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Recap / Big Finish Doctor Who 063 Caerdroia

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Not pictured: Tigger and Eeyore.

The Eighth Doctor feels a kind of time sickness pulling at him, which is of course impossible, because time doesn't even exist in the Divergence universe. It sends him to sleep, which rather annoys the Kro'ka. After all, a sleeping Doctor can't be shoved into random habitats for new experiments. Charley and C'rizz mock and taunt the Kro'ka until the Doctor briefly recovers. He figures out that the Kro'ka's masters must be getting extremely annoyed, which is causing the Kro'ka to become just a little bit desperate. So desperate, in fact, that he's brought a stolen Mind Probe, which he uses to violently Mind Rape the Doctor and break through his mental barriers.

Once he's fully inside, the Kro'ka realises that he fell for the Doctor's trap: he's stuck in the Doctor's inner mental sanctuary. And promptly falls down the nearest mental waterslide. Once the Doctor is done laughing, he begins to blackmail and interrogate the Kro'ka, and finally finds out just what's been going on for the past seven episodes. The zone between habitats is a warp zone that can also link to the Divergence; the Kro'ka wants the TARDIS because he screwed up by letting the Doctor onto this particular planet in the first place; and the Kro'ka is scared for his life, because his bumbling minion antics are really starting to tick off his employer.

The Doctor realises that his time sickness is caused by proximity to the portal leading to the Divergence. He releases the Kro'ka from his mind and, after some fumbling, leads Charley and C'rizz to the correct portal, ending up in a meadow full of cows and birdies and pretty flowers... and two other Eighth Doctors.

The warp apparently caused him to split into three: his rational side, his Cloudcuckoolander side, and his nasty Deadpan Snarker side. (Charley promptly dubs the latter two "Tigger" and "Eeyore".) All are confused at the situation, not in the least because cows, bunnies, monsters from C'rizz' planet, a giant labyrinth, a minotaur, an office building and an Obstructive Bureaucrat were not at all what they expected. The Doctors try to save the day with a ball of string in their pockets. The whole thing turns out to have been engineered by the TARDIS, who's hidden away at the centre of the labyrinth of Caerdroia. To convey her coordinates and guide the Doctor towards her doors, she needed to split him up into three.

The Doctor merges back into one person, and he, Charley and C'rizz finally head off in the TARDIS and leave the planet. They still can't travel in time, but all of space is open to them.


Tropes:

  • Acting For Three
  • Arc Words: The Divergent arc is reaching its end — spinning, breaking free of the cycle, fluid consciousness between multiple beings, the next life and the beyond.
  • As Long as It Sounds Foreign: The Doctor is a bit confused as to why the Divergence would name their castle after something Welsh.
  • Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: After seeing "Tigger" in action for a few minutes, Charley notes it's a miracle the Doctor has never been killed by getting distracted by a flower.
  • Batman Gambit:
    "Got you."
  • Battle in the Center of the Mind: In the form of a giant Cretan labyrinth.
  • Beware the Silly Ones: Tigger points out that some of the Doctor's goofier incarnations have also been the slyest.
  • Bigger on the Inside: The Doctor's pockets.
  • Break the Cutie: The Kro'ka plans to do this to "Tigger", as he is the happiest Doctor he will be easiest to break.
  • Call-Back: The memory editing in Light City and the splitting of personalities from Major Koth.
  • Big "SHUT UP!": The closer the Doctor gets to unravelling everything the more frustrated Kro'Ka gets until..
  • Cloudcuckoolander: The loopy side of the Doctor. More than usual, that is.
  • Cold-Blooded Torture: Without his bouncy side and his sensible side to keep him in line, the Doctor can get... scary.
  • Deadpan Snarker: The nasty side of the Doctor.
  • Discretion Shot: The Kro'ka is forced to turn off his invisibility. The Doctor asks him to turn it right back on, as he apparently looks like a dog's breakfast.
  • Duck Season, Rabbit Season: The Doctor pulls one on the Kro'ka, and even lampshades it.
    Kro'ka: Your petty defiance is useless! I will find out your secrets.
    The Doctor: No, you won't.
    Kro'ka: Yes, I will.
    The Doctor: (sing-song) No, you won't.
    Kro'ka: Yes, I will.
    The Doctor: Won't.
    Kro'ka: Will.
    The Doctor: Won't.
    Kro'ka: Will.
    The Doctor: Won't.
    Kro'ka: Will.
    The Doctor: Will.
    Kro'ka: Won't! ...Wait, I... No!
    The Doctor: (laughs) Amazing how that always works!
  • Evil Twin: Lampshaded by Charley and one of the Doctors.
  • For Doom the Bell Tolls
  • Freudian Trio
  • Good Is Not Nice: The Doctor's "nasty" personality.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Eeyore might be a jerkass but he's still the Doctor. It just means there's no nice side holding him back if you mess with his friends.
  • Literal Split Personality: The Doctor is split in three aspects of his personality.
  • Loophole Abuse: Invoked; the Kro'ka is too scared to directly defy his masters by giving the Doctor information directly, so the Doctor instead asks questions that he feels he could have worked out the answers to on his own given time, such as that the TARDIS is still intact or the name of the world where the Divergents are carrying out their experiments.
  • Mental World: The Kro'ka uses the Mind Blast to enter the the Doctor's mind, hoping to interrogate him. But he soon finds it so scary and chaotic a place with the Doctor acting as a Killer Game Master that he quickly wants to leave.
    The Doctor: Why did you even come here? You thought it would be different, didn't you? What did you expect? A room with a stack of boxes? An endless row of files? A library containing a book entitled All the Doctor's Secrets: Abridged? Or was I supposed to be writhing on some sort of floor, ready to tell you anything? I bet it's the last one. Your imagination seems to run to the hackneyed.
  • Mind Probe: When the Kro'ka threatens him with one of these called the "Mind Blast", the Doctor is more annoyed than anything and calls him out on how unoriginal he is, pointing out that many villains has tried Mind Probes named after various kitchen appliances on him before.
  • Mind Rape: The Doctor puts on a good show of screaming in agony as his mental barriers are being penetrated one by one. It's all just an act to trick the Kro'ka, though.
  • My Friends... and Zoidberg: The Kro'ka tries to wake the Doctor. Charley tells him to shut up. He's delighted to see her. "Aaah, the ever energetic Charley! ... ... And C'rizz.
  • Non-Answer: Charley mentions the Doctor gets vague when she asks how things bigger than a beach ball gets out of his pockets.
  • Obfuscating Stupidity: The Doctor mentions that his "goofiest" incarnations have also been the most sly.
  • Pet the Dog: The Doctor 's angry alternate gets really upset when Charley barely escapes a Death Trap.
  • Plot Allergy: The Doctor suffers from time sickness, so, naturally, he ends up being dragged toward the source of his time sickness by Charlie and C'rizz so they can locate a portal.
  • Self-Deprecation: The Doctors do this a lot.
  • Trail of Bread Crumbs: Of string in a maze.
  • Villainous Breakdown
  • Whole-Plot Reference: At one point the heroes get stuck in a labyrinth with a being which may or may not be a Minotaur.
  • Wounded Gazelle Gambit
  • You Have Failed Me
  • Your Mind Makes It Real: The world the Doctor and his companions land on.

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