The Wrong Doctors (audio story)

The Wrong Doctors was the one hundred and sixty-ninth story in Big Finish's monthly range. It was written by Matt Fitton and featured Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor and Bonnie Langford as Melanie Bush.

Publisher's summary
With Evelyn gone, the Doctor sets course for his destiny... in the form of his first meeting with Miss Melanie Bush, a computer programmer from the village of Pease Pottage, currently busy rehearsing with the local Amateur Dramatic Society — and blissfully unaware that her future is on its way, in his TARDIS.

Make that two TARDISes. Because at that very moment, a slightly younger Doctor is flying into Pease Pottage, too — returning his future companion Melanie Bush to her rightful place and time, after they were flung together during the course of his Time Lord trial.

Time travel is a complicated business — the iguanadon terrorising Pease Pottage being a case in point. But how much more complicated could things possibly become, if the wrong Doctor were to bump into the wrong Mel?

Part one
Having finished the last slice of Evelyn's chocolate sponge cake, the Doctor heads to Pease Pottage to meet Mel whilst his younger self is dropping an older Mel home following his trial, albeit at an earlier time than intended. The older Doctor hurries off after meeting the older Mel and the younger Doctor meets the younger Mel on her way to work at the radar station as he investigates a car wrecked by an Iguanodon. The wreck is ignored by Mel and disappears entirely when Mrs Wilberforce orders the Doctor to leave the village.

The younger Doctor overhears Mr Petherbridge ordering Jed, who is wearing old-fashioned clothes, to hold up a carriage and sneaks into the radar station as the younger Mel is hoovering, finding that Mr Petherbridge has been communicating with a spaceship in the woods. He goes to investigate what Mel casually refers to as a time explosion and encounters his older self, whom he saves from a trap on Horsham Road and makes contact with. They find that their TARDISes have disappeared.

The older Mel meets Mrs Wilberforce, who explains that she has been looking after her whilst her mother and father are on a cruise but also that she died in 1964. Mrs Wilberforce recognises that this Mel is from the future and decides to take her to Mr Petherbridge, encountering both an Iguanodon and a Baryonyx outside. Although she is unsurprised to see the dinosaurs, she, like Mel, who memorised 150 species of dinosaur at the age of eight, knows that Baryonyx is carnivorous and they run away from it.

Part two
The older Mel and Mrs Wilberforce take refuge in Mr Beresford's bungalow with Jedediah and watch as the younger Doctor uses K9's dog whistle to distract the Baryonyx until it fades away. He learns that Jed, who goes to hold up a carriage carrying gunpowder, died in 1884 and goes with the older Mel to meet up with their other selves in the woods. The older Doctor suspects that the younger Mel is under mind control given that she claims to have no knowledge of computers when he meets her at the radar station and tempts her into coming after him once she calls Mr Petherbridge.

The two Doctors, deducing that they are within cauterised time, keep the younger Mel from seeing her older self and decide to split up. The younger pair find that the spaceship belongs to a group of Mardaks led by Vaneesh, who provide services by transporting goods through the Time Vortex with unstable valanxium channels. The Doctor threatens Vaneesh into leaving the planet but, when she identifies him as a higher life form, she assumes that he is a competitor and orders Ksllak to incinerate him.

As the younger Mel seems enthralled by Mr Petherbridge, the older pair locate him in the village hall and demand to know where the TARDISes are. He demonstrates his powers by showing them Queen Victoria's 1837 visit to Pease Pottage and the transportation of prisoners, including Jed, to Lewes Naval Prison. He frees the younger Jed, Pete and other prisoners and has them capture Mel and tie the Doctor to a cart full of gunpowder, handing Jed a flint to light the fuse. Not believing that he has any choice, Jed sets the rope attached to the cart alight.

Part three
Discovering that she is somehow able to alter causality, the older Mel suggests that Jed might have tied a slipknot and makes it so, allowing the older Doctor to get free and stop the explosion. They head to the radar station, which Mel has no memory of ever working at, and the Doctor deduces that the younger Mel is being used by Mr Petherbridge for her eidetic memory to control alternate timelines and manipulate reality. The older Mel leaves and the Doctor is confronted by Mr Petherbridge, a time demon from the vortex.

Ksllak reminds Vaneesh that Mardak Home Corp approval is required for the incineration of competitors and the younger Doctor allows them to believe that he has been sent by the Home Corp to test them. The Doctor sends the younger Mel, who is invisible to the Mardak, to tell the older Doctor about the valanxium channel whilst he goes with Vaneesh to the spaceship where he programmes the channel to shut down. Mel forgets about her mission and meets the older Mel, who questions why she is not at university and goes with her to the village hall to rehearse for Mr Petherbridge's heritage celebration. The Doctor is shown the Mardaks' mine at the golf course, which is full of gunpowder planted there by Mr Petherbridge and the Women's Institute.

Mr Petherbridge reveals to the older Doctor that his plan is to kill the younger Doctor and feed off of the chaos that his death will cause to the timelines, namely the erasure of his adventures with Evelyn, Brewster and future companions. The older Doctor will remain as an anachronism to be consumed by the creatures of the vortex. He runs and finds the two Mels in the village hall, singing a song and counting down.

Part four
The older Doctor arrives at the village hall and Mel knocks her younger self out with a punch to keep the Doctor's past from being erased. He gets Mel to have gunpowder taken to the radio station by Jed and deduces thanks to her and Mrs Wilberforce that Mr Petherbridge has put together a temporal daisy chain of people stretching from the death of the real Stapleton Petherbridge in the late 18th century to Mel. With Mrs Wilberforce's blessing, the older Mel returns her to her death, but the Doctor refuses to allow her to further strain herself by doing the same for Jed and Mr Petherbridge and sends her to tell the younger Doctor that he knows where his TARDIS is.

