic engineering instead of devastating new weapons. Obsessed with the future of the Kaled race in the increasingly toxic and radioactive atmosphere, Davros – despite his debilitating injuries and being restricted to a mobile (but still very limited) life support base – is working toward providing a tank-like travel shell that will protect what he predicts the Kaleds will become, as well as allowing its occupant to defend itself. But the Thals are keenly aware that the best chance the Kaleds have of gaining an advantage in the war is Davros, and a commando unit raids the Kaled science dome to kidnap him. Separated from his life support chair, Davros is dying, but refuses to surrender any information, except the truth that he is not developing new weapons at this time. A Kaled strike team, led by the ambitious young Lt. Nyder, rescues Davros and brings him back to the Kaled capitol. Once recovered from his ordeal, Davros is finally ready to complete his rise to power…and all his people have to do is surrender their future to his great plans.
On the backwater planet of Talis Minor, Salus Kade has a decent life; he helps to bring home the food that feeds his people, he has a wife and daughter – and he wants absolutely nothing to do with the war raging between the Earth Alliance and the Dalek Empire. When he finds Earth soldiers holding a recruitment drive in the middle of his home town, he’s not pleased, and he’s not afraid of them until he discovers that the “recruiting” is just for show and it’s actually a forced conscription drive. Even as he rallies his own people around him by denouncing the Earth Alliance’s tyranny, the Daleks themselves arrive – and a catastrophic attack helps to change Kade’s mind. He enlists, along with many other men from his community, and ends up leading a battallion of Earth and allied soldiers in the Alliance’s newest gear: a sealed, self-contained armored spacesuit which is practically its own interstellar vehicle and weapons platform built around one man. Designed specifically to combat the Daleks, these suits are worn only by the Earth Alliance’s elite troopers, code named the Fearless. But Kade’s latest mission into the teeth of the Dalek war machine is enough to strike at least a little fear into his heart…
The TARDIS arrives at the height of an alien world’s occupation by the Dalek Empire. Susan Mendes is there as well, serving as the Daleks’ “Angel of Mercy,” urging local populations on subjugated worlds to cooperate in order to live (and perhaps fight another day). But the locals here know all about the Daleks – this is far from their first encounter with them. Even with the Doctor and the rebellious Kalendorf working side-by-side, it may not be enough to stop the Daleks’ audacious schemes as they enslave the planet’s citizens and begin a desperate dig beneath the surface for an objective they refuse to name. The locals also have a history with the Doctor, as it was he – in a different incarnation – who helped them begin the fight against the Daleks…when their world was known as Spiridon.
The TARDIS brings the Doctor and his companion, retired Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, to the ravaged planet Skaro, devastated by centuries of war and left with only one habitable city. The Doctor and Alistair almost immediately run afoul of a Dalek-imposed curfew; they’re only saved by members of the Thal underground resistance that seeks to overthrow their Dalek rulers. The Doctor and Alistair get a crash course in local history: due to the first Doctor’s intervention during his first visit to Skaro, the Thals rose up and effectively drove the Daleks away from Skaro. The Daleks spread into space, but then abruptly returned to Skaro to enslave the Thals anew. Having helped to change Skaro’s history enough to create the present situation, the Doctor feels a responsibility to change the planet’s destiny again. Alistair relishes the chance to lead the resistance fighters in their fight against the Daleks, but in the background, the Doctor notices repeated propaganda broadcasts focusing on a being he has never heard of before: Davros, the creator of the Daleks, attempting to instill a messianic fervor into his creations. But Davros left Skaro long ago, his destination and his mission unknown, and the Doctor is able to use that mystery to turn the Dalek-Thal conflict into a Dalek civil war. When another invading force arrives – this time neither Dalek nor Thal – the Doctor realizes that his actions have played into the hands of another race that wants to rule Skaro.
