The Kingmaker
A Shakespeare premiere goes awry when Peri and Erimem wind up drawing too much attention to themselves, but that’s not as incongruous as the Doctor attempting to drink the Bard himself under the table during a heated argument over historical accuracy, specifically with regards to the fate of the two princes in the Tower of London. The Doctor, after clearing his head, decides to investigate the matter for himself, but the TARDIS is in the hands of an impaired driver – a temporal “hiccup” strands Erimem and Peri in the right place, but two years before the Doctor’s arrival. The Doctor is brought before Richard III, and is disturbed to find himself in the presence of a King who is not only aware of time travel, but of the Doctor himself. Peri and Erimem set out to solve the mystery for themselves in the Doctor’s absence, but they find no princes in the Tower – instead, they become the Tower’s two captives, changing history with nearly everything they say or do…no matter how hard they try not to.
written by Nev Fountain
directed by Gary Russell
music by ERSCast: Peter Davison (The Doctor), Nicola Bryant (Peri), Caroline Morris (Erimem), Arthur Smith (Clarrie), Michael Fenton-Stevens (Mr. Seyton), Stephen Beckett (Richard, Duke of Gloucester), Marcus Hutton (Henry, Duke of Buckingham), John Culshaw (Earl Rivers / voice of the Fourth Doctor), Chris Neill (Sir James Tyrell), Katie Wimpenny (Susan), Linzi Matthews (Judith)
Timeline: between The Council Of Nicaea and The Gathering
LogBook entry and TheatEar review by Earl Green
The Doctor follows a trail of highly unusual energy emissions through Earth’s history to Brisbane, Australia in 2006. There, he meets Dr. Katherine Chambers, a woman whose life was changed forever by her last encounter with the Doctor (an encounter that won’t happen until his next regeneration). When he tells her that he’s trying to track down potentially dangerous alien technology, Dr. Chambers begins evading the Doctor’s questions, but he follows her to a surprise birthday party, badgering her with question anyway. But the guest of honor at the surprise party manages to stun the Doctor into silence: it’s Tegan, his former traveling companion, who hasn’t seen him in over 20 years. She isn’t thrilled to renew their acquaintance, since she maintains that anywhere the Doctor goes, trouble – and death – follow. But even without the Doctor, they’re already catching up with Tegan anyway.
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…
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.
The TARDIS brings the Doctor, Peri and Erimem to 15th century Wallachia – a future part of Romania, but known for now as Transylvania. Immediately the time travelers find evidence of a brutal war in progress, and they’re caught up in events before they have a chance to leave. Radu the Handsome, a contender for the Wallachian throne who now sides with the Turks, is leading an army to remove his brother, Prince Vlad III – also known as Vlad Dracula and Vlad the Impaler – from that throne. Peri immediately balks at even the possibility of meeting Dracula himself, despite the Doctor’s assurances that the fictional character bears little resemblance to the man who inspired him. The Doctor warns his friends not to become involved, but when they find themselves surrounded by a pitched battle, Erimem is left with little choice but to take up arms, and finds herself at the mercy of Prince Vlad, whose life she has saved without knowing who he is. He spirits her away to his palace, while Peri tags along as a refugee from the war. The Doctor, still in the company of Radu, tries to convince him that further bloodshed may not be necessary – but according to the history books, the Doctor may have no influence on events and may not even be able to save both of his companions.
The Mind’s Eye: The Doctor finds himself alone in the jungle of a distant world, discovered by security officers from a human expedition which has arrived to examine the planet’s plant life. One particular specimen is of great interest to the expedition’s leaders: a plant which can infiltrate the dreams of animal victims before it consumes them. One side effect of even the most fleeting exposure is memory loss, and only now does the Doctor remember that Peri and Erimem were with him. Erimem is discovered in the jungle, and the Doctor has to use an experimental technique to enter her dreams and lead her back to reality. When Peri is found, however, she is in a more advanced state of the process – the plant has enveloped her body and begun to feed. The Doctor is ready to go into Peri’s dreams to save her, but he discovers that some members of the expedition have a vested interest in studying Peri as she dies.
The TARDIS is drawn again to the planet Vortis by a powerful gravitational force – the same circumstances which once trapped the Doctor and his timeship there in his first incarnation. Determined to find out what’s trapping the TARDIS now, the Doctor and Nyssa set out to explore, but are nearly trampled by a stampede of Zarbi. An eccentric Menoptera scientist and his daughter, living in isolation away from the rest of their kind as they study the Zarbi, whisk the time travelers to safety. As the scientist’s daughter tends to Nyssa’s minor injuries, the Doctor and his new friend set out to discover what’s still causing ships to crash on Vortis. But they find that much more is going wrong: a new breed of colonization has come to Vortis by accident, and it may change the planet’s entire ecosphere forever, unless the Doctor can stop it.
