The Harvest
The Doctor and Ace have insinuated themselves into the staff of a London hospital in 2021, trying to discover what they can about a top secret project called “C Program,” which the Doctor suspects is using alien technology. The Doctor’s nasty suspicions about the origins of that technology come into sharp focus when Ace befriends a young medic nicknamed Hex in an effort to find out more about C Program, and a hulking humanoid tries to kill both of them shortly afterward. Ace lets Hex into the TARDIS, and he quickly becomes involved in the time travelers’ plans to find out what’s going on. He might even join Ace and the Doctor for more of their travels, if any of them survive the harvesting of the human race for the organs needed by an invasion force that could overrun Earth in mere weeks.
written by Dan Abnett
directed by Gary Russell
music by David DarlingtonCast: Sylvester McCoy (The Doctor), Sophie Aldred (Ace), Philip Olivier (Hex), William Boyde (Subject One), Richard Derrington (Dr. Farrer), David Warwick (Garnier), Paul Lacoux (Dr. Mathias), Janie Booth (System), Mark Donovan (Polk)
Timeline: after The Rapture and before Dreamtime
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
The TARDIS arrives on what appears to be an asteroid with a city on it, a city where the cars, the people and even the buildings have turned to stone. Some of the human colonists on the asteroid have escaped that fate – some of them steeped in Australian Aboriginal lore, and others much more determined to return the colony to normality, by brute force if necessary. The strange situation is not helped by the arrival of a Galyari ship, its crew determined to salvage something from the asteroid before they leave. When the Doctor vanishes into something called the Dreaming, and Ace is knocked out cold, Hex finds himself on his own in a situation he can barely even begin to fathom.
Unless it was of Hex’s scenes, that is. Philip Olivier continues to make his new TARDIS traveler likeable, and when he’s thrust into danger that’s beyond what he can grasp, his part of the story quickly becomes the most compelling thing to follow. Ace has to deal with an uncooperative brute determined to gain control of the situation by any means necessary – hardly a situation she hasn’t been in before – while the Doctor finds himself in bizarrely unfamiliar circumstances to which he reacts with what almost seems like calm familiarity. Sophie Aldred and Sylvester McCoy turn in fine performances, and the first episode is gripping stuff, but it gets a bit muddled after that, leaving the cast to do the best they can with what the script gives them. There are even tantalizing hints that we’ll follow up on the Galyari’s relationship with the Doctor – something explored much more deeply in The Sandman – but even that doesn’t materialize.
A radio broadcast unfolds live on the disant Colony 34, recounting the day’s events, including another in a string of terrorist bombings. The incumbent leader, Premier Leo Jaeger, denounces the violence, promises further crackdowns in the name of security, and openly accuses his opponents, the Freedom & Democracy Party, of being behind the attacks. The FDP’s new leader, known only as the Doctor, has a different story to tell: he criticizes the bombings, but also claims that Jaeger is trying to divert attention away from the upcoming elections that the FDP has forced through legal channels – elections that have been delayed for five years. Other news broadcasts profile the “Rebel Queen,” a young woman calling herself Ace who says she’s leading the resistance, and a bewildered paramedic named Hex who stumbles onto a secret during a live broadcast – a secret which could get Live 34 shut down by the government.
The TARDIS brings the Doctor, Ace and Hex to a stormy island, where Hex admits to experiencing strange visions of an incident in an operating room that he’s never personally witnessed, and Ace has a vision of her own near a body of water, and falls in. Spotting a nearby house, the Doctor decides they should seek shelter there, but the handful of people in the house are as unsettling as any of the strange things they’ve seen so far. Everyone there seems to be trying to keep some kind of a secret under wraps, but when one of them turns up dead, they’re all suspects…and so are the time travelers. It turns out that the TARDIS may not be the only time machine on the island, and that none of the residents of the house may have chosen to be here – and every layer of the secret that is revealed seems to cost another life.
It’s Monte Carlo, 1966, and Peri and Erimem are on an assignment: the Doctor has sent them to steal the Veiled Leopard, a spectacular diamond with unusual markings at its center. But this time, the TARDIS travelers are on their own, and the Doctor isn’t there to help them deal with someone else who’s there for the same reason, to say nothing of the other shady characters populating the casino. Two of the other guests in particular stick out like a sore thumb, which is an odd coincidence, because their names are Hex and Ace – and they’ve been sent by the Doctor to make sure that nobody steals the Veiled Leopard.
The Doctor, Ace and Hex arrive in Ireland, 1649, to the sound of thunder…only it’s not thunder. The TARDIS has brought the time travelers to Drogheda, just before Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army raze the town to the ground, and there are almost no survivors. The Doctor befriends a pregnant widow named Mary, after sternly telling Ace and Hex not to get involved in historical events. But when the moment comes, Hex and Ace take up arms alongside the Irish. Ace is injured in battle, and Hex is captured by Cromwell’s forces. Hoping he can change history and prevent another massacre like Drogheda, Hex becomes Cromwell’s personal advisor, trying to steer him toward more humane treatment of prisoners, civilian and otherwise. Hex tries to get Cromwell to be more concerned with how history will see him. As the Doctor tries to help Mary bring a new life into the world, Hex is helpless to watch as his best efforts only ensure that Cromwell will continue carving a bloody path through history at Wexford.
