Trap Street Number Five

Antima

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The editors, talk about topicality and easter eggs!

Our esteemed co-editor, Roger Reynolds, looks at the science of antimatter, as well as its appearance in Doctor Who. Reality Check by Dallas Jones.

Part One. The Doctor and Rose come face-to-face with reality, in a pub in London.

This Astral Map investigates a couple of autobiographies from – Peter Davison and Christopher Eccleston. It also looks back at the introduction of the 13th Doctor, plus two novelisations and a concert. Delve in to find out more.

Darren Jordan becomes a ghostbuster when he investigates supernatural occurrences in Doctor Who , in this Halloween celebration.

Our first letters' column with correspondence from the Central Coast, Ottawa and Florida.

Transmission, swearing, wiki, wallpaper and Kerblam! The weird and wonderful on the web.

Our other co-editor, Dallas Jones, chimes in with the first part, of two, of a exhaustive examination of the Moon and moons that have graced our screens, plus he also educates us about these objects.

This issue's Doctor Who cryptic crossword has clues from the stories of the 10th Doctor.

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Contributors to this issue

Bob Brinkman, Greg Dunn, Michael Goleniewski, Dallas Jones, Darran Jordan, Corinne Kanowski, Steve Panozzo, Roger Reynolds, and Robert J Smith?.

CONFESSIONAL DIAL Yes, it’s us again, a cheery “What ho!” from Roger and a nonsensical “Brain Salad Surgery” from Dallas.

Again we're more or less on schedule with this e-zine, Trap Street Number Five, only a couple of weeks late. If this issue had a theme, it would probably be topicality.

We had planned to have this out for Halloween so that Darran Jordan’s article would have made a nice acknowledgement of that event. Also recently we had the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, so the mammoth article about the Moon and other moons in Who is a nice way to celebrate one of the major milestones in the history of humanity, plus in the last few weeks the US has announced that man will once more step foot on the Moon, in 2024. Yay! To celebrate the first anniversary of the 13th Doctor we revisit her first story, ‘The Woman Who Fell to Earth', plus our other main scientific article was inspired by the major role that antimatter played in the 'Tsuranga Conundrum'.

With Christopher Eccleston's autobiography just hitting the stands as well as reviewing it we thought we would also look at the other recent-ish autobiography from everyone's feckless Time Lord.

And, of course, we have the usual fare: Web Planet; our page of quirky and unusual links to the world wide web this time with a Lunar / antimatter flavour; and Whoword, our regular cryptic crossword puzzle (for the grey matter) which covers the 10th Doctor's stories.

As usual in our zine we have links to various things on the net, which are clearly shown, but we also have 'easter egg' links, which have appeared in previous issues, and also a couple may be found in this issue. So start you mouses hovering!!!

We are very happy with the letters we received, after our request in last issue’s editorial. It allowed us to start up Kerblam It! our letters page. We want to continue this for the next issue and ask that you consider writing in. Your letter can be about anything, but to help us, if you could comment on anything published in our zine or anything topical in Who that would be appreciated. So fingers to keyboards people and send us in a letter of comment.

The next regular edition of Trap Street will be in out in January. As always, thanks massively to all contributors and, of course, we’re always on the lookout for more new and interesting articles and reviews. We would also like to thank Gemma Styles for all the sterling work she has done with proofreading for last issue and this issue. As mentioned in last issue's editorial, we would like to publish artwork. So if you have a skill at drawing, then please contact us about contributing. To contact Trap Street, our email is: editors@drproductionsaus.org

☼

Dallas Jones & Roger Reynolds

We are after an admin helper

Things like; looking after postings on our Facebook group and page, postings in other Facebook areas, and keeping our website up-to-date.

Email us at: editors@drproductions.org

Doctor Who is copyright to the BBC. Copyright of all other material contained within returns to the

contributor on publication. No attempt is made to supercede any copyright. Views expressed within are those of the writer and not necessarily held by the editors.

Antimatte

Written and researche

These were mostly hydro“Antimatter” – a word that invites thoughts gen, which of Doctor Who or Star Trek , but exists in into reality, and without which the Sun wouldn’t amassed larger and larshine and the subatomic world wouldn't ger scale work. structures – Before we launch into antimatter, we should leading to take a look at our current model of the hisstars, planets tory of the Universe – The Big Bang. and galaxies. Eventually, after about 13.7 In the beginning, the Big Bang, we believe, billion years, there’s us lot, sitting on a tiny was an incredibly energetic ‘fire-ball’ which insignificant planet, circling a tiny insignificwas populated, not by composite particles of ant sun, 2,500 light years from the centre of today’s universe (the protons, neutrons etc.) an insignificant galaxy of 200-400 billion but with an impenetrable ‘soup’ of element- stars. There are over 100 billion other galaxary particles, (i.e. quarks and leptons), rap- ies that we can ‘see’, as we contemplate the idly and violently changing from one form to "Origins of the Universe". another. As the Universe expanded and Well – this is what we think happened. cooled, and at various points in time, it beNow, of course, what we’d like to do is look came energetically more viable for these at the Universe very shortly after it was creparticles to coalesce into new forms, so that, ated, to see the details of the particles that after the first few fractions of a second, we made up the ‘soup’. But the problem is that, had protons and neutrons and then, after a we can’t look that far back in few hundred thousand years we had atoms. unfortunately, time with our contemporary electromagnetic devices i.e. telescopes. This is because very early on, for 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was opaque to this form of radiation.

So, our insatiable human curiosity demands that, somehow, we need to observe and experiment with antimatter. There are two (currently) viable sources of antimatter available to us. We can look to the cosmos,or, we must recreate these very energetic conditions, here on Earth with our machines, i.e. particle accelerators, like The Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

er in Who

ed by Roger Reynolds History of Antimatter

But there was a problem — o r In 1905, Albert Einstein published five mag- two. nificent papers, amongst them, his revoluThe equation tionary light / quantum hypothesis, which, had two possible solutions. One solution detogether with Planck’s work on black body scribed the electron, and the other solution radiation, started the quantum revolution. to be a particle, like an electron, Einstein’s paper supported Plank’s proposi- appeared but with the opposite charge. tion that, at the very smallest scale, energy Many physicists at the time, thought there was quantised, i.e. it occurred as discrete, was only one ‘real’ solution to the equation, indivisible, values. Further theoretical conand that the other solution did not actually siderations told us that light is not only a wave but also a particle. What’s more,Louis exist. Dirac, however, thought the equation de Broglie showed us that, in fact, all matter was so elegant that the other solution just had to be valid. at the fundamental level has this dual nature. Matter? Both a wave and a particle? The argument raged for about four years No wonder the blossoming field of quantum until Carl Anderson, in one of his cloud mechanics defied all previous notions of the chamber experiments, which looked at cosfundamental building blocks of nature. Early mic rays (highly energetic particles from in the 20th century, physicists were not only outer space) and their interaction with subgrappling with the vagaries of the quantum atomic particles while under the influence of world, but they were also confronted with a magnetic field, noticed the path of a Einstein’s theories of Relativity. particle having the exact characteristics of Paul Dirac, an imaginative and gifted theor- an electron – but ist, [Dallas: Guess what is an anagram of Dirac] managed to connect these two appar- having a ently disparate worlds together with a math- positive charge. ematical equation.

Thus the This was (is) an elegant and beautiful antielecequation which de- tron had been describes the motion tected, of electrons very accurately. So well, Dirac’s equation that it could describe the light that was vindicated came from the and antiatomic spectra of matter hydrogen when Carl Anderson’s cloud chamber (1 932) was a electrons changed experiment with antimatter particle reality. their energy levels. curving in the ’wrong’ direction.

Paul Dirac

Proving that Dirac’s equation held true for the antielectron [unfortunately, in my humble opinion, called a positron]was compelling evidence that all particles would, most likely, have antimatter counterparts.

Returning briefly to the Big Bang, we think that under conditions of incredible temperature and pressure, a continuous process of annihilation and re-forming of fundamental particles took place. This process, we think, continued for just a few seconds after the initial ‘Big Bang’, while, at the same time, the expansion of time and space occurred.

This expansion led to cooling of the high energy ‘soup’ to such an extent that the particles had insufficient energy to annihilate and re-form; at this stage, matter and antimatter particles coalesced into existence. But, (there’s always a ‘but’), matter and antimatter annihilate each other on contact – don’t they? Correct!

So, the next question is: why do we have only a matter universe. From the nature of the Big Bang, we would have expected that equal amounts of matter and antimatter would have been created. [This, in itself is NOT a proven fact.] Shouldn’t equal amounts of matter and antimatter have completely annihilated each other? Well, we think there was tiny imbalance between matter and antimatter, about 1 part in a billion, so the annihilation was not total and the left-over matter of our universe is the result of this imbalance.

These differences, between matter and antimatter, are to do with two sub-atomic particle properties called charge and parity.

‘Charge’ we understand pretty well as it has to do with electrical charge i.e. + (positive) and – (negative). ‘Parity’ can be imagined as the mirror image of a black and white picture, but also with the various shades of grey reversed.

However, in the case of the matter / antimatter mirror image analogy, the grey-scale transpositions are not exactly opposite, leading to an incomplete annihilation of all matter / antimatter particles, meaning that one matter particle in every billion is NOT annihilated.

Of course, the enquiring mind might ask “Well, how does that work exactly, or indeed, why does antimatter exist at all?” That’s two, heck of a good questions; the answer to which, for both, is – “We don’t have the faintest idea.” Great isn’t it?

Antimatter Experiments

Being inquisitive beings, we humans want to find out more about antimatter (and everything else, of course). One thing we might do, maybe, if we looked to the cosmos, is find that our ideas are wrong, and there is much more antimatter in the universe than we thought.

AMS

So in 2011, a satellite called the AMS (Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) was launched. It’s a high-tech and much larger version (about 8 tonnes) of Anderson’s original cloud chamber. It doesn't contain a super-saturated liquid however but is composed of multiple layers of silicon-based detectors which can trace the paths of various charged particles through the layers. What type of antimatter might we expect from space?

• Antihelium: would, we think, be derived from antimatter galaxies – if there are any.

• Positrons (antielectrons): are created via a known process called ‘proton scattering’ which occurs in the interstellar gas within galaxies.

• Dark Matter annihilation: The possibility of antimatter creation due to normal matter interaction with Dark Matter has been suggested and would be an exciting prospect for Dark Matter research.

• Astrophysics Processes: There may be ways in which antiparticles can be created from known physical processes that we understand and are present in the Universe.

Antimatter particles have been detected, but only occurring at relatively low ratios compared to normal matter. For more information and the initial AMS results, go here.

Conclusions: "From our initial AMS experiments, there appears to be more antimatter in the Universe than we originally thought produced, probably, by mechanisms that we, as yet, do not understand." Brilliant!

The AMS satellite

CERN — Antimatter Experiments

We can also investigate the behaviour of antimatter using high energy colliders, such as the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire). In this environment we have a greater degree of control over the experimental parameters than those with astronomical observations. The LHC accelerates protons to just about 200 metres per second less than the speed of light. (I.e. fast!)

Protons are smashed into each other at the rate 40 million times per second on each of four detectors: ALICE; ATLAS; CMS and LHCb. From these many collisions, matter and antimatter particles are formed. For more information about CERN go here.

The LHCb

The LHCb (the ‘b’ stands for the ‘Beauty’ Quark) detector is designed to investigate specifically, the B (Beauty) quark which, on decaying to other particles, (kaons and pions) exhibit significantly different characteristics between their matter and antimatter counterparts.

From early experimental data, it appeared that, for this type of B quark decay process, about 25% more matter is produced than antimatter. This result was close to theoretical predictions. [One may, or may not, be happy about this result and I think the scientists involved would have preferred to have their predictions proven wrong.] Note that although this type of decay process is relatively easy to detect, only one thousand such The LHCb detector

Trace of particles derived from proton collisions in the LHC. (From Wikipedia)

events were detected in 70 trillion proton / proton collisions.

More recently, many other particles have been used in this kind of experiment, e.g. the Charmed Quark. Contrastingly, we don’t expect to see any differences between matter and antimatter production in the case of the Charmed Quark. For the high energy particle enthusiasts, more recent results are available here.

Antiatoms

Another method of antimatter investigation is that of researching whole antiatoms rather than subatomic particles. This experimentation is also taking place at CERN. These experiments are carried out, not using the LHC, but via another particle accelerator, a device called The Antiproton Decelerator. The process here is to create antiprotons which are then cooled down and bombarded with positrons (antielectrons).

The objective is that some positrons will fall into orbit around antiprotons to form antimatter hydrogen atoms.

The big advantage of investigating antihydrogen atoms is that they are relatively simple structures and we know a lot about the normal matter hydrogen atom, hence we can examine, in great detail, the differences between the two states of matter.

This investigation is called ‘The ALPHA Experiment’ and opposed to the LHC, where particles can have lifetimes of billionths of a second, we’re dealing with stable antihydrogen atoms which can exist indefinitely – well until they annihilate on contact with normal atoms.

A question raised from this experiment is: Does antimatter behave the same way as matter with respect to gravity? One simple way to test this is to switch off the magnetic field and see if the annihilation takes place at the top or bottom of the bottle. These experiments are currently in progress, but conclusive results are not yet available.

Consolidating the Data

From Earth-bound experimental observations, such as those carried out at CERN and earlier similar machines, we have gathered much information relating to matter and anALPHA Experiment timatter, e.g.: matter and antimatter decay, matter / antimatter transitions. From this data, it appears that only the weak force beThis experiment’s objective is to trap antidifferently between matter and antimatter hydrogen molecules and investigate haves matter and, by a series of mathematical them ‘in situ’. One of the main challengers manoeuvres, we can condense this behawith antimatter atoms is that the capture viour into four unique numbers which deand retention of them is difficult because scribe this behaviour in the weak force. they are electrically neutral and therefore Theoretical physicists can calculate the prehard to trap and hold in an electric / magnetic field. Remember, when antimatter and dicted ranges of each of these four unique numbers and plot them, together with the matter make contact they annihilate each other in a burst of high energy photons, con- possible ranges of antimatter particles, onto sisting of mostly gamma rays and neutrinos. a single diagram (see next page).

The ALPHA team have developed a magnet- Each colour in the diagram depicts the posic bottle for containing the antihydrogen mo- sible range of values for the difference between matter / antimatter particles. There lecules. They use a carefully regulated is only one region in which all values align. magnetic field, which interacts with the spins of the atoms inside the bottle, thus If our theoretical model is correct, we would contact between matter and antimatter expect that our experimental data would fit particles is prevented. in with our predictions.

Experiments have been conducted on the differences between the matter / antimatter model, using a variety of different particles.

So far, our predictions have proven to be extremely accurate, lending credence to our current understanding of the matter / antimatter model.

BUT, we have a problem: using this model, and extrapolating back to the Big Bang, we Antimatter Magnetic Bottle find that the matter / antimatter mix is comThe magnetic bottle contains about 400 an- pletely at odds with what we’d expect: i.e. timatter hydrogen molecules in a stable con- there’s only about one galaxy’s worth of andition for about fifteen minutes. The timatter created in the total mass of the Big observations of the Lyman-alpha electron Bang itself! This is something of an anomaly. transition, [Electrons are excited from the So there’s quite a huge amount of antimatlowest energy level (1S) to higher energy ter unaccounted for. We think we have a level (2S) and then drop back to (1S) – emit- good understanding how quarks and antiting a photon of visible light at 121.6 nanoquarks behave. However, this understanding metres] so far, have shown, within a few does not, in any way, enable us to account parts in a hundred million, that antihydrofor the evolution of the universe. There is, gen atoms behave in the same way as norapparently, a great swath of (suspected) anmal matter hydrogen atoms. timatter unaccounted for.

ALPHA Experiment

Other Sources of Antimatter

So where could this antimatter be hiding?

Obviously, somewhere we haven’t looked yet. Suggestions incude; Neutrinos, some type of new physics, or Dark Matter.

New experimental apparatus is being developed to investigate the very elusive neutrino / antineutrino particles. Maybe these particles will hold the key?

In regard new physics, supersymmetry (which has been around since the 1970’s) proposes that there exists a super-set of the conventional matter / force entities. Supersymmetry predicts a completely new regime of particles, that is, there exists supersym-

metric versions of the particle ‘zoo’ found in the standard model. Of course, we won’t know if the missing antimatter is hidden here until we’ve, managed to validate the existence of supersymmetric particles. Only a minor problem!

Dark Matter is also a candidate for the missing antimatter. Here we might find a link between the missing antimatter and the Supersymmetric Model, since it seems that the lightest supersymmetric particle might also be the major component of Dark Matter, whilst also explaining the missing antimatter.

Conclusion

Happily, (for the scientifically inclined) we’re a long way off understanding antimatter. We are building new machines to help us delve into this mysterious world, and who knows?

This could lead us into completely new realms of physics.

Exciting isn’t it?

The Wheel in Space

The TARDIS materialises on board a spaceship, called "Silver Carrier", where the Second Doctor and Jamie are attacked by a servo robot. Jamie contacts a nearby space station known as "The Wheel" and they are rescued. Meanwhile, the Silver Carrier discharges Cybermats, which also travel to, and enter the station paving the way for an invasion of the station by Cybermen, who intend to use its direct radio link with Earth as a beacon for their invasion fleet. To protect the Wheel the crew use some sort of force shield, but there’s bit of a mix up in the script as initially the expression “antimagnetic” shield is used.

At the beginning of episode two Jarvis Bennett, the commander of the Wheel, says "Put up the antimagnetic shield, Leo, when I give the word" and a short time later in the episode Bill Duggan, one of the Wheel's engineers says "Yeah, and they're the antimagnetic field generators. They can fend off even a medium-sized meteorite up to fifty miles."

Jarvis Bennett

Later, however, in episode five Dr. Gemma Corwyn, second-in-command, says "We'll have to rely on the antimatter field projectors." Then in episode six, communications officer Leo Ryan says "All systems on standby. We'll try three second interval shots.

Stand by to reinforce the antimatter field around The Wheel. Maybe we can turn them off course." and shortly afterwards continues "Switch over to the antimatter field projectors!"

Apart from this glaring discrepancy, I have no idea what is meant by an “antimatter” field.

Presumably it’s some sort of force field which can fend off antimatter particles. Currently, we have no technology which can do this – and furthermore we have no inkling of how such a field could be constructed – unless we’re considering the concept of quantum fields.

Hey, there’s another topic for Trap Street, right there. [Dallas: Quantum Who.]

The Mutants

Professor Jaeger

This serial is set on, and high above, the Earth colony world Solos in the 30th century. In the serial, the Marshal of Solos assigns Professor Jaeger to find a way to permanently change the atmosphere of Solos to make it habitable for humans, but not for the native Solonians. The Third Doctor is given the job, by the Time Lords, to deliver a set of tablets containing lost information about the Solonians' life cycle to the Solonian Ky. Near the end of episode five, after Jaeger nearly drops a long glass rod, the Doctor says,, "Tut, tut, tut. The slightest accident in this stage of the proceedings and we'd all reverse instantly into antimatter. Blasted out to the other side of the universe, as a flash of electromagnetic radiation. We'll all become unpeople, undoing, unthings, untogether. Fascinating."

An interesting interpretation of the “Antimatter World”.

The Doctor is absolutely correct that when matter and antimatter interact, there is a gigantic release of electromagnetic radiation (in the highly energetic realms of gamma rays) and there might well be a flash of (visible) light. However, being blasted to the other side of the universe would take an aw-

ful long time, 1 3.7 billion years, at least, travelling as electromagnetic radiation, at the speed of light.

As for becoming ‘unpeople, undoing, unthings untogether’ that would not happen, as matter and antimatter simply annihilate each other – there would be nothing but radiation left: not ‘unpeople, doing unthings’.

The Three Doctors

In the serial, the solar engineer Omega, creator of the experiments that allowed the Time Lords to travel in time, seeks revenge on the Time Lords after he was left for dead in a universe made of antimatter. The Time Lords recruit the First, Second and Third Doctor for help when Omega drains their civilisation's power.

Personally, I really love this story – even though the antimatter premise is, at best, very dubious.

(Later at the beginning of episode two.)

PRESIDENT: Your Excellency, you have said yourself we are dealing with a threat from an area over which even we have no control.

A black hole in space. The universe of antimatter. Unknown forces at least equal and opposite to our own.

CHANCELLOR: But the first law of time must be obeyed!

PRESIDENT: It will be obeyed, later. For the moment the Doctor needs all the help he can get. We can't stop now. Transporting his other selves across the time stream has already utilised more energy than we can afford.

The idea that an antimatter universe might exist and be accessible through a black hole is, indeed, fascinating. Such an idea is appealing and might, just might, be true.

