The Beginning (audio story)

The Beginning was the seventy-third release in the Companion Chronicles audio range. It was the fifth story of season 8. It was written by Marc Platt and featured the First Doctor and Susan Foreman. This story marks the maiden voyage of the Doctor inside a Type 40 TARDIS he chose to steal, and the day both he and Susan fled from Gallifrey. For the Doctor, it was the moment he began what would inadvertently become an enormously long career of travelling through space and time. Chronologically, the story describes events preceding An Unearthly Child.

Publisher's summary
When the First Doctor and his grand-daughter Susan escape through the cloisters of Gallifrey to an old Type 40 Time Travel capsule, little do they realise the adventures that lie ahead… And little do they know, as the TARDIS dematerialises and they leave their home world behind, there is someone else aboard the ship. He is Quadrigger Stoyn, and he is very unhappy…

The First Flight (1)
On Gallifrey, the Doctor and Susan are being pursued by several armed guards through a TARDIS repair shop. Determined to leave their home, the Doctor and Susan steal faulty old TARDIS, although the Doctor has very limited knowledge on how to properly operate one.

Upon escaping Gallifrey, the TARDIS materialises in the Sol system, near a planet that Susan recognises as Earth. They soon realise, however, that their escape has completely depleted the TARDIS's faulty old engines, leaving them with seemingly no way home. They then realise that they are not alone on the TARDIS, as another Time Lord named Quadrigger Stoyn was also aboard the ship, taking apart the engine so that this TARDIS could be scrapped. Stoyn is upset at the Doctor and Susan for stealing the TARDIS with him aboard it, and is further distressed when the Doctor destroys the TARDIS's homing device so that the Time Lords cannot find them, leaving them stranded with no way to get home.

Despite Stoyn's protestations, the Doctor and Susan step outside to explore the planet — with the Doctor taking the TARDIS's dematerialisation circuit as insurance — finding it to be in its primeval era with only the most primitive forms of life. With Stoyn following them, the Doctor and Susan eventually find that the planet is indeed inhabited by a form of intelligent life: a race of glob-like beings called Archaeons.

One of the Archaeons, known simply as the First Propagator, welcomes the Doctor, Susan, and Stoyn, and shows great curiosity about them. The three of them are led to an enormous cavern housing a strange cannon-like device that shoots red lightning at the planet's moon, seeding life on it. When the Doctor realises that they are interfering with the development of this planet's life he immediately protests, an action that the Archaeons consider to be heresy. As this goes on, the Archaeons begin disassembling the TARDIS, causing the stasis field to destabilise, forming a breach in space and time.

Red Lightning (2)
Susan awakes to find herself in a hospital run by humans, where she learns that she was found in a 450 million year old archaeological dig site. As she is being questioned, she can faintly hear the Doctor's voice coming from somewhere. She eventually realises that the she is on Earth's moon, and the Archaeons had actually been seeding life on Earth itself.

While being transported to the nearby Giant Leap Base, Stoyn mentally projects himself to Susan, claiming that he's trying to bring her and her grandfather back, but Susan does not believe him and refuses to cooperate. Stoyn is then interrupted as the lunar rover that Susan is being transported on is assaulted by red lightning, like the kind the Archaeons were using. Eventually Susan finds that the Doctor is in the next bed over from her. After waking him up, she explores the rest of the lunar rover only to find that the crew are all dead, killed by some sort of strange parasites.

As the Doctor tries to make sense of this all, he realises that the stasis field must have frozen him and Susan in time until they were recovered by the human archaeologists. Stoyn manages to get in touch with them once more through the rover's communication devices, telling them that they need to come back and that the Archaeons are very angry with them for ruining their experiment. The Doctor attempts to warn the humans back at the moon base, but the link is cut off by more of the red lightning, knocking out the power at the base.

