Fans Fiction The Eternal Diamond: Part Two The Key to Everything by S. Florence

 

6pm came just as Cook finished setting the dinner table in the dining room for 3 people. Lady Christina, The Doctor and himself seeing as he was an integral part of everything that occurred within the manor walls. The sound of wheezing engines broke the silence and a warm gust of wind blew the swan like origami napkins from the place settings and into the pea soup warming on the serving sideboard. Cook huffed with resignation as the dining room door flew open and Lady C came bustling in in her dressing gown and pyjamas, not wanting to give the new lady Doctor anything to fancy about her seeing as she had snogged her once when she was a man! Waiting with baited breath for the Tardis doors to open and slightly unnerved that all she was thinking about was that kiss! She gave a sideways glance at the sideboard and pulled a confused face. 

“Cook, why are their napkins in the pea soup?”

“Erm, no idea MI ‘Lady, must ‘ave been Hugo. I’ll flog the silly old git later”

“Well, I’m not eating it. Go fetch the steak whilst I greet the Doctor” 

Cook nodded and left the room mumbling under his breath. “If by steak yer mean fish ‘n’ chips from the chippy down south street then yeh alright”

Cook left and the Tardis doors opened and an old man stepped out looking very frail and slightly confused, not only at his surroundings but at the woman in front of him who seemed to be dressed for bed. 

“Hello, did you call? I’m the Doctor! Well, what is it girl?”

Christina stared slightly open mouthed for a bit and frowned, trying to respond to the dodgy looking pensioner in front of her feeling slightly nauseous as she tried to push the image of that snog out of her mind before she spoke.
 “You’re the Doctor? Really? Oh dear, what happened? I know it’s been a few years since we last met but has it really been long enough for you to have aged so much and you’re a man again I see. Did you get my message, the one about the key?”

Unknown to Christina, phoning the time vortex to reach the Doctor was a very fractured experience in that there were so many versions of him zooming about in space and time that it was impossible to know which version of him you would get! And, unbeknown to her, she had reached the very first version of him, a man so old and yet so young by comparison that he had never met nor heard of Lady Christina de Souza before and in fact in his time she hadn’t even been born yet!

“Oh, that was you was it? Yes, I got the message. It’s the year 2021 isn’t it? Very futuristic I must say although not as advanced as I imagined. Still using a basic cellular device for contact when its very easy to establish mind to mind connections, you just need to concentrate more. If you’re looking for the Omnia Clavis then you’re out of luck, it was stolen from me some time ago. It is strange though because as soon as I received your message the Tardis locked onto the Omnia and brought me here, to this house and in this time. It is said that the key will only present itself when an acceptable trade is offered for it, so what do you have my dear?

   Christina stared somewhat confused as the old man rattled on in what seemed to be a very old-fashioned dialect and offered him one her of best educated responses…. “huh?”

“My dear, what have I stumbled into? It seems the human race has travelled backwards and not progressed forwards. I am the Doctor, the original you might say and by the look of confusion spreading across that pretty face of yours I would say you were not expecting me but possibly a newer version of me, is that Correct?”

Christina nodded

“Your primitive communications devices found me in the time vortex, it is how we travel through time and space and on a day when I myself was looking for something valuable to me so the two connections have been made and here I am. You called me and I arrived. That is how it works but not in the order one wishes it would. Are you in possession of an eternal diamond by chance? One you wish to trade for the Omnia Clavis? The key to everything?”

   Understanding slightly more than she originally did, Christina nodded, still open mouthed and possibly dribbling but she managed to regain her composure as the mention of the key.

“Yes! Yes, I have the diamond but I am confused, the key has been in my family for years, at least 100 or so and it has been passed down to me by my family lastly my father who left it to me in his will. I had no idea what it was until you, or a future you turned up here 2 years ago and took it from me claiming it was some kind of key to the universe and would only be returned once I returned to you the diamond which I had stolen from you, namely the eternal diamond. The thing is, I hadn’t actually stolen it from anyone at that time and I had to go looking for it and literally only came across it last week and stole it from a jeweller last night so none of this is making any sense”

   The Doctor listened with great interest and great boredom and wondered why he bothered to save the human race anymore when all they did was babble on and dribble down the front of their bed clothes.

“I have no idea what you are talking about, I would just like to know if you have the diamond? If you do then bring it to me, if it is indeed the eternal diamond then the key shall be returned to you”

“But you said the key was stolen from you, so you don’t have it do you?”

“That is true but as I said before if you had cared to listen, the key will present itself when there is a compatible trade for it. I do not know who stole it from me, only that it was and it ended up within your family meaning you had it all along”

   No one ever said time travel was easy and the inconsistencies of jumping time were starting to show. Nothing ever ran in a smooth straight line so nothing ever would make sense, a situation the Doctor had come to terms with long ago and now never questioned but one the humans would never get their tiny brains around.  Before he could insist she bring him the diamond, the dining room door opened and Cook walked in with 3 bags of fish ‘n’ chips and large box containing the diamond which he placed on the table and opened.

“The eternal diamond. Thought to be alien in origin but no beggar knows. Whats’it do then?”

   The Doctor stepped forward and took a closer look and smiled before reaching out for it and placing it inside his coat.

 “It is the heart of a storm on my home planet of Gallifrey. Without the storm our crops cannot grow and we cannot feed ourselves. It was lost during the Autumn Rains of Never, and we feared it had gone forever and how it turned up on earth I do not know but with our last stocks diminishing from the 5 years without the storm, we can now farm our lands again”

“It was Cooks turn to look confused” You’d be better off getting’ yerselves a Tesco I reckon”

Once he had the diamond safely in his possession the strangest thing happened. The sound of wheezing engines followed by a warm familiar wind brought another Tardis into the dining room making Cook step back with fear and panic so he was using Lady C as a human shield just in case the Time Lords had come to invade Earth. Instead, the door opened and a woman with a blonde bob stepped out sinking Christina’s heart completely as she was still hoping her Doctor, the man she had met on the bus, would one day come back for her and take her travelling among the stars whilst they did some more snogging.

