'Twelve Doctors of Christmas'

SOMETIMES IMPOSSIBLE THINGS JUST HAPPEN AND WE CALL THEM MIRACLES

Twelve festive adventures, starring twelve incarnations of the ever-enduring Doctor.

Bright and brilliant, these tales are filled with monsters, mayhem, merriment and plenty of Christmas magic.


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'All I Want for Christmas' by Jacqueline Rayner

When the TARDIS crew stop off on a plain, snowy planet to find some minerals needed for a machine the Doctor is working on, Ian and Barbara find themselves reminiscing over past Christmases. That night, Barbara wakes from a dream of her mother to learn that the TARDIS has managed to land in London on Christmas Eve, 1963. While Barbara and Ian are overjoyed the Doctor is suspicious, but he grudgingly joins them and Vicky as they attend a church service; here they befriend an elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Robinson, who invite the four travellers to stay in their cottage for Christmas. After some festive fun and games, everyone retires to bed; all except Barbara, who investigates a noise in the living room, and is amazed to find her late father dressed as Father Christmas; the shock makes her faint… The next day, as Vicky happily checks the Christmas presents left in her stocking, Barbra recounts her experience, which the Robinsons dismiss as a dream. Then things get very odd: dinner is only a dry pudding, the crackers are filled with explosives, and there is an appearance from a real snap dragon and Frankenstein’s monster bearing gold and myrrh. Barbara then wakes in her bed in the TARDIS, where she has been in a shared-dream created by Vicki using the Doctor’s new machine. Vicky explains how she just wanted to give her friends a nice Christmas, but may have gotten some of her facts wrong. Barbara and Ian can’t bring themselves to be cross with Vicky, who only meant well; oddly, Ian still has a sixpence from his dream, while Barbara has the handkerchief she embroidered for him as a gift…

Notes:
*Featuring the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki

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'A Comedy of Terrors' by Colin Brake

Landing on the Royal Space Cruiser Starlight, the Doctor Jamie and Zoe are mistaken for travelling actors and roped in to a performance of Shakespeare’ pantomime ‘Much Ado About a Beanstalk’, to be given when they reach the planet Luxona. Zoe meets Princess Triana, who is visiting Luxona to collect the missing half of her royal pendant and her birth records, which she needs to ratify her overdue coronation as Queen of the Sita Federation of five planets. Meanwhile, the Jamie overhears the Queen Regent, the Lady Vaxene, being informed that her step-daughter’s records and pendant have gone missing, and the Doctor investigates the panto’s suspicious organiser, a fat, farty woman named Billie Butlins. Arriving on Luxona, the trio are taken to the capital city’s playhouse to begin rehearsals - and Jamie narrowly avoids death when someone deliberately tries dropping a stage light on him. During the performance - in which the Doctor is an ugly sister, Jamie a cook and Zoe the principle boy - the Doctor is approached in the wings by the costume supervisor, who gives him a golden egg. When the Doctor goes to meet the costumier during the interval, he, Jamie and Zoe discover that the man has been murdered by Billie, who is really an alien monster from the planet Raxicoricofallapatorius. Billie’s family, the Hanazeeen-Blathereen, have been strip-mining Luxona for years, but their operation is now under threat from the changes that Triana has promised to make when she becomes queen. Now unmasked, Billie attempts to kill the princess, but the Lady Vaxene intervenes, giving the Doctor and Zoe time to dispense with the creature using vinegar-laced custard pies. Luckily the audience think that the chase and attempted regicide were part of the performance, and Triana is overjoyed when the Doctor cracks open the golden egg to reveal the missing half of the royal pendant. As Triana makes plans for the Grand Christmas Ball, the time-travellers slip away in the TARDIS…

Notes:
*Featuring the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe

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'Christmas Inversion' by Jacqueline Rayner