(Later in the episode outside the UNIT laboratory.)

(In the middle of episode one the Chancellor DOCTOR 2: So wherever they are, Miss Grant and my other self, we can't contact and the President are discussing the adthem. That's the problem with antimatter. versary force (Omega) in the Universe.)

You can see the effect but never the cause.

CHANCELLOR: Are you telling me we are It's like being punched on the nose by the up against an adversary, a force, equal to invisible man. our own?

PRESIDENT: Equal and opposite to our own.

CHANCELLOR: A force which inhabits a universe where by definition even we cannot exist?

PRESIDENT: Yes. A force in the universe of antimatter.

CHANCELLOR: But that's too terrible to contemplate. Someone must go and help the Doctor.

Not too sure what the Doctor is getting at here. If there was a matter / antimatter explosion, then you would know the cause and you would see the effect.

(Immediately followed by.)

BRIGADIER: Then what's this stuff?

DOCTOR 2: The invisible man. Antimatter.

BRIGADIER: But I thought you said that matter and antimatter couldn't meet without an explosion.

DOCTOR 2: Yes, that's right.

BRIGADIER: So, it shouldn't exist here, but it does.

DOCTOR 2: Yes. Awkward, isn't it?

As far as I can see, there's only one explanation.

BRIGADIER: Yes? DOCTOR 2: Well, this stuff, or whoever sent it, is cleverer than we are. Unfortunate, isn't it.

BRIGADIER: And there's nothing that even you can do?

DOCTOR 2: Oh, I wouldn't say that. We can make sure it stays harmless for a start.

Well, whoever sent the antimatter into our Universe and prevented it from exploding was, indeed, very clever as there’s no known method (I mean WE don’t know how) to prevent matter and antimatter from annihilating each other on contact.

(Doctor Tyler has been transported to Omega’s antimatter world. Meanwhile Jo Grant and The Doctor have also been transported there.)

JO: Who's that?

DOCTOR: It's Doctor Tyler. Doctor Tyler!

TYLER: Huh? Why, it's the Doctor, isn't it?

And Miss Grant.

JO: How did you get here?

TYLER: Well, I was in your lab, developing that plate, and there was some kind of an explosion and here I am. Oh, it's fascinating.

JO: Do you know where we are, Doctor Tyler?

TYLER: No, I don't. Do you, Doctor?

DOCTOR: Yes. We're at the other end of that light streak of yours.

TYLER: What?

DOCTOR: We've been transported along it.

TYLER: That's in the black hole.

DOCTOR: Yes, exactly. That's where we are.

On a stable world in a universe of antimatter. An anomaly within an impossibility.

JO: Huh? TYLER: What he means is that a place like this shouldn't exist in a cosmos like this, and even if it does, we shouldn't be here anyway.

I think.

JO: Oh. DOCTOR: Well, here we are. Kidnapped and marooned. But by whom?

The Doctor’s description “An anomaly within an impossibility” sort of describes the situation; except that, in reality, (our reality!) technically, it makes no sense whatsoever.

BUT – that’s the charm of the show – is it not?

(Just a bit later in the control room of the TARDIS.) DOCTOR 2: Yes, it is, isn't it. My little plan seems to have misfired. I seem to have accentuated its metabolic rate.

BRIGADIER: Doctor!

DOCTOR 2: Most unfortunate. It shouldn't have happened. Now, what went wrong?

BRIGADIER: Will you let me out of this contraption!

DOCTOR 2: The beam should have desensitised. Of course, you fool. It's antimatter! The opposite effect! Instead of quietening down, I've stimulated it.

The problem here is we don’t really know HOW the Doctor was “desensitising” the antimatter. We don’t even know what this means.

(At the end of episode two, the Doctor, Tyler and Jo are being escorted through passageways in Omega's world.)

TYLER: It still doesn't make sense, Doctor.

We are matter, and you say this place is antimatter.

DOCTOR: That's right.

TYLER: So, the mere fact of our being here should cause a colossal explosion.

DOCTOR: Yes, well, our bodies have been converted, processed in some ways, so that we can exist here.

JO: Just as that organism thing could exist in our world?

DOCTOR: Yes, exactly.

TYLER: I just don't believe it. This is matter.

I can see it. Why, I can feel it.

DOCTOR: But things aren't always as they seem, you know, Doctor Tyler. Now, you take this pencil, for example.

TYLER: It's just a pencil, isn't it?

DOCTOR: Ah, but is it? Watch very, very closely.

[The Doctor holds the pencil out vertically, at arm's length, then lets it go with a flourish. It vanishes. Another flourish.]

DOCTOR: Or is it a bunch of flowers?

TYLER: Ah ha, that's all very well, but that's just a conjuring trick.

DOCTOR: Yes, that's exactly what this place is, a scientific conjuring trick of a very high order.

JO: Oh look, Doctors, what are you talking about? And simple answers, please. One at a time this time.

DOCTOR 2: Well, singularity is a point in space time which can exist only inside a black hole. We are in a black hole, in a world of antimatter very close to this point of singularity, where all the known physical laws cease to exist. Now, Omega has got control of singularity and has learned to use the vast forces locked up inside the black hole.

This pretty much sums up the scientific accuracy in this story.

DOCTOR: Now, that is how Omega is able to create the world we are now living in by a (A short time later in his 'throne' room fantastic effort of his will, but unfortunately Omega tells the Doctor.) he thinks he's been wronged by the Time OMEGA: I was sacrificed to that supernova. Lords.

I generated those forces, and for what? To (Finally, at the end of the story in UNIT's be blown out of existence into this black laboratory.) hole of antimatter? My brothers became Time Lords, but I was abandoned and forDOCTOR: So there you are. Omega's will gotten! was like the tension in the elastic. Once that DOCTOR: No, not forgotten. All my life I've will was broken, all the bits of Earth, UNIT etc. just snapped back right into their propknown of you and honoured you as our er place. greatest hero.

BENTON: But how come you turned up in (Just a moment later the Doctor asks.) the TARDIS? DOCTOR: Thank you. Tell me, how did you DOCTOR 2: Because that was the proper manage to survive? place for us.

OMEGA: How does anyone survive? Force of JO: What was all that business about the will. Mind, you might say, over antimatter. flute?

(Omega goes on to explain that the Doctor and companions have been transported and DOCTOR 2: Well, as you know, it accidentally fell into the force field of the TARDIS, so modified to exist in this antimatter world.) that when we were all transformed into antiAll pretty fantastic and brilliant! matter, that was the only thing that wasn't processed.

(Later Doctors 2 and 3 plus Jo, Tyler and Benton are in a prison room and Tyler asks.) DOCTOR: And when Omega knocked it out TYLER: Look if this is a world of antimatter, of our hands and it fell out of the force field, all the atoms and the anti-atoms annihilated how can it all exist?

DOCTORS: The phenomenon of singularity. one another.

TYLER: Singularity?

DOCTOR: Look, you explain to him. You're far better at it than I am.

DOCTOR 2: Oh, no, no, please. Older and wiser head.

TYLER: Singularity. Now I know it's supposed to exist.

DOCTOR: Yes, well, it does exist. Right here, I'm afraid.

TYLER: But that's just a theory.

TYLER: So, big bang, and the black hole becomes a supernova!

DOCTOR: Exactly.

Well – that’s a lot to absorb or make any sense of: Basically, Omega’s ability to control his antimatter world was disrupted by the Second Doctor’s flute which had not been converted to exist on Omega’s world.

SO ‘Big-Banga-Boom’ (shades of the 5th Element) and Omega and his world were blown up and ultimately compressed into a black hole.

Good story – but from today’s knowledge of antimatter and black holes it is, frankly, essentially, technobabble. However, I just love the idea of Omega being able to control (anti) matter in his universe with the power of his mind.

DOCTOR: Yes. From the beginning of time, it has existed side by side with the known universe. Each is the antithesis of the other.

You call it nothing, a word to cover ignorance, then centuries ago scientists invented another word for it. Antimatter, they called it.

As far as we know, (which is always a necessary caveat) there is NOT another universe, composed of antimatter, existing side by side with ours. However, Zeta Minor is stated as being at the edge of the known universe, so maybe, there IS another universe right next to ours at the extremities of our universe.

SALAMAR: Nonsense. Clever deception to cover their real motives.

VISHINSKY: I don't think so. Let him finish.

DOCTOR: And you, by coming here, have crossed the boundary into that other universe to plunder it. Dangerous.

This serial is set on and above the planet SORENSON: Salamar. My mineral samples Zeta Minor, the last planet in the known uni- are aboard. It is getting dark. Prepare for verse, more than 30,000 years in the future. the return journey.

In the serial, the Morestran geologist, DOCTOR: Mineral samples? Sorenson, you Sorenson, seeks to exploit the antimatter can't take any part of this planet with you. minerals on the planet to use as a power source for his own planet when he and the SORENSON: That was the purpose of my military mission looking for him are attacked expedition. by a creature from a universe of antimatter.

DOCTOR: But you can't!

(Towards the end of episode two the Doctor explains to Vishinsky, Salamar and Sorenson I t seems that the mineral samples contain (traces) antimatter. Tricky, as when matter what he suspects.) and antimatter touch there is a violent exDOCTOR: We had nothing to do with those plosion and release of a vast amount of radideaths. They were brought about by your in- ated energy – so – this is an unlikely trusion. Listen, now listen to me, please. scenario. [Dallas: Sounds a bit like dilithium Here on Zeta Minor is the boundary crystals in Star Trek.] between existence as you know it and the (Near the end of episode three the spaceother universe, which you just don't undership attempts to leave the Zeta Minor, but stand. the gravity drag is too strong.)

VISHINSKY: Other universe?

MORELLI: Gravity drag still increasing.

Height only thirty miles.

VISHINSKY: That's more than gravity.

There's antimatter still aboard!

SALAMAR: All the canisters were removed.

DOCTOR: Except for this.

SALAMAR: What's that?

DOCTOR: Antimatter. How else do you think I survived that pool?

SALAMAR: Is there enough there to hold us back?

DOCTOR: Yes.

Planet Of Evil

Vishinsky

Not too sure that antimatter would have any effect on gravity – although, this is one of the experiments currently being undertaken at CERN.

(Thinking that they have got rid of the antimatter the ship ascends but begins to slow down. The Doctor concludes.)

DOCTOR: Because there must still be antimatter aboard. It's the only explanation.

SALAMAR: Impossible.

VISHINSKY: Salamar, we're burning fuel at thirty units over norm. At this rate we'll never make the stellar systems.

SARAH: But that means we'll be marooned in space!

DOCTOR: If we're not vapourised first.

SALAMAR: Vapourised? What do you mean?

DOCTOR: Antimatter in collision with matter causes radiation annihilation. A release of energy more powerful than nuclear fission.

Professor Sorenson with the Doctor ist, we (currently) have no means of isolating them on an individual basis. As for coming in three configurations, they actually come in six ‘flavours’; up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top.

(Back to antimatter and the ship has now stopped and the Doctor says.)

DOCTOR: Antimatter can. There's still some aboard and this proves it.

At last a bit of real science.

VISHINSKY: You mean the ship will be (A short time later talking about new energy dragged back to Zeta Minor? sources.)

DOCTOR: Yes, faster and faster. Until, of SORENSON: There are other civilisations as course, we reach the surface, then we'll stop desperate as we are for new energy sources. with a bang. The only way to prevent it is to find the antimatter.

My discoveries on Zeta Minor would be of immense value to them.

(In the ship's sick bay Sorenson tells Sarah.)

DOCTOR: Professor Sorenson, has it ever SORENSON: Antimatter is simply matter occurred to you that you might be mistaken? composed entirely of antiparticles. ThereThat there is no practical method of exploit- fore, the hypothetical energy available, ing antiquark energy? available, is, is stupendous.

SORENSON: Oh no, you're wrong. I've spent All very good science. my life discovering alternative energy.

(Shortly after Sarah sees de Haan, a crew(And just a bit later.) man, being killed.)

SORENSON: What is your friend's field of SARAH: I caught a glimpse of that thing. It science? was horrible.

SARAH: Oh, everything. He's brilliant.

DOCTOR: Antiman.

SORENSON: And he's wrong. He has to be SARAH: Antiman? wrong. Antiquarks come in three configura- DOCTOR: A hybrid creature running amok. tions, exactly as I predicted. All my theoret(Later at the beginning of episode four the ical calculations have proved this! We shall Doctor expands on this.) find a way of discovering the energy!

SARAH: Just before de Haan was killed, I SARAH: Alright. I'm not arguing. felt the same sort of icy suction.

For some inexplicable reason we have sudDOCTOR: Who was with you? denly jumped into “antiquark” territory.

Now, although we know that antiquarks ex-

SARAH: Professor Sorenson.

DOCTOR: Sorenson. Of course. The sole survivor of the expedition.

SARAH: So Sorenson is Antiman.

DOCTOR: Yes. He's been infected with antimatter. His brain cells are being destroyed.

He'll descend to the level of a brute.

(Sarah when she meets up with Vishinsky says.)

SARAH: And the antimatter has turned Sorenson into that monster.

DOCTOR: Listen, Vishinsky. Listen. There are now two forces of antimatter aboard.

I've got one, and the other one is Sorenson himself.

(With the Sorenson creature loose on the ship things get worse.)

DOCTOR: Shut down all the hatchways. It may hold them.

SARAH: Them?

DOCTOR: Yes, them. They've multiplied.

[Vishinsky puts the neutron accelerator back it belongs. Meanwhile, an Antiman So it looks like Sorenson is not made of anti- where walks through a bulkhead. They watch the matter but has been transformed by the en- progress on a diagram of the probe on the ergy of antimatter. monitor.]

(A brief return to antiquarks.)

SARAH: Doctor, look. The hatchways are goDOCTOR: Professor Sorenson, you're ill. ing.

SORENSON: What do you mean, ill?

VISHINSKY: What are they?

DOCTOR: You think you've discovered an or- DOCTOR: Duplicates of Sorenson. Pure antial vaccine to protect you against antiquark matter. The neutron accelerator boosted its penetration, but you're wrong. power, and the creatures split off and multiplied.

SORENSON: It worked.

DOCTOR: For a time, but it set up a cycle of So now Sorenson is antimatter, so whatever energy he has absorbed has not just affected chemical change. There's no way back, Sorenson but has turned him into multiple Sorenson. You've reached the point where antimatter monsters! Unfortunately how this your tissues are so monstrously hybridised that the next metabolic change could be the can be done so that they are not immediately annihilated is not explained. final one.

(The Doctor lures the Sorenson monster into Again this seems to confirm the idea that the TARDIS and then down to the rock pool the energy of antimatter is affecting Sorenon Zeta Minor where Sorenson topples into son and it also nicely ties in with the previthe hole followed by the Doctor throwing the ous, out of the blue, mention of antiquarks. final canister of antimatter in after him.

(Later with the ship accelerating back to Sorenson is returned to normal.)

Zeta Minor Vishinsky asks.)

DOCTOR: You're a very lucky man, ProfessVISHINSKY: Doctor, we're accelerating back or. You've been released. to Zeta Minor. Have you located the antimatSORENSON: Released? ter?

DOCTOR: Yes. Because I kept my promise and returned the antimatter.

Note, that this is 30,000 years into the Morestran Civilisation – but we do not know if they are humans. If that’s so maybe their understanding of antimatter would be equivalent to where we are now. However, this doesn’t make sense as, somehow they have technology which can travel to the edge of the universe. If you could do this, why would you be piddling about with antimatter as an energy source?

NOTE: 30,000 years into our future and science / physics/ technology would be totally beyond our wildest imagination.

The Leisure Hive

In this serial, a criminal organisation of alien Foamasi, called the West Lodge, attempt to buy the planet Argolis from the Argolin people, as a West Lodge base. Meanwhile, the young Argolin Pangol seeks to start a war against the Foamasi, whom his people had previously lost to, with an army made up of clones of himself.

(There is a brief, single line relating to ‘antimatter’ in this story it occurs in the middle of episode four.)

DOCTOR: The antibaryon shield. Antibaryon shield. Antibaryon shield. Now, where was it, exactly?

Strange, random, introduction of an antibaryon shield in this story, but it is an interesting concept. A baryon is a composite subatomic particle made up of three quarks.

The most stable baryons are protons and neutrons and this means that most building blocks of matter are baryons.

Quarks each having the following four properties; electric charge, mass, colour charge, and spin. As mentioned earlier there are six types of quarks, known as flavours; up, down, strange, charm; top, bottom. Up and down quarks have the lowest masses of all the quarks. Only up and down quarks are stable; all heavier quarks decay very quickly into these.

For every quark flavour, there is a corresponding type of antiparticle, known as an antiquark. Each baryon has a corresponding antibaryon. For example, normal baryonic matter, such as protons and neutrons are composed of ‘normal’ quarks: however, their anti-matter counterparts, such as such as antiprotons and antineutrons are composed of antiquarks.

Earthshock

This serial is mainly set on Earth and on a deep space freighter in 2526. In the serial, the Cybermen plot to wipe out Earth, where a conference of multiple planets is planning to form a military pact to defeat the Cybermen in a war.

(Towards the end of episode three.)

ADRIC: Doctor!

DOCTOR: They've started. I see from the computer the ship is powered by antimatter.

BRIGGS: So? DOCTOR: How is the antimatter contained?

(And just a little bit later.)

ADRIC: Will you just try and explain what you're doing?

DOCTOR: Antimatter powers the ship. For the antimatter to remain safe, it has to be contained in a vessel with a totally stable molecular structure otherwise it would, well, blow to bits.

ADRIC: But no such material exists.

DOCTOR: Absolutely right. Although with computer-controlled electronics, it is possible to simulate it.

ADRIC: You're saying that that machine will constantly adjust and readjust the molecular structure of the antimatter vessel?

DOCTOR: Right. However destructive the antimatter is, the vessel is always stable.

ADRIC: That's very clever.

How Interesting? I wonder, to what extent does the Doctor’s description of how the antimatter is contained, actually relates to the antimatter containment bottle currently being used at CERN, which uses a magnetic field to contain the antimatter.

(Near the end there is one final mention of antimatter.)

DOCTOR: The antimatter vessel will split open on impact. There will be a tremendous explosion.

TEGAN: The freighter was the meteorite?

DOCTOR: It seems inevitable, as is your history as we know it.

The Doctor is absolutely correct, as we know now, anti-matter + matter = very big booom!

(Shortly after in the Time Lords' council chamber.)

ZORAC: Well, Lord President?

BORUSA: The Matrix confirms what we already know, Cardinal Zorac. The creature is intelligent, immensely powerful, and formed from antimatter.

ZORAC: Damnable business. Thalia, you're the expert on this, what do you have to say?

A creature formed from anti-matter? – Well – why not?

[Dallas: Bye, bye Adric.]

Arc of Infinity

Omega is plotting to cross over into this dimension by bonding with the Doctor. Meanwhile, the disappearance of a man in Amsterdam piques the curiosity of his cousin, Tegan, who previously left the Doctor at Heathrow Airport and now finds herself at Omega's mercy. Fearing total destruction from the collision of matter and antimatter, the Time Lords recall the Doctor to Gallifrey to undertake the only viable solution: executing him!

(In the middle of episode one Omega intrudes into the TARDIS and unsuccessfully tries to bond with the Doctor. Shortly afterwards Nyssa asks the Doctor if had he been taken over.)

DOCTOR: Well, for a moment it did. What you saw was an attempted temporal bonding. The molecular realignment of two basically incompatible life-forms.

NYSSA: I checked the sensors. This creature is formed from antimatter.

DOCTOR: Are you sure? Then it's worse than I feared.

NYSSA: But the creature failed. It's not in our dimension now.

DOCTOR: Oh, it is somewhere, and halfway to achieving its purpose. It won't have given up that easily.

NYSSA: To remain in this universe, the creature would have to reverse its polarity. I mean, if it failed.

DOCTOR: Matter and antimatter in collision.

Yes, I take your point. Come on, we've got work to do.

(Back in the TARDIS the Doctor and Nyssa are looking up an entry in the TARDIS databank. Nyssa reads off the screen.)

NYSSA: Rondel, intergalactic region devoid of all stellar activity. In former times the location of a collapsed Q star.

(The rest of the entry can be clearly seen on the screen and is: Colloquial name for area, Arc of Infinity. Derivation of name unknown.

Star chart reference 9z63.72.C2. See Quad Magnetism, Laws Relating to Antimatter.)

NYSSA: Q star?

DOCTOR: They're very rare. On burnout it creates quad magnetism. That's what the sensors picked up. It's the only force known to shield antimatter.

NYSSA: So that's what's shielding the creature?

