The Outliers (audio story)

 was the second story of the fourth series of The Early Adventures, produced by Big Finish Productions. It was written by Simon Guerrier, narrated by Anneke Wills and Frazer Hines and featured the Second Doctor, Polly Wright, Ben Jackson and Jamie McCrimmon.

Publisher's summary
The TARDIS takes the Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie to a flooded underground town on an alien world. The streets are empty. The houses are bare. Not a trace of life.

The miners working here are vanishing. And it isn’t long before the time-travellers are suspected of being responsible for the disappearances. But even the authorities haven’t fully realised the scale of the problem.

There’s something else on this world. Something dragging people away. And it won’t stop until it’s taken them all.

Part one
The Doctor, Jamie, Ben and Polly arrive in a flooded cavern underground full of abandoned and are mystified when they cannot find anyone around. They are spotted via security by Richard Tipple and his crew through a security camera. As the four investigate, they hear a noise and see some uniformed personnel and hide to avoid trouble but are called out anyway and concede and surrender. They manage to convince them and their commander Chatura Sharma that they are Earth Ambassadors but before more can be explained, an alarm goes off and the four are dragged off by Chatura to go investigate. They discover in one of the houses ciripedes and Chatura explains about a series of disappearances that they have been investigating. Chatura informs the Doctor that she has orders to bring him to higher authority and he and Ben depart, leaving Polly and Jamie behind to investigate and he leaves the Earth examiner badge with Polly. Ben and the Doctor are greeted by Tipple while Jamie and Polly meet Dr Goro. Polly helps Dr Goro reconfigure some numbers after doing a data scan and they discover people have been going missing at a rate of two per hour for over a decade...

Part two
The Doctor manages to dissuade Tipple from having them shot after suspecting them of being saboteurs and he agrees to temporarily help them investigate the disappearances. They return to the base of operations and there learn that Tipple supervises the mining of arconite, a dangerous substance used in the destruction of whole planets. Tipple receives a call from Goro requesting his presence, and the Doctor accompanies him, leaving Ben to investigate the mines. On the journey, Tipple admits to the Doctor that he had fudged with the data because the disappearances seemed like statistical outliers and he wanted them to be ignored so people wouldn't interfere with the mining operations. They arrive and are found by Jamie who explains that Polly's not with him because there was just an attack and the guards with him disappeared. In the meantime, Ben and Chatura descend into the depths of the mine to investigate and discover massive amounts of "barnacles" and the core is hot, something unusual for an asteroid where the mining is taking place. Tipple puts the Doctor in charge seemingly admitting he has made too many mistakes and put everyone in danger.

Ben is swallowed by a large wave of water, frightening Chatura, however she manages to save him and they go off to tell the Doctor about their findings. The Doctor, against protests, goes down to talk to the creature Ben informed him about but in the middle of discourse the Doctor is suddenly pulled into the water...

Part three
Ben, Polly and Chatura make a plan to rescue the Doctor despite Tipple refusing to help and forcing them into jobs to try and keep them apart. The three of them and Jamie travel through the caverns looking for any traces of the Doctor. Jamie decides to go for a deep dive in a wet suit but suddenly disappears and the scanner registers a massive shape which chases them. Polly, in the ensuing chase, is also thrown overboard while Ben attempts to take the creature head-on and manages to successfully lose it but discovers Chatura has gone missing when suddenly he is dragged into the water as well by the strange creature....

Part four
Ben has a strange dream about living in the tropics with an older Polly before he is awoken by the Doctor who is accompanied by Chatura, Jamie and Polly. They deduce that the ceripides are trying to communicate to them in the only way they know how, which is transmitting visions of the future. They awaken again inside the creature and the Doctor explains he has found a way to communicate with it. They manage to make contact with ciripedes Orthogona who gives them a cryptic message explaining that something terrible is about to happen and that the five of them may be able to prevent the ensuing catastrophe. Jamie and Chatura return to Tipple and explain the situation but he misinterprets and prepares an attack in an attempt to save the mine. The Doctor, Ben and Polly, however, learn that the ciripedes are dying due to Tipple's actions and try to go stop him. Tipple orders two guards to shoot Jamie and Chatura who are being held prisoner, but Chatura, who worked with them, convinces them something is amiss. Receiving some information from Imperial Command she confronts Tipple for covering up the disappearances and for playing all parties, as discovered in Dr Goro's notes. They also see the gas released by the Doctor as shown to them by the creature, which appears on Tipple's scanner and ends his charade for good, showing his mining to be doing more harm than good.

