The Gulf (audio story)

The Gulf
Doctor:	Third Doctor
Companion(s):	Sarah
Main enemy:	The Gulf
Main setting:	The Collective, third millennium
Key crew
Publisher:	Big Finish Productions
Writer:	Tim Foley
Director:	Nicholas Briggs
Producer:	David Richardson
Music:	Nicholas Briggs
Sound:	Luke Pietnik
Release details
Number of parts:	4
Release number:	7.2
Part of:	The Third Doctor Adventures: Volume Seven
Release date:	18 May 2021
Format:	2 CDs Download 2nd of 2 stories
Production code:	BFPDW3RD07
ISBN:	ISBN 978-1-83868-567-6 (physical); ISBN 978-1-83868-568-3 (digital)
The Third Doctor Adventures
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The Gulf was the second and final story in the audio anthology The Third Doctor Adventures: Volume Seven, produced by Big Finish Productions. It was written by Tim Foley and featured Tim Treloar as the Third Doctor and Sadie Miller as Sarah Jane Smith.

Publisher's summary

The TARDIS lands on an ocean planet where the Doctor and Sarah find themselves stranded on a former rig, which has recently been converted into an artistic retreat.

But art is far from the residents' minds. A troubled member of their collective has disappeared, and the Doctor senses a sinister psychic presence. The waves are rising. And there's something in the water.

Plot

Part one

The TARDIS materialises on an obsolete Earth Empire spin drifter on an ocean world and the Doctor and Sarah look around, crossing a bridge towards a figure that Sarah sees. The figure disappears, but Lynette warns them that the bridge is unsafe and it collapses because of their weight as they reach the other side, separating them from the TARDIS. Although Lynette is unhappy about their arrival as she believes them to be from Depot, the conglomeration that owns the spin drifter, Marta welcomes them and has Lynette take Sarah to Pen for some dry clothes. She explains to the Doctor that the spin drifter, known as the Collective, is a retreat for artists and that Laurel, one of their number, disappeared the night before.

Marta, whom the Doctor realises is the famed painter Marta Malvani, gives the Doctor a tour and introduces him to Jesko, a cook, before taking him to the hydroponic garden. At the Doctor's request, she takes him to Laurel's room where they are joined by Sarah and Pen and look at Laurel's latest watercolour, one depicting tentacled creatures in the ocean. Looking at them gives the Doctor a feeling which he felt whilst outside. Although this is a theme present in many of the artists' works, there is supposedly no life native to the planet and Marta states that they are likely metaphorical. The Doctor touches the painting once Marta and Pen have gone and realises that Laurel used water from the sea, which is poisoned by trivax.

At dinner, Sarah admires a portrait of Marta's daughter, who was killed at the border of Barbica whilst on a pleasure cruise. When the Doctor asks the group what they think of the retreat, Pen says that the sea screams at night and Jesko reports that those who worked at the spin drifter before its closure experienced strange phenomena which led to Depot pulling out. Marta disregards this, however. The Doctor and Sarah spend the night in the observation lounge to listen out for the screams and hear a knocking from the deck below. Pen warns them not to go outside through the hatch, but the Doctor ignores her and the hatch opens.

Part two

Laurel enters through the hatch and Marta sends her straight to bed rather than making her answer questions on her whereabouts. In the morning, she explains that she fell into the water for a few seconds and spent several hours recovering before making the considerable climb back up the spin drifter. She returns to her work without eating breakfast and the Doctor recommends that Marta contacts the authorities via an astral flare regardless of Laurel's return, telling Sarah that she could not have survived the trivax nor made the climb. The spin drifter's systems began to falter and the Doctor, suspicious of the timing given Laurel's return, goes to examine the tidal generators to ensure that the Collective does not fall into the sea. Laurel, meanwhile, tells Lynette that their secret project is over and Lynette threatens the eavesdropping Pen into silence.

