When the TARDIS is critically damaged during and impromptu flight through a spacio-temporal maelstrom, the Doctor and Ria are forced to crashland on the planet Llandros. Here the Doctor discovers a shattering truth: the race of biological engineers who are the Ship’s only hope of repair have suffered a massive ecological disaster which has reduced them to a state of total genetic chaos.
The finale to season 2 of the Audio Visuals ends in epic fashion with BLOOD CIRCUIT.
Blurb
RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY
When the TARDIS is critically damaged during an impromptu flight through a spacio-temporal maelstrom, the Doctor and Ria are forced to crash land on the planet Llandros.
Here the Doctor discovers a shattering truth:
The race of biological engineers who are the Ship’s only hope of repair have suffered a massive ecological disaster which has reduced them to a state of total genetic chaos.
Meanwhile, Ria is desperately ill, a victim of the acceleration of relative time across her unique physiology, and in a gigantic silo somewhere beneath the surface of Llandros, huge Blackstone Generators hold the key to armaggeddon.
With blurbs like that, who needs reviews?
Part 1
The story starts with a pair of explorers on the surface of a barren planet. They shoot a creature and are thrilled at the notion that they are about to become rich.
CUE MUSIC
The explorers, Tate and Stringer, are back at their base, discussing whether or not they want to go back out. They’re afraid “The Screamers” might get them, but their supervisor, Fowler, has a computer log written out (in COBOL! How quaint! I wonder if their spaceship runs on a Commodore 64) and Stringer is scheduled to go back out on a hunt.
Seven minutes into the story, the Doctor shows up. Nice of you to join us. He and Ria are about to head off to a new destination (Planet 41 Theta in the star cluster Signas, galactic coordinates 41 degrees 0 minutes 13 seconds galactic north, 317 degrees 43 minutes 0.7 seconds galactic south, 87 degrees right ascension to the plane of galactic elliptic, and a sixth order vector equation to determine the compensation factor for orbital position and rotation – for those of you playing at home). The Doctor is worried about the Tardis. It’s his life and home. It’s getting old, and the Doctor feels that the Tardis is worried about dying. And when the Tardis dies, the Doctor knows that his travels will be over. So he’s been repairing, updating and healing the Tardis to the exclusion of everything else. The Doctor tells Ria that they are headed to the Planet Tersurus (check the coordinates above if you can’t find it on Google Gallifrey) to seek out biological engineers who can help fix his ship. Bonus points if you remember the relevance of Tersurus to Doctor Who mythology, you spineless poltroons.
Meanwhile, redshirt, I mean Stringer, is exploring the planet surface. He sees Screamers all around him. Tate tells his boss that he wants to go help, but uber witch Fowler says that he’s dead meat. Several horrible screams later, and sure enough, Stringer is dead, to Tate’s horror and Stringer’s ambivalence.
The Tardis arrives in orbit around what first appears to be Tersurus. Ria hears a strange voice calling her name. Just then, the Cloister Bell sounds. The lights go off and the Tardis goes into free fall. In a last ditch effort, the Doctor turns flight control over to the Tardis itself. They survive but crash land. The Doctor sees that Ria is injured and is acting very strangely. She decides to go to her room for some rest. A voice calls to her, telling her to come with her. It wants to show her something. It tells her that they have to go back to the Punishment Dome (see Maenad). The Doctor comes in to apologize for his recent behavior. He says that they were forced through time as a result of the malfunction, and have both been aged. The Tardis has been badly damaged and they won’t be able to take off again without repairing it. They are stranded. The Doctor detects radio signals outside and decides to go look for help. As soon as he steps out, the voice starts talking to Ria again.
The Doctor ventures outside and discovers hundreds of very hard manufactured blocks. He ends up stumbling into a cave, which leads to a kind of basement. He notices drag marks which lead to the body of Stringer. The dead man is holding pebbles of a refined material with which he can repair the Tardis. But before he can contact Ria, a monster attacks him. It leaves him alive, but has taken the light and severed his airline. The Doctor is left to suffocate.
CUE MUSIC
Part 2
The Doctor takes the pack off of the dead astronaut and saves himself. He gets in touch with Ria, who apologizes, to him. She takes off in the Tardis and abandons him. Tate, the surviving astronaut, approaches the Doctor with a weapon drawn. He seems to think that the Doctor had something to do with his partner’s death (see An Unearthly Child, Survival, and the 150 odd stories between them). The Doctor points out that the dead man had a heating device put in his suit, which brought the Screamers to him. Tate tells him that they are after precious gems. The gems are actually cysts developed inside the Screamers. Hunting and killing the Screamers provides a fortune’s worth of “Screaming Gems”. Tate suspects that Fowler set up Stringer. At the moment, they are cut off from their mother ship.
Ria is getting close to the spatial maelstrom that first caused the Tardis to crash. The voice in her head tells her to push on. It calls her its sister and says they should die together.
