The TARDIS team land on the planet Valderon, which, to their surprise, has already been predicted. For once, they are welcomed to a planet and have the opportunity to meet the residents. However, one of the residents knows Nyssa a little too well, while the Doctor investigates the planet's jail and fortune-telling machine. Meanwhile, Turlough and Tegan are accused of murder by the machine and must find a way to prove their innocence. Their futures and pasts have come back to haunt them, but will they become prisoners to their fate?
Due to this serial's status as a major Wham Episode, this page contains spoilers for not only this story, but stories from the Doctor's first ever departure from Gallifrey up to and including The Fifth Doctor's Regeneration. Read at your own risk!
Tropes
- Anti-Climax: The Doctor finds out about Nyssa's children long before he's supposed to, unleashing a powerfully destructive paradox that threatens to destroy everything... and he undoes it all merely by promising to act really surprised when Nyssa tells him she has kids in the future.
- Big Bad Duumvirate: Sibor and the First TARDIS, though their alliance is very one-sided and tenuous, and the TARDIS quickly shakes Sibor off once she becomes more trouble than she is worth.
- Blessed with Suck: Tegan and Turlough's experiences being possessed by The Mara and Eldrad, respectively, rendered them vulnerable enough that the weakened First TARDIS could influence their minds. It notes that nobody else on the entire planet had that degree of psychic vulnerability until the two of them came along.
- Brief Accent Imitation: The Doctor and Nyssa pretend to be Scottish while impersonating two guards. Nyssa in particular makes a real hash of it, never having been any good at undercover work, but somehow they still get away with it.
- Call-Back:
- Adric Traken (first mentioned in Cobwebs) is a major character here.
- Audio from Big Finish stories featuring the 6th, 7th and 8th Doctors is used in a Flash Forward.
- Nyssa mentions first telling the Doctor about her son when he was in a barn (in a dream) during his regeneration.
- Nyssa now looks younger due to an infusion of rejuvenation energy.
- Call-Forward: The Type 50 TARDIS' last words are (possibly on purpose) "is this death?"
- Calling The Old Woman Out: Adric rips into Nyssa for failing to come back to her own time, especially after having developed a cure for Richter's Syndrome, because she was too caught up in having adventures with the Doctor. Not only has she missed out on 25 years with her family, who thought she had died, but millions of people have died from Richter's in the intervening years.
- Continuity Nod:
- Trying to figure out the specifics of the double timeline crisis, Tegan asks if it's like the time there were two Brigadiers.
- When trying to figure out a way to escape from prison, Turlough wryly notes a distinct lack of ventilation ducts.
- Creepy Monotone: TARDIS-possessed Tegan has a thoroughly frightening, emotionless way of speaking.
- Deadpan Snarker: Turlough is one as usual, telling Tegan (an Australian) that she should be comfortable being in a penal colony.
- Dead Person Impersonation: Not long after Sibor dies, the First TARDIS assumes her voice and form to communicate with, having previously been impersonating Tegan.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: The First TARDIS' anger and jealousy over the Doctor effectively abandoning her (for an inferior model, no less), has overtones of a spurned wife whose husband has left her for another woman.
- Flash Forward: The 6th to 8th Doctors make brief audio appearances when the First TARDIS is trying to kill the Doctor for good and feed on the ensuing paradox.
- Green-Eyed Monster: The first TARDIS is not happy she's been trapped for aeons while the Doctor was gallivanting around the galaxy with an inferior model.
- Have We Met Yet?: Briefly played with when Adric thinks the younger-looking Nyssa was from before she had him. It's not, she was rejuvenated by a powerful mineral substance in a previous story.
- Hoist by Their Own Petard: Sibor reactivates the power lines to the First TARDIS, hoping to exploit its powers to take over the planet. She is killed in the resulting energy blast.
- Jade-Coloured Glasses: Stranded in the past but convinced not to interact with her family for 25 years, Nyssa becomes cold, lonely and bitter. She is fully aware of it, and begs the Doctor to break his own rules to change time so she doesn't have to be this way.
- Lampshade Hanging:Tegan: Fantastic. Locked up, as usual!
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Upset with the Doctor and Tegan for apparently not trusting him enough to reveal what they know about Galen, Turlough storms off to demand the information from Galen himself, inadvertently revealing that Nyssa was not from the past, as Galen believed. If Turlough had left well enough alone, they could have all beat a hasty retreat in the TARDIS and most of the plot would never have happened.
- Older Than They Look: Thanks to her previous rejuvenation by The Emerald Tiger combined with her naturally-slow aging process, it goes completely without comment when Nyssa shows up after a 25-year exile that she is now well into her 90s.
- One-Steve Limit:
- An odd case, since "TARDIS" isn't really a name, but it is most commonly used in reference to the one used by the Doctor. Apart from a few instances of calling The First TARDIS by that name, most other characters refer to it by the rather clunky "Type 50", even characters who have no real understanding of what a TARDIS is.
- Also averted with Nyssa's son, Adric, though he spends some time going by the name Galen so as not to reveal who he is.
