A Doctor Who Podcast
This week, our friend from over at SciFi4MeTV, Mr. Tim Harvey, joined us to discuss the Time Lord Victorious event. We talk about the event as a whole, what worked, what didn’t, and our levels of enjoyment throughout the entire series of materials.
Enjoy!
Traveling the Vortex - Episode 496 – Traveling the Victorious – The FINALE – Where it All Ends [ 1:12:47 | 79.15 MB ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
This week we begin our wrap-up of reviews of the ‘Time Lord Victorious’ crossover event, This time it is the long-delayed – Echoes of Extinction featuring the Eighth Doctor and the Tenth Doctor. Hear what we thought of this audio adventure from Big Finish!
Enjoy!
Episode 495 - Traveling the Victorious – Part 12 – Sonic Screwdriver Trumps Robot Butler [ 32:34 | 0.01 MB ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Cpt 7
Lucky number seven. Double-O seven, Seven-eleven…
“Will you knock it off?” She asked, though she wasn’t entirely sure who she was talking to anymore. It might be a plea to the author, (if she ever pleaded for anything, which she didn’t), or perhaps she was talking to herself, ordering her brain to cease its whimsical connective association game. Or hell, it may even be that she was talking to him.
The rest had done her some good, and now she gingerly sat up in the bed, finding the restraining field had dissipated. There was a red light on the console next to her, silently blinking on and off. Surely an indicator to the console room that she was awake and mobile.
Which meant the next move was hers.
Well, technically the next move involved getting to the wardrobe, which indeed, opened only on a sparse closet containing her clothes and sword and not into the fabulous fantasy world of Narnia.
“Well, he did warn me.” She mumbled, getting dressed. Which lead to the next thought. If he was honest about the clothes and sword, was he being honest about everything else? She barked out a laugh, which same so quickly and forcefully it startled her. What was she even thinking?
The only thing the Master was honest about was his dishonesty. The Doctor’s oldest foe, (and hers too, if she were quite honest), he put the MY in enemy. Fiendish, clever, ruthless, and evil, but still charming in his own way. What with the whole Time Lord Victorious nonsense, this was no time for him to show up and wreak his usual brand of havoc.
And yet, he had returned the sword to her. He was either being extra dubious, or he didn’t see her as an immediate threat.
She’d have to cure him of that notion, toot sweet.
Dressed and armed, she made her way through his TARDIS. Whether through simple necessity or some trick of the trans-dimensional engineering, the sickbay bedroom was just down the corridor to the console room, so she didn’t wander far. She drew the sword, and with her left hand grasped the doorknob to the nerve center of the ship. She didn’t have a plan so much as an inkling of a course of action, but sometimes those were best. With a mighty bestial roar (what Whitman described as a barbaric yawp and Robin Williams tried to explain to a group of adolescents in that movie), she charged through the door, sword leading the way.
He stood at the controls on the far side of the center console, the lighted column in the middle rising and lowering with each great breath of the time machine indicating they were in flight.
And because that was the scene she expected in her mind’s eye, the sheer number of him in the room stopped her in her tracks and the yawp died in her throat. There was a Master in a fetching purple three-piece checking the time on a fob watch. Another Master wearing a leather coat and sunglasses leaned against the wall looking for all the world like he’d rather be somewhere else. A Master who looked like he’d been left too long in the sun—scratch that, ON the sun—hunched over the other side of the console consulting with still another Master in black crushed velvet.
There was some Mucho Master going on.
Another sword tip parried hers, and SHE stepped forward in her blue and orange Mary Poppins ensemble. Suddenly that nightmare about a classroom full of clowns was starting to look pretty good.
“Oh, you’re awake my pet” Missy said, managing to be all kinds of condescending. “Pity.” She turned to yet another Master, this one with short blonde hair. “I owe you a five spot.”
“Double or nothing she disarms you in under two minutes.” The Master leaning against the wall said.
Missy turned back to face her. “What do you say gosling? Shall we dance?”
The Master, (the original in her mind, though honestly who could know at this point where his timeline diverged and folded back on itself) stepped forward. “Now now, is that anyway to treat a guest? Arissa is here at my invitation. I do not want her to feel unwelcome.” He raised a gloved hand and lowered the points of their still crossed swords.
