The one featuring a "battle of the sexes" story. Alternatively, its the second chronological story featuring underrated Doctor Who villain Sil, before his second (and final) appearance on TV. Also the one featuring the Doctor's school bully!
Oh, I guess the Ice Warriors return here, too. Anyway...
Fresh off their Busman's Holiday in Blackpool, the Sixth Doctor and Peri are yanked rudely through time by a TARDIS distress summons, which turns out to have been issued by the Doctor's school bully, Anzor. Despite his low grades at the Academy, Anzor has managed to wrangle himself an appointment as an emissary of the High Council of Gallifrey. While on an official visit to the binary planets Magnus and Salva, Anzor managed to get his TARDIS trapped in the shields of a warship orbiting Magnus. He forces the Doctor to take his place by threatening torture with his Galvanizer and proceeds to Magnus to continue his mission. The Doctor does an emergency jump to escape the force field and finds himself in a cave.
On the arid surface of Magnus, Anzor meets with the Sixth Doctor's sometime adversary Sil. Banished after his failure on Thoros Beta until he recoups his financial losses, Sil has wormed his way into the good graces of Magnus's ruler, the Rana Zandusia, and spends most of the story alternately licking her boots and heavily hinting that he's going to betray her. Anzor, an old-school sexist, is infuriated that he must negotiate with a woman, but Zandusia explains that a particular disease on the planet kills any men who are exposed to sunlight. She fears, however, that the men who rule Salva have devised an antidote and are planning to invade and conquer Magnus. She requests that the Time Lords allow them to travel back a year to stop the development of the cure, which Anzor flatly denies — even if he weren't a raging misogynist, the Council only allows meddling with time in case of extreme emergencies (as we've previously seen). Infuriated, Zandusia has one of her underlings use a telepathy-enhancing ring to torture him and then place him in suspended animation so they can probe his mind for the secrets of time travel. She plans to steal his TARDIS and use it herself to preemptively conquer Salva.
Meanwhile the Doctor and Peri exit the TARDIS to find themselves in a ring of young boys. Their leader, Vion, is convinced that the Doctor and Peri are the prophesied ones who will guide them through the end of the world. It comes out that the boys of Magnus are kept below ground and raised so they can be used for breeding before they die at twenty with the Matrons weeding out any who show signs of rebellious spirit. The Doctor allows himself to be captured by some Matrons to allow Vion and Peri to escape.
Rana Zandusia's mind-readers are having no luck finding the secret of time travel in Anzor's brain, which is mostly just filled with bits of fluff and cobwebs. Fortunately they've just captured another Time Lord! The Doctor's mind proves much more interesting, and despite some clever psychic traps, the Magnusians extract the secret formulae necessary for time travel.
Peri and Vion, meanwhile, make their way overland to the palace under cover of night. Once inside they run into two Matrons. Vion is captured, but Peri escapes and rescues him from the re-education chamber by pretending to be a Matron, stealing one of their weapons for good measure. She decides to head back to the TARDIS in hopes of meeting the Doctor there.
The Doctor and Anzor are brought to the latter's TARDIS, and a little light torture convinces the Time Lord bully to open it for the Magnusians. Once everyone has entered and the formulae are plugged into the computer, Anzor pulls out a hidden gun and forces everyone out of the TARDIS, much to the Doctor's dismay. As it dematerializes, he reveals that he had planted the wrong formulae on his mind for the Magnusians to find. Anzor, who is incapable of navigating properly, is safely on a slow ride to the Big Bang.
Zandusia then drags the Doctor to his TARDIS, where they meet with Peri and Vion. They all take this opportunity to escape, fleeing to the frigid tunnels beneath the polar ice caps. Here they discover the detonator for a massive nuclear bomb, as well as some Ice Warriors! Turns out it was their ship in orbit, and they're planning to use nuclear bombs to move the planet into a more distant orbit, making the climate more to their liking and creating a new homeworld for themselves. They capture Peri while Vion and the Doctor escape.
While all this is happening, Zandusia, Sil, and a couple Magnusians break into the TARDIS. Sensing the intruders, the old girl does an emergency jump a few hours into the future, where the passengers see the palace in ruins and the landscape blasted. Zandusia resolves to head back and prevent this future from coming to pass.
Peri meets some captive Salvans, who were in fact planning to invade but were instead enslaved by the Ice Warriors. The Doctor and Vion show up and bust them all out. They try to destroy the Ice Warriors' control center, but they fail and the Ice Warrior plan goes off without a hitch.
Well, mostly without a hitch. You see, they had backup bombs in place in case the first bunch failed. The Doctor sets them off, somehow causing the planet to move back to its original orbit instead of flinging further from its sun. The Doctor's party and Zandusia's group are captured and Sil reveals he's been working for the Ice Warriors all along, helping them get their equipment set up while stockpiling heaters and winter clothing so the Magnusians would be forced to buy from him. The Ice Warriors, however, had no intention to honor their deal and slate Sil for execution with everyone else.
Just as the execution is about to happen, the planet slips neatly back into its old orbit and the sun rises, killing the Ice Warriors. The leader of the Salvans gives Vion a vaccine so that the sunlight won't kill him and offers to bring in all his people to marry the Magnusians and help them rebuild their society. This sets off a round of squabbling and the Doctor and Peri slip out to their next adventure, and the Doctor even manages to get the last laugh on his school bully. "Mission accomplished!"
Like most episodes of the first Lost Stories series, Mission to Magnus was originally slated to be filmed for the aborted Season 23 of the Classic series. It was adapted for audio with as few changes as possible, including bringing back Nabil Shaban as Sil. Unfortunately this also meant including the original script's hamfisted attempt at commentary on gender relations in the 1980s, though as it's played in a sort of panto tone it's not as grating as it could be.
Tropes:
- Agony Beam:
- One of the abilities of the Magnusians' rings.
- Anzor uses a "galvaniser" to threaten others into obeying him. During their time at the Academy, he used it to get the Doctor to do his navigational homework for him.
- Bad Future: The ruins of the palace as seen by Rana Zandusia, though it's a much more immanent future than usual.
- Blind Jump: Both the Doctor's escape from the Ice Warrior ship and the TARDIS's later jump into the future.
- Conqueror from the Future: Sil keeps trying to goad Zandusia into becoming this.
- The End of the World as We Know It: The Ice Warriors' goal.
- Gendercide: The effect of certain microbes in Magnus's atmosphere combined with exposure to its sun.
- Global Warming: Inverted. The Ice Warriors' plan is to cool the climate of Magnus.
- Hostile Terraforming: The Ice Warriors' plan.
- Matriarchy: Magnus is a Patriarchy Flip.
- Ominous Floating Spaceship: The Ice Warrior battleship.
- Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: The number of nukes it would take to shift the Magnus's orbit far enough to cool its climate for the Ice Warriors to be comfortable would obliterate the planet.
- Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up: Anzor, who ruthlessly bullied the Doctor and his classmates while they were at the Academy together. He hasn't improved any since then.
- Signs of the End Times: Vion believes that the Doctor and Peri's arrival is the first of these.
