The Wanderer (audio story)

The Wanderer was the tenth story of the sixth series in The Companion Chronicles audio range. It was Big Finish Productions. It was written by Richard Dinnick and featured the First Doctor, Susan, Barbara and Ian. It was told from Ian's perspective.

Publisher's summary
Siberia at the end of the 19th Century, and the TARDIS arrives just as a shooting star hurtles to the ground.

With it comes an illness that affects the Doctor and Susan, and knowledge that must not fall into the wrong hands.

With his friends either dying or lost, Ian Chesterton must save the future and win the ultimate prize — a way home to 1963...

The Dark Pilgrim (1)
Ian starts by telling that, while an errant life could seem fascinating, sometimes being on your own can make you lose perspective on the world and what it means being part of a community. He himself was a normal man, content to live a normal life, before he and Barbara met the Doctor - and started travelling with him. At first, they felt like intruders, but Ian admits they gradually came to behave more like the Doctor, intervening in the places they found themselves and developing a taste for adventure.

At some point, they landed in Russia, in 1903, in a forest. Immediately after landing, they saw something coming down on Earth from the sky, which the Doctor conjectured being an alien ship. The TARDIS readings on the subject were difficult to read, so they went outside in search of it, trying to prevent it affecting Earth and the timeline. They reached a village, where they met Grigori, a travelling monk who the people regarded as a healer, an holy man, and assisted him as he went to visit the house of a local hunter, Michail, whose sons fell ill.

As soon as they reach the place, the Doctor also falls ill, and Ian and Grigori go back to the village to gather medicine. On the way, Grigori tells Ian that he survived drowning with his brother years ago, and that he is convinced to have been appointed by God to do something great; he even says he can have some perceptions regarding the future. When they come back to Mikail's house, they found the place trashed, Barbara and Susan gone and the Doctor almost unconscious, holding what is clearly an alien object; before passing out, he manages to whisper Ian he and Susan have been affected by Chronon particles. Barbara comes back, and tells Ian Susan found the object and started acting violent (it was her to trash the place) before running into the forest: Barbara followed her, only to see four shapes coming out of the woods and taking Susan with them.

After resting a while, Barbara and Mikail once again venture into the woods in the hope of finding Susan, while Ian reads the Doctor's notes about the object. Apparently, it's a sort of device sent to Earth to gather evidence on the planet, but, due to a malfunctioning, he is now registering not only Earth's past, but also its future. The men fell ill when they touched it, but his influence is only fatal to time travellers, and increases as long one has been in contact with the Time Vortex. Grigori, understanding the machine can give him actual visions of the future, elects to touch it and indeed sees images of Earth's future - including Hitler, men on the Moon, alien invasions and the Doctor's future selves.

The Scorpion Men (2)
Finally, Grigori lets go of the machine and falls to the ground, unconscious. Ian succours him, but is relieved as she hears, and then sees, the Doctor rising up, now healed. Grigori has absorbed all the chronon particles, thus healing the Doctor. When he hears what happened, the Doctor is furious, but agrees there is no remedy now. Ian and the Doctor bury Mikail's son, now deceased, and then wait around for Grigori to wake up. When this happens, the Doctor scolds him, before sending the two men in the woods to look for the now missing Barbara and Michail. As they go along in their search, Grigori starts blathering about how to use his knowledge of the future to shape the future of his country, but Ian admonishes him that playing with the history of Earth could be dangerous. Grigori, however, is set firmly in his opinion, and lets us slip that his name, to Ian's astonishment, is Rasputin.

The two men come across some of the alien creatures - scorpion-like being called the Dahensa - as they torture and kill Michail when he fails to tell them where their machine is. Grigori runs away, to let Ian being seized by the Dahensa. They interrogate him and come to know the location of his machine, then putting it away together with the now healed Susan. Both of them are released by Grigori, who knew Ian would be captured and came back to help them, and the three of them go back to Michail's cabin, where the Doctor is being confronted by the Dahensa. It is revealed that the machine crash-landed on Earth, and the Dahensa only assumed they have been attacked by Earth; now, however, they are interested in conquering the planet. The Dahensa force the Doctor to lead them to the device by threatening to kill Ian and Susan; as they leave, they once again leave them behind, to be rescued this time by Barbara.

As the five of them reach the boathouse, the Dahensa grab the object, but the Doctor did adjust his controls so that it now turns back time when someone touches it. The Dahensa, taken back in time, de-evolve in beings made of oil, and vanish into the ground. Grigori collapses to the floor, exhausted and confused, and the Doctor brings him to the TARDIS so that he can bring him home. He connects Grigori to the ship's telepathic circuits and uses them to pinpoint his location, leaving him at the door of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. He then tries the same thing with Ian and Barbara to take them home, but the system was overcharged by Grigori's mind, overheats and burns. Ian is displeased by this, but Barbara comforts him: even if he is far from home, unlike Grigori, he is not alone.