Quad magnetism? I think they are referring to a Quadrupole magnet which is useful, as it creates a magnetic field whose magnitude grows rapidly with the radial distance from its longitudinal axis and is used in particle accelerators to focus particle beams. So they could possibly be used to make a magnetic bottle as a shield against antimatter.

A Q Star, also known as a grey hole, is a hypothetical type of a compact, heavy neutron star with an exotic state of matter. Such a star can be smaller than the progenitor star's Schwarzschild radius and have a gravitational pull so strong that some, but not all light, cannot escape. The Q stands for a conserved particle number, or a Baryon number.

A Q-Star may be mistaken for a stellar black hole. But a Q-star producing a magnetic field like that of a Quadrapole magnet, not very likely.

OMEGA: That changes nothing. Transfer will take place as planned.

BORUSA: But you are antimatter.

(Just a bit later the Doctor and Nyssa are both working on two small devices in the TARDIS.) NYSSA: What's that for?

DOCTOR: Omega's using a fusion booster to build up energy to transfer. If we can attach this, it should knock it out of phase.

NYSSA: Isn't that dangerous?

DOCTOR: Hopefully it'll feed the power back through his own equipment.

NYSSA: A kind of short circuit.

DOCTOR: Exactly. How's the meter?

NYSSA: Now calibrated to detect any change in anti-matter.

(A short while later in Amsterdam the Doctor checks the meter.)

DOCTOR: Afraid so. Antimatter present but More, somewhat vague references to antisteady. Omega hasn't transferred yet, but it matter, and magnetism. The point being that can't be much longer. the co-existence of matter and antimatter results in a massive release of energy which, NYSSA: Can you find him using that? of course, will destroy the arc of infinity, DOCTOR: If only it were that easy.

(A short time later in the TARDIS.) NYSSA: There was a massive energy transfer.

DOCTOR: Hmm. This creature controls the shift of the Arc. Just think of it, Nyssa. With such power you can unlock the door to travel between the dimensions of matter and antimatter.

(In episode two in the Time Lord council chamber.)

BORUSA: The space-time parameters of the Matrix have been invaded by a creature from the antimatter world. We know its composition and how unstable is the magnetism that shields it. The creature must be expelled immediately if we are to avert disaster.

DOCTOR: Without knowing its purpose here.

BORUSA: Its presence here must be our first concern. Antimatter cannot co-exist in harmony in our universe.

thus making time travel impossible and hence, result in the end of the Time Lords.

(At the beginning of episode four Omega has gained control of the Matrix and the Doctor, in the Time Lord council chamber, confronts his image on a screen.)

DOCTOR: We know who you are.

A meter that handily Nyssa can recalibrate to detect antimatter, sounds like a plot device.

There are a few more references to antimatter in in the conclusion to this story and they relate to the disastrous consequences of matter / antimatter reaction on Omega.

Snakedance

The TARDIS makes an unplanned landing on Manussa, where preparations are under-way to celebrate the defeat of the Sumaran Empire five centuries earlier. But the ancient evil of the Mara lives on, and Tegan, who has been haunted by disturbing dreams since her time under the Wind chimes on Deva Loka, is now a pawn in its plan to reenter the physical world and subjugate the Manussan people. Only the Doctor can stop the Mara – but first he must convince the (When Rose first meets Sarah Jane they try authorities that he is not just a deluded fool to one-up each other.) who believes in children's fairy-tales…

SARAH: I had no problem with space stuff. I (At the start of the first episode Nyssa saw things you wouldn't believe. enters the console room and shows off her ROSE: Try me. new costume to the Doctor.)

SARAH: Mummies.

ROSE: I've met ghosts.

SARAH: Robots. Lots of robots.

ROSE: Slitheen, in Downing Street.

SARAH: Daleks!

ROSE: Met the Emperor.

SARAH: Antimatter monsters.

ROSE: Gas masked zombies.

SARAH: Real living dinosaurs.

ROSE: Real living werewolf.

SARAH: The Loch Ness Monster!

NYSSA: Well?

DOCTOR: We're not where we're supposed to be.

NYSSA: Where are we?

DOCTOR: I don't know. There are traces of antimatter.

NYSSA: Omega?

DOCTOR: Oh, highly unlikely he's still alive.

It's not a navigational malfunction either.

Omega? Strikes again – lovely.

[Dallas: A very strange throw-away mention, probably just to link back to the previous story.]

School Reunion

Deffry Vale High School is haunted at night by strange, bat-like creatures. When the Doctor investigates, he finds Sarah Jane Smith, already working undercover.

Just a casual 'one-off' mention of antimatter.

The Tsuranga Conundrum

Injured and stranded on a medical spaceship in the wilds of a far-flung galaxy, the Doctor, Yaz, Graham, and Ryan must band together with a group of strangers to survive against a Pting, one of the universe's most deadly, and unusual, creatures.

(The Pting is loose on the ship and Eve Cicero, a patient, tells the group that she has encountered one before and it massacred her fleet.)

MABLI: It must've got to the central systems. That means we'll soon lose oxygen and heat.

CICERO: It'll go for whatever's powering the craft next.

MABLI: We're on an antimatter drive.

CICERO: We could use stazers to defend ourselves. They can stun it briefly. Got any on board?

MABLI: A couple, I think, in here.

CICERO: If we're going to live through this...

MABLI+CICERO+DOCTOR: Protect the antimatter drive!

DOCTOR: Snap!

(A few moments later.)

DOCTOR: Sorry, where are we? Oh, antimatter drive. What century is this?

CICERO: Are you joking?

DOCTOR: No. We travel in Time.

CICERO: Are you joking now?

DOCTOR: No. DURKAS: 67th.

DOCTOR: Ah. Nice century. Bit tricky in the middle. It turns out all right in the end. See this, Yaz? Antimatter drive.

YASMIN: Oh. I did a bit on antimatter at school. Never quite understood it.

DOCTOR: The thing with antimatter is you have to either find it or generate it. That's what this bit does. Particle accelerator.

YASMIN: Like at CERN? We did that in physics. No, but the thing at CERN is massive.

DOCTOR: In your time, generating anti-matter cost a massive amount of money. This is progress. Things get smaller, faster and cheaper. This is like the iPhone version of CERN, accelerating enough particles to power this entire craft.

YASMIN: So how does it work?

DOCTOR: The particle accelerator smashes the atoms together, like a little antimatter factory, to produce positrons, which are then stored very carefully inside electric and magnetic fields. The positrons interact with the fuel materials to produce heat, which produces thrust.

DURKAS: It's pretty old school, this one.

DOCTOR: It's beautiful. Antimatter powering the movement of matter. Bringing positrons into existence to move other forms of life across space. I love it. Conceptually, and actually. Yaz, you have to keep this safe from the Pting. If this drive gets destroyed, this ship will lose propulsion, we'll drift endlessly while the Pting...

YASMIN: I get it. It won't be good.

Lots of mention of antimatter here, seems mainly to be about use of an antimatter / matter engine – shades of Star Trek. The explanation of an “antimatter factory producing positrons which are then stored very carefully inside electric and magnetic fields” is interesting as it relates accurately to our current activities at CERN. It’s nice to see Doctor Who catching up with current scientific advances.

(Yasmin and Ronan, a Clone drone who was the consort of Eve, are left behind in the engine room.)

RONAN: Just focus on protecting the antimatter drive.

(A short time later in the control room Durkas has created a makeshift holographic interface for Eve in order to pilot the ship away from the asteroid field.)

DURKAS: Okay, it's rigged. I've leached some system power off the antimatter drive.

Now, if they can keep that up and running, we'll have enough power to keep basic systems going and still get to Resus One. That's if that thing doesn't get in there and drain the energy.

There are many example of antimatter in our favourite show and, gradually, over time, its interpretation has become more accurate in its use and description. It’s used mostly as a means of creating large amounts of energy and much has been made of its explosive power.

Antimatter universes, although an intriguing idea, (and the latest thinking conjectures the existence of ‘Multiverses’) have occurred in several stories, but, unfortunately we have no way (currently) of verifying their existence.

To me, Doctor Who is based on a fantastic premise and permits an amazing variety of stories.

Brilliant!

The waiter, gorgeous, tanned, mop of dark straggly hair, picked his way through the crowded restaurant. He’d already spotted the attractive young woman sitting in the sunny bay window; with an older man. No matter. He noticed how the sun shone through her beautiful blond hair. Definitely a ten.

Rose saw him coming from way off; of course. She was ready.

“Good morning miss,“ – with the slightest of pauses – “Sir.” She smiled. Eye contact! Cheeky. Oh yeah – a ten.

“Here for breakfast, miss?”

“If that’s what’s on offer.”

The Doctor leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Humans – just can’t help themselves. Rose ...“ “Yes, Doctor.”

“Behave.”

“Never.”

The waiter made a coughing sound. “How would you like the eggs miss?”

“Eggs?”

“Poached, scrambled, fried, sunny side up – or down?”

“Cheeky.”

“She’ll have them poached and a little runny, thank you, waiter.”

“Doctor – we’re just having a little friendly banter. You’re jealous!”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Er – Beauty. So for the lady that’s Chai Latte with skim milk, orange juice, and for first course Granola then for second course poached eggs, a little runny, then for the gentleman, English Breakfast tea, apple juice and for first course Granola and second course of Ocean Trout. To finish off, both of you will try the selection of pastries?”

“Thanks – yes, that’s about right.”

“And keep your sunny side up,” Rose quipped.

The Doctor and Rose glared briefly at each other. Then smiled.

“And – can we please have the juice with the Granola first and the coffee and tea later with the pastries?”

“No problem sir.” The waiter ticked off the order – he was not really sure what happened here, but still, – a ten – oh yeah – definitely ten.

He left to take their order out to the kitchen.

Rose couldn’t help staring. “He’s a bit of alright,” she whispered to herself.

“Evidently.”

Rose adjusted her napkin and looked around.

“This place is really swish.”

“Glad you like it.”

“Do you come here often? And by the way, where exactly is here? The TARDIS landed and we stepped out and just around the corner is this exquisite restaurant. I really don’t think we are in England, the view is breath-taking, such a lovely sandy beach. It reminds me a bit of Cornwall, St Anne’s, but it’s way too warm plus that waiter’s accent – hard to pick.”

“Jonah’s in Sydney, on one of its northern beaches.”

“So – you’ve been here a few times before, then, Doctor?”

“One of my faves. I’d say the waiter is Canadian, maybe a back-packer, but he has been out here for quite a while.”

“Jonah’s you say. Am I going to have a whale of a time?”

“Well in fact yes, I thought we would, after eating, have a pleasant walk down to the beach…, Whale Beach.” The Doctor let it sink in. *** The Doctor and Rose, barefooted, walked casually along Whale Beach.

“Come on Doctor – shoes and sock off – roll up your trousers – be bold - show us yu knees then.”

Rose raced down to the water’s edge and stopped abruptly. A wave washed in, covering her feet. She squealed with pleasure cool but refreshing. “Come on Doctor, the water’s lovely.”

The Doctor, shoes and socks in hand, trousers rolled up, raced after her. He could be bold if he had to.

“Pity I didn’t bring any swimmers.”

“We could go back to the TARDIS, I am sure I can rustle something up.”

“No, no, no. No problem. This is just fine.”

The Doctor joined her at the water’s edge, he also enjoyed a little paddle.

“Nice knees Doctor. That was a divine breakfast, probably the best I have ever had.

Usually it’s instant coffee and toast, before dashing off to work.”

“Better than Brighton beach on a cold and windy Sunday afternoon, then?”

“Brighton beach? I don’t understand. It’s not that bad in summer.” She looked out to sea.

Memories of her home life flooded back, and in particular her mum.

She turned to face the Doctor “I’d like to go home if that’s OK. I’ve had enough of bouncing around in time and space, the past, the future and space stations. Don’t get me wrong, I really did enjoy dancing with that Captain Jack – you were OK too, but I really miss my Mum and even, I can’t believe what I’m saying, Mickey.”

“OK, my next stop was to Cardiff anyway – to recharge the TARDIS engines. What I can do is make sure it’s 2005.” The Doctor star-

ted to walk back up the beach to return to the TARDIS. “Can we stay here a little bit longer, this is really beautiful? Catch a few rays, and get a good look at those knees.”

“No problèmo. Tell me when you’re ready.

I’m going to have a sticky beak at the rock pools at the end of the beach.” He wandered off, “and the knees are just fine, thank you!”

Rose was now by herself. She looked out at the sea, staring into the distance, just quietly thinking. *** “Cardiff here we come.”

The Doctor triumphantly pushed a button on the console, the button that activated the landing procedure. The sound of the TARDIS materialising could be heard but something was very wrong, the sound got louder and became distorted and the TARDIS began to vibrate.

Rose clutched the console to stop herself from falling and yelled over the noise.

“No, no, no, not again. ‘No problèmo’ you said.”

The Doctor checked various items on the console.

“Oh no, that can’t be.” He frantically pressed a number of buttons and worked a few levers and other controls. The sound changed to that of the TARDIS dematerialising. It rocked violently: the Doctor and Rose were thrown to the floor; unconscious. *** A few moments later Rose awoke to see the Doctor as he scrambled up from the floor and lurched towards the console, where he did a quick check of the readouts.

“What just happened?”

“It looks like we were just about to materialise in the middle of a black hole, but I managed to dematerialise her in the nick of time.”

“There’s always something with you, isn’t there? It’s never smooth sailing.”

“Everything seems OK now. I’ve re-checked the co-ordinates and found the problem."

He gave the console a hearty slap. “I can promise you – the next landing will be as smooth as a…”

He again triumphantly pushed the landing

button and the materialisation sounds began only to dramatically ceased half-way through. The TARDIS shuddered and the materialisation sound restarted.

Rose sarcastically, over the cacophony, said, “Smooth as a…, my…”

The Doctor, totally ignoring her comment, explained, “The TARDIS is trying to land but something is stopping her and she keeps retrying.” The stop-starting continued whilst the Doctor worked frantically at the console.

“Come on girl, come on, you can do it,” he coaxed. He continued trying out various combinations of switches, buttons and levers and then bellowed frustratingly, “Blast”.

The sound of the TARDIS trying to materialise abruptly ended.

“See – easy as.”

“Yeah, easy as –?”

“Well – I’ve had to cancel the landing.”

“Cancel? – what happened to Cardiff, 2005?”

“I think I need to observe what’s outside the TARDIS, in the time vortex, to see what’s causing the landing to continually abort.”

He turned back to the console, dragged a large screen towards him and stared intently at it.

“That can’t be right. Look, it doesn’t show the time vortex, instead it appears to show the interior of a dark room. It seems we’ve landed, but that’s impossible, we never completed the materialisation.”

“Might I suggest – How about you open the TARDIS doors and we take a peek to see what’s out there?”

“Good idea,” the Doctor replied cheerfully.

"What could possibly go wrong?"

The Doctor strode over to the TARDIS doors, with Rose following, and pushed open the left-hand door. They both peered out and discovered that what was on the screen was exactly where they were; inside a darkened room.

It was about four meters wide and roughly two meters from the TARDIS doors there was a wall with a door. There were no windows. Barely visible on the left-hand wall were a series of shelves which held a jumble of items including buckets, mops and bottles.

“Oh, nice landing.”

“Not my doing.”

“It never is. Let’s see if outside is Cardiff, and by that, I mean Cardiff 2005, not Cardiff 1935 or Cardiff 1965. Or even Cardiff.”

Rose took a step forward, but the Doctor blocked her way. “Something is very wrong.

I think we need to do some more checking before we rush outside.”

“OK Doctor, seems logical.”

He carefully closed the TARDIS door behind them and returned to the console.

“Let’s do a basic survey of outside.” He activated a different combination of controls and checked a smaller screen embedded in the console. Then, reading off the screen, “Gravity is 9.8 Newtons, atmosphere 78% Nitrogen and 21% Oxygen. They are exactly the figures for Earth. But I have a funny feeling that we are not in Kansas, Toto.”

“I’ve not heard of any of them. Are you sure Blu is not listed?”

“Nope, there is definitely no listing for Blu,” he then added, “Wait a moment” and worked a bit more on the handset. “I’ve managed to get you connected to a network called Orange.” He triumphantly handed the phone back to Rose “Try that.” He then muttered to himself “Very strange.”

Rose selected her mum’s number from the list on the screen and put the phone to her ear. “It says my mum’s number doesn’t exist.” She tried again “and nor does Mickey’s.” She continued to try different numbers. “Damn it, even triple 8 doesn‘t work.”

“What’s triple 8?”

“I thought you knew everything, Doctor, it’s the number to call for emergencies.”

“OK, let me have another look.” The Doctor took the phone out of Rose’s hands, played with it for a short time. "Well, sorry to say, we’re definitely not in Kansas.”

“What do you mean?”

“It appears not to be your Earth. So far, what we have found makes it looks like it’s Earth, but why it isn’t your Earth, I’m not really sure. We’ll have to go outside and do some hands-on investigating.”

“Oh, goody.”

“But before we do that, I need to check some other things to see if it is OK for us to exit. It may be much more than just not be“Good. If this is Earth, I should be able to ing your Earth.” ring mum, without the need for your jiggery “Why all this caution? I thought you were a pokery.” She then took out her flip-phone, switched it on, tapped an item on the screen gung-ho sort of person?” and put it to her ear. “I can’t get mum.” She “I nearly landed us in black hole, that’s very looked at the phone’s screen and angrily ex- careless of me.” He strode off irritably into the TARDIS interior, annoyed at himself for claimed, “It’s got plenty of charge left, but being so reckless. it’s not working!”

A few moments later the Doctor returned “Here, let me have a squiz,” He took the phone out of her hand, examined the screen. with a pair of long tongs and a paisley scarf.

“Signal strength is OK.” He then used one of “I’m confused. What the hell are you going his long, thin fingers to glide across the to do with those things?” screen. “Who is your network provider?”

“Just watch and learn, watch and learn,” the “Blu,” Rose replied.

Doctor enigmatically replied.

The Doctor responded, “It’s not listed.”

He ambled over to the TARDIS doors and Rose said in disbelief, “That can’t be, Blu is then dropped to the floor so that he was very close to the door frame, but still inside the UK’s largest.” the TARDIS. He picked up the scarf with the “There are listings for an Orange, a Vodatongs and carefully pushed it beyond the phone and an O2 amongst others, but no door but not so that his hand passed the Blu.”

door frame. Nothing happened. He then dropped the scarf. Nothing happened.

“Good, good it’s looking like we will be able to exit, the next step is crucial.” Still holding the tongs, he pushed them further out so that his arm was beyond the TARDIS doorframe. Nothing happened. “Yes!” he exclaimed and then stood up, nonchalantly stepped outside and bent down to pick up the scarf with the tongs. He looked back to Rose with a triumphant smile on his face which quickly changed to that of concern.

“What’s wrong now?” Rose asked.

“Well, the good news is that we can exit the TARDIS with no trouble, but there’s another mystery to be added to the list. Before you join me can I ask you to do something that may sound a bit strange?”

“Everything about you is a bit strange, Doctor.”

“Can I get you walk to the TARDIS doors and stop just inside, please don’t exit. Then can you lean out of the TARDIS, with your feet still inside the TARDIS, and tell me what you can see of the TARDIS exterior?”

“That does sound bizarre, but if you say so,” Rose answered. She did as the Doctor requested and replied, “I can see the TARDIS, no problem.”

“A blue police box?” the Doctor questioned.

“Yes of course. What did you expect me to see, a Portaloo?”

“Can I now get you now to turn around and bend yourself backwards and look out the door? Still the blue police box?”

“Yes of course.”

“Now, whilst still watching the TARDIS, can I get you to please back out and tell me what you see?”

“What the hell. It’s turned into a tall grey box!” exclaimed Rose.

The Doctor walked up to the TARDIS and examined it very closely; he used his fingers and touched the exterior. “Hmm,” he murmured to himself. He then whipped his sonic screwdriver from his jacket pocket and pointed it at the TARDIS. He turned it on and took a reading. “Interesting,” he again murmured to himself. He turned and faced Rose, “I’ve used the sonic screwdriver to interrogate the TARDIS and it indicates that the chameleon circuit is working.”

“Why can’t we now see it as a police box

then?” declared Rose “We are outside the TARDIS and it looks like things are different in some way out here. I think we are not just on a strange Earth, but we are in fact in a different Universe.”

“What?” Rose responded disbelievingly.

“Inside the TARDIS we are in ‘our’ Universe and from it we can see the TARDIS as a police box, but out here in ‘this’ Universe the chameleon circuit doesn’t work and we see the TARDIS as it really is – a tall grey box.”

“Are you sure?” Rose asked.

