You can’t change the past, every time traveller knows that. What’s done is done and cannot be unwritten. But what if it isn’t the past any more? What if it’s now the present?
The spaceship called the UK-201 was intended to fly to the Earth colony of Astra. But it never made it. Crashing on the planet Dido, a tragic chain of events was set in motion leading to the death of almost all of its crew and a massacre of the indigenous population.
The only survivor of these events was a young girl called Vicki. Rescued by the time traveller known as the Doctor, she’s been travelling in his ship for some time.
So when she suddenly wakes up in her cabin on the UK-201 again, without her friends, a few days before the accident, she’s faced with a stark choice… Can she stop the crash from happening? And if she can, should she?
THE EARLY ADVENTURES: THE CRASH OF THE UK-201
The latest series of Early Adventures wraps up with “The Crash of the UK-201” by Jonathan Morris, a story that gives us a glimpse of a previously unexplored part of Doctor Who: Vicki’s life before her ship crashed prior to “The Rescue.” And it’s good, though it struggles against its biggest problem: it has no reason to be 4 episodes and well over 2 hours long.
If you saw “Father’s Day” on TV, you’ve seen “The Crash of the UK-201,” except shorter and better. Nonetheless, “Crash” is a fantastic look into Vicki, a character we’ve only ever learned about through Companion Chronicles. Due to an accident on the TARDIS, Vicki wakes up in her cabin on the UK-201 near the day it is fated to crash on Dido. Given this chance to rewrite history, she takes it: Steven appears on board shortly thereafter, and he is able to repair Bennett’s sabotage of the engines and pilot the UK-201 out of Dido’s atmosphere and back on course. (The story never indicates whether this is in the past or future relative to Steven’s history, but given the ease with which Steven effects these repairs, I’m assuming he’s from Vicki’s future.) This has what seems to be a wonderful effect: the crew survives, the ship proceeds to arrive at the colony Astra, and Vicki goes on to live a long, happy life, first with her father and later with her husband and children. Unfortunately, mysterious hooded creatures haunt her, and while they don’t look or sound like the Reapers from “Father’s Day,” they seem to have the same purpose: erasing paradoxes from the timeline.
Vicki has the ability to keep traveling back in her personal history, and so, having done it once, she keeps trying to fix “mistakes.” But these decisions have consequences. Her father is killed in a disaster at an observatory, but Vicki meets the doctor that tries to save him, and they later fall in love and are married, living a happy life with two children. But when she tries to go back and save her father, history changes, and she no longer falls in love and has a family. Yet when she tries to put that right, the essential randomness of sexual reproduction means that her two children are no longer the same children she had on a previous attempt. This is the thematic core of the piece: life is determined by a series of random events that chain together to establish our histories. Some of these events are wonderful, some are tragic, but together they form our lives. And if we had the power to change individual events, we would forever change the tapestry, and our lives would become unrecognizable. Vicki learns this the hard way – she tries and tries to engineer a perfect life for herself but realizes no matter what she does she will experience pain and loss. This is a fantastic theme, and Morris captures it well – but he belabors the point.
This story could have been told in two episodes. By the time Vicki is cycling back through her life for the 5th time, the story passes the point of feeling important and instead starts to feel tedious. We know what’s happening, we know what ultimately has to happen to return things to normal, and we spend the second half of the story in a holding pattern. When Vicki finally decides to return things to normal, we have to sit through multiple false starts before she even gets that right. This isn’t the sort of story we would have seen on TV in the 1960s, but the obvious padding fits right in with Doctor Who of that period and is unnecessary in a modern audio drama.
Fortunately, the performances carry us through the tedium of the story’s second half. Maureen O’Brien is excellent throughout, really selling Vicki’s alternating happiness and frustration. Peter Purves handles most of the narration as well as a supporting role for Steven, and he’s excellent as usual. Lisa Bowerman directs well, and Toby Hrycek-Robinson’s sound design nicely captures the different time periods. The major selling point for “The Crash of the UK-201” is learning more about Vicki, and O’Brien’s performance is the reason to stick around. Sticking around, unfortunately, is the tough part.
Recommended nonetheless.
7/10