Doctor Who: The Sonic Salvaging of the Sixth, Part 1

The consensus in Doctor Who fandom seems to be that whilst the Sixth Doctor’s run on television was kind of rough, Colin Baker was really able to turn the character around in the Big Finish audio dramas, where at long last he was given solid material to work with and wasn’t caught up in a power struggle between a script editor and a producer with opposed views on the show’s direction. If we set aside the multi-Doctor oddity The Sirens of Time, Colin Baker’s first Big Finish audio was Whispers of Terror. This paired him with a returning Nicola Bryant in a story which managed to be, if not stellar, at least more consistently enjoyable than much of the material they’d starred in together. Over year 2000, Baker would go on to star in four different Big Finish audios – none of which featured Peri, or for that matter Mel – for Baker would be the first Doctor to perform the role for Big Finish opposite companions he’d never travelled with during the TV show.

In the case of the Sixth Doctor, there’s a compelling creative opportunity set up for this. The timey-wimey nature of The Trial of a Time Lord means that it sets a firm end point for his journeys with Peri, who’d been his companion since prior to his regeneration, but whilst he leaves the courtroom with Mel at the end of the saga, this sets up a bit of a paradox – because Mel comes to the courtroom from some point in her personal timeline after Terror of the Vervoids, which was picked out by the Doctor as a case from his future, involving a companion he hadn’t actually met yet.

The smoothest way to resolve the paradox is to assume that the Sixth Doctor and Mel don’t go directly from The Ultimate Foe to Time and the Rani without any stopovers in between; instead, the Doctor dropped Mel off wherever she’d been plucked away from to attend the courtroom (where she was most likely then picked up by a future version of the Sixth Doctor), and then went off on his own way, eventually encountering Mel for the first time and experiencing Terror of the Vervoids for real instead of as courtroom footage.

This means that, just like the Second Doctor is theorised to have enjoyed an entire “Season 6B” following The War Games in which he undertook tasks for the Celestial Intervention Agency before his forced regeneration was imposed upon him, so too can we imagine any number of “Season 23Bs” enjoyed by the Sixth Doctor; in fact, Season 23B is even better-supported by the TV show itself than Season 6B, because the mere existence of Terror of the Vervoids implies its existence directly, no reasoning outside of the television show needed. We can go further than that, though: sure, sooner or later the Sixth Doctor must meet Mel for the “first” time, but who says he can’t go the long way around to get there? It’s possible to infer all sorts of new friends for him to meet in between – and in doing so, this creates a creative space to explore how the character might have further developed into the softer direction which Trial gave us glimpses of.

Of course, to get the best out of that, you’d need the right companion, and as it happens Big Finish managed to strike gold the first time around…

The Marian Conspiracy

Dr. Evelyn Smythe (Maggie Stables), a middle-aged history professor, is giving a lecture on Elizabeth I’s rise to power and the difficulties she faced during the reign of Queen Mary. Unfortunately, a big-haired buffoon in a clownish coat has shown up with a machine that makes annoying bleeping noises; this proves so disruptive that Evelyn has to cut the lecture short. When she confronts the weirdo in question, he witters about how she’s somehow connected to a temporal nexus point which threatens the integrity of the timeline, and on top of all that insists that John Whiteside Smith – privy councillor to Elizabeth I and ancestor of Evelyn – never existed. To make things even more ridiculous, the stranger makes this claim on the preposterous grounds that he himself frequented Elizabeth’s court, and would have met Whiteside had he existed!

When the weirdo shows up at her home, Evelyn decides to let him see her family records for himself, just to shut him up. Not only is Whiteside missing, but Evelyn’s entire family tree starts to fade away before her very eyes! The stranger explains that some manner of time paradox has ended up affecting her history, and that if it is not resolved she too will pop out of existence. Well, Evelyn has felt a bit under the weather recently, and the disappearance of information from her notes is outright bizarre – perhaps there’s something to the stranger’s claims after all. After all, he is a Doctor…

Doctor Who: Big Finish’s Big Debut

If you’re looking into Doctor Who tie-in media, the elephant in the room is Big Finish. Much as you can divide televised Doctor Who into the classic series and the revived show, you can divide the expanded Doctor Who canon into two eras. Prior to 1999, you had an era when novels were the biggest deal in expanded media – the Target novelisation series was the only way to experience many classic stories before home media, particularly when it came to lost serials before audience-taped audio had at least partially filled the gaps, and then you had the Virgin New Adventures providing the most prominent trickle of new stories during the wilderness years. Sure, the Pertwee audio adventures were landmark moments, but there was only two of them – for much of the wilderness period, new novels were coming out frequently and formed the most substantial and exciting bit of expanded media.