The Doctor sends Sarah to the library with Pen to discover what phenomena made the spin drifter's crew leave and warns her to keep her distance from Laurel, who is secretly given instructions by a monster she has made an agreement with. However, after reading about how the crew experienced night terrors and heard screams, Sarah is told by Pen about the project she heard Laurel and Lynette talking about and decides to investigate it despite the Doctor's warning. Lynette catches them trying to spy on her and they find a Barbican communicator indicating that she is a rebel in opposition to the Depot, of which she believes the Doctor and Sarah to be agents. As Lynette has information that Pen does not want shared with Marta, Pen asks Sarah not to report what they have discovered.

Marta explains that that nobody has been to the generators in quite some time, but she and the Doctor find that the doors have been serviced recently and the area is full of containers of raw trivax. Once they reach the main area, the Doctor notices that seawater has been leaking onto the generators and Sarah and Pen join them to inform them of Laurel and Lynette's project. The Doctor deduces that they have been extracting trivax to sell to Barbica and that the supposed screams are the sounds of the machinery, but he also believes that a psychic force is at play. They hurry to the kitchen when they hear Jesko crying and find Lynette, distressed after witnessing Laurel using psychic powers to force Jesko to relive her son's funeral and seeing a creature inside of Jesko. The group find Jesko's withered body and Laurel offers to free them as she did Jesko.

Part three

A creature resembling those of Laurel's painting approaches the group and they lock themselves inside Marta's studio. Lynette confesses that she and Laurel were indeed extracting trivax, but Laurel only intended to paint with it and was unaware of Lynette's plans to sell it for monetary gain. Her ramblings make the Doctor realise that Jesko's body was robbed of its salt, merged with seasalt embedded in the concrete and manipulated by psychic power to create a creature which, over the communications system, Laurel says is one of the Gulf. The Doctor and Pen fail to find a way to escape via the balcony and Marta smashes the communications when Laurel psychically displaces Sarah to try to make her cry by accusing her of abandoning her Aunt Lavinia. Finding a secret passageway, most of the group get away whilst Lynette tries to get through to Laurel; she fails and Laurel makes her cry by reminding her of her family.

The spin drifter starts to tilt and Marta's hands are blistered by seawater running through the pipes. After giving Pen his cravat to dry Marta's hands, the Doctor tasks Sarah with getting the two of them to the life raft whilst he heads to the TARDIS to use it to stabilise the spin drifter. He allows Laurel to detect his thoughts in the hopes that she will ignore the three women, but she sees through this and she invites him to negotiate on the deck with the promise that she will not hurt his friends. Cornered in the garden by two creatures, Sarah realises that they can be repelled by freshwater as they do not wish to be diluted and prepares to attack them, only for Laurel to arrive and reveal that Pen fought alongside Marta's daughter on Barbica's side and failed to save her life. Pen cries over her lost love, causing a creature to emerge from her. On the deck, the voice of Laurel offers the Doctor answers if he joins the Gulf in the sea, but he declines and the Gulf attacks.

Part four

The waves further destabilise the spin drifter and give Sarah and Marta the opportunity to activate the sprinklers and escape the garden to find the Doctor, who has been psychically displaced. He learns that the Gulf is a realm of collected minds, including those of the planet's original sea-dwelling inhabitants, and refuses to join them. Although Laurel, Lynette and Jesko claim to be at peace, the creatures grasp at the Doctor in a bid to escape and he manages to break out of the dimension, finding himself under the sea and being harmed by the trivax. He manages to get back inside the spin drifter and is reunited with Sarah and Marta inside a lift as they go to collect the containers of trivax to cause an explosion. When Sarah mentions the report detailing an outbreak of stress amongst the crew, the Doctor clarifies that the gruelling work of the crew poisoned the Gulf and made them hunger for anxiety.

