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'The Fourth Wall'

CD audio adventure released February 2012. 4 episodes

Writer: John Dorney
Director: Nicholas Briggs

Roots: The Last Action Hero and action movie cliches.. Flip mentions Mystic Meg, Bruce Willis (Die Hard) Blue Peter and the Death Star and compares Krarn to "every Bond villain that ever existed." The Porcians quote Bill and Ben "Flob-a dob... flib...dob...")

Dialogue Triumphs: "One morning in and she's vanished already. That's a record, even for me."

"Don't mock 'mere entertainment', Doctor. For some people that's all they have."

"You have responsibility to those you create. If you give us life, you must honour that life. You must not hurt us for no reason. What sort of sick mind creates only to give pain, to torture his children for the entertainment of others?" If you wanted mercy you should have written me more three-dimensional!"

"I offer you eternity and you complain that it's not in colour!"

"Some of my other iterations can be astonishingly irritating"

Continuity: Multiple unstable dimensional fields can warp local space-time

The TSV is always black and white and uses energy from light neutrons which it converts into energy impulses. It ought to be a visual-only medium, and not interactive.

As the TARDIS moved through the bubble at the moment of materialisation, Flip was 'snatched' away by the fictional universe. The dimensional bubble maintains a separate existence. When the characters inside aren't following a "pre-programmed path" (i.e. a script) they remain alive but in a holographic pattern so as not to affect the plot. As they can exist without the narrative, the danger lies in introduced elements that would cause them to react or "improvise"

Dashra in the Ninth Galaxy is home to the legendary dream smithies, a lost race who were able to warp realities and space-time to their will, and through detailed computation and mathematical processes.

Shepherd's machine Reel Life is a reality generator that creates a dimensional bubble containing the reality program derived from the recorded performance of its actors. The bubble is then overlaid onto the real-world dimension at the point of screening so both dimensions coexist in the same point in time - what the Doctor describes as dimensional transcendentalism, a science the Time Lords have been using for "centuries." The Doctor says Reel Life and the TSV are based on the same technology The bubble is kept 2.6 seconds ahead of reality, removing the risk of interaction via a governing circuit.

Porcians are legendary for their ineptitude and the laughing stock of the galactic community, forever invading worlds about to be consumed by supernovae, or are carnivorous, or are called 'Skaro'. They take the wrong equipment with them, inadvertently destroy their own invasion fleets or get sucked into black holes before they even arrive. Despite learning from their mistakes, they have nearly wiped out their own species in doing so. The Doctor has encountered them many times before, on each occasion attempting to tidy up the mess before they have the chance to make it. He considers them dangerous to be around - they also know of him. He met Chimbley on Ballastron VII. They took a left turn at Delta Magna. Porcian ships are squalid and filthy. They wear silver body stockings and capes (Pigs in Space?)

The two rival networks are Drexel Media Group (Xander Drexel) and TransGalactic (Augustus Scullop) Laser is set on a future Earth, five years into an invasion by the warmongers who arrived by wormhole.

Flip knows of the TARDIS food machine and gets popcorn and tea bags

The Doctor isn't as into cricket as his predecessor "but you never lose the taste". He watched the Australia v South Africa one day international 2006. The Doctor mourns Flip The Doctor says he wasn't expecting to take on a new companion so soon.

Location: The artificial planetoid Transmission

Links: Flip recalls Napoleon and the Daleks - this story follows very quickly after The Curse of Davros. Nick Kenton mentions the Actaeon Galaxy. Flip uses the TARDIS food machine

The Bottom Line: "Brother, I think it is time for some audience participation..."

Another Dorney classic. Putting the Sixth Doctor in the third virtual world of fiction requires a deft hand to bring something new to a story, and The Fourth Wall's exploration of the responsibilities of an author to his or her creations delivers a yarn that is by turns funny, sad, thrilling and horrific. Best of all, it makes the Doctor's ingenuity shine - he takes the time to mourn another companion, and returns, shoulder to the wheel to undo the same with all the deftness of the best of Time Lords. A joy.

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