Everything changed in July 1999, when Big Finish released The Sirens of Time. Big Finish had previously been making audio dramas based on the adventures of Bernice Summerfield – a space archaeologist who had been a companion in the Virgin New Adventures, and who the New Adventures line had reconfigured around after Virgin lost the tie-in novel rights in the wake of the TV movie. Having established themselves, they then pulled off a licensing coup by convincing the BBC to let them produce their own line of full cast Doctor Who audio dramas, featuring whichever classic Doctors wanted to take part. Tom Baker, legendary curmudgeon that he is, wouldn’t return their calls, but Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy were ready to don their question mark-patterned underpants and return to the TARDIS.

The rest, of course, is history. Big Finish have produced a lot of material – their main range ended up putting out at least one Doctor Who story a month for nearly two decades, and if anything their pace has only accelerated in recent years, now that the central range has been abolished and a confusing array of series has taken its place. Their output is simultaneously a sign of their success and a big red flag; they’re now producing an absolutely absurd amount of stuff, to the point where it’s hopeless to even attempt to keep up, and their Doctor Who-related lines alone represent more material than any sensible person would ever want to plough through. Significant creative problems have arisen, some of which are clearly side-effects of the increasing tendency towards shovelware, some of which are not. Elizabeth Sandifer has offered convincing criticisms of the state of present-day Big Finish here and here.

However, it’s one thing to provide a glut of spin-off material in a time when there’s lots of other spin-off stuff being made and we’re regularly getting new Doctor Who on television, and quite another to provide an oasis in the desert in a time when there’s no televised Who on the horizon – and it was through that that Big Finish became beloved and carved out a niche which, thanks in part to a lenient attitude by RTD early on in the revival show, it has largely kept to this day. By virtue of having the Eighth Doctor mention his Big Finish companions in The Night of the Doctor, but not any companions from novels or comics, Grand Moff Steven implicitly elevated Big Finish above other strands of tie-in media. This may be somewhat unfair to the novels and the comics – but at the same time, it is kind of an acknowledgement that, if your main lens for Doctor Who is the television show (and for most people it will be), a good audio drama feels a bit closer to “proper” Doctor Who than a novel or a comic does, especially when it includes Doctors and companions you know and love from the show.

We’re not in the Wilderness Years right now, of course… but we’ve got to wait until May until the show comes back. May! It’s enough to make those four months feel like eighteen. Perhaps it’s time to go back to the roots of Big Finish and start sifting for gold – especially when much of their early material is readily and legitimately available through various channels on a highly reasonable basis. Don’t expect this occasional review series to be anywhere near as rapid as my TV watch-through, mind – or at all completist, since there’s a lot of stuff Big Finish put out I have no interest in. I will leave it to other hands to do a complete overview of Big Finish, and I absolutely reserve the right to skip over material I don’t find appealing, ignore entire product lines, or just plain stop doing these if they stop being fun.

In particular, I am not particularly enthused by the idea of product lines like the Companion Chronicles, which are more like audiobooks with an in-character narrator than audio dramas – akin, perhaps, to the Nest Cottage Chronicles – or audios which cast impersonators as their Doctors, and I am much more interested in those product lines focused on Doctors who I feel got short-changed on television, either because their eras had horrid quality control or because their stint in the show was cut short or both.

Mini-Review: The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot

It’s the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who, and Peter Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy aren’t feeling celebratory. Grand Moff Steven’s shooting this Day of the Doctor thing and is using their likenesses from archive footage, but is he giving them a guest spot like Tom Baker? No. Is he giving them a fun little minisode like Paul McGann? No! This is rubbish, and something must be done – so the three spurned classic Doctors team up. If Moffat won’t even invite them to participate, they may as well simply gatecrash the filming and sneak their way into the production…

Whilst The Day of the Doctor marked the show’s 50th Anniversary with a continuity-heavy episode which leaned into the show’s mythology whilst also revising it, and An Adventure In Time and Space provided a hagiography of the original production team (and proved fresh for revision in its own way, with the final scene where William Hartnell has a vision of Matt Smith at the TARDIS controls being remixed to show Ncuti Gatwa in the most recent retransmission), The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot might be my favourite part of the anniversary celebrations. It’s a zero-budget, cheap little thing that’s full of heart, and that’s what those three Doctors’ eras were at their best, and whilst it could have gone very, very self-indulgent with the cameos, it actually uses them more artfully.

