Recap / Past Doctor Adventures Prime Time

Warning: spoilers may be unmarked.

Written by Mike Tucker; published 2000, and featuring the Seventh Doctor and Ace.

In-flight, the TARDIS receives a broadcast - The Roderik Saarl Show. Given the unlikelihood of a signal strong enough to reach the TARDIS, the Doctor lands on the planet Blinni-Gaar, where lies the headquarters of galactically popular Channel 400.

Although renowned for their agriculture, the indigenous Blinnati have left most of the farming to gigantic Guldarian farming drones - on Blinni Gaar, commercial and domestic life is now managed almost entirely by television broadcasts.

While the Doctor and Ace book into the Rooth family’s board and breakfast, freelance broadcasters Greg Ashby and Eeji Tek uncover the Doctor's century-spanning adventures. Channel 400 boss Vogol Lukas has an idea for a compelling new show about time travel and monsters. Unfortunately, it's going to be unscripted.

In the suspiciously spacious studios of Channel 400, the Master and a pack of genetically engineered Zzinbriizi jackals involuntarily aid a scheme hatched by Lukos and the fiendish, hooded Fleshsmiths...

Tropes:

• Actor Allusion: The Doctor’s cover story of his and Ace’s respective work in alternative comedy and children’s programme presentation alludes to the careers of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred.
  The Doctor: You can impress them with your Blue Peter badges.
• Alien Blood: Through bionically applied pipes, the Fleshsmiths regularly imbue themselves with some kind of black goo.
• All Webbed Up: The Channel 400 Commissionaires are equipped with tape guns, which squirt quick-drying strands of literal red tape.
• And I Must Scream: On the planet Scrantek, the Fleshsmiths’ fleshbanks hold numerous interstellar species, all of whom are suspended for gradual harvest of their body parts.
• The Assimilator: With their home planet Scrantek rendered barren by natural disaster, the Fleshsmiths became masters of transplant surgery. They eventually resorted to harvesting the flesh of other species, leading to the annual mysterious disappearance of thousands of spaceships.
• Big Eater: Not long after breakfast, Ace, on the way to Blinni Prime, gets addicted to grape-sized, orange-tasting berries.
  The Doctor: {prods Ace’s stomach} I swear I don’t know where you put it all.
  Ace: Bigger on the inside.
• Bio-Augmentation: A pack of bipedal Zzinbriizi jackals, led by Barrock, have, by the Fleshsmiths, been given sapience.
• Body Horror: The Fleshsmiths survive by surgically merging their own bodies with the flesh of other species. Flayed with weeping sores, their skin is laced with tubes, and variably infused with machinery.
• Bizarrchitecture: The TARDIS Console Room always gives an inscrutable impression of being at the top of the ship.
• Chekhov's Skill: The Rooths’ teenage daughter Gatti shares with Ace a love of rock climbing. This comes in handy in their escape from the Channel 400 building.
• Cloning Gambit: With the Fleshsmiths’ DNA sequencer, the Doctor makes a short-lived self-replicate, imbued with a DNA-unravelling sequence.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Retired quizmaster Gartrold Breame, meets life in general - including arrival of horrifically bionically augmented Greg Ashby - with a genial, facilitative inquisitiveness.
  Breame: Ladies and gentlemen, a mystery guest star for you to identify. Familiar features hidden in a most unusual way. Can you guess who it is?
• Continuity Nod: The Master, with his catlike movements and pointed teeth, still has the Cheetah virus.
• Creepy Cathedral: Scrantek buildings resemble warped cathedrals.
• Death World: The Brago nebula has long-since poisoned the planet Scrantek's atmosphere, rotting its minerals and rendering the populace infertile.
• Deflector Shields: During a heavy storm, many residents of Blinni Prime use force field umbrellas.
• The Eeyore: Eeji Tek, a gangly, blue-skinned Monteekan, is generally pessimistic.
• Eldritch Location: With its “pedestrian infrastructure in a state of flux,” the Master's TARDIS adopts a metallic sky; a plane of red sand, and towering, root-like buildings. Via an “auxiliary control node,” the Doctor puts the corridors back in place.
