Hogan Reviews

The Destiny of the Doctor “advanced audiobooks” roll on with Doctors 4, 5 and 6. While none are bad the Fourth and Sixth Doctors are pretty dull but I will praise the Fifth Doctor story, “Smoke and Mirrors”, as it’s a great little story and well worth the little money these stories go for individually nowadays. Anyway, let’s see how the Eleventh Doctor cameos in these three stories then!

The Fourth Doctor story is “Babblesphere” and opens with that classic set up of The Doctor and Romana (Lalla Ward) arriving on a planet and immediately seeing someone die and being arrested as the likely culprits. They find out that the people of the planet (“Hephastos”) are all linked to a mental network called the Babblesphere via “Interface chips” and not having one is a major crime. While The Doctor gets measured for his device Romana chats with a fellow prisoner called Aurelius (Roger Parrott) who was arrested for independent thought and who then fills her in on the details of how the head of the planet, known as “The Prolocutor”, controls the populace, kills anyone whose thoughts wander, and wishes to spread across the stars to all of Earth’s Empire. The Doctor, Romana and Aurelius manage to escape but end up in a room with some headset versions of the interface chip and find out that Aurelius was released from control on purpose so he could lead them here and now he was back under its influence. The Doctor and Romana are forced to wear and headsets and enter the Babblesphere…

“Smoke and Mirrors” sees the Fifth Doctor, Adric, Nyssa and Tegan (Janet Fielding) arrive in a 1920s fun fair after The Doctor received a physic distress call from the area. There they meet The Doctor’s old friend Harry Houdini (Tim Beckmann) who wishes for his old Time Lord friend to debunk a medium that is performing in the same fair. The Doctor heads to the booth and discovers that the medium’s crystal ball is an “Ovid Sphere”, an alien device that can project the mental thoughts of those who hold it. As The Doctor holds it he gets a mental message from his Eleventh self telling him to keep the Ovid Sphere safe as he has to return it to the Ovids in his time. While this is all going on the three companions end up on the run from escaped tigers and cheetahs and stuff and Adric and Nyssa end up hypnotised, the latter seemingly by the Tremas Master via a mirror. While Tegan is chased after by hypnotised friends and fair customers The Doctor is hit on the head from behind by Houdini, who then puts him in a wooden box and rolls it out in the sea. He claims The Master has told him that his old friend kept important information from him and that he is his enemy…

I wonder if there’s a hidden message in all those words faded into the artwork…

“Trouble in Paradise” (which I’m surprised hasn’t been used as a title before this release) has the Sixth Doctor and Peri (Nicola Bryant) get interrupted in the TARDIS by a message from the Eleventh Doctor right away, asking his past self to collect an “Omniparadox” for him, an apparent source of great power created by two paradoxes colliding. The Doctor begrudgingly tracks one down to Earth in 1492, specifically a sailing ship captained by none other than Christopher Columbus (Cameron Stewart) on its way to the New World. After a few misunderstandings that the pair were natives who snuck on board Peri falls overboard when she storms off in a huff after The Doctor refuses to cure a man with tuberculosis due to it being the wrong time period to introduce such medicine. As The Doctor tries to put up with an increasingly jealous and angry Columbus and the fact his TARDIS key was lost Peri washes ashore and is greeted by a bipedal buffalo creature called the “Bovine Herd Leader”, the Bovine being an alien race that used to dominate the early humans of the future Americas but he, their leader, became frozen and the rest of the herd slowly became the regular buffalo. To make things even weirder (and let’s face it, it’s pretty weird already) the Bovine Herd Leader is from the future and has come back via a Time Machine to stop humanity from hunting his kind into extinction. Blimey. While the Herd Leader threatens Peri’s life as he believes she came back in time to stop him The Doctor manages to get into the TARDIS but Columbus followed him, and now has plans to kill him out of jealousy because The Doctor is clearly a greater explorer than he was…

Once again I feel the format is a lot of the issue here, apart from “Smoke and Mirrors”, which was really fun. “Babblesphere” especially I found lacking solely because Lalla Ward didn’t make for a great reader, and “Trouble in Paradise” just didn’t work for me in general…