Peter Davison not only co-stars in this – he also wrote and directed it, and it was produced by Georgia Tennant, his daughter and David Tennant’s wife. This isn’t a Davison family love-in by any means, however – as well as bringing Colin and Sylvester along for the ride, Davison crams in cameos from a dizzying number of actors and behind-the-scenes contributors to the show from over the years, both from the classic era and the revival period, giving a heap of folk who weren’t participating in either of the bigger, fancier anniversary spectaculars a chance to be involved in some small way.

Most of the humour is at Davison, Baker, and McCoy’s expense; Davison is initially set up to be desperate to be involved because he told his younger children he would be, but it quickly becomes apparent that they don’t really care and so he’s only trying to get into The Day of the Doctor to serve his own ego. The dream sequence he has where Matt Smith, Jenna-Louise Coleman, and Steven Moffat all heap praise on him as he turns up to take part in the reboot, only for Janet Fielding to show up to tell him he’s fooling himself, is superb.

McCoy overhyping his part in The Hobbit (and Davison dismissing it as a “flash-in-the-pan $5 million dollar picture” and Colin Baker being openly catty about the whole thing) is similarly good – and he even managed to get Peter Jackson and Ian McKellen to film a bit for the special on the set of The Hobbit, which is probably the best thing shot on that set come to think of it. Colin Baker is a particularly good sport here, depicting himself obsessively trapping his family in the living room to endlessly rewatch the Vengeance On Varos DVD extras, but all three Doctors throw themselves into the joke where each of them is fixated on their past in the show.

Having thoroughly made fun of himself and his co-conspirators, Davison has room to take a few pops at others. The joke where they call Tom Baker only to call the Fourth Doctor midway through Shada (at the same instant he and Romana are snatched away during The Five Doctors) is particularly good, because on the one hand, you can read it as praising Tom for being more authentically Doctor-y than any of them, but on the other hand you can read it as razzing him for not taking part in The Five Doctors.

The best jokes, however, are those directed at the showrunners. Moffat at his desk playing with his action figures is about as devastating a slam on his stewardship on the show as you can hope for, and he’s going along with it happily here with all the lack of self-awareness of someone who doesn’t realise how accurate the joke it is. Moffat having a nightmare in which a host of companion’s faces swirl around, like the Fifth Doctor’s dying vision in The Caves of Androzani, is also chuckle-worthy, particularly with the way Matthew Waterhouse/Adric prompts him to jerk awake like it’s a nightmare, and having the final scene showing the Grand Moff in the process of editing The Day of the Doctor and cutting to credits when he says “cut it” is a neat Vengeance On Varos nod.

Moffat isn’t the only showrunner to get it in the neck; the gag where RTD phones up towards the end and it turns out he’s just as desperate to appear in the spoof as the Doctors are to be in The Day of the Doctor is lovely too, as is the shot of action figures on his desk. (It’s even funnier now he’s showrunner again – talk about playing the long game!) Still, at a point when the show under Moffat had lost the sense of effortless fun it had formerly enjoyed, something like The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot was just what was needed to bring things down to Earth a bit.

According to McCoy, the BBC said no to a sequel for the 60th Anniversary, but really that’s fair enough – between cameos in The Power of the Doctor and episodes of Tales of the TARDIS focused on them, the Fifth to Seventh Doctors have been getting a fair bit of love recently, so the schtick wouldn’t work. Besides, a better comedy concept presents itself – Mark Gatiss has been talking up the idea of doing a sequel to An Adventure In Time and Space chronicling the 1985 hiatus and The Trial of a Time Lord, and that has scope to be an even better farce. Unless and until that happens, this is the Doctor Who equivalent of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace or Cruise of the Gods, in terms of being a comedy about the people behind a beloved show – except this time the show is real.

