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)
to be added

Cast

 * Ian Chesterton - William Russell
 * Grigori - Tim Chipping

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)