After explaining that Pen came to the Collective to be close to Marta and suggesting that Marta use her art to explore the war in Galaxy Three, the Doctor threatens to explode the trivax with his sonic screwdriver unless Laurel listens to him. She agrees to talk in the dining hall where the portrait of Marta's daughter in an attempt to make Marta cry, but she declares that her daughter's life is to be celebrated rather than mourned. The spin drifter floods and the Doctor reveals that he overloaded the sonic extractors to blast everything into the sea and cause the creatures to lose their form and return to the sea. The Doctor, Sarah and Marta escape in the life raft and see the approach of Lynette's Barbican contacts who have come to collect the consignment of trivax. Leaving Marta to be rescued by them, the Doctor and Sarah enter the TARDIS, which is floating on the water.

The Doctor takes Sarah to the library and shows her a copy of Significant Artists of the Third Millennium which contains a biography of Marta. It details how she joined forces with the Barbica uprising to fight Depot and became a symbol of resistance through her acclaimed political art. Her most famous was a portrait of Pen named Make Amends. The Doctor, however, does not answer Sarah when she asks whether Depot was ever defeated and instead suggests that they go and see where they are going next.

Cast

• The Doctor - Tim Treloar
• Sarah Jane Smith - Sadie Miller
• Marta Malvani - Wendy Craig
• Laurel - Lucy Goldie
• Pen - Jennifer Saayeng
• Lynette - Bethan Walker
• Jesko - Issy Van Randwyck

Worldbuilding

• Spin drifters are "concrete monstrosities" dropped into a planet's ocean from orbit. They use sonic extractors to collect trivax.
• Trivax is a highly valuable but toxic plasma sourced from seas. It once powered half of the Earth Empire.
• Sarah jokes that the Doctor has vertigo.
• The Doctor has walked the Astral Peaks in handcuffs.
• IMC, ATP and GMG have been absorbed by Depot.
• Marta does not think favourably of the Barbica Colonies.
• Marta intends to fire an astral flare from a life raft to summon the authorities.
• Jesko used to cook on Babette.
• At school, Sarah's art was described as "accidentally Picasso" by her art teacher.
• The Shrieking Sea is a painting by Pen.
• Laurel does watercolours.
• The Doctor mentions meeting Raphael in his artists studio.
• The Collective make their own wine.
• Jesko met a drifter at Pensive Port.
• Jesko makes cocoa for the Doctor and Sarah.
• Depot and Barbica are fighting in Galaxy Three in the first of the Conglomeration Wars.
• Buildings in Sarah's time were brutalist.
• Marta thanks Minerva.
• The Marquis of Piff once visited the Collective.
• Dr Kurtz worked on the spin drifter.
• Marta says that the Doctor could swing across a series of chains to the other side of the spin drifter like "an industrial Tarzan".
• Jesko's son died in the first Barbica strike.
• Depot installed security seals as standard following the worker riots on Trinket.
• Pen fashions a tourniquet out of Marta's silk grown for Lynette's head wound.
• The average human contains about 40 teaspoons of salt.
• Laurel says that Sarah has abandoned her Aunt Lavinia.
• Laurel uses psychic displacement.
• The Doctor fetches a copy of Significant Artists of the Third Millennium.

Notes

• This story marked the debut of Sadie Miller in The Third Doctor Adventures reprising her mother's role of Sarah Jane Smith. Miller first portrayed her opposite the Fourth Doctor in Return of the Cybermen ^[+]Loading...["Return of the Cybermen (audio story)"] in The Lost Stories. With this story, the Third Doctor had now appeared with all of his television companions in Big Finish full-cast audio dramas.

Continuity

• The Doctor tells Sarah that the TARDIS is capable of towing a planet, and that if she is lucky, she may see this one day - something she would indeed witness many years later. (TV: Journey's End)
• The Doctor likens the mental displacement caused by the Gulf to being inside the mind of Omega. (TV: The Three Doctors)
• The TARDIS is able to float on the water again. (TV: Fury from the Deep)
• Lauren tries to use Sarah's memories of Aunt Lavinia Smith. (TV: A Girl's Best Friend)

External links

• Official The Gulf page at bigfinish.com