The Dead Star (audio story)

The Doctor, Ben, and Polly race to escape a frightening lifeless London. But as the city folds in on itself, it is a warning of a far greater danger. Someone has misused terrifyingly advanced technology to make Earth the target of a primordial black hole - a tiny, invisible world-killer. Struggling to avert the catastrophe, the Doctor must send his companions on dangerous undercover missions.

Can the Doctor and his friends prevent the planet Earth from being erased from space and time?

Plot[[edit] | [edit source]]

Part one[[edit] | [edit source]]

The TARDIS is caught in a time corridor and lands on Carnaby Street in 1968 instead of Ben and Polly's home time of 1966. The newly-regenerated Doctor and his companions find that the city is deserted, the street is at a 90 degree angle and various other laws of physics have broken down, leading the Doctor to the conclusion that they are in a singularity created by the TARDIS entering the corridor. Without the Vortex constants, they will not be able to safely leave the city, which resembles a dream landscape and is without a Sun. Ben and Polly feel that they are being watched by something in the sky and take shelter with the Doctor when a mountain-sized, lopsided Big Ben moves towards them.

The trio find themselves in another strange London, which the Doctor explains is a bubble which has taken the place of the last. They go in search of the pathological bubble, which will allow the Doctor to determine the singularity's structure constants, and this second bubble pops shortly after Ben and Polly find the TARDIS sitting in Fitzroy Square. The Doctor believes that it is a copy and leads his companions into the London Underground where they find the pathological bubble and experience a suspension of the laws of physics; he manages to get Ben and Polly out after getting the measurements he needs by bouncing a rubber ball and they go to find the real TARDIS, the Doctor calculating the stability of the bubbles using an abacus on the way.

The bubble begins to fall apart as they reach Carnaby Street, but they manage to get into the ship and dematerialise. Reasoning that the time corridor was likely created by scientists out of their depth and that Earth could be in danger, the Doctor pilots the TARDIS down the corridor to confront them and they arrive at the London College of Natural Sciences in August 1968. There, the Doctor gets Polly and Ben jobs as Dr Anne Fields' secretary and the Chicxulub Club's chauffeur respectively. Polly learns from Fields that she believes there to be a tenth planet in the solar system which is heading towards Earth, but Professor Christoffel of the Chicxulub Club does not accept her findings.

The Doctor eavesdrops on Polly and Fields at lunch before asking to have a look at Fields' calculations and deducing that the approaching planet is actually a black hole. He and Polly are attacked by a shape-changing robot after leaving the university and are saved by Ben, who is driving a limousine for Professor Jerro Scapinelli and smashes into the robot before picking them both up. Scapinelli gives Polly a glass tube filled with a blue liquid, the taste of which the Doctor recognises but cannot identify, to use in an emergency and the trio are surprised by her lack of a reaction to the robot. They decide to go to the ecology department's offices whilst its members are all at a Chicxulub Club meeting.

After finding a letter in Christoffel's office mandating that Fields be denied access to technology which help her prove the existence of the black hole, Polly is caught by Fields and hands it to her. They are interrupted in their discussion of Christoffel's existing knowledge of the nature of the black hole when a robot climbs onto the window and smashes in in the form of an eight-legged disc. Polly screams.

Part two[[edit] | [edit source]]

The robot knocks Polly over as it attacks Fields, causing Scapinelli's tube to smash and the liquid to spill onto Polly's skin. Polly gains increased strength and destroys the robot by hitting it with a typewriter and tearing out its insides before throwing it out the window, surprising the Doctor and Ben. The Doctor identifies the liquid as a 21st century pneumatic gel which gives its user the ability to fight by affecting their brain and leaves with Ben, asking Fields to ensure that Polly gets to her flat safely to rest. On the way, Polly convinces Fields to make her findings public so that she will no longer be a target, but Fields disappears in the crowd at a café and Polly assumes she has been kidnapped.

Ben drives Scapinelli back to Auldenwhite House, the club's headquarters, and gets the feeling from a conversation about physics and the club's iridium rings that she is from outer space. Meanwhile, the Doctor uses a holographic orrery from the TARDIS to discover that the time corridor originates from the Kuiper Belt and that the black hole is following its path. He gets some of Fields' students to help him build a muonic activator to find the exact location of the corridor's exit and activates it in Polly's flat; the remains of the robot form a face which which identifies itself as Trim, an astronautic assistant built by the Outer System Company in 2064.