When the Doctor receives a call for help from a mysterious woman, he uses the TARDIS to find her location in space and time, inadvertently bringing Captain Mike Yates along for the ride. When they arrive, the Doctor feels some of his Time Lord energy being drained, drawn away by a future self who is nearby and regenerating. Then a bossy woman named Jackie Tyler barges into the ship, who mistakes them for the Tenth Doctor, her daughter Rose and her friend Mickey; Jackie identifies the woman in the distress call as Prime Minister Harriet Jones, and explains how London is under threat from an alien spaceship that is hypnotising people into wanting to jump from the rooftops. Now believing the strangers to be alien Slitheen in disguise, Jackie runs off and hides in her flat; the Doctor and his colleagues, follow her, and after the Doctor has escaped the clutches of some killer mistletoe, Jo explains who they really are. Jackie tells them how UNIT’s secret HQ is now under the Tower of London, so the Doctor takes the TARDIS there to gain access to the PM; unfortunately, the jobsworth Beefeater on guard duty refuses to allow the Doctor and his party access, and by the time they finish arguing all the people standing on the rooftops have woken up and gotten to safety. Returning with Jackie to her flat, the Doctor, Jo and Mike find their old enemy, the Master, trussed up in the mistletoe; the renegade Time Lord confesses that he followed the Doctor and intended to strike an alliance with the invading aliens, the Sycorax, but then got captured by the mistletoe instead. The Doctor frees the Master, who then escapes in his TARDIS, which was disguised as Jackie’s fridge. As Jackie leaves to find the real Rose, the Doctor, Jo and Mike watch as the Sycorax spaceship flies off and then explodes. As they leave in the TARDIS, the Doctor assures Jo that he will never leave her, but he knows that she will one day fly the nest…

Notes:
*Featuring the Third Doctor, Jo and Captain Mike Yates, and Jackie Tyler *Time-placing: The TARDIS is working, placing this story after ‘The Three Doctors’; it also takes place during ‘The Christmas Invasion’

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'Three Wise Men' by Richard Dungsworth

On Christmas Eve, 1968, the crew of the Apollo 8 mission - Lieutenant Colonel William A. Anders, Colonel Frank Borman and Captain James A. Lovell Jr. - fulfil their mission to become the first manned spacecraft to orbit the Moon. After they each find a small package stamped with a UNIT logo secreted about their spacecraft, they then receive an unexpected visitor, in the guise of a strange man wearing a long scarf, who opens the main hatch from outside and invites them along an air corridor and into his police box. Inside is an impossibly large control room crammed with presents, which the man - the Doctor - explains he is distributing overnight as part of a bet with Santa. Taking each crewman’s mysterious package, the Doctor takes out some extra-terrestrial spare parts from UNIT’s collection (and some jelly babies) which he somehow arranged to be on the Apollo rocket so that he could repair his own space ship. Now engrossed in fixing his vessel, the Doctor sends the crewmen back to their own craft. Back aboard the Apollo rocket, Anders, Borman and Lovell find that time has reverted to when they first left their spaceship, and there is no sign of any blue box outside. The astronauts wisely decide to keep their experience to themselves, lest Mission Control think they have gone mad…

Notes:
*Featuring the Fourth Doctor

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'Sontar’s Little Helpers' by Mike Tucker

While calibrating his new TARDIS console on Christmas Eve, the Doctor detects a mayday signal; he pilots the ship to the source of the distress call, a fighter craft stranded near an icy planet, just as another vessel, a freighter, arrives in response to the call as well. Materialising aboard the cargo ship, the St. Nicholas, the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough are met by the robot in charge, P011Y, who explains that the fighter craft is empty and that its distress signal was on automatic. P011Y wants to leave immediately so that it can get its cargo to the human colonists on the remote planet Loen; however, before P011Y and his robot crew can depart, the freighter is boarded by Lieutenant Braast of the Sontaran gunship Apocalypse, which has just de-cloaked outside. After destroying P011Y, Braast scans the time-travellers and then threatens the Doctor and Tegan with death unless Turlough pilots the fighter craft against the Apocalypse in a battle to the death. Held captive by Sontaran robots, the Doctor tells Tegan that Braast has lured them there in order to prove his prowess in a rite of initiation, in what he thinks will be an easy battle; however, instead of fleeing, Turlough attacks the Sontaran’s ship, heavily damaging it. While the battle rages outside, Tegan causes a distraction, enabling the Doctor to use P011Y’s remains to create a link that overrides the Sontaran robots, including those operating Braast’s ship. After sending Braast back to his superiors in disgrace, the Doctor rewires the Sontaran robots so that they will take the St. Nicholas and its supplies to the colonists, just in time for Christmas.