Doctor Who Series 7: The Doctor Should Be Louder, Angrier, and Have Access To a Time Machine

The story so far: after a patchy first season, there were some signs in Matt Smith’s second season that Grand Moff Steven was righting the ship, albeit with an unfortunate emphasis on convoluted plot arc stuff and an overfondness for using “Doctor who?” as diegetic dialogue. We begin Series 7 with the Doctor having discovered that the Silence – the second of the multiple big teamups out to destroy him he’ll face over the course of his run – were trying to kill him because it was prophesised they’d be destroyed if the Question – “Doctor who?” – were answered on the fields of Trenzalore.

We’ll eventually get there… kind of. But fair warning: this is going to be a bit of a slog. We have a full thirteen episode season, divided in two with a Christmas special in the middle, and then a 50th Anniversary special before the final Christmas special. And for the first time since the revival show began, there’s no multi-part stories, so I have an eye-watering 16 stories to cover here. Pack a lunch, we’re going to be here for a while.

Oh, and content warning: there’s some sexual assault stuff coming up and the Doctor’s responsible this time and I rant about it a lot because, well, it’s the Doctor sexually assaulting people (yes, people, it happens multiple times). It’s not cool.

We kick off with the Moffat-penned Asylum of the Daleks, in which the Doctor is captured by the Daleks, as are a freshly-divorced Amy and Rory, and the trio are dragged before the Dalek parliament… But not for execution. Instead, it turns out that the Daleks want the Doctor’s help, since a crisis has arisen which is well beyond their ability to deal with via the methods they have to hand. Specifically, something’s gone south on the Dalek asylum planet – a place where they dump all the Daleks who are too twisted to be controlled but the Dalek authorities don’t want to simply execute. (Apparently the insane Daleks are so full of hate the other Daleks consider them sacred.) A rogue transmission has been emanating from the planet – the opera Carmen, which it makes no sense for any Daleks to be transmitting.

At the other end of the transmission is Oswin Oswald (Jenna Louise-Coleman), a surviving crew member from the starliner Alaska, which has crashed on the planet. That implies a major security problem: if the Alaska could get on, Daleks on-planet could conceivably get off. Oswin explains she’s been surviving onworld for a year or so, in part by hacking Dalek technology. The Daleks want the Doctor to go down and shut down the planetary force field so they can declare Exterminatus on the place, reasoning that the Doctor, as their nemesis, is just the man for the job. The Doctor just wants to get himself, his companions, and the Alaska survivors away safely. There’s two problems: something is badly wrong with Oswin, and an entire ward of the asylum is dedicated to Daleks with Post-Doctor Stress Disorder…

Doctor Who: The Slippery, Fishy Early Audio Adventures

Doctor Who audio dramas are pretty much a cottage industry at this point, with Big Finish churning them out in outright ridiculous quantities. As I’ve previously explored, Jon Pertwee and the core of the season 11 gang would team up in the 1990s to pioneer the concept of audio adventures starring past Doctors, which has been Big Finish’s bread and butter ever since – a corner of official Who output which, by virtue of being kept away from the newest Doctors, is obliged to forever carve out a corner for itself which is distinct from what the television show is currently doing.

However, there were a few previous times when presently-serving Doctors were called in to produce audio adventures during the run of the classic series. In the 1960s, Peter Cushing was involved in an attempt to make a Doctor Who radio series which would have had a parallel continuity to the television show (and might or might not have been in continuity with the Amicus adaptations of Dalek stories he’d appeared in as his version of the Doctor), but only a pilot episode was recorded and, after the BBC scrapped it, the recording seems to have fallen into obscurity and may well no longer exist. In subsequent decades, however, two audio adventures of significant did emerge. One of them smells of fish. One of them smells of Saward…

The Pescatons

The Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith arrive back on present-day Earth to discover strange things going on at the mouth of the Thames – a meteorite was observed falling into the sea just off the coast, and repeated expeditions to retrieve it have vanished without trace. Eventually, the Doctor and Sarah Jane discover the truth: the meteorite was an advance scout, and an invasion of Earth by the fish-like Pescatons is imminent!

Released as a single LP in the gap between seasons 13 and 14, this is only barely an audio drama; great swathes of it are narrated by Tom Baker in-character as the Fourth Doctor, and the only segments that are actually dramatised as such are a few conversations between him and Sarah Jane and a chat between the Doctor and Zor (Bill Mitchell), leader of the Pescatons.