Cast

 * Ian Chesterton - William Russell
 * Grigori - Tim Chipping

Worldbuilding

 * Ian refers to the Arabian Nights.
 * Ian describes the Doctor as "the ultimate wanderer."
 * Ian remembers listening to John Arlott.
 * As their travels in the TARDIS continue, Ian notes that the Doctor's influence is rubbing off on himself and Barbara. Recently, they have become increasingly likely to embroil themselves in events outside of the ship.
 * Nicholas II is the Tsar of Russia at the time of the TARDIS' arrival.
 * Grigori describes himself as a strannik, a religious pilgrim, whereas Mikhail Kropyn refers to him as a starets, an elder of the Church who is believed to be a faith healer. However, he is not a priest.
 * Zarechny is on the River Tura.
 * Grigori tells Ian that he spent much of his youth carousing around the village where he grew up. His sister Maria and his brother Dmitri both drowned in separate accidents. He himself almost suffered the same fate on the latter occasion but managed to survive. He believes that God gave him a special purpose to fulfil and that he was not able to save his siblings as he was not destined to do so. He subsequently named his two children after them.
 * Grigori claims to know the future. He tells Ian that he does not experience visions but instead possesses an ingrained certainty that events will follow a particular course.
 * The Doctor tells Ian that the chronon particles emitted by the alien device have a deleterious effect on time travellers and are also damaging to the health of ordinary humans if they come into physical contact with it, though not to the same extent. It affects the Doctor and Susan more seriously than Ian and Barbara as they have travelled through time far more extensively.
 * The alien device was designed for the purposes of information gathering. It was seriously damaged either in transit or when it fell to Earth. Due to the emission of chronon particles by its damaged power source, it began to detect and record humanity's future at a rate of approximately 1,000 years per day. Once it has reached the limit of its information retention capabilities, it will vent its information around the Earth and every human will gain precise knowledge of the future.
 * When Grigori makes contact with the device, he gains knowledge of Tsaritsa Alexandra, Kaiser Wilhelm II, a great war, a revolution, an armistice, another world war, Adolf Hitler, the Blitz, the Holocaust, television, computers, spaceflight, Yuri Gagarin, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Wall, a tenth planet, alien invasions, a lunar space station, men on Mars and the Doctor.
 * Grigori received only glimpses of his personal future. However, he is aware that he will have a role to play at the highest levels of government in St Petersburg.
 * Grigori gives his full name as Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin.
 * Grigori tells Ian that the Doctor's presence is woven throughout the tapestry of human history.
 * The information gathering device, the ranger, was created by the Dahensa. They have yellow, glowing eyes and four arms. Two of their arms end in scorpion-like pincers whereas the other two end in humanoid fingers. They will attempt to invade Earth at least once more at some point in the next 1,000 years.
 * By connecting the ranger into the telepathic circuits of the TARDIS, the Doctor is able to remove the knowledge of the future from Grigori's mind. The Doctor tells Ian that he may still be able to remember these events, though probably only in the form of dreams.

Continuity

 * Ian recalls that the Doctor asked he and Barbara if they knew what it was like to be "wanderers in the fourth dimension" when they first met. (TV: An Unearthly Child)
 * Ian remembers that the Doctor once observed that the travellers' "destiny is in the stars". (TV: The Reign of Terror)
 * The Doctor's condition reminds Ian of the symptoms of radiation poisoning which he displayed on Skaro. (TV: The Daleks)
 * Ian warns Grigori that, as the Doctor told Barbara in Mexico, history cannot be changed. (TV: The Aztecs)
 * Grigori mentions that he has seen Ian and Barbara's first encounter with the Doctor in a junkyard in Totter's Lane in November 1963 (TV: An Unearthly Child) as well as the three of them and Susan fighting "strange beings" who have invaded Earth in the future, which has not happened yet in Ian's personal timeline. (TV: The Dalek Invasion of Earth) He also knows how Ian's travels in the TARDIS will end. (TV: The Chase)
 * Grigori has seen beings which live beneath the surface of the Earth, (TV: Doctor Who and the Silurians) people made of plastic, (TV: Spearhead from Space) metal, (TV: The Tenth Planet) calcium (TV: Aliens of London / World War Three) and silicon, (TV: The Hand of Fear) Egyptian gods (TV: Pyramids of Mars; PROSE: The Sands of Time; AUDIO: The Bride of Peladon), werewolves (PROSE: Wolfsbane; AUDIO: Loups-Garoux; TV: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, Tooth and Claw), ghosts, (TV: Image of the Fendahl) vampires (TV: State of Decay; PROSE: Goth Opera, Blood Harvest, Vampire Science), a tenth planet, (TV: The Tenth Planet) men on Mars (TV: The Ice Warriors) and a lunar space station. (TV: The Moonbase)
 * The First Doctor would later return to Russia twice. The first time, he, Susan, Ian and Barbara will assist to Nicholas II's execution with his family in 1917 (AUDIO: Last of the Romanovs). The second time, he, Steven Taylor and Dodo Chaplet will land during the French invasion in 1812, and on that occasion, he met Napoléon Bonaparte for the first time. (AUDIO: Mother Russia)
 * The Third Doctor, Liz Shaw and Jo Grant would later become involved in the events surrounding Rasputin's murder at the hands of Prince Felix Yusupov and his co-conspirators Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich and Vladimir Purishkevich in the Moika Palace in St Petersburg in December 1916. (PROSE: The Wages of Sin)
 * Later in his life, the "Spy" Master will take Rasputin's place as the counsellor to the tszars, in his scheme to hijack the Doctor's existence. (TV: The Power of the Doctor)