Arissa took a chance a lowered her guard. Either this would look cool and carefree, or Missy would try and run her through. “Alright, I’m here. I’m not fighting–” She stopped herself. “—yet. So what’s going on? You having a soirée? A little get-together? A meeting of the Master-minds?” She was proud of that one. She knew by pushing she was increasing the odds of Missy lunging point first, but she was on a roll. “Are there refreshments? Some chips and dip? OOOOhhh, a convention! Where’s the ‘I tried conquering the universe and all I got was this lousy t-shirt’ vendor?”
Missy smiled that quirky, half smirk of hers, and Arrisa steeled herself for the steel that would surely be plunging into her any minute. But instead, she turned her maniacal glare back to the Master—damn the descriptors when multiple versions of the same person are present—and said menacingly, “We don’t really need her, do we?”
The Master surprised her then. “In point of fact, we do. My dear Arissa, as impossible as it may be to believe, I rescued you from THE DARK TIMES—”
“Oy!” Shouted the blond Master.
“Forgive me. WE. We rescued you from THE DARK TIMES… because we need your help. Not only has the Doctor’s foolish Time Lord Victorious crusade endangered the cosmos on scale we could only hope to dream of, but your podcaster friends are in trouble as well.”
“The author? But he’s controlling all this.”
“If only that were the case. You keep sending out their schedule because it was what you were contracted to do, and you never renege on a contract. An admirable trait. But its so much more than that. Despite its insignificance to the world at large, the very act of sharing it is also a tether. A very tenuous tether keeping the real world from disintegrating entirely.”
“We know a thing or two about disintegrations.” Said the purple clad Master a little too eagerly.
“Speaking of” the crispy Master spoke from his perch at the controls, and his voice was as dry and raspy as his skin. “It’s time to transmit the new schedule.”
“Then by all means.” The Master said, moving back to the console and pressing a series of buttons, then flipping a toggle.
They all turned to the viewer, which irised open to display the following:
491 – Lethbridge-Stewart The Laughing Gnome: Havoc Files (5) by Various Artists
492 – 25th Anniversary of Doctor Who: The Movie, Big Finish Master!: #1 Faustian, #2 Prey #3 Vengeance
493 – Fury From the Deep (Animated) DVD review
494 – Sarah Jane Smith: Roving Reporter by Various Artists
495 – TLV: Echoes of Extinction (Big Finish Audio)
496 – TLV: The Edge of Time (Video Game), Time Fracture (Event), The Time Lord Victorious & Brian the Ood (Action Figure/Short Story?), Overall impressions (w/special guest Timothy Harvey of SciFi4MeTV’s TARDIS Sauce)
“What do you mean tether? Why is this podcast so important to the fate of everything? And what does the author have to do with this?”
Missy whirled on her, her eyes flashing. “Tell us poppet, what do you know about The Land of Fiction?”
Cpt 4
Sprong.
With a rippling of its mighty engines, the golden Osirian Pyramid ship rends the fabric of reality asunder and pops into existence in THE DARK TIMES.
Arissa stares at the viewscreen with a mixture of amusement and disbelief, both that the ship actually arrived in THE DARK TIMES, and that the author allowed it to happen without killing her.
And that he continues to type THE DARK TIMES in all capital letters.
And that the Osirian Pyramid ship, technological marvel of the 35th Century, actually makes a “Sprong” noise.
What can she say? She is easily amused.
She fiddles with the view screen to get a look at her surroundings, and despite the desperate circumstances, feels a weight of relief at no longer being in the year 2020. The jokes and internet memes had started early, but if humanity only knew the depths to which time travelers actively avoided the year, they might feel better about having survived it.
Assuming, of course, this was THAT timeline. There was after all, still a couple of weeks to go.
The sensor readings bounce back to her display, confirming the worst: Major temporal disruptions. Arissa always thought of time (incorrectly) as the surface of a lake. A temporal disruption was like dropping a rock in the middle of it, sending ripples and waves out in concentric rings that changed the surface reflection. These readings indicated someone had dropped a dump truck full of gravel over the water, seeding it with minor blips and ripples that were cascading back and forth into each other before being wiped out by the impact wave when the truck itself fell in.
Time was tearing itself apart as forward moving paradoxes begat backward traveling paradoxes.
She hadn’t seen anything like this since The Time War (which, she notes, only warrants capitalization of the first letters, not the whole title). The sensors also show her a myriad of wreckage outside. The Pyramid ship had materialized in the middle of a debris field. And quite the interesting on at that. She detects pieces of Dalek saucers, hull fragments of Arkanian star liners, the burned-out hulks of Draconian battlecruisers, and what appeared to be stonework from the monolithic Cathedral-Class Coffin ships of the Great Vampires. Very few of these races occupy the same plot of history as each other, and yet here they all are, mingling in yet another paradox mixer as the flotsam and jetsam tumble endlessly in space.