The younger Doctor realises that the Maraks have detected the trace of a future valanxium deposit which will only come to be thanks to them being buried and attempts to persuade Vaneesh not to accept Mr Petherbridge's offer of human slaves to assist them in mining it. The older Doctor sends both Mr Petherbridge and Jed to their proper places in time to die by taking Mel's place, but Mr Petherbridge refuses to go gently and the younger Mel helps by forcing him into a temporal cul-de-sac. The younger Doctor makes Ksllak an assessor, tasking him with filling the pit dug at the golf course with the Mardak's supply of valanxium, and the younger Mel dies in the older Doctor's arms.

The older Doctor decides that he will return to wearing his patchwork coat as it was the one that the younger Mel preferred. The two TARDISes, used to anchor the pocket dimension, are recovered and the younger Doctor departs with Mel, advised by his older self to visit Sheffield Hallam University. The older Doctor realises that the younger Mel has been removed from time by the Blinovitch Limitation Effect and reconstructs her as the older Mel using his TARDIS and the radio station. In 36 Downview Crescent, Mel wakes up and is berated by her mother for napping.

Cast

 * The Doctor - Colin Baker
 * Melanie Bush - Bonnie Langford
 * Stapleton Petherbridge - Tony Gardner
 * Jedediah Thurwell - James Joyce
 * Mrs Wilberforce - Patricia Leventon
 * Vaneesh / Millicent / Christine Bush - Beth Chalmers
 * Ksllak - John Banks

Worldbuilding

 * When the older Doctor realises that he has crossed his timestream, he is relieved that it is not another incarnation with their scarves, frills or celery.
 * When she first met the younger Doctor, the younger Mel believed that he was going to audition for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
 * At the age of eight, Mel committed the names of 150 different species of dinosaurs to memory and is therefore able to recognise an iguanodon on sight.
 * Stapleton Petherbridge was born in Pease Pottage in 1758. He was impressed into the Royal Navy in 1810 and was killed during the War of 1812. He was possessed by a time demon.
 * Jedediah Thurwell was born in 1812. He was deported to Victoria, Australia, where he met a woman named Patsy. They later married and had four children and fifteen grandchildren. He died on his farm in 1884 at the age of 71.
 * Muriel Wilberforce was born in 1884. She and her husband Francis Wilberforce were married in 1910 while their son Francis Wilberforce, Jr. was born in 1912. Her husband was killed in the First World War in 1914. After World War II, she continued working at the Pease Pottage Post Office until she was well past retirement age. She was the chairwoman of the Pease Pottage Women's Institute from 1922 to 1964, serving in that position for longer than anyone else. She died in 1964 at the age of 80. During the 1980s, her grandson Martin Wilberforce ran the post office.
 * After naming "Mel A" and "Mel B" the two versions of Melanie, jokes about the Spice Girls (which included Mel B and Mel C among its members) are made, including a pun to the title of the song Spice Up Your Life.
 * Pease Pottage is in a pocket of cauterised time, detached from the mainstream of time.
 * Mel was born in 1964.

Continuity

 * In the older Doctor's personal timeline, his companion Evelyn Smythe has recently left the TARDIS to marry Justice Rossiter on Világ. (AUDIO: Thicker Than Water)
 * Mel's address in Pease Pottage is 36 Downview Crescent. (PROSE: Business Unusual; AUDIO: The Juggernauts)
 * Mel tells the younger Doctor that she is supposed to be reunited with his future self on Oxyveguramosa. (PROSE: Business Unusual)
 * The younger Doctor thanks Mel for testifying on his behalf at his trial. (TV: The Ultimate Foe)
 * The younger Doctor mentions that his future self is wearing Necros mourning colours, namely blue. (TV: Revelation of the Daleks)
 * The younger Doctor uses K9 Mark II's dog whistle to control the Baryonyx. (TV: The Ribos Operation)
 * The older Doctor refers to his encounter with Harry Houdini. Prior to their arrival in 1963, his first incarnation and his granddaughter Susan Foreman met Houdini in the United States. Houdini taught the Doctor how to perform sleight-of-hand tricks. (PROSE: The Sorcerer's Apprentice)
 * The older Mel mentions taking dancing lessons from Miss Fairs (PROSE: Business Unusual) and visiting the museum with her uncle John Hallam (AUDIO: Catch-1782) during her childhood.
 * As the younger Mel dies, she tells the older Doctor that she prefers his multi-coloured coat. He promises to begin wearing it again. (TV: Terror of the Vervoids)
 * The older Doctor advises his younger self to brush up on his history and recommends that he take a trip to Sheffield Hallam University. (AUDIO: The Marian Conspiracy)
 * Petherbridge refers to the Vortisaurs, (AUDIO: Storm Warning) the Chronovores (TV: The Time Monster) and the Pantophagens. (AUDIO: The Foe from the Future)
 * When Petherbridge talks about wiping the Doctor from existence, he refers to his travels with the scholar, the thief and the girls you met and never met...or are they yet to come.
 * In an alternate timeline, Ace likewise compared the Sixth Doctor to Joseph from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. (AUDIO: The Light at the End)
 * The older Doctor proves his identity to the younger by telepathic contact. (TV: The Three Doctors, et. al)
 * Melanie has an eidetic memory. (TV: Terror of the Vervoids, AUDIO: Spaceport Fear)