“Brilliant!” The second Doctor explained as she looked round the room. “No 13, or is it 14? I never know but hello number 1, got the diamond I see? That’s so cool! I knew we wouldn’t all starve to death cos well, future stuff and all that but I had forgotten a lot of it which is why I made a mental note to myself, bit like an alarm clock, to come here at various points in time to set this all up. The eternal diamond originally fell through a crack in time landing in the jewellery shop just 2 days ago. Obviously, no one reported it stolen cos no one knew it was there but I needed a thief to get it for me and I needed me to come at the right time to get it back, the right time being just a few days after it was lost. With me so far? In order to do that, I had to convince Christina here to get it for me and not try and sell it on herself so I went back in time to another me, number 10, the handsome one with the hair? Took a valuable family heirloom which was the key then travelled back in time again to me being number 1, left it in his Tardis with a note telling him what it was and that he was to keep it safe and then a few regenerations later when I remembered cos, I do sometimes forget stuff, I went and stole it back off him leaving him with the memory of a fabled key to everything that would present itself at the right time to its rightful owner. Then, I gave it to a young woman called Angela de’ Castiel as a wedding present to the 5^th earl of Norway and told her to keep it safe as it was a magic key that could open anything which then became a family fairy story and something of a mystery that would reveal itself at the right time to the right person, then I stole it back off Lady Christina here 2 years ago and when I knew it was time for her to steal the diamond, I did a bit of jiggery pokery on the internet so she would find what she was looking for, and here I am to give the key back now I have the diamond back! Bit of time stuff in-between but it got the job done otherwise Gallifrey would have died long before the time war and nothing I’d done since then would have made any difference to the universe and the earth would have died too”!

   Finished rambling she took a very deep breath and looked very proud of herself, grinning happily as everyone including the other Doctor looked on in complete fascination.

“What time war? What do you mean?” He bellowed at her with etched concern that furrowed his brow in shock.

“OH bugger, erm yeah nothing for you to worry about gramps, you’ll be long gone by then especially if you don’t get the diamond back to the heart of the storm”

   The first Doctor assuming his beloved home world was under attack, left as quickly as he arrived without so much as a thankyou or a nod of appreciation to lady C and her butler leaving lady C and her butler to turn to the new lady Doctor for questioning with one of the questions from Cook wanting to know if she was single which was met with a hard look of menace from her ladyship causing him to lower his head in shame and mumble… “Well, you snogged her so why can’t I?”

“SO, the key? Do you have it? What does it do exactly? I was never left any instructions as to what it opened by my father only that he said it would open something one day when the time was right and I would never want for anything every again, so do you have it?”

The Doctor took the key from her coat pocket and handed it to Christina with a genuine look of remorse on her face.

“I’m sorry Lady C, it’s just a key and one I planted in your family history as a decoy so that I could convince you to get my diamond back. It really doesn’t do anything, it’s just an heirloom now with a bizarre history attached to it. It is alien though, cos I got it from a market stall on the planet Diarumous, but I’ve scanned it and it really is just a key, probably to an old relic of a castle somewhere judging by its size but I really couldn’t tell you where.”

Shrugging, she spied the bag of fish and chips on the table and grabbed one for herself. “Cheer’s mate, love a bit of fish, anyway gotta be going now, planets to save and all that. Laters!”

   Before anyone could say anything more, she left and the Tardis disappeared into the night leaving Cook rather red faced at his indecent proposal and Christina rather red faced from her burning anger at being taken for a fool, used and cheated out of something magical and wonderful that had filled her head with wonder for all of her life, The Key to everything!

She slammed it into Cook’s hand with disgust and took her own fish ‘n’ chips to bed with her to sulk away the night as she attempted to plan a way to get the Doctor back. Cook took his own meal into the kitchen and dumped the key in the bin knowing the bin men would be arriving in the morning and as he sat outside the kitchen door on an old wooden chair eating his fish supper, in the bin unknown to him, the key had stared to glow!

 

The End

Who Reviews The End of Time Parts 1 & 2 by SF Cambridge

 

Starring:

The Doctor - David Tennant

The Master - John Simm

Donna Noble - Catherine Tate

Rose Tyler - Billie Piper

Captain Jack Harkness - John Barrowman

Martha Smith-Jones - Freema Agyeman

Sarah Jane Smith - Elisabeth Sladen

and introducing Matt Smith as the Doctor 

WARNING: IF YOU’VE NOT SEEN THE EPISODE, THERE ARE SPOILERS AHEAD! 

“It is said that in the final days of Planet Earth, everyone had bad dreams. To the west of the north of that world, the human race did gather. In celebration of a pagan rite to banish the cold and the dark. Each and every one of those people had dreamt of the terrible things to come. But they forgot. Because they must. They forgot their nightmares. Of fire and war and insanity. They forgot. Except for one…” 

The End of Time is a 2-part episode depicting the last story of the 10^th Doctor played by David Tennant. In these 2 episodes we see the return of some familiar faces of companions past and present, a glimpse into the Time War on Gallifrey and the much-awaited return of the Master played by John Simm. It’s an emotional journey of regret and refusal as the Doctor takes his TARDIS on one last trip as he travels back and forth through time saving lives and making amends before his impending regeneration.  His was probably the most emotional regeneration I think I’ve seen on Doctor Who and one that caused many a Whovian to break down all over social media as they mourned the loss of David Tennant whilst swearing, they would never watch newcomer Matt Smith step into his shoes and step in he did, gaining nearly as much popularity in the role as his predecessor. 

“He will knock 4 times”, the words of wisdom given to him by Carmen, a woman he met on a bus, the build-up and anticipation we were all waiting for that most of us had put down to something to do with the Master and his rhythm of 4 heartbeat was in fact just Bernard Cribbins as Wilfred Mott, trapped in a radiation chamber, tapping the door wanting to come out! It was a hilarious ending to the long-awaited mystery and Wilf’s own fault for going into the chamber in the first place, but it was all so lovingly done with the Doctor angry at Wilf for putting himself in that position in the first place and Wilf so remorseful that he begged the Doctor to leave him in there until in the end, both characters were willing to sacrifice themselves for each other, so very very sweet. 

