Hogan Reviews

This is a review I was hoping I would’ve got to in my sadly-put-on-hold “filling in the gaps” covering of older Who stories I had to stop a year or so ago as instead of a big anniversary story with multiple Doctors meeting its instead a near four hour story wrapping up a bunch of the Eighth Doctor and Charley Pollard storylines and setting up the next era of the audio-exclusive series (the show’s TV revival had yet to come about at this point so these audios with Paul McGann were very much the continuation of the show) so while I’m happy to talk about this now it does feel like reviewing a season finale without having reviewed any other part of the season. There is a brief scene with four Doctors talking, in case you’re wondering why it’s part of this marathon, plus each of Doctors 5-7 and a bunch of their companions play other roles in the story as well. Confused? I bet. Strap in, it’s a long story…

Picking up from the end of “Neverland” The Doctor (Paul McGann) and his TARDIS are now infected by “Anti-Time”, like anti-matter in that if anti-time comes in contact with regular time all of the universe will be destroyed. So it’s safe to say Charley (India Fisher) is a bit freaked out, especially as The Doctor is now referring to himself as Zagreus, the bogeyman from Time Lord nursey rhymes, and even struck her. Luckily for her there’s a flash and the two separate, with Charley appearing with her mother Louisa (Anneke “Polly” Wills)) in an flashback of sorts from her childhood when she visited a school teacher called Miss Lime (Elisabeth “Sarah Jane” Sladen) with a strong focus on the book of Alice in Wonderland as her mother turns into the White Rabbit and other strange things happen. She then meets the Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney himself!) who claims to be there to help her. Meanwhile Zagreus wanders around the TARDIS (referring it simply as “ship”) and gets increasingly angry that he can’t find “that girl” and then is whispered to by a distant voice giving him directions around the TARDIS library. This voice is the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee via some old archive recordings that sadly are too faint to hear most of the time) and eventually he finds a sweet spot where The Doctor regains control of his mind, though he begins talking to Zagreus in his head like it’s a separate entity. Zagreus shows The Doctor various timelines (based on the Eighth Doctor comics and novels, which were being released alongside the audios creating three continuing adventures at the same time, though I like to just merge them rather than say they’re separate) and says that if he gets free they’ll all be destroyed.

Meanwhile Charley figures out that the Brig is actually the TARDIS trying to help her via a holographic projection and soon it says that they’re in danger from “The Divergence” and that to explain it he needs to show her some things. Using the TARDIS databanks to fill in the gaps (explaining why many of the characters are played by actors and actresses from the show) Charley and the TARDIS-Brig are virtually taken to some 1950s army barracks. The Doctor on the other hand soon finds himself in a forest somehow and begins talking to the Cheshire Cat (Conrad “C’rizz” Westmaas before the role was created!) and is tricked into getting into a box with a cyanide capsule, a literal Schrödinger’s cat demonstration. The Doctor realises that he’s still in the sweet spot but much like the cat either being alive or dead until you lift the box he realises that he’s either fully The Doctor or fully Zagreus once he leaves his safe space. Back in the sort-of the 1950s Charley and the BrigDIS (that works as a shorthand, why not?) find out that in this base at this time a scientist called Dr. Stone (Nicola “Peri” Bryant) was experimenting with a machine that could peer into other dimensions and the local chaplain Matthew Townsend (Peter “Fifth Doctor” Davison) is hoping to see God on the other side, draggin his niece Mary (Caroline “Erimem” Morris) along for the ride. Onsite soldiers Captain McDonnell (Mark “Turlough” Strickson) and Miss Foster (Sarah “Nyssa” Sutton) are embroiled in a hunt for a spy which turns out to be the latter as she’s found planting a bomb on the machine and during the confusion horrible creatures, the Divergence, try to break through as everyone is killed, or rather everyone was killed back when it actually happened.

