The Foe from the Future (audio story)

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The Foe from the Future was originally submitted as the possible conclusion to Season 14. When writer Robert Banks Stewart was called away from Doctor Who by Verity Lambert to guide the writing of a troubled soap opera at Thames Television, however, the story lapsed and script editor Robert Holmes instead wrote The Talons of Weng-Chiang as the season-ender. (DOC: The Foe from the Future)

About 40 years later, Big Finish Productions resurrected the original script idea and adapted it to audio. It was then released as a six-part adventure starring Tom Baker and Louise Jameson. As a sort of in-joke to the relationship between Foe and Talons, Big Finish adapter John Dorney explicitly set it immediately prior to the events of Talons.

Publisher's summary

The Grange is haunted, so they say. This stately home in the depths of Devon has been the site of many an apparition. And now people are turning up dead. The ghosts are wild in the forest. But the Doctor doesn't believe in ghosts.

The TARDIS follows a twist in the vortex to the village of Staffham in 1977 and discovers something is very wrong with time. But spectral highwaymen and cavaliers are the least of the Doctor's worries.

For the Grange is owned by the sinister Jalnik, and Jalnik has a scheme two thousand years in the making. Only the Doctor and Leela stand between him and the destruction of history itself. It's the biggest adventure of their lives – but do they have the time?

Plot

Part one

A fissure in time brings the Doctor and Leela to Staffham Village, 1977, which has been beset by time distortions and deadly apparitions - ever since the arrival of new inhabitants at the village Grange. While investigating the anachronistic sound of bells coming from the boarded-up church, the Doctor's and Leela's lives are endangered as the church bell crashes through the belfry.

Part two

While Leela is detained by the local constabulary, the Doctor and village resident Charlotte investigate the Grange. Exploring underneath a crypt, they discover a secret laboratory containing one end of the time fissure, before they are confronted and attacked by the Grange's new owner - the half-human, half-insectoid, Lord Jalnik.

Part three

The Doctor and Charlotte are taken through the time fissure to a domed city in the year 4000, where its inhabitants are undergoing training for living life in the twentieth century. Leela follows the Doctor and Charlotte through the fissure. Escaping into a desolate wasteland after being pursued through the city, the Doctor and Leela are attacked by the giant, locust-like Pantophagen.

Part four

The Doctor deduces that the future earth has been overrun by the Pantophagen after Lord Jalnik - really a time travel scientist in love with the secret leader of an aggressive political faction - brought them back from the Time Vortex in order to implement a coup that has gone disastrously wrong. Cornered by coup soldiers, execution orders are given for the Doctor, Leela, Charlotte, and their unwitting associate, Shebak.

Part five

Jalnik and the Pantophagen travel through the time fissure to take over twentieth century earth, Leela is lost to the time vortex, and with access to the fissure destroyed, the Doctor is stranded in the year 4000 with no way of stopping the destruction of the universe.

Part six

to be added

Cast

References

Notes

  • This is the first Lost Story to adapt a script which was originally to have been made during the 1970s.
  • This audio drama was recorded on 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 September 2011.

Cover gallery

  • Disc One

    Disc One

  • Disc Two

    Disc Two

  • Disc Three

    Disc Three

Continuity

External links

v • e
The Lost Stories
First Doctor
Second Doctor
Third Doctor
Fourth Doctor
Fifth Doctor
Sixth Doctor
Seventh Doctor
Sara Kingdom
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