Archipelago (audio story)

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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[[edit] | [edit source]]

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[[edit] | [edit source]]

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. River connects this to Harvey's research into fixed points in time and she and the Doctor go to speak with Thaddeus, whom they save when he falls overboard. Having left the light of the TARDIS lamp, Thaddeus is almost completely covered in coral and the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to release a final burst of light in an attempt to get rid of the coral. Thaddeus disappears, however, and the Doctor and River are left without the lamp's protection.

River is overwhelmed by shattered time and sees the history of Fortuna and the Doctor's many faces, but she holds on by holding onto her diary, which the Doctor reads, and she and the Doctor take refuge beneath the deck. The skimmer leaves temporary time and jumps a time track, after which River realises that the Doctor has looked through her diary and they argue about what the Doctor sees as an unequal marriage between the two of them. Coral, which they come to realise echoes the future, starts to cover the two of them and they agree to be friends, spending time reading and re-reading River's diary and coming up with new entries in which they get a happy ending together. They finally reach the base and River is distraught to learn that Harvey is dead as he was supposed to go on to invent the vortex manipulator.

The Doctor decides to use his and River's temporal fields to power up the base's equipment and skip back time tracks to before the explosion and avoid the paradox of Harvey's death. However, it will result in the two of them not meeting on Crell. After spending time together, the equipment powers up and time is reset; the Doctor receives a message from Fortuna and travels there to stop the explosion. Meanwhile, Thaddeus meets Harvey for the first time.

Cast[[edit] | [edit source]]

Worldbuilding[[edit] | [edit source]]

Notes[[edit] | [edit source]]

Continuity[[edit] | [edit source]]

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

  • Textless cover

    Textless cover

  • Alternate cover

    Alternate cover

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

v • e
The Ninth Doctor Adventures
Series 1
Ravagers
Respond to
All Calls
Lost Warriors
Old Friends
Series 2
Back to Earth
Into the Stars
Hidden Depths
Shades of Fear
Series 3
Pioneers
Travel in Hope
Buried Threats
Star-Crossed
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