The giants are not what they seem

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.

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?