The TARDIS deposits the Doctor, Ace and Hex in harm’s way on the front lines of World War I. After a close call with a German shell, they wind up in a makeshift military hospital, and as soon as the Doctor is fully recovered, he’s startled to find that there are orders awaiting him: they ask the British commanding officer to accord the Doctor and his associates full access to the hospital in order to investigate a murder that has yet to happen. Completely mystified, the Doctor begins investigating, but not before Hex warns him of one disturbing possibility: the future murder victim could be one of the time travelers. Hex discovers first-hand that horrifying experiments in mind control are taking place at this hospital, far ahead of their time, and crude – but effective. The Doctor and Ace find themselves on the receiving end of a none-too-subtle warning about poking around where they’re not welcome. They find an ally in a man who’s being kept off the front lines for fear that his pacifistic views will send him running into the arms of the enemy, but with the rest of the soldiers turned against him, he can’t offer the Doctor much help. When the murder finally takes place, however, it seems that the base commander has his own ideas as to who should face the music for the killing, whether his suspicions are founded in truth or not. But who knew about the murder ahead of time?
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.
After a particularly harrowing adventure, the Doctor promises to take Ace and Hex somewhere where they can all relax, and by virtue of having both a spa and a beer tent, the Festival of the Twin Moons of Tuin wins the toss. But of course, the Doctor hasn’t shared everything he knows about Tuin: the societies of its twin moons, despite being very closely related biologically, are locked in a seemingly endless war, from which the Festival is the only break in hostilities. Furthermore, the Doctor takes it upon himself to bring that war to an end, having read some local lore. He declares himself the suitor to an unknown bride, the marriage of whom will bring peace to Tuin at last. But instead of being one step ahead of the game, this time the Doctor’s information is woefully incomplete, as he has no idea who he’ll be marrying. And even when the bride is revealed, the Doctor discovers that the peace their wedding vows will bring will not be the peace of a war ended, but the peace of a dead world.
The Doctor, Ace and Hex arrive just in time to see famed archaeologist Howard Carter unearth one of the more interesting Egyptian tombs he would excavate prior to discovering the tomb of Tutankhamun. But what Carter finds here startles the TARDIS crew: evidence that another time traveler may be nearby, altering the course of human history. A distress call then leads the Doctor and his friends to a remote laboratory where Dr. Verryman is trying to crack a genetic code that could lead to the mental improvement of the human race – whether the human race wants it or not. The code turns out to be a mathematical virus which infects the Doctor’s mind: kill and cure could be the same thing. The TARDIS next lands in England on V-E day, where a man from 1945 has procured alien technology allowing him to control others’ minds. The device has attracted the attention of not only the Doctor, but of the Forge as well, and the consequences hit close to home for both Ace and Hex. At a top secret base in Antarctica in 2012, the time travelers arrive just after a murder that should never have happened with the base’s tight security measures…and of course, this means the Doctor and his companions are now the prime suspects.
A strange gathering takes place in a sanitorium in the Swiss Alps in 1926. Among the strangest patients there is a man known only as the Doctor, who seems not to have the slightest idea who he is – and anytime he seems to stray anywhere near finding out the truth, there always seems to be something handy to prevent him from remembering too much: chloroform here, a powerful electric shock there. Other patients go through the motions of playing an endless series of games, and being subjected to similar memory-erasing tactics by the shadowy couple calling the shots from the sanitorium’s attic. These two mysterious people are named Ace and Hex, and they’re keeping the patients – and their Doctor – imprisoned for a reason: to rid the universe of a malevolent presence. But it turns out that the Doctor, even without his memory, doesn’t take kindly to being imprisoned.
On the planet Bliss, an isolated human research base is besieged by both the local insect life and by an approaching attack force of Daleks. The TARDIS arrives outside the base, and the Doctor, Ace and Hex demand shelter from the deadly insect swarm. Once inside, the time travelers find that the base’s crew is demoralized and on edge. Something is drawing the Daleks’ attention to this otherwise unremarkable outpost – and the Doctor discovers that it could be something even more horrifyingly destructive than the Daleks themselves. Will he actually join forces with his dreaded enemies to keep it contained?
The Doctor takes Hex to the Crimean War, in the wake of the costly and ultimately futile charge of the Light Brigade. Ace understands why the Doctor has brought them here all too well: Hex can, at least temporarily, make a difference and regain his confidence about traveling in the TARDIS. But this adventure becomes more than any of them can handle when the three time travelers are separated; Hex takes charge of battlefield medicine at the front of the war, but when the TARDIS is lost at sea, Ace and the Doctor are captured by Russian soldiers. The Doctor is treated like a visiting diplomat, while Ace gets to recover from her injuries in a cell. The three time travelers have to use what they know about this juncture in history to try to reunite with each other without changing recorded events. For Hex, avoiding interference with history becomes doubly difficult when he is introduced to Florence Nightingale herself, and is then accused of collusion with the enemy. Hex’s accuser is eager to see Hex dead for this crime, whether he actually committed it or not, and this time the Doctor isn’t there to help him.
The Doctor and Ace rush the critically injured Hex back to his own time, to St. Gart’s, the hospital where the time travelers first met Hex. The TARDIS slips a little too far forward in time, however, and arrives in 2026. St. Gart’s is closed down at the heart of a quarantine zone, and the streets of London are deserted. Using his sonic screwdriver, the Doctor breaks into the hospital and gets ready to operate on Hex himself, only to be interrupted by armored soldiers in the employ of Department C4 – once known as The Forge. Nimrod, now a public figure using his real name or Sir William Abberton, is still in charge, seeking a solution to a widespread mutation of humans into insect-like life forms. In the absence of a cure, Nimrod is happy to treat the outbreak as a pest control situation, and he’s also delighted to learn that the Doctor has never told Hex about how his mother died. When the Doctor himself becomes infected with the mutation, Hex fights to keep the Doctor calm to prevent the mutation from taking hold. Nimrod, on the other hand, wants to see the mutation process first-hand and eliminate his arch-enemy at the same time…