The Curator's Gambit (audio story)

The Curator's Gambit
Main character(s):	Kate, Osgood
Featuring:	Josh, Jacqui, the Curator, Ava, Harry
Main enemy:	The Eleven
Main setting:	National Gallery, 2010s
Key crew
Publisher:	Big Finish Productions
Writer:	Andrew Smith
Director:	Ken Bentley
Producer:	Emily Cook, David Richardson
Music:	Howard Carter
Sound:	Howard Carter
Release details
Part of:	Between Two Worlds
Release date:	16 November 2021
Format:	1 Episodes on 1 CD (4th of 4 stories)
Production code:	BFPUNS09
ISBN:	ISBN 978-1-83868-623-9 (physical); ISBN 978-1-83868-624-6 (digital)
UNIT: Nemesis
← Previous	Eleven's Eleven
Next →	The Man From Gallifrey

The Curator's Gambit was the fourth and final story in the audio anthology Between Two Worlds, produced by Big Finish Productions. It was written by Andrew Smith and featured Jemma Redgrave as Kate Stewart, Ingrid Oliver as Petronella Osgood, James Joyce as Josh Carter, Tracy Wiles as Jacqui McGee, Christopher Naylor as Harry Sullivan, Mark Bonnar as the Eleven and Tom Baker as the Curator.

Publisher's summary

The arch is taken to the Under Gallery for safekeeping, under the protection of the Curator. When the Eleven penetrates the Gallery’s security, the Curator initiates an emergency plan. He and UNIT play a game of cat and mouse with their pursuers within the Under Gallery’s original location, Hampton Court Palace.

Plot

The Curator finds J. M. W. Turner sketching the condemned HMS Temeraire and commissions him to paint a royal building with provided water colours for the new National Gallery. Turner is not accustomed to being commissioned in such a manner, but agrees, initially assuming that the Curator works for the Queen.

Having anonymously received information on the Eleven's whereabouts, Kate, Osgood, Josh and Harry enter a remote house in the country and find a hypnotised family. The Eleven hides upstairs and shoots Private Claire Duvall with a weapon that forces her to answer his questions honestly; he learns that Kate visited the National Gallery three times in two days and manages to escape after freezing two soldiers with a time grenade. He and Ava head to Trafalgar Square.

Kate, Osgood and Josh go to the Under Gallery, passing through a portrait of Elizabeth I with the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors, and meet the Curator, who has no issue with UNIT placing additional security to protect the Arch. In the public area, Kate, Osgood and Josh notice Ava and give chase, but the Eleven kills her remotely with a sonic pulse. Harry performs an autopsy and locates the nanotechnology which allowed the Eleven to control her.

Assuming that the Eleven is aware that the Arch is in the National Gallery, Osgood sets a trap for him in the lift and waits at the Arch with the Curator. Jacqui, investigating Ava's death, finds Kate and is forced to leave when the Eleven, Jack and Bernie arrive. The lift trap fails and Claire draws a gun on Kate, Osgood and the Curator, but Josh wrestles the gun from her and she runs to the Eleven, who kills her just as he did Ava. The Eleven orders Jack and Bernie to place teleport limpets on the Arch before realising that it is a hard-light facsimile.

The Curator takes Kate, Osgood and Josh to where the real Arch is hidden: inside Turner's painting of Hampton Court Palace, the original home of the Under Gallery. Jacqui sees the group pass into the painting and is captured by the Eleven, who realises that the painting was made with empathic oils and takes her in with him, Jack and Bernie. The Curator and Osgood head to the Arch in the original Under Gallery, where there is a painting of the National Gallery to get them back, whilst Kate and Josh try to find a way to slow the Eleven down.

Bernie and Jack fall into a bottomless pit in the palace, the result of Turner not having been shown every room in the building. The Curator leads the Eleven and Jacqui to the cellar of the banqueting house, devised entirely by Turner's own imagination. Walls appear and disappear, allowing the Curator and Jacqui to get away from the Eleven and escape outside whilst he is trapped. Osgood assembles a disruptor to destroy the Arch should the Eleven come close to gaining possession of it, but Jacqui takes a nearby sword and informs the Eleven that she has gained control of the Arch.

The Eleven incapacitates Josh and uses him as a hostage to force Kate to obey him. He takes them to the Arch and swaps his gun for Jacqui's sword before activating the Arch and setting the disruptor to destroy the painting after he leaves with it. Osgood jams the device controlling Jacqui whilst the Curator fights the sword-wielding Eleven with a stick. Jacqui takes the disruptor to get rid of it, but falls through the Arch and appears on another planet, surrounded by aliens. One of them, Valariss, takes the disruptor from her and dies when it explodes.

The Arch is damaged by the disruptor's blast and the bridge vanishes, trapping Jacqui. The Eleven is arrested and the Arch moved to the Tower of London, planning on saving Jacqui despite the Curator's warnings against repairing it. On the other side, Jacqui is imprisoned for killing Valariss.

Cast

• Kate Stewart - Jemma Redgrave
• Osgood - Ingrid Oliver
• Josh Carter - James Joyce
• The Curator - Tom Baker
• The Eleven - Mark Bonnar
• Jacqui McGee - Tracy Wiles
• Clare Duvall - Becky Wright
• JMW Turner - Glen McCready
• Ava Drake - Maggie Service
• Lt Harry Sullivan - Christopher Naylor

Uncredited

• Vulpreens - Glen McCready (BFX: The Curator's Gambit)

Worldbuilding

• J. M. W. Turner was a Royal Academician.
• Turner sketches the HMS Temeraire, the ship that saved Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar. She was known as the Saucy Temeraire to her crew, but the Curator calls it the Fighting Temeraire.
• The Eleven uses a time grenade to keep two soldiers frozen in time for an hour or so.
• On Vanerius, the Battle of Agliar is commemorated with a marble edifice of a Draconian commander standing atop four-thousand dead Vanerians.
• Jack and Bernie work for Ava.
• The Curator reminds Osgood of someone.
• The Arch reminds the Curator of Tennyson's Ulysses.
• Jacqui calls Ann-Marie, a fellow journalist.
• Jacqui first came to the National Gallery as a teenager to see The Ambassadors by Holbein. It contains an optical illusion of a skull.
• The Curator gives Turner empathic oils.
• The Curator once lost Camille Pissarro, a 19th century artist and fan of Turner's, in the painting of Hampton Court.

Notes

• The Curator's Gambit was recorded remotely. Tom Baker was recorded separately. (BFX: The Curator's Gambit)

Continuity

• Elizabeth I's portrait, which was punched through, has been replaced with a new portrait with two gentlemen by her side: one wearing Converse trainers and the other wearing a bow-tie. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
• The news mentions that Ava might be connected to a series of robberies. (AUDIO: Eleven's Eleven)

External links

• Official The Curator's Gambit page at bigfinish.com