The Doctor in the Bubble

Perhaps in tribute to Delia Derbyshire, the woman who realized the Doctor Who theme song back in 1963 as a piece of electronic music (that is far superior to the conventional orchestrated versions we get these days), we are introduced to Flora Millrace, a woman who composes music for, amongst others, the TV show The Identikit Man in 1968. But her music is more than just a way to manipulate the emotions of the audience. With several million televisions playing her music at once, Flora is able to monitor the interference patterns of the sound waves around the London area to detect problems with the connection between our universe and the space-time vortex.

The results of her survey show bubbles where time is out of joint. Upon bursting one at the home of a family of stocky people, her old pal, the Doctor, falls out. He is quite grateful for her assistance. Things apparently did not go as planned when he was working on the Hostile Action Displacement System. Zoe, Jamie, and the TARDIS are presumably stuck in bubbles of their own.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Flora and the Doctor, two aliens named Turis and Arto are working in opposition. They require all the free energy humanity has and they're prepared to obtain it by hook or by crook. They are manipulating things behind the scenes of a rival TV station so that when one of its TV shows is broadcasted, the soundtrack with produce an interference pattern that will suck energy from the Vortex into those bubbles that Flora detected. Then they can detonate the bubbles like bombs until humanity forks over that free energy.

Of course Flora, the Doctor, and Zoe save the day by draining the energy from the bubbles and neutralizing their explosive potential.

I think I missed something because I don't understand why Turis (I found it amusing that the alien claimed this odd name was Eastern European and everyone just accepted it.) and Arto need our energy when they seem to be able to draw it out of the Vortex rather easily. Why waste time sucking up all that fine geothermal energy in Iceland and letting the poor Icelanders freeze to death when you can simply play some music on a TV show and tap into the limitless energy of the Vortex?

Regardless, this was a fun little tale. It was neat that Flora's activities were extraordinary, on the one hand, but, at the same time, seemed to be routine maintenance on the other. I thought it was hoopy that she did it using music too. A clever little conceit. This is also a rare Doctor Who short story where I felt it was compact and self-contained and didn't need to be expanded to novel or novella length to realize its full potential. It just felt right at 30 pages.

I also appreciated the little mysteries that author Eddie Robson leaves for us. How does Flora know the Doctor? What compels her to fix the fabric of time and space around the greater London area? Turis and Arto are killed at the end by a mysterious grey man. What is that all about?