All Done with Mirrors (short story)

All Done with Mirrors was the third short story in the Short Trips anthology Short Trips: Past Tense. It was written by Christopher Bav. It featured the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith.

Summary
When the Doctor decides to take Sarah Jane Smith on a visit to the theatre, the TARDIS arrives in Sixteenth Century London, on the stage of the Rose theatre, during a performance by the celebrated Christopher ‘Kip’ Marlowe.

Moving the ship to the less conspicuous location of a timbre store in Deptford, the Doctor and Sarah, disguised as a young boy, set off for the theatres of the South Bank. However, on arriving back at the Rose, the two time travellers overhear a group of men plotting to kill Marlowe. After making a hasty exit, they then meet Edward ‘Ned’ Alleyn, who mistakes the Doctor for his friend, Marlowe; realising his mistake, he then invites the Doctor and Sarah to join him in a meal in a nearby pub.

The Doctor tells Sarah that they have arrived in London on the night that Marlowe was reportedly murdered at the hands of secret servicemen, who had become concerned that the man’s plays were filled with anti-Protestant ethics. On leaving the pub they encounter Marlowe himself, on the shore of the Thames; the Doctor quickly wins the man’s confidence, and warns him of his imminent demise.

After a grateful Marlowe takes his leave, the two travellers enter a public house, where the Doctor is again mistaken for Kip – but this time by one of the assassins. As Sarah flees, the Doctor is stabbed in the heart, and his body dumped into the Thames. But as a grief-stricken Sarah looks on, the Doctor promptly swims to the shore, showing her the copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare that was in his breast pocket, and which took the brunt of the knife’s blow. Meeting up with Marlowe once more, the Doctor reveals the man’s other identity: the bard himself, William Shakespeare.

Now that he is believed to be dead, Kip vows to carry on his work as the bard; the Doctor and Sarah leave in the TARDIS, the Doctor having left his Complete Works with Shakespeare “in case he gets really stuck”.

Characters

 * Fourth Doctor
 * Sarah Jane Smith
 * Christopher Marlowe
 * Ned Alleyn
 * Nicholas Skeres
 * Ingram Frizer
 * Robert Poley

Continuity

 * The Doctor last smoked a pipe in TV: An Unearthly Child.