"What If...?" The Trial of a Time-Lord

The Trial of a Time Lord has a reputation of being a bit of a mess, and we know there was certainly well-documented turmoil behind the scenes, but what would you have done differently if you'd been running the show? Well, here's my fantasy take on it... 

(14 x 25 minute episodes)

Parts 1 - 2: Mission to Magnus by Phillip Martin

 
The trial begins, with the Doctor accused of causing deaths contrary to the web of time, and the Valeyard opens the evidence with his first witness, the Mentor Sil, who recounts a tale of how the Doctor interfered in a scheme of his which he claims would have benefitted the world of Magnus, and he claims the Doctor caused the deaths of the Ice Warriors there.
based on the story by Philip Martin intended for the original, cancelled, season 23

Parts 3 - 4: The Horror of Peladon by Johnny Byrne
(What if they'd decided to do a Peladon story? Johnny Byrne seemed to be the go-to guy to bring back old set-ups. Look at The Keeper of Traken, Arc of Infinity & Warriors of the Deep. Sadly Brian Hayles couldn't have written another Peladon/Ice Warrior story as he'd passed away by the time of Trial's production).

 
The Doctor rebutts Sil's evidence by calling the Grand Marshall of Mars to recount a tale where in fact he helped the Ice Warriors - a third peladon story.

Parts 5 - 6: Paradise Five by PJ Hammond

The Valeyard uses a story of the Doctor and Peri investigating a luxury space cruiser where powerful aliens disguised as angels are abducting humans - and posits that the Doctor interfered in events and allowed people to live that should have died...
based on the story developed for Trial by PJ Hammond, eventually replaced by Terror of the Vervoids

Parts 7 - 8: The Nightmare Fair by Graham Williams

The Doctor rebutts this by giving another example of a powerful being threatening humans - the Celestial Toymaker - and how it was his duty as a Time-Lord to prevent people being taken out of time by such a being.
based on Graham Williams' story for the original season 23.

Parts 9 - 10: Yellow Fever by Robert Holmes

The Valeyard calls some rather disreputable witnesses: the Master and the Rani, who tell a story of how the Doctor altered the web of time by preventing the Autons from invading Earth. The Doctor is able to call Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart to point out that the Autons would not have attempted such a plan without the Master and the Rani's help. During this story, Peri decides to remain on Earth, and a UNIT computer expert, Mel, joins the Doctor instead.
based on the story idea by Robert Holmes for the original season 23.

 

Parts 11 - 12: Retribution of the Daleks by Terry Nation

A final, surprise witness has asked to give evidence in support of the Doctor - Davros! He wishes to put on record that the Doctor had the chance to eradicate the Daleks (i.e. in Genesis) but did not; and he suggests that the Time Lords themselves, through their attempt to wipe out the Daleks, are far more guilty of the crimes of which they accuse the Doctor. Of course, this is all a ruse - given safe passage to Gallifrey to appear at the Trial, Davros has paved the way for a Dalek Invasion, and there's a bigger shock for the Doctor - the true identity of Davros' ally, the Valeyard...
complete fabrication this one! Davros would have been a great witness, and I just liked the idea that Genesis of the Daleks is actually a counter-argument to the charge of Genocide. Terry Nation? Why not, though probably more likely any Dalek story of this time would have been written by Eric Saward. 

 

Parts 13 - 14: Gallifrey by Robert Holmes

 
 
The aftermath - Gallifrey has been destroyed by the Daleks, with the few surviving Time-Lords banding together on their space station. The Doctor forms an unholy alliance with the Master and the Rani in order to track down and trap the Valeyard. Only by defeating him can they restore Gallifrey. Things don't go according to plan though, and the Time-lord spacestation is damaged, with the Valeyard attempting to crash it into the Earth (just to spite the Doctor). The Doctor knows if he can merge with the Valeyard, he will absorb him and regenerate, and hopefully negate his dark side. But what will the resulting new Doctor - the 7th - be like...?
drawn from elements of a vague story outline called Gallifrey given to Pip & Jane Baker, but adding a more modern-style 'series finale' with the Doctor and the Valeyard going head to head, and a self-sacrifice from the 6th Doctor that would not have been intended at the time i.e. because there was not meant to be a regeneration. This version of the ending is designed to still segue back into the 1987 of the real world... although Time and the Rani may have been a bit different...

 

THE END...?

Feature: 6B or Not 6B?

Steven Moffat’s only gone and done it again.

