An Ocean of Sawdust (audio story)

	Eighth Doctor
	Big Finish Productions
	Paul Starkey
	Stephen Critchlow
	3 October 2019
	Audiobook
Subscriber Short Trips
← Previous	Still Life

An Ocean of Sawdust was a short trip featuring the Eighth Doctor which was available to subscribers of Big Finish's main Doctor Who range whose subscription included Harry Houdini's War and Tartarus.

Publisher's summary

to be added

Plot

to be added

Characters

• Eighth Doctor
• Samuel
• Kestrians (race)

References

• The Doctor recalls a visit to Russia in the 1950s, some time after the Russian Revolution.
• The Doctor leaves a warning message 'Here be dragons' to prevent travellers accessing the home planet

Notes

• The Doctor encounters a temporal riptide, a 'kink in the time stream' the type of which the TARDIS encounters everyday.
• The Doctor adores wood and the myriad of possibilities that wood could become.
• The Doctor refers to futuristic technology, including artificial gravity, cryo-sleep, artificial lights, generational starships and a psychic comforter containing empathic projectors.
• The Doctor recalls his history with cricket, noting he was 'quite a demon bowler'.
• The Doctor promises to take Samuel to Ruvicon Minor, home to the Milky Way's most talented chocolatiers.
• The Doctor states that he knows three planets, an asteroid, and an unscrupulous robot bear called Eureka.
• The Doctor sings a lullaby 'from a time long past, and a world long gone' - an exhortation to the universe for a people who died long before their time, and a powerful psychic tool that the Doctor uses sparingly. This can put listeners to sleep, including psychic creations and their creators.
• The Doctor encounters the powerful psychic race Kestrians, who resembled stunted grey slugs that squirmed. They are also known around the galaxy by many names. They have the power to bait and trap others through realistic psychic illusions, feed on scraps of memory and store them for future use as bait.
• The Doctor finds himself on the Kestrians' homeworld, a desolate planet with ochre sands and triple suns barely visible in a hazy yellow sky.

Continuity

• The adventure appears to take place before the Last Great Time War - it references minor skirmishes that had 'intruded upon real time' that heralded a larger storm, and the Doctor intended to avoid it for as long as possible.
• The love of wood and craftsmanship that the Eighth Doctor holds appears to have carried through from a previous incarnation (PROSE: Model Train Set).
• When asked if he was really 'a doctor', the Doctor replied that he was actually 'The Doctor' (TV: Robot et al).
• The Doctor defeats the enemies by singing a lullaby. The Eleventh Doctor also successfully used singing (albeit in part) to defeat Akhaten (TV: The Rings of Akhaten).
• The Doctor feels a 'childhood fear' of dangling his legs over the side of the bed, which he considers a 'childhood recollection' tingling in his memory (TV: Listen).
• The Doctor in anger comes up with multiple ways to destroy the Kestrians or go back in time to wipe them from existence, but refrains because he 'was not that kind of man - not a warrior, or a killer'. This would change in his regeneration to the War Doctor (TV: The Night of the Doctor).