SHOOTING STARS’ IN THE night sky portend dramatic events at a country manor in seventeenth-century England. Soon after, the Squire and his household come under attack from an ornately decorated android armed with an energy weapon...
Some weeks later, the TARDIS lands in the vicinity. The Doctor, Adric, Nyssa and Tegan are chased through the woods by villagers bearing cudgels. The Doctor and his friends are helped by an itinerant actor-turned-highwayman named Richard Mace, who explains that the villagers are setting purification fires to ward off plague. It transpires that the disease broke out in the area around the time the ‘comet’ fell.