These wrecks did not belong here, not in this when. Had they been pulled to their destruction by the paradoxes? Or had they arrived intact and fought amongst themselves until only scrap remains? She backs away from the monitors and sensors intending to step out onto the terrace and see the devastation firsthand, to see if the distortions are visible to the naked eye. Pyramid ships are quite capable of holding an atmosphere over their ray-shielded observation decks—when her heel strikes something, sending her suddenly tumbling over backward.
At this point, there was any number of things Arissa was prepared to accept, but a gigantic stone tablet was not among them. Her fingers snaked out to caress the tablet, which is covered with a combination of hieroglyphics, runes, symbols, and pictograms, all deeply etched upon its surface.
“Is this High Galifreyan?” She asks, knowing the author will not reply, but unable to stop herself. She’s rusty but manages to decipher a few pieces of the tablet while the Rosetta circuits embedded behind her eyes and ears translate the rest.
TTV #477 – A Christmas Carol Revisited, Eleventh Doctor Chronicles “The Top of the Tree” (Big Finish Audio)
TTV #478 – TLV: The Last Message, Mission to the Known, (Eagle Moss / Hero Collector short stories), Mutually Assured Destruction (Big Finish Audio)
TTV #479 – Revolution of the Daleks
TTV #480 – TLV: Exit Strategy, Genetics of the Daleks (Big Finish Audio)
TTV #481 – TLV: Tales of the Dark Times Episodes 4 & 5 (Comic Maker), All Flesh is Grass (Novel)
“Really? There’s no one here who could possibly listen to your podcast. Why would you send me your schedule to post…” She trails off, suddenly understanding. “You really have no control over this, do you? I suspected as much, but this bloody well confirms it, doesn’t it?”
She rises, moving back to the controls. If things are this bad, she has less time than she thought. Scouring the debris for salvage would have to wait. Arissa transmits the schedule—because despite it being a worthless gesture that would not gain them listeners, she had been contracted to do the job, and therefore it was going to get done—and fiddling with the sensors, slaved them to the navigation controls and set a new course. As the Pyramid ship moves off, she heads to the wardrobe.
You can’t save the universe wearing a silk robe, no matter what the movies say.
Interlude
It was the best of THE DARK TIMES; it was the worst of THE DARK TIMES.
Arissa slams the book shut and throws it across the room in disgust with no regard for the ancient binding or crumbling pages within. It thuds against the far wall before hitting the floor, leaving her instantly ashamed. One simply doesn’t throw books, no matter how inane the book may be.
“I know, I know.” She acknowledges, rising off the couch to retrieve the tome. “But come on, ‘the best of THE DARK TIMES’?” She quotes. “Times that were so dark, they are spoken about in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS? How could there possibly be any ‘best of’ times?”
She inspects the book, and satisfied that there was no permanent damage done, returns it to its place on the bookshelf.
“The problem with THE DARK TIMES is that not too many people made it out of them alive. It’s difficult to learn the history when so little history exists. So, we’re left with all these half-truths and myths and legends, and most of them involve the Doctor in some way, shape, or form, which automatically makes the truth of the stories suspect in my mind.”
She whirls suddenly, glaring skyward. “You used my name. I thought we agreed, no names?” The author starts to type something about “literary license”, but is cut off—“No, no, no! I’m doing you a favor. Don’t forget that. Stick to the terms of the deal.” She warns. Then sighs, rubbing a hand through her short hair. “Well, it’s out. Can’t take it back now, can we?”
She begins to pace the confines of the pyramid’s control room, walking around the black silk couch, between the pool table sized control panel and the gold felt covered pool table, in front of the giant viewscreen that dominated one wall of the room, and past bookshelves stuffed full of leatherbound first editions, signed copies of the dead sea scrolls and other documents from all over the universe. She bypasses the open doors that lead out onto the terrace that overlooks the ruined city. 2020 is out there and she inherently knew it would contribute nothing of value.
There’s only so much paradox a mind can take, after all.
