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Show Notes
The Douglas Adams story that just will not die as long as the BBC can milk some more money out of it. Simon and Eugene look once again at Shada in its latest animated recreation form.
Episode Synopsis:
Aboard a space station, something sinister involving people and a ball has happened. The sinister Skagra leaves with his ball. Meanwhile, at Cambridge, a researcher named Chris Parsons stops in at the rooms of Professor Chronotis to borrow some books. Unbeknownst to him, he borrows a mysterious book from Chronotis’ library.
Meanwhile, the Doctor and Romana have come to Cambridge to visit Chronotis, who is a retired Time Lord friend of the Doctor, living at Cambridge for the last three centuries. He called the Doctor to get him to return a book, the Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey, one of the relics from Rassilon’s time.
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Skagra wants that book, too, and by what seems to be the most tortured of coincidences, the Doctor and Romana have turned up on the same day as Skagra which also happens to be the day when Chris Parsons inadvertently borrowed said book which had been just fine for the last three centuries. Skagra kills Chronotis by sucking his mind dry into the sphere.
Comedy ensues as bicycles are ridden around Cambridge. While the Doctor pursues Chris and the book, and Skagra pursues the Doctor and the book. Meanwhile, Claire a colleague of Chris’ gets drawn into the mystery when Chris attempts to analyze the book and discovers it has some very, very weird properties.
Skagra gets the book, and imprisons The Doctor, Romana, K9, and Chris Parsons aboard his invisible spaceship. Skagra sucks the Doctor’s mind dry and learns that the Doctor didn’t know what the book meant, so he forces Romana to use the TARDIS to take him to his command ship.
The Doctor, like Chronotis, has been killed by the Sphere. Unlike Chronotis, the Doctor isn’t really dead. He defeated the mind drain by using one of his time-honored strategies: pretending to be stupid. The ships computer knows the Doctor to be dead. The Doctor uses this to argue, “logically,” that since he was an enemy of Skagra, but now he’s dead, he must therefore be an ex-enemy of Skagra. An ex-enemy is not a threat and therefore anything he asks of the computer cannot possibly be a threat to Skagra. The computer accepts this and cooperates with the Doctor. Sans TARDIS, the Doctor uses the ship to try to go in pursuit.
Meanwhile, Claire, not knowing that Chronotis is dead is waiting for him to return in his rooms, and accidentally launches his rooms into the time vortex, for – you see – Chronotis’ rooms are a TARDIS. Chronotis, no longer dead, then shows up and, demonstrating some very un-Time Lord like powers, works with Claire to get his TARDIS more operational.
The Doctor has returned to the physical point where Skagra came to Earth from. It is the think tank, the Institute for Advanced Science Studies. He finds the now much, much older, wizened and mindless scientists that Skagra nefariously did things to at the beginning of the episode. He stole their minds, too. They were the greatest minds in the Galaxy. The Sphere is a device for collecting minds.
Skagra has taken Romana to his command ship where he wastes a lot of time not really explaining his nefarious plot to become the entire universe, but first he must find the forgotten Time Lord prison planet: Shada, to which the book is the key.
On Shada is the most infamous of Time Lord criminals – Salyavon: A Time Lord with a unique gift – the ability to project his mind into others – just like Chronotis did earlier when nobody but Claire was looking.
The Doctor and Chris track him down, as does Chronotis and Claire. Things go awry and Skagra gets to Shada, discovers that Salyavon is missing, then discovers that Chronotis is Salyavon. With Salyavon’s mind in the sphere now, again, actually, since he already mind-sucked Chronotis, who has been Salyavon all along, Skagra has the ability to project his mind into every living organism in the universe.
But he’s got the Doctor’s mind in there, too. The Doctor, with the help of a stylish helmet that he whipped up in the TARDIS, is able to defeat Skagra and imprison him in his ship.
Chronotis, now alive again, once more, returns to Cambridge to live out the rest of his retirement in peace. The end.
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