When a teleportation accident goes badly wrong, Nyssa finds herself stranded on the freezing slopes of the Swiss Alps in 1963. She finds shelter in a snowbound finishing school for girls, haunted by a poltergeist.
When the Doctor finally arrives, he decides to investigate, and soon finds out that the two girls who were snowed in both have psionic powers. One of them is mildly telepathic, another is a bit telekinetic. Together, they've accidentally triggered the powers of a rather friendly dead chap named Harding, who's been haunting the school for a long time. After he died, he merged with some pure energy, making him into something akin to a ghost. Unfortunately, he was epileptic when he was still alive, and his seizures still manifest as poltergeist activity.
All of that turns out to be the machinations of an interdimensional alien invasion fleet, whose soldiers hand-picked the girls to open a transdimensional portal. The Doctor and Nyssa defeat them using Nyssa's own limited telepathic abilities, although as usual for the Fifth Doctor, there's a high body count. He gets the survivors home for Boxing Day, after (predictably) missing Christmas.
Written by Andrew Cartmel, making it one of the very few stories he wrote for a Doctor besides the Seventh, as well as his first script for performed Doctor Who.
Tropes
- As the Good Book Says...: Miss Tremayne is very religious.
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Or rather William Blake and Walt Whitman were possibly Timelords
- Closed Circle: Given the heavy snowfall, the only easy way out of the school is the TARDIS, but The Doctor is none too keen on letting anyone besides Nyssa into it. A helicopter's on the way, but it gets destroyed just as it arrives.
- Covert Pervert: Peril teases Harding about being one, given that he's haunting an all-girls school.
- Creepy Cathedral: The chapel is a focal point for psychic energy.
- Disaster Dominoes: Everybody's psychic powers or effects, affects someone else down the line, which goes full circle through 4 people, creating the effects.
- The Fundamentalist: Miss Tremayne is deeply religious, with some particularly strange ideas (like that freezing your butt off is good for the soul).
- Fusion Dance: Of everybody's psychic powers, forming one gestalt.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: The Spillager that's taken over Paul's body fires a gunshot, and gets swept away by an avalance.
- Left the Background Music On: As we find out halfway through the episode, the piano playing is not part of the background music.
- Polar Madness: With heavy snowfall having prevented the last four remaining teachers and students from leaving for the Christmas holidays, Cabin Fever has set in hard, and the worst hit has been Miss Tremayne, the headmistress: already a germophobic fundamentalist with some rather extreme ideas about the purifying nature of cold alpine air, being trapped and witnessing the supernatural activity around the school sends her into full-blown religious mania - to the point that she actually goes so far as to start opening windows during a blizzard in a deranged attempt to "purify" the school. And when she finds out that the two remaining students are actually psychic, she takes her madness to the next level by trying to stab them to death.
- Portmanteau: The alien species is called the spillagers from spill and pillager, though it's a given name to them, they didn't name themselves it. They supposedly spill into a universe and then pillage it.
- Shapeshifting Sound: When the two Spillager operatives finally drop their human disguises, they revert back to their true forms with a series of squishing, pulping sound effects.
- Snowed-In: Not a full 100%, but the weather conditions are abysmal.
- Swirly Energy Thingy: The portal the spillagers plan.
- That's No Moon: Alison Makes A Wish upon a falling star. It's a crashing and burning alien ship.
- The Nose Knows: No one has it as a superpower, but the poltergeist activity is accompanied by a vague floral scent.
- The Radio Dies First: Someone trashes it and it's not the poltergeist..
- There Are No Coincidences: The Doctor doesn't buy that a telepath and a telekinetic just happened to be attending the same haunted school.
- We Just Need to Wait for Rescue: There's a helicopter coming a half hour before sunset.
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? The lieutenant just outright shoots Miss Tremayne when she threatens to kill the Doctor and Nyssa.
-
You Look Familiar: India Fisher, who later went on to play long-running companion Charley, appears as Peril.
