Power Play (audio story)

It's been many years since Victoria Waterfield travelled through time and space fighting monsters and dictators. Now she's back on Earth fighting for the future of the planet. But are her environmental campaigns so far removed from those former adventures in the vortex?

As trucks carrying nuclear waste start to vanish into the air, her friends are kidnapped by a dangerous alien police force and a nuclear power plant runs dangerously close to meltdown...Victoria spies a familiar blue box.

The Doctor. After all this time, the Doctor has come back.

And now...Victoria Waterfield is going to kill him...

Plot[]

Part one[]

Victoria and David follow a waste truck which disappears into thin air and head back to Marion Tudor's demonstration outside of Matthew Dysart's nuclear power planet in the English countryside to tell her what they have seen. On the way, Victoria spots the TARDIS and gets David to stop the Jeep so that she can investigate, hoping to be reunited with the Second Doctor and Jamie after several decades. She bangs on the door, but Leiss and Weska of the Pleyarec police capture the two of them with a stasis net and imprison them, believing David to be the Doctor.

The Doctor and Peri wake up on the floor of the control room and deduce that they must have been knocked out by an external attack by the Pleyarec, whom the Doctor believed he had managed to escape after a tumultuous journey trying to avoid them. They find the unattended Jeep outside and meet Marion, who is looking for Victoria and David and invites the two of them for tea at the protestors' camp. There, she and Sean explain that they are protesting Dysart's use of a transuranic element at the plant. When an earthquake hits, the Doctor declares that the plant is going into meltdown.

Part two[]

The earthquake subsides as the Doctor, Peri, Marion and Sean begin to drive away, so Marion tries to arrange a meeting with Dysart to discuss the incident and succeeds only in getting one with his assistant, Dominic, who tells her and Peri that nothing went wrong at the plant. Marion leaves and Dominic gives Peri a tour so that she can provide an objective report to placate the protestors, apparently taking a liking to her upon learning that she is a recently-arrived traveller. When she tries to leave, Dominic stuns her.

The Doctor and Sean investigate the disappearing waste trucks and are almost hit by one when it appears out of nowhere, after which they go to the TARDIS to examine mud splattered by the vehicle and find Ediacara biota, an example of prehistoric life. Returning to the camp, the Doctor is reunited with Victoria, who has been released under hypnosis to identify the Doctor since Leiss learnt that David was human, and promises to talk to her later given that she does not recognise him.

After breaking into the plant in search of Peri, the Doctor finds that the waste trucks are controlled remotely and is caught by Dysart. Dysart threatens the Doctor with prosecution for trespass and tells him that Dominic is too busy to meet with him, but he is interrupted by a report of a woman breaking into the plant with a gun. The Doctor initially assumes that it is Marion, only to find himself held at gunpoint with Victoria, who declares her mission to find and destroy the Doctor.

Part three[]

Victoria is confused by the Doctor's new body and comes to her senses, going with him through a time corridor to an old battlecruiser which the Doctor suspects is owned by Dominic, who has evidently been manipulating Dysart. A hypnotised Peri offers them a tour of what she believes to be the power station, not realising that they are in a spaceship on prehistoric Earth because of a hallucinogen, and the Doctor sends Victoria with her whilst he confronts Dominic, actually named Dominicus. Dominicus reveals that he has been dumping nuclear waste in the distant past so that it is harmless by the time of the 21st century and claims that he is doing so for the good of humanity.

Concerned for Victoria, Marion and Sean trace her to the power station and are captured and imprisoned with David by the Pleyarec. Leiss admonishes Weska when he scans them and identifies them as human and soon declares that he intends to execute all three of the prisoners, which Weska takes issue with. They prepare to continue their mission to locate the Doctor, with Weska forbidden from scanning their next captive despite protocol and Leiss going to kill the prisoners.

Peri realises that she and Victoria are hallucinating after they talk about their travels with the Doctor and they return to him, but they are trapped inside an energy barrier by Dominicus. The Doctor deduces that he is stockpiling the nuclear waste to power his spaceship and directs Dysart to release them when he arrives on the ship in search of his assistant, after which Dominicus reveals that he has been contracted to leave Earth uninhabitable. Dysart attacks Dominicus so that the Doctor, Peri and Victoria can return to the 21st century, but Dominicus kills him and takes Peri captive before trapping the Doctor and Victoria in the time corridor for eternity. Within the temporal void, the Doctor and Victoria reach out for one another.

Part four[]

Taking Dominic's stun gun, Peri incapacitates him and follows the Doctor's directions to reattach the time corridor, returning him and Victoria to the ship. However, Leiss appears through another time corridor and captures Peri, after which Dominicus reveals that he bribed Leiss into framing the Doctor for his crimes so that Dominicus could steal the TARDIS. The Doctor now knows too much to be put on trial, so Dominicus plans to have Leiss destroy the power plant with thermonuclear warheads in a strike which he can claim was to stop the Doctor. Weska has learnt from Marion, Sean and David that the Doctor is innocent and releases them but they are caught by Leiss, who has armed the warheads.

