An English Gentleman: Not in possession of all the facts,
the Doctor agrees to take Nyssa away from Valderon but doesn’t realise the full
dangers of the presence of her son. He describes the old Type 50 as an old
acquaintance from his youth. When time is royally cocked up the Doctor has
proof of why he is always so keen to holds its hand (as Tegan so uniquely puts
it). He discovers that Nyssa had a whole life waiting for her that he never
knew about. If he had known he would never have allowed her to travel with him
for so long.
Alien Orphan (the Older): Thank goodness somebody has
started paying attention to Nyssa again, After being practically irrelevant in
both Eldrad and Mercia I was starting to wonder after all the good work Big
Finish have done with her solo with the fifth Doctor that she was going the
same way as her fate on TV series, shunted to the sidelines and left to fester.
I’m all for variety in the range and would love to see another fifth Doctor and
Nyssa trilogy without Tegan and Turlough hogging the limelight quite so
dramatically. It’s the curse of the three companion format, somebody always
gets left behind (the only story that I can think of featuring this trio of
companions that managed to give them an equal share of the limelight is The
Emerald Tiger…it is no co-incidence that it is also the best story of their run
by some considerable margin). I was wondering if we would ever catch up with
Nyssa’s alleged children that have been mentioned in several stories and
finally the producers feel that the time has come to further explore her
background after she left the Doctor.
When Adric (her son, understandable choice of name, even it
is rather cringy) was a little boy, Nyssa used to tell him stories of her
adventures with the Doctor. Because Nyssa was made to look younger again her
son assumes that this Nyssa is from a point before he was born. He wears a
masks when talking to his mother, pretending to have had an accident, so to
protect his identity but the truth is she might not even recognise him even if
he had greeted her as his son. Nyssa is devastated to learn that she never made
it home to her family, that they suffered a gaping void from her absence. The
reunion with her son 25 years after she last saw him is beautifully played by
both actors, sensitive and poignant. She learns that her husband died alone and
heartbroken while she has been off adventuring with the Doctor. Perhaps she
should have asked to have been taken home immediately. Travelling with the
Doctor, things tend to get in the way. Nyssa always has had her head screwed on
properly and she doesn’t blame the Doctor for not taking her home as soon as
she had the opportunity. She takes responsibility for her own actions. Saying
that she does want to know why the decision to meet her son was almost taken
out of her hands in this situation. She as lost so many people that are dear to
her and she doesn’t understand how the Doctor thought that knowing she never
returned home would be too much to bear. She can see how Adric has grown into a
remarkable man and wishes she hadn’t missed so much of it. She knows her
responsibilities to time but when the Type 50 gives her the chance to break
free of its rules and step back in her life it is very tempting, to undo all
her mistakes. If she has a choice she wont allow her children to grow up
without a mother. The truth is that Adric became a better person because Nyssa
wasn’t around, trying to live up to her memory. If she does walk back into her
old life she will undo all of that and he could turn out a monster (lets be
honest if you had do-gooder Nyssa expecting you to follow in your footsteps you
would probably want to break out of that mould quite dramatically). The Doctor
asks her to do the hardest thing she has ever faced – to abandon her husband
and children. What an impossible choice.
Mouth on Legs: Apparently the product of an ancient
civilisation giving Turlough the opportunity to suggest that she is something
of a genetic throwback (hehehe). She promised to keep Nyssa’s secret and she is
the sort of person who lives up to those promises.
Alien Orphan (the Younger): Turlough is frustrated because
he is always kept in the dark about what is really going on because he thinks
that the Doctor doesn’t trust him. As soon as he is apprised of the situation
he blunders, telling Adric that the Nyssa who has visited Valderon is post-his
birth! You can always rely on Turlough to look on the bright side – not!
Standout Performance: Rather than bringing in new actors to
play the role of the Type 50 TARDIS, Morris strikes upon the clever idea of
using Tegan and Turlough as the mouthpieces of the machine. It enables Janet
Fielding and Mark Strickson to give very different kinds of performances,
ethereal and emotionless and the effect is quite spellbinding. Peter Davison
and Sarah Sutton attempt to get away with cod Scottish accents but don’t quite
succeed.
Sparkling Dialogue: ‘Isn’t it obvious? Your machine only
shows you what it wants you to see…’
‘This gadget of yours might be handy for a weather forecast
but you can’t use it as a basis for a judicial system!’
‘It should have been me! Not this antiquated relic!’
‘You just ate my dematerialisation circuit!’
‘You’re saying we’re all about to get Blinovitched!’
‘You’re nothing more than a castle built on broken dreams.’