Trim is destroyed again when the muonic activator malfunctions and the Doctor, leaving Polly to sleep, gets a lift from Ben to a party at Auldenwhite House. Ben is told by Mrs Berry to serve drinks at the party and searches the house using a lockpick given to him by the Doctor, finding a laboratory and photographing it with a camera from the future. As he does so, he is caught by bodyguards Mr Sage and Mr Tanning, who are joined by a wolf-shaped robot before they fetch Scapinelli. Scapinelli summons the rest of the club and discreetly gives Ben a teacake which gives him the knowledge to write out a complex formula on a blackboard, giving her the pretext to claim that he is not a spy but an enthusiastic fan.

Christoffel writes out a formula which Ben understands to mean that something is going to smash into and destroy Earth, an event which Ben is able to elaborate upon, but he denies that the existence of black holes has been proven. When the effects of the teacake wear off, Ben is unable to continue answering Christoffel's questions and Christoffel orders the robot to attack him. Instead of pouncing, the robot breaks apart into flying pieces and covers Ben, leaving him struggling to breathe.

Part three[[edit] | [edit source]]

The Doctor saves Ben from the robot using his muonic activator and, after destroying Mr Tanning's gun with the device, they drive away. Mr Sage pursues them in Scapinelli's car, but it starts glowing with anticolour and stops with Mr Sage unmoving inside after he experimentally presses a switch. Ben stops the car and the Doctor is joined in examining the frozen one by Scapinelli, who explains that the car's metric structure has temporarily changed and agrees to tell him everything tomorrow. He is unable to find her the next day and rides a rented motorcycle to Christoffel's cottage in Surrey.

Christoffel explains that Scapinelli has vanished and that the club exists to identify and cover up possible extinction events so that society continues unto the end. When the Doctor goes to leave, Mrs Christoffel attempts to shoot him with a rifle and he flees on the motorcycle, pursued by the couple in a sports car. He manages to escape by boarding a moving train and collects Ben before heading to the college where Polly is with Fields, who has accepted a job as head of a physics department at an American university and is no longer concerned about the black hole as her calculations indicate that it will not arrive for a century. The Doctor, however, knows that it will arrive after sunset tomorrow.

The black hole destroys Mars and its moons and the Doctor thinks about using the TARDIS's dimensional stabiliser to pop the time corridor, but doing so would destroy the TARDIS and possibly a sizeable part of south-east England as well. At a coffee shop, Polly opens a parting gift from Fields and finds pieces of a robot inside which begin to take shape. The Doctor takes out pieces of Trim and the two robots form an egg-shape which gives the location of the muonic array battery which powers them. Reasoning that the battery is likely in Scapinelli's possession, the Doctor heads there with Ben and Polly in the limousine and sees people start to panic as the Moon is torn apart. A Mini crashes into the limousine and they continue on foot.

The Doctor, Ben and Polly reach an abandoned factory with a spaceship inside and, looking for the time corridor's exit, they find Scapinelli with her robot. Scapinelli has been trying to close the corridor without success and the Doctor gets into the spaceship to try himself, after which Mr Sage, who had been hiding in the limousine's boot, kills Scapinelli. The Doctor scares Mr Sage by firing the spaceship's guns and says that there is only one hope of saving Earth; he runs back to the TARDIS with Ben and Polly and dematerialises, intending to stop the black hole's creation. The ship travels through time, but the black hole threatens to swallow it.

Part four[[edit] | [edit source]]

The TARDIS escapes the black hole's gravity and travels along the corridor to Montu Station in the Kuiper Belt at a time prior to the corridor's creation. The Doctor, Ben and Polly meet an earlier version of Scapinelli, who is presenting as a man, and learn that the scientists aboard are studying Raet-Tawy, a Schwarzschild black hole. Ben and Polly are given a tour by Commander Novak whilst the Doctor speaks with Scapinelli and Carjil Sou about the possible origins of Raet-Tawy and the nature of a starfish-shaped force field found in its orbit. Using a tuning fork, the Doctor temporarily deactivates it and speculates that the anticolours within, which leave Scapinelli unconscious, are to control the black hole.

