When we last saw the Second Doctor, he was swirling down a time vortex on the way to a forced regeneration and exile on Earth by the Time Lords. However, this is not that ending. Oddly, enough, the Second Doctor awakens on a snow-bound mystery planet, plagued by visions of his future self, accompanied only by a mysterious woman named Raven, and later by two unlucky junk scavengers.
Once he finds out exactly where he is, and why, things go From Bad to Worse in a heartbeat…
This episode officially introduces Michael Troughton, son of the original Second Doctor actor, Patrick Troughton, as the new Second Doctor in Big Finish’s audio dramas note and is a MAJOR Wham Episode. Suffice it to say that Season 6B is now official.
Tropes:
- Anything but That!: A small moment of humor in an otherwise fairly dark episode comes from the Second Doctor protesting about eventually being "trapped on Earth — with a frilly shirt!"
- The Bad Guy Wins: Completely. The Daleks come back from their Long Bus Trip, while the CIA gets the Doctor under their thumb and were able to get him to help in the return of the Daleks.
- Body Horror: Katona gradually becomes a Dalek mutant throughout the last two episodes of the story.
- Boxed Crook: The Doctor is forced into becoming this by the Celestial Intervention Agency. His first job? To bring about the return of the Daleks for shadowy reasons.
- Call-Back: The first lines from the episode are a newly-recorded version of the final lines of "The War Games".
- Downer Ending: A pretty bad one from the Doctor's perspective. The Daleks are back, he was unable to save either Cyrus or Katona, and the CIA now have him at their mercy.
- Foreshadowing: How did Raven have all those goodies (firewood, food, hot cocoa) in the desolate wasteland of Skaro when the Doctor first meets her? Well, she was an agent for the CIA, which almost certainly supplied her with them.
- Leonine Contract: The CIA essentially has one with the Doctor. He, at first, is told he will have his freedom as himself so long as he does occasional errands for the CIA. However, he soon learns that the things he has to do are despicable, and that his TARDIS has been tampered with to include remote control devices, and that if he even thinks of stepping out of line, back into the timestream he goes to his forced regeneration.
- Meaningful Name: "The Final Beginning" which undoes the "Final End" of the Daleks. It's spelled out as such in the audio drama.
- The Men in Black: The Celestial Intervention Agency is depicted this way having tricked the Doctor into resurrecting the Daleks for their own purposes, then forcing him to become an agent/catspaw/deniable asset for them, with the implication that they will dispose of him through the forced regeneration when it suits them.
- Wham Episode: The whole dang thing. The Second Doctor is plucked away from his forced regeneration and sent to a planet which turns out to be Skaro. There, he encounters the time echoes of the Daleks, as well as meeting the Dalek Emperor again. While on Skaro, he accidentally engineers the undoing of the destruction of the Daleks in The Evil of the Daleks, bringing them back to menace the universe again. Then, once his mission is through, he learns that the young woman he has been travelling with is his handler in the Celestial Intervention Agency and that he has just been recruited to undertake missions for the agency, one of which was the return of the Daleks for reasons unknown.