“Based on what has happened so far I think is a good hypothesis. Let’s get out of this room and see if we can find more information that will back it up. It doesn’t look like it can give us any more clues, all I can see is what looks like cleaning stuff on the shelves over there.” The Doctor marched to the only door in the room and tried the handle to open it, but it was locked. He took out his sonic screwdriver and pointed it at the lock.

Nothing happened.

Rose asked “How can that be? You just used it.”

The Doctor tried again. Nothing happened.

He then adjusted the sonic screwdriver and tried once more with the same negative response. He muttered, “This is getting curiouser and curiouser.” He once more readjusted the device, but this time turned it on himself and operated it. He was happy with what he found and then pointed the sonic screwdriver at Rose and turned it on.

He said, “You should feel a tingle.”

“Yes, a slight tingle,” Rose replied, “Why did you do that?”

“Just testing. It looks like the sonic screwdriver doesn’t work outside the TARDIS, except on things that come from inside the TARDIS. I can contact the TARDIS with it, and it can affect us as we have come from the TARDIS, but as you have seen it won’t open the lock.” He then readjusted the sonic screwdriver and pointed it at the floor, but nothing happened. “See the floor was not affected and I have set it a full blast”.

“This seems to be confirming your hypothesis, Doctor.”

“Yes, unfortunately it does, but we still have to get through the locked door. So, I’ll use the back-up.” He pulled out a set of skeleton keys from his pocket and after a short time the door was opened. He then motioned for

Rose to exit and followed. They found themselves in what was a rather expansive floor of an underground car park, with quite a number of cars parked in the various bays.

“It looks fairly normal, we’re in an underground car park, plus, the room we just exited from has a sign on the door saying ‘Cleaners’,” commented Rose sarcastically.

“Well, let’s use the staircase to get to the ground floor and see what’s outside” the Doctor advocated as he walked towards the stairwell. “I think we have a bit of a climb,” he said as he pointed towards a sign with "B4" in large letters.

A couple of minutes later they arrived at the ground floor, having climbed four underground levels. They saw an ‘Exit’ sign and followed it and as they moved on further they heard a very loud noise.

“What can that be?” Rose asked.

“I’m not sure, all we can do is press on to find out,” the Doctor replied.

He opened a door and they found they were in the foyer of the car-park. Through the glass exit door they observed the reason for the noise as it was teaming with rain outside. “Doctor, look over there, this car park has a lift, we didn’t need to have climbed all those bloody stairs,” Rose complained. All they could see from inside the foyer, through the glass door, was a narrow road and directly opposite a brick wall. “I’m not going out in that weather for all the tea in China,” Rose declared.

“Wait a moment here Rose, I won’t be long,” The Doctor hurried off back down the stairs.

“Typical, he leaves me in the lurch and buggers off”. She walked over and flopped herself onto a lonely stool in the foyer. “What am I supposed to do, sit here and twiddle my thumbs!”

Suddenly the ‘ping’ sound of the elevator announcing its arrival echoed in the foyer.

The doors sprung open and out of it emerged a young man, with briefcase and umbrella. He looked out, saw the heavy rain and proclaimed, “Damn, it’s got even heavier.” He noticed Rose and gave her a nod to acknowledge her existence.

Rose responded by saying “I’m waiting for it to stop.”

He replied, “I can’t, I’m late.” He took a fob watch out of the pocket of his pin-stripe suit jacket, looked at it, and said “Very, very late.

It poured for most of my drive in, although there were a couple of breaks. Sorry I’m sounding like a weather reporter. Got to go.”

“I’ll help with the door,” Rose offered. She stood up, walked over and pulled open the foyer door so that the young man could exit, with his umbrella up, ready to face the downpour.

Rose returned to the stool and watched the rain fall against the glass door, it quickly eased and after about a minute it was just a light sprinkle. She looked around and saw no Doctor in sight. “Well I think I’ll go out to see what’s out there, it’s better than just sitting here.”

On exiting the foyer Rose found the narrow road led to a dead-end to her left. She looked to the right and saw that twenty meters up the road, it ended at an intersection with what looked like a much busier thoroughfare with a lot of people walking by.

She briskly strode up to the intersection and immediately confirmed that it was indeed a major street with lots of shops, heavy traffic and people trudging by with their umbrellas up. She looked around and in the distance saw the Houses of Parliament and the London Eye. “Ha, ha it is London. At least you got the country right place this time Doctor even if it maybe in another Universe.”

The light sprinkle suddenly increased to steady rain. “Oops I can’t stay out in this I’ll get a chill, its back to waiting in the foyer.”

Rose turned and quickly ran back down the road, as she approached the car-park foyer door, a man exited and bumped into her, as they collide he dropped his newspaper and

Rose picked it up. She turned to him and said “Hey you, your newspaper” but he ignored her and continued striding on up to the intersection. “That’s what I hate about London, everyone is in such a rush.”

She entered the foyer and returned to the lonely stool. “At least I now have something to read to pass the time.” She sat down and opened the paper but before she began reading the Doctor appeared triumphantly brandishing an umbrella with a questionmark handle. “This will help us go outside and investigate.”

“Been there, done that,” Rose sarcastically replied.

“What?” the Doctor responded.

“The rain dropped to a light sprinkle, so I had a quick recce and guess what I saw in the distance.”

“The Hanging Gardens of Babylon?” the Doctor retorted.

“No, London. The Houses of Parliament and the London Eye.” She stood up grabbed his hand and dragged him out the door. It was still pouring, so the Doctor opened the umbrella and a few seconds later Rose was showing him the view at the intersection.

“There, London in all its glory, pouring rain and all.”

The rain got even heavier, becoming a torrential downpour.

“I think we should beat a tactical retreat,” the Doctor suggested.

“Eh?” “Back to the foyer,” he explained.

They both ran back and despite the cover from the umbrella, entered the foyer the worse for wear.

“As well as my little bit of exploration, look what I picked up outside.” She showed him the newspaper; it was the Daily Express with the headline ‘Diana: Police Probe on Car’. She pointed to the masthead. “See, it’s dated May 31st, 2005.”

“So, it’s London in 2005, but unfortunately it appears not to be our London,” the Doctor replied. “Anyway, let’s go back to the TARDIS, I think we need to get some towels to dry ourselves and freshen up. I also want to use the TARDIS to do a bit more investigating – now we know when and where we are.”

He headed off towards the staircase.

“Doctor,” Rose yelled to get his attention and pointed to the elevator. She walked over, pressed the button and almost immediately the doors opened. Once inside, he grabbed the newspaper from Rose and said, “Let’s see if this helps in any way.” He quickly scanned through it, as the lift descended and mumbled to himself, “Wish I knew more of the minutiae of Earth in the 2000s.”

The elevator chimed as the doors opened, and they were back down on B4. As they approached the door to the utility room the Doctor suddenly stopped and exclaimed “Ah, ah.” Leading to Rose stumbling into the back of him, which caused the Doctor to drop the umbrella. He turned and showed Rose a page of the newspaper with a headline that included the word ‘Vodaphone’. Rose said, “As I said before I’ve never heard of that company.” They entered the utility room and approached the TARDIS, but as they passed the door’s threshold the newspaper disappeared from the Doctor’s hands. He stepped back out of the TARDIS but the newspaper did not return.

“Where did the newspaper go?” Rose demanded.

The Doctor replied, “It actually didn’t go anywhere. When I entered the TARDIS I entered a different Universe, the newspaper stayed in its Universe and as far as it was concerned I disappeared and it fell to the

ground. It is sort of underneath the TARDIS. At least that is my current hypothesis based on the information I’ve gleaned and the events we’ve seen.”

“So, it’s not an alternate time-line, like with my Dad?” “It’s like a jigsaw, but without the box that has the picture. I’ve got to put it all together, but many of the pieces are missing. I can’t complete the puzzle until I find them, luckily with the current pieces I have an idea of what the picture could be.”

“Where are you going to find the other pieces?” Rose asked.

The Doctor motioned to the TARDIS console.

“We know the people out there have cell phones.” He then put out his hand.

“What? Rose asked bewildered by his actions.

The Doctor repeated the action and then pretended to mime using a cell phone.

“Oh, I get it.” She sheepishly took the phone out of her pocket and handed it to the Doctor.

He quickly touched and scrolled the screen on the phone and said, “Great they have the internet and Wi-Fi”. He returned the phone to Rose and marched over to the console.

Within moments he had made connection to the internet on the small screen. He looked up to Rose and enquired, “Ever heard of ‘Google’?”

Rose answered “No.” "It's a search engine."

"I use Search Wise or Fountain Six, never heard of Google."

The Doctor flashed a smile and lightheartedly replied, “Neither have I. Now let’s see what information I can find from this Universe’s great store of knowledge. Rose, you don’t mind if I ask you some questions as I investigate?

“That’s OK. All I can do for the moment is watch you, which can quite easily become very boring.”

“First question, have you heard of Wikipedia?”

“No.” How about “Tony Blair.”

“Yes.” “David Cameron?”

“No” “Interesting. How about Carmila ParkerBowles?”

“Of course.”

“Dark Matter or Dark Energy” “What, that’s out of left-field. The answer is, as you would have guessed, no.”

“Coronation Street” “Yes,” she answered. Then without warning she shouted emphatically “Doctor, look!”

The Doctor turned to see that Rose was pointing at the large screen which showed a man entering the utility room. He appears not to have seen the TARDIS. They hear him say “Where is that sign? Can’t have any accidents, too much bloody paperwork. Let’s see if it is behind that pile of stuff against the wall.” The screen showed that he walked up to and apparently into TARDIS. After a short time he was seen coming into view again carrying a sign which said, “Be careful. Slippery surface” He then strolled out of the room closing the door behind him.

The Doctor turned to look at Rose and told her “Another piece in the puzzle. It’s just like the newspaper, as far as he is concerned the there is no TARDIS. The TARDIS does not physically exist in this Universe.”

“How do we interact with the outside then?” asked a confused Rose.

“It appears it is some sort of property that the TARDIS has bestowed upon us. Different Universes are tricky things. Back to the internet.”

“No,” Rose complained “I am bored just standing watching you and answering your silly questions.”

The Doctor replied thoughtfully “OK, follow me.” They exited the console room and, after a short walk, came to a door. The Doctor pushed it open, then waved her in whilst he said “Voila.”

It was a largish bedroom, obviously for a female, dominated by a brass bed with a white lace cover and matching pillows plus a bamboo side table. Against one wall was a bamboo dressing table with a large mirror and in front of it two cane chairs. One was fairly large with high round back and the other smaller. Against another wall was a mediumsized brass shelving unit with 4 shelves. On them were all sorts of objets d’art including a ceramic tea pot.

“You mean you had this room all along and didn’t tell me?” cried an annoyed Rose.

“I did not think you needed it as we were so often dropping back to your Mum’s place.

I’ll leave you to explore the room and all the things it contains.”

The Doctor returned to the console room.

“Now let’s see what I can find out. This could take a while, better get a chair.” He then ducked out of the console room and returned a few moments later with a nice office chair. *** “Fantastic. What an interesting Universe. I think I’d like to go outside and explore and get a hands-on feel of the differences. I’ll leave trying to get back to my own universe in the too-hard basket for the moment. I need to think some more on that – and do some more research. A break from the screen will do me good.”

The Doctor had been engrossed with searching the net and he was amazed, confused, and intrigued by what he found and had quickly confirmed to himself that it was definitely a different Universe.

Amongst the many differences the Doctor discovered were: This Universe was much larger than Doctor’s Universe, which only had thousands of galaxies, whilst this Universe had billions and billions of galaxies and was over 13 billion years old, at least twice as old as his Universe. There was no space-time vortex in this Universe so the Doctor could not use it to return to his Universe nor could the TARDIS move in time in this Universe. In this Universe there was no such a thing as dimensionally transcendental, in fact a TARDIS could not be constructed in this Universe. He learned that this Universe had Dark Matter and Dark Energy, things which he had never heard of and then when he found that this Universe had Strange Matter, he was intrigued that it had completely different physical properties than what he was used to.

Looking closer into this Universe’s Earth he found that the UK never had a Space programme in the 1970s, there was no UNIT, no Torchwood, no Harriet Jones and no Joseph Green. In this Earth’s past the moon formed when the Earth did, rather than being captured 200 million years ago. The people of this Earth call the era when this occurred the Jurassic era not the Silurian era. Instead their Silurian era was over 400 million years

ago and the Doctor found no reference to the reptilian Silurians. There has never been any alien invasions and as far as he could ascertain there were no aliens within cooee of this Earth. The Cybermen and the Daleks, amongst other alien races, appear not to have existed. He also confirmed that Rose does not exist in this world, nor her Mum or Mickey. He also found no evidence of the Time Lords.

“I’m not sure how Rose is going to react to all that I have learned –but I won’t dump it all on her now. Let’s go and see what she has been up to these last few hours.”

He extricated himself from the office chair and made his way to the bedroom and found that Rose was watching ‘Aliens’ on a small portable TV. “I’ve been just doing some homework,” Rose told the Doctor with a smile. “I’ve found a whole lot of videotapes in a box marked ‘Ace’s’.”

“I’m glad that you have been enjoying yourself whilst I’ve been stuck surfing the net for 6 hours.”

“Has it been that long” Rose replied, “How time flies when you are having fun. What have you found in your internet trawling?”

“Lots of information, too much to tell you now, but what I have learned indicates that we will be safe. It will be very interesting to see what this Universe is like. All I’ll say, it's very, very much like your Earth. It will be fascinating to discover some more of the differences. Want to join me on a little adventure?”

The Doctor about faced and walked briskly out of the bedroom. Rose said “OK, OK I’ll join you. I’m getting a bit bored watching videos.” She followed him as they returned to the console room and then left the TARDIS. As they exited, Rose noticed the forlorn umbrella lying on the ground and picked it up.

She remarked, “I think we will need this, especially, considering what is was like last time we went out.”

Luckily as they arrived in the foyer of the car park, they found it wasn’t raining. They returned to the intersection where they again gazed out over London. “Look, I recognise that name,” Rose commented as she pointed to a road sign which read, ‘Charing Cross Road’.

“Which way then?” asked the Doctor, pointing left then right.

“I don’t know, your guess is as good as mine.

This is not my part of London,” replied Rose.

“OK then.” The Doctor pulled a coin out of his pocket and offered, “Heads or tails?” as he flipped it into the air.

“Tails,” Roses replied.

The Doctor scrutinised the result, then pointed to his left and strolled off in that direction. He proceeded to stop at nearly every establishment, be it shop, business or whatever, to peruse and take in the ambience. After a few minutes, Rose jabbed him in the back and bleated, “We’ve passed three restaurants and they're making me hungry.”

“Alright hold on to you horses, how about we try a nice friendly English pub for some repast?” He pointed ahead where could be seen, on the next corner, a pub with the name of ‘The Bear and Staff’.

‘The Bear and Staff’ building was three stories tall with the outside of the ground floor all in dark burgundy and its name picked out in gold. On entering a door, off Charing Cross Road, they found themselves in a cosy but not too small room dominated by a large bar with a busy clientèle. The décor would best be described as Victorian, all done out in dark wood.

Rose observed “Look that clock over on the wall says its 6pm. Goodie that means it’s time for dinner. I’m famished. Let’s go find the restaurant area.”

“I think you will find it upstairs, at least that what the sign outside said.”

They quickly discovered the stairs that lead upstairs and climbed them. They found themselves in a pleasant, comfortable dining room with large windows which let in plenty of light. Quite a number of people sat at the many dining tables. At one end of the room was the bar and above it in large gold letters it read, ‘The Charlie Chaplin Dining Room’.

A tall brunette lady in a trim maroon ensemble rapidly approached them.

“My name’s Veronica, welcome to the Charlie Chaplin restaurant, how can I help you?”

The Doctor brightly responded, “Table for two, please.”

“Sorry Sir, we are fully booked,” she replied.

The Doctor took his physic paper wallet out of his pocket, thought better of it and instead palmed the lady a twenty and said innocently. “Surely you can slip in our small party?”

She accepted the money and replied “Please, just wait a moment, sir. I’ll see what can be arranged.”

The Doctor and Rose watched bemusedly as Veronica went off and spoke to someone at the bar before a table and two chairs seemed to miraculously appear in a corner of the room.

“By the way, why didn’t you just use the psychic paper?” Rose asked.

The Doctor replied “I think it, like the sonic screwdriver, won’t work on things or people from this universe, so she would have only seen a blank card. If I showed it to you, now that would be interesting to see what you thought it said, but enough of that, she’s coming back.”

Veronica returned and politely requested “This way, sir.” She ushered them to the

table that had been set up and handed each of them the menu. “Do you want something to drink whilst you decide what to order?”

“I’ll have your advertised ‘Evening meal and drink’, the Gammon steak and your pale ale, please,” the Doctor immediately responded.

Rose replied, “I’ll have a vodka and tonic and I’ll need a chance to look at the menu, I‘m not as hasty as my friend here.”

“That’s OK, take your time. I’ll be back in a moment with your drinks.” She turned and strode over to the bar where she gave the bartender their drinks order.

As soon as Veronica left, the Doctor gave Rose a withering look.

“I’m sorry, but I haven’t eaten since that lovely breakfast which we had more than ten hours ago. So I’m going to have a starter and a main meal. It will give us a chance to do a bit more observing, plus I want you to tell me what you have found.”

“OK. OK. I’ll tell you a little bit of what I have found while you’re eating your starter.

For now, we’ll both just observe.”

The Doctor looked intently around the room whilst Rose sat hunched in her chair. “I don’t think we’ll find anything groundbreakingly important, while we eat dinner,” Rose sarcastically commented.

“You never know what you may find, it’s best to always be prepared,” the Doctor responded.

A short time later Veronica returned with their drinks. “Have you decided, miss?” she inquired.

“Yes,” Rose responded. “I’ll have the salmon for starter, and for main, the seasonal salad with chicken breast.”

“Thank you,” Veronica said, and she then jotted down the order. As she turned her back and left to take the order to the kitchen Rose poked her tongue out at the Doctor.

“Cheeky,” the Doctor retorted.

“What’s all this about this being a different Universe? I thought there was only one Universe.”

“There are alternate time-lines, like with your dad, and there are also what are called pocket Universes, you get to them through a thing called a CVE. It has always been known that there could be other Universes but there is no known way to get to one,” the Doctor explained.

“How did we get here, then?”

“I don’t know, I’m still trying to work that out – as well as how to get us back.”

“You mean we are stuck here?”

“For the moment, yes.”

The Doctor looked around and spied Veronica coming out of a doorway near the bar.

“Here comes your starter.”

Rose turned around just as Veronica arrived and placed the plate in front of her. She said “Here is your Smoked Scottish Salmon, miss. Enjoy.”

“Thank you. Can I please have a glass of your house white?” Rose asked.

“Yes miss. I’ll bring it straight out. Sir, do you want any wine with your meal?”

“Yes, I’ll have a glass of your Jam Shed Shiraz, thank you.”

Veronica picked up the two, now empty, glasses and walked back to the bar.

Rose began to eat, whilst the Doctor returned to observing the clientèle of the restaurant.

Rose interrupted the Doctor’s watching and asked him “What else have you found in all your time in front of the computer?”

“I think that the people at that table in the far left-hand corner seem to recognise us.

They keep looking at me and then looking at their phones. I even saw one of them taking a photo of us. Anyway, one major thing about this Universe is that you do not appear to exist in it. I can find no records of a Rose Tyler, nor of a Jackie Tyler and no Rickey, sorry Mickey Smith. In fact, I can’t even find the Powell Estate where you live. The buildings where the estate is in our Universe, also exist in this Universe but they are in Kennington, not Peckham and are called something different, the Brandon Estate. I also looked for people I have met whilst you have been travelling with me and I can’t find any Harriet Jones, and Flydale North does not exist. Nor can I find a Margaret Blaine, a Joseph Green, or a General Asquith. This Universe does not seem to like you Rose.”

Whilst the Doctor was holding forth, Rose completed eating her salmon. “That can’t be true, from want I have seen, it looks exactly like my London.”

“There’s even more, but here comes our wine.”

Veronica arrived with their glasses of wine.

“Your mains won’t be long” and then she briskly took their starter plates away.

“Even more?” Rose queried.

“Yes, a lot more. Just some of the things I have found out. In this Universe I do not exist, and as far as I can ascertain the Time Lords do not / did not exist. In fact, a lot of things that we have recently encountered do not exist in this Universe. No Autons, no Slitheen, no Daleks, no evidence of aliens at all.”

“I’m liking this Universe.” Rose responded as she took a sip from her glass.

“Not if we are stuck here,” the Doctor glumly replied.

