Sunday 10 October 2021

The New Doctor: Series 4



Everyone knows about the New Doctor. He was the mysterious time traveler who came to save the last human from the end of the world and bring her into the future when the Earth had recovered. But then the New Doctor was poisoned, and the new humans vowed to work on a cure. The New Doctor traveled forward in time to claim the cure... but he never appeared again, even after the antidote was discovered.

Why has the New Doctor never returned? Is the new Earth somehow a failure? Is it true that the humans are descended from an organic human and synthetic man? Must humanity be purified before the savior will return as promised? And would such a purge leave any survivors?

The day the purge begins someone who might be the New Doctor returns, only to die and come to life in a new body. If this strange woman really is the New Doctor, will she able to save the world before all impurity is scorched away?








Those who do not learn from history are doomed to make a fortune with inaccurate theme parks. OK, maybe Ned Kelly wasn't a super-powered android fighting Queen Victoria in her pink-coloured empire, robbing the rich to feed the Tasmanian Tiger people desperate to regain their land from the evil Terror Nullius. But you try selling glove puppets and showbags based on boring old facts!

It's not much consolation for Jess and Julio to see how much of their history has been forgotten, distorted or ignored and the New Doctor provides little to no comfort. Especially as there is something else going on with this theme park, an underground involving drug-running Spectrox and mind-swapping technology. When bodies are being hijacked, who can you trust?

The New Doctor and her companions are about to find out the hard way.


An effort to steer the TARDIS to 20th Century Australia only overshoots by 66 million years, leaving the New Doctor, Jess and Julio in a Jurassic-era plantation in the time dinosaurs ruled the Earth and the Silurian lizard-men ruled the dinosaurs. To the Silurians, the mammalian time travelers are overgrown vermin and not at all welcome - but they have other things to worry about.

A group of dinosaur-rights activists are raiding a Silurian zoological ranch, determined to free the saurians from their yolk. But good intentions pave the road to hell just as much as high ideals and humans and Silurians are soon at risk of being devoured by the newly-freed wild animals...


A long time ago, the natives of Delta Magna were driven from their world to one of their moons. The human colonists granted these dispossessed natives some giant squids to the swamps, to worship as their god. One of those squids grew so large, so dangerous and so uncontrollable that it began to devour every living thing on the swamp moon. That squid was called Kroll.

Finally, a mysterious Doctor destroyed Kroll, turning the colossal monster into billions of tiny baby Kroll scattered all across the moon. He was sure these babies would grow into normal giant squids, and be no threat to anyone.

He was wrong.

Now, the third moon of Delta Magna has been uninhabited for centuries. And when humanity finally returns, the children of Kroll are waiting.

And they are hungry.


A flash of inspiration allows the New Doctor to for once pilot the TARDIS to a specific destination. One problem is that she doesn't remember what that specific destination. A bigger problem is that this destination is what little remains of Skaro, home of the Daleks and centre of their fallen empire.

The Daleks and their empire were wiped out when Skaro's sun went supernova, but the remains of the planet are occasionally raided by scavengers and salvage teams stealing whatever they can find. They only have a few hours of night to raid the rubble, because during the day the gamma-radiation of the supernova sterilizes everything it encounters.

The New Doctor is trapped on New Skaro, trying to outrun the lethal dawn and the obscene creatures still surviving in the ruins. Her companions are no safer: they have been accidentally scooped up aboard one of the scavenger ships along with an old Dalek casing.

And the Dalek mutant within is still alive - and deadly.
 
 
An attempt to steer the TARDIS appears to be a complete success. The New Doctor has brought Jess and Julio back to their home time and place, in fact in their old high school. However it quickly becomes clear they have arrived too early - this is when they were attending high school, and there are a younger Jess and Julio out there attending classes and failing to summon the courage to ask each other out.

When the New Doctor is mistaken for a substitute teacher and her companions for their student selves, they find themselves risking undoing history by altering their own pasts - but perhaps it's time for Jess and Julio to play cupid with their younger selves?

More importantly, some of the students are acting oddly. There's a tree in the playground that wasn't there yesterday. The New Doctor soon discovers that the school is undergoing a very unusual inspection, and if it doesn't measure up to standards, then the entire Earth could be destroyed...
 
 
The Nova Mondas is one of the biggest and most successful casinos on the leisure planet, and the charming cybernetic staff welcome all gamblers to try their luck and win the jackpot - a prize greater than any currency, the prize of functional immortality in an indestructible cyborg body. You get to live forever, super-strong, super-smart, never feeling cold or sick or weak ever again...
 