The Doctor, Chatura, Jamie, Ben and Polly take a boat back to the TARDIS while they explain Jamie's hypothesis as to why the creature didn't harm Chatura, because it only communicates potential futures and the creature didn't harm her because it sensed that she had potential to help alter the future and save them by stopping the mining.

Cast

 * Polly Wright/Narrator - Anneke Wills
 * Jamie McCrimmon/The Doctor - Frazer Hines
 * Ben Jackson - Elliot Chapman
 * Richard Tipple - Alistair Petrie
 * Dr Goro - Debbie Chazen
 * Chatura Sharma - Matilda Ziegler

Crew

 * Cover Art - Tom Webster
 * Director - Lisa Bowerman
 * Executive Producers - Nicholas Briggs and Jason Haigh-Ellery
 * Music and Sound Design - Toby Hrycek-Robinson
 * Producer - David Richardson
 * Script Editor - John Dorney
 * Writer - Simon Guerrier

Worldbuilding

 * Asteroids shouldn't have hot cores.
 * The ciripedes are not related to the barnacles of Earth, but are an example of parallel evolution.
 * Ben has done scuba diving before.
 * The Doctor and Jamie get somewhat sea sick.
 * Ben and Polly were both born in the 1940s.
 * The Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie all wear Wellington boots. The Doctor's are a size too small.
 * Tipple drinks coffee.
 * The Deltin War was 2 centuries ago.


 * The Doctor explains to Ben and Polly what a dishwasher is, since they were not widely common-place in Ben and Polly's time.
 * The Doctor has a piece of string and child's catapult in his pocket.
 * Arconite is a mineral being mined on the asteroid colony, and is the active ingredient in Robust Planetary Cleansing; it was used to end the Deltron war. It is used to obliterate whole worlds.

Possible futures

 * Jamie sees himself in a castle, and later sees himself on a desert island with a girl, but when recalling the vision, he is cut off before giving her name.
 * Polly sees herself and Ben being chased by Cybermen on a beach.
 * The Doctor sees people he thought he could never see again, people he didn't want to leave, and who he thought were gone. He theorises that all of them dreamt about things they didn't realise they wanted to see.
 * Chatura sees the Doctor, but the man in her vision looks nothing like him.
 * The ciripedes can see potential futures based on the thoughts they sense from others.

Continuity

 * The Doctor uses his Earth Examiner badge (TV: The Power of the Daleks) when Chatura wonders if he's an Adjudicator. (TV: Colony in Space)
 * Chatura mentions Vega IV and the Daleks. (AUDIO: Invasion of the Daleks)
 * It's possible she meant Vega VI.


 * Jamie mentions his suit looks like the fish people. (TV: The Underwater Menace)
 * Ben remembers Mondas and 1986. (TV: The Tenth Planet)
 * The Doctor and his companions experience visions of possible futures: Ben sees himself at an orphanage somewhere tropical as an old man (TV: Death of the Doctor) and meeting Polly at a hotel room in on New Year's Eve, 1986, (PROSE: Mondas Passing) Polly sees Gatwick Airport, (TV: The Faceless Ones) and the Doctor sees people whom he thought he would never see again. (TV: The War Games)


 * Jamie mentions that Polly is "good with computers" and she uses her data entry skills to help Dr Goro see the statistical problems regarding the disappearances. Polly's job as a secretary to Professor Brett involved data entry with computers. (TV: The War Machines)
 * Ben reminds Polly that the Doctor can't control his TARDIS. Many of his companions, like Jamie and Victoria, would end up telling him the same thing. (TV: The Faceless Ones, The Tomb of the Cybermen, et al.)
 * Ben thinks the tunnels look like the "tube", which he and Polly explain to a confused Jamie is another way to refer to the London Underground. Jamie would later visit it in the 1960s with Victoria Waterfield where they would help the Doctor fight the Great Intelligence. (TV: The Web of Fear)