At this point Veronica arrived with their mains and they then spent their time eating in quietness as they both contemplated what the Doctor had just advised.

To break the silence, which was getting a bit oppressive, the Doctor asked, “Do you want to be extravagant and order dessert?”

“Yes.” Rose immediately responded, with a twinkle in her eye. She much preferred the Doctor when he had that slightly goofy look of his.

He turned and waved in Veronica’s direction and as she approached, he told her. “We are going to be decadent, can we have the dessert menu please.”

“No trouble sir, I’ll bring them back in a moment.”

“Anything takes you fancy Doctor” Rose asked playfully. He gave her a withering look

but before he could reply she added “I feel like a nice pudding.”

“You don’t look like one” the Doctor pretended to mutter under his breath.

Before Rose could reply, Veronica was back with the menus. “Sorry, but we have run out of sticky date pudding.”

A disappointed Rose looked down the list and saw something that brightened her mood. She looked up at the Doctor and whispered conspiratorially, “Do you want to share? They have a trio of hot puddings.”

“Fantastic,” the Doctor replied, “I’ll have dibs on the chocolate one.”

Rose turned to Veronica and told her “We’ll have the trio of hot puddings to share.”

Veronica cleared away the main plates and went off to put in the dessert order.

As they waited for their dessert to arrive, the Doctor saw that more people in the restaurant were getting excited. Some of them were pointing at a television, that was on in the background, and then at them. He heard someone say, “It’s the Doctor and Rose”. He was immediately convinced they had been recognised. Then he saw on the TV there were scenes of himself, Rose, Captain Jack and Rickey, oops Mickey, plus the Slitheen, who had taken over Margaret Blaine; something that had just occurred. How did it get on the news he wondered? Then he looked carefully and saw it was not the news. He did not know what it was, but at the end in big letters he read, “Next Saturday on BBC One. Doctor Who.”

ASTRAL So, did I open the book and search my way to the Doctor Who section?

No, I sat down and read the book, as it had been intended to be read, from the first page to the last.

I noticed that it had a “Contents” and I could see quite clearly that chapters 12, 13 and 14 with the titles “Doctor Daddy 1”; “Lots of Planet have a North” and “Doctor Daddy 2” were going to concentrate on Who. Before starting to read, I did, however, flick through to the photographic section to find 11 photographs, 10 in colour, chronologically arranged, one for each major work that Christopher had appeared in, but I could find no personal photographs, until I saw the back cover which showed two black and white pictures of Christopher and his dad taken about 50 years apart.

After reading the book I was further disappointed that there were no other personal photographs as I would like to have seen something of his mum, his two brothers, his children and his home, especially as the book is not a kiss-and-tell account of his work in the industry but is a very personal description of his life and his family, especially his

dad, as the by-line of the book “My Father and the Making of Me” indicates.

The book begins with a prologue in which there is a description of Christopher visiting his father in an age-care home and how being put in a home was the end of his dad's life, not his eventual death. The phrase "love the bones of you” is first mentioned here and it is repeated a number of times throughout. We find out the circumstances of the phrase and who originally said these words, later in the book.

We learn of his family life as a child, of being read to at night by his dad, as his mum was working, and of the consequences, when she stopped working and took over reading to him. We discover his relationship with his two, much older, brothers, who were twins, and how he felt the being the odd one out in the family, as his brothers and parents had each other. We learn that he is a Salford man, even though he only lived in Salford for a very short time, and grew up in the more ‘up-market’ Little Hulton. His parents were born and bred in Salford, most of his relatives lived there and his family visited them very, very regularly. We learn that he wanted to be a footballer

to please his dad and how he transformed this into an interest in acting due, to his love of reading instilled by his dad and his time at primary school.

He talks about his time at secondary school and you can find out why he said it was “a turn-off”. Christopher tells us that his dad had played football and that he and his dad enjoyed, over many years, going to see Manchester United play.

Chapter Four begins with a cryptic piece about him, as a 52 year old, lying in his childhood bed in his family home in Little Hulton. All is revealed in Chapter 10, ominously titled, “Breakdown”, where he talks about his mental breakdown, after the break-up with his wife Mischka, which led to him committing himself and not seeing his children for six months. It is interesting to note that his wife is barely mentioned in the book, she is not even named, but it is clear that he loves his children. In fact the book is dedicated “To my mother Elsie, my son Albert and my daughter Esme. I love you.”

The other chapter with a strong title is Chapter Eight “Anorexia”. It starts off talking about him as an 18 year old leaving home, being driven down

L MAP to London by his parents to share a flat and start his career as an actor. He talks about the support of two actor friends, Paul Higgins and Dave Lansbury and then the bombshell. He says “The extreme self-doubt I was feeling wasn’t a subject for debate in the pub.

Neither was my body dysmorphia, a secret that I’d been hiding for more than ten years..." He goes on to explain when and why it began and how it manifests with him.

Now to the Doctor Who chapters. Firstly, Doctor Who is mentioned occasionally elsewhere in the book, but it is chapter 13 “Lots of Planets have a North” where the main action lies. If you expected a tell-all expose, this is not the book for you.

When Christopher found out that Doctor Who was going to return, he says, whilst out running, later that day, he “couldn’t stop thinking about the show.” He goes on to say that “When I was a kid, Doctor Who had never really meant anything to me.” He had vague memories of Troughton and said that Pertwee and Tom he could never identify with, he was much more interested in Patrick McGoohan in Danger Man or Sean Connery as James Bond.

Talking about Russell T Davies, he reveals that the producers of Queer as Folk wanted him to play Stuart, but due to his body dysmorphia rearing its head at this time he could not do nudity and suggested Aiden Gillen.

Davies reply when Christopher asked to play the Doctor was “What!!!!!!?”

He reveals that there was no discussion about the character as production date neared, all he had in the script was that the Doctor appeared in a leather jacket and Christopher took it to mean “He is modern”. He decided he would play the character as Russell, a man, he says, whose brain was at a genius level, a tinder box of ideas, who had energy and humour and wore a leather jacket!

He said he decided to play a ‘northern’ Doctor as no one told him he could not do that.

He loved the character of Rose and said the he and Billie had a chemistry that allowed the characters of the Doctor and Rose to live in the mind of both of them and the viewer.

He says that he appreciated the work of directors Euros Lynn and Joe Ahearne and says that if Ahearne had directed all his stories he would still

be the Doctor now. That of course brings up the question of, "Who he fell out with?", which he does not go into. He makes it quite clear, elsewhere in the book, that he has had difficult relationships with directors. He has said, in a subsequent interview with Radio Times, “My relationship with my three immediate superiors, the showrunner, the producer, and co-producer, broke down irreparably during the first block of filming and it never recovered,” So the finger points to James Boak.

Chapters 12 and 14, which bookend “Lots of Planet have a North”, are an actual record of his very recent discussions with his children whilst they watch ‘Rose’ and ‘Dalek’. A wonderful idea which works perfectly to me. This is the highlight of the book.

From reading this book, my first impression of Peter is that he is a lovely man, for whom fame, (and probably not very much fortune) had zapped a beneficent fork of lightning.

Like his many screen characters, in the book, there seems to be a wisp of surprise and wonder that he’s actually here, doing it, whatever that might be, right now. It’s a close up and intimate recount of his life, seen, probably, like we all do, through slightly rose tinted glasses.

Within the biographical structure of this book, Peter has interposed short commentaries on what he’s doing at the time of writing the book.

These make for humourous readings and have an interesting way of breaking up the narrative of the autobiography itself.

Peter was born on Friday 13th April 1951 – ‘not an auspicious start’ as he notes. He describes his mother and father as an unlikely alliance – “my mother, born in colonial India and the daughter of a British army man – and my father, born in the Caribbean and one of the colonised – both children of the British Empire, but worlds apart”. He comments that there must have been much discrimination about his parents at the time, her with her blond hair and blue eyes and he with his West Indian accent and dark skin.

Peter’s school years, at ‘The Winston Churchill’, are depicted as a mixture of creativity; Mr Verney (a keen cricket enthusiast) awarding him an “Imaginative! Well done!” for an essay; – and condemnation from Mr Lee, who taught religious instruction, describing him as “A lazy good for nothing who would never amount to anything.”

Peter’s latent acting skills were demonstrated when his school took part an acting competition and was awarded first prize for Peter’s delivery of an impassioned soliloquy concerning “The Cat Sat on the Mat” (who’s cat and who’s mat?). The very next day, The Headmaster wrote to Peter’s parents suggesting he should ap-

ply to Italia Conti Stage School. Peter’s comment on this described it as “Well-meaning – but with an obvious subtext i.e.

‘I’ve found a way to be rid of your son’.”

May 12, 1967 was the day “Whiter Shade of Pale” came out and Peter was scheduled for a bout of GCE and CSE exams. All that remains to be said is: it did not go well. His father’s dream of him working at The Abbey National Insurance Company were severely crushed.

It was at this juncture that Peter thought he might learn to play the guitar, pen a few world shattering pop songs, move to LA and end up with lots of money, girls and fame. Er NO! It was not to be the astounding voyage of fame and fortune he had anticipated.

So – back to school, where, for some inexplicable reason (or maybe because, early on, he’d shown an aptitude for mental arithmetic) he was persuaded by his teachers to take A level maths.

Unfortunately, for him – another plunge into the deep and dank depths of the unfathomable.

Peter, now having left school, decided that, as he seemed to have some latent acting skills, he might investigate the opportunities in that noble profession. Like so many hopefuls, in their early days, there were the dreaded auditions, fol-

lowed swiftly by the usual ‘exit left and don’t stop until you reach the pavement’. Eventually, however, Peter was accepted into The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama which was part of The Embassy Theatre where he learned his trade.

After several skirmishes with Radio and Theatre, Peter’s big break-through came with the TV series All Creatures Great and Small – an adaptation of the books by James Herriot. Initially he was to appear in five of the thirteen episodes. But, as we know, it ran for seven seasons with Peter taking a leading role.

Peter describes his time in this series with amusement and great detail. It is here, I think, that he truly established his acting skills and understanding of the business.

We quickly dive headfirst into Peter’s time as the Doctor: a mixture of elation and frustration from reading between the lines. But, as it is with Peter, a story told with affection, great humour and gentle nostalgia. We see from the inside out, Peter’s view of his three year stint as our beloved Doctor: Adric’s demise; Janet Fielding and 'Snakedance'; new outfits for the companions (which were not much appreciated by them); what to do with Turlough and his everlasting attempts to kill the Doctor; Peri’s first appearance, shot on

a nudist’s beach, and her attempted rescue from drowning by naked Germans.

Peter’s exit as the Doctor in ‘The Caves of Androzani, is fondly, but with a sense of sadness, recalled in detail and with the ultimate realisation, with the arrival of Colin Baker, that it’s all over.

There are some wonderful colour pictures to be found in the centre of the book, with some familiar faces from the TV world of the time (and of the present, happily).

Like so many actors, they are greatly affected by their time in THE SHOW. Life after the Doctor goes on, but the experience stays with you forever.

Hence “Is there life outside the box?”

As for most Doctors Peter enjoyed a steady run of acting roles post “Doctor”.

Peter describes, in considerable detail, his acting and personal experiences in the rest of this entertaining and humorously written book.

Unfortunately, this steady run of jobs dried up when Peter reached that very problematic age of forty.

He calls them ‘The Wilderness Years’ in the book.

“Most actors” Peter says, “start off playing small parts, and [then] graduate to lead roles. I began to wonder if I was doing it in reverse.”

After a series of small parts, an opportunity opened up for Peter with ‘Dimensions in Time’.

Unfortunately, Peter states, “For those who were looking for a celebration of thirty years since the first broadcast of Doctor Who, this was all you got.”

Peter, now into his forty’s, and divorced, finds himself in “the precarious world of dating” and this, as he puts it, should be a time of glorious “Drugs, sex and rock and roll.” Of course, Peter, being Peter, never really got round to it.

It is during these furores into the dating scene that he met his future and current wife, Elizabeth Morton, and after several Davison-esque miss-directions and floundering about like – well a flounder – they both somehow got it together.

Of course, the story doesn’t end there and the book contains more to amuse and entertain.

I must say, although I’m not much given to reading these sorts of books i.e. autobiographies, (give me something on multivariable calculus i.e. something you can really get your teeth into) I enjoyed reading Peter Davison’s book, full of charm, good humour and his peculiar blend on breathless astonishment which, I’m sure, everyone will find quite endearing.

Before I delve into the story that is Dæmos Rising, I think a careful investigation is needed of the presentation of the book. As David J Howe said on page four, “While we have tried to emulate the look of the ’70s Target Books, there are some details which eluded us... we hope this doesn’t detract from your pleasure in this edition.”

So firstly the cover; obviously the Doctor Who logo could not be used and it’s a nice idea to make the title of the book very large and in something of the style of the original Doctor Who logo as seen on such Target novelisation as Dæmons.

Unfortunately, the font used is not that similar, other than being nice and thick, the ‘O’ is not round enough, and the ‘R” is clearly different. Underneath is “Based on the popular spin-off from TV’s Doctor Who”, thus the all-important Doctor Who is on the cover.

Although not part of the Target cover, this addition pays homage and is reworded to appear on page three, the title page, under the tile. For this book, the wording is “Based on the Reeltime Pictures drama Dæmos Rising by David J Howe by arrangement with Reeltime Pictures Limited” which very much re-capitulates the “Based on the BBC Television series… by… by arrangement with the British Broadcasting Corporation” that was used

in the Target books. It is a pity that the thin lines, above and below this statement, in the Target books is not shown here.

Back to the cover. In the bottom left hand corner we have the Telos logo which is very, very similar to the Target logo, but why down here and not proudly in the top right hand corner? We have under the title, the author’s name David J. Howe, but inside on the title page is David J Howe without the full-stop, yet where his name is shown throughout the rest of the book there is no full stop after the J???

The illustration for the cover, by Andrew-Mark Thompson, is obviously based on Chris Achilleos style with the black and white dotted main characters, but I think that Kate Lethbridge-Stewart’s depiction should have been larger than Douglas Cavendish, who in a sense serves as the companion to Kate’s “Doctor”. The ‘circles round the characters’ is an Achilleos trait that was done on a few of his books in particular Claws of Axos.

Unfortunately, I can’t discuss the back cover as my copy of the story is a pdf and does not appear to have a back cover. I do not think the ad for the re-release of the DVD shown on the last page of the pdf would have been the back cover of the printed book.

Moving inside. Page one is the simple title of the book, which is a standard for all books that are published. At the bottom is the addition of “The Changing Face of Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. The cover illustration portrays the first Kate LethbridgeStewart, before she became Head of Scientific Research at the Unified Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT).” This is an obvious homage to "The Changing Face of Doctor Who: The cover illustration and others contained within this book portray the second Doctor Who whose physical appearance was later altered by the Time Lords." First seen in The Abominable Snowmen . Although in the Target books this was on the title page not on page one.

Page two is usually left blank, but here we have, “This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.” Which usually would have been on page four but has been moved here as there is too much information needed to go on page

four. I feel that this should have stayed on page four and I would have moved the dedication to Stephen Thorn to this page. As this page already has this statement, an extra piece of information has been added “Also available in the Telos Adventure series : Olive Hawthorne and the Dæmons of Devil's End; Sil and the Devil Seeds of Ardoras.” This is not needed as this information is repeated at the back of the book, in more detail, in the addendum section called “Stay On”.

Page three, the title page, has already been mentioned and in keeping with the Target tradition it includes the logo and underneath is “Telos Editor: Sam Stone”. In keeping with the Target tradition, it should have had “A Telos Book published by Telos Publishing Ltd.” Page four is the information page, mentioned previously, which is bursting to the seams and page five is the Contents page.

Page six has an atmospheric teaser followed on page seven with a 4-page foreword. Personally I would have had these four pages at the end of the book, as an afterword so that the teaser would have lead nicely into the Prologue.

Now on to the main course, the story. I’d

like to review this as a novelisation, but it has been far too long since I saw the original production that I really can't compare the original with his version, so I will just look at it as a novel. As David J Howe said in his forward “The book you hold in your hands is a slightly different take on the story which made it to DVD as Dæmos Rising back in 2004.”

The plot is quite clear and uncomplicated and not over cluttered with too many continuity references. Yes, this is a spin-off of Doctor Who but you do not have to fill it with gratuitous references. The main references are to Downtime, a previous Doctor Who spin-off, as both the main characters, Douglas Cavendish and the original Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, appeared in that story.

A rather charming prologue sees everyone’s favourite white witch, Olive Hawthorne, involved with Corporal Fitch of UNIT in finding a certain book in the ruins of a church in Devils End which provides the impetus of the story.

At the beginning I noticed a few poorly worded sentences, such things as hot tea that "slid" down his throat, further on the tea front we have “pouring the boiling water into a cup containing two teabags and a splash of milk.” I always put my milk in after the hot water, not before. In fact there are two chapter titles which both start with “Tea with…” In another paragraph a storm is approaching, and refer-

ences are made to wind.

Next thing rain is mentioned but it's not stated when it started to rain.

Later, the word “raced” is used twice in consecutive sentences. Next, Andy and Laura are said to race up into a small graveyard whilst the gargoyle following them clatters up some stairs not previously mentioned. Similarly “had happened” is used in two consecutive sentences. In two places words appear to have been missed. “But (a) return to the village” missing the “a” and “and indeed had seen (it) himself during his many trips to this time” this time missing the “it”. Three final examples I thought were poorly written: “In the clearing, Andy caught a glimpse of something across the other side.”

“The two humans looked at each other in terror, and then around themselves.” And “there was the slight smell of ozone in the air also.”

These problems, appeared to disappear as I continued to read, I am not sure if it was because I got more interested in the story and did not notice them or they stopped.

Who is the Grand Master?

He appears to be the High Executioner’s boss and makes an appearance in chapter 5 and is referred to in chapter 7. I think he is an unnecessary character. I kept waiting for his return.

I really enjoyed reading the story but the few problems I found with it, which I think a final editing would have cleared up, did dampen my enthusiasm a smidgen.

Since its release almost a year ago, the 13th Doctor’s first series has gone down as possibly one of the most controversial in the show's history. Some really like it, others absolutely despite it, and some are just lukewarm on it, citing bad writing, boring characters, nonexistent tension, and cultural backlash i.e. making it all about the SJWS or making it more PC. Some of these problems are valid while others don’t hold quite as much validity or weight to them. But time is an odd mistress that can do much to change perceptions, viewpoints and details.

For this reviewer, when it first aired, Series 11 felt like a flawed but very serviceable first season for 13, having both a lot to enjoy and a lot to be worked on for the future.

There were weaker episodes sure such as 'Arachnids in the UK', 'The Tsuranga Conundrum', and 'The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos', but others such as 'Rosa', 'It Takes You Away', and 'Demons of the Punjab' rank as some of the show’s best and most relevant in years. The New Year Special 'Resolution' worked as a spectacular capstone to close things out and set things off for the future, but it all had to start somewhere, and for the 13th Doctor, that beginning came on October 7, 2018 with 'The Woman Who Fell to Earth'.

This episode had a lot to

prove, even more so than other New Who premieres, posting a new style, writers, and showrunner but also a new cast and Doctor ,as well as the first female Doctor in the show’s history. To that end, within the opening minutes, the serial immediately sets things out in a very new direction, and it's obvious that Chris Chibnall's style as showrunner is going to be very different from anything we've seen before. Similar to his other show Broadchurch , and even episodes of Torchwood of which a strong comparison can be made, Chibnall's story-telling language feels very modern, very immediate, and surprisingly intimate. Far from the overarching grandeur of much of Moffat’s era, the stakes here are much smaller, allowing for a deeper dive into the lives of the people involved whilst never losing a sense of the scope that makes regeneration stories so fascinating.

The structure and importance of the episode are very much akin to 'Eleventh Hour' of which it’s the most comparable, but its tone is more akin to 'Rose' or 'The Christmas Invasion' and the story follows very similar beats to its predecessors. It does follow a predictable 'random people get in trouble with aliens, regenerating Doctor drops into their lives to save the day' storyline. But the plot isn't really the focus,

as much as the look of the story, re-establishing the world, and getting to know these characters and especially our new Doctor.

It must be said that Whittaker's Doctor is brilliant right from the start. She seems to have taken the final words of the 12th Doctor to heart as she for once feels like she's excited to be the Doctor again. While all of the New Who Doctors prior have had their own personal arcs and happier moments in the New Series, their journeys have always been more about their own trauma, especially related to the Time War, struggles in handling grief and darkness, and all of the negative emotions therein.

That’s not to say it hasn’t been second with them, and it’s led to some of the most triumphant moments in all of Who canon, but it did tend to bring us as an audience down in places, and it really wore out its welcome by the end of Twelve's era.