The Doctor and Tate decide to go exploring in the planet interior. They discover an ancient shelter and activate a panel, which reveals a huge Screamer graveyard. Tate decides to scavenge enough gems to make him the richest man alive. The Doctor notes that the graveyard contains giant spaceship engines – engines that create holes in space. The holes create gateways to space outside of space. Through the laws of technobabble, these gateways will inevitably eventually replace all matter in our universe with matter from the other. The Screamers are apparently travelers from this other universe. Speaking of them, the Doctor and Tate hang around too long and some Screamers find them and attack. Fortunately they’re able to distract them and make an escape. Tate decides to go settle his score with Fowler for letting Stringer die. But as they struggle, their mother ship leaves the system without them. And if that weren’t bad enough, the Screamers arrive.
CUE MUSIC
Part 3
As the Screamers bear down, the Tardis materializes a short distance away. One of the Screamers attacks Tate, leaving him as an unfortunate distraction while Fowler and the Doctor escape. Tate promises vengeance on Fowler, living or dead (in this case, dead). Fowler forces the Doctor inside, telling him that she’ll kill him if he doesn’t cooperate. They find Ria collapsed in the console room. Fowler, who takes pushy *itchiness to levels that Leona Helmsley would find rude and uncomfortable, demands that the Doctor take her back to her mother ship. They look at the scanner and see that the Screamers are recovering the gems from Tate’s body. One of the Screamers starts banging on the door. Ria comes to, and the Doctor and Fowler take her to the medical center. Afterwards, the Doctor analyzes the Screamer crystals and discovers that they aren’t cysts, they are baby Screamers. Fowler doesn’t care and demands that they be synthesized into the byproduct that will temporarily repair the Tardis. All the Doctor has to do is push a button, but he refuses. Fowler solves the problem by pushing the button herself. Back in the medical center, Ria tells the Doctor that she is dying and must return home. She is an engineered life form and only has a 6-month life span. She’d been with the Doctor for 4 months, but the Tardis accident aged them both by 2 additional months. The voice that Ria hears suddenly starts talking to the Doctor. She is the “clone sister” of Ria, also created by Rayden (see Maenad). She is projecting herself into the Tardis from a medical center on their home world. She and Ria must join together so that they can live. They are different aspects of the same mind. Suddenly the Tardis goes out of control. The embryonic gems that the Doctor synthesized have survived inside the time rotor and have begun turning the ship into a Tardis/Screamer hybrid. The floor itself starts to turn into flesh.
CUE MUSIC
Part 4
Fowler lips off one time too many and Ria thumps her, taking her gun. The Doctor decides to rip the Screamer organs out of the time rotor by brute force. Liquid helium erupts out of the Tardis and shatters Fowler (about time too!). By sheer force, the Doctor finally removes the infection from the ship. But the Tardis appears to be dead. The Doctor laments the loss of his machine. Just then, a Screamer possesses the Doctor’s body, telling him that the Tardis is not dead, but suspended. The temporary transformation of the Tardis has cleansed and renewed its system. It has been reborn. The Screamer is actually a Tersurus engineer. The rock that they crash-landed on is actually was Tersurus. The Screamers invaded Tersurus, corrupting their bodies (I think). With a fully functioning Tardis, the Doctor takes Ria home, bringing along the Tersurun.
CUE MUSIC
Evaluation
The Audio Visuals up until this point had had some very high highs and some very Connection 13 lows. But they hadn’t had their perfect masterpiece until this story. What an epic! You could hand this script to Steven Moffat, and Matt Smith would have the opening to end all openings. It’s a real adventure. The cast is great. And the cast that isn’t great dies very quickly. The story is exciting, the music is excellent, the atmosphere is real, and it even has one of those “Do I have the right?” moments. Blood Circuit is by far the best release of the first two seasons. And as the closer to season 2, it leaves things on an incredibly high note. So, complaints? Well, yeah. For every Weng-Chiang there is a giant rat, and for every Androzani there is a Magma Creature. The Blood Circuit Magma Rat is named Fowler. She’s a decent Ice Queen type for the first half of the story. But once she meets up with the Doctor she becomes the most single mindedly obstinate and nasty villain you could imagine. It’s like if you took all of the annoying characteristics of Peri (that is to say every characteristic of Peri), the snottiness of a spoiled 6 year old, and the murderessness of a standard supervillain, and then threw a hive of bees at her. That’s Fowler. She starts coming across as ridiculously irrational and over the top. Aside from her, it’s just a fantastic story. Not only good enough to be one of the best Big Finish stories if it were ever adapted, but one of the best televised stories too. Masterpiece!
Overall 10 out of 10
NEXT TIME
Season 3 starts with a story that is the linchpin to an arc that covers the rest of the Audio Visuals series, SECOND SOLUTION.