When the Doctor reveals that they are frolicking on the top of a research station on the planet Mercury, Jamie frustratingly intones, "Oh, don’t tell me we’ve run out of that stuff again." I smiled a big grin upon reading this.
The TARDIS has landed on a mobile research station that is a bit like the Snowpiercer. But different. Instead of a train racing headlong against the deep frost of a new Ice Age, what we have here is a domed research vessel called the Sunwatcher that creeps like a tortoise along Mercury's equator keeping it in the twilight zone, an area that straddles the blast furnace of the day side where not even the crew of Icarus II would dare go in one of those big suits and the extremely chilly night side which puts our polar vortices to shame. And instead of the last remnants of humanity engaged in a Hobbesian class war of all against all, the Sunwatcher has but a handful of people engaged in much more peaceful pursuits such as looking out for solar flares.
Our heroes' dilly-dallying is interrupted when the Sunwatcher starts to shudder. Then a hatch opens and a woman pops her spacesuited head up. I chuckled when I read that Jamie expected her to blame them for a recent mishap. "Thank God you’re here," the woman, named Alison, says before ushering them inside.
As it turns out, the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe are not the help she had radioed for. There's a creature onboard and, while it's not killing the crew one by one, people whom it touches go semi-catatonic and say little more than, "Help against the giants." It is described as being silver with a featureless face and I immediately thought that it was a Raston Warrior Robot gone soft.
Alison had found this silver man essentially frozen stiff out on the dark side and brought him into Sunwatcher to be probed and studied. Well, it thawed out and started laying hands on the crew. People are locking themselves in rooms as the creature stalks the hallways. Another researcher, Chelo, feels the silver touch but reveals to us that the creatures - and there are more of them now out on the tracks in front of the Sunwatcher - are locals. They were checking out the track that the Sunwatcher rides on one day when they came upon three giants and were frightened.
The giants, it turns out, are these big solar pylons that extend panels to catch some rays and power the Sunwatcher. One of these locals, described as not being the brightest of the bunch, was apparently scared out of his wits and accidentally ran towards the dark side where he froze only to be picked up later by Alison.
The natives receive full assurance that the giants are harmless and thusly our heroes are free to go on their merry way.
This was a really fun little story. It has some spooky Alien vibes early on with a creature roaming the Sunwatcher and the crew running scared. But it becomes clear fairly quickly that the threat isn't so threatening as Robson flips the base under siege trope on its head. This is another one of those short trips that would benefit from being expanded into a novel but is also quite satisfying as an amuse-bouche as I plow through most of the Second Doctor in the written word.
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