First we had the mystery of what to call 2010’s series – Series Five? Series One? Season 31? Our Moffat’s own (less than serious) suggestion “Series Fnarg”? The history of the great internet flame wars has, thankfully, been lost, hidden amongst the great broken URLs in the digital ether.

Fnarg+1 we could just about get our heads around, but Moffat and his sinister BBC overlords then saw fit to snap the 2011 series in two, with seven episodes in the Spring and the remaining six in the Autumn.

Most folk of a sensible disposition (TV viewers, 2|entertain and the rest of us non-editors of DWM alike – I kid, I kid) have continued numbering the series where RTD left off, so Matt Smith’s debut series is by and large referred to as Series Five, and his second would sensibly enough be referred to as Series Six. But what have we here? Series Six “A” and Series Six “B”?

Well, we can’t be having that, can we? As any anorak hiding in the mid Nineties Who closet knows, we’ve already HAD a Season 6b, and it starred Patrick Troughton – whether he knew it or not...

You see, not everything in Doctor Who makes sense. No, really.  Only to be expected in a show sailing past fifty with gay abandon (no, not agenda!), but – and you may have noticed this – Doctor Who’s memory isn’t quite what it once was.  In fact, Doctor Who’s memory was never all that to begin with.

As early as December 1972, a mere three and a half years after we’d seen Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor giddily spinning to his supposed death at the conclusion of The War Games, continuity went for a burton as the cosmic hobo himself happily explained to his dandified Pertwee alter ego that he’d popped up in the TARDIS to help him defeat Omega at the behest of the Time-Lords in the tenth anniversary story The Three Doctors.

Come again? The same Time-Lords that, the first time they got hold of him, sentenced him to death (well, regeneration, which is pretty much the same thing) and exile to Earth?  Well how the ruddy hell could that be right? Of course, we got the lines about lifting the Doctors from their time streams and all that, but what does this actually mean? It’s not clear, is it?

Needless to say the Doctors triumph and the Second and First Doctors are returned to their relevant time streams, meaning that the whole thing can just be overlooked as a bit of harmless anniversary fun.  That is, until the next bit of harmless anniversary fun rocks the boat even further.

In The Five Doctors, Terrance Dicks, who really should know better after having co-written The War Games and script-edited The Three Doctors, gives us a Second Doctor who can not only steer his TARDIS to the Brigadier’s reunion party but knows that Jamie and Zoe had their memories of him erased after they were returned to their own times at the conclusion of Troughton’s swan song.

Now that just can’t be right at all, can it?  After all, we know, don’t we, that immediately after said memory tinkering, the Time Lords popped Troughton in a blender and whisked him off to face the Autons, ably assisted by Liz Shaw and the good old Brigadier.  The only way he can possibly know about Jamie and Zoe’s memory-mangling is if he didn’t, in fact, immediately regenerate, and something else happened between the end of The War Games and the disabled TARDIS’ arrival on Earth in Spearhead from Space.

But here’s the thing.  Obviously something’s happened in the interim, because the newly regenerated Third Doctor is in the TARDIS, when we last saw the spinning Second Doctor outside it.  He’s also in possession of a ring, a bracelet, and a watch which homes in on the TARDIS, none of which he had at the close of The War Games.

Things become a little clearer, and the same time more confused, in The Two Doctors, when the Sixth Doctor encounters the Second.  This time around, it’s even more obvious that continuity’s gone on holiday and forgotten to cancel the milk – the story begins with a visibly aged Second Doctor, sporting a silver variation of his usual Beatles moptop do, inside a TARDIS console room that is clearly not a version he’s ever been seen to use before, accompanied by an older Jamie McCrimmon, chatting merrily about missions for the Time-Lords, steering the TARDIS and claiming to have recently dropped Victoria off to study graphology.  His altered TARDIS even has a recall device and is dually controlled by the Time-Lords.

All of which is entirely at odds with everything we thought we knew at the conclusion of The War Games.  Continuity snafu or something altogether more sinister?

Well, okay, it’s clearly the former, but those wilderness years of the nineties gave rise to some of the very wankiest of fanwnak, don’t you know.  To account for all these continuity discrepancies surrounding the Second Doctor, Paul Cornell proposed the “Season 6B theory” in 1995’s “The Discontinuity Guide” (co-written with Martin Day and Keith Topping).

Steven Moffat has been quoted as saying a show about time travel can never have an official continuity – even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff, but in the nineties, continuity was all we had, so Season 6B and its’ ilk were very much the order of the day.