Arissa thought she was almost at capacity herself. She found her memories changing from moment to moment, adding to her frustration. It was one thing to know something and be confused by contradictory evidence, and quite another to suddenly realize the thing you knew wasn’t what you knew at all, and the evidence wasn’t contradictory, because IT was correct all along, and you knew that. She shakes her head vigorously trying to dislodge the chaos. She even considers reconsulting Andrew Kearley’s “The Complete Adventures” for reference, but that website, (and all other subsequent Doctor Who websites for that matter), while normally rock-solid kept displaying File 404 error messages as if the internet itself was giving up.
Without consciously knowing that she’s doing it, Arissa moves back to the control panel and begins laying in a course. The Pyramid ship responds to her touch, sealing off exterior bulkheads and lifting gently off the towers it was resting on. The buildings crumble into their own pyramid-shaped piles of debris, but the sound dampers are already on, so inside she hears nothing but the distant throb of the engines from somewhere deep inside the ship.
“There’s really only one way out of this.” She reasons. “I don’t appreciate being forced into it, mind you, but if you’re being affected by these temporal shifts more than just having to change the upcoming podcast schedule every week—well then drastic measures it is.”
The Pyramid ship hangs over the ruins, tears a hole in the fabric of reality with the sound of a door stopper being sprung by a precocious kitten, and vanishes.
“Next stop, THE DARK TIMES,” Arissa says grimly.
This week we take another break from the Time Lord Victorious event… well, sort of. In this episode, we review the recently released book The Wintertime Paradox, by Dave Rudden. Find out what we thought of this festive collection of stories about Doctor Who at Christmastime.
We also, take a look at the short story, Canaries, also written by Rudden and released on the Doctor Who website as a tie-in with the ‘Time Lord Victorious’ Event.
Plus, we examine some news of the week, including some insights into when we might expect the next series of Doctor Who to release.
Enjoy!
Traveling the Vortex - Episode 472 - All Sorts of Things Unleashed [ 1:45:52 | 98.36 MB ] Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadCpt 2
Deep within the pyramid that sat atop the ruined city, she lounges on a couch of black silk. The couch is in stark contrast to everything else in the room which gleamed white, from the sandblasted marble floors to her own white silk robes. She cradles her head in her hands, long, slender fingers absentmindedly play with an errant lock of her short, spiky blonde hair.
“Don’t do that.” She mutters. “I’m tired and frustrated. It’s been a long year that doesn’t show any signs of improving. I’m in no mood to have you describe my beauty just to make me feel better.”
But she was beautiful, tall and strong, with rounded features and bright eyes that sparkled with the depths of her intelligence.
“Okay, that wasn’t bad.” She admits. “At least my eyes aren’t piercing. What do you want anyway? Shouldn’t you be toppling a regime or sending a starship into a black hole or something?”
A wall panel within the pyramid illuminated suddenly. Words filled the glowing wall, words she barely payed attention to from her perch on the couch.
“Seriously? You’re still doing this? After the last batch was such a disaster?”
The words continued to flow across the wall screen.
“I mean, it’s not like we told people you were going bi-weekly and had to change it. OR that several of the dates were wrong and you had to issue a retraction. A retraction, I might add, that you simply uploaded to the website without calling attention to it. You sneaky bugger.”
The words paused, then in all capital letters spelled out, “AS ALWAYS THE SCHEDULE IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE” then went back to their scrolling.
“Ooh, THAT hit a nerve. Look, don’t blame me. If you didn’t want to have these stimulating verbal debates, you wouldn’t have written me as self-aware.” She rises from the couch and considers the writing on the wall. “I’ll make the announcement.”
Nov
TTV #472 – Book Review – The Wintertime Paradox by David Rudden, TLV: Canaries (Short story)
TTV #473 – TLV: The Last Message (Short Story), Tales of the Dark Times #3 (Comic Maker), The Enemy of My Enemy (Big Finish Audio)
TTV #474 – TLV: Mission to the Known (Short Story), Monstrous Beauty #3 (Comic), Daleks! #1 “The Archive of Islos” (Animated Series)
TTV#475 – TLV: Daleks! #2 & #3 (Animated Series)
That taken care of, she returns to her place on the couch to contemplate her part in this mad story.
Our journey through the Time Lord Victorious series continues this week. This time we look at the first book in the epic event story arc, The Knight, the Fool, and the Dead by Steve Cole
Then we review the short story, The Guide to the Dark Times which is found in The Official Doctor Who 2021 Annual.
Find out what we thought of these stories.
Plus we look at some announcements in this week’s news segments.