...but you have to play to win. Don't you?

The New Doctor is certain Nova Mondas is part of a scheme to bring the Cybermen back from the brink of total extinction, but just who is behind this plan? Why are the Cybermen so comfortable around all these gold coins? And why, if everything hinges on winning the prize of Cyber Conversion, do unlucky gamblers keep disappearing in the casino basements?
 
 
When you're trying to steer a runaway time machine towards twentieth century Earth, the more often you try to land there, the more likely you are to end up in the middle of a world war. The latest attempt to return Jess and Julio home to 1990s Sydney leads them into a stinking war-town swampland between the armed forces of Britain and Germany.
 
Does it matter precisely what battle ground they've ended up in or which particular war they've been caught up? At the end of the day, the details don't change why humanity is fighting, what it is capable of or what horrors it can conflict. All that matters is that a lot of people are going to die for their beliefs.

And that might include the New Doctor and her two companions...
 

The Sontaran Empire has been at war with the Rutan Empire for longer than mankind has walked upright. The Sontarans will do anything to win. They will develop any weapon, forge any alliance, embrace any idea that might give them an edge in combat.
 
Up to and including boosting morale with a concert of stand up comedy, magic acts and the top ten West Galaxy Hits. After all, Rutans have no sense of humour.

On the plus side, this means the New Doctor, Jess and Julio have an excuse to arrive in the middle of Sontaran territory without immediately being executed. On the downside, they are now on the front line between the various forces trying to control the Sontaran/Rutan war, as everyone has their own agenda and are more than willing to kill for it.

On with the show!
 

 The New Doctor is not feeling herself today - and she isn't alone in that.

Acting uncharacteristically unpleasant, the Time Lord has set off on a mysterious quest to the planet Oseidon warning her companions they will almost certainly die if they try and follow her. As Jess and Julio brave the androids with the literal trigger fingers prowling the plastic forests on the surface, Marldrok, one of the last Kraals alive, is dealing with a fussy new customer - a wanted fugitive from Thoros Beta, the revolting Mentor Sil.

But then the New Doctor arrives demanding the best android that Marldrok can build and offering Sil the use of the TARDIS. Just which, if any of them, can be trusted to honour the agreement? And regardless, how will Jess and Julio surviving the impending crossfire...?


Their relationship at breaking point, the TARDIS crew agree to answer a mysterious distress call from the far future - specifically from a penal planet in the Belquon system, and the psychotic criminal Graz who is determined to escape prison at any cost.
 
Belquon is also home to an impossible spatial anomaly they call a black hole that leads to another dimension entirely. This gateway guarded by an overzealous squadron of trigger-happy gunships. But why is the blockade there? Is it to keep humanity out? Or to keep something else in?

Although Julio and Jess are horrified by the ruthlessness the New Doctor has demonstrated, it soon becomes apparent she has not gone far enough - and that overestimation could mean the end of all life in the universe as she and her friends can only watch on...


The final Dalek offensive against the  civilized universe has begun...

...but then what?
 
What happens after the Daleks succeed in their mission? What will they do when they run out of people to exterminate and planets to conquer? When there's nothing left to conquer and destroy, what point is there in the entire Dalek race? It is a question the Daleks and Davros, their creator, have been avoiding but now as they face total victory, the question must be answered.

But this is little comfort to the New Doctor.
 
Her oldest enemy has destroyed her time machine, her friends, her life and now all hope in the future. She has well and truly lost - or has she? Could it all be a trick to break her morale? Is her nemesis lying, or is she in denial? Either way, is there anything left worth fighting for?

The time has come to find out, once and for all.



 
 
101: The Monsters of Ness
102: Vienna, 1913
103: Secret of the Sontarans
104: Time Parasite
105: Volcano
 
201: The Pirates of Penance
202: Heartbreak
203: Battle Toad
204: Debts Owed
205: The Three Dimensions of the Rani
 
301: How The World Ends...
302: The Liberation of France
303: A Night At The Mausoleum
304: The Bone-Stealers
305: Wanderlust
306: Dalekmania!
 
401: The Phoenix Rises
402: Visitors to the Outback
403: The False History of the Kelly Gang
404: A Bygone Error
405: Son of Kroll
406: Dalek Salvage
407: High School Daze
408: Casino of the Cybermen
409: The Fog of War
410: Entertaining the Troops
411: Who Do You Want Me To Be?
412: The Black Hole Blockade 
413: Denouement of the Daleks