FEATURE BY MATT MICHAEL
Unlike many science-fiction series, Doctor Who has always treated travel into parallel universes and other dimensions as a rare and dangerous event. While the series was originally conceived as featuring past, present, future and ‘sideways’ stories, the last of these options was quietly dropped very early on. That general reticence has continued, even with the proliferation of stories in books, comics and audio dramas. Although Big Finish have released well over 500 plays, the number of these that feature the TARDIS travelling sideways is small.
When Big Finish has featured alternative realities, it’s tended towards the direction set by the TV series. In 2010, for example, there were four plays that paired the Sixth Doctor with the Second Doctor’s companion, Jamie. In City of Spires, the Doctor arrives in the Scottish Highlands in the middle of a rebellion against the hated Redcoats. Many of the details seem right, but the landscape has been taken over by what seem like vast, anachronistic oil wells – only the black liquid they’re pumping seems less like oil and more like ink. In Night’s Black Agents and The Wreck of the Titan, the Doctor and Jamie trek through the nightmarish Scottish landscape, encountering creatures from myth and folklore, and then travel to the Titanic on its maiden voyage. There, an encounter with Captain Nemo and the Nautilus reveals the truth: the TARDIS has returned to the Land of Fiction, a universe of stories and ideas lying outside our own reality that first appeared in 1968’s The Mind Robber.