The Continuity:

Smoke and Mirrors was the only story I remembered going back into this re-listen…

Technically there are a bunch of references in “Babblesphere” as both Doctors and Romana towards the end start listing off old enemies, old Time Lord Presidents and Time Lord myths and other stuff nearly all of which reference old stories from TV and Audio. It would take ages to list though…

“Smoke and Mirrors” has Harry Houdini as an obvious one, though referring to having known Houdini is a recurring gag he has actually only made one major appearance, in the Eighth Doctor novel “The Great Escapes”. Obviously there are plenty of mentions of The Master’s actions with Nyssa’s father during Fourth Doctor TV story “The Keeper of Traken”, as well as the planet’s destruction and the Doctor’s regeneration in “Logopolis”. The Master is “trapped in another dimension” as the last time he was seen was being trapped in his own Castrovalva pocket world in, well, “Castrovalva”.

“Trouble in Paradise” doesn’t really have any non-Destiny links. Peri mentions a few other historical persons she’s met while travelling with The Doctor, but that’s about it.

Overall Thoughts:

It’s a mixed bag, this lot. “Babblesphere” is fine but not super-engaging (especially as Lalla Ward sounds bored reading it), “Smoke and Mirrors” is good fun with some fun twists, whereas “Trouble in Paradise” was hard to concentrate on due to the prose and the absurd plot was presented really straight which made it just seem… off. I guess I’ll split the scores three ways this time!

Babblesphere:

Smoke and Mirrors:

Trouble in Paradise:

“Babblesphere” is actually quite simple, as I mentioned The Prolocutor kills anyone whose thoughts are too unfocused and unnecessary so The Doctor and Romana get everyone to start thinking random things and then put their own massive Time Lord minds into the mix as well, overloading the Babblesphere with boring trivial nonsense. During this the Eleventh Doctor’s mind enters the Babblesphere and has a chat with his prior self and Romana and asks them to make a copy of the Prolocutor’s program and keep in on a harddrive until he can use it in the future, which Romana does. The Doctor then adds a copy of his own mind so it doesn’t get lonely…

“Smoke and Mirrors” ends with Tegan managing to break Adric out of his daze, then the two of them being in immediate danger shortly after breaks Nyssa out of her trance and she rescues them. While Nyssa is upset about the Master having her father’s face and still messing with her (something that really doesn’t get addressed as often as it should…) The Doctor arrives, revealing that Harry’s own teaching showed him how to escape and he managed to break Harry out of the Master’s control. The Doctor believes The Master is using a second Ovid Sphere to control the one at the fair and hypnotise people from another dimension entirely, but instead of destroying this Sphere to break the connection (as he now knows he has to keep it) he and Tegan pour calming thoughts into it, breaking everyone from The Master’s influence. Harry apologises to The Doctor once more before everyone heads back into the TARDIS, The Doctor making sure to put the Ovid Sphere somewhere safe.

I wonder how many times that image of the Sixth Doctor has been used now…

“Trouble in Paradise” ends with The Doctor and Columbus arriving in time to save Peri just as the Herd Leader reveals that he intentionally drew Columbus to the Americas so he could wipe out the native people and save his race but just when things couldn’t get any weirder a second Herd Leader appears from even further in the future and reveals to his younger self that his plan will fail and that the Europeans will just wipe out the buffalo instead. While everyone is distracted Columbus tries to stab The Doctor in the back but Peri warns him in time and the explorer accidentally strikes the original leader of the Bovine’s time machine and breaks it, thus meaning the second Herd Leader could never have time travelled to warn his younger self and so history stays on course. The remaining Bovine leader runs off, while The Doctor and Peri head back to the ship and find the Omniparadox above the TARDIS, the paradox of two Bovine leaders chatting being one of the paradoxes that created it. Columbus decides to send his men after the Bovine Herd Leader and not write about any of this in his journal while The Doctor secretly cures the man with tuberculosis to calm Peri down…