Smoke and Mirrors (audio story)

Smoke and Mirrors was the fifth release of the Destiny of the Doctor audio series, produced by Big Finish Productions for AudioGO.

Publisher's summary
The Doctor answers a psionic distress call being sent from England in the 1920s. There, in the environs of a fairground, he is reunited with an old friend: Harry Houdini. To Adric and Nyssa the name means very little, but to the Doctor's companion Tegan he is a legend. Escape artist extraordinaire, Houdini's reputation will last for decades.

But how come Harry knows so much about Tegan herself? Is it really just guesswork, as he says? Is Harry right to be concerned about the fairground's fortune teller, who claims to have supernatural skills? Both he and the Doctor suspect an alien influence they know of old.

What neither the Doctor nor his friends realise is that, somewhere in the shadows, a far more sinister and familiar presence is lying in wait for them...

Plot
Instead of travelling to Heathrow, the Doctor follows a psionic beam to an English funfair in the late 1920s and introduces Adric, Nyssa and Tegan to Harry Houdini, who wants his help to debunk the inexplicable abilities of a medium. The Doctor has his companions stand guard whilst he and Houdini inspect the medium's booth and find her crystal ball, which is actually an Ovid Sphere capable of reflecting thoughts and memories. He uses the sphere and is told by the Eleventh Doctor that he has to return it to the Ovids.

The three companions accidentally wander into the menagerie and are confronted with a tiger which Adric runs from in the hope of buying time for Nyssa and Tegan to escape, but they are chased by a leopard and separated. Nyssa encounters a ghostly Master in a theatre and calls out for the Doctor before she is hypnotised to capture Tegan, whom she finds shortly after Adric is captured by the hypnotised fairground workers and performers. Having heard Nyssa's call, the Doctor goes after her, but Houdini hits him over the head and pushes him off of the pier in a crate, having been told by the Master that the Doctor is untrustworthy and has been keeping important information about his life and death from him.

Nyssa is pained when Tegan makes her think about what the Master did to her father, as are the fairground workers, and Adric realises that the Master is an illusion. Tegan smashes a lamp beneath the stage which is focused onto a mirror and the Master loses his grip on Adric before ordering his slaves to kill the two of them, but Nyssa breaks free from her control and saves them. They are joined by the Doctor and Houdini, who despaired at how the Master got him to try to kill his old friend and helped him get back onto land.

The Doctor recovers the Ovid Sphere and deduces that the Master has used another one to project himself to Earth from a collapsing dimension, but he remembers what the Eleventh Doctor said about destroying it and instead, with Tegan's help, soothes the energy with calming thoughts. The hypnotised workers lose their memory and Houdini easily persuades them that they were test subjects in a new act of his. The Doctor tells Houdini that he knew about his intentions all along and escaped from the crate using his methods and returns to the TARDIS with the Ovid Sphere, which he plans to return to the Ovids in a future incarnation.

Cast

 * Tegan Jovanka - Janet Fielding
 * Harry Houdini - Tim Beckmann

Worldbuilding

 * Nyssa and Adric consider the fairground carousel to be rather frivolous and silly.
 * Harry Houdini has met the Doctor on several previous occasions and is aware of regeneration. As he once met Jo Grant, one of these encounters took place during his third incarnation. He learned of the existence of the Bay City Rollers from Jo.
 * The Ovids are beings of pure thought who travel from world to world in crystal spheres. Four of them became trapped in New York City in the 1890s. They can give form to dreams and nightmares. Houdini helped the First Doctor, Ben Jackson and Polly Wright free the Ovids.
 * There were no zoos on Traken.
 * There is a tiger and a leopard in the fairground menagerie.
 * The Doctor receives a message from his eleventh incarnation through an Ovid sphere. He realises that it is his future self.
 * refers to Adric, Nyssa and Tegan as "the Doctor's whelps."

Continuity

 * Tegan is still wearing her Air Australia uniform. (TV: Logopolis, Castrovalva, Four to Doomsday, Kinda, The Visitation)
 * The Doctor has once again failed to return Tegan to Heathrow Airport in 1981. (TV: Four to Doomsday, Kinda, The Visitation)
 * Houdini tells Tegan that her aunt Vanessa would be proud of her as she had always wanted to travel. (TV: Logopolis)
 * The Doctor also encountered Houdini in his first, (PROSE: Houdini and The Space Cuckoos) eighth (PROSE: The Great Escapes) and eleventh (PROSE: Houdini and The Space Cuckoos) incarnations. From Houdini's point of view, the latter was the first encounter with the Doctor. However, he fails to recognise the Eleventh Doctor on this occasion.
 * The Doctor's sonic screwdriver was recently destroyed by the Terileptil leader in London in September 1666. (TV: The Visitation)
 * Nyssa refers to the Fourth Doctor's recent regeneration. (TV: Logopolis)
 * Tegan would later be cornered by another tiger on Lady Adela Forster's private train in Calcutta, British India on 31 December 1926. (AUDIO: The Emerald Tiger)
 * The Eleventh Doctor refers to spoilers. (TV: Silence in the Library, Let's Kill Hitler, The Name of the Doctor, The Day of the Doctor)
 * The Master refers to Traken's destruction. (TV: Logopolis)
 * Nyssa refers to the Master's apparent death on Castrovalva. (TV: Castrovalva)
 * Houdini refers to the fact that the Doctor and the Master attended the Time Lord Academy together. (TV: The Sea Devils, The Five Doctors)
 * Tegan tells the hypnotised Nyssa that she knows what it is like to be under someone else's control, having been controlled by the Mara on Deva Loka. (TV: Kinda)
 * Tegan refers to the Master killing Nyssa's father Tremas and stealing his body (TV: The Keeper of Traken) and killing her aunt Vanessa. (TV: Logopolis)
 * The Master is trying to reconstitute his body after being trapped in a collapsing dimension on Castrovalva. (TV: Castrovalva)