“Cold Fusion” was originally a novel for the “Virgin Missing Adventures” line, pitched as a Fifth Doctor story that happened to feature the Seventh Doctor and his then-current companions from the main “New Adventures” line, but like some of the other novels (though not nearly as many as I’d like) it was turned into a full cast Audio Drama, and boy it’s a really fun one too. At six parts it moves around at a quick pace and gives lots to do for pretty much everyone while keeping a light-hearted but occasionally serious tone. Let’s take a look at what is the last audio in this marathon (as I’m going by release order of the original book, otherwise it would’ve been closer to the start!)
The story actually starts with the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) at a waystation on a wintery planet talking to a lady about local prospectors coming across a machine in a cavern that caused a ghost to appear only for a similar ghost to appear in that very location. The Doctor leaves by transmat while the lady is executed by the arriving Adjudicators, Earth Federation private police, for spreading propaganda. We then switch to the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison), Adric (Matthew Waterhouse), Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) and Tegan (Janet Fielding) in the TARDIS, though the ship is soon forced to land on the same wintery planet as his later self. They’re soon split up as The Doctor and Adric check for “Time Field Disturbances” as a local Skitrain (basically a train that runs on skis rather than rails…) while Nyssa and Tegan check in at a local hotel. This is where they run into the Seventh Doctor’s companions as Adric and his Doctor come across Roz (Yasmin Bannerman) who is looking for the same disturbances as they are but makes a break for it when Adjudicators arrive, while Tegan spots a man doing a terrible fake Australian accent at the bar and it turns out to be Chris Cwej (Travis Oliver) using the name “Bruce Jovanka”, making Tegan even more furious.
Meanwhile the Fifth Doctor and Adric are arrested for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, as per usual, and we’re introduced to some key story-specific characters and lore as the Adjudicator Provost-General Medford (Jeremy Hitchen) explains how their experiments on the planet, headed by Chief Scientist Juno Whitfield (Sharon Maughan), are being hindered by a group of terrorists trying to get them to leave the planet, headed by a man named Adam (Peter Caulfield). The two of them are led down to a room where a lady (soon voiced by Christine Kavanagh) is being held in cryo-sleep assumed to be unconscious but instead she reaches out to The Doctor’s mind via telepathy and learns of his fleeing Gallifrey with Susan and remarks how there seems to be a contradiction in his past while The Doctor suddenly gets flashes of wearing the patient’s husband’s wedding ring and being with her. The Doctor blocks the patient from delving any further back in his past before suddenly watching her regenerate. While all this is going on Tegan and Nyssa have started going back and forth with Chris while he’s keeping up with Roz, who has broken into the same “Scientifica” that the Fifth Doctor and Adric are at. The Adjudicators arrive and Nyssa and Chris escape but Tegan is captured, and then we go around like this for a bit. The Doctor and Adric are arrested but the Adjudicators doing that are killed by more ghosts, then as the two of them find and try and escape with the patient Adric stays behind to get arrested to give them time to run, though in this case their pursuer ends up being Roz who takes Adric with her when he says he’s “with The Doctor.”
Given how many cast members they had to fit in half a square it’s a damn good cover.
The Fifth Doctor finds Tegan in a cell on the way out and frees her and its his companion who names the patient “Patience” on the way out. She makes mental contact with The Doctor again during a Skitrain escape and he finds out she had a “pioneering husband” and thirteen children. As this is happening Nyssa and Chris travel to “Skybase” and find a space freighter unloading some mysterious boxes that end up containing fusion bombs, just one of which could take out a city, this amount could take out the entire planet. Back with The Doctor, Patience and Tegan, their Skitrain is attacked by the Adjudicators and they end up buried in an avalanche and while The Doctor and Patience go into a trance to conserve oxygen our titular Time Lord experiences a memory of Patience and her husband having their house raided just as their son’s daughter is being born, all from the perspective of being her husband again. They’re soon saved by some of Adam’s soldiers. As all of this is going on Roz and Adric have transmated to a cavern where they meet up with the Seventh Doctor, who is shocked to see Adric alive and in front of him. The two of them go off together as Roz is ordered to activate an old machine that was dug out of the cavern that the Doctor describes as an extremely old proto-TARDIS and when she turns it on thousands of the killer ghosts appear and surround The Doctor and Adric. They’re held back by a simple chalk circle drawn on the floor but The Doctor speaks to the ghosts and wishes to know more about them so steps out of the circle and vanishes into thin air along with the ghosts…
As you can see by splitting the main cast into three and having them move all around locations and having the odd big set pieces means the story never slows down and the key mystery of “who is Patience?” adds a lot to it as well. I’m sure a lot of the new characters and surroundings were further fleshed out in the novel too, but with so many novels not adapted into an easier-to-digest audio drama to get through I’m unlikely to read it any time soon…
The Continuity:
I guess the main one is Patience, who is pretty much made out to be The Doctor’s wife and Susan’s grandmother (though whether that’s a young First Doctor or an incarnation earlier than Hartnell isn’t clear, for those Timeless Children plot lovers!) as she appears again in “The Infinity Doctors”, but a cursory glance at that book’s TARDIS wiki entry makes me think it’s not that simple… at all.
