The Wanderer (audio story)

The Wanderer
Doctor:	First Doctor
Companion(s):	Ian, Susan, Barbara
Featuring:	Grigori Rasputin
Main enemy:	The Dahensa
Main setting:	Zarechny, Siberia and St Petersburg, Russia, 1903
Key crew
Publisher:	Big Finish Productions
Writer:	Richard Dinnick
Director:	Lisa Bowerman
Producer:	David Richardson
Music:	Andrew Edwards
Sound:	Andrew Edwards
Cover by:	Alex Mallinson
Release details
Number of parts:	2
Release number:	6.10
Release date:	18 April 2012
Format:	1 CD Download
Production code:	BFPDWCC54
ISBN:	ISBN 978-1-84435-621-8
The Companion Chronicles
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You may be looking for The Wanderers, a comic story.

The Wanderer was the tenth story of the sixth series in The Companion Chronicles audio range. It was Big Finish Productions. It was written by Richard Dinnick and featured the First Doctor, Susan, Barbara and Ian. It was told from Ian's perspective.

Publisher's summary

Siberia at the end of the 19th Century, and the TARDIS arrives just as a shooting star hurtles to the ground.

With it comes an illness that affects the Doctor and Susan, and knowledge that must not fall into the wrong hands.

With his friends either dying or lost, Ian Chesterton must save the future and win the ultimate prize — a way home to 1963...

Plot

The Dark Pilgrim (1)

to be added

The Scorpion Men (2)

to be added

Cast

• Ian Chesterton - William Russell
• Grigori - Tim Chipping

References

• Ian refers to the Arabian Nights.
• Ian describes the Doctor as "the ultimate wanderer."
• Ian remembers listening to John Arlott.
• As their travels in the TARDIS continue, Ian notes that the Doctor's influence is rubbing off on himself and Barbara. Recently, they have become increasingly likely to embroil themselves in events outside of the ship.
• Nicholas II is the Tsar of Russia at the time of the TARDIS' arrival.
• Grigori describes himself as a strannik, a religious pilgrim, whereas Mikhail Kropyn refers to him as a starets, an elder of the Church who is believed to be a faith healer. However, he is not a priest.
• Zarechny is on the River Tura.
• Grigori tells Ian that he spent much of his youth carousing around the village where he grew up. His sister Maria and his brother Dmitri both drowned in separate accidents. He himself almost suffered the same fate on the latter occasion but managed to survive. He believes that God gave him a special purpose to fulfil and that he was not able to save his siblings as he was not destined to do so. He subsequently named his two children after them.
• Grigori claims to know the future. He tells Ian that he does not experience visions but instead possesses an ingrained certainty that events will follow a particular course.
• The Doctor tells Ian that the chronon particles emitted by the alien device have a deleterious effect on time travellers and are also damaging to the health of ordinary humans if they come into physical contact with it, though not to the same extent. It affects the Doctor and Susan more seriously than Ian and Barbara as they have travelled through time far more extensively.
• The alien device was designed for the purposes of information gathering. It was seriously damaged either in transit or when it fell to Earth. Due to the emission of chronon particles by its damaged power source, it began to detect and record humanity's future at a rate of approximately 1,000 years per day. Once it has reached the limit of its information retention capabilities, it will vent its information around the Earth and every human will gain precise knowledge of the future.
• When Grigori makes contact with the device, he gains knowledge of Tsaritsa Alexandra, Kaiser Wilhelm II, a great war, a revolution, an armistice, another world war, Adolf Hitler, the Blitz, the Holocaust, television, computers, spaceflight, Yuri Gagarin, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Wall, a tenth planet, alien invasions, a lunar space station, men on Mars and the Doctor.
• Grigori received only glimpses of his personal future. However, he is aware that he will have a role to play at the highest levels of government in St Petersburg.
• Grigori gives his full name as Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin.
• Grigori tells Ian that the Doctor's presence is woven throughout the tapestry of human history.
• The information gathering device, the ranger, was created by the Dahensa. They have yellow, glowing eyes and four arms. Two of their arms end in scorpion-like pincers whereas the other two end in humanoid fingers. They will attempt to invade Earth at least once more at some point in the next 1,000 years.
• By connecting the ranger into the telepathic circuits of the TARDIS, the Doctor is able to remove the knowledge of the future from Grigori's mind. The Doctor tells Ian that he may still be able to remember these events, though probably only in the form of dreams.

Notes

• While the synopsis stated that the story takes place at the end of the 19th century, within the story it is stated that it is the turn of the century or perhaps a bit later. Grigori Rasputin, who became a journeying pilgrim in 1901, arrived in St Petersburg in 1903, dating this story with more specificity. As the story states that Rasputin (1869-1916) is in his early 30s, the story must also take place after 1899.
• This is the first Companion Chronicle to feature the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan since AUDIO: The Transit of Venus in January 2009.
• Richard Dinnick's original draft was based in 16th century France and involved the alleged prophet Nostradamus rather than Rasputin. However, he was forced to abandon this idea when he learned that Nostradamus was due to appear in AUDIO: The Doomsday Quatrain in the main range.
• This audio drama was recorded on 10 March 2011 at the Moat Studios.
• In reference to Rasputin, Ian comments that "most people looked at him with terror and with fear." This is a line from the Boney M song "Rasputin".
• This story is set between The Reign of Terror and Planet of Giants.

Continuity

• Ian recalls that the Doctor asked he and Barbara if they knew what it was like to be "wanderers in the fourth dimension" when they first met. (TV: An Unearthly Child)
• Ian remembers that the Doctor once observed that the travellers' "destiny is in the stars". (TV: The Reign of Terror)
• The Doctor's condition reminds Ian of the symptoms of radiation poisoning which he displayed on Skaro. (TV: The Daleks)
• Ian warns Grigori that, as the Doctor told Barbara in Mexico, history cannot be changed. (TV: The Aztecs)
• Grigori mentions that he has seen Ian and Barbara's first encounter with the Doctor in a junkyard in Totter's Lane in November 1963 (TV: An Unearthly Child) as well as the three of them and Susan fighting "strange beings" who have invaded Earth in the future, which has not happened yet in Ian's personal timeline (TV: The Dalek Invasion of Earth). He also knows how Ian's travels in the TARDIS will end. (TV: The Chase)
• Grigori has seen beings which live beneath the surface of the Earth (TV: Doctor Who and the Silurians), people made of plastic (TV: Spearhead from Space), metal (TV: The Tenth Planet), calcium (TV: Aliens of London / World War Three) and silicon (TV: The Hand of Fear), Egyptian gods (TV: Pyramids of Mars; PROSE: The Sands of Time; AUDIO: The Bride of Peladon), werewolves (PROSE: Wolfsbane; AUDIO: Loups-Garoux; TV: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, Tooth and Claw), ghosts (TV: Image of the Fendahl), vampires (TV: State of Decay; PROSE: Goth Opera, Blood Harvest, Vampire Science), a tenth planet (TV: The Tenth Planet), men on Mars (TV: The Ice Warriors) and a lunar space station (TV: The Moonbase).
• The First Doctor would later return to Russia during the French invasion in 1812 in the company of Steven Taylor and Dodo Chaplet. On that occasion, he met Napoléon Bonaparte for the first time. (AUDIO: Mother Russia)
• The Third Doctor, Liz Shaw and Jo Grant would later become involved in the events surrounding Rasputin's murder at the hands of Prince Felix Yusupov and his co-conspirators Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich and Vladimir Purishkevich in the Moika Palace in St Petersburg in December 1916. (PROSE: The Wages of Sin)

External links

• Official The Wanderer page at bigfinish.com