Notes:
*Featuring the Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough *Time-placing: The Doctor is fine-tuning his new TARDIS console, placing this just after ‘The Five Doctors’

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'Fairy Tale of New New York' by Gary Russell

The Doctor’s mis-piloting of the TARDIS lands him and Mel inside The Abbey, a hospital spaceship crewed by the catkind Sisters of Plenitude. The Doctor and Mel encounter one of the feline humanoids, Novice Shed, who subjects then to decontamination and then sends them to the admin office. Exploring the ship, the two time-travellers find a ward of sick children, who mistake the Doctor for Santa Claus; while he entertains the children, the Doctor learns that the cat nuns have taken away four children who never returned. The new arrivals are met with disapproval by Charge Tarrow, who explains to Mel that the children have been taken away from New New York to life a life of simplicity, and then sends her and the Doctor and Mel under armed guard to meet the Abbess. Luckily, she turns out to be an old friend of the Doctor’s, former-Novice Ayesha, who explains that instead of eating the children, they are using them to synthesize an antihistamine to combat the allergic reaction to cats in order to improve the life of the population on New New Earth. Ayesha is puzzled as to why the children are scared, because she has kept their parents informed, so the Doctor and Mel explain how parents often forget to tell their children everything. Together they question Charge Tarrow about the missing children; the catkind guiltily explains that her kitlings are allergic to humans, so she has been secretly reverse-engineering the antihistamine to cure them. With the missing children reunited with the others, Ayesha promises to help Tarrow with her work, and the Doctor heads off with the children to organise a proper Christmas dinner for all…

Notes:
*Featuring the Sixth Doctor and Mel

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'The Grotto' by Mike Tucker

Having set the TARDIS in Earth orbit to show Ace the aurora borealis from space, the Doctor spots a spaceship plummeting out of control. The vessel is shot down by the American Air Defense, but an escape pod manages to eject and land on Earth. The Doctor and Ace locate the pod on the roof of Macy’s department store in New York, and search for its missing occupant. After hearing cries and a gunshot, Ace and the Doctor find themselves in an indoor forest of Christmas trees and fake snow; Ace comes across a security guard’s gun and a strange device, which the Doctor identifies as a neural inhibitor belonging to a Stellogratt, savage hunters enslaved by aliens called the K’Rin, and used as weapons in their war against the Elayyn. Realising that the missing security guard must have shot and damaged the implant, the Doctor sets off to track down the creature, while Ace goes to the perfumery to stock up on scents that will confuse the Stellogratt’s heightened sense of smell. The Doctor soon finds the creature, in a confused state and dressed as Father Christmas; after the injured creature stomps off, the Doctor enters the remains of the Christmas grotto and finds the missing security guard lying unconscious next to Santa’s chair. Waking the guard, the Doctor cautiously leads him back to the artificial forest; unfortunately, the silence is broken by a carol-singing janitor, causing the Stellogratt to return and capture them all. Hearing the creature’s roar, Ace rushes to the rescue; arriving just as the creature is about to eat the Doctor, Ace pelts it with bottles of perfume, their cloying smell overpowering the creature and rendering it unconscious. With the help of the guard and the janitor they take the Stellogratt back to the TARDIS, so the Doctor can fix its implant and then take it home.

Notes:
*Featuring the Seventh Doctor and Ace

*Time-placing: Ace wants a new baseball bat, so I'm placing this after ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’, in season Twenty-Five

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'Ghost of Christmas Past' by Scott Handcock

Escaping from a temporal disturbance caused by the Time War, the Doctor drops the TARDIS out of the vortex and ends up in a temporal orbit around Earth on the last second of Christmas Eve. Frustrated at being stuck in a time-loop inside a stalled TARDIS for the rest of eternity, the Doctor is surprised by a knock at the door; no-one is there, but then the Doctor finds a Christmas card for him on the ship’s console. A ghostly presence leads him through the TARDIS, passing the abandoned rooms of his former companions, and when the Doctor finally returns to the console room he finds it awash with lights, and a present labelled with his name in Old High Gallifreyan. Inside is a Time Lord hypercube containing a message from his grand-daughter Susan, sent centuries ago after she left to raise a family with David Campbell on Earth; the message gives the Doctor hope, which in turn spurs the TARDIS to break free of the time loop. Wondering if the TARDIS did this deliberately to make him think of the good times he once had, the Doctor sets the controls for his next adventure…