The theory goes that rather than undergoing a regeneration at the end of The War Games, the Second Doctor was recruited to work for the Celestial Intervention Agency, a branch of the Time Lords, first mentioned in 1976’s The Deadly Assassin.

During this time, the Second Doctor is allowed to regain Jamie McCrimmon (and possibly Victoria Waterfield – more on her in a bit) as a companion, is given a Stattenheim remote control device for his TARDIS, and undertakes an unknown number of missions, including the one in The Two Doctors.

Then, presumably after the Doctor has gone against their wishes or tried once more to escape them, the Time Lords carry out their original sentence and force him to regenerate as well as exiling him to Earth, with Jamie’s (and Victoria’s) fate unknown.  They are obviously no longer with him when he arrives on Earth in Spearhead from Space with a convenient amount of memory loss meaning that the Third Doctor does not, in fact, remember this period.

All good and fanwanky, but in fact not only does it not stop there, it didn’t even start there…

Season 6B might not have been fully fanwanked into existence in the months following broadcast of The War Games, but the pages of TV Comic (TVC #916) saw the Second Doctor, having in fact escaped from the Time Lords before they could complete his sentence of a forced change of appearance, and fled to Earth for further adventures, arrive in London without his TARDIS and base himself at the swanky Carlton Grange Hotel for a further five stories.

These culminate in The Night Walkers (TVC #934-#936), in which the Doctor investigates walking scarecrows, who, it transpires have been animated by the Time Lords to capture him.  The scarecrows take him into the TARDIS and proceed to trigger his regeneration, leading directly into Spearhead from Space.

 

These scarecrows get a brief mention in Big Finish’s alternate timeline “Unbound” tale, Exile, and Cornell later employed a variation of the Scarecrows when RTD informed him that the televised version of his Virgin New Adventure Human Nature was lacking a suitable monster.

 

The  BBC’s own Doctor Who website uses excerpts both from The Discontinuity Guide and The Television Companion by David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker, and them mentioning  Season 6B on their own site could be taken as the BBC lending some legitimacy to the theory, but perhaps the real seal of approval has come from one of the people that left the door ajar in the first place.

Never one to pass up a good idea that wasn’t necessarily his good idea, Terrance Dicks himself turned out the novel Players,  in which the Sixth Doctor and Peri encounter not only Winston Churchill, but the sinister eponymous “Players”, and the Doctor shows Peri an incident from his past, one in which the Second Doctor, at the conclusion of The War Games, insists that the Time Lords show him that they have returned Earth’s history to normality and let him travel via Time Ring to visit with Lady Jennifer and Lieutenant Carstairs. After doing so, they discuss with him that he has work to do.

Dicks then goes the whole hog with World Game, and gives us the first fully fledged, self-consciously Season 6B tale.

In World Game, Dicks shows us that the Celestial Intervention Agency required an operative who could discreetly investigate temporal disturbances but could also be disavowed, and therefore approached the Doctor and the Time Lord High Council, proposing that the Doctor's sentence of death and exile be commuted if he becomes their agent.

The portion of Players, in which the Doctor is sent via time ring to 1915 France, is a test of this arrangement, with World Game seeing him subsequently given a Type 97 TARDIS and a supervisor/companion in the politically ambitious Time Lady Serena. Although their relationship is at first antagonistic, over the course of the mission they come to respect one another and Serena eventually sacrifices herself for the Doctor's principles.

The Doctor, having learned enough of Gallifreyan politics from her to negotiate with the CIA, is able to demand the return of his TARDIS and Jamie. They agree, giving him the Stattenheim remote control seen in The Two Doctors, and fitting the TARDIS with an override to give them ultimate control.  Dicks even explains that Victoria was never on board the TARDIS at this point; Jamie's memories have been altered again so that he only believes Victoria is away studying graphology, thus leading into the events of The Two Doctors.

So it’s during this Season 6B period that the Doctor takes time off to visit the Brigadier at a UNIT reunion in The Five Doctors, thus being aware of Jamie and Zoe's return to their own people, and regales him with a reminiscence about creatures that were “covered with hair, [and] used to hop like kangaroos”.  This actually tallies with the description he gives of the Medusoids, whom he mentions in Frontier in Space, as having detained him whilst he was on the way to a peace conference – presumably at the behest of the Time-Lords.