In the audio, when the two Doctors are talking towards the end, they mention how they’ve met before though the Fifth Doctor doesn’t have many memories for the usual reasons. Funnily enough yesterday’s story in the marathon, “The Sirens of Time”, is mentioned, as is 50th Anniversary TV story “The Day of the Doctor” and the Fifth Doctor / Tenth Doctor Children in Need special “Time Crash”.
Overall Thoughts:
I like how both covers have Adric in Adjudicator armour, as well as an Adjudicator robot thingy, which I don’t think I actually mentioned in the review…
“Cold Fusion” is a great story in general, let alone a multi-Doctor one. It nicely separates the cast out and has several big events and set pieces to keep things going at a steady pace all leading to a satisfying finale. The mystery of Patience is a good one too, though it seems that didn’t really go anywhere in the end sadly. Either way though, both times I’ve listened to this has been a great three hours-ish spent, so I’m sure I’ll be doing it again!
Roz tells Adric that The Doctor told her to turn the machine back on in fifteen minutes but the two are captured by Whitfield and her team. Meanwhile Nyssa and Chris try to reach The Doctor with the fusion bombs but crash their ship, losing the bombs down an icy crevasse though luckily it was a crevasse that The Doctor, Tegan, Patience and Adam were currently at. The Doctor is naturally horrified at the bombs and defuses each one before they continue their journey and meet up with Nyssa and Mr. Cwej soon after. They eventually end up at the main cavern facility and Medford loads the proto-TARDIS with all the fusion bombs and orders The Doctor to send it on a return journey so they can destroy the ghosts’ homeworld but our Time Lord knows that the ghosts aren’t what’s on the other end, it’s the early Time Lords on Gallifrey. However the Doctor also knows he reversed all the bombs polarity so it doesn’t matter and sends the machine on its way but the Provost General shoots Patience dead anyway before he and Whitfield are disabled by Adjudicator tech. As things get dicey the Seventh Doctor arrives with the ghosts and says they’re called the Ferutu and come from an alternate timeline where ancient Gallifrey was destroyed by the bomb his earlier self just sent on its way but that its okay because he reversed the polarity of the bombs before they got packed.
This obviously sends the Fifth Doctor into a panic because if that’s the case then he unreversed the polarity, arming them again (apart from one bomb that Adam had pocketed and later tries to detonate, but as he pocketed it before the Fifth Doctor “disarmed” it, so he’s just arrested with a faulty bomb). The two Doctors mentally join forces to bring the ship back down the time stream and save Gallifrey while also coming up with a plan to freeze the bombs mid-stream so both universes can co-exist. The Ferutu agrees to the plan and assists but is horrified to find the two bomb-laden TARDIS collide and explode, thus meaning his entire timeline/universe now doesn’t exist and to make matters worse the ghost is trapped in a small chalk circle the Seventh Doctor created with nothing to do but exist in the small space for eternity. The Fifth Doctor apologises for his future self’s actions but the Ferutu just says he would’ve done the same and accepts his fate before telling the Doctor that he’ll meet Patience again because “love endures”. The two Doctors have a quick chat, including The Seventh mentioning the calculations the two of them have to do with their other eleven selves to save Gallifrey (that clearly wasn’t in the original book!) while the Fifth Doctor says a codephrase that his later self told Roz to listen out for to stop his younger incarnation, so she knocks him out cold. The Seventh Doctor explains that was in case he figured out what he was doing with the Feturu while they were tricking them rather than now and then all walk off as the Fifth Doctor’s companion arrive and try to wake him up…
Apparently in the original Novel the Seventh Doctor is far harsher towards his earlier self, when telling Roz to knock him out he pretty much said it was because he was a soft-hearted fop in this incarnation. So I hear, anyway…
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