Trapped behind an energy wall, the Doctor gets Victoria to exploit her connection to the Pleyarec and tell Weska of Leiss's alliance with Dominicus, the true fugitive. Weska and Sean detain Leiss whilst Marion and David return to the power plant, Marion waiting there whilst David travels through the time corridor to Dominicus's ship and frees the Doctor, Peri and Victoria. Leiss soon manages to overpower his captors, however, and activates the launch sequence before Weska shoots him. Victoria learns of this from Weska through the mind link, which the tied-up Dominicus says is the backup plan, and the Doctor uses her as a go-between to acquire the launch codes and missile vectors.

The Doctor and Peri join Marion at the power plant and use Dominicus's intercom to keep in contact with Victoria and David. The Doctor sends them figures which widen the time corridor and scoop up the missiles, redirecting them into the past some distance from Dominicus's ship. After the final missile is fired, David sends Victoria through the time corridor and uploads a line of code which directs the missile to the ship, killing him and Dominicus, who claimed that no court would ever convict him. The Doctor passes on the details of Dominicus's employer, the Terrible Zodin, to the Pleyarec and leaves with Peri after Victoria turns down the offer to return to the TARDIS. He promises his old companion that the door is always open for her should she change her mind.

Cast[]

Crew[]

Cover Art - Alex Mallinson
Director - Ken Bentley
Executive Producers - Nicholas Briggs and Jason Haigh-Ellery
Music and Sound Designer - Simon Robinson
Producer - David Richardson
Script Editor - John Dorney
Writer - Gary Hopkins

Worldbuilding[]

Peri is opposed to nuclear power and brings up Three Mile Island.
According to the Pleyarec Dominion's galactic classification system, the Sol System is in Sector 12. The Pleyarec police officers Collector Leiss and Constable Weska refer to the Doctor as "the Destroyer of Worlds."
Steve and Angela are protestors.
Sean mentions Blue Peter.
The Doctor discovers a living specimen of Ediacara biota, a life form which lived during the Cambrian era, approximately 500,000,000 years earlier.
The Doctor mentions the Nuclear Safety Inspectorate.
Marion refers to the Pleyarec as "Godzilla's grandkids."
Peri compares Leiss to Officer Dibble from Top Cat.
Dominic has created a time corridor linking his office in the nuclear power plant to Earth in circa 500,000,000 BC.
David enjoys paintball.
The Doctor describes the Terrible Zodin as "a devastating diva of dissimulation, the queen of corruption and chicanery."
Sean applies for a job with the Pleyarec.

Notes[]

This is the first time that Deborah Watling has reprised her role as Victoria for Big Finish Productions outside of The Companion Chronicles.
This is an adaptation of a script for an unproduced TV story called Meltdown. (BFX: Power Play)
This story was recorded on 20 and 21 April 2011 at The Moat Studios.
This story was originally released on CD and download.

Continuity[]

Victoria is called "Vic" by her friends and fellow protestors. She previously objected to Captain Hopper referring to her as such while on Telos in the 25th century. (TV: The Tomb of the Cybermen)
Victoria refers to her former travelling companions, the Second Doctor and Jamie McCrimmon. (TV: The Evil of the Daleks to TV: Fury from the Deep)
The Doctor mentions Queen Mary I. Later in his personal timeline, he and his companion Evelyn Smythe would meet the Queen in London in January 1555. (AUDIO: The Marian Conspiracy)
Peri refers to the meltdown of the nuclear power planet in Chernobyl in the Ukraine on 26 April 1986, which rendered the entire area uninhabitable. (COMIC: Black Destiny) As the meltdown occurred after she began travelling with the Fifth Doctor on 8 May 1984, she seemingly learned about the incident during her travels in the TARDIS. (TV: Planet of Fire, AUDIO: The Reaping)
Victoria is unaware that the Doctor is a Time Lord. (TV: The War Games) The Fifth Doctor once told his former companion Polly Wright that he tended not to refer to himself as a Time Lord during his first and second incarnations as he was on the run from his people. (AUDIO: The Five Companions)
The Doctor reminds Victoria of their encounters with the Daleks, (TV: The Evil of the Daleks) the Robot Yeti (TV: The Abominable Snowmen) and the Cybermen. (TV: The Tomb of the Cybermen)
Peri tells Victoria that she witnessed his regeneration into his sixth incarnation. (TV: The Caves of Androzani)
The Doctor discovers that Dominic was hired to destroy Earth by the Terrible Zodin. (TV: The Five Doctors)
Later in his personal timeline, the Doctor, by then in his seventh incarnation, visited a younger version of Victoria in the 20th century. He took her to London in February 1868, where she took care of her father Edward Waterfield's fortune and visited her aunt, Margaret Waterfield, before returning to her adopted time. (PROSE: Prelude Birthright)

External links[]

Official Power Play page at bigfinish.com
DisContinuity for Power Play at Tetrapyriarbus - The DisContinuity Guide

Tardis