Although The Two Doctors shows us the Doctor and Jamie in a console room similar in style to that seen in the latter part of the Fourth Doctor’s life, and the early part of the Fifth’s, Sarah Jane Smith's discovery of the second Doctor's recorder in the wooden control room (referred to by him as “the old one”) in The Masque of Mandragora indicates that this console room was also used during this period.

The trouble with this control room, the Doctor tells Sarah, was that he was never in control of where the TARDIS landed, tying in with the idea that it was the Time-Lords dictating his whereabouts.

Since Dicks, the man who created the discontinuity in the first place, embraced it, it has given rise to further short stories appearing in Big Finish’s since deleted “Short Trips” series, including The Time Eater, All of Beyond, That Time I Nearly Destroyed the World whilst Looking for a Dress, Mother’s Little Helper, Scientific Adviser, Reunion, Dust, The Steward’s Story, Golem, Blue Road Dance, and The Man Who (Nearly) Killed Christmas, as well as the acclaimed Companion Chronicle audio play, Helicon Prime.

This tale sees Fraser Hines recant a tale from the point of view of Jamie McCrimmon, whilst at the same time turning in a spooky impersonation of the late, great Patrick Troughton, rivalled only by the once Doctor’s own son David, and takes the work laid down by Cornell and Dicks and gives it the legs to run and run by bringing Season 6B to audible life.

So what of the second Season 6B, the one that picks up where A Good Man Goes to War left off with the loveably bonkers serving suggestion of Let’s Kill Hitler, Mark Gatiss’ Night Terrors, Toby Whithouse’s The God Complex, Tom MacRae’s “most accomplished piece of plotting ever” (his words), Gareth Roberts’ almost sequel to 2010’s The Lodger, and Steven Moffat’s own brain twisting series finale?

Will we, in years to come,  have uncle Terry’s Futurama-style head-in-a-jar writing fanwanky tales of the ganger Doctor battling Madame Kovarian and the Silence to rid the universe of all things "gween"?

Well, perhaps not, but seeing as World Game has already shown us a Second Doctor employing some psychic paper, maybe it’s only a matter of time until we’re leafing our way through The Fourteen Doctors, in which the Silence pay a visit to Coal Hill School in 1963 and persuade two teachers that there’s something a bit odd about Susan Foreman, with the Time-Lords dispatching the silver-haired Second Doctor to convince them that the only way to get their oddly misshapen hands on a space suit is to shoot for the moon…

 

It couldn’t get much more fanwanky than that… Could it?

TTFN! K.

Fiction: THE WALLABY AND THE MERMAID

On a deserted moorland track, a battered looking blue box announced its’ arrival with a scratching, roaring, wheeze, and in another dimension both far away, and very close indeed, two friends peered at a screen, and looked out across that misty moor.

“Oh great, Doctor,” said Peri Brown, rolling her eyes at the rather damp looking expanse of rough turf. “You’ve only gone and landed us in the middle of nowhere!”

“My dear, Peri,” breathed the Doctor, “the middle of nowhere is precisely where I intended to land us!”

Peri stuck out her tongue childishly. “Yeah, right!”

“Believe it or not, Peri,” said the Doctor, fiddling with the controls on the console, “unless I am very much mistaken, this is the Staffordshire moorlands, and not too far away from this very spot, there lies a great treasure!”

Peri blinked in disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”

“I assure you I am,” the Doctor said, raising his eyebrows in mock indignation.

Peri snorted. “Okay, well... what treasure?”

The Doctor seemed to calm, and he beamed at her “It’s ancient Anglo-Saxon gold. Worth millions of ‘dollerz’ in your time, let me tell you, and a fine hoard, fit for a king.”

Peri nodded, her interest actually piqued, and turned to glance at the scanner screen.  A shape bounced across the screen and was gone. “Doctor!” she exclaimed.

“Mmm?” he murmured absent-mindedly.

“Doctor!” she repeated, “I saw something, out there!”

The Doctor looked up. “What sort of something?”

“Well, you’re gonna think I’m completely bonkers...” she began.

“Perish the thought!” he muttered.

She went on. “It looked like, I mean, I think it was... a kangaroo? Or.. or, a wallaby? It was smaller than a kangaroo, I think it was a wallaby!”

The Doctor huffed. “On the Staffordshire Moorlands? Highly unlikely; must have been a trick of the light.”

The Doctor could see form her troubled expression that Peri was even doubting herself that it could have been what she thought.