Wilfred: “No really. Just leave me. I’m an old man, Doctor. I’ve had my time.”

The Doctor: “Well exactly! Look at you. Not remotely important! But me? I could do so much more! So much more! But this is what I get. My reward. Well, it’s not fair! ….. Oh… I’ve lived too long.”

Wilfred: “No. No no please don’t. No no! Please don’t! Please!”

The Doctor: “Wilfred. It’s my honour.” 

“And so, it came to pass that the players took their final places. Making ready the events that were to come. A madman sat in his empire of dust and ashes. Little knowing of the glory he would achieve. While his saviour looked upon the wilderness in the hope of changing his inevitable fate. Far away, the idiots and fools dreamt of a shining new future. A future now doomed to never happen. As Earth rolled onwards into night the people of that world did sleep. And shiver. Somehow knowing the dawn would bring only one thing. The Final Day.”

Even though Bernard Cribbins was undoubtedly the star of the show at that moment in time, it was in fact David Tennant’s show, and a fitting tribute to an actor who really pushed life, warmth and depth into an ancient alien. 

Not forgetting the newly restored Master brought back to life by his coven of wiccan disciples and the DNA stolen from Lucy Saxon’s lips, John Simm once more managed to portray the Master in such a broken way that you almost felt sorry for him as he gained the realisation that it was his much loved Time Lords who played the drumming in his head as a boy that sent him so insanely mad just as a way to locate him in the future in order to bring Gallifrey back from the clutches of the Time War to press on the surface of reality of Earth’s atmosphere. Knowing this would crush the earth and kill every human being on it the Doctor knew that it wasn’t just his time that was ending, it was all time. 

Timothy Dalton’s depiction of Rassillon was a welcome addition to the story and he played the part well, although I could have done without all the spitting he did, but the mystery woman who appeared to Wilf several times by way of visions, urging him to once more be a solider and help the Doctor was far too confusing because it left the viewers wondering who the hell she was without revealing an ounce of information about herself. Was she the Doctor’s mother perhaps? Who knows?! Certainly not us so what was the point to her character? It did however give us the explanation for Carmen’s prophesy at the end of Planet of the Dead. “It is returning. It is returning through the dark. And then Doctor— Oh but then… He will knock four times.” 

The Doctor: “Something is returning.” Don’t you ever listen? That was the prophecy. Not some “one,” some “thing”.

The Master: What is it?

The Doctor: They’re not just bringing back the species. It’s Gallifrey! Right here. Right now.

What I absolutely love about the episodes and in any film or program that I watch, is when they do or say something in a time before, when someone says something of seemingly little importance and then future episodes down the line suddenly bring that back into focus and you realise that it was part of the very fabric of the storyline woven in and out of each episode like a golden thread. Scenes like that, like the one where you suddenly realise that everything leading up to this point was prophesized by a side character in the past and it literally opens up the story to you in ways you couldn’t imagine. The same thing happens in a future episode of Doctor Who starring Matt Smith. It is brilliant writing at it’s best.  When you watch them back, even when you know what’s coming, you start seeing other things of similar importance that you had previously missed. It’s pure magic from the imaginations of magicians. 

I think personally I would have preferred both episodes to have been one long special episode rather than split in 2 parts. I think the story would have flowed better and our anticipation of wanting to know what was coming next would not have been diluted by a week wait and life filtering out part 1 from our minds so that we almost needed a re cap before watching part 2.

The master turning everyone into himself using the medical arch to create the master race seemed a bit insignificant to me and its something the story could have done without as were some of the sub characters brought into the show to give it that comedy edge “SHIMMER!” I get that the Master is deranged but what would remaking the world in his image have achieved in the long run? It just seemed like a sub plot that died before it really got a chance to take hold and develop. 

I did however enjoy Donna’s brief return and I was happy to see she had retained some of her Time Lord powers from her brief interaction with Time Lord DNA. I think her story ended far too soon, it was a sad day when he made her forget everything she had done and sent her back to living her normal boring life. Whilst it obviously saved her life, she was such a great addition to the show that I would have loved to have seen her interact with Missy in future episodes. 

We could have had more Gallifrey, more of an insight into the Time War and how the Time Lords became trapped in their bubble of time, more about where Gallifrey had been hidden, more about the Master and the Doctor as children, I think seeing as these 2 episodes were Doctor 10’s final farewell which is never seen on an impending regeneration, more of his history and the story which brought him to earth in the first place would have been better, but as we’re not saying goodbye to the Doctor only a version of himself, it was to say in all fairness a very good story, if not slightly tongue in cheek. 

My favourite part was towards the end when Donna got married and the Doctor gave her a winning lottery ticket which he brought when borrowing a pound off her father in the past before he died. It was a scene that made me tear up completely, watching the faces of Donna’s grandad and mother crumple when they realised what he had done and even more so when Wilf blew him a kiss goodbye, I had literally gone then. 

Saving Martha and Mickey from a Sontaran and finding out they were married was lovely to see, as was him saving the life of Luke smith, Sarah-Janes Smith’s adopted son and finding Jack Harkness in a space bar and introducing him to Alonzo but I was less than thrilled when he went back to visit Rose Tyler in the days before she first met the doctor in his 9^th regeneration, only because Billie Piper had aged too much to be so young and it showed on screen which kind of took the emphasis of that scene away from its meaning, however it redeemed itself with Odd Sigma singing the doctor to sleep as he took the TARDIS into space and openly declared… “I don’t want to go!”  breaking the hearts of Whovians throughout time and space as he became the long awaited, (my personal opinion) Matt Smith, a man far greater and as far better Doctor, going from the man who regrets, to the man who forgets and starting his journey with the immortal words…” And still not ginger!”