After receiving instructions from the Chicxulub Club, Novak locks the station down and orders the robots to wipe out all humans aboard, repeating the order to those like Trim who flagged it as anomalous. The Doctor saves Scapinelli from Trim using his muon activator, after which Sou locks Trim in an air lock, and goes in search of Ben and Polly, who escape from an attacking R Mrs Chippy with Tolman, a palaeontologist studying the possibility of life on Earth coming from the Kuiper Belt. A robot breaches the hull and the pressure doors automatically close, trapping Ben, Polly and Tolman on the side of the breach and the Doctor on the other.

The Doctor goes for help and finds Scapinelli and Sou ejecting Trim from the barricaded air lock. They deduce that somebody is attempting to keep the scientists aboard Montu Station from investigating the starfish, which they discount as the cause of the robots' attack. Readings detect a speck of radioactive material and Sou is killed, making the Doctor realise that she and Scapinelli opened the starfish in his absence. The invisible threat, Scapinelli deduces, is a microscopic black hole.

Part five[[edit] | [edit source]]

The Doctor plans to communicate to the starfish that there is no danger and that it does not need to protect itself, but it summons over thirty more microscopic black holes. He contacts Novak, having deduced that he must be responsible for the slaughter and thus alive, and together he and Scapinelli try and fail to persuade him to put the station into a new orbit. Eventually, Novak reactivates the station's communications and has the robots return to their duties, after which the Doctor and Scapinelli go about trying to change the station's orbit.

Mrs Chippy kills Tolman by ripping out a window and Ben and Polly take refuge in a module, donning space suits they learn to use thanks to pneumatic gel and attaching a bag full of batteries to the wall. When Mrs Chippy slices open the module's hull with a laser torch, the batteries explode and she is apparently destroyed, but she attacks, blinded, after Ben and Polly head out. Ben tells Polly to get into the observatory whilst he holds Mrs Chippy back, only for Mrs Chippy to take the form of a puppy and run away. They are then contacted by the Doctor and head to the power deck to meet him and help change the station's orbit, but the pneumatic gel runs out for Ben and Polly has to get him to an air lock.

Polly helps the Doctor bypass broken controls from outside the station and, when the pneumatic gel runs out for her as well, he guides her to the air lock and warns her and Ben about the microscopic black holes, one of which he tracks with a Geiger counter and releases into space. Scapinelli decides to return the starfish to Raet-Tawy's orbit in the hopes that it will stop the black holes, but her spaceship is swallowed by the expanding event horizon. The Doctor flies the station into the event horizon as well.

Part six[[edit] | [edit source]]

Inside Raet-Tawy, Sister Diphylleia, a scientist aboard Montu Station, sends out a message threatening to kill Scapinelli and then the Doctor, Ben and Polly for flying the station into the black hole, leading Ben to lock the door to the power deck. The Doctor fights her for control of the station, which she sends towards Scapinelli's rocket, and Ben and Polly decide to go and find her with Pooley, a robot in the shape of an octopus. Diphylleia, wounded by the robot Peebles, believes that Scapinelli is responsible for the robots' slaughter despite Ben and Polly telling her otherwise, and she destroys Pooley before going into a rocket to ram Scapinelli's. However, she falls into the singularity faster than light.

By cannibalising parts, the Doctor creates a mass projector to send out gravity waves in response to a signal the station has been receiving, apparently from Raet-Tawy. The station is then transported to a null space without radiation or neutrinos and with only simple laws of physics. The Doctor, Ben, Polly and Scapinelli all get the feeling that they need to make a big decision and are separated by the universe's fluctuating concept of distance, although they can hear one another despite not being able to find one another for some time. Polly sees a vision of Raet-Tawy destroying a planet in the Kuiper Belt and experiences the life of the black hole whilst Ben is given fast-moving options of what to see and where to go. The Doctor sees how to to rewrite the universe and Scapinelli finds out how to leave.