The 13th Doctor doesn't seem to have this problem at least initially.

She's a silly ball of manic energy with a positive smile right from the getgo who genuinely feels happy to be alive even initially sans TARDIS and sonic screwdriver. She also never forgets that she is the Doctor, and while her darker moments and journey do begin to manifest eventually

(especially in the next story ‘Ghost Monument’), it feels very organic and not overly forced or drawn out. These moments come out more naturally, as the result of her interactions with others rather than her own problems, while still coming back to who the Doctors are at their core.

This is not a Doctor scarred, traumatized, in denial, or figuring out who they are. This is a Doctor who’s finally healed, and ready to see what that means with a new setting and faces around her. It's a beautifully refreshing change that feels new but familiar at the same time and some of the moments she’s given in this first story are some of the absolute best that New Who has ever brought.

Her TARDIS team feels more or less the same way albeit to a much lesser degree. If there was an obvious favorite from the new entourage that would take hold in this first season, it would be Bradley Walsh as Graham, who feels like a lovable combination of Wilfred Mott from the Tennant era and Ian Chesterton from the Hartnell days. Mandip Gill playing Yasmin Khan as a frustrated young policewoman looking for a break, is easily the weak link, despite what the story (and the series as a whole) tries to do to make her relevant. Tosin Cole’s Ryan Sinclair is intriguing right from the

beginning, working as a struggling young man whose problems become more relevant the further things go. Sharon D. Clarke also does well as Ryan's grandmother and the comedic heart of the tale and they all are brought together with enough tangible connections and believability that it doesn't feel forced or empty.

Everyone has a lot of great interactions together, spaced out by plenty of time to breathe in between, and the episode gives us plenty of great moments to enjoy. This includes the Doctor's post-regenerative mania, how the new sonic screwdriver comes into the picture, and of course the final moments that establish this new team's adventures in stories to come, as well as the Doctor's new look. The pacing is strong, production values excellent, villain generally menacing, and each part does seemingly have a purpose to it. Also worth mentioning, the music by new composer Segun Akinola is subtle

but fabulous at the moments when it counts and there are plenty of good themes here that are very repeatable in an atmospheric soundtrack format.

While it still doesn't quite match the heights of 'Eleventh Hour', as it does sag a little in the middle with some of the slower and less relevant moments, 'Woman Who Fell To Earth' is still one of the best season openers and first Doctor stories we could ask for. It has aged incredibly well since its initial broadcast; far surpassing 'Deep Breath', 'Rose', and 'The Christmas Invasion' in terms of New Who stories and repeat viewing which has only increased my enjoyment of it. It's important, enjoyable, very engaging, and a perfect place for newcomers to jump in, just as promised before its broadcast. Considering how easily things could've gone wrong with this new direction, it deserves appreciation and love, even more now, as we wait for new 13 adventures to come in 2020.

An enthusiastic audience was treated to the many talents of singer, actor and entertainer John Barrowman on Saturday night, September 21, 2019 at the Concert Hall of the QPAC (Queensland Performing Arts Centre) in Brisbane.

John was at his best from start to finish and interacted with the audience, sharing with us stories of his childhood, family, and of course his “Fabulous” 30 year career in show business.

So how does John Barrowman fit his entire 30 year career into a 2 hour concert? He has a slideshow behind him on stage, listing every theatre and TV show he has starred in, and many pictures including photos from Doctor Who, Torchwood and Arrow.

The concert began with John off-stage singing the chorus of ‘From Now On’ from The Greatest Showman, changing as John danced onto the stage to the song ‘Celebrate Good Times’. He kept the crowd clapping and singing as he followed up with ‘Listen to the Music’. In typical Barrowman style after the second song John waves to the crowd saying “Thank you Brisbane and goodnight” as he proceeds to walk off the stage, before turning around in a roar of laughter, “honestly could you imagine?”

He continued with talking about his career, and his life, marriage to Scott and about their love of travel including many funny photos and videos. At one point, his TARDIS and Wonderman cosplay outfits were brought out onto the stage on dummies as a lead up to his song ‘The Doctor and I’, which was particularly popular with the audience, many of them Doctor Who fans, of course.

A highlight of the show was when John invited Scott to share the stage with him for a duet. This is after John shared some rather amusing photos of Scott on a boat trip taken on a particularly windy day, John was wearing sunglasses...

Scott was not, and was very wind affected in the photos. Scott took to the task and performed and danced, constantly being reminded by his husband that he needed to face the audience when he performed and not John.

And of course in John and Scott style they finished the song with a kiss which was well received with cheering and clapping from everyone.

(Unfortunately I can’t recall the song they performed).

From laughter to tears, John captured the emotional side of his audience with his formidable

performance of ‘Goodbye My Friend’ as a tribute to all animals and pets who have crossed the rainbow bridge. He shared photos of his dogs (Captain Jack, Harris and Dixie) and performed the song to pictures of pets from his “fan family”. There were definitely tears throughout the audience.

John was also able to fit in a small Q & A section with the audience and performed a wide variety of songs including ‘Hero’, ‘What About Us’, ‘Baby Give It Up’, ‘I Made it Through the Rain’, and ‘A Thousand Years’ to name just a few.

For his encore John performed a very moving version of ‘Angel’, after sharing a story about a dear friend of his who found himself a dark place, and how with friendship and support we can get through tough times together; and of course finishing the show with his anthem ‘I Am What I Am’. A perfect way to conclude, what was in his own words, a “FABULOUS night of entertainment, fun, laughter and some tears”.

One of the first things I noticed about the book is how poorly edited it is.

Apart from a lack of improvement to Saward's prose, there are frequent typos, what appear to be editor's notations left in the text indicating references to be checked (of which there are many relating to the London locations used in the story; another case of an author clearly thinking "I did the research, I'll be damned if I don't get a couple of pages out of it!") and errors to be corrected. In one case the entire first few paragraphs of a chapter are left dangling at the end of the previous one rather than opening the next as presumably they were meant to. All of which is indicative of the lackadaisical approach to the book as a whole.

Clearly determined to avoid treading old ground (while at the same time shoehorning in endless continuity references to Terileptils and 'Slipback' – but more of this later), Saward plays fast and loose with his own story, stripping it back to the barest of bones and using them as a framework on which to cobble together what is essentially a new version. Everything happens in roughly the same order, with the same beats in place, but often from a very different perspective and in a very different way. Plus, his characters, while bearing the same names, are by and large new – or at

least augmented – creations, as is the majority of their dialogue. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the author's disposition, the deliciously jaded Styles is the only one to really benefit.

Indeed, Saward seems less concerned with novelising the 'Resurrection of the Daleks' we know and more concerned with reimagining the story in the style of his aforementioned radio play – which itself was a blatant, if not entirely successful homage to the Douglas Adams school of fiction.

(I'm guessing this was his way of circumventing the ennui he feels for the original that stopped him from penning the paperback sooner.) Never is this more obvious than in the 10 or so pages he spends mid-novel on describing the TARDIS interior in terms of garden sheds and robot chefs. As was often the case on TV, he is also slow to introduce the title character to the action – or in this case characters, since not a single Dalek appears until a third of the way through the narrative.

That's probably for the best, however, as he treats the "demented pepper pots" with unbridled authorial disdain: the Supreme Dalek becomes "effete" and Machiavellian, disdained by bitchy underlings, and even Davros suffers, being compared to Florence Foster Jenkins. What with basically rewriting the

story without bothering to fill in any of its gaping plot holes and then throwing many (if not all) of his characters under the bus for cheap laughs, it makes you wonder why he agreed to novelise it at all. It certainly feels like he's doing it on sufferance. Even his determination to imagine the action anew deserts him in the end, with the last third of the novel hewing closer to the original, making it more satisfying but also suggesting he couldn't be arsed embellishing things any further.

The result is inconsistent, to say the least.

"Novelised at last by the original author 35 years after its first TV transmission" – and to be honest I'd rather have waited 35 more until an author came along who actually cared about doing it justice by serving the story rather than sacrificing it out of proprietorial boredom.

For a concept based on science (or at least pseudo-science) with a central character versed in academia (sporting the title of Doctor no less), it may seem surprising to some that the narrative of Doctor Who is so heavily steeped in gothic imagery. In contrast to that imagery however, there is usually a scientific explanation for every seemingly supernatural occurrence to face our hero and his or her friends.

Moving eyes and claims of evil spirits in the Cave of Five Hundred Eyes in the story 'Marco Polo' were soon shown by the First Doctor to be caused by bandits using the cave as a hideout. When the TARDIS crew seemed to have become ghosts themselves in 'The Space Museum', it was instead explained that they had skipped a time track. When they found themselves in a haunted house in 'The Chase' it was later suggested that they were actually lodged for a period in an area of pure human thought (or possibly that they got caught up in a 1996 festival attraction called Frankenstein’s House of Horrors). Supernatural awakenings in 'The Daemons' were shown by the Third Doctor to be the result of alien science (even if he did still have a soft spot for the local White Witch). The hauntings of 'Day of the Daleks' turned out to be soldiers from the future caught in a paradox, just as the ghostly apparitions of 'The Time Warrior' were the work of Sontaran technology. Even when the Fourth Doctor was haunted by a ghostly figure in white in 'Logopolis' it turned out to be an aspect of himself, linked to his impending regen-

eration. Ghostly events in the Fifth Doctor story 'The Awakening' were caused by the psychic alien creature known as the Malus, just as Ace’s haunted house in the Seventh Doctor story 'Ghostlight' were the result of the alien being known as Light.

In the Ninth Doctor story 'The Unquiet Dead', the reanimated corpses and ghostly apparitions were shown to all be down to the gaseous aliens known as the Gelth.

The ghosts in the Tenth Doctor story 'Army of Ghosts' were just Cybermen from a parallel dimension, and the ghostly woman haunting the 17th century pirate ship in the Eleventh Doctor story 'The Curse of the Black Spot' was an alien medical interface. Even the haunted mansion in 'Hide' turned out to be the result of a time traveller from the future who was trapped in a pocket universe.

The one exception to this noghost rule of course was the Twelfth Doctor two-part story 'Under the Lake' / 'Before the Flood'. Real ghosts were indeed the threat there, but even so, they were treated to some pseudo-scientific explanation, the Fisher King having harnessed the energy of real ghosts for his own nefarious ends. Even when the Thirteenth Doctor went hunting the 'Ghost Monument', it turned

out to be nothing more than the TARDIS. This avoidance of ghosts gives all the thrill of a tale of the supernatural, with the comfort of knowing that everything can actually be explained by the application of scientific principles, no doubt of much comfort to younger viewers.

If the avoidance of ghost stories in favour of scientific explanations for gothic imagery is the rule of thumb for the show, that certainly hasn’t been the case in real life for two of its stars. Both Jon Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen described seeing ghosts themselves – with some of those even spotted on the set of Doctor Who! Jon Pertwee’s first encounter with the unknown occurred when he stayed with his childhood friend Peter Dawson during his school years. He stayed at the boy’s family home, which was a Tudor house in Sussex. During the first night of his stay he was awakened in the night when overwhelmed by a sudden nausea, but was too embarrassed to tell his hosts. He did notice a strange look pass between his friend’s parents the next morning though, when they were asking him if he had slept alright. The second night he was again wakened by nausea, but this time he realised it had been sparked by a foul stench that had suddenly entered the room. Looking around for the source of the odour he spotted something that froze him in terror.

“Between the end of my bed and the now opened bathroom door,” Pertwee described, “there was an undulating greenish shape in the form of a tree trunk. It was translucent

and appeared to be bubbling like marsh gas. As the bubbles burst, so did the room fill further with the odour of noxious putrefaction… as soon as the ‘presence’ started to move towards me, I made the allpowerful effort that enabled me to get out of bed and fumble my way frantically out the door.

Hurtling up the corridor and screaming my lungs out, I ran smack into the arms of Mrs Dawson… she turned on her husband like a tigress. ‘I told you to see that nobody was ever put into that room again. You just won’t listen. From tomorrow that wing will be permanently locked and sealed.’ No explanation was ever given and the matter was never discussed”. Pertwee went on to state that: “since that time, I have had several strange encounters with the unknown”, although no further examples were described by him in his autobiography.

His friend and colleague Elisabeth Sladen however did describe multiple ghostly encounters that she herself experienced. While acting in the play Mother Courage, director Tony Colegate was taken to hospital with colitis. During rehearsals Lis saw him walking past at the back of the stage.

Glad to see he was recovered, she returned the smile he gave her with a cheery wave. It was only the next day that the news was broken to her that Tony had never left the hospital and had died the day before. “I’d seen him with my own eyes,” she stated. “I know it was Tony. I know that’s exactly who I saw and now I know he was saying goodbye. Not everyone believes me. Some people think I dozed off in the wagon and dreamt it. I got the same thing later during similar events at Wookey Hole…”

through until I found the margin marks. There they were: an arrow and star reminding me to check with Michael. But where was the text? The bottom of the page was blank. I swear to you, it had been covered in text. Now, though, it was completely white.”

Which brings us back to Doctor Who, because it was during the making of the story 'Revenge of the Cybermen' at Wookey Hole that Lis Sladen experienced multiple ghostly encounters along with fellow actor, Ian Marter. When they arrived for shooting, the guide that led them into the caves pointed to a stalagmite shaped like a witch’s face and intoned: “The Witch doesn’t like you – she doesn’t want you here!” Later Lis and Ian sat under the stalagmite to go through the scripts. Both noted there was a scene in the script that didn’t seem to make any sense. “We both turned to this funny little half page. It was just dialogue between him and me but, stare as hard as I might, I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Without doubt it was the most unfathomable text I’d ever been asked to learn… so I put an asterisk next to the preceding passage to jog my memory.”

Later, after the director announced that filming had been completed for the day, Lis and Ian were both confused as they hadn’t yet filmed the scene they’d been mystified by. “’What about the scene between Ian and me?’ I asked. ‘Aren’t we going to do that one today?’

Michael stared. ‘What scene?

There is no other scene – we’re finished.’ ‘Look here,’ said Ian and rifled through his script. I watched him flick forwards then back; he couldn’t find the scene. Impatiently I pulled my own copy out and thumbed

Not long after that, Lis Sladen almost died when a stunt went wrong. She was supposed to jet across an underground river on a skimming board, but when she jumped onto the board it turned in the water and veered away, taken by a strong current towards the darkness at the far end of the black cavern.

She leapt off the board and managed to cling onto a protruding rock until the stuntman swam out in full frogman gear to rescue her. The boat she had been on was never seen again. Later a man was spotted wearing full potholing gear, wandering around what was supposed to be a closed set.

When she asked who the man was, she was told that there had been no-one there. A man identical to the one she described however had been in the caves – only he had gone missing there years before!

Although it has sent children scurrying behind the sofa for decades now, the scare factor in Doctor Who has always been tempered by the Doctor, who uses intelligence and (pseudo) science to defeat the worst monsters in the universe. It would seem though, that there are still unexplained occurrences in the larger world, including some experienced by the people who breathed life into our favourite show. One can only hope that, however creepy things may get, the Doctor and the TARDIS will always be there to put our minds at rest and help us sleep at night. Happy Halloween!

KERBLAM IT Our first letters column. Hope you like the title we have chosen for it. We eagerly await more 'parcels' of correspondence to be delivered! Our first letter is, as well as some nice praise, is about how to cheque spelling!

Hi guys – superb work on Trap Street.

As someone who loves the English language, don't become too reliant on spellcheck. I noticed, for example, instances of "lead" when, instead of the metal ("lead") you meant the past tense of "lead" (as in having "led" someone up the garden path).

Spell-check doesn't assess context. A human editor needs to be able to know that the past tense of "lead" isn't treated the same way as the past tense of "read". You do need to be more diligent in this instance.

Otherwise, a superb effort. And what a brilliant selection of contributors! Real, informed reviews from people who know what they're talking about.

I'm really enjoying the Terry Nation Army documentaries, by the way! Thanks Dallas, for alerting everyone to those!

Steve Panozzo Dallas here. Thanks Steve, the "lead" was

my mistake but it was not picked up by the four writers I sent the questions to, nor by my co-editor and nor by our proof-reader, extraordinaire, Gemma Styles. We were all 'word-blind'. But when an issue has over 25,000 words in it, picking up every singe error is a near impossibility. Note that when I put Steve's letter through the spell-check it said his spelling of "spellcheck" was wrong.

Dear editors, I just wanted to say how much I've been enjoying Trap Street (both as a reader and contributor), and specifically how much issue four was a highlight. I sorely miss the fanzines of old, which were such a source of delight and sometimes glorious frustration.

(I did want to hurl my phone across the room at one or two points while reading issue four… which is all part of the fun.) That you've managed to provide a fanzine with

such depth of analysis, while keeping it fun, in this age of grumpy knee-jerk internet fandom is just amazing to me. That drive and creativity is one of the things I love so much about fandom.

I absolutely adore the idea of fourteen reviews of material from all fourteen Doctors.

That's a stunning idea, to say nothing of the "boot on the throat" concept of ensuring that all the material came out recently. It's quite a world we live in where every single Doctor (bar the mayfly one) can have current material. It's not just that Doctor Who is still alive, it's that all the Doctors are still alive.

That's just sensational.

My only question is: why did you place the War Doctor after Christopher Eccleston's Doctor? Inquiring minds want to know.

Cheers, Robert J Smith?

Dallas here. In answer to Robert's question. The order of the reviews in Astral Map had to be re-jigged to make sure that the 2 page reviews were all on a 2-page spread.

As the editor of an American club’s fanzine (The Gallifrey Guardian) and fellow fan across the sea, I am consistently impressed with the quality of publication that you manage to produce. The level of activity, the vibrancy of the Australian (and New Zealand) fan-base helps me to hold out hope for the future of our collective fandom. These days, so many clubs have been replaced by Facebook groups or the like, pale shadows of what fan clubs once were. Far too often what passes for a fan group is merely a selection of regurgitated memes and linked viral videos.

What you are doing in the Southern Hemisphere is inspirational to us folks toiling away in the Northern Hemisphere and, quite frankly, it is time that someone just flat out told you that.

Regards, Bob Brinkman, Vice President – The Guardians of Gallifrey Fan Club and Editor – The Gallifrey Guardian Dallas here. Kicks the ground and says "Oh, shucks".

A guide to foreign airdates & transmissions. Oz details here

The antimatter eats Bessie

Unearthly children: Writer, director lead Aussie Doctor Who invasion

The Doctor Who wiki

Moon of Doom

Backyard Astronomy for Whovians: The Moon

Moonbase (Creepy Fan Trailer)

Swearing

A brief history of the Moon in Doctor Who

The Doctor explains antimatter and a particle accelerator

Sylvester swearing

A History of the Moon in

Doctor Who

With the (at the time) upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the Moon landing, I thought for the next issue of Trap Street I would write an article on the Moon’s appearances in Doctor Who. I started to do the research and very quickly decided to broaden the article to cover all the moons that have appeared or been referred to in Doctor Who, and when I say Doctor Who, I mean the televised show. To try to cover all the various representations of the Doctor’s journeys would be nigh impossible. I also decided, as well as reporting the various moon’s appearances, I would also include scientific information about the Moon and those moons that circle other planets in our solar system. Another limitation is that I would mainly cover those times the Moon or a moon was mentioned. This is for two reasons; firstly, of course, quite a lot of the black and white era can’t be readily viewed and secondly it would take way too long to watch each available episode noting when the Moon or a moon appeared in shot.

I decided to watch 'An Unearthly Child' anyway, to see if the Moon appeared in any scenes of the prehistoric past, but no Moon was seen. The first reference to "moon" was heard in episode five of 'The Daleks' when Ganatus told Barbara that the light in the sky she has just seen was from a lake glow-

ing in the moonlight, caused by some chemical in its water. Although no moon is seen [I checked the scene] it is clear that Skaro had at least one moon and it must be fairly large and / or bright for it to have strong moonlight. On Earth, moonlight is the reflection of the Sun off the Moon’s surface and is quite bright due to the size of our Moon, being 3,474 kilometres in diameter.

Another factor in the Moon‘s brightness, is what is called albedo, which is the reflectivity of an object. The Moon’s albedo is 0.14, which means, it reflects 14% of all the radiation that falls upon it, which is quiet low in comparison to the Earth with an albedo of 0.3.

We first encountered Earth’s moon in the show during 'Marco Polo' episode two, where Ping Cho, a sixteen-year-old Chinese girl whose father was a government official in Samarkand, told Susan that the Moon will rise later, to which Susan replied that she had not seen a moonlit night. This seems very strange because Susan had been in London for at least five months. In episode five, the soon-to-occur rising of the Moon is mentioned by a Mongol bandit named Acomat, to another Mongol bandit as the latest they will wait before attacking Marco Polo’s camp. Shortly after, the rise of the Moon is also mentioned by Ian to Marco Polo and Marco subsequently told Tegana to wake the bearers as he gambled that an attack will now take place.