Enjoy!
Traveling the Vortex - Episode 468 – Traveling the Victorious – Part 2 – Dressed For The Occasion [ 50:24 | 47.57 MB ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
We have arrived at the first of our reviews of the materials being released in the epic Time Lord Victorious event. We begin our adventure, mostly with comics. But first, we look at the recently released short story The Dawn of the Kotturuh by James Goss which was provided to readers through the official Doctor Who newsletter.
Then we move onto Titan Comic’s contribution, reviewing both issues of the Time Lord Victorious comic arc, Defender of the Daleks.
And lastly this week, we review the first part of the comic story, Monstrous Beauty #1, which accompanies issue 556 of Doctor Who Magazine.
Find out what we thought of these first stories.
Enjoy!
Links mentioned in the podcast:
Festival of Family Classics – Jack O’ Lantern (1972)
The TARDIS Wiki article for The Dawn of the Kotturuh (short story) with link and password
Traveling the Vortex - Episode 467 - Traveling the Victorious - Part 1 - Murder Toilets [ 1:01:13 | 57.48 MB ] Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadDawn.
The sun’s rays have just begun to crest the horizon, illuminating a towering pyramid that looms over the desolate cityscape below. ‘Scenes from an apocalypse’ might be one way to describe the city. If it were a boxer, it would be beaten, bruised, and bloodied. The sprawling metropolis certainly had seen better days, but it was the people who still cowered in it that should be the focus. They too were broken and haunted, mere shadowy reflections of their former selves, for their eyes had seen horrors.
And yet they survived.
Atop the pyramid, a cloaked figure appears, gliding up to a stone podium that stands near the edge. Soft robes billow about her form as she lifts her hands aloft. The silence, which in reality was merely quiet, now becomes an eerie sound vacuum in anticipation of the words to follow. Breaths are held in that pause for attention, and she certainly has it. Time stretches out into a thin stream of nothing in that heartbeat before she begins to orate, leaning into the strange device that can only be a microphone sending her voice booming into the valley below:
“Is this thing on?”
The cacophony of sudden noise startles her, and the bombastic feedback of her words causes a crumbling tower to finally give up its fight against gravity and collapse to the earth.
“Right. Here we go…
BEHOLD MORTALS:
A NEW DAY DAWNS.
A NEW FORMAT BEGINS.
TRAVELING THE VORTEX RETURNS.”
She pauses, looking thoughtful.
“Really? Is that it? Isn’t this an awful lot of pomp and circumstance just to announce your silly little podcast is coming back? I mean, I get it, you’ve been doing this pretty much non-stop, week after week for YEARS.” She draws out the word, adding more syllables to it than should be phonetically possible. “And then you take a little hiatus for a breather and suddenly that turns into a long hiatus because of a pandemic and…”
The author stares hard at her, projecting his will onto the flashing words that form on the screen. The meaning is clear.
“Oh fine, I’ll get on with it,” She mutters, not at all convinced the author wouldn’t carry out his threat to feed her to some horrible abomination in his next story. She coughs, attempting to get back into character.
“JOIN THE VORTEX BOYS IN THEIR NEW BI-WEEKLY FORMAT AS THEY REVIEW WHAT MAY BE THE MOST AMBITIOUS PROJECT IN DOCTOR WHO HISTORY:
THE MULTI-PART, MULTI-FORMAT TIME LORD VICTORIOUS!”
Words appear at the bottom of the screen, spelling out the upcoming schedule dates and topics:
Aug
8/31 TTV #465 – LOCKDOWN continued…
Sep
9/21 TTV #466 – Lost in Time: The Myth Makers (Recon and Novelization)
Oct
10/5 TTV #467 – TLV: A Dalek Awakens (Escape Room), Defender of the Daleks #1 (Comic), The Guide to the Dark Times (Annual 2021)
10/19 TTV #468 – TLV: Monstrous Beauty #1 (Comic), The Knight, The Fool and The Dead (Book)
and more to come!
“AS ALWAYS,” She concludes, looking rather exasperated by the whole ordeal, “THE SCHEDULE IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE WITHOUT NOTICE, BUT WE’LL TRY AND LET YOU KNOW!” With that, she turns in a flutter of robes and strides from the dais, muttering something about “real authors like Andy Frankham-Allen”.
And in the ruined city below, a faint sound reaches back up to the top of the pyramid. She could not be certain, of course, but it sounds like applause.