Chapter Text
Episode 1: Adric
Adric Paul is a university student in modern-day London. In the basement of the shop where Adric works part-time, plastic mannequins begin to attack him. A man who calls himself the Doctor rescues him and they flee the building, which the Doctor blows up.
The next morning, the Doctor reappears at the flat Adric shares with his older brother, Varsh. He says he’s tracking down a mannequin arm that Adric took with him, disabling it before it can attack Adric. Adric tries to get explanations from the Doctor about the strange goings on; the Doctor won’t explain, and orders Adric to forget about him.
The next day, Adric and his brother visit a man named Clive who runs a conspiracy theory website, concerning a man fitting the Doctor’s description, who has appeared throughout history. While Adric is talking to Clive, Varsh is replaced by a plastic duplicate.
Adric meets the Doctor a third time, where he reveals Varsh to be an Auton. He and Adric locate the Nestene Consciousness which controls the Autons and has been using the London Eye as a transmitter. At this point, Auton mannequins come alive and start killing other people. Adric saves the Doctor and those that the Autons are killing.
The Doctor thanks Adric and leaves in his space and time machine called the TARDIS. He takes off, leaving Earth and heading to the year five billion. When he lands at his next destination, he realizes that Adric snuck aboard and came with him. Adric runs out of the TARDIS to see the future, and the Doctor follows.
Excerpt 1: Adric
Living plastic. Thought control. Overthrow the human race. Everything the Doctor was telling him should seem ridiculous. But…
“Do you believe me?” the Doctor asked nonchalantly.
“Yes,” Adric said without thinking, because, well, it was true, wasn’t it?
That seemed to unbalance the Doctor more than anything Adric had seen yet, including the explosion. “Why, though? You don’t know me.”
Adric frowned. “Tell me, then. Who are you?”
A pause. “Do you know like we were saying about the Earth revolving? It's like when you were a kid. The first time they tell you the world's turning and you just can't quite believe it because everything looks like it's standing still. I can feel it. The turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at —“
“A thousand miles an hour,” Adric finished.
“Yes,” the Doctor said, getting excited, taking Adric’s soft hand in his own calloused one. “And the entire planet is hurtling round the sun — how fast?”
“Sixty-seven thousand miles an hour,” Adric rattled off. His heart skipped a beat in his chest. He didn’t know that hearts actually did that!
“Exactly! We're falling through space, you and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go…” The Doctor dropped Adric’s hand. “That's who I am. Now, forget me, Adric Paul. Go home.”
So Adric went home. But in his gut, he’d decided — he would find the Doctor again. He would get more answers. He had to.
—
Episode 2: The End of the World
The Doctor and Adric arrive in the year five billion, aboard a space station orbiting the Earth named Platform One. Many elite alien guests have assembled to watch the Earth be destroyed by the expanding sun. Amongst the guests are Jabe, a humanoid tree woman; the Face of Bo, a massive head in a jar who is rumored to be the oldest being in existence; and Lady Cassandra, who takes pride in being the last “pure human”, though she has received so many plastic surgery operations that she’s just merely stretched-out skin and a brain.
It is discovered that Cassandra, to receive money for her many operation, plans to let the guests die and then profit from the stock increases of their competitors. She releases discreet robotic spiders all over Platform One, and starts interfering with the systems.
When the Doctor and Adric confront Cassandra about her scheme, Cassandra escapes via teleportation and the spiders bring down Platform One’s shields, causing harmful direct solar radiation to penetrate the station. The Doctor manages to reactivate the system and save the guests. Afterwards, the Doctor brings Cassandra back and Adric lets her rupture from the intense solar heat.
Adric is saddened that, in all the chaos, no one actually saw Earth’s end. The Doctor takes him back to Earth in his own time. He explains that his home planet, too, is gone, as are his people, the Time Lords. To cheer themselves up, Adric buys them sausage rolls. They only have five billion years until the shops close.
Excerpt 2: The End of the World
She was beautiful. Even Adric could admit it. Lady Cassandra O’Brien Dot Delta Seventeen.
Oh, she was terrifying, too — Adric’s stomach hurt just looking at her. They didn’t seem the same species at all. He didn’t want to imagine himself, or his big brother, or anyone he knew from his time, as a single sheet of flesh, stretched thin, veins dancing as an artificial heart pumped blood through them.
But… “We made it, then,” he whispered to the Doctor. “Humans made it.”
The Doctor laughed softly. “Depends on your definition of ‘it’, I suppose.”
Adric puffed out his cheeks. “Well, she had to change to do it, but change is a good thing.”
“Not always.” The Doctor leaned forward, gently knocking their shoulders together. “Everything has its time, Adric. Everything dies.”
“No!” He’d spoken louder than he’d meant to. The tree woman was looking at him like he was a particularly interesting specimen. Lady Cassandra hadn’t noticed at all. “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” he said.
He turned on his heel and left the observation deck. For the first time, he regretted coming. He needed a minute to clear his head.
-
Episode 3: The Unquiet Dead
The Doctor and Adric travel back to Christmas in Cardiff, 1869, where a funeral parlor, run by Gabriel Sneed with his clairvoyant servant girl Gwyneth, contains corpses which have been animated by a mysterious blue vapor. Sneed and Gwyneth kidnap Adric, and the Doctor teams up with Charles Dickens to track him down.
In the funeral parlor, the group is reunited and the Doctor determines that the blue vapor is the result of a being trying to cross a rift in the spacetime the parlor is built on. They are revealed to be the Gelth, an alien species who want to animate bodies until they can build their own. They are using Gwyneth as a bridge. The Doctor encourages her to let the Gelth through to Earth.
As they arrive, Adric and the Doctor realize the Gelth are more numerous than they thought, and will have to kill billion of living humans, not just inhabit existing corpses, to survive. Dickens escapes the funeral parlor’s cellar and floods it with gas. Gwyneth volunteers to ignite the gas, closing the rift and trapping all the Gelth. The Doctor is reluctant to let her, but Adric realizes she is already dead from the strain of becoming the bridge.
The Doctor, Adric, and Dickens escape before the parlor is engulfed in flame. Though the time travelers know Dickens will soon die in the course of history, the impossible events have given him a new lease on life and inspire him to try and mend his strained relationships with his family. The Doctor gives him one more surprise by letting him see the TARDIS dematerialize.
Except 3: The Unquiet Dead
Fire bloomed from the funeral parlor. Adric was still coughing up gas, unsteady on his feet. He took the Doctor’s arm to steady himself.
“It worked,” the Doctor said sadly. “She closed the rift.”
Dickens put a hand to his heart. “At such a cost. The poor child.”
The fresh air wasn’t clearing Adric’s head. “I don’t understand, Doctor,” he managed. “She had no pulse. She was starting to… to cool. How long had she been dead?”
“I think she was dead from the minute that she stood in that arch.” Shadows danced across the Doctor’s face in the firelight. He squeezed Adric’s arm.
“Brain activity may briefly persist.” Adric thought back to his textbooks. “Reflexes too — is that how she could strike the match?” That, he could understand.
Adric was a genius. He could make death ordinary again, after all the terror of the zombies, the Gelth, of a kindhearted woman at the center of an explosion. Gwyneth was just electrical impulses until the end.
But Dickens scoffed. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Even for you and your doctor.”
He finally got his footing, coming out of the Doctor’s grasp to stand by himself. Adric Paul, in 1869, on Christmas, alive. A tear slid down his cheek.
“It wasn’t true. What she said before she went to the arch.” He sounded desperate even to his own ears. “I didn’t think she was stupid, Doctor. She wasn’t stupid.”
“I know.”
Snow fell.