- One-Winged Angel: After absorbing a massive amount of energy from the various paradoxes in play, the First TARDIS merges with the building it's in, growing to enormous size and transforming the architecture into a massive, roundel-riddled monstrosity, with the intention of doing the same to the entire planet.
- Precrime Arrest: The First TARDIS spends its time on Valderon telling its local law enforcement who's going to commit what crimes next. The Doctor soon becomes suspicious of this when the system accuses Tegan and Turlough of killing a guard when they were just about to leave the planet.
- Prequel/Sequel Episode: Primarily to "Winter", part of Circular Time. It's a prequel in the Doctor's timeline, but a sequel for Nyssa.
- Prophecy Twist: The "chronometer" does correctly predict that Turlough and Tegan will be present, holding a gun, when a guard is killed, but it wasn't them that fired.
- Redemption Equals Death: Realizing she had gone too far, the First TARDIS sacrifices herself to give Nyssa her life back and restore some peace to the Doctor's life.
- Ret-Gone: The version of Nyssa who spent 25 years in the past is wiped out when the Doctor travels back in the First TARDIS to rescue her almost as soon as she'd been abandoned there. The resulting paradox destroys the TARDIS for good.
- Sequel Hook: The closing moments of the story reveal that Nyssa never returned to her family, meaning something happened to her on her travels to keep her from coming home.
- Take Over the World: Sibor's entire M.O. By the Doctor's standards this is almost quaint and, with everything else going on, he barely has the energy to focus on such a (comparatively) minor obstacle. Eventually she takes care of herself.
- Temporal Paradox: All over the place, as the First TARDIS is deliberately creating them to feed on their temporal energy. The paradox created by Nyssa revealing the existence of her children to the Doctor, years in her past but still to come in his future, is mentioned as being especially powerful, as it coincides with the Doctor's regeneration, and can potentially wipe out all his future incarnations in one fell swoop.
- Timey-Wimey Ball: Hoo-boy. The Doctor's First TARDIS becomes supercharged when dealing with paradoxes, so it starts abusing the timey-wimey ball hard. Its methods include:
- Predicting (accurately) who's going to commit which crimes next, tipping off the authorities to prevent the crime and then feeding off the paradox that it creates. How can they commit a robbery if they're jailed in a fortress?
- Attempting to kill the Doctor to feed on the ensuing paradox. How could the Fifth Doctor be dead even though he's already met later incarnations?
- Allowing Nyssa to travel 25 years into the past, so she could spread a cure for the very deadly Richter's Syndrome and tempting her with the chance to be with her family, despite the fact that she officially went missing in that time (by joining the Doctor). It was rectified when she was told to go into exile instead, to prevent the timelines from being destroyed from such a large paradox.
- Finally, she reveals to the Doctor who "Galen" is, despite him being first told decades from then. Though the ensuing paradox is comparatively minor, since it coincides with the Fifth Doctor's regeneration it becomes possible to wipe out all his future incarnations. This crisis is almost immediately resolved when the Doctor says he'll just pretend to be surprised when the younger Nyssa would later tell him Galen's true identity.
- We Have Reserves: After Nyssa creates a paradox by travelling back in time to be with her family, the Doctor and Adric reach out to her telepathically, convincing her to go into hiding instead and deprive the First TARDIS of paradox energy. She simply shifts focus onto the secondary paradox she had brought into play that nobody else had noticed.
- Wham Episode: This episode has an unusually high "Holy Shit!" Quotient for a monthly story. It includes:
- An extended look at Nyssa's new family and how severely her new travels with the Doctor have affected them.
- The Doctor's First TARDIS got stuck on Valderon when searching for her owner. What she didn't know was that he was fleeing Gallifrey and didn't have time to retrieve her, instead stealing a random dilapidated TARDIS as an escape vehicle. She's not happy.
- Nyssa swears Tegan to secrecy regarding her son's existence, since she earlier told the Doctor about him shortly before his regeneration on Androzani. note She has to reconsider this promise when her son's real identity become obvious to the Doctor.
- Nyssa chooses to stay in 25-year-earlier Valderon to get Richter's Syndrome cures out earlier and make up for lost time with her children, until the Doctor and Adric are forced to make telepathic contact and tell her not to do that.
- Wham Line: Just when you thought there were no more Wham moments that could possibly fit into one story, we get Adric's narration at the end.Adric: I still remember it like it was yesterday. My mother, turning away, walking back into that beaten-up blue box, before it faded away to nothing. And I never saw my mother again.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Nyssa chews the Doctor out for thinking she couldn't cope with events and keeping things from her, citing the deaths of everyone she grew up with and everything she's gone through since she's known him as proof that she is strong enough to handle anything.
- The Doctor also gives a brief one to Tegan for keeping the knowledge of Nyssa's children a secret, but Tegan, naturally, is having none of it, since she made a promise to a friend and, to her, that's that. The Doctor quickly backs down.
- You Can't Go Home Again: Specifically, this story means that Nyssa can no longer return to the time she came from, 25 years in the past. And, at the very end, we find out that she never returns to this time, either.