'The Aztecs', the next historical adventure, saw the Moon, or more importantly its eclipse of the Sun, as a major part of the story. In episode three, Barbara learnt from Autloc, the Aztec High Priest of Knowledge, that the eclipse was to take place in three days’ time at noon. Later, Autloc also told Susan this and added that at this time, a sacrifice will be made to the Sun God of the young man he has just introduced to her.

The young man said it would be a great honour to be chosen, and that he will take Susan for his wife. In episode four, the eclipse takes place and the young man is sacrificed.

In the next historical story, 'The Reign of Terror',episode two has the Doctor pretend that there would be a total eclipse of the sun as a ruse to escape from a chain gang. A scene in episode six opened with the full moon being seen to disappear behind storm clouds before cutting to the interior of 'The Sinking Ship', an inn on the Calais Road, where Ian and Barbara have been placed undercover to learn of Paul Barras’s plans.

Paul Barras was deputy to Maximilien Robespierre during the French Revolution and Robespierre's enemy. On 26 July 1794, Barras met with the young war hero Napoléon Bonaparte at an inn called 'The Sinking Ship' with a proposal to Bonaparte that after the overthrow of Robespierre; Bonaparte would serve as one of three figurehead rulers.

The eclipses mentioned in both stories were an eclipse of the Moon by the Sun, or more commonly called, a solar eclipse. It occurs when a portion of the Earth is engulfed in a shadow cast by the Moon which fully or partially blocks sunlight. This occurs when the Sun, Moon and Earth are aligned.

There are four types of solar eclipses: A total eclipse occurs when the dark silhouette of the Moon completely obscures the intensely bright light of the Sun, allowing the much fainter solar corona to be visible. During any one eclipse, totality occurs only in a narrow track on the surface of Earth. This narrow track is called the path of totality.

An annular eclipse occurs when the Sun and Moon are exactly in line with the Earth, but the apparent size of the Moon is smaller than that of the Sun. Hence the Sun appears as a very bright ring, or annulus, surrounding the dark disk of the Moon.

A hybrid eclipse (also called annular/total eclipse) shifts between a total and annular eclipse. At certain points on the surface of Earth, it appears as a total eclipse, whereas at other points it appears as annular. Hybrid eclipses are comparatively rare.

A partial eclipse occurs when the Sun and Moon are not exactly in line with the Earth and the Moon only partially obscures

the Sun. This phenomenon can usually be seen from a large part of the Earth outside the track of an annular or total eclipse. However, some eclipses can only be seen as a partial eclipse, because the umbra passes above the Earth's polar regions and never intersects the Earth's surface. Partial eclipses are virtually unnoticeable in terms of the sun's brightness, as it takes well over 90% coverage to notice any darkening at all. Even at 99%, it would be no darker than civil twilight.

The apparent size of the Moon and Sun observed from Earth are very nearly the same at about half a degree, which

leads to the Baily's Beads, or diamond ring effect. It is a feature of total and annular solar eclipses. As the Moon covers the Sun during a solar eclipse, the rugged topography of the lunar limb allows beads of sunlight to shine through in some places while not in others. The effect is named after Francis Baily, who explained the phenomenon in 1836. The diamond ring effect is seen when only one bead is left, appearing as a shining "diamond" set in a bright ring around the lunar silhouette. Although Baily is often said to have discovered the cause of the feature which bears his name, Sir Edmond Halley made the first recorded observations of Baily's beads during the solar eclipse of May 3, 1715.

Currently, the Moon is receding from the Earth at about 3.8 centimetres each year.

Thus, in the future, the apparent size of the moon will decrease, and at some point, in the far future

the Moon’s smaller size will mean that no total solar eclipses will occur, only annual or partial eclipses.

The last total solar eclipse was on July 2, 2019. It lasted just over 2 hours, 40 minutes and was visible over the Pitcairn Islands through central Chile and ended in Argentina.

Its maximum path width was just over 200 kilometres and the longest totality, somewhere over the Pacific, lasted about 4 minutes, 33 seconds. The next one is on December 14, 2020, which will again be seen in Chile and Argentina as well as the South Pacific and South Atlantic. None will occur in 2021 or 2022. Although they occur somewhere on Earth every 18 months on average, it is estimated that they recur at any given place only once every 360 to 410 years, on average.

I checked and found that a total solar eclipse occurred where the Aztec capital city was, on August 6, 1496 but there was no solar eclipse either total or annular anywhere near Paris in 1794, the

last annular eclipse having occurred in 1764. The last total eclipse in Paris was May 22, 1724 – just on 70 years before the Reign of Terror.

In episode two of 'The Daleks Invasion of Earth', Jack Craddock, a survivor of the Daleks' occupation of Earth, mentioned a Moon station to the Doctor.

In episode one of 'The Web Planet' Ian thought, initially, that they were on the Moon. In episode two, the Doctor told Ian he thinks that they have landed on the planet Vortis, but the Vortis he knew did not have moons, unlike this planet. Two of Vortis’s moons are named; they are Pictos and Taron. Pictos is described as a dim, halfworld, and it was where the Menoptera had fled. The Doctor in episode three calls Pictos a planet. Then in episode five Prapillus, an elderly Menoptera suggested to the Doctor that the moons were drawn to Vortis by the power the Animus had taken from Vortis’s magnetic pole. The Doctor then realised that the same force had drawn and held the TARDIS.

so we only see one side of the Moon. Although we call the other side the "Dark Side of the Moon", it also receives sunlight from the Sun and is no colder than the side of the Moon that we see. In fact, on the Moon, the coldest places are the poles, where there are craters which have walls high enough to prevent sunlight ever reaching small areas of the Moon. It is in these areas that scientists expect ice maybe found.

In the final episode of 'The Chase', when Ian asked for two bus tickets, and obviously says the wrong price, the bus conductor replied “Where've you been? On the Moon?”

In 'Mission to the Unknown' Malpha, one of the representatives on the Galactic Council, mentioned the conquest of the Moon colonies alongside Mars, Venus and Jupiter.

Although no moons of Uranus are mentioned in Doctor Who the planet itself is mentioned by Mavic Chen in episode three and eight of ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’. He said that taranium can only be Ian, in episode one of 'The found on Uranus, one of the Space Museum', told the Doctor dead planets in the solar syshe has always associated extem. Anyway, Uranus currently tinction with extreme cold, has 27 moons, the largest of something like the dark side of which is Titania (not to be conthe Moon. Ian here is not being fused with the Saturnian moon scientifically accurate, as the of Titan) 24 are named after Moon is tidally locked to Earth, characters that appear in, or are mentioned in, the works of William Shakespeare, two are named after characters that appear in, or are mentioned in, Alexander Pope’s poem The Rape of the Lock and one, Ariel, is in Path of the July 2 2019 eclipse both.

In 'The Gunfighters' the song The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon has the line “So come, you coyotes and howl at the moon.”

In 'The Tenth Planet' episode one Ben is told by a sergeant that an expedition to the Moon has just returned.

The second Doctor travelled to the Moon in the appropriately titled 'The Moonbase'. The TARDIS does not land on Mars where the Doctor expected. On the scanner, the desolation made Polly believe they had done so, but Ben quickly interjected that they were on the Moon as he had seen pictures of the Moon's surface. Jamie can't believe the scanner showed the Moon as he said, ‘The Moon's way up in the sky” and later added, “We'll maybe meet the old man in the moon. For “Man in the Moon” information go here.

Later in episode two Polly reaffirmed this to Jamie, who had just woken up in sickbay, by saying, “We're on the moon.

You know, the moon, up in the sky.” The Doctor reluctantly agreed that they could stay and explore, but only for half an hour.

Before they exited the TARDIS the Doctor told them, “You need space suits. There's no atmosphere out there.”

Shortly after, the Doctor reaffirmed there is no air on the Moon by telling his companions that one tear in their space-suit would lead to them being suffocated.

This is a central point of the story as the Cybermen surreptitiously entered the Moon base causing air pressure drops, and later punctured the Moon base dome.

Interestingly, the base is originally, in episode one, referred to as “Weather Control Moon”

by Earth control. Nils Jensen, a Danish astronomer and mathematician, who was in charge of communications, responded by calling it Moonport. Shortly after, Earth control called it Moonbase, and it is referred to as Moonbase thereafter, except at the beginning of episode four when Nils called it “Weather Control Moon”.

When they go out on the surface of the Moon, Polly asked why they have such heavy boots, to which the Doctor replied, “Try a little jump”.

Thus the low gravity of the Moon is depicted and acknowledged. We assume that the TARDIS has artificial gravity.

The use of heavy boots is an obvious solution to the technical problem for the program to show the lesser gravity of the moon all the time. When inside the Moon base, it’s obvious that

it has artificial gravity. Although not directly indicated, we assume the base, which is using gravity to control Earth’s weather, would have the ability to produce artificial gravity.

Gravity on the Moon is 1.62 m/s2 which is 16.5% (about 1/6th) of the Earth’s at 9.81 m/s2. When Jamie, and shortly after, the Doctor, Ben and Polly entered the base, it was quite clearly shown that it had an airlock.

Towards the end of episode one the Doctor told Polly that on the Moon they have “a fortnight of days and a fortnight of nights” (i.e. one Moon day is 28 Earth days long). He added that on Moonbase they must make their own day and night artificially, so as not to upset their biological time clocks. Because the Moon is in synchronous rotation as it orbits Earth, it makes a complete orbit around Earth, with respect to the fixed stars, about once every 27.3 days, which is called its sidereal period. However, because Earth is moving in its orbit around the Sun at the same time, it takes slightly

longer for the Moon to show the same phase to Earth, which is about 29.5 days its synodic period. This period of time is what we on Earth in ancient times, used as a period of time measurement – the month. The words “month” and “moon” both come from the Proto-IndoEuropean root *meh₁- "to measure", the month is the ancient unit of time measured by the Moon.

At the beginning of episode two Jack Hobson, the British commander of Moonbase, told Ben twice to “get off the moon.”

Hobson repeated this sentiment towards the end of the episode when he told the Doctor “You can all get off the moon now.” Later in the episode, two Moonbase geologists, Jules Faure and Franz Schultz, were sent out onto the surface on the Moon to check on a probe control antennae, which according to readings, had at least two pieces missing. It was though that it may have been hit by a meteorite.

With no atmosphere, it is easy for any size meteor to land of the Moon’s surface as a meteorite. Thus, in the future, being on the surface of the Moon could be risky and equipment and buildings on the Moon could be hit.

Calling someone a geologist on the Moon is a misnomer, as

“Geo” is a prefix derived from the Greek word meaning "earth". The proper name for this science is Selenology, and the scientists who would do this work on the moon would by selenologists. The word is derived from the Greek lunar deity Selene.

In episode four Roger Benoit, the second in command on Moonbase, said that Earth was bound to have sent a relief rocket, and Hobson responded with, “Get the scanner lined up on the flight path between Moon and Earth. Let me know the moment you spot anything.” Towards the end of the episode the Doctor asked if the Gravitron could be “brought to bear on the surface of the Moon”. Benoit and Hobson said it had never been tried, but they attempt it. With a few minor adjustments to the machine, it is achieved, and the Cybermen and their ships were sent floating off into space.

The last we saw of the surface of the Moon was the Doctor and his companions, in space suits, returning to the TARDIS. They saw a ship fly overhead and the Doctor said he hoped it's the last they would see of the Cybermen.

In episode one of 'The Macra Terror' Barney, the supervisor of the Refreshing Department, offered to the Doctor and his companions amongst other options, “moonlight treatment”.

At the end of the episode, Medok, a colony member who has previously seen the Macra, indicated to the Doctor a patch of moonlight where he has just

seen the creatures. This means that the unnamed planet had at least one moon, and to shed enough moonlight to be noticeable, the moon could not have been too small.

In episode three of 'The Evil of the Daleks', the Moon was seen above Theodore Maxtible’s country house just before Jamie met up with Mollie Dawson, Maxtible's maid, who gave him plans for the house. At the end of the episode, Jamie saw movement in a moonlit corridor, and it was revealed to be Kemel, a mute Turk employed

by Maxtible.

In episode three of 'The Tomb of the Cybermen', the Cyber-controller said he knew of the Doctor’s intelligence to which the Doctor replied, “Ah, Ah, yes. The lunar surface.” He was referring to his encounter with them on the Moon. The controller further explained that the reason they attacked Moonbase was because their machinery had stopped, and their supply of replacements was depleted, thus they were becoming extinct.

In episode three of 'The Enemy of the World', Salamander made an off-the-cuff comment of “The Moon doesn't fall out of the sky.” to try and placate Fedorin, the Central European controller’s deputy.

At the beginning of episode one of 'The Invasion', the Doctor saw, on the TARDIS’s scanner-screen, that they were hovering over the dark side of the Moon. In episode four the Doctor related to the Brigadier that they had been attacked whilst hovering over the Moon.

In episode five Zoe told Isobel that the spaceship they saw on the other side of the Moon was obviously the Cybermen’s. In episode six the Doctor made a rough drawing of the Earth and

the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie in the museum he boasted “That's not surprising. I designed it.

I've been in rocketry all my life.

My father engineered the first lunar passenger module, and I travelled on the last trip back to Earth. Before it all finished.”

the Moon on a piece of board and told Professor Watkins that the Cybermen intend to use their ship, parked on the dark side of the Moon, to boost the signals from their satellites then magnify them and beam them back down to Earth. In episode seven the Brigadier remembered something he had seen before, so he went to a safe where he uncovered a document that informed UNIT of the Russians plans to send a manned orbital survey to the Moon on the day of the invasion.

'The Seeds of Death' was shown during the height of Apollo fever, with Apollo 9 launched three days after episode six was screened. Two years earlier, just three days after episode two of Moonrise was screened the Apollo 1 fire occurred.

In the opening title we first saw the Moon when the Earth was revealed to appear from behind the Moon. It is first mentioned right at the start when Gia Kelly, manager of TMat Control in London, said, “Why is there a delay at Moon Control?” This is another name for Moonbase, which during the story was mentioned 39 times, with Moon Control mentioned six times. It wasn't revealed if this was the same Moonbase as

the one seen being attacked by Cybermen.

Every time a scene changed from being on the Earth to on the Moon, and vice versa, a shot appeared of that globe.

This was first seen at 4.05 minutes into the episode one when the scene changed from T-mat Control on Earth to Tmat control on the Moon with a shot of the moon between these two scenes. Also, at the beginning of each episode, a shot of the globe the episode starts on was seen from the other globe.

A picture of the Moon was also seen when the Doctor used the TARDIS screen to see what was outside before deciding it was a space museum. One of the things shown on the screen was a picture of the Moon with the words “TravelMat Relay” superimposed.

Other than the use of the word "Moon", "lunar" was used twice in the story. First in episode one when Harry Osgood, manager of T-Mat's Moonbase, asked “Hey, have you got a TMat cubicle ready for me?” to which Gia Kelly said, “Number six” and then went on to say “Prepare lunar cubicle number six for transport to Moon Control.”

Later when Eldred, the curator of a space museum, met

In the space museum, before they meet Eldred, Zoe pushed a button causing a screen to drop down on the wall behind her showing an information video with a voice over which said, ”Travel Mat is the ultimate form of travel. Control centre of the present system is the Moon, serving receptions at all major cities on the Earth. Travel Mat provides an instantaneous means of public travel, transports raw materials and vital food supplies to all parts of the world.” Eldred explained to the Doctor about the ion jet rocket that "was to have been the vehicle to take man beyond the moon. T-Mat put an end to all that." Later Zoe asked, "But if the rocket was so good, why did you stop at the moon?" Eldred replied, "Because of T-Mat. TMat, the ultimate in travel.

With about as much sense of adventure as a synthetic carbohydrates factory." The Doctor then asked, "But surely rockets would still be useful as an auxiliary means of transport, wouldn't they? Besides, how would man get beyond the moon?" to which Eldred concluded, "Nobody cares any more about exploring space. Life made. Well, it was made too easy by T-Mat." Unable to contact Moonbase, Earth control realised that the only way to get to the Moon is by rocket, and the only rocket was in a museum. So Kelly and her supervisor, Commander Julian Radnor, went to see Eldred, who Radnor knew had the knowledge as well as the rocket. Eldred refused to help

leading to Jamie suggesting that they use the TARDIS. However, the Doctor confirmed that the TARDIS was not suited to short-range travel Eventually, when the Doctor said he would pilot the rocket ship, Eldred reluctantly offered his help. Later however, as the Doctor worried about how to get back from the Moon, if they can’t get T-Mat working, Eldred advised there was a fuel dump on the Moon.

While in the capsule waiting for take-off, the Doctor reminded Jamie about the briefing Eldred had given him; an exasperated Jamie replied “Aye, he's told me all about this G-force stuff. Now I know.” In space, Zoe told Jamie not to release his safety straps, “until I switch over to automatic gravity control, otherwise you'll float away."

Good to see references to Gforce and weightlessness to explain why there is gravity on Moonbase.

On the way to the Moon they found they cannot keep in contact with the Earth, however, Zoe advised they do not have to as they could use the Moon homing beam. They had an automatic device which sent out coded radio signals which triggered the homing beacon into action and automatically locked onto it until they

reached the point in orbit where they could fire retrorockets to land. Unfortunately, things happened on the Moon, the homing beacon cut out and without the beacon they started to drift. Zoe stated that at their present rate of drift, and allowing for the usual gravitational influences, they would be drawn into the heart of the sun in approximately five months and ten days.

At the beginning of episode three Phipps, a maintenance crew-member of T-Mat Moonbase, was in contact with the Doctor and was astounded to learn that they were in a rocket orbiting the moon. They went out of range, but as they are orbiting the Moon, they came back in range and they then used the signal from Phipps to land. From what Phipps said, they realised that Ice Warriors were on the Moon, and as Mars, their home planet, was dying they were using it as a stepping stone to Earth. When they re-contacted Phipps, he told them not to land but to go back to Earth. They advised him they did not have enough fuel to do so and needed to land to get to the fuel dump.

We see the rocket, using retro-rockets, turn head to tail and then see it slowly descend to the Moon. A little later we again see the spaceship descending to the Moon. We finally see a model shot of the spaceship as it lands on a pad near Moonbase.

In episode four Slaar, the Ice Warrior leader, ordered Fewsham, assistant controller of T-Mat Moonbase, to change the T-

mat controls so as to suspend the Doctor in space between the Moon and Earth. Fewsham replied that the T-Mat was only programmed to send to other centres, so he would have to reprogramme the circuit.

It is interesting to find out that you do not need a cubicle in which to land.

In episode five, Slaar told Fewsham that the Ice Warrior fleet was not going to land on Earth, but are to land on the Moon and when the seed pods had done their work on Earth it would be time to commence the second stage of their plan.

A bit later, Gia Kelly said that the T-Mat was working but, “It's still controlled from the Moon. We must find a way of controlling it from the Earth.” To which Zoe replied “But is that possible? Don't you need the moon as a relay?”

Kelly went off and came up with the idea of using a specially programmed satellite that could be sent up and act as a relay. It wouldn't be as effective as the Moonbase, which handles up to two million microwave channels simultaneously, as it would only handle a few thousand, but it would be enough for vital food supplies.

Towards the end of episode six she said, “When the Moon relay is repaired, we must check over the equipment and build in safeguards. From now on, TMat must be entirely controlled from Earth.” An exasperated Eldred replied “Oh, surely you've learned not to put all of your eggs in one basket in future?”

That the Moon presents the same face to the Earth all the time means that using a base on the moon as a relay is a good idea, but as Eldred indicated, you need back-ups in case things go wrong.

A bit later, the leader of the Cybermen fleet, the Grand Marshall, told Slaar that the fleet was approaching the gravitational field of the Moon.

Later, in episode six, he said they were receiving the homing signal and would soon enter the gravitational field of the Moon.

Finally the Marshall desperately told Slaar that they were passing between Earth and Moon and that the signal had not led them into the Moon's gravitational field and they are heading towards the Sun. Just to make it clear, a gravitational field does not just start at a point, in fact, the Moon, like any object in the Universe, has an infinite gravitational field, it is its strength that is important. As an object leaves the Earth the further away from the Earth the object gets the Earth’s gravitational influence on the object decreases. If it is going towards the Moon, the Moon’s gravitation influence on the object would increase and at some point, between the Earth and the Moon (a good deal closer to the Moon than the Earth) the Moon’s gravitational influence would be greater and it can be said to have entered the Moons gravitational field.

