Immortal Beloved
The Doctor and Lucie find themselves literally among the gods, as they land on a planet apparently ruled by Zeus, Hera and a host of other gods. But how did they get there? And given the fact that they clearly age, how do they maintain their immortality? When Zeus’ son Kalkin falls inlove with a young girl named Ararti, it sets in motion a chain of events that will alter the landscape forever.
written by Jonathan Clements
directed by Jason Haigh-Ellery
music by ERSCast: Paul McGann (The Doctor), Sheridan Smith (Lucie Miller), Ian McNeice (Zeus), Elspet Gray (Hera), Jennifer Higham (Sararti), Anthony Spargo (Kalkin), David Dobson (Tayden), Jake McGann (Ganymede)
Notes: Elspet Gray portrayed Chancellor Thalia in the original Doctor Who story Arc Of Infinity. Jake McGann is Paul McGann’s son. Ian McNiece would go on to play William Churchill in Doctor Who television episodes starring Matt Smith, and would return to audio in Big Finish’s fourth Doctor range in Renaissance Man.
Timeline: after Horror Of Glam Rock and before Phobos
LogBook entry & review by Philip R. Frey
On Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, tourists engage in a wide variety of extreme sports. Key to the thrillseekers is bungie-jumping into a wormhole found on the surface. But there’s a problem: tourists keep disappearing or winding up dead. Kai, who runs the place with his longtime girlfried Eris, says it’s all caused by monsters from the wormhole and tries to warn everyone away, to no avail. But tensions among the guests begin to run high and even Kai himself seems somehow tied in to the danger. When the Doctor and Lucie show up, things begin to come to a boil and it’s anyone’s guess who’ll come out alive.
Liz Shaw looks back on her days with UNIT and the Doctor, recalling an adventure that began with the disappearance of several prominent scientists. The Doctor and the Brigadier are on the case, and Liz goes undercover to see if a suspicious dentist’s office has any connection to the disappearances. The Doctor figures out that the Cybermen are once again trying to stage a quiet takeover of the human race…and Liz herself may be the next victim of their new conversion process.
Spring: The Doctor and Nyssa, at the behest of the Time Lords, visit a world where bipedal birds are the dominant life form – and a rogue Time Lord has installed himself as their ruler, accelerating their technological progress dramatically. The Doctor knows that causing his fellow Time Lord to regenerate would confuse the locals and break his hold, but it seems that his actions have been anticipated…
Long after her travels with the Doctor and Jamie ended, and after the Time Lords wiped her memory and returned her to her own timeline, Zoe Herriot experiences disturbing memories of meeting the Doctor. She also remembers him showing her one of his terrifying adventures with the Daleks, and his subsequent reassurances that he had rendered the metal monsters extinct. But in her first trip in the TARDIS, Zoe and her friends find themselves embroiled in interplanetary politics, captured and used as pawns in a conspiracy to sabotage a peace conference. But as if that wasn’t bad enough, Zoe comes face to face with the very terrors that the Doctor said were no more.
The Doctor and Lucie are entangled with a rogue time traveller named Zimmerman who escapes, leaving them at the mercy of an group of angry aliens, bent on finding the cause of the time trouble, no matter the cost. But when the Doctor and Lucie finally catch up to Zimmerman, they find him happily married and enjoying a garden party that seems to go on forever. Only Zimmerman can end the time loop and thereby save the space/time continuum. But even though he has denounced his former life, he is disinclined to help, as ending the time loop would cause the death of his beloved wife, leading to a standstill between the Doctor, Zimmerman and the Tar-Modowk, who get ever closer.
The Headhunter has finally gotten Lucie and puts her to work…in an office. Of course, it’s in Telford and she thought she was going to work in London, but it’s a nice enough place and she settles in quickly, having easily gotten over her dreams of travelling through time. Meanwhile, the Doctor finds that his TARDIS won’t work without Lucie (handiwork of the Time Lords) and accepts a time ring as a means to locating her. But Lucie is already finding trouble and even once she gets her memory back via the Doctor, she can’t keep from getting fired. As this involves her finding herself in the middle of an alien jungle during major hostilities, its hardly back to the dole queue on Monday. When the Doctor learns the sinister truth behind the “company” for whom Lucie was working, he tries to throw a spanner in the works only to be thrown himself by who is trying to do business with them. They’re a group with whom the Doctor has had plenty of experience and they give new meaning to the term “hostile takeover”.
With the Doctor and Lucie embroiled in a conflict with warmongers on one side and the inhuman Cybermen on the other, the Doctor isn’t sure who he should back. But even as he noodles his way through that question, many more are raised. Who is responsible for this war being fought? Why is it being run in such a peculiar fashion? And what was so important about Lucie that so many people were making so much fuss about her? The answers lead all the way back to the Doctor’s home planet of Gallifrey and, as usual, he’s not going to like them…
The Doctor brings Ace and Hex to Glast City on the planet Nocturne, home of the Artists’ Enclave, a community of poets, musicians, writers and other creative types, which happens to be one of the Doctor’s favorite places in the universe. But death seems to arrive on the Doctor’s heels: one of the community’s prominent artists is murdered and his home is set ablaze. Hex arrives to try to help, but he’s found by the authorities and arrested on suspicion of murder. The Doctor arrives to vouch for him, but that only brings the Time Lord – and his history of unauthorized visits to Nocturne – to the attention of the city’s security forces. He discovers that someone has been conducting experiments in bioharmonics, the science of living sound, and may have summoned a dark force to Nocture. But by the time there are more deaths for the security forces to investigate, they’ve already decided that the Doctor is their prime suspect.
The TARDIS is drawn to a meeting with General Tillington, an American general heading up an anti-alien agency called Global Warning in the U.K., in 2158 – a year after the Daleks should have overrun the entire planet to begin a ten-year occupation of Earth. But the Daleks are on Earth as tiny toys that are all the rage among kids and collectors. Global Warning employs a number of “time sensitives” who foresee the Dalek invasion that the Doctor thinks should be in progress, and yet they can’t pin down when or how it will happen, and for that matter, with the timeline apparently already disrupted, neither can the Doctor. With the help of Tillington’s seemingly rebellious son Wilton, the Doctor escapes and returns to the TARDIS and begins trying to track down Nyssa, who he left in an earlier point in Earth’s history to test a piece of temporal communications equipment she’d invented. But Nyssa isn’t where or when he left her – she and one of the Knights Templar who was pursuing her have somehow been transported to the American Civil War, where they aid a wounded former slave. The Doctor rescues them, but the TARDIS then leaps into the heart of the Vietnam War, where they rescue yet another passenger, a tough-talking female helicopter pilot. But unknown to the Doctor, Wilton has brought his toy collection with him – the miniature Daleks – and the tiny but deadly Daleks sieze control of the TARDIS. They need the Doctor’s time machine – and, of course, him to pilot it – to launch a new and more devastating invasion of Earth.
Exotron: The TARDIS arrives at a distant human colony, and the Doctor is ready to be off again, but Peri is still sampling the local flora. When they meet their first exotron, however, both of the time travelers are ready to go. The enormous, remotely-operated mechanical men – or at least whoever is controlling them – takes a keen interest in the Doctor’s scientific knowledge. An exotron snatches up the Doctor and simply walks away with him in hand, while Peri encounters some human colonists and barely survives a meeting with the local fauna. The Doctor finds that the exotrons are powered by telepathy, or in this case, the machine-enhanced telepathy of a man who seems to have something to hide. The Doctor decides to use his own mental powers to level the playing field, but doing so may put his own survival, and Peri’s, at risk.