I mean with that cover you can see why most people believed it would be a full on multi-Doctor story…

The Doctor worries that if he’s split between a good side and a bad side then so must the TARDIS and is therefore thinking that if his default is the evil Zagreus what does that mean for his beloved ship? We then cut to ancient Gallifrey where the TARDIS projection shows a meeting between the Great Mother (Maggie “Evelyn” Stables) and her High Priestess Cassandra (Bonnie “Mel” Langford) from the Sisters of the Flame and Provost Tepesh (Colin “Sixth Doctor” Baker) and his underling Lady Ouida (Nicola “Peri” Bryant again, because she appeared in the Fifth and Sixth Doctor eras, you see!) from the Great Vampires as they all hate on Rassilon for his betrayal of them and his recent success of creating the Eye of Harmony and mastering time travel. They plan to assault his hidden foundry but when they get there they find Rassilon himself waiting, only for the purpose of the TARDIS projection its Charley, who badly tries to act important and threatening to the others. This is where we get a whole load of continuity dropped in a very short time as Rassilon’s computer starts spilling all the beans. To the surprise of nobody Rassilon turns out to actually be a complete bastard, like all Time Lords of importance besides The Doctor it seems, but to a rather insane degree. He did indeed betray Omega when the Eye of Harmony was created and took the time travel technology for himself and then due to extreme racism used it to not only take the Divergence, a race he saw overtake the Time Lords in the future, and seal them in a timeless void universe instead of letting the natural order of things happen but he also seeded his own image across the early universe in order for the majority of species to in someway resemble him, a gag at the fact that most aliens The Doctor comes across are human-looking (or Time Lord looking I guess!)

Then Tepesh reveals that the Great Vampires actually drank the blood of specially bred animals until Rassilon began to hunt them into extinction for the crime of looking too different from himself, forcing them to feast on intelligence species to survive. To top it off he also reveals that the ability to regenerate that Rassilon is currently working on giving to himself and the rest of his chosen Time Lords is based on Vampire physiology. The final secret is that his great foundry is powered by siphoning off power from the Divergent Universe, making the unfairly trapped creatures into his own personal battery. History then plays out in front of Charley as the barrier keeping the Divergent Universe at bay is turned off and the creatures begin to pour in so Rassilon fireblasts the entire facility and escapes via his own personal Matrix portal, killing everyone else (or in this case, Charley runs through a mirror door to escape). Back in the TARDIS proper The Doctor starts destroying parts of his own ship to get its attention and sure enough the BrigDIS appears and reveals he is indeed the evil side of the ship, corrupted by anti-time, and sends an illusion of the Jabberwock after The Doctor to get him to stop. Meanwhile Charley now wakes in the body of a large animatronic mouse in a theme park where the animatronic animals are at war with the animatronic human characters, with Captain Duck (Sophie “Ace” Aldred) heading up the former and Goldilocks (Bonnie “Mel” Langford again, due to crossing both eras) heading up the latter. They’re fighting over their creator, the great animator Walton Winkle (Sylvester “Seventh Doctor” McCoy) who is frozen in suspended animation at the top of the tower, so yes this is a big on-the-nose Walt Disney parody.

Here’s some fun fanart to break up the wall of text…

The battle leads them to “Uncle Winkie” and he’s woken up, disappointed to find there are no children around to entertain. Over the next few scenes we find out his theme park was moved from planet to planet and currently its situated on the barren planet of Gallifrey right where Rassilon’s foundry was located and that its 60 billion years into the future and the universe is dying out. Only here where there are no real biological sentient life left in the universe, can the Divergence find the way into the universe, which they do just as Winkie dies of the heart condition he was original frozen to fix. We finally get things properly moving now as The Doctor manages to pull Charley out of the TARDIS projection and back to reality but she unsurprisingly doesn’t trust him. Its here that Rassilon himself appears (played by Don Warrington), who reveals he has made an alliance with the corrupted TARDIS and part of that deal was for it to show him those three events with the Divergence. Before she can process any of this there is a flash and she suddenly wakes up in a barren landscape with Townsend, Tepesh and Uncle Winkie with her, and a description of a tower and a certain horn soundeffect makes any Doctor Who fan know full well they’re in the Death Zone on Gallifrey…

*Phew*, and that’s just Parts 1 and 2, I’ve left Part 3 for the spoiler section! When it comes to Zagreus there are two main reasons people are down on it, the first is they thought it was a big anniversary multi-Doctor release due to the packaging, which makes sense I guess, especially if you drop in without knowing the backstory of what happened before this; and the other is that it’s overly long and… yep! I do enjoy the story and its idea of using the classic cast but not in their characters isn’t bad by itself, but at close to four hours it’s definitely too long…

The Continuity:

Obviously the story follows on from the cliffhanger at the end of “Neverland” and follows directly into the next release, “Schzero”. The Death Zone and the Dark Tower are all features of the 20^th Anniversary story “The Five Doctors”, while the alternate timelines the Doctor sees have descriptions of the events of the book “The Adventuress of Henrietta Street” and the comic “Oblivion”, respectively. This is the first depiction of Rassilon being evil but his next TV appearance in the Tenth Doctor story “The End of Time” carried this idea on quite nicely. Finally the TARDIS manifesting as a living person of some description is once again used in the Eleventh Doctor story “The Doctor’s Wife”.