Scapinelli is offered a time corridor to take him home, but the Doctor convinces him not to and the group are released. The TARDIS materialises and the universe's geometry changes, bringing the Doctor, Ben and Polly together. Scapinelli, apart from everyone else, decides to stay in the null space with Trim and Loxodrome and travel outside of the solar system. The Doctor takes Ben and Polly to Fitzroy Square, landing in 2017, and confirm that they have successfully changed time by preventing the creation of the time corridor. Whilst Ben and Polly go for fish and chips, the Doctor wonders about the Chicxulub Club and the little black holes in the Kuiper Belt, as well as the nature of Raet-Tawy and the starfish. Raet-Tawy will, one day, plunge into Sagittarius A*.

Characters[[edit] | [edit source]]

Crew[[edit] | [edit source]]

Cover Art - Claudia Gironi
Executive Producers - Jason Haigh-Ellery and Nicholas Briggs
Music and Sound Design - Steve Foxon
Producer - David Richardson
Script Editor - Roland Moore
Writer - Kate Orman

Worldbuilding[[edit] | [edit source]]

Ben is looking forward to eating an English breakfast with tea and fish and chips.
The TARDIS food machine does not make a decent pie and mash in Ben's opinion.
The Doctor bounces a rubber ball.
Polly wears a watch.
Cygnus XI is the closest known black hole to Earth, located 6000 light-years away.
The Astronauticus robot was manufactured on 8 April 2064.
The Chicxulub Club are named after the Chicxulub Crater in Mexico.
Auldenwhite House is a Chicxulub Club base located outside of London.
The club members wear rings made of iridium, which look like silver.
Brabant is a vulcanologist. He has a wife.
Villaco works with computers.
Ben believes that Dr Bassey's job involves viruses. He has returned to Italy.
Mr Sage and Mr Tanning smirked at one another whenever they saw Ben during his first week and once tried to attack him.
Mr Tanning made Ben carry a Browning.
Mrs Berry is the cook at Auldenwhite House.
A man in a blue suit mentions the film 2001.
A man in paisley mentions the film Dr. Strangelove.
The Doctor gives Ben a lockpick.
Ben says that differential geometry is clumsy.
Ben draws a C-Mel 5-orthoplex matrix.
The Doctor uses a tuning fork he mistakenly acquired after a chat with Clara Schumann in the 19th century.
James Burke appears on television.
The Doctor tests for artificial gravity using a bubble wand.
The black hole Raet-Tawy is located in the Kuiper Belt and is named after and Egyptian sun goddess.
Those aboard Montu Station are international ("From Venezuela to Sudan") and interplanetary.
Cyrellisans have four hands.
The people aboard Montu Station resolve their differences through arm wrestling.
Sister Diphylleia is a geochemical prospector from Titan.
Tolman is a palaeontologist from Luna.
Scaponelli is from the Uranian moon Titania.
The Doctor and Scaponelli's discussion of the physics of the black hole includes reference to Fourier transforms and Zipf's law.
Sagittarius A* is the name of the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.
When Polly was seven or eight, she saw Time Stabbed in a book and had a nightmare.
Polly sings Frère Jacques.
The Doctor has a horseshoe magnet.

Notes[[edit] | [edit source]]

The cover originally featured the 2018 logo, which had been used on Big Finish releases since July 2018.^[1]^[2] It was updated to feature the 2022 logo before its release.^[3]
The story ends without an explanation for exactly what Raet-Tawy is. In narration, the Doctor does think up several hypotheses though. These include:
- A probe from another universe.
- A lifeform which thrives in extreme gravity.
- A huge computer program written at the planck level on the event horizon.
- A tool or gateway.

Continuity[[edit] | [edit source]]

While living on Earth in 1968, Polly tries and fails to track down Dodo Chaplet. The two met in The War Machines ^[+]Loading...["The War Machines (TV story)"].
The TARDIS materialises in Fitzroy Square in 2017, the same location where Ben and Polly had first boarded the TARDIS back in 1966 in The War Machines ^[+]Loading...["The War Machines (TV story)"].

Cover gallery[[edit] | [edit source]]

Old cover with 2018 logo
Textless cover

External links[[edit] | [edit source]]

Official The Dead Star page at bigfinish.com

[1] ttps://www.bigfinish.com/news/v/a-stellar-second-doctor-audiobook

[2] ttps://twitter.com/bigfinish/status/1521489775081017361

[3] ttps://twitter.com/bigfinish/status/1597576330329362432

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