 

Beyond The TARDIS Mark of the Berserker Part 2 by Andrew Allen

After a quick recap of last week’s misadventures. Rani and Luke do the logical thing, and attempt to ring Sarah Jane herself for help – leading to a cute cameo from Lis Sladen who’s turned her phone off in accordance with the rules of the hospital in which she’s alien-hunting (apparently the ward is OK with all other sonic devices). When they can’t get in touch with the lead of the show, Rani and Luke begin to call up the rest of the supporting cast, leading to another cute cameo from Mariah and her dad, who manage remarkably quickly to hack into the secret files of UNIT and find out the history of this week’s Scary Alien Artefact.

Meanwhile, Clyde’s dad is fulfilling his function as Typical Nightmare Weekend Divorced Dad by getting his son lots of new clothes and driving around in a flashily expensive car (yes, it’s all stolen, but that’s almost beside the point).Clyde has renounced his friends and any degree of interest in ever saving the world again. It reminds you of what the style of the Doctor Who universe was when it was being overseen by Russell T Davies – OK, fine, have the world about to end, but if you can’t push that crisis into the background in order to concentrate on a family dispute, then the story isn’t worth doing.

In this, the script is subtly economical too, never taking half a page of dialogue to achieve what can be delivered in just a few words: as soon as Carla discovers that Paul’s car is heading towards the marina, her reaction is absolute and immediate: ‘He’s taking my baby,’ she cries, terrified. We’ve said it before, but in many ways SJA, via its script, very often proves itself to be somewhat more mature than its parent show (no, we’re not even entertaining the possibility that one might call Torchwood ‘mature’ – not without smirking, anyway).

By the end of the episode, everyone is gridlocked into an immovable position – how exactly can you defeat a force that can bend everyone to its will? This is a story that has very little of Sarah Jane in the episodes, which is a trick that the concurrent seasons of Doctor Who used to do. But – with the exception of Turn Left – those stories were not particularly concerned with the absence of the title character – indeed, in Love & Monsters, or Blink, the Doctor still prowls around the edges and influences the plot. This double of Sarah Jane Adventures goes a little further, suggesting that as powerful and resourceful as the supporting cast are, the story cannot continue without Sarah Jane, and the day can be won only by bringing the star of the show back into the mix: which is exactly what the episode does, with a quick handwave of exposition to explain why she’s suddenly in the right place at the right time.

By the time we get to the epilogue, Clyde gets to talk about his ‘found’ family – Sarah and friends – indicating that he is who he is because of knowing them – while Ms Smith gets to briefly mention her own parents, which is so incongruous it can only be a plot seeding for a forthcoming episode ..   

Fans Fiction The Mystery of Mayhurst Manor part 2 by Sarah Cambridge

The heat was well and truly beating against the cellar door as the Doctor spoke, revealing the truth he was trying to get through to his shocked companion.

   She had always hated the thought of being trapped in a building that was on fire, ever since she had watched the film The Towering Inferno, one night when she’d had the prison TV room to herself after Trish the Snitch got everyone in trouble on C wing for helping themselves to extra potatoes at dinner, leaving them all confined to their cells for the night. Lady C, as it was well known, was very allergic to potatoes and hadn’t had so much of a crisp since she was 5 years old and had blown up like an air balloon during one of daddy’s parties which ended abruptly with the sound of ambulance sirens and mummy crying into her wine glass as her baby girl looked like the Sloth from the goonies.  Now here she was, living her nightmares and once again in a life and death situation courtesy of the Doctor.

   “That’s it! I’m leaving right now and going home!  You can stay if you like Doctor but I will not become part of the fire and rescue service for an empty house!  I took that pendant knowing the lady of the manor had died and there was no one, not one living member of her family left and it was all due to be sold at auction. I just got there first and saved myself some serious money. Its my retirement fund and you can’t have it. I won’t let you!”

   She was almost in tears at this point. Scared of the fire raging against the door knowing that was all that was standing between her and death, and angry that her beautiful pendant might be taken from her when she had gone to great lengths to protect it and keep it hidden.

The doctor shook his head in confusion and shouted at Christina who nearly dropped the phone she was holding as she was about to text herself in the past.

   “You don’t understand, do you? Is it because you have smoke in your ears or have I not explained it properly? That pendant is the reason Mayhurst Manor is on fire! This house, the Mayhurst family, they weren’t just a load of posh people who had some money. They were witches! Well, Lady Jane was and from a very noble family line too. Lord Harry took her name and title when they married, albeit it for the money but he had no idea who she really was, but they had a daughter. Harriet-Jane Mayhurst, or as you and I know her, Harri the witch? That pendant had a protection spell on it to keep Harri safe after her mother had died because she knew that once her husband discovered her magical heritage and in turn his daughters, he might not be too pleased to know he’d married a witch, and as it happened, he wasn’t!  He killed Lady Jane himself and locked Harri in the cellar, this cellar for 5 years when she was 7 years old so that she could never receive the gifts her mother would bestow upon her when she became of age. Lord Harry’s death was the only reason Harri was found by the staff who had ventured into the cellar in search of his will. You taking the pendant from here after her mother had died, made her vulnerable and she became tortured, twisted into her magical beliefs, believing her father’s rantings that she was as evil and as vile as her mother, until she became cursed by her magic, not gifted.”

   Lady C listened in silence, her fury and impatience growing more each second as the Doctor’s tale of the one person in the world that gave her more hassle than Hugo ever did, was Harri the useless witch. She had worked at the manor around 10 years ago, turning up on her doorstep days after Lady C had returned from the planet San Helios, claiming the Doctor had sent her to help out.  She was to cook, clean and protect the manor with her magic and although Lady C had never really believed in that sort of thing before, having just returned from an alien planet and arrived home by flying bus, she had resigned herself to every possibility in the hope that nothing would shock her anymore. Unfortunately, the only thing Harri helped with was herself to lady C’s vodka supplies and spent most of her time in the stables with Hugo showing him how to turn knackered ponies into dead ponies with the flick of her magic wand. Harri was the bane of Lady C’s life but the Doctor insisted she stay there because as he told her repeatedly whenever she complained…

   “One day, you’ll thank me” …. So far, she had not!

  

   “Oh, so what you’re saying is that the reason Harri is so bad at magic, so unbelievably lazy, useless and rude is my fault? That stealing the pendant made her the way she is? That if somehow I could go back in time and leave the pendant for her in this very cellar when she was trapped down here that it would enable her to receive her magic properly and then she’d become the good wonderful witch she was always meant to be?”