“Nevertheless,” he blustered, hurrying to repair any damage to her confidence he may have inadvertently inflicted, “you saw something move, and out here – in the middle of nowhere – it could be someone that’s got lost on the moor and needs our assistance. Let’s take a look, shall we? Fetch a coat, and we’ll see which we find first, some treasure or your wallaby!”

Out on the moor, there was no sign of the wallaby, nor of anyone else, and although Peri felt sheepish, the Doctor insisted that they look and strode off into the mists. Peri struggled to keep up, but at least she was ever so slightly out of earshot of the Doctor’s unsolicited lecture about Anglo Saxon gold. As if she cared. God, he reminded her of Howard when he started off on his big speeches about the historical importance of some piece of beat up old junk.

She had all but convinced herself that there had been nothing on the screen after all when , losing her footing slightly, she found herself stumbling forward, landing on her knees, and face to face with the wallaby.

She stopped herself from calling out, even though she could tell that the Doctor had completely failed to notice that she was no longer following him and was probably halfway across the moor, still gassing on about some king’s bracelets or whatever. The wallaby didn’t seem remotely flustered. It stood there, blinked, chewed a bit of grass and then hopped off. She took a step to follow it, and it took a bigger jump, in the opposite direction to the one the Doctor had taken.

“Oh, great!” she complained. She looked over her shoulder and called out to the Doctor, but the wallaby was getting away again, and the Doctor didn’t seem to be coming. She didn’t want to lose the wallaby, but she didn’t want to end up lost on the moor either. “Thanks a bunch, Doctor,” she said.

As fast as she could run on the uneven ground, the wallaby was at a natural advantage hopping from one bump in the ground to the next, and it soon raced out of her sight. She started to wonder if she could retrace her steps when out of the mist there loomed a rocky outcrop. Something about it wasn’t quite right, as if someone had been playing domino rally with Stone Henge and the stones had all collapsed together in a higgledy piggledy pile..

Peri shrugged. Well, it looked like there was probably a cave of sorts that was quite a likely hidey hole for the wallaby, and if it wasn’t there, then maybe she could get higher on the rocks and get a view across the moor. If she could just spy the TARDIS and get her bearings, things wouldn’t be so bad.

She gave herself a decisive nod and headed into the cave mouth. The rocks were damp and mossy, and she could hear the lapping of water, so there must have been a pool of rain water collecting somewhere inside. There was no wallaby to be seen, but this cave seemed to be going on forever, and she started to worry that she was actually heading underground. That couldn’t be right, though, there was light at the end of this particular rocky tunnel.

Finally, she came to the other end, and found herself in what she assumed must be the centre of the outcrop. As she’d guessed, the centre was completely open, and there was a large pool of water there. She doubted it was very deep, but it was a lot bigger than she thought would have been possible. Never mind, she thought, absent-mindedly kicking a stone into the pool as she contemplated climbing up to get a view across the moor. The stone sank without trace, and Peri frowned to herself. Just how deep could that pool be?

She edged closer, and as she stared at the ripples and bubbles, a dark shape began to form where her reflection should have been....

Not as far away as Peri seemed to think, the Doctor had come across some help at last, in the form of two very helpful hikers; a young couple who had asked him a question that he thought rather bizarre, but that was just about to make perfect sense to Peri.

“A mermaid?” the Doctor spluttered. “On the moor? Not possible.  I like a local legend as much as the next person, but the one thing I know about mermaids is that I don’t expect to find them on dry land!” He looked down at his rather soggy spats. “Well, damp land.”

“There’s a pool,” Jeff said, “kind of like a lagoon.”

Carol nodded, “the legend says that the mermaid appears every Easter like some sort of rite of spring, and grants eternal life to whoever can swim to the bottom of the pool and reach the treasure there.”

The Doctor was still sceptical. “Any inland collection of water around these parts would be very shallow indeed.” Then his brow wrinkled. “But if there were an Anglo-Saxon burial mound and the top had fallen in or been eroded, it could perhaps have flooded and the treasure interred there might be at the bottom of a collection of water. There’s always an explanation for these local legends.” He shook himself out of his musing. “So you say you think you know where this pool must be?”

As Carol and Jeff pointed across the moor in the direction of a dark hump in the mist, the Doctor chuckled to himself. Bouncing around in the distance, plain as day, there was Peri’s wallaby.