Great Ideas: Morris loves the idea of the Doctor and friends
being expected when they apparently show up randomly in stories, both Festival
of Death and Cobwebs explored the same idea. The Chronoscope allows them to see
into the future, to see events of significance that are to come. It has brought
peace and prosperity to the world since accidents are now preventable, illness
is a thing of the past and all forms of crime are antiquated. Would be
perpetrators are stopped before their crimes have even been committed.
Technically innocent people are sent to prison as a reminder to obey the law
and not question those in charge. It’s both fair and criminally unjust. Morally
paradoxical. You can see the merits of such a system although I cannot imagine
living on a world where spontaneity and autonomy has died a quick death. We
witness a man being sentenced for murdering somebody before the idea has even
come to him and so naturally he protests his innocence. It proves to be a self
perpetuating system because the very act of being arrested and accused of a
crime is what gives him the idea in the first place! The reason the Chronoscope
has predicted the TARDISes arrival could be because it was responsible for
bringing them to Valderon. Because he thinks that Nyssa is the younger version
who travelled with the Doctor before she left him and fell pregnant with him,
Adric spells out Nyssa’s fate to Tegan all the way up to her abandonment on
Helheim (featured in Cobwebs) and tries to avert that future for her. After
Nyssa went missing in 3530 she never returned to her own time (because Adric is
still looking for her in this period) which means the Doctor never managed to
take her back home and knowing this means now he never will. It also means that
all the people that have died between 3530 and now of Richters Disease have
done so pointlessly since she could have returned home with the cure…which she
now can’t because this is a set point in time! A massacre caused by a temporal
nightmare! I haven’t been this involved in the mechanics of a story since
January’s The Wrong Doctors. The trouble is nobody is telling anybody the truth
which causes all kinds of problems; Tegan wont betray Nyssa’s confidence and
tell the Doctor about Adric, Nyssa has no idea that her grown up son is so
close, Turlough doesn’t realise that the truth about Nyssa’s post-Helheim
timeline should be kept a secret…and as a result everything spills out into the
open with dramatic consequences. Obviously Adric doesn’t quite understand the
theory behind temporal mechanics…by telling his mother that she never came home
he is ensuring that those events never take place. If only he had kept his gob
shut then there was always the possibility that she would return home,
blissfully ignorant of this future and delete this timeline. After Nyssa went
missing her family left Zarat and never stayed anywhere for more than a few months,
her husband buried himself in his work and Adric enrolled in college and got a
first class degree in xeno-medicene. He wanted to help people and honour her
memory. Nyssa’s daughter became an aid worker but eventually became infected
with Richters disease. Volunteers are plentiful on a penal world and that’s why
Adric came to Valderon, to further his work on a cure for the disease. The
Chronoscope predicted that he would find a cure, which Nyssa now firmly
believes is the one that she holds in her possession, their reunion foretold.
It was inevitable as soon as we learnt the truth about the Chronoscope that one
of the Doctor’s friends would be framed by the device and it gives a nice
excuse to tuck Tegan and Turlough out of the way while the Doctor and Nyssa
deal with the emotional ramifications of the events of the first episode. Sibor
permitted Adric to come to Valderon because she wanted something to use as
leverage against the Empire, holding them to ransom unless they recognise her
as the new Prime Elector or she will withhold the cure for Richters. There are
any number of time sensitive races across the universe that could be able to
see into the future (Tharils, Jagaroth, Xeraphin, The Times Lords). When the
Miracle occurred everybody on Valderon woke up and realised they could speak
every language in the known universe as though it was their own…that is a
massive clue as to the identity of the villain of the piece before it is
revealed. As soon as a TARDIS with a functioning chameleon circuit was introduced
I suspected there would be a scene where it morphed into the identity of one of
the Doctor’s friends. It’s still a great moment when it comes. Nyssa makes the
comparison with the Melkur, a walking, talking TARDIS. As a result of Nyssa’s
decision to return home history is being split into two, one where she never
came home and one where she did and cured Richters syndrome. You can just
imagine the visual of two different versions of the same planet overlapping on
each other. Reconstructing a planet as one vast TARDIS – you could never accuse
Morris of limiting his imagination! There have been plenty of Doctor Who
stories short of a good idea, Prisoners of Fate has enough to power an entire
season. If Alan Barnes knew all along that this story would take place and
Nyssa would need to step back in time into her old life just before she left,
is that why they made her younger in The Emerald Tiger? Getting her ready for
the twist events in this story? Or did it work the other way around? They
wanted to use publicity shots of a younger Nyssa on the covers and Jonny Morris
exploited the idea of Nyssa being younger so she could step back into her
life…oh my word I’ve gone boss eyed with confusion. During Circular Time when
Nyssa was caught in a dreamscape created by the Doctor during his regeneration
she told him about her son Adric and he didn’t know about him. But by
telling him about Adric earlier in his life she has created a paradox that is
still fuelling the Type 50. It’s a pretty obscure twist considering it takes in
the events of a one part story that was released years ago but it is still well
explained and logical. As a result the Doctor’s future incarnations could be
wiped from the future.