   Lady C scoffed at the idea and muttered under her breath about how ridiculous all this was, but then, suddenly had an amazing idea! Take the Tardis back in time to when Harri was here and leave her the pendant. They could literally drop it off 10 minutes after her father had left her here and she would never go through 5 years of hell meaning she would never turn up on her doorstep years later in the mood she was in and give her 5 years of hell. It was an ingenious plan. Before she could open her mouth and tell the doctor just how clever she was, he grabbed her hand and pulled her back towards the portal, shouting behind him over the roar of the fire.

   “We’ll go back to the Tardis and take the pendant back in time to the moment Harri was put here by her father. That way she’ll get the protection her mother left for her and she’ll get the magic in the way she was supposed to get it, not all backward and twisted. Maybe she’ll turn out to be a better person and the two of you might actually get along. Might save all that nasty business with the ponies too.”

   Before she knew it, she was back in her own vault stepping in spilt gin, and the Doctor picked up the pendant case and opened it carefully, his eyes full of admiration as he looked at it.

   Lady C however was full of annoyance at having her plan and pension plan stolen. Deciding to let it go, she slipped her mobile phone back in her pocket after pressing send seconds before she was dragged through the portal, her look of annoyance now turning to one of quiet smugness.

   “Didn’t you ever wonder why it glowed the way it does or why it vibrated as you held it Christina?” The Doctor asked softly as his eyes lit up with the magical light the pendant omitted.

   “It’s full of magic, literally bursting at the seams waiting to be set free to its rightful owner. You keeping it here for so long could potentially have caused a catastrophic explosion of immense power that the world would never be able to cope with. It’s a wonder you don’t get yourself killed from time to time.”

He was as furious as he was concerned for her, but that was how it was with lady C, she would never learn her lesson.

   “Yes whatever.” she said airily pretending she didn’t care anymore and made her way over to the Tardis waiting to be let in where her mood became a lot darker.

   “But I swear to god Doctor, if we succeed and we get back here and she’s miss magical bloody mega witch with a billionaires fortune living the high life, famously flouting her magical talents all over the news for all to see whilst I have to scrape by on what I can steal, you will feel my wrath until your never ending dying days!”

It would be just her luck to return to an alternate universe where Harri was loved the whole world over and she wasn’t.

   The Doctor looked confused once more and glared at her thoughtfully as he opened the Tardis door and let her saunter in, wondering how women managed to change their moods and their minds so quickly. He dashed in after her and placed the pendant on the console and tapped in some coordinates.

   “Right! I’ll land, you go in, give Harri the Pendant and then leave again. No talking, no helping, no remarking on the smell or mess or giving her any indication who you are or where you’ve come from. In and out, do you hear?”

   Lady C nodded and shrugged and sat herself down impatiently waiting to do as she was told and hoped that by the time she got back, if all was well and Nelson’s column hadn’t been turned into Harri’s Column, she would be walking back into a world where she would never have to go begging to the Queen again, in fact…..she might even be the Queen!

   Seven years in the past, in the year 2012, the notorious cat burglar known as the Lucky cat was about to leave her house the deSouza Manor and go on one of the biggest diamond heists of her life when she received a text from an unknown number. It read….

   “GN 2013/14 Auroras Encore. Pineau De Re. £1000,000 on each. Stash the winnings in Hugo’s clean sock drawer.”

She then gave her past self a name with instructions on what to do with it.

   “Take the Koh I noor you’re about to steal to the Queen and tell her if she wants it back, she’ll have to give you the throne or you’ll tell the world who your real mother is.”

To be continued…….

Reviews God Among Us, Part 2 by Tony J Fyler

Tony goes looking for God.

Finds…a whole bunch of other stuff.

The ‘new’ Torchwood, from Series 5, Aliens Among Us and now into what presumably must be thought of as Series 6, God Among Us, is probably a fairly challenging proposition in and of itself for anyone weened on the likes of series 1-3. It’s post-Miracle Day, back in Cardiff, having apparently abandoned the implications and connections of Miracle Day and bringing in a whole group of new characters. By the time we get to God Among Us, Part 2, it’s probably fair to say that unless you’ve been following since Aliens Among Us, you might not have much of a clue what the hell is going on. It’s like jumping in to Game of Thrones in Season 4. Many people you’ve heard of might already be dead, and there’s always the possibility of dragons.

Or indeed, gods.

The upshot is that aliens invaded Cardiff, not through the whole showy ‘spaceships in the sky, take us to your leader, let us kill your leader, now you belong to us’ schtick of the B-movie, but through council appointments, cutting-edge businesses and commerce. They settled in Cardiff because they were running away from their god. As you do.

Now, God has found them. Apparently, bad things will happen as a result, although the aliens themselves seem mostly to have either been killed or to have sodded off along the way. So now God’s here, more or less kicking her heels.

Just as well there’s some entirely-other alien chicanery, time travel ghastliness and human duplicity for her to get mixed up in, then, all things considered.

Oh yes, and both Jack Harkness and Yvonne Hartman now run Torchwood. Gwen Cooper’s quit, but someone who looks and sounds almost freakishly like her, but who’s also the herald of God, now works for Torchwood. An alien mood-based shapeshifter…has been working for Torchwood, but appears nowhere in evidence in God Among Us, Part 2. One of the best of the new recruits, Mr Colchester, was apparently dead at the end of God Among Us, Part 1. And then, he wasn’t. His current status and the reason for it is undetermined, but on he goes anyway – much like when Owen Harper died, and then simply kept on going. It’s Torchwood, go with it. There’s Norton Folgate, a gay hologrammatical member of 1950s Torchwood who pops in from time to time to stir the pot, and Tyler Steele, a wannabe-Torchwooder who chose the wrong path and backed the alien mayor, but who still hangs around now and then too, as part of the extended Torchwood family. And there’s Sergeant Andy ‘Normal’ Davidson, still involved with the alien embuggerances of the gang, even though his pal Gwen has put them behind her.

