The Easter Sunday special of ‘Jonathan Creek‘ – The Judas Tree – features the Doctor Who duo of Sheridan Smith and Paul McGann, previously only heard on BBC Radio 7 or via download as Lucie and the Eighth Doctor. Worth a look, I’m sure. Seems like perfect timing given the return of Who this weekend.

Despite what feels like an endless term of planning followed by lashings of self-doubt, I move ever closer to running my own role-playing campaign using the new Doctor Who system. With that in mind, I have been concocting a story arc. So, given the common practice seems to be to have a season structured along the lines of thirteen episodes… What I have in mind thus far is:

1. Arrowdown
   • A TARDIS crashes on the outskirts of a small seaside town faces an infinite time loop filled with Autons and a tortured fragment of the Nestene Consciousness, while a lost Torchwood operative only seeks to find her husband
2. Future of the Cybermen
   • A scout ship on a deep space run to deliver vital medicine to an outlying colony faces scavenging Cybermen, misguided pirates and a temporal anomaly strong enough to trap everyone until the end of time
3. Collision
   • A research team on the LHC have discovered a ground-breaking new particle, but also appear to have opened a channel to their beloved departed… and the hate-infused Gelth (I realise this is something of a riff on the Torchwood radio drama ‘Lost Souls’)
4. Adventure #4 – part 1
5. Adventure #4 – part 2
6. The Tunnel
   • A train carrying a royal traveller from Paris to London comes under threat from clockwork soldiers that threaten to derail time and space itself
7. The Sward and the Stone
   • In 14th century Wales, a small group of travellers transport a carved stone along the south coast to Pembroke, trailed by what appears to be a leper knight and a retinue of rebels intent on acquisition of the block and the power it contains to save the Pyrovile
8. Adventure #7 – part 1
9. Adventure #7 – part 2
10. Adventure #8
11. Adventure #9
12. Doom of the Time Lords
    • Locked in the gaol of an ancient castle, the time travellers struggle to escape only to be faced with the revelation that the world around them is a construct of the Matrix, their captors are the Krillitane, and the adventures before now have been faced by doppelgängers.
13. Triumph of the Krillitane
    • With the all the elements needed to restore the core to the Nightmare Child in place, the Krillitane intend to absorb the DNA of the Time Lords to access the Rassilon Imprimatur that will allow them to escape with mastery of Time, leaving the true Lords of Time and the Daleks trapped within the Time Lock, and the Universe at their mercy

Yes, several gaps remain – and I’m working on them. I have a feeling I may try for another Cybermen episode to follow-up on ‘Future of the Cybermen‘, a reworking of the old adventure module ‘Countdown‘.

The Krillitane sit at the heart of the arc and they have used the loophole in The Doctor’s time lock created by The Master to steal a TARDIS, insert agents of their own (namely the players) and set them off to find the components needed to steal one of the hideous meta-weapons of the Time War – the Nightmare Child. The real Time Lords, who will hopefully save the day in the final episodes, have been held within the Matrix – as per previous experiences in The Deadly Assassin and The Ultimate Foe – and manage to make their escape in time to foil the Krillitane plot.

A twist in the tale will leave the players faced with the prospect of imprisonment along with the rest of the Time Lords when The Doctor restores the lock following his confrontation with The Master and Rassilon. Each adventure in the sequence will give the players access to a piece of technology or knowledge that will combine to create the core of the Nightmare Child. The players will not actively perceive the act of ‘theft’ needed to acquire each item, though some foretelling may occur at the end of certain episodes where any physical items may be seen to disappear at the hands of an unseen enemy.

“Life’s not a game son. I’m teaching you the art of survival…”

Survival… I’ve had this sat on top of the video pile for a while. Sunday afternoon seemed as good a time as any to watch it again.

I love the Doctor’s characterisation here, keen to find a mystery at the bottom of a cat food tin. Perivale seems over-grown and near derelict, bereft of inhabitants except a few scant ‘survivors’. However, the analogies and comments all seem too heavily laced with references to survival; and action, and acting, a little too wooden compared to the Who of today. Sylvester and Sophie act, but it feels like the plot’s so leaden they can’t drive much energy into it. The Doctor, fascinated by the black cat, spends the whole first episode chasing it and basically failing miserably, before engaging in a spot of pointless wall-crawling reminiscent of the pointless ice wall abseiling from ‘Dragonfire’. Ace pursues her friends, many missing for weeks, but doesn’t really seem to care either about what might have happened to them or what the Doctor might be up to.

In many ways, Episode 1 feels like a role-playing game adventure run badly. The gamemaster seems to have lost control of the players, uncertain how to guide them towards the plot while they wander hither and yon doing whatever they want to do. Mid-way through Episode 2, with cats feasting and fighting, we get a vague hint of a purpose – but nothing much. The Master appears to have become trapped on the Cheetah Planet and infected with some feline DNA, separated from his TARDIS; but, quite why The Doctor might find a solution The Master could not doesn’t make sense. Couldn’t The Master trap one of the prey teleported from Earth and infect it, then use it to head there? Surely he could then use resources left behind from his previous visits to Earth to either get back to his TARDIS or trick someone into helping him get to wherever he left it.

The idea of a living planet that enjoys a symbiotic existence with it’s inhabitants has potential. The world can only survive while the Cheetah People live on, but their feline instincts mean they live to fight, live to feast. When people engage in battle with the inhabitants, they become part of the chain of existence, an element of the relationship. Midge and Ace do battle – the former more violently than the latter – and both become infected with the Cheetah People DNA.

Anyway… I can’t feel too mean towards this story, the final episodes of the old series. Littered with things to fault, driven by a plot full of holes like Swiss cheese and filled with pantomime cat people, Survival spells the end of an era. I loved Ace and the Seventh Doctor – and they’ll always occupy a soft spot in my fan boy heart.

“There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea’s asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice, and somewhere else the tea’s getting cold! Come on, Ace — we’ve got work to do!”