Three Wise Men (short story)

Three Wise Men
Doctor:	Fourth Doctor
Companion(s):	K9
Main setting:	24 December 1968
Key crew
Writer:	Richard Dungworth
Illustrator:	Rob Biddulph
Release details
Part of:	Twelve Doctors of Christmas
Release date:	6 October 2016
Twelve Doctors of Christmas
← Previous	The Christmas Inversion
Next →	Sontar's Little Helpers

Three Wise Men was the fourth short story in Twelve Doctors of Christmas, featuring the Fourth Doctor.

Summary

to be added

Characters

• Fourth Doctor
• Frank Borman
• William Anders
• Jim Lovell

References

• It has been almost three days since Apollo 8 launched.
• Apollo 8 was launched by Saturn V, a 110-meter launching rocket. Saturn's first stage uses five large F-1 engines -- each burning a total of 2,500 litres of liquid oxygen per-second. The shuttle had taken off from Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center with a thrust of over 34,000 Kilonewtons. The astronauts onboard had been subjected to a record-breaking 24,000 miles per hour.
• There is no atmosphere in space, leaving an eerie silence all around the astronauts.
• Apollo 8 is to be the first shuttle to orbit the Moon.
• Anders is the designated chief photographer. Nasa hopes to use images of the Moon for reference towards finding a potential landing zone for a future mission.
• Anders goes to unpack the camera equipment, which includes enough film to capture nearly 1,000 pictures and a Hasselblad 70mm Camera. Each piece of equipment on board the CSM is atomized by the Mission Stowage List. Despite this, included with their equipment is a brown parcel.
• The Doctor enters through one of the hatches in the shuttle. He has opened an air corridor between the TARDIS and the Apollo, allowing the group to move between them with ease.
• The Doctor references Lovell as the "hero of Apollo 13." He notes that Apollo 13 was "real skin-of-your-teeth-stuff."
• The Doctor says that he had used UNIT's storage of alien artifacts to repair his TARDIS while stranded with a broken Dematerialisation circuit.

Notes

• K9 does not appear in the story, but is show in the accompanied illustration.

Continuity

• The TARDIS is packed full of wrapped boxes. The Doctor notes that the downside to having a ship that dimensionally transcendental is that it's hard to clean. The Tenth Doctor would come to the same conclusion, after calculating that a simple cleaning cession for the TARDIS would take more than six years. (COMIC: A Rose by Any Other Name)
• The Doctor notes that while UNIT has a large collection of UNIT artifacts, they understand very few of them. A Zygon in the Black Archives would note the same fact in the 21st century. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)