This is where you find us as God Among Us, Part 2 opens. Come play our game.

Flight 405, by Lou Morgan, seems like standard Torchwood fare – there’s a plane that’s been crashing since the 50s, and time-travelling Torchwood hologram Norton Folgate (played with a joyful archness by Samuel Barnett) arrives to tell the team they have to solve its problems and let it land because it has a McGuffin on board that could theoretically end or save the world. It’s a story of time-twisting, cause, effect, causality, re-animating bodies and not a little what-the-helling, as Norton, Andy and Yvonne try and break the plane out of its inevitable time loop, rescue the McGuffin and ideally not die – or indeed perpetually not-die - in the process. But once you’re on board the plane, do you not become an inevitable part of the sequence of events that lead it to be crashing but never to crash, doomed to repeat a short sequence of actions time and time and time again?

Barnett, Tracy-Ann Oberman as Yvonne and Tom Price as Andy give strong performances in a story that – by the very nature of its elements – sometimes makes your brain ache. It’s like Back To The Future, but condensed, with less kissing at the Enchantment Under The Sea dance, more ‘If we don’t get this thing off this plane, we’re all going to die…very, very eventually’ and quite a bit more reanimating pilot-corpses.

So that’s nice.

As an episode, it’s very involving – it easily allows you in to sample the mayhem and the humanity at the heart of its concept, and you end up with a satisfying conclusion. What any of it has to do with the whole ‘God Among Us’ arc is difficult at first to understand. You’re gonna want to hold on though. Keep listening.

Hostile Environment, by Ash Darby, is by quite some considerable margin the hardest hitting of the episodes in this set. It’s homelessness, as experienced by thousands of people in Britain today – just with a Torchwood twist. Hostile Environment imagines homelessness policed by drone, where penalties range from immediate injection with experimental drugs to death, and where those who don’t give immediate practical aid to the homeless are encouraged to ‘tag’ them with a phone app – the idea being that once tagged they get help, when in reality, the drones arrive with their stark choice – drugs of death, putting the hostile into the environment, empowered by hapless, deceived would-be doers of good. It’s fitting that wannabe Torchwooder Tyler Steele takes this journey for us because he’s always been particularly slick and morally complex, but the journey is a harrowing one, while always giving us a new view on situations most people are uncomfortable thinking about. You’ll find it hard to breathe listening to some of Hostile Environment, and it finishes with a denouement that, while sad, is probably truthful, and will make you think long and hard once it’s done.

Another Man’s Shoes, by Tim Foley, takes the premise of many a frothy comedy – body-swapping – and, while giving it its comedy due, also highlights the complexities of individual lives, and how we don’t perhaps ever know quite as much as we think we do about even the people we like, love or work with.  To tell you too much about one particular pair of body-swappers would be spoilerific, but suffice it to say, two Torchwooders swap bodies and then have a knee-trembler in a menswear fitting room, while their personalities are in each other’s bodies. Romantic relationships are explored from new perspectives, working relationships are redefined, retcon is deployed to hilarious effect and secrets are unwittingly revealed, which bring the actual threat in the box set into sharper focus. Could it be that the god of the aliens is not such a baddie after all? At least not compared with the resurgence of another group with whom we’ve had dealings in Torchwood before? Another Man’s Shoes is probably, when you boil it down, mostly still comedy froth, but being able to see things from whole new perspectives as regular cast members do impressions of the idioms and mannerisms of their colleagues gives some sense of the easy flexibility with which honesty is treated in every day-to-day walk of life – and the consequences that brings with it.

Eye of the Storm, by David Llewelyn, is one of those Torchwood stories that turns a run-of-the-mill Torchwood day – alien power stations turning people to stone, sending out waves of energy and stoking a tidal wave…as they do… - into something potentially Biblical and cataclysmic that could wipe the Earth clean unless a handy McGuffin is used that could sort everything out. From that straightforward base though, David Llewelyn gives us a story where lies are uncovered, partnerships dashed, allies revealed as having their own dark agenda, and quite possibly, not everyone makes it out alive. There are hair-breadth escapes and dime-turns and plotlines that turn out to be cyclical and the competition between God and a group of would-be humanity-destroyers is played out over tea and chat, while Torchwood does its best, as ever, to stand between the Earth and the Abyss.

Whatever happens in the next Torchwood box set, the dynamic as it’s been set up over the last few sets is probably set to change – or at least, if it doesn’t, it’ll rely on a great deal of luck and some possible classic cliffhanger sleight of hand to get out of the consequences of the end of this set. In some respects, it feels as though God With Us could end on this note, and wake up to a fresh new day in a fresh new arc when ‘new’ Torchwood comes back to us. But the ultimate point of God being among us has yet to be revealed and dealt with – or at least, that’s how it feels.

Overall, God Among Us, Part 2, by virtue of the epic arc that ‘new’ Torchwood is on, by virtue of being quite deeply embroiled in that arc, and because the listener subsequently needs to know quite a bit about the past that Torchwood’s had in order for the dramatic beats to land as heavily as they should (and do, if you know the history), is potentially quite heavy going. On the other hand, if you know all the history, there’s a sense in which, as with the Eighth Doctor Ravenous sets, you could easily become impatient during the individual stories here, waiting for the arc-advancement to come along. It’s a tricky balancing act and no mistake. Does it pull it off? Yes, but only because each story offers the listener something in and of itself – a classic timey-wimey conundrum, a bleak look at homelessness, comedy body-swapping with consequences, and a big apocalyptic drama – and because the writers give some of the new characters enough to do. Paul Clayton as Mr Colchester and Ramon Tikaram as his husband Colin are worth their weight in emotional gold, Tracy-Ann Oberman and Tom Price as Yvonne and Andy are glorious, Samuel Barnett’s Norton Folgate is both waspish and en pointe, and Johnny Green as Tyler Steele has probably the most scary, close to the bone tale to tell us this time out.