Audio Landscape: Rain lashing, static, bubbling experiments,
church bells, electrics. I kind of lost track of the atmospherics because I was
so absorbed with the story.
Standout Scene: Morris has fun suggesting that there might
be a Time Lord at the heart of the Chronoscope and given his prolific amount of
appearances during the Davison era I was wondering if there was going to be a
surprise reveal of the Master. The actual twist is far more interesting than
that. The Chronoscope is a Type 50 TARDIS, the one the Doctor originally chose
before the TARDIS he ended up with chose him. By ingenious co-incidence this
ties in perfectly with The Name of the Doctor where we witnessed the first Doctor
heading towards one capsule before Clara stepped in and suggested another. His
original TARDIS feels spurned, that he took another in his place. I can
remember having something of an allergic reaction to the way Gary Russell and
Alan Barnes portrayed the Doctor’s TARDIS in Zagreus as a spiteful and vicious
old queen that was furious with how the Doctor mistreated him. It felt like a
perversion of the one constant in the Doctor’s life. In comparison this
beautifully done, for a start the characterisation a world away from anything
Russell could achieve but there is also a damn good reason for this TARDIS to
feel so hard done by. If it wasn’t for a quirk of fate it could have roamed the
universe with the Doctor for the past 600 odd years, taking in the most incredible
sights and adventures. There is sufficient cause to feel as if it had been
abandoned. The idea of the machine abusing itself and tearing through the Time
Lord defences so it could escape Gallifrey and come after the Doctor is both
terrifying and heartbreaking and shows what lengths it is willing to go to in
order to seek revenge. It crash landed on Valderon 20 years ago, crippled,
broken and alone. Now it wants to be reborn and experience the life it should
have had. It’s dramatic, satisfying and uses the shows continuity to its own
advantage. Some might say it is wanky but it’s a flea biting compared to what
was revealed in The Name of the Doctor.
Result: After the slack and uninteresting Eldrad Must Die!
and the slightly bland Lady of Mercia, the Main Range really needed to strike
out with something special to regain its chutzpah in the 50th
anniversary year. Fortunately the ever reliable Jonathan Morris is on hand to
give the range a shot of adrenalin and he has crafted one of his finest scripts,
easily matching his work on last years Protect and Survive and then some.
Whilst I always find his work of a high standard, Morris tends to buck the
trend of most writers by doing his best work in the Main Range whereas pretty
much every other current writer scores their wins in the spin off series’ (the
Companion Chronicles, Jago & Litefoot and The Lost Stories especially). I
remember Mark Gatiss recalling on the Earthshock DVD range that his younger
self had the feeling that ‘something different is going on here…’ when he
watched Logopolis and Earthshock and that was precisely the feeling I had with
Prisoners of Fate, that tingle of excitement as things complicate and evolve
with a crushing sense of doom and a feeling that perhaps this time things might
not work out in the way they usually do. My one disappointment was that the
story seems to be promising big developments but the net result is that
everything resets at the end to precisely how things were at the beginning.
Classic Who was often plot heavy and Morris in particular has always been able
to construct a abundant narrative and with Prisoners of Fate he blends some
very strong ideas (the Chronoscope and it’s predictive power, Nyssa’s temporal
nightmare, an old friend of the Doctor’s returning to haunt him) with excellent
character work to produce something truly surprising and captivating
throughout. Once again Morris out Moffat’s Moffat by creating a timey wimey
puzzle to unravel with an emotional sting that will stick in your memory for
some time – the decision that Nyssa makes in episode four is heartbreakingly
difficult – but the net result is agreeably tied up in a satisfying fashion
rather than leaving a million questions, threads and moments of illogic
unresolved such is the method of the series’ current show runner. It’s a story
that manages to feel as though it has spiralled out of the characters control
whilst at the same time feeling precisely crafted and Ken Bentley ensures that
the mass of information is conveyed in an engaging and dramatic fashion. Sarah
Sutton grabs hold of the opportunity to take centre stage and shares some
excellent moments with Peter Davison whilst the rest of the regulars are
afforded the chance to play a very different role in these events. Easily on
par with The Wrong Doctors without quite toppling it (that story lost its way
in the middle but scored a massive high with its ending, the opposite of
Prisoners of Fate), this is still a terrific achievement and another top dollar
tale from a writer whose imagination clearly has no limits: 9/10
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