Notes:
*Featuring the Eighth Doctor

*Time-placing: This story takes place during the Time War

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'The Red Bicycle' by Gary Russell

After Rose changes history by leaving a record in her mother’s room in 1977, a ‘Stranglers’ album that Jackie was never allowed to own, the Doctor comes to question the principles of altering established time. He decides to nip back in time to Christmas 1998, intending to sneak into the Tylers’ flat in the Powell Estate and leave the young Rose a Christmas Gift that she always wanted but never got, a red bicycle. Unfortunately, the bike is stolen, forcing the Doctor to run through the Camberwell streets as the thief rides away. However, just as the boy evades the Doctor’s clutches he is stopped by a huge metal man, who steals the bike from him and then disappears in a flash of light. When the boy tells the Doctor about the loss of the stolen bike, the Time Lord sets off to find the culprit. By using the TARDIS to track the energy signature of the teleport beam, the Doctor traces the thief to a scrap yard in the Andromeda Galaxy; it is run by a dodgy cyborg called Jinko, who has a giant, customised metal body made of junk, and who wants revenge for a previous disagreement between them. On entering the scrap yard the Doctor encounters a trio of Elian thugs; by using the junk around them the Doctor ably deals with the goons, and soon comes face-to-metal-face with the angry Jinko. Tricking the huge cyborg into dropping the stolen bicycle, the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to topple some piles of scrap metal, causing them to fall like dominoes. Leaving a furious Jinko to deal with the ensuing chaos, the Doctor pedals off on Rose’s bike, and makes his escape in the TARDIS. On Christmas Day, Rose is delighted with her new red bicycle from father Christmas, while Jackie wonders who actually gave it to her…

Notes:
*Featuring the Ninth Doctor

*Time-placing: Rose’s interest in changing history eventually culminates in the disastrous events of ‘Father’s Day’

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'Loose Wire' by Richard Dungsworth

When Alice Wu tries out her new Christmas present of a smartphone, she is surprised to receive a call from her heart-throb, singer Justin Bieber. But Justin acts very oddly, and attempts to drain Alice’s life force through the phone; luckily Alice is saved by the sudden arrival of a stranger in her room, who zaps her phone with a silver device before Justin can hurt her. Discovering that the creature attacking Alice has escaped her phone, the stranger asks the girl if anything was connected via its Bluetooth connection; realising that her brother’s speaker could have connected, Alice takes the stranger to her brother’s room, where a quick rummage in teenage mess reveals the device, now crackling with alien energy. When the creature attacks the stranger, draining his energy and pulling off his face, Alice grabs the man’s silver device and blows up the speaker. The stranger - the Doctor - explains that the alien is an executed alien predator called the Wire, which feeds on the electrical activity of its victims’ brains. Racing downstairs, Alice is horrified to find her parents and gran sitting in front of their new smart TV, their faces erased by the Wire’s latest attack. The Wire escapes through wireless connection to the sat-nav in Alice’s mum’s car; the Doctor and Alice manage to get inside the vehicle as the Wire drives it away, but are unable to gain control of it. During the ensuing frightening journey, the Doctor explains that he had trapped the Wire on an old Betamax tape, but inadvertently released it while looking for his favourite Christmas movie. Recalling her mother’s Walkman in the glove compartment, Alice provide the Doctor with the means to trap the Wire again: by plugging in the cassette player the Doctor is able to record the alien onto a tape of ‘Cliff at Christmas’. Gaining control of the car, the Doctor takes them back to his ship, the TARDIS, where he retrieves the neuro-electrical identities of the Wire’s victims and returns them to their bodies via the Net. Her family restored to normal, and her old phone given an upgrade courtesy of the Doctor, Alice enjoys a Christmas dinner with her new friend, and together they watch his favourite film, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’…

Notes:
*Featuring the Tenth Doctor

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'The Gift' by Scott Handcock