God Among Us, Part 2 could well fall between the stools of long narrative arc and individual ‘drama of the week’ for some listeners, and it’s quite a financial investment, so if you’re new to ‘new’ Torchwood, under no circumstances start here – go back and put the hours in with earlier sets. If you do that, or if you’ve done that, there’s plenty of protein for your money here, plenty to get your teeth into, and some cracking performances to advance what you know, and think you know, about Torchwood’s latest iteration.

Beyond The TARDIS Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? Part 2 by Andrew Allen

As we move towards the end of the first season of The Sarah Jane Adventures, the show continues to swagger with an impressive amount of confidence. It’s telling, for instance, that the show is already adept at showing a ‘Sarah-lite’ episode, and indeed one in which the lack of the titular character is indeed the entire point of the story. So, where were we last time? How’s – to coin a phrase – tricks? The Trickster is scrubbing heroes out of existence, Maria can’t help, a meteor is plunging to Earth, and Sarah Jane isn’t around to help (neither is Bruce Willis, for that matter, a fact that Clyde subtly refers to).

There’s a brief interlude in sixties England as Maria tries to convince a young Sarah Jane that things are going very wrong, and that it’s up to her to help – quite accidentally, making Maria this episode’s version of Clara Oswald to The Doctor in Listen. Young Sarah Jane is depicted as ‘clever, but not a swot’, and it’s worth noting that while she’s sensible to the point of being accused of dullness, her sense of unashamed adventure is in her DNA right from the start – she’s more than happy to give in to her best friend’s peer pressure and investigate the abandoned jetty. It’s not long before Maria is zapped to a limbo world, one that looks somewhat like the dreamscape of the It’s A Good Life segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie. Here, Sarah Jane pops up again to give us the plot, becoming very much a surrogate Doctor Who – and as such, gets in a few era-appropriate quips that wouldn’t sound out of place coming from David Tennant, demanding of the mysterious villain ‘Any chance you could be a little less cryptic?’

In answer to that question, the Trickster suggests that Sarah Jane is a vitally important human in the universe (obviously we already knew that), while neatly explaining away the continuity issue of why none of Sarah Jane’s previous victories are relevant to this story – although he does tantalisingly seem to suggest The Doctor is still his main focus, even if whatever he and Sarah Jane did together has now been erased from existence.

Back on Earth, Andrea (Jane Asher) is offering people cake (presumably not her own brand) and listening to old sixties songs, trying to forget her ongoing problems as the speakers blare out Always Something There To Remind Me. In the end – as is often the case with the Russell T Davies era – the world is saved not by the titular character, but by a seemingly unimportant person with everything to lose and even more to sacrifice for the greater good. And so it is with Andrea who manages to face her demons, accepting that she has had a wonderful life, even if that life will now never have happened, although Jane Asher gets a great scene in which she finds the idea that she’s the one who is ‘supposed’ to have died genuinely offensive.  At the risk of belabouring a point, there is something quite wonderful about the pivotal scene in a sci-fi show for kids hinging on two women in their sixties declaring to one another how important their friendship is.

Andrea’s defence of trading Sarah Jane’s life for her own is well played also – ‘I was thirteen; I was terrified’, and blends in well with moments of levity – Alan knocking out the Graske by riding Clyde’s skateboard into him, and Chrissie witnessing her first alien with the entirely reasonable dismissal ‘That’s ridiculous.’

When Andrea decides to revoke her agreement to The Trickster (thereby restoring the timeline to the correct reality), we are told that it was her death as a child that formed Sarah Jane’s sense of righteousness and desire to put the world(s) to rights. Sarah Jane tells her friend that she was never forgotten, and later – once the meteor crisis is averted – is swift to say that it was Andrea that saved the world. As everyone’s memories come back, Alan finds that he knows more than he may have wanted to about aliens, and demands answers. But that’s a story for another time.

Beyond The TARDIS SJA: The Eye of the Gorgon, part two by Andrew Allen

In the second episode of The Eye Of The Gorgon, the boys are grabbed by the nuns (which is exactly as painful as that might sound), while Sarah Jane and Maria have to look on helplessly as the latter’s dad is turned to stone. In an efficient and economical bit of storytelling, neither plot point is immediately resolved, meaning that the Impending Danger That Will Destroy The World ™ is still hanging over the gang.

This means that Joseph Millson doesn’t feature a great deal in this episode, even though a number of people interact with his character – albeit through the medium of his stone effigy (which leads one to wonder if actors who get artistic depictions of themselves in a film or television programme, get to take home the painting or garden gnome version). Juliet Cowan gets a surprisingly moving scene in which she once again gets to hint at depths hidden beneath the shallows.

When Sarah Jane manages to confront the gang of nuns, she’s firmly told that what’s going on is ‘salvation, not invasion’. This, and the vaguely catholic vibe of the baddies this time round makes them look quite fundamentalist – their methods stink, but they do seem to be acting selflessly for a higher purpose: even their chanting isn’t evidence of any kind of mind control (well, no more than any other church service). Somebody else who seems to be surprisingly in control is Mr Smith: he sends Sarah Jane and Maria off on a wild talisman chase, claiming that he doesn’t have enough information to save Alan from irreversibly becoming stone. Later, when Alan is illogically revived, Mr Smith is able to explain why. Such obstuffocation might become relevant later in the season. 

Even if it isn’t foreshadowing the finale, Mr Smith’s delaying tactics do mean that there are successfully three separate story strands as Sarah faces up to the Wimples, the boys are playing escape room in the basement, and Maria resorts to Plan Bea. Considering that all of that doesn’t even include the mild subplot involving Maria’s parents, and is all neatly folded up within twenty five minutes, it’s an instructive piece of narrative for anyone who thinks that three companions is too many characters for an episodic sci-fi TV show (cough cough).

The Bea of Plan Bea is the ‘dotty old lady’ played by Phyllida Law. (She gets a cheeky time travel reference – listen to the record she’s playing when Maria comes to visit), and she has a chance to wear the talisman at the end, promoted by Maria’s entirely logical but scientifically wonky theory that she could be ‘restored’ to an earlier version of herself in much the same way that her father was. Perhaps surprisingly, the episode makes the correct and respectful decision that Bea’s Alzheimer’s cannot be cured by sci-fi magic (a lesson that the much more recent Class failed to learn when dealing with not dissimilar territory), proving itself once again to be a very mature stable partner to Doctor Who. Indeed, what with the demonic chanting nuns, masked disfigured villains and candlelit stone basements, with only a few tonal and aesthetic adjustments, this could very easily be a story out of the classic era of Who, at least on the level of The Image Of The Fendhal.   