Responding to an Ice Warrior ambassador’s distress call, the Doctor, Peri and Erimem wind up on a doomed ship on a crash course for the planet Peladon, a world the Doctor has visited before. The Ice Warrior’s ship breaks up as it begins to enter the atmosphere, stranding the TARDIS in orbit as the crew cabin plummets to the planet below. On Peladon, a recent tragedy has left the planet without its queen, and a young prince prepares to take the throne on the eve of his wedding to a princess from Earth. But the prince, among others, has been hearing a mysterious voice, bidding all who hear it to offer up a sacrifice of royal blood – and any royal blood, from the arriving princess to Erimem, will suffice to unlock an ancient terror similar to one that the Doctor has faced before.
The Doctor’s TARDIS literally crashes through a suburban greenhouse, and upon stepping out of the TARDIS he immediately meets the greenhouse’s owner, though she’s more worried about her boyfriend being injured than she is about the damage. The Doctor finds her boyfriend in a delirious state, with alien toxins in his blood and a pair of bite marks in his neck, which the man apparently suffered while searching for a relic of his childhood in the attic. Concerned about the strange developments, the Doctor tracks down the toy – a pink vampire hamster called a Cuddlesome with a voice recognition device – which was apparently all the rage in the 1980s. Now he finds that others are suffering from similar injuries, and there have even been deaths, with Cuddlesomes as the common denominator, all of them leaving the scene after attacking their owners. The Doctor follows the Cuddlesomes an abandoned toy factory, where their creator, Turvey, has activated his own kind of product recall – he has attracted the Cuddlesomes to his current location. But Turvey is at the mercy of someone else who is creating a new line of Cuddlesomes…and if the Doctor thought the 1980s models were deadly, he hasn’t seen anything yet. This attempt to cash in on childhood nostalgia could endanger the entire human race.
Young Thomas Brewster hasn’t exactly led a charmed life. Orphaned at the age of five, he winds up in the London workhouses and is eventually handed off to a vile man who forces young men into a life of virtual slavery, searching the banks of the Thames for valuable cargo thrown overboard by corrupt boat skippers who don’t want to pay taxes on what they’re carrying (or smuggling). But from his mother’s funeral onward, there have been two constants in Thomas’ life (aside from suffering): his mother’s ghost speaks to him, and he keeps seeing a tall blue box whose occupants keep asking after him. When he finally meets these two people – a man called the Doctor and a girl named Nyssa – they seem pleasant enough, but they’re an obstacle to his plans. His mother’s ghost has given Thomas instructions to build a time machine to change the future – an act which she assures him will reunite them at last. And when Thomas’ makeshift time machine isn’t enough to change history to his mother’s liking, she tells him to steal the Doctor’s TARDIS instead…
Trapped in Victorian England without the TARDIS, the Doctor and Nyssa try desperately to track down the TARDIS, ultimately resorting to – out of sheer desperation – convincing guests in a Victorian sitting room to unwittingly participate in a block-transfer computation to allow the Doctor to peer into the time vortex to look for his missing ship. But instead of a peek, the Doctor, Nyssa and two of their unsuspecting acquaintances find themselves transported into prehistoric Earth – but a prehistoric Earth that shouldn’t exist at all. The dinosaurs are nowhere to be found, and giant insects seem to overrun the planet. Even the insects, however, answer to someone else – someone eager to renew his acquaintance with the Doctor and Nyssa. They’re horrified to discover a wizened, demented old man at the heart of this world, a man they once knew as a boy called Adric. Having somehow managed to survive his fiery fall to Earth, Adric has changed history, and he has a score to settle with the Doctor…and he expects to make Nyssa his queen. But is this really Adric? And if so, can his surprisingly vicious taste for revenge be turned into his own redemption before his rule comes to an end?
Time Reef: His TARDIS returned to him by Thomas Brewster, the Doctor is suspicious of everything, and it seems with good reason, since the TARDIS is missing vital pieces – one of which holds the timeship’s the internal dimensions in place. The Doctor backtracks to the TARDIS’ most recent destination, a “time reef” isolated in a shrinking pocket universe, where two other ships have become marooned. The missing pieces of the TARDIS are easy to find: Brewster had been selling and bartering items such as the TARDIS’ food machine to both ships’ crews. Hawklike predators from another dimension swarm around the stranded ships – including the Doctor’s now-useless TARDIS – and the Doctor isn’t sure he wants Brewster’s help to try to set things right.