Peri herself had almost completely forgotten about the wallaby. Okay, you didn’t expect to see a wallaby on an English moor, but at least wallabies are real, right? What you’d expect even less would be to see a mythological creature anywhere at all. Well, anywhere on this planet, anyway.

The woman that had emerged from the pool slithered across to the side of the pool, all the while piercing Peri’s eyes with her stare. The air was still and Peri felt a curious tingling, like goosebumps, but she wasn’t cold.  The only thought in her head was that she had gone mad. Even now, even after seeing all those worlds and all those creatures, she still couldn’t believe what she was seeing. It was a mermaid. That was the only thing she could be. Half woman, half fish, tail and everything. That’s a mermaid, right?

“Hello?” Peri called. “Can you understand me? My name’s Peri – Peri Brown.”

The mermaid opened her mouth, but not to answer. As her watery lips parted, a strange music filled the air. It was a singing of sorts, but the sound that came out was a million miles away from the sound of a human voice. In a funny way it reminded her of that noise you get when you rub your finger round the top of a wet wine glass, a piercing high noted ringing that sounds like a thousand glasses all breaking in perfect harmony.

There were no words to the song, but Peri realised that as she looked into the Mermaid’s eyes, and listened to the sound that a message was there.

“Bring me the treasure from the bottom of the pool, and I will reward you with eternal life.”

Something nagged at the back of Peri’s mind. Why couldn’t the mermaid get the treasure for herself? After all, she had come from inside the pool. That seemed quite strange, but it didn’t seem in the slightest bit strange that she found herself taking off her shoes and socks and wading into the water.

“Your friend has lived many lifetimes, and will live many lifetimes more. He is a lord of time but your time with him will be but the blink of an eye, and you will fade and die.”

How did the mermaid know about the Doctor? Was she reading her mind? Inside her head somehow? She took a breath and plunged beneath the surface of the water.

“If you bring me the treasure, I will reward you with eternal life and you need never be parted.”

Mentally, Peri shrugged. Forever’s a long time, she thought, diving down, down, down. Hey, she’d go so far as to say the Doctor was her best friend, but did she really want to spend forever with him? She was in no hurry to leave him, but hadn’t she always envisioned a life after the Doctor? When she’s, y’know, settle down, have kids, all that stuff you’re supposed to do?

“It’s right at the bottom of the pool. Deeper, Peri, deeper.”

And then, as hard as she was swimming downwards, she felt a huge dark shape pulling her upwards. She tried to swim down, but she was going the wrong way, further and further upwards.

The next thing she knew, she was gasping for breath at the side of the pool, staring up at a lumbering sodden shape, that – with those colours – could only have been one thing. “Doctor!” she gasped, spluttering for breath.

The Doctor rounded on the Mermaid, who had slunk back into her pool. “Yes, you’d better leave right now, Madam, and you had better not return.”

She sunk lower, so that only her eyes and the top of her head were showing above the water’s surface. “ You won’t be luring anyone else to a watery death ever again,” the Doctor growled.  The Saxon hoard isn’t here; it never was. It’s in a field about twenty miles from here, and even now, a farmer out walking his dog has just spotted something glimmering in the ground.”

The mermaid’s eyes glowed with anger.

“I don’t know what your business here is,” the Doctor said, scooping Peri up in his arms, “but you’ll never get your treasure, and no one will ever come here looking for it again.”

The mermaid hissed, and vanished beneath the surface.

“Come on, Peri,” said the Doctor gently. “I know a lovely little inn nearby that has a roaring log fire!”

An hour or so later, and nicely drying out, Peri looked at the Doctor sheepishly. “We never did find the wallaby, did we?”

The Doctor smiled. “I’ve just been speaking to the landlord, and it turns out that the legend of the mermaid isn’t the only local tall tale about these parts. Apparently, back in the 1930s, a group of wallabies escaped from a private zoo, and made it out onto the moor.”

Peri couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Seriously? But... how long do wallabies live? I mean...”

The Doctor shrugged. “Well, I suppose it’s possible that they could have survived on the moors and gone on to breed, but you know, I can’t help wondering who took the gold from the mermaid’s pool and buried it across the moor, and how the wallaby might have lived for over fifty years out on the moor...”

Peri shook her head. “That’s ridiculous. I mean, Wallabies can’t... can’t swim, can’t dive... although, if the gold was there before the pool... Oh, come on, Doctor, that’s crazy!”

The Doctor folded his arms behind his head and stretched out his legs. “Oh, of course, of course. It does make for a rather good local legend, though.”

THE END