Performed, then, by Baker, Sladen, Mitchell, and some sound effects, some compromises become necessary. Any scene involving conversations with someone other than the Doctor and Sarah Jane is summarised rather than played out, and occasionally these summaries are brief to the point of being bullet points. A glaring example happens early on: one moment the Doctor and Sarah Jane are fleeing a Pescaton on a lonely beach, the next we’re told about how they ended up discovering the backstory about what went on from this “Professor Emerson” person without being told how the Doctor and Sarah Jane actually got away from the Pescaton or found Professor Emerson.

Doctor Who Season 23: Doctor In Distress

The story so far: after violently abusing Peri in his first story, the Sixth Doctor continued his misdeeds by starring in the worst season of Doctor Who we’ve seen in this article series to date. For such foul deeds, mere cancellation does not suffice: justice would demand that the Doctor be subjected to an extremely public show trial for Crimes Against Television.

Well, that’s an unfair way to phrase it. If you drew up a list of the people you could conceivably hold responsible for the doldrums Doctor Who slid into in 1985, Colin Baker’s name really shouldn’t feature on it. The days when the actor who actually played the Doctor had any significant influence over the show’s direction were well and truly over by the time he took on the role. William Hartnell exerted some influence back in the early days, pushing back against John Wiles’ new direction during the muddled middle of season 3. Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker both ended up serving in the role long enough to exert a certain gravitational pull of their own, though of course they both needed to earn that level of influence through long service and pulling good ratings in the first place.

One of the first challenges John Nathan-Turner faced as a producer, back in season 18, was weaning the show off being so dependent on Tom Baker as to make replacing him unthinkable. Perhaps that problem made him cautious of allowing subsequent Doctors to gain the sort of leverage over the show Baker developed. Peter Davison left in part because Patrick Troughton advised him not to stay too long, but also because he found himself in a situation where, despite nominally being the star of the show, he found he couldn’t affect the direction it was going in even when he was dissatisfied with the quality of the stories.

The Twin Dilemma was, we can all agree, an utterly miserably bad story in which the Doctor behaves abominably. It was also Baker’s first story – and is it really plausible that if he’d tried to put his food down and force a rewrite in the first serial he appeared in, he’d have been listened to? It seems far more likely that he’d have simply been fired and they’d have reshot the regeneration scene of Caves of Androzani to show Davison turning into someone else. And for the span of season 22, he could only do the best he could with the material he was given.

Conversely, John Nathan-Turner’s production sensibilities, which had been so fresh and exciting back in season 18, had become mired in cheap stunts and hot-shotting, pulling off little controversies to spike the ratings in the short-term without regard for the long-term stability of the show. Indeed, the frequency with which he adjusted the companion lineup in the Davison era suggests that JNT thought that stability was, in itself, an undesirable state – that he saw it as amounting to stagnation, and stagnation being ratings death. This is despite the show having done damn well in the Baker era (seven seasons with the same lead actor), and having been very solid in the Jon Pertwee era until the very end (an era where had the same Doctor and script editor all the way through, the same producer for all but the first story, and the same companion for three of the five seasons).

Doctor Who Season 22: Doctor At the Funeral Parlour

The story so far: Five Doctors came and went. Now the Sixth Doctor has arisen, only to be torpedoed below the waterline immediately by his first story, the risible The Twin Dilemma. Nine months have passed; now the Sixth Doctor has the challenge of winning over audiences who’ve had the better part of the year to digest the scene of him choking out Peri in his first episode. Will his first full season turn things around?s

Rather than consisting of 26 twice-weekly episodes of around 25 minutes each, this season consisted of weekly 13 episodes of around 45 minutes each (which comes to double length when you account for less time given to title sequences, credit sequences and repeating pre-cliffhanger scenes), with the show returning to its traditional Saturday slot. The upshot of this is that you got about as much Doctor Who this season as in any other from seasons 7 to 21, spread out over about the same span of the year, but with the BBC needing to schedule less episodes. The format had been tried out with Resurrection of the Daleks in the previous season, and despite the actual content of that serial being poor the scheduling experiment seems to have worked.

