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'Eldrad Must Die!'

CD Audio adventure released April 2013. 4 episodes.

Writer: Marc Platt
Director: Ken Bentley

Roots: Gibbs paraphrases Pop Goes the Weasel, refers to the parable of The Prodigal Son and likens Turlough to Dorian Gray ("portrait in the attic, right?")

Goofs: Tegan calls Gibbs a 'yuppie' which is skirting very close to the earliest likely date for its popular use (perhaps she read about them on an in-flight magazine?)

Dialogue Triumphs: Turlough's rock pool observation: "It's quite a metaphor, isn't it? A group of creatures stranded when the tide goes out, and none of them happy to be stuck together")

"Men and their sheds!"

"Has the wind learned a new song?"

Dialogue Disasters: "Last one in's a dingoes dinner!"

"After the stunt you pulled they'll have you scrubbing the crystal latrines"

Continuity: Kastria would appear to be in the Milky Way galaxy. Among the sites mentioned in this story on Kastria are a marketplace and the King's Cavern, a vast throne room.

The Kastrians have their genetic matrix set in stone; the symbiotic navigational code of Kastrian ship is encrypted and linked to its owner (or their ring). Kastrians can mind read, but the Doctor is trained to resist this. Mulkris the Executioner knows of the Time Lords as "a race of archivists and know-alls" and reports directly to King Rokon. She claims she has slain "a hundred other Eldrads on a hundred other worlds." Eldrad crafted a poison dart that would corrode another Kastrian body with acid. Once possessed and encased in crystal, Turlough/Mulkris is able to use the armour as an energy weapon. The Watcher is a crystal cut in the shape of an eye.

The Kastrian crystals are either silicon or silica quartz (this varies throughout the story.) The permanently collapsed quartzberg is left in the bay.

The British Government dumped depleted uranium waste on the island, twenty miles from Penzance.

Tegan can't, and doesn't surf.

Nyssa cheats the fruit machine by noting the algorithmic patterns from the last three players. ("Remind me never to take you to Las Vegas") She says her people have empathy for creatures in distress.

Turlough once spent a half-term holiday in rainy Weston with the Hippo family. Contrary to the CD cover illustration he has, presumably, changed out of his school uniform - it is believed he was expelled from Brendan. He once raided the school tuckshop. His father on Trion was Rince Turlough. Charlie Gibbs was another exile from Trion. Brendon being something of an 'underground railroad' for exiles via Turlough's shady solicitor in Chancery Lane. Gibbs was on 'the other side' in the war, sold off and exiled by his kinsmen. Turlough and D'la were both pilots in the war.

The Doctor finds an inflatable dinghy in a suitcase aboard the TARDIS. Eldrad/Gibbs is able to trip the TARDIS lock using intelligent silica. The Powerhouse is directly under the console room.

The Doctor says he hasn't played ducks and drakes in years, and hasn't been surfing in a while ("not on the sea at least.")

Links: The Hand of Fear. Thirty years have passed since the events of Mawdryn Undead. Turlough dreams of D'la (Kiss of Death)

Q.v.: 'ESP and Telepathy', 'The TARDIS Lock'.

Location: The Cornish coast. Aberystwyth

The Bottom Line: "That Eldrad is dead, The nothing from which he came becomes something again."

Big Finish's raiding the Hinchcliffe Era for sequel ideas (and doling sequel duties out to Marc Platt) is almost beginning to be a running joke in itself. There is some unfortunate 'describing' dialogue, but typically of Platt the visuals are enchanting, and Turlough's hallucinations of the Doctor as his headmaster and Tegan as his solicitor are fun.

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