Archipelago (audio story)
Archipelago was the third story in the audio anthology Star-Crossed, produced by Big Finish Productions. It was written by Tim Foley and featured Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor and Alex Kingston as River Song.
Publisher's summary
River Song has one last request. If the Doctor undertakes a dangerous journey with her on the planet Fortuna, she’ll never bother him again. But this is no ordinary voyage.
As the storms batter their tiny vessel, the travellers are confronted with some brutal home truths. There is a captain in search of a husband. There is a ship in need of a light. And there are lovers lost in the maelstrom who will always be islands apart...
Plot
River summons the TARDIS to the planet Fortuna, which is beset by time storms preventing the Doctor from leaving, and requests the Doctor's help in return for leaving him alone in the future. She introduces him to Captain Thaddeus Grey, who is launching an expedition by skimmer to the research station where his husband Dr Harvey Grey was working on temporal experiments before the storms. The Doctor declines to join them, believing that Harvey is likely dead, but River assures him that she knows that Harvey is alive and reminds him that he cannot leave Fortuna by TARDIS. He joins them in the skimmer with his Gladstone bag and informs River that, according to the TARDIS's readings, the journey will take months due to the time storms and temporary time which will cause the time they spend inside of it to "unhappen".
To protect the skimmer's dimensions from being caught in the temporality of the temporary time, the Doctor brings the TARDIS's lamp and breaks apart his Gladstone bag to create new rooms in the tight skimmer using the bag's dimensional transcendentalism. They pass through temporal time and find themselves eating algae stew with no memory of what occurred during that part of the journey. The Doctor becomes even more sceptical of the mission when he learns that Harvey has been missing for over a decade and Thaddeus, who keeps seeing visions of him, has not captained the skimmer for years. He also finds that the skimmer is covered in dark coral and that the same coral, albeit emerald in colour, covers the back of one of Thaddeus's hands. This reminds Thaddeus of his first date with Harvey on a natural landmass covered in the coral.
Although the Doctor assumes that the coral is dimensional debris caused by the destruction of the islands, River forbids him from taking away Thaddeus's hope. The coral spreads across Thaddeus's body and the skimmer and the Doctor spends his time below deck, scribbling hypostatic equations on the walls and calculating that the coral is endangering the skimmer by anchoring things in time.
to be completed
Cast
- The Doctor - Christopher Eccleston
- River Song - Alex Kingston
- Captain Thaddeus Grey - Trevor Cooper
- Dr Harvey Grey - John Banks
Worldbuilding
- The Doctor compares River to a thesaurus.
- Harvey enjoys cocoa.
- The Doctor has a dimensionally-transcendental Gladstone bag.
- River's vortex manipulator is useless in the time storms.
- The Doctor, River and Grey eat algae stew.
- The Falls of Fortuna are living hurricanes which resemble horses.
- The Doctor plays patience.
- Three mistgulls fly past the skimmer.
Notes
Continuity
- The Doctor uses his old Gladstone bag, a staple of First Doctor stories in TV Comic, first seen in COMIC: Shark Bait [+]Loading...["Shark Bait (TVC comic story)"]. River knows that it was a gift from John and Gillian.
- During a temporal shift River remembers dying on the streets on New York. (TV: Day of the Moon [+]Loading...["Day of the Moon (TV story)"])
- The Doctor mentions Gruach giving him the Eye (AUDIO: The Curse of Lady Macbeth [+]Loading...["The Curse of Lady Macbeth (audio story)"]) and a lady in Yorkshire giving him Chipsticks. (AUDIO: Auld Lang Syne [+]Loading...["Auld Lang Syne (audio story)"])
- The Doctor reads the stories of River's adventures in New York (TV: The Angels Take Manhattan [+]Loading...["The Angels Take Manhattan (TV story)"]), facing the Daleks (TV: The Big Bang [+]Loading...["The Big Bang (TV story)"]), the Silents (TV: The Impossible Astronaut [+]Loading...["The Impossible Astronaut (TV story)"]/Day of the Moon [+]Loading...["Day of the Moon (TV story)"]), and a dance on the Byzantium with the Angels (TV: The Time of Angels [+]Loading...["The Time of Angels (TV story)"] / Flesh and Stone [+]Loading...["Flesh and Stone (TV story)","Flesh and Stone"])
Cover gallery
Textless cover
Alternate cover
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External links
- Official Archipelago page at bigfinish.com