While the Doctor and Susan contemplate their next move, they are again contacted by Stoyn, who pleads with them to come back so they can all escape, but the Doctor refuses. Eventually they are taken back to the cavern by the Archaeons by force. Upon returning, the Doctor congratulates the Archaeons on creating such a beautiful world full of vibrant life. However, the First Propagator says that their experiment was a failure due to their interference and as a result Earth has become a disorderly mess of chaos. With Stoyn's testimony against them, the Archeaons lay the blame of their failed experiment on the Doctor and Susan and decide to purge the Earth.

As the Archaeons fire upon Earth, Stoyn leads the Doctor and Susan back to the TARDIS, its engines now fully regenerated, where he tries to convince the Doctor to give him the dematerialisation circuit. As they argue, they come to realise that the humans are launching a retaliatory missile strike at the Archaeons. The Archaeons' power begins to fail, at which point the Doctor decides to help them, thinking that the Time Lords will look more favorably upon them for restoring order when they catch up with them. The Doctor and Stoyn convince the Archaeons to let them use the TARDIS to power up their systems. When the Doctor refuses to turn the dematerialisation circuit over to Stoyn, he takes Susan as his hostage, offering to take her with him in the TARDIS, leaving the Doctor to face judgment at the hands of the Archaeons. As the Archaeons prepare to resume their bombardment, the Doctor cuts the cable, leaving the Archaeons defenseless. Susan gets away from Stoyn and runs back into the TARDIS where they close the doors on him. Stoyn begs to be let into the TARDIS, but both the Doctor and Susan decide it best to leave him behind. Stoyn vows to get his revenge on the Doctor.

As the TARDIS dematerialises, the Doctor and Susan see that the Archaeons' weapon has been destroyed by a direct hit from the humans, leaving them defenseless. Still impressed by the Earth and its history, the Doctor attempts to make the TARDIS take them back to Earth. Instead, they end up on an alien planet, causing the Doctor, in his excitement, to forget all about Earth at the moment.

Cast

 * Susan Foreman - Carole Ann Ford
 * Quadrigger Stoyn / The First Propagator - Terry Molloy

Uncredited cast

 * Greta - Lisa Bowerman

Characters

 * The Doctor
 * Susan Foreman
 * Quadrigger Stoyn
 * First Propagator
 * Greta
 * Maguire

Continuity

 * The flashbacks in Lungbarrow give a certain context to the Doctor and Susan's sudden departure from Gallifrey. Susan acknowledges her recollection of events may not be the only one.
 * Before the Doctor departed Gallifrey, he possessed a Type 50 TARDIS but abandoned it. His first TARDIS eventually escaped Gallifrey on its own and made its way to Valderon in the 36th century, where it again encountered the Doctor, who was by then in his fifth incarnation. (AUDIO: Prisoners of Fate)
 * Susan enters another time capsule but the Doctor does not follow. He briefly speaks with someone outside, before pulling Susan out and entering another parked alongside it. (TV: The Name of the Doctor)
 * The Doctor finds a food machine in the TARDIS. (TV: The Daleks, The Edge of Destruction) Susan states that these are common in most workplace refectories.
 * Susan coins the term "TARDIS" from the principles on which the time capsule works: "Time and Relative Dimension in Space." The Doctor tells her that the term already existed but she did not believe him. (TV: An Unearthly Child)
 * There are sentient chairs on Gallifrey. (PROSE: Lungbarrow)
 * The TARDIS again assumed the form of a boulder on Iwa. (PROSE: Frayed)
 * In his capacity as Lord Burner, Irving Braxiatel was ordered by Lord President Pandad VII to burn "an old man" and "his granddaughter," who are implied to be the Doctor and Susan, from history. He disobeyed this order and the intended victims stole a TARDIS and fled Gallifrey. The very same day, Pandad died when a power relay in his office overloaded. An inquiry headed by Braxiatel found that this was an accident. (AUDIO: Disassembled)
 * The Fourth Doctor later told Adric that there were "pressing reasons" for his departure from Gallifrey. (TV: Logopolis)
 * The TARDIS previously belonged to Marianna. The Doctor would not learn until his fourth incarnation that she had been in the TARDIS for the entire time. (AUDIO: The Abandoned)