First up is Attack of the Cybermen – credited to Paula Moore, said name being a pseudonym for Paula Woolsey, though it has subsequently been claimed by some that this was Eric Saward and Ian Levine using her as a figurehead for a story which at most had some suggestions from her, but was largely done by Saward with input from Levine. One of the most absurd thing about Eric Saward and Ian Levine is that they both keep trying to claim credit for this story, which is ridiculous because anyone with taste would want to disavow it completely.

Saward’s fingerprints certainly are all over this, what with the story bringing back Lytton (Maurice Colbourne), the space mercenary from Resurrection of the Daleks who escaped into 1984 London at the end of that serial, having set himself up as the leader of a team of bank robbers. Saward seems to have regarded Lytton as a signature character of his – he did a comic about him recently – so his presence here is a dead giveaway.

Then again, there’s a lot of comedy schtick early on which is quite un-Sawardly. A good chunk of the first episode involves the Doctor and Peri clowning about in search of a distress signal emanating from 1985 Earth (in the vicinity of Totter’s Lane scrapyard, no less) with the TARDIS taking various forms as a result of the Doctor botching a repair to the chameleon circuit. Nathan-Turner circulated the rumour that the chameleon circuit repair would be permanent, rendering the old police box redundant, in yet another example of him courting controversy to pump the ratings.

This is the sort of thing which keeps happening in Saward’s era – not always, but often enough that it’s noticeable, the TARDIS will fail to materialise square in the middle of a story, necessitating a chunk of busywork early on to actually get the Doctor and the gang involved in the first place. It’s either a fundamental misunderstanding of the benefits the TARDIS offers as a storytelling device when it comes to cutting past all that, or a desire to provide filler to pad out otherwise insufficient stories. “The TARDIS just randomly shows up somewhere without explanation” is a perfectly good way to start a Doctor Who story; the 1960s show relied on it exclusively, the Pertwee era only dialled it back due to the whole “exiled on Earth” thing, and for most of the Tom Baker era it happened around half the time.

Doctor Who Season 21: Doctor In the Depths

The story so far: the Fifth Doctor’s tenure began with an unusually patchy season, but ended up returning to something resembling an even keel in his second season, albeit with two stories still falling short of standards (the miserably poor Arc of Infinity and the frustratingly mishandled The King’s Demons). Both seasons had been produced by John Nathan-Turner, and (bar for a couple of stories in season 19) were script edited by Eric Saward, a creative partnership which was still a few seasons away from imploding. Dissatisfied with the quality control on the storylines he was getting, and having been given some sage advice by none other than Patrick Troughton himself about not going longer than three seasons in the role, Peter Davison decided early on in the production process of season 21 that he would depart.

The season opener is Warriors of the Deep by Johnny Byrne – his third and final story for the show, his previous two having been The Keeper of Traken and Arc of Infinity. This is yet another “bringing back old enemies” story – like a hangover from season 20. In this case, the Silurians (from, er, The Silurians) and the Sea Devils (from, er, The Sea Devils) are back – a team-up which makes sense, since the two species were defined as being related back in The Sea Devils. With a party of awakened Silurians having found the Sea Devils and released them from their confinement under the seabed, they decide to set about reclaiming the Earth.

John Nathan-Turner’s penchant for stunt casting saw Snuffleupagus take on the role of the Myrkur.

It is an apt time to do it. As the TARDIS crew discover when they arrive in Earth orbit and get interrogated and shot at by an automated weapons satellite, the world is on a state of high military alert. The TARDIS ends up landing in an undersea complex – Sea Base 4, a crucial hub of one of the superpower bloc’s nuclear weapons programs. This naturally prompts a security alert – but the Sea Base has bigger problems. For in order to provoke all-out nuclear war and clear the world of humanity for reconquest, the Silurians and Sea Devils have chosen to attack Sea Base 4…

Yes, not only are these old monsters, but we also have an old format coming back – the Base Under Siege. We kind of had a taste of that in Earthshock, but that was just a mode the story moved into in its second half; this one follows the Base Under Siege playbook, as laid down in the Troughton era, more or less to the letter. You have the TARDIS crew showing up in the middle of a situation, you have bickering in the ranks of the people in the base, you have the locals mistrust the Doctor and his buddies, you have monsters attacking, you have the Doctor help save the day after a bit of a bodycount is racked up.