The final mention of the Moon is by Jamie, back in the TARDIS, when he replies to Zoe’s question to the Doctor about where they are going next. “Oh, it's no good asking him. He's no more idea than the man in the Moon.”

In episode five of ‘Doctor Who and the Silurians’ one of the Silurians tells the Doctor the reason they had gone underground and suspended their lives. They had seen a small planet approaching their world

and calculated that it would draw off the Earth’s atmosphere. They would wait in suspension till the atmosphere returned. The Doctor replied that “the small planet was drawn into the Earth's orbit and became the Moon? Your catastrophe never happened.”

The current theory on how the Moon came about, at least in broad strokes, is similar to what the Silurian said, a Mars sized body called Theia, did come near to a recently formed Earth, but rather than go into orbit and become the Moon, it crashed into the Earth and created a debris ring that eventually collected into a single natural satellite, the Moon.

This collision also resulted in the 23.5° tilted axis of the Earth, thus causing the seasons. The main thing is that this occurred billions of years ago (4.5 billion is the current agreed time) not 200 million years ago as the Silurian indicates. There was an extinction event 201.3 million years ago the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event and at the time this story was written it was thought that all extinction events were caused by asteroids as the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction about 66 million years ago had just been proved to have been by an asteroid that made the Chicxulub crater in Mexico. This was the extinction event that saw the end of the dinosaurs and thus would have been the date the Silurians went into suspension,

not 200 million years ago in the Triassic and definitely not Ordovician–Silurian extinction event of 450 million years ago where the only land animals were insects.

In episode one of 'The Ambassadors of Death' Professor Bruno Tatalian suggested that loss of contact with the capsules could be because they are behind the moon, but reporter John Wakefield tells him that they are not behind the Moon.

Later the Doctor searches an electronic map in the laboratory and finds, amongst other things, a map of the Moon, but none of London, which he is looking for.

The Doctor is heard to be singing an altered version of Shine on Harvest Moon (Shine on Martian Moons) in episode seven of 'Inferno'. [Dallas: I will discuss the Martian moons when we get to 'The Christmas Invasion'].

In episode three of 'Carnival of Monsters' Vorg, Lurman showman, told Pletrac, an Inter Minorian official, that the Drashigs came from one of Grundle’s satellites.

During episode three of 'Frontier in Space' the Doctor is sent to the Lunar Penal Colony for life by the Earth’s president, so that the Draconians cannot reach him. We see the cratered surface of the Moon through the large windows of the Penal colony association area. No indication of the lesser gravity of

the Moon is depicted or mentioned. The Moon having no air is covered by showing that the Doctor tries to escape through an airlock to get out onto the Moon’s surface and that he needs a spacesuit with tanks of air. At the beginning of episode four the Master arrives, disguised as a Commissioner of the planet Siris IV and gets the Doctor released into his custody and taken off the Moon.

In episode one of 'Time Warrior', Linx makes the statement “I hereby claim this planet, its moons and satellites, for the greater glory of the Sontaran Empire.” Although the Earth has official one moon, programs such as QI (Quite Interesting) have said that the Earth has more than one moon. See the Wikipedia article for a summary.

The Doctor mentions in part two of 'Planet of the Spiders' that Metebelis Three is known as the blue planet because its moonlight is blue. Shortly after Sarah says “You know, this is barmy. Here am I, calmly discussing fabulous planets with blue moons, giant spiders, magic crystals, as if I was talking about, pussycats, fish and chips and the Liverpool docks.”

In 'Robot' episode four the Brigadier asks about the range of the disintegrator gun and the Doctor tells him it could drill a hole in the surface of the moon.

At the beginning of 'The Ark In Space' when the Doctor says he does not know where they are, Sarah replies “A little trip to the moon, you said, just to prove to Harry”.

In the first episode of ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ the Doctor learns that a satellite turned up 50 years ago becoming the 13th moon orbiting

Jupiter, it was originally named New Phobos but was renamed Voga by Professor Kellman. The Doctor immediately recognises the name and calls it "Voga, the planet of gold".

Thus Voga is both a planet and a moon! Interestingly, Phobos is a moon of Mars and I will discuss Mars’s moons later in this article. At the time of writing this story I assume that Jupiter had 12 reported moons.

The actual 13th moon of Jupiter, Leda, was discovered on September 14 1974 at this time, 'Revenge' was still being written! Currently, there are 79 known moons of Jupiter with 57 having a name. Curiously, as of 2018, seven satellites are considered to be lost.

Go here for the full list.

In the first episode of 'Masque of Mandragora' Heironymous, the astrologer of the Court of San Martino, makes quite a few mentions about the Moon, he says “Everything is foretold by the stars.” He then goes on to foretell the death of the Duke by saying, “When Mars comes into conjunction with Saturn in the seventh layer, in the House of the Ram, and the Moon is full grown, death comes to great ones. So it is decreed.” He later adds “What does it signify when Venus is in opposition to Saturn and a great shadow passes over the Moon?” This is the first reference to what is a lunar eclipse. Sarah, after being captured by the Brethren of Demnos, is told by one of its

priests “My child, the purity of your sacrifice renders it doubly welcome to the mighty Demnos, god of the twin realms of moontide and solstice.” Later the priest refers to the position of the Moon in the sky when he tells Sarah, “When the Moon rises over the southern obelisk, your hour of glory will have come.” Giuliano says, “Well, there's this man in Florence who claims that by arranging ground glasses in a certain order, it's possible to see the Moon and the stars as large as your hand.”

The Doctor had earlier said they had landed in late 15th century Italy, so who this person in Florence is, it is certainly not Galileo. Possibly Leonardo Da Vinci? To back this up later in the beginning of episode four when picking up a primitive telescope Giuliano developed the Doctor says “Yes, just about adequate. Pity, another fifty years we could have used Galileo's." As the Doctor says it’s late 15th century, 50 years is way too short as it would be over a 100 years because Galileo first used a telescope to look at the Moon in 1609. He drew one of the first telescopic drawings of the Moon in his book Sidereus Nuncius and noted it was not smooth but had mountains and craters.

At the end of episode one, the Doctor makes a flippant remark about the Moon being made of cheese.

"The Moon is made of green cheese," was one of the most popular proverbs in 16th and 17th-century English literature. It likely originated in this formulation in 1546, when The Proverbs of John Heywood claimed "the moon is made of a greene cheese." A common variation at that time was "to make one believe the Moon is made of green cheese." "Green

cheese" in this proverb simply refers to a young cheese, which is actually white! Historically, there was never a popular belief that the Moon was made of green cheese, instead it was typically used as an example of extreme credulity.

In episode four, a lot is mentioned about the upcoming lunar eclipse with Heironymous and the Doctor each saying thrice that Mandragora will swallow the Moon. The Doctor tells Sarah it will occur at "forty three minutes and eight seconds past nine". Sarah is about to be sacrificed by the Brethren when the eclipse occurs but the Doctor has earlier defeated Heironymous and taken his place. He saved Sarah, destroyed the Brethren and banished the Mandragora “back to square one".

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes directly behind Earth and into its shadow.

This can occur only when the Sun, Earth, and Moon are exactly, or very closely aligned (in syzygy); with Earth between the other two. A lunar eclipse can occur only on the night of a full moon. The type and length of a lunar eclipse depend on the Moon's proximity to either node of its orbit.

During an eclipsed the only light reflected from the lunar

surface has been refracted by Earth's atmosphere. This light appears reddish for the same reason that a sunset or sunrise does: the Rayleigh scattering of bluer light. Unlike a solar eclipse, which can only be viewed from a relatively small area of the world, a lunar eclipse may be viewed from anywhere on the night side of Earth and can last up to nearly 2 hours.

Earth's shadow can be divided into two distinctive parts: the umbra and penumbra.

Earth totally occludes direct solar radiation within the umbra, the central region of the shadow. However, since the Sun's diameter appears about one-quarter of Earth's in the lunar sky, the planet only partially blocks direct sunlight within the penumbra, the outer portion of the shadow.

A penumbral lunar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes through Earth's penumbra.

The penumbra causes a subtle dimming of the lunar surface.

A special type of penumbral eclipse is a total penumbral lunar eclipse, during which the Moon lies exclusively within Earth's penumbra. Total penumbral eclipses are rare, and when these occur, the portion of the Moon closest to the umbra may appear slightly darker than the rest of the lunar disk. A partial

lunar eclipse occurs when only a portion of the Moon enters Earth's umbra, while a total lunar eclipse occurs when the entire Moon enters the planet's umbra. A central lunar eclipse is a total lunar eclipse during which the Moon passes through the centre of Earth's shadow, contacting the antisolar point.

This type of lunar eclipse is relatively rare. A selenelion or selenehelion occurs when both the Sun and an eclipsed Moon can be observed at the same time. This can only occur just before sunset or just after sunrise, when both bodies will appear just above the horizon at nearly opposite points in the sky. This arrangement has led to the phenomenon being also called a horizontal eclipse.

The timing of total lunar eclipses is determined by its contacts: P1 (First contact): Beginning of the penumbral eclipse. Earth's penumbra touches the Moon's outer limb; U1 (Second contact): Beginning of the partial eclipse. Earth's umbra touches the Moon's outer limb; U2 (Third contact): Beginning of the total eclipse. The Moon's surface is entirely within Earth's umbra; Greatest eclipse: The peak stage of the total eclipse. The Moon is at its closest to the centre of Earth's umbra; U3 (Fourth contact): End of the total eclipse. The

Moon's outer limb exits Earth's umbra; U4 (Fifth contact): End of the partial eclipse. Earth's umbra leaves the Moon's surface; P4 (Sixth contact): End of the penumbral eclipse. Earth's penumbra no longer makes contact with the Moon. At least two and as many as five lunar eclipses occur every year, although total lunar eclipses are significantly less common. The next Lunar eclipse, a Penumbral, is at 19.10 (UTC) Jan 10, 2020 and the next total Lunar eclipse is 11.19 (UTC) May 21, 2021.

Sarah Jane mentions the Moon at the end of ‘Hand of Fear’ when she says, “You know, I might as well be talking to the moon” in her famous ‘leaving speech’.

At the beginning of 'The Invisible Enemy' the Doctor says they have materialised in the Solar system, between Jupiter and Saturn, when the TARDIS receives a mayday from Titan Base, a large filling station on Titan – a moon of Saturn. At the end of the story, the Doctor rigs the refuelling tanks to blow; they escape the base just in time to see the massive explosion, amplified by the methane in Titan’s atmosphere.

Titan is the largest moon of Saturn and the second-largest natural satellite in the Solar System. Jupiter's moon, Ganymede, is 50% larger than Earth's moon and larger than

the planet Mercury, but only 40% as massive.

Titan is the only moon known to have a dense atmosphere and was discovered on March 2,5 1655 by the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens. Titan was the first known moon of Saturn, and the sixth known planetary satellite (after Earth's moon and the four Galilean moons of Jupiter). Titan is primarily composed of ice and rocky material, which is differentiated into a rocky core surrounded by various layers of ice, including a crust of ice and a subsurface layer of ammoniarich liquid water. Titan's atmospheric composition is nitrogen (97%), methane (2.7%) and hydrogen (0.1–0.2%) with trace amounts of other gases. It has methane and ethane clouds and a nitrogen-rich organic smog. Titan has bodies of liquid ethane and methane that were detected in January 2007 by the Cassini–Huygens space probe. The large ones are known as maria (seas) and the small ones as lacūs (lakes).

Kraken Mare is the largest with an area of 400,000 km2.

Saturn has 62 moons with confirmed orbits, 53 of which have names and only 13 of which have diameters larger than 50 kilometres. Currently there are four unconfirmed moons observed by Cassini. It is not yet clear if they are real satellites or merely persistent clumps within the F Ring.

A picture of the Moon, or more accurately a Tarot card of the Moon, is seen on a table in episode two of ‘Image of Fendahl’.

‘The Sun Makers’, is set on Pluto, which was made just a year before we knew that Pluto had a moon (it now has five moons). In order of distance from Pluto, they are Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. The most famous of these, and the first to be discovered in 1978 was Charon; it is the largest, with a diameter of about 50% of Pluto’s. It is mutually tidally locked with Pluto, and is massive enough that Pluto–Charon is sometimes considered a double dwarf planet. K9‘s information about Pluto, it provided, was “Ninth planet. Was until the discovery of Cassius believed to be the outermost body in the system.

It has a diameter of three thousand.” Pluto’s diameter is now known to be 2.376 kilometres.

K9’s figure is accurate, for the time, as it would have been the best estimated diameter of Pluto and the then unknown Charon.

Among the host of the Captain’s well used phrases in ‘The Pirate Planet’ are three that use “moons”. The phrases are: “Moons of Madness”, used twice; “By the flaming Moons of Heretes”; and “By all the flaming moons of hell.”

Near the beginning of ‘Stones of Blood’ we see illuminated by a full moon a group of robed figures around a stone circle.

Shortly after when the TARDIS lands near the stone circle, the Doctor tells Romana that they are not just stones. “They're all aligned with various points on the horizon, giving you sunrise and moonrise at different times of the year.”

In the last episode of ‘The Androids of Tara’ when the Doctor and K9 are in a small boat at night, the Moon is quite clearly seen glinting on the water.

At the beginning of ‘The Power of Kroll’ the Doctor drops his hat and from this is able to determine the escape velocity as 1.5 miles a second, subsequently deducing they must be on one of the moons of Delta Magna, and finally concluding, as he wets his finger and holds it up, that it is the third. In the second episode the Doctor tells Romana that the Earth colonists from Delta Magna had shipped the little green men up to where they are. Romana replies “Ah, because they thought this moon was no use to anybody”. A short time later the Doctor finds an illustrated history of the green men and says “They were given this moon as a sort of reservation.” In episode three the Doctor claims that electrical storms on planetary satellites can be quiet spectacular.

It is interesting that the Doctor calls Delta Magna’s moon a “planetary satellite”. Up until Galileo first pointed his telescope towards Jupiter and found that it had objects circling it, the Moon was thought to be a planet just like Jupiter.

When it was ascertained that the planets did not circle the Earth, but the moon did, it was clear that the Moon and the four objects that circled Jupiter were the same sort of objects and were called planetary satellites. This became confusing to the general public when with the launch of Sputnik in 1957, which became a satellite of the Earth and was called an artificial satellite. Rather than have confusion about what a ‘satellite’ was, it came to mean ‘an artificial satellite’ and these

objects that circled planets became known as moons. This cleared up one confusion, but of course left the confusion of the Moon vs a moon. A similar confusion in Astronomy is the notion a sun vs the Sun. In episode two of ‘The Creature from the Pit’, Organon refers to many “moon flows” as a measurement of time, which indicates that Chloris has at least one major moon.

In episode one of ‘The Keeper of Traken’ we see the TARDIS travelling through what appears to be the moons of Traken.

Strangely no mention is made about the Moon or moons during the time of the Fifth Doctor.

Early on in ‘Attack of the Cybermen’ we learned that Lytton was born on the satellite Riften 5, orbiting the planet Vita 15.

Just a bit later Lytton told the Cyberleader that he knew they have a ship hidden on the dark side of the Moon as he had tracked their transmissions.

In the first episode of ‘Timelash’ the Doctor talks of the Eye of Orion’s beautiful moonset as a reason for them to visit.

At the start of ‘Mindwarp’ on landing on Thoros Beta, Peri thought that Thoros Alpha was a moon and was correct by the Doctor.

At the beginning of ‘Delta and the Bannerman’ it is seen that the planet Chumeria, home world of the Chimerons, has a large moon. Later in the first episode, Hawk and Weissmuller, CIA agents, are in their tent at night and we see a half moon in the sky. ‘Silver Nemesis’ episode three shows the Cybermen continuing with their affinity for having their spaceships near the Moon.

Toward the end of episode two of 'The Greatest Show in the Galaxy' Mags, an interplanetary adventurer, was frightened when she saw a “moon sign” (twin crescents) on a stone lintel which was part of a large stone structure the Doctor and Mags had stumbled upon whilst exploring backstage at the circus. The Doctor asked why it frightened her and her reply was, “Don't ask.

Just let’s get out of here.” They then entered the stone structure and Captain Cook, another interplanetary adventurer, and a phalanx of robot clowns arrived and captured them. At the beginning of episode three as they all exited the structure Mags turned to see that the moon symbol had moved, and now the crescent was nearly full. Mags snarled and Captain Cook responded, “Mags, now please. Not now. Not yet!’

Clearly indicating he knew her secret. Mags's secret was re-

as seen from Earth is increasing and conversely waning means the amount of illuminated surface as seen from Earth is decreasing.

vealed when in the ring Captain Cook asked for the “old devil moon effect” and a spotlight with a crescent moon shape shone down on her, causing her to transform. Thus, Captain Cook confirmed she was a werewolf. She killed the Captain and then returned to normal.

In this story we see depictions of various phases of the moon. There are eight phases of the moon. They are: New Moon, Waxing Crescent, First Quarter, Waxing Gibbous, Full, Waning Gibbous, Third Quarter and Waning Crescent.

The phase of the Moon is the shape of the directly sunlit portion of the Moon as viewed from Earth. The lunar phases gradually and cyclically change over the period of a synodic month (about 29.53 days), as the orbital positions of the Moon around Earth and of Earth around the Sun shift. Waxing means the amount of illuminated surface

Along with vulnerability to a silver bullet, a full moon being the cause of the transformation into a werewolf, only became part of their depiction on a widespread basis in the twentieth century. The first movie to feature the transformative effect of the full moon was Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man in 1943. W.R.S. Ralston in his Songs of the Russian People, published in 1872, gives the form of incantation still familiar in Russia. In Italy, France and Germany, it was said that a man or woman could turn into a werewolf if he or she, on a certain Wednesday or Friday, slept outside on a summer night with the full moon shining directly on his or her face. For vampires, both Lord Ruthven in John William Polidori's The Vampyre published in 1819, and Varney, from Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood, a serialised gothic horror story which first appeared in 1845–1847, were able to be healed by moonlight, although no account of this is known in traditional folklore.

The lunar effect is a real or imaginary correlation between specific stages of the roughly 29.5-day lunar cycle and behaviour and physiological changes in living beings on Earth, including humans. A considerable number of studies have examined the effect on humans.

By the late 1980s, there were at least 40 published studies on the purported lunar-lunacy connection, and at least 20 published studies on the purported lunar-birth-rate connection. This has allowed several extensive literature reviews and meta-analyses to be produced, which have found no correlation between the lunar cycle and human biology or behaviour. Examples of these beliefs go back as far back as ancient Assyrian / Babylonian writings. Things that have been claimed to be influenced by the Moon include; menstruation, birth rate, blood loss, mental illness, epilepsy, violent crime, motorcycle fatalities and sleep quality.

Finally here are sixteen types of Moon: Super, Micro, Blood, Blue, Wolf, Snow, Worm, Pink, Flower, Strawberry, Buck, Sturgeon, Corn, Harvest, Frost and Cold.

To find out about each of these go here.

his crossword has 47 clues, one for each story of the 10th Doctor. The answer for each question is a word that appeared in a story title. As for the previous crossword, some answers will be easier to work out than others, some stories have only one-word titles! There is a clue for each answer based on an important event in the episode, the clue is a bit cryptic but not as cryptic as clues in previous crosswords. As an example, previously I may have given you a clue of “Emblem of a confusing city” with the answer being “Logopolis”, but now with easier clues I would have given you a clue of "Universal message". I will leave it to you to work out how these two clues would give the answer.

4 6 8 11 14 17 18 20 21 22 23 27 28 30 33 34 35 37

Light trip Making the right decisions in life Eyeing the oppositio n They were in formation He leant how to beat you Too short to the countdown Jam and toast on the way to work Looking at thin water The beginning of a possible herb She has a little death Conclusion of a role Scary but captivating A place to say goodbye to friends Bad karma in the car The kingdom that changed Takeaway Number 27 It could be read in the deep 200 has gone here

38 39 41 43 44

Trying to live forever Maybe taken elsewhere It's not heavy or smart Double the limit A sharp burglar

1 2 3

A great spaceship A perfect beginning Augmented ear pods

5 7 9 10 12 13 15 16 17 19

Attac A ge A qu Mad Mind Save Pair The Near Orbi

ck of the trombones em of a singular smile ueen to mate d maker's alias d the sphere ed in the book of mimes key to winning rly sacked in Naples iting the unattainable

24 25 26 27 29 31 32 36 40 42

Hath no fury like a woman...

Prodigy plan Book leaves from this Pigs are central Fallible teacher Vacant ending A colossal jaunt Repeated dirt A valiant ending Follow the Balloon