A story featuring the Eighth Doctor. Written by Eddie Robson, read by Yee Jee Tso in the 1st person.
Charlie Sato, UNIT Agent is on the trail of a mysterious piece of alien tech in Puerto Rico. The aliens he stole it from want it back. A group of hired thugs want it for themselves. And the original owner may want it back for themselves. All this... over a damaged screwdriver?
After hiding the screwdriver, getting captured and tortured by a gang of thugs, and overall having a bad day, Charlie is rescued by the Doctor, posing as a Torture Technician. He tells Charlie the screwdriver was taken by a group of Mentra, intelligent humanoid parasites that live on the bodies of giants. Only these ones lived on the body of a prisoner, trapped in a fold in space and time between Jupiter and Saturn. They want to use the damaged sonic, in conjunction with the Arecibo Radio Telescope, to open the lock and free their host. Which will, inadvertently, kill billions of humans when they land on Earth.
Charlie and the Doctor make it, and successfully talk the pair of Mentra down. They slipped through the space-time lock by accident, and only want to return home to survive, but the Doctor appeals to their consciences, and offers them whatever they need to survive by themselves. No longer parasites, reliant on something that wouldn't even care about their help, but free. They agree, and return the screwdriver to the Doctor. They discovered it in an English village called Leadworth, and while the Doctor doesn't recognise it, he refuses to let Charlie have it. Instead, he gives him the money paid to him by the thugs, and drops him off for a nice cruise back to Miami. Or not, as Charlie is set upon and beaten to a pulp by said thugs, none too pleased about the Doctor's betrayal. Still, he's alive, and while he's recovering, Captain Ruth Matheson has tracked down the people who hired them. UNIT still has work to do.
The Turn of the Screw contains examples of:
- Anti-Villain: The Mentra. They just want to get home so they can live, and are easily swayed by the Doctor's appeals to their better nature.
- Call-Forward: The damaged Sonic Screwdriver at the centre of Charlie's mission is described like the Tenth Doctor's, with Eight explicitly noting he's not built it yet, and was found by the Mentra in Leadworth. This marks it as the one seen in The Eleventh Hour.
- Eight also mentions how, despite being damaged, it's still running some unknown program, and resolves to leave it in a TARDIS drawer to figure out later. This program is the calculation of how to disintegrate a door from The Day of the Doctor.
- Eight uses nanogenes to heal Charlie's wounds.
- Mythology Gag:
- The Doctor drives a VW Beetle, as he did in the EDA novel Vampire Science.
- Yee Jee Tso plays a semi-companion of the Doctor here, just as he did back in The TV Movie.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: Charlie pretends to only speak Cantonese when questioned by a local cop.
- Sequel Hook: At the end, Captain Matheson notes they've discovered he identities of the third party who were after the Sonic Screwdriver. This sets up "The Tactics of Defeat", Ruth's solo adventure.
- Shout-Out:
- When describing the Arecibo Radio Telescope, Charlie mentions that "If you've seen James Bond hanging off a radio telescope, you'll know it."
- The story's title is a reference to Henry James's work of the same name.