There’s a wordless gag involving Sarah Jane’s sonic lipstick (presumably The Doctor never bothered to tell her it wouldn’t work on wood), and generally she gets to do a bit more climbing and physical stuff than she has previously (no rolling down a gentle incline this time round), and generally this a fast paced and efficient two-parter that even manages to pull in a direct reference to Raiders Of The Lost Ark by the end. Keep your eyes open; you might miss something.

Beyond The TARDIS SJA: Warriors of Kudlak: Part 2 by Andrew Allen

While the first episode of this adventure risked standing on the spot while on the central characters run up multiple platforms, episode two sometimes runs the risk of being almost too like a computer game shoot-em-up: there's lots of thrilling running around and shooting lasers, but comparatively minimal story. That said, there is a cute argument to be made about our relationship with violence to be made by the denouement of the episode which we'll chat about in a moment, but in the meantime, it's an episode of boys will be boys with plastic guns.

Because Clyde is required to be funny and derisive at least forty percent of the time, he also has to be curiously slow on the uptake when it comes to making a journey by transmat, assuming it to be a well-budgeted special effect (and he's supposed to be smart). Speaking of special effect budgets, this week's monster saves on his by the time honoured method of wearing a Very Long Coat while chasing Maria and Sarah around corridors, the latter of whom gets a line to calm the kids and infuriate the older continity freaks when she refers to her 'UNIT training'.

Sarah deduces pretty quickly that Kudlak is recruiting soldiers, at the same time that Clyde and Luke discover the bunch of kids who will soon be fighting in an unseen war, who our two friends soon recruit themselves to rise up against whoever it is that's got their fingers on the controls. Star Trek, Planet Of The Apes and even Terminator 2 get referenced within minutes of one another (and Sarah gets called a 'cool old bird'), but it soon becomes apparent that war cannot be fought if the combatants are not willing. 'Fight your own wars. It's got nothing to do with us', snaps Clyde, while the response, hinting at the episode's end, suggest that without war, the cosmos has no need of soldiers.

Ultimately, it is revealed that - much like a real computer game - there is no war, but no shortage of desire to fight one, whatever the cost, something that humans themselves have been guilty of, even at the cost of their own lives. 'I think if more people saw the Earth like this,' says Sarah, observing her home planet from above, 'They might appreciate it more.' It's this odd sense of nobility that closes the episode, as we say goodbye to a monster bred for war and finds itself purposeless when stripped of a need to fight - which is not a million light years away from the very first creature Sarah Jane Smith met way back in her debut story of Doctor Who. Time makes a monster of us all.

Beyond The TARDIS SJA: Revenge of the Slitheen, part 2 by Andrew Allen

With the second part of this season one opener (yes, we should just come out and call it the ‘second episode’, but there’s a reason for our tautology, promise – we’ll explain next time), Clyde earns his stripes as a member of team SJ. He’s clearly the one who Gareth Roberts has most fun writing for at this point in the series, which makes sense: Maria Jackson’s homelife means that she’s not yet wide eyed and filled with wanderlust, and Luke suffers the same challenges as any starchild: you can only have your naïve genius stay naïve for so long, before they stop being a genius (‘Is that good?’)

In the meantime though, it’s all fun and games. The episode’s mostly broad style allows for some very decent jokes (the idea that a spray can of Lynx or Axe might be pungent enough to deflect an alien invasion might ring very true for anyone who has a teenage boy around the house), and despite the fact that there’s a passing hint that the Slitheen have no problem killing human children, we’re still some way from exploring the darker themes that SJA will mediate on, which is ironic, since this episode largely concerns itself with the Slitheen plunging the Earth into darkness. For instance, the fact that Maria kills an intelligent life form in cold blood (albeit in self defence) is played for laughs rather than pathos – as indeed you might expect in an episode of a kids show. But SJA isn’t going to stay this broad for long. By the way, it’s worth acknowledging that this is one of those rare ‘Revenge Of’ stories that is actually about revenge – the actions of the monsters in this episode are a direct result of the Doctor Who episode World War Three, meaning that this episode’s villains already have a rich history, even if the show itself doesn’t yet. 

Daniel Anthony’s charm sells his lines as he demands to be part of the gang (‘We blow up the school?!’), deducing the Slitheen’s major weakness because it couldn’t cope with the contents of his rucksack, while Sarah Jane is allowed a more brittle edge than we’ve been led to expect (‘Another life in my hands – just what I needed!’). There’s a couple of cute side swipes at the parent show, in particular Russell T Davies’ fondness for memorable names (‘You’re making that up,’), but this is in many ways where The Sarah Jane Adventures first stakes its claim that it’s the most adult of the three Whoniverse shows – borrowing a knowingly ridiculous monster from Doctor Who that immediately underestimates the hero – ‘She’s an old woman with a funny lipstick! End of!’

There’s poetry in the dialogue as well – much play is made of the mirroring of losing the sun / losing one’s son – and by the time the episode comes to an end, the death of more aliens is played a lot more tragically by Elisabeth Sladen’s horrified response. The closing scene, between Sarah Jane and Clyde, seems at first mildly diluted, presented as it is as a love letter to The Doctor, but once Sarah begins to talk about a legacy passed on, it’s clear that SJA can stand alone, and Sarah is the wonderful traveller who can save the world. Almost immediately, Clyde finally earns his place as the heart of the show – not through fighting aliens or witty banter, or even his effortless puncturing of one of Tom Baker’s most iconic scenes, but by suggesting that Luke should refer to Sarah Jane as mum, and also being the first character to get a hint at what this season’s Big Bad is. Oh, yes, The Sarah Jane Adventures has a Big Bad.

You’re playing with the grown ups now.