Young Maisie Thompson stays up on Christmas Eve to see Santa. After she and her mother are visited by some carol singers, they meet a strange young man called the Doctor, who invites himself into their house on the pretence of looking for an alien creature called a Lengo. They quickly find the mischievous little imp in Maisy’s room, gleefully making a mess. The Doctor sedates it with his sonic screwdriver, which he then uses to reopen the wormhole to its home planet of Lengos Four, which brought it to Earth in the first place. After depositing the Lengo back home, the Doctor closes the wormhole and leaves; however, on his way back to the TARDIS he sees Maisie sitting glumly by her window. Climbing up the drainpipe to Maisie’s bedroom, the Doctor learns that the Lengo stole some of the Thomspson’s Christmas presents; he resolves to retrieve them, and, after reopening the wormhole, he and Maisie make their way through the Lengos’ beautiful town on the trail of the offending creature. Arriving at the Lengo’s house, the Doctor astounds Maisy by speaking to the creature in his own language; when the Lengo hears that he took items that were special to Maisy and her mother, he realises his mistake, and apologetically returns the items. Maisie forgives the Lengo, and gives him one of her presents to cheer him up, before she goes back home with the Doctor… Thirty-four years later, Maisie Hussain meets the Doctor again, looking exactly as he did back on that mad Christmas. He tells her that her act of kindness caused the Lengo to spread the gift of giving amongst his people, and now the whole planet has united in their own version of Christmas. When the Doctor offers Maisie the change to revisit the Lengos’ world to see for herself, she grabs her husband and children, and they all set off in the TARDIS…

Notes:
*Featuring the Eleventh Doctor

*Time-placing: The Doctor is wearing his outfit first seen in ‘The Bells of St. John’, so I'm placing this story during the second half of Season Thirty-Three

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	'The Persistence of Memory' by Colin Brake

When the Doctor travels back to Christmas Eve, 1979 to buy a packet of Spangles, his anachronistic behaviour draws attention of a young boy named CJ, who follows him into the TARDIS. Seeing the boy’s inquisitiveness, the Doctor agrees to take him on one trip through time and space; CJ is interested in mysteries, so they eventually settle on a visit to Loch Ness. Here they meet Robbie, one of a team of amateur Nessie Hunters, who claims to have a photo of Nessie that was recently taken by a colleague. To their surprise, a giant monster explodes up out of the Loch, which CJ identifies as a Plesiosaurus. But Robbie gets to close and falls into the water – just as the dinosaur disappears in a flash of light. Having rescued Robbie, the Doctor returns to the TARDIS with CJ, where he uses the ship’s controls to determine that the dinosaur was removed with a Time Scoop, which is located inside a spaceship on the bottom of the Loch. Materialising the TARDIS aboard the alien ship, the Doctor and CJ set off to find the person responsible. After evading a couple of sentry robots, the Doctor leaves CJ in hiding while he explores; but CJ is drawn to the screens of the Time Scoop, which show scenes of the past and future, and is then captured by the machine’s owner, a peculiar, jolly man dressed in mismatched clothes. The Doctor arrives and berates the man for his irresponsible action of dropping a dinosaur into Loch Ness, only to discover that he is an old foe of his: Mortimus, the Meddling Monk. The renegade Time Lord orders his robots to take the Doctor and CJ to the cells, but the sentries grab him instead, having been reprogrammed by the Doctor. Under guard, Mortimus confesses that he found the spaceship in the distant future, and planned to use its Time Scoop to depopulate the Earth and then put it up for sale. After locating Mortimus’ TARDIS, which is disguised as a wardrobe, the Doctor fetches a Memory Worm from his own ship, which he uses to wipe the Monk’s memories. Having sent the amnesiac Monk off in his TARDIS, the Doctor orders the robots to dispose of the spaceship by piloting it into the sun. The Doctor returns CJ to 1979, and uses his Time Lord powers to cloud the boy’s memories of recent events. However, that night, as CJ goes to bed, he finds his notebook filled with details about the TARDIS, the Doctor and their Loch Ness adventure. The young Clive J Finch decides to start a scrapbook about the Doctor – an obsession that will be with him for the rest of his life, until the fateful day he meets Rose Tyler…

Notes:
*Featuring the Twelfth Doctor

*Time-placing: Clara is off at an end-of-term Christmas party, so I’m placing this just before ‘Last Christmas’

*The origin story of Clive, who first appeared in ‘Rose’, the first episode of Twenty-First Century ‘Doctor Who’. He ran a website about the Doctor as well. Does that sound familiar??

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Publication Date:
July 2016

Notes:
*Published by Penguin for BBC Books