• Enemy Mine: Promised a custom-made new body, the Master is forced by the Fleshsmiths into a lethal flight, with the Doctor, from the Zzinbriizi.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Rennie Trasker, having unknowingly shot her Old Flame Greg Ashby, breaks down.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Jovially sadistic Roderik Saarl is stunned by Vogol Lukos's deal with the Fleshsmiths.
• Flying Car: On Blinni Gaar, vehicles are powered by antigrav fields.
• Fun Personified: Dining with Ace at an Argolin restaurant, the Doctor is approached by Greg Ashby and Eeji Tek with request for a televised interview. Delighted, the Doctor entrances the restaurant with talk of past adventures; juggling and magic tricks.
  The Doctor: Of course, it’s not all about saving the universe. {reaches for spoons} I am quite musical.
• Gallows Humour: For the imprisoned Master’s surgical scars, the Doctor whips out some sticking plasters and antiseptic cream.
  The Doctor: Don’t want you getting infected, do we?
  The Master: You are an imbecile.
• Humanoid Aliens: The Blinnati have smooth, wide, delicately green-tinged faces.
• Humongous Mecha: Since the decline of its farming industry, Blinni Gaar's cornfields are currently maintained by Guldarian farming drones.
• I'm Melting!: With their DNA sequencer disabled by the Doctor's clone, the Fleshsmiths’ bodies collapse.
• Immoral Journalist: Renownedly unscrupulous Rennie Trasker deviously lures Ace back into the clutches of Vogol Lukos.
• Intrepid Reporter: Freelance broadcasters Greg Ashby and Eeji Tek.
• In the Hood: The Fleshsmiths wear dank, heavy, hooded robes.
• Light Is Not Good: Gaudily staged Channel 400 forces the Doctor and the Master into lethal pursuit by the Zzinbriizi, and torments Ace with time travel-gleaned elements of her troubled personal life.
• Old Soldier: Thirty year space corps veteran Reg Gurney, now a security guard, maintains a brusque efficiency.
• Ominous Multiple Screens: On Blinni Gaar, television screens are all over the place - on traffic signs; in a taxi Hovercab - Ace even finds one built into a bath.
• Psychological Torment Zone: Forced onto The Roderik Saarl Show, Ace is tormented with a time travel-acquired photo of her elderly mother, and footage of her own gravestone.
• Resist the Beast:
  • Under threat of mechanically dwelt torture, Barrock and his pack have learned to resist their predatory instincts.
  • The Master has gained some control over his Cheetah virus.
• Scenery Porn: Some beautiful descriptions of the sun-baked, mountain-flanked cornfields.
• Shout-Out:
  • In the TARDIS's 1920s style cinema, the Doctor and Ace have recently watched Jurassic Park.
  • Channel 400 has a show called Walking With Drashigs.
• The Spook: Having looked into the recent disaster on Coralee, Greg Ashby realises the Doctor to have been involved in numerous, similarly scaled, galaxy-wide, century-spanning incidents.
  Greg: He’s been cropping up for centuries. No name, just calls himself the Doctor. I’ve pulled records from Central as far back as the prespace era.
• Starfish Aliens: A Hovercab driver follows a broadcast sport involving giant amoebas.
  Driver: Go on, son, get a pseudopod in.
• Teleportation: Channel 400 screens, imbued a deconstructive enzyme, are set, when the ratings peak, to break down the viewers' flesh into a transmittable form, which, via a lunar transmitter, will send the Fleshsmiths laughing all the way to the fleshbank.
• Trojan Horse: Of himself, the Doctor produces a short-lived self-clone. When the Fleshsmiths try to harvest the Doctor’s regeneration powers, the clone disables their DNA sequencer.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Having helped start the Fleshsmiths planned mass-teleportation harvest, Roderik Saarl aims to put a stop to it, and reap the financial kudos.
• Was Once a Man: Greg Ashby, by the Fleshsmiths, is captured, and surgically equipped with a bodily implants and a prosthetic camera. It leaves him severely disorientated.
• What Are Records?: Albee Greeth's chain of Albee Megastore music shops sell "vidcubes" of Channel 400 programmes.
• Your Days Are Numbered: Following Channel 400's screening of what appears to be Ace's gravestone, the Doctor finds the grave - which contains Ace's young corpse. Desperate to prevent the young death of another companion, he resolves to pit himself against Time itself.