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Bide-a-Wee was the ninth short story in the Short Trips anthology Short Trips: Past Tense. It was written by Anthony Keetch. It featured the First Doctor and Susan.
Summary
The Doctor is relaxing at a B&B named Bide-a-Wee in Keelmouth, 1933, while his granddaughter spends time at the beach—or so it seems until the Atkins family arrives in town. Jeff and his wife Ujwala are taken aback by the locals’ casual racism appalled reactions to the Atkins’ mixed marriage and their son, Craig—but soon, Jeff and Ujwala seem to have grown accustomed to this treatment, and Ujwala has even forgotten that she used to be a brain surgeon, which of course is just silly. The Doctor decides that the time has come to put an end to his vacation, and confronts another of the B&B’s residents, Prentice. Prentice admits that he used to roam through time and space, fighting the forces of evil, but that he has since retired to Keelmouth—and, finding it a pleasant and quiet place in which to spend his retirement, he’s frozen the community in the year 1933. Outside Keelmouth, it’s the year 1999; a flaw in Prentice’s technology caused the Atkins family to slip through the cracks, and now they are subconsciously acclimatising to the social standards of 1933. Prentice is reluctant to put an end to his peaceful retirement, but the Doctor convinces young Craig to pretend that he has whooping cough, a disease that can be easily cured in 1999 but is fatal in 1933. Prentice accepts that it’s time to put things right, and the Doctor helps him to bring Keelmouth back in synch with the outside world, leaving the Atkins family in their proper time period and returning everyone else to 1933.
Characters
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Notes
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Continuity
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Timeline
- Bide-a-Wee occurs after ST: Ash (flashback).
- Bide-a-Wee (not counting flashbacks) occurs before TN: Frayed.
- Bide-a-Wee takes place before ST: The Gift.