Beyond those there are just lots of reused quotes and little references to past stories, nothing major.

Overall Thoughts:

“Zagreus” is a tough one to talk about, really. I’m fully aware that at five minutes short of four hours its way too long and could easily have been trimmed down significantly, but for whatever reason I still really enjoy listening to it. This is my third time and I still love following the zany story, the silly continuity nods and the downfall of Rassilon. Definitely can’t give it a five though, even split up over three days like I did it was still clearly going on a bit…

Romana (Lalla Ward) and Leela (Louise Jameson) are summoned by Rassilon to his own personal Matrix space which is currently in the form of the Death Zone as it was in ancient times. He demands Romana give up her Presidency so his new ally Zagreus can take over, then uses his mental powers to influence Leela to attack her. Meanwhile Charley realises that Townsend, Tapesh and Winkie are the only three people besides Rassilon to have seen the Divergence and the only three TARDIS avatars to be portrayed by past incarnations of the Doctor and that there must be a reason for that. The four travel to the Dark Tower and Charley subdues Leela by knocking her out from behind and begins to plan out what to do while Rassilon summons The Doctor and the BrigDIS to his foundry, where the evil TARDIS smelts down its Police Box-shaped outer-shell on Rassilon’s behalf, the sight of which makes The Doctor lose all hope the fully give in to becoming Zagreus. As this is happening Charley realises that the three Doctor-looking people have some of the Doctor’s memories inside of them and that they must also be partial copies of The Doctor, so when they all travel to the Foundry via the same mirror-shaped exit Rassilon used to escape the Doctors and Charley head to the Time Lord founder while Romana and Leela do battle with the BrigDIS, who ends up being knocked into the same smelting pot its shell had been melted in (with a proper Darth Vader “Nooooooooo!” to boot!)

This gag picture in Doctor Who Magazine must have been so confusing to someone who hadn’t listened to it…

Zagreus is at an anvil forging a sword made out of his old ship’s hull and despite his three past selves’ actions is still very much under Rassilon’s control. Rassilon takes the Anti-Time Sword and cuts all three of them down, with each one giving inspiration words to their sort-of other self. Zagreus is then given the sword and told to kill Charley but he can’t, he gives the sword to his old companion and begs her to kill him before Zagreus really takes full control, which she eventually does while breaking down in tears. We get a brief scene in The Doctor’s head where the Eighth Doctor talks to his Fifth, Sixth and Seventh selves, who all tell him that this is what happens when one of them dies and its time to take his place to watch his next incarnation take over, but then it doesn’t happen, and all the Doctors believe they have finally died for good. What happens instead though is that the sword absorbed the lost parts of The Doctor that had manifested in the three avatars and by being stabbed they were restored in him, giving the admittedly still Zagreus-crazed Doctor free will to turn on Rassilon and throw him through his own vault door and into the Divergent Universe to face the consequences of his actions. Zagreus then turns to attack his friends but the BrigDIS appears and reveals that the only part of him forged in the sword was the Anti-Time and when this avatar entered the same melting pot as the rest of him he reformed without the infection. It then uses its powers to remove the Zagreus part of the Doctor’s mind for good.

The crisis is finally over but one fact still remains: The Doctor is infected with Anti-Time and if he steps out into the actual universe it could destroy everything, so he’s decided to head into the timeless Divergent Universe where he can explore the many civilizations Rassilon deemed to be a threat to the future of the Time Lords without the fear of his Anti-Time destroying everything. Romana is regretful but The Doctor is frankly sick of the Time Lords after yet another hero turned out to be an insane egomaniac and is looking forward to a break. He does try and dissuade Charley from joining him due to how dangerous it is but after a chat with Leela she sneaks back on board the TARDIS as it heads for a whole new Universe…